Walking In the Midst of Fire

CHAPTER TWO

Steven’s visit had left Remy’s mind buzzing.

After his friend had decided to pack it in for the evening, he’d stayed on the roof for a while pondering the questions of an uncertain future.

His dreams warning of an impending war, and now the Vatican looking for him, made him very anxious indeed.

But what to do about it?

Remy downed the last of his scotch, not allowing himself to feel the effects of the alcohol. Marlowe was looking up from the floor where he lay.

“We should think about heading down,” Remy said, his mind still annoyingly abuzz.

“Yes,” Marlowe agreed, in the voice of his species.

Remy stood, grabbed the nearly empty bottle of scotch and the two tumblers, and started for the doorway. Marlowe cut him off, zipping down the stairs in front of him to get inside first, his toenails clicking on the wood steps as he made his way down.

“Don’t make too much noise,” Remy warned the beast. “You don’t want to wake up Linda. You know what she’s like when you wake her up.”

Remy laughed as he heard Marlowe’s bark of a response. “Monster!”

“Exactly,” Remy replied as they reached the first floor.

Most of the lights were off, but Remy had no problem moving around in the darkness. With just a thought, he could adjust the structure of his eyes, and see in the black as though the sun was coming in through the windows.

Marlowe drank sloppily from his bowl of water in the kitchen corner as Remy set the bottle on the counter and put the dirty glasses in the sink.

No matter how hard he tried to slow it down, his brain simply refused to cut him that slack. Something was brewing, and he knew that it likely had to do with the return of Lucifer to the prison dimension of Tartarus to remake it in his own image.

To turn it into Hell.

Remy had always feared something like this happening—the forces of God once again pitted against the Morningstar.

He needed to know what was happening; needed to know how close the impending disaster was, and how much danger the world of man would be in.

It was time to make a call.

He moved away from the sink and caught sight of Marlowe watching him from the corner, his shiny black coat blending with the shadows. The dog’s tail immediately started to wag.

“What?” Remy asked.

“What?” the dog repeated in a throaty growl.

Remy was just about to ask him if he wanted to go for a ride, when suddenly they were no longer alone.

Linda sleepily rubbed at her eyes as she leaned against the kitchen doorframe. “What are you guys doing?” she asked, stifling a yawn.

Remy couldn’t help but stare at her. She was wearing the gray, extralarge Walking Dead T-shirt they had bought at Newbury Comics the week before and nothing else, her long, shapely legs looking even longer and shapelier than they usually did. Her hair was tousled, suggesting that she had been asleep for a bit. She ran her fingers through the long, dark locks, pushing them back from her face.

Though half-asleep, Linda smiled at him, and he felt that sudden flush of humanity that he had learned to appreciate so much.

“Want to fool around?” she asked, biting at her lower lip, her hair falling back over one half of her face.

She couldn’t have been sexier if she’d tried.

“What kind of a man do you take me for?” he asked, crossing his arms in mock indignation.

She padded toward him. “The kind that stands around in a dark kitchen with his dog, stinking of booze,” she said. She kissed him hard upon the lips, then pulled away.

“And tasting of booze, too,” she added, making a face.

She turned, heading back for the doorway, walking in such a way that he had no choice but to watch her. “If you have any interest at all in my offer, you know where I’ll be,” she called over her shoulder as she passed through the door into the room beyond.

“Huh.” Remy looked at Marlowe.

“Bed?” Marlowe asked, his blocky head cocked to one side.

“Eventually,” Remy said. “A little playtime first.”

“Playtime?” Marlowe repeated eagerly. He looked about the darkened kitchen for one of his toys.

“Sorry, pal. Not that kind of play.” He patted the dog’s head as he passed him. “People play.”

He heard Marlowe sigh pathetically behind him, and turned to see his friend sitting dejectedly, head low, in the darkened kitchen.

“I’ll tell you what. Once Linda and I are finished playing, I’ll take you out for a walk.” Remy told him.

The Labrador’s thick tail thumped furiously on the kitchen floor.

“Walk!” Marlowe barked, his sadness suddenly forgotten.

