The Prison of the Angels (The Book of the Watchers 3) Read online

  “Yes. And she was about to kill us.”

  “Kill your paramour, you mean.”

  I hesitated, stung.

  “Which bit of ‘Milja saved your life too,’ are you struggling to grasp?” Egan growled. “Because either you’re thick as a plank, or you’re claiming she offended your high moral precepts. And I’m not buying that.”

  You’re not helping, Egan!

  Azazel took a single angry step forward and I put my hands on his bare chest just to stop him crashing into me. The touch, thankfully, distracted him from Egan. He glowered down into my face. “Why do you love him?” he demanded.

  “Why do you love me?”

  He shook his head and laughed; it was an ugly sound. “You told me you needed me to love only you. In five thousand years chained in darkness, I had forgotten how much humans lie. There is not a bone of honesty in your bodies.”

  “Okay,” I said humbly. “You were right. I was a gigantic hypocrite, and I wronged you. I’m sorry.”

  Azazel waited, one black brow crooked high.

  “I should never have made demands on you. I screwed up. I was… I am… I’m weak, Azazel. I’m scared. You’re so much more…” Oh, this is not coming out right. I cleared my throat. “I was jealous because I was afraid that if you got, um, involved with someone else, then you couldn’t possibly love me.”

  I could see Penemuel out of the corner of my eye like a great golden flame.

  “Because I’m just not that beautiful. Not good enough for an angel.” I took a deep breath. “That was so stupid of me, wasn’t it? I already knew that love’s not like that.” I already knew how I felt about Egan. I just didn’t grant you the same grace.

  “Yes,” he said with consummate bluntness. “It was stupid.”

  “There are ways they teach us we should act when we love, and I don’t know if they’re right, but they’re definitely wrong for you. Because you’re not… Every time I try to control you I screw up. Every time I make demands, or expect you to behave like a proper human boyfriend, whatever that is. Every time I try to make you safe for me.”

  “You were always safe with me.”

  “No. You’re not safe. And you’re not my husband, or my boyfriend. You’re a fallen angel.” It felt, as I said those words, that I was letting go of something I’d clung to for a long time. It felt as if I was falling away from him. “I still don’t know how to deal with that. But I do know I should stop trying to make you do things. You are you, forever and ever, and I am just human. I’m momentary. So love who you want; it’s not my job to tell you. Do what you want; I will still love you.”

  “Will you? Whatever I do?” Azazel’s silver eyes bored into mine. His voice was low, his breath honey and pepper. “What if I choose to push him off that rock?”

  He would. He would, you know.

  For a moment I held my breath. “I’d rather you killed me first. Really.”

  He understood. His face seemed to crumble, muscles pulling his eyes and mouth awry. “All I wanted was to make you happy,” he rasped. “Why couldn’t you just be happy with me?”

  I shook my head. “I can’t ever be happy, Azazel. Ever.”

  “Why not? What do you want?”

  What do I want?

  “I want to be yours,” I said, my breath so shallow that I could hardly get the words out. “Yours entirely. Your concubine—your slave. I want to forget everything but you. I want you to love me and desire me and never stop, even when I cry for mercy. I want to kneel in chains at your feet; I want you to ravish me whenever, wherever, however you want me. I want you to own every inch of my body, and to fuck me so senseless that I never think again.”

  Everyone was staring.

  “And I want a lover,” I continued, “who will be with me all my days. Who will grow fat and wrinkly with me, and share stupid jokes and cook dinner and cut the lawn and drink bad wine and watch box-sets on TV and get all excited imagining what will happen next. I want to hang wallpaper with him and argue about whether the cat should be allowed to sleep on the bed with us. I want a partner whose life I make complete. I want to wake up every morning determined to be the best version of me that I can be, for his sake. I want to sit in the park with him and watch our children feeding the ducks, and know that this is the most wonderful, exciting thing we could ever do in all the world. I want our lives to be one. I want to grow old with him, and change with him, and know we have made each other different and better people. I want him to die first and break my goddamn heart forever, so that he never has to mourn me.”

  I fell silent.

