The Wrong Goodbye

25.

“The Brethren?” I repeated. “Not much. I mean, I’ve heard the stories. A group of Collectors who, centuries ago, banded together and found a way to break hell’s bond of servitude. Of course, they’re nothing but a fairy tale —a Collector’s pipe dream.”

“A fairy tale,” Dumas said, smiling. “Right.”

“I miss something funny?”

“Funny? No, not too,” he said. “Come on —this little tour of ours ain’t done.”

Dumas led me deeper into the cavern. The corridor, so broad at its outset, dwindled until it was more fissure than tunnel, and could no longer accommodate the intermittent torches that had marked the way thus far. Dumas snatched the last of them from the wall —a concession to my human eyes, no doubt —and took me by the elbow, dragging me reluctantly into the narrow, winding pass.

The walls pressed close as, sideways, we squeezed through. A time or two, stone outcrops dug into my back and chest as I forced myself through a particularly narrow spot or around a tricky corner, Dumas’s light all but disappearing ahead of me as, despite his apparent girth, he pressed onward without incident. When that happened, I was left alone with my thoughts, my fears, my shallow hitching breath —all three of them threatening to spiral out of control and leave me panicked, trapped, damned to be stuck here in the darkness until the clock ran out and the bugbeast came to claim me. But that thought alone was enough to keep me moving, and eventually, the passage widened. Not much, mind you —the walls in this new, smaller chamber were maybe three feet across, and the ceiling here was low enough I had to stoop —but after the sidewalk-crack we’d slipped through to get here, it may as well have been Montana.

As I cleared the fissure, brushing filth from my lapels, Dumas turned to me and smiled. For a moment, with the torchlight glinting off his eyes and yellowed teeth, he looked every bit the demon that he was. “Welcome to the monkey house,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“The monkey house. This is where I stash the Collectors in my employ. Out of the way, so they can fling their poo or whatever it is they do without troubling my Fallen employees or bothering the clientele.”

I looked around. By the torchlight, it looked like the cavern continued on another seven feet or so and then terminated. Three low openings, each shored up with rotted four-by-fours, extended outward from the room on either side —two left, one right. I ducked my head to see inside the one beside me. It was no larger than a coat closet, and apart from a heap of blankets in one corner, it was empty.

“They’re rarely occupied,” called Dumas, his stentorian voice echoing off the close stone walls. “Save for Danny, none of my Collectors ever had much interest in sticking ’round once the job was done. Not all of them are as eager as Danny was to sample the product, so most of them are outta here as soon as the soul they brought’s done processing. But Danny was another matter. Danny liked to stick around. I always figured he came back here to fix, that the ramblings on the wall were nothing more than skiminduced delusion. Stuff’s awful to come off of —for your kind in particular —and it’ll fill your head with all manner of wacky shit you’d be hard-pressed to explain once you finally touch down. Truth is, I never thought much of it. But you factor in these ramblings with his interest in watching Psoglav ply his trade and his theft of the Varela soul, and a pattern emerges.” He gestured toward the doorway furthest back. “That’s the one you want. That’s where Danny staked his claim.”

Once I crawled inside, I could see why. It was bigger by half than the other I’d seen, and set a little ways apart, providing some small measure of privacy. At first, of course, the room was black as pitch, but as Dumas shimmied in behind me, his torch’s light crawled up the walls —first illuminating the bare military cot that took up much of the chamber’s floor, and then the tattered photo of two strangers I presumed were he and Ana that rested on the framework of the door. And as the light climbed toward the ceiling, I realized the walls of Danny’s chamber were covered with writing —writing of all shapes and sizes, in a dozen alphabets and at least twice that many languages. I recognized Arabic and Hebrew, Sanskrit and Akkadian —all scratched onto the wall with charred bits of wood or pointed rock —but most of the tongues were foreign to me. They looked to be the work of a crazy person, with no rhyme or reason to their placement —some scrawled over older snippets, some halted halfway through; some flecked with blood as if the scribe’s hand had split at the effort required to mark the stone. It was hard for me to imagine Danny had done all this. It was hard to imagine anyone could have.

