In Bonds of the Earth (Book of the Watchers 2) Read online

  I slipped the engine into park and stretched my back, half nervous and half grateful. The windows I could see in my mirror were smoked and only reflected a strip of gray sky and the black, louring pines.

  “Goddamnit,” I muttered, unbuckling and sliding out onto the roadside. The air tasted fresh, and at least it had stopped raining. I walked around the back of my Hilux.

  Both front doors in the other vehicle swung open and two figures stepped out. It took me a moment, in my confusion, to recognize two of the three guys from Roshana’s ranch; the ugly sinewy one and the one who’d stood watch over me at the poolside. They sauntered forward.

  The Nissan headlamps suddenly flared impossibly bright, filling my skull, enough to blind me. By the time I brought my arm down, blinking the blue lights from my retinas, there were not two but three figures in front of me. The two goons, standing quite still. And between them a tall man with silver hair and blue, perpetually disappointed eyes, rocking an unknotted tie and the most beautiful three-piece Italian suit known to humanity.

  He looked so out of place.

  “Hello, Milja,” said the Archangel Uriel softly.

  “What the hell do you want?” I stammered, as he closed on me. “You know what Azazel promised to do to you if you ever came near me again!”

  “Yes. I remember.” His smile was narrow-lipped and taut, but his voice calm. “But there are exceptional circumstances that I’m sure even he’ll forgive. I’m here to rescue you.”

  “From what?”

  “From them.” He waved both hands to indicate the guys behind him. They hadn’t shifted an inch. In fact, now that I was paying attention, there was no movement anywhere in my field of vision. No leaf stirred, no drip of water fell from the long lank grasses. A lacewing fly hung motionless in the light from the headlamp, like a chip etched into the air’s glassy surface. An absolute silence pressed down over us, the thousand tiny sounds of life sucked out of the world. We were the only agents capable of motion, here between the moments of time.

  “These gentlemen are under orders,” said Satan calmly, “to take you into the woods just there and put a bullet through your head. They’ve also been discussing, whilst driving along, the merits of getting you to—ahem—suck both their cocks before one of them pulls the trigger.”

  Cold water ran through my veins, and I backed hard against my rear fender. “Why…” I rasped, “why should I believe you?” I said this even though I could see the ugly one was poised with his hand reaching casually inside his quilted jacket. Their faces were expressionless, like masks.

  “Have I ever lied to you?”

  “Uh…you’re the Father of Lies.”

  “Oh come on, now that’s a libel I find particularly hurtful. That little weasel Paul—”

  “Jesus. Jesus said that, actually.”

  Uriel sniffed like I’d slapped him. “Hh. He…had his reasons. But he was misinformed. Very well, Milja.” He spread his hands. “As a demonstration of my sincerity and in the spirit of full disclosure, I will also tell you that your lover is less than ten minutes behind you on this road.”

  “My lover?” Azazel? I was completely confused now.

  “The dirty priest. Oh, don’t look at me like that, girl. The imprint of him is all over your soul. Do you think I can’t see it?” He wrinkled his nose in contempt. “Honestly—you can’t even stay loyal to a Son of Heaven? Huh. Just when I was beginning to respect you a little.”

  Oh crap.

  “Well, I don’t know how you found someone quite so messed up—he’s got love and guilt more confused than you can imagine, I’ve listened in at the confessional and it is a circus—but he’s been trailing you since you left him. Quite the stalker.”

  I think I managed to breathe, nothing more.

  “Anyway, you have two choices at this point. One: I go away and let this all play out. There is, I am prepared to admit, a fairly good chance that the priest will get here and find you in time… Before they pull the trigger anyway. And also relatively good odds that he can kill them both without you coming to further harm.” He smiled. “Choice two: you let me carry you away from this, all the way back to Chicago or wherever you like. You go free.”

  “In return for what?”

  “So cynical! Alright, since you insist.” He shrugged. “I do like a rational and equitable arrangement. In return for my saving you, I would only ask that you agree to give up on trying to approach the Scapegoat. Leave him be, unless he comes to find you.”