  “I can’t give you that,” he said at last.

  I shook my head, my pain a mirror of his. “I know. But neither can he.”

  His eyes were molten pewter, the silver of Heaven and the darkness of the Pit swirling together.

  Penemuel stirred, lifting her head. “Michael’s here,” she said ominously, as light turned the spinning snow to motes of gold. “Hurry.”

  Azazel glanced up at the sky, then flung me bodily with a scoop of his hand against Penemuel. She caught me in one arm, faster than thought, strong as a lioness, and launched herself straight at Egan. We body-checked him as a single mass, straight off the edge of the overhang, a tangle of limbs plummeting into the empty air.

  Then the air tore open, and we were nowhere, and then whumph Egan and I were released to spin horizontally across packed snow and crash into a drift piled against a clapboard wall. The snow cushioned us, mostly.

  I lifted my head, spitting out bloody ice from where I’d bitten the inside of my lip, in time to see Penemuel—who, catlike, was still on her feet—look up with a snarl at the sky and pull the fabric of reality around her like a curtain, vanishing into the folds.

  I crawled out of the snowdrift as Egan hauled himself to his feet. We were in a side street of a snow-covered mountain town. I could see the huge cliffs towering beyond the neat, insulated, multi-colored houses. Light spilled from a shopfront on the opposite side of the main road; clearly darkness came here early, so close to Midwinter and so shadowed by the mountains.

  Up on those peaks, though it wasn’t yet sunset up there, strange lights flickered and bloomed briefly in the sky, red as blood and gold as glory.

  7

  JÖTUNHEIMR

  I don’t think I even need these winter things,” I said, plucking at the sleeve of my Norwegian Army-surplus jacket as we sat in the snow. The whole padded get-up, jacket and pants and woolen hat, was patterned in winter camouflage hues of white and grey. “I’m not feeling the cold anymore, have you noticed?”

  There were other things I’d stopped feeling since we’d left Rome; anxiety, claustrophobia, formless panicky rage. I felt like a new woman. Or perhaps, like my old self at last. We were up in the mountains away from crowds and priests and churches—and we had a plan once more, sort of. And I’d spoken to Azazel. Just seeing him, speaking to him… It made all the difference.

  Egan glanced sideways at me. His knees were pulled up, his arms hanging loosely over them. “Better safe than sorry,” he said. “Does it still work when you’re asleep, or exhausted, or hurt? Besides, there are people up here on this mountain and you don’t want to draw attention. They might just notice someone skipping past in a bikini.”

  I scooped up a handful of snow powder and tossed it at him in rebuke. He smiled. Tufts of blond hair stuck out sideways from under his hat, and snow-dust clung to them.

  He had a nice mouth, I thought, not for the first time. In fact right at this moment, sitting here in the sunlight in the lee of a crag of rock, on the side of a mountain overlooking a frozen lake, I couldn’t picture anything in the whole world sexier than him leaning in and kissing me with that mouth—not even the actual sex we’d had.

  Just kissing. The image made my stomach flutter.

  I caught myself blushing and I looked away, examining my bare hands. “I’m not really human anymore, am I?” I muttered.

  “You’re more than human. Yo
u’re touched by Grace.” He wrinkled his nose. “If only you were working for the other side, you’d be a saint.”

  “Hah.” I liked that. “What would I be patron saint of?”

  Egan considered. “People with divided loyalties.”

  “Really? Your personal favorite then!”

  He grinned. “Sure, I’d never be off my knees.”

  Whoa. I gave him a pointed stare. “For a priest, you are one hell of tease.”

  That made him chuckle, and then he looked a little ashamed. “I’m sorry. I just…enjoy your company.” He kicked a hole in the snow with the heel of his boot. “I’m a pretty shite priest too, to be honest, given that my skillset mostly consists of putting people down in a ton of pain. I doubt there’s many parishes that’d welcome me.”

  “I dunno.”

  “Not to mention the whole heresy thing, of course.”

  Ah. There is that. For a long moment I bit my tongue. “It must have been a shock for you, when you spoke to Gabriel.”