“What is all this?” I muttered.

“Folklore, mostly. Tales transcribed centuries ago from the oral tradition. Or, more accurately, fragments of tales. See, these stories were thought lost to your kind, and for good reason —the forces of heaven and hell aligned to purge them from this Earth, for fear of the damage they could cause.”

“And these stories,” I said, “they’re about the Brethren?”

“Yes. Most of it’s nonsense, of course —an oblique passing reference, a half-heard conversation written down a hundred years after the fact. But some of them are quite specific. Dates. Places. Descriptions of rites the likes of which I’ve never seen. And it’s the latter, of course, that our Daniel seemed most interested in —they’re the ones writ large across the wall.”

My eyes settled on one black char inscription scrawled atop all the others, and wrapping around three quarters of the room. The script itself was crude and angular, though if that was Danny’s doing, or the appearance of the language itself, I didn’t know.

“What is this,” I asked, “Phoenician?”

“Close,” Dumas replied. “It’s Ancient Aramaic. Predates Biblical Aramaic by nearly five hundred years.”

“Can you read it?”

The look he gave me, you’d think I just insulted his mother. “It says: ‘As the worlds drew thin, the unclean spirit was cleaved, which in turn summoned forth a Deluge that purged the Nine of sin, and cast their bonds of slavery aside.’ Or, you know, something to that effect.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

Another look, this one like I’m the kid in class who eats the paste. “What does it sound like it means?”

“It sounds like Danny aims to crack Varela’s soul and wind up a normal boy,” I replied —glib, dismissive.

Only Dumas didn’t take it that way, which, truth be told, kind of freaked me out. “Yeah, that’s what it sounded like to me, too. Only it don’t say ‘crack,’ it says ‘cleave.’ As in fucking rend asunder.”

“The hell’s the difference?”

“The difference, Sam, is all the difference. That shit that went down in San Fran? That was on account of a ‘crack.’ A mean one, yeah —the worst I’ve ever seen —but the soul we cracked was only damaged, not destroyed. I think that Danny’s aiming to destroy Varela’s soul, and that’s a whole other ball of wax. We’re talking split-the-atom bad. Worse, in fact. ’Cause ‘cleave’ ain’t the scariest word up on that wall.”

“OK, I’ll bite —what is?”

“Deluge.”

“Deluge.” Me, playing parrot; skeptical.

“Yep.”

“Like, the Deluge? As in Noah and a giant fucking boat?”

“The very same,” he said. “Well, more or less.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning I don’t know crap about some bearded jackass collecting zebras or whatever, but there ain’t a civilization worth a damn that doesn’t have a flood myth of some kind. To this day, Hindus tell the tale of Manu, who saved Mankind from the rising waters of an apocalyptic flood. Ancient Mesopotamians had Utnapishtim, a man who survived the Deluge only to be granted eternal life. You people got that Noah deal. Point is, the particulars may not agree, but when you add up everything that does agree, it looks to be that once upon a time there was a bigass flood.”

“And you’re telling me it was the Brethren and some weird-ass soul-cleaving mojo that caused it? What about the whole ‘God sent the flood to purge the Earth of Man’s wickedness’ thing?”

“Hey, I ain’t sayin’ for sure that’s not how it went down. Like I said, this shit’s been buried deep by the good guys and the bad guys both, and the only folks who’ve got the juice to answer that are like a mile above my pay grade. But it seems to me if your precious God sent the flood to wash away Man’s wickedness, he did a pretty fucking lousy job. And as far as the whole soul-mojo angle, it’s not as crazy as it sounds. All magic worth a damn requires sacrifice —an infusion of life’s essence to get the gears a-turnin’. That’s why the mystics of your species always use blood to kick-start their little parlor tricks. Sometimes, sure, animal sacrifice will do, but you and I both know human blood is where it’s at if you really wanna get anything done. And a feat of the kind we’re talking about —breaking the bonds of eternal damnation, dropping off the radar of heaven and hell both —that’d require more juice than even a genocide’s worth of blood could muster. That’d require real power. Power like what’d be unleashed if you destroyed a human soul.”