Remy placed a finger to his lips, warning the dog to be quiet. “After playtime,” he assured the dog, starting toward the flight of stairs that would take him up to his bedroom. Once again, Marlowe rushed past to get there first.

“Stay off the bed!” Remy warned as the dog bounded up the stairs. The sound of Linda’s surprised scream, followed by hysterical laughter and a dog’s playful growl proved that the one obedience class they’d attended had certainly done the trick.

Since being touched by the Nazarene, Simeon could not die.

It was not as if he hadn’t tried; it was just that death would not have him.

Even the passage of time could not harm him, the man looking just as flush with life as he had before he’d died so very long ago.

Plagued by the curse of immortality, he chose to wander, to experience everything that this world—now his prison—had to offer.

The good as well as the bad.

Simeon found himself drawn to the darker corners. Where the sane and rational mind might flee the terrors that hid in the shadows, the eternal man found himself moving toward them eagerly.

He was desperate to know what secrets they might share, how they might help him someday to see Heaven fall from the sky. Simeon had gathered much in the way of knowledge over the centuries he had lived and wandered, but it was the ways of sorcery and black magick that had proven the most useful.

The forever man had an aptitude for the black arts, and his hunger for this particular type of knowledge had become insatiable.

During his travels, as he sought out those in special circles who could teach him, there was one name often spoken in both reverence and great fear.

Some said he was only a legend, an amalgam of all the world’s greatest sorcerers and wizards, while others believed that he truly did exist, a living repository for all the magickal knowledge that had ever existed.

The name of the legend was Ignatius Hallow, and Simeon had traveled long and far to finally find him.

Standing on English soil, in the pouring rain, the forever man looked upon the ruins of the castle he had been directed to, and felt the beginnings of despair.

“How can this be?” he asked the foul elements, as he stumbled through the mud toward the ruins.

In a tavern in the town of York he had met an old man whose neck had been broken but he still managed to be alive. Those in the tavern whispered that this one was so insane that neither God nor the Devil wanted him, and they had sent him back to the world. They also said that the man with the twisted neck knew things—dark secrets that he would share for a price.

That had been good to know, for Simeon had need of such information.

By its appearance, the castle had been taken a long time ago, in some long-forgotten conflict that had caused its battlements to fall. There was not a sign of life to be found.

Simeon snarled as the realization that he’d been had began to sink in. He and the insane old man had made a deal: the first digit of his little finger from his right hand in exchange for the whereabouts of the legendary magick user. A bizarre price to pay, but it was what the man with the broken neck had demanded for his services. The madman had said that he could see the remnants of many years in Simeon’s eyes, which made him—as well as pieces of him—so very special.

The eternal man could still hear the old-timer’s cackle as he wondered aloud whether perhaps Simeon had been discarded by Heaven and Hell as he himself had been.

Simeon stared down at the bloody bandage wrapped around his hand. He could feel it throbbing with the angry beat of his heart as what had been cut away slowly, painfully, grew back.

Looking out over the ruins as he was assaulted by wind and rain, Simeon debated his next course of action. There was a part of him that wished to continue on his way, wandering to the next location, hoping for a piece of forbidden knowledge to add to his growing arsenal.

Or he could return to the tavern in York, for a piece of the twisted old man.

The wind pushed him even closer to what remained of the forgotten castle’s walls, as if the elements were urging him to be certain that the madman had indeed been wrong. He was about to step back, to prepare himself for the long trek to York, when the ground in front of him began to churn.

At first he believed it to be a trick of his eyes, the way the heavy rain pelted the muddy patches of exposed earth, but he quickly came to realize that wasn’t the case at all.

The vines, their bodies as fat as the thickest rope, and covered in large thorns that looked as though they could strip the flesh from his body, erupted from the saturated ground in a writhing tangle. Simeon managed to throw himself back, away from the thorn-covered tendrils, only to have another patch of the virulent growth explode from the ground behind him. Everywhere he looked the ground churned, and more of the serpentine vines grew, reaching for him, ensnaring him in their constricting embrace.

Simeon screamed as the thorns dug into his skin, tearing it through his garments. The tentacle-like growths held him tight, and began to squeeze the life from his body.

The more he struggled, the tighter the vines became, until his bones began to snap like pieces of dry wood.