  “Azazel needs me.”

  “Not anymore, he doesn’t. He has others. You know that. Besides, do you really want him to know about your bit-on-the-side? Do you think he’ll take that well?”

  That prospect made me feel sick with guilt, to be honest. Which was why I’d been studiously not thinking about it since the moment it happened. I ignored it now. “You think you can make me just forget about him, after everything that’s happened?”

  “I’m not asking you to. Think of him fondly all you like. Indulge your torrid dreams. Keep him topped up, if you must. Just stay away. I’d hate to see you hurt.” He shot a glance back over his shoulder, a look of great distaste. “These thugs are not my doing, I assure you.”

  They’re Roshana’s. Good God, she really is that cold.

  “That’s thoughtful of you,” I said weakly, stalling for time. Keep him talking. C’mon Milja, work this out.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “You’re not nearly as bad as they paint you.”

  Vanity was always Uriel’s weakness. Well, that and controlling his physical reactions whilst in human form, including his expressions. He actually looked flattered. “I’ve been much maligned.”

  “It’s got to be hard to be prosecuting council. No one appreciates your role.”

  “Well, I’m honored to be entrusted with the task.”

  “But it’s got to be a lonely job, right? I don’t see any of the other angels at your back when things get tough.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “It’s enough to be right.”

  “I’m glad you think so.”

  For a moment he seemed on the verge of saying something, then he shook himself almost visibly. “So what’s it to be, Milja—Home? Or fellatio and bullets?”

  I tried to swallow. I could not bear the thought of abandoning Azazel, whatever was going on with him. But I was scared, yes, and worn down by bloodshed. The prospect of more violence made me feel like physical collapse.

  “To be honest,” Uriel mused, loosening his shoulders, “I’m not sure I understand all the fuss you people make about getting your penises sucked. Like it’s some ultimate pleasure, better than any ecstasy imaginable, physical or spiritual. In all the universe: mouth-on-genitals. I mean, really?”

  I didn’t answer. I did not like the way this was going; Uriel embodied such a dangerously unpredictable mix of prudishness and prurience.

  “Though I’ve never tried it myself of course—I have refused every offer.” He took another half-step closer, and I shrank back. “Do tell me. Is it really so wonderful? Do you suck the Scapegoat’s penis, Milja?”

  “Yes,” I said in a very small voice, my gaze sliding away from his as he brushed his hand across my cheek.

  “Do you like doing it?” He was standing way too close now, all but pinning me against the back of the car. He smelled of frankincense, and his fingers felt cool on my burning face.

  “Stop that.” I loved doing it, but I wasn’t telling Uriel that.

  “Did you suck the priest’s too?”

  “Go jump in the lake, Uriel.”

  “What about me? Would you suck mine? I mean, you demonstrably don’t confine your sexual favors to a single recipient. Why not me? I might even let you if you asked nicely enough. Do you think I could Fall for you, Milja?”

  Oh this is bad. Panic made my heart kick. “You really hate Azazel, don’t you?” I snarled.

  Uriel went still.

  “I mean, he’s already been condemned and pun
ished, but you’d disobey the Divine Command just to hurt him? Not to piss him off—you could do that by abusing me, any time. But to throw it in his face that I’d voluntarily gone with you—”

  He took a step back. “Clever little monkey. Yes.”

  “Why do you hate him so much?”

  Something flickered in his blue eyes, like a shark in the deep ocean. He spread his hands. “He just doesn’t do what he’s told.” A huff escaped his lips as he shook his head. “Do you have any idea how frustrating that is? To see someone who knows for a certainty what they are supposed to do, lunge for exactly the opposite?”

  “Really? Happens all the time, Uriel.”

  “Yes—that’s precisely the problem with your kind! You’re the only animal smart enough to be told what to do, and just what the consequences will be if you don’t, and yet you won’t obey! It’s just…irrational.” He said it like it was the ultimate condemnation.

  “I can’t argue with that.”

  “I mean, why is it so hard to do what you’re told? I can do it! Why not you?” He gestured angrily at the cars, the road, and the men. “All this. So unnecessary and ugly and pointless.”