“Why Varela, though? Why’s the soul got to be unclean?”

“Could be because it’s hell’s bond he’s trying to break. Could be it doesn’t have to be at all. Probably Danny’s just going by what he’s read —which ain’t the worst plan, since the Brethren seemed to pull it off.”

“So you’re saying this could work? Danny does his little song and dance and busts open Varela and he’s free?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Seems to me it doesn’t matter —what matters is Danny thinks it will. Once he shatters that soul, it won’t matter to the millions he’ll be killing whether his hoodoo was successful.”

“But it can’t be that easy to destroy a soul, can it? I mean, it’s not like he can just whack it with a hammer, or every time some yahoo thrill-seeker’s parachute failed to open, boom —apocalypse.”

“True enough,” Dumas conceded. “Only a demonforged instrument would be capable of inflicting the kind of damage Danny’s after. And I’ll admit, they’re hard to come by. But the boy’s already gotten this far —you think we ought to leave it up to chance he falters now?”

It was a fair point. Actually, from where I was sitting, it was a seriously unfair point, but given that I’m damned and all, that made me more inclined to believe it. I looked for any sign Dumas was putting me on with all of this, but if he was, it didn’t show. And truth be told, it jibed with what I’d seen these past few days; after all, the bug-monster’d said, “Were it not for the Great Truce, for the rules to which we three agreed, I would not abide the Nine at all. But now it seems that truce is crumbling, and with it my patience for your games. I assure you I will not abide a tenth.” So it sounded to me like the Nine and the Brethren were one and the same. And that Danny was gunning to be number ten. Only Captain Crawly had it in his head I was the one causing problems, which didn’t really bode well for me —particularly since I still didn’t have the faintest idea who the hell he was, or how he fitted in to all of this. And the rotten cherry on top of this shit sundae was if I didn’t stop him, not only would I wind up chillin’ in oblivion, but millions of people would die horribly. How’d that old poem go? “Fear death by water.”

Too fucking right, I thought.

“So the Brethren are real, and Danny’s obsessed with them, and he stole Varela’s soul to recreate an ancient mystical rite that, if he’s successful, would bring about a second Great Flood and wipe out civilization as we know it?”

“That’s about the size of it, yeah.”

“Shit,” I said.

“Yeah,” Dumas replied. “Shit.”

“So —what now?” I asked.

“What’re you asking me for? You know what I know. You wanna stop the guy, you’re gonna hafta figure out the rest all by yourself.”

“I thought we both wanted to stop the guy.”

“Yeah, and I just gave you all the help I can.”

“Says the guy who knew about Danny’s caveman ramblings from the get-go and did fuck-all to stop him going rogue.”

“You gotta understand, Sammy, coming down off a skim, you tap into something. Something greater than yourself. Something greater than the soul you’re skimming off of. It’s like, for a little while, you’re tapped into the whole of human experience or some shit. Past, present, future —who knows what the fuck you’re gonna see or why? Call it chance, call it the hand of God —from where I’m sitting, they’re the same damn thing. But whatever you call it, I just figured that’s where Danny got all this —and hell, maybe it was. I didn’t think for a second he understood a word of it. Yeah, maybe I fucked up, but if I start poking around now and then the shit goes down, it only increases the odds it all leads back to me —which is precisely what I’m trying to avoid. So sorry, champ, but you’re on your own. But hey —there’s a chance you’ll come through and save the world. A very, very narrow chance.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it,” he said, and then he smiled. “Hey, I think you and me, we just had a breakthrough in our relationship. Hashing things out all civil-like —me not killing you, you not killing me. Feels good. Feels right. Feels like maybe we oughta hug it out.”

He spread his arms. I shook my head.

“Suit yourself. How ’bout a word of advice instead, on account of how we’re such good friends now.”

Friends my ass, I thought, but what I said instead was: “I’m listening.”

“If it were me tracking Danny down, I’d be trying my damndest to figure out where worlds draw thin.”