  “You could say so. He’s the first angel they show recruits. It’s like a test, almost.”

  “How did you take it?”

  “Better than some. I’d had previous experience.”

  Oh yes. He’d told me. Michael, in Central America somewhere, killing Nephilim. “What does he look like, in the flesh?”

  “Uh… A big, good-looking black guy. Tied up underground.”

  “And you didn’t have a problem with that?” I said, my voice squeaking a little.

  “I…” He stopped and sighed. “I believed everything my superiors told me. That the Watchers were demonic powers who had rejected Almighty God and dedicated themselves to evil. That any appeal they made to my compassion or reason was just some trick.”

  “And what do you believe now?”

  “That they’re no worse than we are. Just a whole lot more dangerous, individually.” His eyes, behind their sunshades, were tracking back and forth across the horizon. Jotunheimen National Park, named for the mythical home of the giants, looked white and empty from where we sat. It actually looked a lot like my childhood landscape in Montenegro; maybe that was why I was feeling so optimistic. Somewhere out there on one of those slopes was a cave where the Norse trickster-god Loki lay bound until the Twilight of the Gods. Or the Great Serpent Samyaza lay imprisoned until Judgment Day, depending on your point of view.

  I twisted my fingers together. “Well, I’m glad about Jesus. That even if he was half-angel… I mean, I always thought… Look, I know Azazel’s take on God is pretty bleak; that He’s autocratic and irrational and just incredibly heartless. Old Testamenty, of course.” The God of Abraham and Isaac, demanding murderous proof of devotion. The God of Father Velimir, torturing innocents to reprieve the rest of us from a program of His own devising. The God who sits back and does nothing as people are sent to the camps and the gas chambers, as they die and kill in His Name. “I still sort of hoped that he’d got it wrong, that we’d maybe all misunderstood. I hoped there was love at the heart of it, and room for mercy and the Beatitudes and stuff.” I sat up straighter, arching my back. “I mean, it’s not like we can know the true nature of God, that’s what the Orthodox Church teaches; His essence is wholly transcendent, now and forever, so we can never know or comprehend Him. ‘A divine darkness beyond all being;’ that’s what Saint Dionysius said. But if He truly was there, at that moment in history, as the Christ, revealing His intentions—then there’s some sort of hope, isn’t there? For us? For goodness? I can have some sort of faith, can’t I?”

  “And now abideth Faith, Hope, Love; these three,” said Egan softly. He sounded terribly sad.

  But the greatest of these is Love, I completed the quote to myself.

  And it’s the one you struggle with, Egan, isn’t it? You’ve got Faith in plenty—Faith in God and His Law and your Church. You’ve got Hope; you do not doubt that your choices and actions will make a big difference to the future, for good or evil, and that’s why you take such care with them. But Love? It’s a dangerous siren-song as far as you’re concerned, leading you onto the rocks. Not to be trusted.

  “What are we waiting for?” I asked, breaking the silence at last.

  “Penemuel is doing some shopping for me.”

  That came as a surprise. I didn’t know that he’d had any private conversation with her. “What sort of shopping?”

  “Extra ammunition mostly.”

  Ugh. “You think we’re going to have to shoot our way in?”

  “I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised.” He shifted on his rock seat. “I do know theoretically where the cave is located, but I know nothing about the layout of the place, or how many people they’ve got there. Not without logging back into the Vidimus files, which would be a big giveaway.”

  “You’d shoot priests?”

  “They’re not priests. Not Christian ones anyway. Samyaza is in the keeping of an Asatru temple, and they are not a co-operative bunch. Nor do they believe in any of this ‘turn the other cheek’ stuff. They’ll fight to defend their own, believe me.”

  “What’s Asatru?”

  “A heathen revival religion. As far as they’re concerned, it’s their old Viking god Loki they’ve got chained up down there. None of the Christian churches have had any access up here since the nineteenth century, and we don’t know much about what they’ve been getting up to. Except that they did a good job denying access to the Nazis during the occupation.” He shrugged one shoulder. “So. We need to be prepared.”

  I chewed my lip. “If they’re not Christian, is the place still consecrated?”