  “Yeah, I get it. You think humanity was a bit of a mistake.”

  His spine snapped straight. “There are no mistakes.” For a moment his eyes glowed. Even under this overcast sky, his deep-set eyes looked a luminous swimming-pool blue. Then his shoulders slumped. “You are just…hard to like.”

  I almost felt sorry for him.

  “So what do you like, Uriel? Out of all Creation, there must be something that doesn’t offend you?”

  He frowned. “Dragonflies,” he said at last. “In all honesty I liked the Carboniferous best.”

  I found a wobbly smile on my lips, to my own surprise as much as his. “Dragonflies. They’re cool. Do you ever stop to think that we’re the only two kinds of people to know about giant Carboniferous dragonflies?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s one thing we have in common. You angels remember them. We humans found fossils and can picture what they were like. Every single other species ever created in between is dead.”

  He rubbed distractedly at the back of his head, momentarily disrupting his perfect silver locks. He’d seemed so superior the first time I met him, but he had chinks in his armor just like anyone else. “Make your choice,” he growled.

  “I can’t give up on Azazel.”

  He stared. “You see, I like that. Faithfulness. But if you are so devoted to the Scapegoat—tell me, Milja: why the priest?”

  I wish I knew. “Irrational instinct,” I whispered sadly. “Love.”

  “That’s your excuse for everything, isn’t it?” His lip curled. Then he lifted his hand dismissively, starting to turn away.

  “Don’t!” My voice was loud and the warning in it so clear even Uriel didn’t miss it, though it must have been a novelty as far as he was concerned. “You don’t want to make me do this, Uriel!”

  He froze, one dark eyebrow arched. “What?”

  “You’ve given me enough time to think. Thank you for that.” I spoke with conviction, not allowing any hesitation or doubt into my words. “I know for a fact that as Azazel’s witch I can use sex to heal people. Well, I don’t see any reason it can’t work the other way around. With ill-will, I’m sure I can maim and kill. What do they call malign witchcraft, Uriel—there’s a word, isn’t there?”

  “Maleficium,” he said grudgingly.

  “So you’re going to leave me alone with those guys? You’re going to add that to the burden of my sins? Because I swear I’ll do it if I have to.”

  He swung back to me, his shoulders as stiff as if he bore bristling wings. “Why do you have to make everything so difficult?” he complained. “I offered you a way out! You are just deliberately awkward.”

  “Oh, I know. If only I could be a nice obedient dragonfly just eating the head off her mate—”

  “That’s mantids! Oh for heaven’s sake—” He snapped his fingers at each of the men in turn, and even from where I stood I saw their eyes glaze over white. “Get out.”

  It took a moment for me to realize what he meant, but even as motion came back into the world and my would-be-assassins gasped and pawed at their faces, I was on my way back to my car. As I gunned the engine and pulled away I heard one shot go off, but it didn’t hit anything at all so far as I could tell. I looked into the rearview mirror and saw Uriel walk out onto the road, haloed in a silver shimmering light, watching me.

  I kept my speed high all the way to the town of Grand Rapids, and was lucky not to be pulled over. My driving was erratic, I’m sure, though I don’t recall much of the journey. I knew I needed to think though, not just run. I had a lot to mull over regarding that encounter, and what Uriel had said. He’d genuinely tried to keep me alive, in his awkward, manipulative way. And that meant he had a use for me. He didn’t want me dead, because that was no longer enough to cripple his enemy. Alive, I must still be—despite both his protestations and Roshana’s—a lever he could use against Azazel. If not now, at some point in some possible future.

  Unless he had some other motive.

  His hard-on was real enough. Ah, I didn’t want to think about that. Uriel’s attitude to me seemed to be located somewhere on the line between weird and seriously unhealthy.

  Just like every other man in your life then, hey Milja? “How do I keep finding them?” I asked out loud.

  Roshana now, she was definitely at the hostile end of the spectrum. That was impossible to deny any longer. All the evidence was that she’d tried to eliminate me from the picture.