“Yeah. That’d be more helpful if I had the tiniest idea what the fuck it even meant.”

Dumas shrugged like what’re you gonna do? “Hey, you know as well as anyone that the whole of Mankind’s prophecies and scripture amount to nothing more than a ten-thousand-year-old game of telephone. Half the time, they don’t mean shit at all, and the other half–”

But before he finished his thought, there was a muffled boom from somewhere overhead, and the very cave around us shifted, raining dust upon us both and forcing me to steady myself with one hand against the wall. The movement was unthinking, reflexive, and of course it was my bum arm I reached out with; when my palm connected with the chamber wall, a jolt of queasy, white-hot pain shot up my arm, settling in my shoulder and throbbing like an impacted molar.

Another boom, right on the heels of the first. This one loosed more than dust —the darkness above rattled as small rocks bounced off the walls on the way down, and then a not-so-small rock whizzed past my head in the darkness, parting my hair and damn near doing the same to my skull before burying its pointy self six inches into the dirt at my feet.

“The hell?” I said. “Did Psoglav–”

“No,” Dumas replied, his face set in a frown. “If Psoglav had cracked a soul, he’da brought the whole damn cave down. And whatever that was, it came from outside.”

“It couldn’t have been the storm,” I said, thinking aloud, “lightning doesn’t make the fucking ground shake. Besides, it sounded like a goddamn bomb went off. It sounded like…”

Dumas watched me talk myself out. Then he supplied the same words my brain had. “An angel’s wrath? That what you were gonna say?”

I said nothing, my mouth moving for a second like that of a dying fish before I took notice and closed it. Dumas was glaring at me now, and the frown that graced his face deepened into something harsher, angrier, more sinister. His squat, round frame seemed to swell until he dominated the narrow room, and his eyes raged with black fire. “You did this.”

“What? No! Why the hell would you think–”

“Why? Gee, Sam, I don’t know —maybe because when you came marching in here, you were pretty sure stealing Varela from you was my idea. Maybe because you blame me for the eternal predicament in which you find yourself. Maybe because despite all the havoc that you wreaked in life, and in the decades since you up and died, you still fancy yourself a Good Guy, and thought turning stoolie on me would be your fast-track into the Maker’s good graces. And here I thought you and I were getting on so well.”

Dumas, a full head shorter than me when we crawled in here, dropped the torch he’d been carrying and grabbed me by my lapels, lifting me until I was a good foot off the ground and we were nose to nose. The room seemed to elongate as the torch lit it from below. Dumas’s face had elongated as well —to twice its normal size, it seemed —and when he spoke, I saw his mouth was now filled with row upon row of blackened, jagged teeth. “Tell me, Sammy,” he said, his striated, spiked tongue lashing at his front teeth with every word, and rasping out the sibilant in my name, “did you ring up one of your angel-friends before you sauntered over here, maybe let ’em know where you were going? Did you promise to deliver me if they’d make your missing-soul problem go bye-bye?”

My feet cast wild shadows as they scrabbled for purchase, but it wasn’t any use. “I didn’t —I swear!”

He slammed me into the rock wall behind me. My head hit so hard I thought I’d puke. Then I did puke, so, you know, yay for being right.

“I think you’re lying to me, Sammy,” he said, and slammed me into the wall again, so hard my vision swam. Not that I minded much. In the best of times, Dumas wasn’t much to look at, and these weren’t the best of times. From what little I could see through the darkness and the circling cartoon birds, Dumas’s current visage put Psoglav to shame. “But it hardly matters, does it? Either you called in the cavalry, or you were so fucking incompetent in get ting here they tracked you. You’ll pay dearly either way, I assure you. But now, unfortunately, I have to delay the pleasure of flaying you alive, so I can deal with this fucking mess you’ve made. Don’t worry, though —I’ll be back before you know it.”

A leathery rustle, the click of claws on stone, and Dumas was gone —gone so quickly that he was through the narrow aperture of Danny’s hovel and out of sight before I even hit the ground.