  “Good question.”

  “Maybe it’ll be possible to call Azazel in without the Host knowing?”

  “Maybe.”

  I stamped my feet up and down in their snow-notches, impatient rather than cold. “I need to sleep before we do anything. To see if I can make contact with Samyaza.”

  “Yes.”

  “And we’re going to lose the light around three. We haven’t got long days here.”

  “Well—”

  There was a puff of snow, dazzling white, as Penemuel appeared in front of us. Egan jumped to his feet.

  “Hello, little ones,” she said fondly. I wasn’t sure if I liked the epithet. “Here you go.” She threw a long, stiff canvas bag toward Egan and he caught it. “Hunting rifle.”

  Egan worked the buckle of the bag, revealing something with a polished stock and a telescopic sight. “Nice,” he muttered.

  She followed this up with a smaller green canvas bag that nearly buried itself in the soft snow as she dropped it at his feet. “And 9x21mm rounds for the Beretta. As requested.”

  He glanced down and nodded. He wasn’t looking at her, I noticed. Really deliberately not looking at her.

  “Where’s Azazel?” I asked.

  Penemuel only rolled her eyes. She strolled forward across the snow—leaving, I noted, only the faintest of prints—and spun to look at the icy lakes and the circle of mountains. “Pretty place. He’s still thinking things over.”

  “Well, I killed his daughter. He can take as long as he likes.”

  She made a dismissive gesture. “He’ll have more children. He needs to focus on what is in front of us now.”

  Oh, angels. All that snow, but it was her words that made me feel cold from head to soles. Egan, who had the rifle out and was examining the bolt action, looked up.

  “He’ll have more lovers too, Penemuel,” I said. “Does that make me expendable?”

  She gave me a narrow look. “I take your point; I intended you no personal slight.”

  You missed my point by miles. Our worth is not predicated on immortality.

  “We’re heading to the lodge by the shore tonight,” I told her, though my heart felt heavy. “We’ll start looking for the cave tomorrow, first thing.”

  She nodded. Her circling took her around Egan’s back and she draped an arm over his shoulder. Egan froze over the rifle barrel. Penemuel grinne
d, then stooped to lick and nip at his ear-lobe. “He’s so cute.” She looked over at me with mischievous appetite. “Won’t you lend him to me just for a night, Milja?”

  My stomach was tying itself in knots. Egan was absolutely motionless, his mouth compressed to a thin line, but I couldn’t see his eyes because of his shades and I couldn’t tell whether his expression was dread, rage, or the one I’d come to interpret as I’ve got an erection and now I deserve the fires of Hell.

  “No,” I said flatly. And then because of all people I had no right to tell Egan who he could get dirty with, added, “Not unless he begs me to.”

  She grinned again. “Aw.”

  “Put him down, Penemuel.”

  She acceded. She actually obeyed. I think that shocked both me and Egan. “Call us when you need us,” she said to me, circling again. Then winked at him. “Call me.”

  She disappearing in a shower of snow-crystals.

  I let out a long breath.

  “So I’m your toy now, am I?” said Egan softly. His frozen face was thawing, but I still couldn’t tell whether that weird twist to his mouth was bitter resentment or relief tinted with black humor.

  “I think your choice is, mine—or hers,” I answered flatly, because that was the bald truth. “You’re a popular guy. Shall we go?”

  We came down to the Laufeyjarson Lodge on the north shore of Lake Gjende on skis, just as dusk was falling. The landscape at height was so much like that of my own childhood—craggy and open and completely barren. The big difference was the color of the rock; back home it was pale limestone, but here it knuckled black and volcanic and grim wherever it was too steep for the snow to lie. The long lake itself was frozen white, except for a grey strip in the center.

  Egan had been endearingly pleased when I’d told him in the winter apparel shop in Odda that of course I could ski, even if I wasn’t used to these slick, modern, multi-colored things with the boot crampons. “My father made me some out of waste plastic, and taught me to use them cross-country. We even have ski slopes and bobsled runs at Žabljak in Montenegro, you know. We are not medieval peasants.”