Simeon’s screams filled the night, diminishing to little more than a pathetic whine as his blood flowed, watering the hellish vegetation. He was waiting for the inevitable death that would not hold, when through a darkened stone doorway in the ruins of the castle something appeared and began to move toward him.

The man was tall and of indiscriminate age, clad in robes that seemed to be cut from the fabric of night. He leaned on a staff as he slowly approached—a walking stick that appeared to have been carved from bone.

The figure stopped mere inches from him, and stared deeply into his eyes.

“You should be dead,” the magick user, Ignatius Hallow, said in a voice ripe with curiosity.

“That I should,” Simeon managed, though his throat was clogged with bile and blood.

“Why have you come?” the sorcerer asked.

Though it took all the strength that he had remaining, Simeon managed to answer.

“To . . . learn.”

And then he died, his body no longer able to sustain his life as a result of the abuse his fragile human form had endured.

But as before, death would not have him.

“Do you like it?”

Simeon’s eyes were focused on the bare skin of a waitress’s arm, or more specifically, on the tattoo that curled its way around her pale flesh.

Thorny vines.

That was all it took to stir the memories of long ago.

He pulled his eyes from the tattoo to gaze up into the woman’s face. She was attractive in that used sort of way, the deep lines around her eyes and smiling mouth hinting at a hard life.

“Quite lovely,” Simeon told her, forcing a friendly smile. He didn’t want to be rude and draw attention to himself.

“I had it done when I was just a kid,” she said, taking his empty wineglass and placing it on her tray. “Wished I hadn’t as I got older, but now I think it’s kinda nice.”

She smiled again, as he agreed.

“You’re new in here, aren’t you?” she then asked, becoming more personal.

This was what he’d hoped against. Simeon had needed to get away by himself, away from the demonic trio that served him, even for just a single drink.

Methuselah’s was the best place he could think of. He’d always wanted to patronize the strange bar that catered to the most unusual clientele. And looking around, he was glad that he had.

A golem of stone wiped the surface of the bar with a damp rag, as a minotaur checked identification at the heavy wooden door. In one corner of the darkened establishment sat creatures more reptile than human, served by a waitress whose skin was nearly translucent, her internal workings on view for all to see. Four succubi that had followed a group of humanoid travelers down a hallway leading to the restrooms emerged from the darkened passage, dabbing at their mouths with lacy handkerchiefs.

Methuselah’s was a most fascinating place, and Simeon was glad he’d come, but he caught sight of what was coming through the door and knew it was time to leave.

He smiled again at the waitress, ignoring her question as he took some bills from his pocket and placed them on her tray. “Keep the change.”

“Next time you’re in,” the waitress said, eyeing the cash before slipping it into a pocket on her apron, “you be sure to ask for Katie.”

He stood up, staring at the three demons that had just entered the bar. Their eyes were shifting about the room. They were looking for him.

“I’ll be sure to do that, Katie,” Simeon told Katie, reaching out to take hold of her arm in a firm grip. “But I’m afraid that in a little bit you won’t even remember I’ve been here.”

She seemed a little startled, a bit perplexed at first, but then he watched his magick seep deep into her flesh, and spread throughout her body, and as he released his grip, she was already moving toward her next table.

His presence forgotten.

The demons had come closer, waiting for him to notice their presence.

He turned to them. “You’ve found me.”

“When we noticed you were gone . . . ,” one of them began.

“You were worried?” Simeon asked. His coat was hanging over the back of another chair and he retrieved it, pushing past the demons on his way to the door.

“Was it wise for you to come here?” another asked in a voice low and soft, so as not to be heard.

Simeon stopped as he hung his coat over his arm.

“Your concern is really touching,” he said, trying the smile again but certain to make it appear as obviously insincere as he could manage. “But it’s nothing you need to worry yourself about.”

“Hold this,” he ordered, handing his coat to one of the demons smart enough to keep her mouth shut.

Simeon walked away from his pale-skinned escorts and placed his hands together, allowing the two rings, one on the ring finger of each hand to briefly touch, before raising his hands in the air.