Which I did.

Hard.

And then got whacked square in the back by a stone the size of a fucking cantaloupe falling from above.

This week was not my favorite ever.

The cantaloupe brought friends. Like half the fucking roof. Shit pelted me like this was a game of dodgeball and I was the last kid standing, only harder, meaner, and from above. OK, maybe it wasn’t so much like a game of dodgeball as it was a game of try-not-to-get-stoned-to-death. I’d never played that one before, but I hoped to God I’d catch on quick.

Got up. To my knees, at least. Felt like an accomplishment, till I got knocked back down. Figured maybe up wasn’t the way to go. Figured instead I’d stay low.

I protected my head as best I could with my bum arm. The tendons in my shoulder hurt like hell, holding it up like that, and the old bean still got clocked a couple times, but I deflected enough blows to stay conscious, so we’ll call that a win. Tried to snatch the torch with my good arm, but the steady rain of dust from above proved too much for it, extinguishing the flame.

That was OK. I’d seen darkness aplenty those past two days. I was starting to get used to it.

What was harder to get used to was the constant battery outside —like London in the fucking Blitz —and the deadly hail of rocks it set upon me.

A stone dagger shook loose from the ceiling and sliced along my side, through fabric and skin both. The wound burned white hot, the only light in the room —and I could see it even when my eyes were closed. Hurt enough it made me lower my shieldarm for a moment. Then a quick shot to my temple reminded me why that was a bad idea.

A crushing blow from nowhere set off fireworks in my kidney. Something inside me went all wet and loose. I’ll be pissing blood if I get out of here alive, I thought. The notion didn’t fill me with warm fuzzies.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking why didn’t I let nature take its course and say sayonara to this poor pathetic meat-suit? After all, just two days back I was rooting for the bug-monster to kill me, so why not? Why bother busting ass for the privilege of wandering smack into the middle of an angel/demon grudge match when I could take my chances with reseeding and hope I wind up possessing someone hale and hearty and way the fuck away from here? And believe me, I get where you’re coming from. But there’s a couple things I’m privy to that you’re not.

Thing One: dying fucking hurts.

Thing Two: dying really fucking hurts.

How bad does dying hurt? So bad that even if shit’s hitting the fan full-on and you’ve got no other choice, you still stop and check the math to make sure it don’t add up another way. And yeah, OK, I’ll cop to trying to goad the bug-monster into killing me, but there were extenuating circumstances —namely the fact that I was (mistakenly, as it turned out) pretty sure he was going to kill me anyway. So I wasn’t so much rooting for death as I was for him to make it quick. Big difference.

Besides, the key to a successful reseeding is luck, and lots of it. Luck’s the difference between winding up in a millionaire meat-suit with a private jet or an invalid in an adult diaper without enough spare juice to raise his head, let alone allow you to hop hosts.

Now do I strike you as the lucky type?

Yeah, that’s what I thought —which is why most times I’d just as soon take my chances in the here and now, regardless of the crappiness of said here and now.

Sick of getting pummeled, I crawled toward where I figured the door was, but ran into Danny’s cot instead. I started to turn around, and then I got me the beginnings of an idea, so I stopped. My fingers traced the cot’s metal frame until I found the hinge. Then I folded it in half and climbed under. It was a tight fit, me hunched inside my makeshift Aframe tent, but it was better than being crushed to death. It was, at best, a temporary solution; the way this place was filling up, I had to get through that crawlspace and into the outer chamber fast if I wanted to keep this meat-suit breathing.

I tried sliding the whole shebang forward, toward the door. Too damn many rocks in the way. I looped my hands around the frame and lifted, figuring I’d use it all umbrella-like and knee-walk over, but the uneven terrain required all fours to maneuver, which is to say I tipped over and wound up on my face.

I won’t lie —tipping over hurt. Hurt enough it took a sec to realize I wasn’t getting pummeled anymore. I could hear shit falling, sure —louder every second, in fact, suggesting this room wasn’t going to be a room much longer —but it was no longer reaching me. Seemed the cot had gotten wedged against the wall, building me a little fort. But by the creaking of its frame, it wasn’t going to stay wedged for long.