  So I was a threat to her plans. Which meant, whatever was going on with Azazel and Penemuel, and whatever she thought she was getting out of the arrangement, I had the potential to change things.

  That’s good, isn’t it? Hopeful? Maybe?

  Roshana had got what she wanted, her long-lost daddy home again, and she meant to keep it that way.

  Uriel had…got some sort of outcome that suited him for the moment, but he possibly didn’t trust to last.

  ‘I do like a rational and equitable arrangement,’ he’d said to me.

  ‘I’ve refused every offer.’

  Roshana: ‘I’ve sucked the cocks of tyrants.’

  “Oh God,” I groaned, shooting a tree-lined junction without looking. “Oh God, how could you?”

  I waited it out in town, knowing that Egan would break sooner or later and come find me.

  I really needed to talk to Egan now.

  Grand Rapids, unlike its Michigan namesake, was a small town with a logging past and a tourist present. There were lots of cabins for rent and restaurants to hang out in. In happier times I might have liked the place. I was in a big cafe-bar one night, a near-empty refuge of raw wood and red padded leatherette booths, when it happened. I was reading Lake Wobegon Days because it seemed to be on sale in every tourist shop, and eating fries. A plain brown envelope flopped onto the table in front of me.

  “I’d like to talk,” said Egan, sliding onto the seat opposite me. He wore a sheepskin jacket and looked grim.

  I felt like I was letting out a breath I’d held for three days. “Okay.”

  “You all right?”

  “Been better.”

  “Still angry at me?”

  “I was never angry at you.”

  “Yeah…yeah you were.”

  “Fine.” I had to concede that one. “I’m not angry right now.”

  He nodded. “That’s good enough.”

  The waitress came up and he ordered coffee for both of us. Once she’d gone he pulled out some scanned photographs from the envelope and flipped them over one at a time so I could see. “Roshana Veisi, your employer. You bolted to her place as soon as you threw me out, stayed less than hour, then came here. Vanda Veisi, her mother.”

  The photo looked like it had been taken sometime in the Eighties, judging by the big hair, but the face was identical to Roshana’s o
wn. Absolutely identical.

  “Anoushak Veisi, her grandmother, taken back in Iran.”

  This one was very stylish, black and white. She looked like a Fifties movie starlet.

  “Three generations of women, none of whom married, yet who all had a single daughter who fortuitously inherited everything. Amazing family resemblance, don’t you think?”

  I made a “Hmph” noise.

  “I’m willing to bet that the pattern could go back maybe five hundred years or so, if I had time to chase it all up.”

  “Further than that.”

  My words took the wind out of his sails. He narrowed his eyes.

  “She’s one of the Nephilim—that’s what you wanted to hear, isn’t it? She’s only half human. Yes. Well done. She’s Azazel’s daughter. One of the original ones. She’s not a giant or anything, not anymore. But she is thousands of years old. You’re going to tell me that’s not possible, even for Nephilim, but it is.”

  He actually sat there with his mouth open; then the waitress arrived with her tray and coffee-pot. “No cream,” he muttered. The interrupted conversation hung in the air over us until we were alone again.

  “Do you remember the angel in the monastery?” I asked, spooning sugar because I felt like I was going to need it. “Don’t say his name. The other angel.”

  “Oh yes. The Adversary.” Egan’s mouth went hard.

  “He insists he’s still on God’s side, even if no one else believes him. Did you know that?”

  “I gathered that was the case.”

  “Does the Church know it?”

  “It is most certainly not part of official dogma.” He spread his hands. “I’m not personally in any position to judge the facts.”

  Was there a patron saint of prevaricating? I narrowed my eyes at him.

  “Well, he paid me a visit a couple of days ago. We had a talk—quite a long talk really.” I took a cautious sip of my drink. “I think he doesn’t have many people he can just, you know, have a chat with. He let some stuff slip.”

  “Like what?”

  “I think—I’m pretty sure—that he’s made a bargain with Roshana—which I don’t really get, because he’s one of the ones that hates the Watchers and is under instructions to kill all their offspring. I think he patched her up after Lalibela and bought her home—”