“Excuse me,” he called out, feeling the ancient power imbued in the two pieces of jewelry flow through his hands and out into the tavern’s patrons. “Just to be on the safe side,” he said as they listened. “I was never here.”

He watched the memory of him leave each and every one of those present, all of them going back to whatever it was they were in the middle of doing before the pale-skinned man with the curly black hair called on their attention.

“Happy?” Simeon asked the demon that had questioned him, stealing back his jacket from the other, and throwing it over his arm.

He headed toward the door, ahead of his entourage.

“Have a good night,” he told the minotaur as it opened the door for him and the demons that followed.

• • •

Remy stopped to let Marlowe sniff the base of the parking meter, before the dog lifted his leg to spray it with urine.

“Where do you keep it all?” Remy asked him.

“What?” the dog asked, already moving Remy along the nearly deserted early-morning street.

“The pee,” he said. “I can’t imagine one dog having so much of it inside him. You must have some sort of storage tank or something. Is that what it is? Do you have a storage tank?”

Marlowe had no real idea what Remy was talking about and answered in the expected manner.

“No.”

Remy chuckled, walking down Boylston Street with Marlowe sniffing at the ground and pulling slightly on his leash.

He and Marlowe had been careful not to make too much noise as they got ready to leave the house on their walk. Buttoning his shirt while Marlowe patiently waited just outside the door, Remy had watched Linda sleep. His body still tingled with the memory of their lovemaking, and he considered crawling back beneath the covers for another go, but a faint, pathetic whine from the hallway was enough to reignite his other purpose.

He had a call to make that couldn’t be made from his cell, and besides, he’d promised Marlowe a walk.

Remy loved the hum of the city by day and night, but this time of the early morning, when things were so remarkably still and quiet, was high up there on his list of favorite times. It was almost as if the day to come was waiting, tensed, at the starting line, eager for the pistol shot that would signal what was to come.

He loved this city and the humanity it coddled, which made the reason he’d left his lover, and his bed, to head out into the early morning, all the more pertinent.

If war was on the horizon, he needed to know exactly how close it was, and what could be done, if anything, to prevent it from overflowing onto the world of man.

Remy pulled back on Marlowe’s leash, standing on the corner of Boylston and Dartmouth, preventing the overeager beast from heading out into the street. Traffic was light, but all it would take was one taxi driver or delivery truck not paying attention.

“You really need to be more careful,” Remy told the dog.

Marlowe looked up at him, his dark eyes dark filled with adoration.

“You careful for me.”

The coast clear, the two crossed, passing by an entrance to the Copley Square T station, Remy tugging Marlowe past several early commuters, their eyes bleary as they headed for work. They stopped near an unobtrusive door in a darkened corner of the Old South Church, one of the last places of worship that Remy had been in.

He was about to take Marlowe into his arms and wrap his wings about them to take them inside, when something moving in a patch of shadow caught his eye. Remy shifted the configuration of his eyes to see that it was one of the many homeless people who slept on Boston’s streets. An old woman’s head popped up from a filthy sleeping bag to stare at them.

“No need to be scared, fella,” she said, addressing Marlowe.

It took everything that Remy had to keep the dog, tail wagging, from pulling himself over to her.

“Marlowe, no,” Remy ordered.

“It’s all right,” she said, her hands coming out from within the sleeping bag to eagerly clap. “C’mon over and see old Dottie.”

Remy let up on the leash, letting him go to the old woman. It wasn’t long before he was licking her weather-worn face, and she was scratching him behind his velvet soft ears, cooing affectionately to him.

“You’re a sweet one, aren’t ya?” she said as Marlowe administered some of his patented affection, licking every inch of her face, neck, and ears.

“Marlowe, go easy on the poor woman,” Remy said.

“Marlowe?” the woman asked. “Is that your name? Marlowe?”

If the dog could have crawled into the sleeping bag with her, he would have.

“‘Why should you love him whom the world hates so?’” old Dottie quoted, glancing at Remy to see if he was listening. “‘Because he love me more than all the world.’”

Remy realized that she was reciting from Elizabethan dramatist and poet Christopher Marlowe.

He smiled at her and nodded. “Nice,” he said. “But not that Marlowe, I’m afraid. He’s more Philip Marlowe.”