I clawed over rock and dirt and the still-hot cinders of the torch, mindful not of the scratches and burns I inflicted on myself in the process, only of the door, of freedom, of away. A few seconds of blind groping and I found it. The aperture was narrower now, and riddled with loose stone, but there it was.

There it was.

A sound like a thousand hoofbeats as the ceiling caved in, and the darkness around me imploded. I dove for the passage as the cot crunched beneath the sudden weight. Hot, stale, dusty breath chased after me as all the air in the heap of rock that used to be a room was expelled along with me. And then the ceiling of the crawlspace popped overhead like a crack spreading through glass, the sound zipping past me in the darkness and letting me know I wasn’t out of the woods yet.

I scampered through the short passage and into the slightly larger outer chamber of Dumas’s socalled monkey house, only realizing I’d left the crawlspace behind when the echoes of its collapse reverberated off the walls around me. All I wanted was to collapse as well, bloodied and spent as my egress from Danny’s burrow had left me. But the muffled booms of the angels’ continued onslaught, and the constant patter of pebbles on the dirt floor, suggested that wouldn’t be prudent. Suggested that Danny’s hidey-hole was only the beginning. Suggested that if I didn’t get my ass out of these caves and into the open desert air, my ass was gonna get a whole lot flatter.

So I kept moving.

Finding the fissure that connected the monkey house to the main cavern wasn’t easy. Damn thing was only sideways-me wide, and in complete darkness, every nook and cranny in the cavern wall felt like pay dirt. I must’ve circumnavigated the chamber twice before I finally found it, and beat to hell as I was, squeezing through was no mean feat. But, halting though my progress was, it was progress, and eventually, I spilled from the crevice, tumbling to the dirt floor and squinting against the sudden light.

Sweet Christ, was I sick of falling down.

Turns out, though, much as it hurt, that fall was lucky as all get-out. Not like it was strategy or anything —I was just beat up enough I was having trouble supporting my own weight, is all —but still, it was lucky nonetheless. ’Cause when I fell, I wound up hunkered behind one of them rock formations that juts up from the floors of caves —stalagmite or stalactite, I can never keep them straight —and so I managed not to run afoul of the angry angel.

I should’ve known that this light I stumbled into was too bright, too white —too pure to be cast by torches alone. Should’ve recognized it for what it was. Because I’d seen light like this before. Breathtaking. Painful. Glorious. Deadly.

The light of God’s grace.

The light that emanates from His most trusted servants —and from His deadliest assassins.

Most times, were you to spy an angel topside, you’d never know it. They, I don’t know, seem to dim their natural light, and project a sort of vague suggestion of human form that your eyes slide right off of. I mean, you register the basics. Eyes? Check. Hair? Check. Two arms? Two legs? Yup and yup. But if I were to ask you what color those eyes were, or was the hair cut long or short, you’d have no earthly idea. Which makes sense, because an angel is a celestial being; there ain’t nothing earthly about ’em.

This guy, though, he wasn’t bashful. Wasn’t subtle. Wasn’t hiding his true nature. Which, quite frankly, means me saying “guy” wasn’t quite accurate. But junk-having or not, tall and hulking as he was, “guy” and “he” seem closer than the alternative. Seem as close as this earthly, imperfect language of ours is gonna get.

The angel stood naked in the middle of the hall, lit from within and shimmering like a mirage on the horizon. Like pavement on a hot day. Like a reactor on the verge of meltdown. He was eight feet tall if he was an inch, and he was so beautiful —and so goddamn terrifying —I didn’t realize until I heard his captive speak that he was not alone.

The voice I heard was low and rumbling, and in a tongue I did not speak —a tongue I could not speak, full of sounds no human could ever hope to make. Though the canyon beyond the cave raged with sounds of battle —screams of anger and of agony, and countless explosions far less muffled than before —that voice cut through them all, and reached my ears as though from mere inches away.

The voice was Psoglav’s.

The horrid dog-beast was on his knees before the angel —a posture of necessity rather than penitence, given that the angel had in his hand one of Psoglav’s wrists, which he held twisted over Psoglav’s head, keeping him immobile and in no small amount of pain. Though if Psoglav’s acid tone was any indication, the hold still left him somewhere shy of accommodating.

The angel struck out with his free hand —a chopping blow to Psoglav’s throat. An awful gargling sound, and Psoglav fell silent. The angel spoke then, its words in the same tongue as the demon it questioned, but where the latter’s words sounded horrid and perverse, the former’s were melodic and wellmodulated —serenity itself.

Then, when Psoglav failed to answer, instead spitting at his captor’s feet, the angel ripped off Psoglav’s arm, which kind of put a damper on the Zen of the moment.

Psoglav roared in agony. I’m talking shook-thefucking-walls roared. I thought my ears were going to bleed. Thought the place was going to come down around me. But the angel didn’t even flinch. Instead, he smacked Psoglav across the face with his own severed arm, spewing gore across the cavern wall, and asked his question again.

Psoglav, now free of the angel’s wrist-hold on account of the wrist the angel was holding being no longer attached to him, picked himself up off the floor and launched himself at the angel —marshalling every ounce of strength and speed he had —his iron teeth bared for attack. If the angel had a face, I might’ve thought Psoglav aimed to bite it off.

But he never got the chance.

The fastest goddamn demon I’ve ever seen, and he didn’t even come close.

Oh, sure, he started well enough, rocketing off the ground faster than my human eyes could follow. But a funny thing happened on the way to biting his Chosen brother. Two things, actually. The first was that Psoglav slowed to a halt in mid-air, his snapping maw scant inches from its intended target. The second was that the angel, I don’t know, expanded —growing bigger, taller, brighter —until he seemed less a person than a tiny, white-hot sun.

It happened so fast, I nearly failed to react. Nearly. But when the corona created by the angel-sphere engulfed Psoglav and then collapsed back in on itself, I hit the floor, hiding behind my stalagamabob and burying my face in the dirt.

Then the angel loosed God’s wrath, which set the very air around me ablaze, its blinding white light searing my retinas despite their being protected by closed lids and rock and dirt, while my ears rang with the most beautiful and terrible sound I’d ever heard. Once upon a time, a girl with cause to know told me it sounded like a chorus of children, painful in its beauty, and that strikes me as close to right as anything I could come up with. But even that can’t do it justice, because the whole of human experience has yet to invent the words to describe such agony, such ecstasy —and given the animal terror with which I trembled upon hearing it, I pray they never will.

I pray they’ll never have to.

I pray this infant war between heaven and hell dies in childbirth.

Because the alternative is too frightening to imagine.

I’ve no idea how long I spent, curled fetal behind that stone outcrop and weeping like a child, but when I came to my senses, I was alone. Aside from the charred black husk I assumed was once the demon Psoglav, the cave was empty —deserted —and most of the torches had burned out. All was still and quiet —not just in the cave, but in the canyon beyond as well. After the hue and cry of war, I felt as though I’d been struck deaf, but what few torches remained lit cracked and popped as they burned through the last of their accelerant, and as I found my feet and staggered along the cavern’s gentle upslope, my shambling gait echoed off the limestone walls.

I walked without thought, without fear of discovery, with no intention but to be free of this subterranean hell and to feel fresh air upon my face. I suppose if I had the energy, I would have wondered who’d won, and whether I’d be greeted by a pissed-off Dumas or a legion of wrathful angels upon surfacing. I’d have wondered if it was day or night, or whether I’d been out an hour or twenty-four of them —the latter of which would leave me right screwed with regard to the bug-monster’s deadline.

But I didn’t wonder any of those things. I was too tired. Too sore. Too bruised and bloodied to even care. And God help me for saying so, but as much as my every movement hurt —as much as I wondered where I’d find the strength to even take another step —the momentary absolution from caring bestowed upon me by my pain was bliss.

For maybe the first time since I shuffled off the mortal coil, I felt free.