The woman laughed as the dog continued to lick her face.

“Ah!” she exclaimed. “Raymond Chandler.”

“That’s it,” Remy agreed.

“‘Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid,’” Dottie said, quoting Remy’s favorite author. “‘He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man.’”

The woman stopped, smiling a toothless grin.

“Pretty good, right?”

He gave her the thumbs-up. “Awesome.”

“I read a lot,” she told him, scratching roughly behind Marlowe’s ears, but the dog didn’t seem to mind. Not one little bit. “And stuff just seems to get stuck up there.” She stopped scratching Marlowe to point to her head, upon which sat a floppy, knitted hat. “Can’t forget the stuff even if I tried—especially if I like it.”

“Not so bad of a curse as far as curses go,” Remy told her.

“I guess.”

Marlowe had plopped down beside the woman, shimmying as close to her as he was able. He was a good judge of character; if Marlowe liked her, this woman was probably special.

They were silent for a bit, as old Dottie continued to stroke Marlowe’s ebony fur.

“He likes that,” she said, looking deeply into the dog’s dark eyes.

“That he does,” Remy said.

Dottie let her eyes leave Marlowe’s and fixed her gaze on Remy. He could see that she was staring really hard, squinting her watery eyes as if she was having some difficulty focusing her sight.

“What is it, Dottie?” Remy asked. “Something wrong with your eyes?”

“No,” she said, with a shake of her head. “No problem . . . just that I see things a little differently from most.”

Remy continued to listen to her, sure that she was about to say more.

“I see things about folks that they can’t see themselves,” she said.

“That another curse?” Remy asked her. He had moved closer to them, squatting down so that he, too, could pat his dog.

“All depends on how you look at it,” she said. “Makes it kinda tough to have a normal life . . . to keep a job and stuff.”

She was staring at him again, old eyes squinting.

“Do you see something with me?” he asked.

“Yeah, I do,” she said. “You’re not like everybody else, are you?”

Remy smiled. It wasn’t entirely unusual, but it was rare. There were a select few people out there in the world with the ability to see things—those who could peer into the shadows and see what was actually lurking there behind the veil.

Those who could see things as they truly were.

“No, I’m not,” Remy said, looking away from the intensity of her gaze.

“So, what’s your story?” she asked him, her face now very serious. “Haven’t come to take me, have you?”

Remy laughed as he patted Marlowe’s head. The dog was in heaven with all this attention.

“Not my job,” he told her with a shake of his head. “So no worries there.”

“Good,” Dottie said, happy that he wasn’t the Angel of Death. “Been seeing a lot of your types walking around recently, and have gotten a little nervous.”

Dottie’s words hit him hard, her observations worrying.

“You’ve seen a lot like me around?” he asked her to be sure.

The old woman nodded. “Oh yeah, just strolling around.” She waved a hand around in the air. “Like they were checking the place out or something.”

Or something, Remy thought, certain that the angels she had seen were doing reconnaissance . . . but for which side? Perhaps both? It was truly bothersome, but it made what he had come to the Old South Church for all the more pertinent.

“Was that what they were doing?” Dottie asked him, interrupting his train of thought.

“Yeah, it probably was.”

“Something up?”

“That’s something I need to find out,” Remy answered, rising to his feet and looking at the church before him.

He needed to get himself inside to do what he had to do. He had been planning on taking Marlowe in with him, but now maybe he wouldn’t.

“Hey Dottie, want to do me a favor?” he asked the old woman.

“Sure, if I can,” she said, stroking Marlowe’s side.

“Want to keep an eye on Marlowe while I take care of some business?” he asked her.

She smiled warmly, looking to the dog.

“What do you think, pal?” she asked him. “Can you stand to hang around here with Dottie for a little while longer?”

Marlowe panted heavily, his tail wagging happily in response.

“Will you be okay, buddy?” Remy asked the Labrador.

“Okay with Dottie,” Marlowe grumbled, extending his thick neck to give her another big wet kiss on the side of her face.

“That’s great. I should only be a little while,” he told the dog.

“Take your time,” Dottie called out as he started to walk around to the back of the building.

To make his direct call to Heaven.