The Prison of the Angels Page 3

  Repeatedly?

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh crap.”

  His eyes weren’t just glassy and bloodshot—they were leaking blood.

  Oh God, Egan. I reached out without thinking to clasp his face, but he recoiled.

  “Don’t.”

  Because I couldn’t touch him and I couldn’t bear to look at him, I stood up and walked into my bedroom, and ended up just facing into a corner. Because I couldn’t cry I shook, silently.

  And I didn’t wonder at the drinking anymore.

  2

  ICE BREAKS

  Egan insisted on spending the night propped up dozing in my only comfortable chair, whilst I slept on the bed. At four in the morning I heard him start awake with a gasp, then let himself out of my room.

  He didn’t come back until after dawn. I saw him out of the window as I stood over my toast. He was weaving slightly as he crossed the road back toward the house, hunched up in his coat, head down. Wet flakes of snow were flicking like spittle from a grim sky, melting as soon as they touched the ground.

  “Azazel, I love you,” I said quietly. I’d said it every morning since the day he left me. In the early days, I’d said a lot more. I knew he could hear.

  He’d never answered me.

  I let Egan back into the warm. “Are your legs okay?”

  “Better. We should get going to Minot as soon as possible,” he said, sinking into a chair. He didn’t smell of alcohol anymore, but he sure looked hungover. “Do you want me to drive?”

  “You, drive? Are you out of your mind?”

  He rubbed his face. “Probably.”

  I put a plate of toast down in front of him, and when he just stared at it, I buttered it and covered it with jelly. “Egan, eat.”

  He obeyed.

  I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to comfort and advise, but there wasn’t a single word I could think of. I couldn’t say “They’re just dreams,” because I knew they weren’t. Angelic dreams have a reality all their own. I’d been through all this myself. The big difference was, I’d been willing.

  And there is no bigger difference.

  Now I felt numb with helplessness. I sat and watched him eat, because there was nothing else I could do. I couldn’t even touch him. I couldn’t put my arms around him and hold him until the cold and the numbness melted away, the way I wanted to, because he could not bear being touched. And I was tainted by my own sexual motives. I wanted Egan myself. I wanted him in a bad, bad way.

  I’d lain awake since he left in the night, worrying about that.

  I was, I thought, not that much better than Penemuel.

  Which is why I jumped like a scalded cat when, as I took the empty plate and squeezed past his chair to the little sink, Egan put his hand on the inside of my thigh and slid it up to my ass. Even through my snug jeans I felt that caress.

  “Whoa!” I turned and stared at him; he scrambled out of his chair and backed away, hands raised as if to fend me off.

  “I’m so sorry!” he gasped. “I wasn’t thinking!”

  “Egan! What the hell?” I wasn’t angry—far from it; just confused. “I thought you were…”

  He cringed. I’d never seen a man so racked. “I’m sorry! She…” He gestured in a wild hopeless manner, then visibly changed his mind and surrendered all rights to dignity. “My mother would say I was being hag-ridden, but she’s no hag. She’s just…relentless. Every time I fall asleep, she’s waiting for me. And it feels like, in the dream, it feels like she makes me come, over and over, but”—he swiped angrily at the air over his crotch—“apparently not. It’s just a brainstem thing I guess. So when I’m awake I am…” He swallowed, then bared his teeth. His handsome face was a twisted mess of self-loathing. “I’m just stupidly horny. I’m really sorry, Milja!”

  “It’s not your fault,” I told him, color burning in my cheeks like a lamp.

  “Bull. Total bull. I didn’t control myself.”

  “Okay. I mean—I understand. It affected me the same way.”

  For a moment his face smoothed in wonder.

  “And you need to sleep, Egan. You have to, even if it means…” I cleared my throat. “You’re not thinking straight. You’re not yourself.”

  He sagged. “You’re telling me to lie back and take it?”

  I clenched my fists. “Oh God, I’m not telling you anything.”

  “Is there—is there any way to stop them wanting you?” he asked hoarsely.

  Kill her daughter. “Not that I know of.”

  I could see him gnawing the inside of his cheek. “Okay,” he growled. “Then I will endure it. It is my cross to bear.”

  Minot airbase in North Dakota was theoretically an eight-hour drive from Saint Paul. We took longer. First I packed everything I needed to keep, and loaded the car. I left the saw coiled neatly on my table, along with a week’s advance rent, because I felt bad skipping out like that. Then I took Egan shopping for all the stuff that hadn’t made it back from Roshana’s ranch. It was almost routine for us now.

  In the mall café Egan borrowed my phone and downloaded all his own contacts that he’d saved online. Then he did a whole lot of texting while I navigated my way out of the Twin Cities. The weather was overcast, and I was glad I’d invested in some winter tires as wet snow scythed horizontally across my windshield. It was hard to remember that a few weeks ago I’d been dining on a hotel patio in Lalibela wearing a T-shirt and capri pants. But the snow didn’t settle on the blacktop, and the I-94 was a good route. What stretched the journey out was that I pulled in every few hours at public rest-stops just to buy coffee and blow away the mental cobwebs, and during those breaks Egan stomped around the parking lots, exercising his legs and, I presumed, cooling his blood.

  “Do you remember John—he flew us out of Ethiopia?” he reported back from his texting mission.

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s out of the country, but he’s going to let us use his house in Minot, off-base. We just need to pick up the key from the neighbor.”

  “That’s kind of him.”

  We took it slowly because the road was so straight and the landscape was so flat and featureless, lacking even trees once we passed Fargo, that I was scared of losing concentration, and Egan wasn’t any help in keeping me alert—he dozed, despite his protestations, almost all day, waking with a start every so often when a text came through, or again seemingly at random, and then surrendering to exhaustion straight away.

  At first I was glad he was catching up on some sleep, even fitfully—even if he was dreaming of her—because his waking moments looked like a kind of torture. But under my numbness a hard knot of anger was starting to press against my heart. I looked into the gray sky with its whirling specks of slush hurtling toward me, picturing angels soaring up there somewhere overhead, pacing us.

  How could you, Penemuel?

  Re-connecting with Egan had given my mind a break at last from weeks of agonizing over Azazel. But now that he was asleep in the passenger seat, and there was nothing to watch but the endless unspooling of black road across white landscape, I returned to the heavy ache of my loss like it was the only home I knew.

  It hurt to be cast off. It hurt more to know that I deserved it. But most of all it hurt because I missed Azazel, bone-deep. I missed his wild, dark joy in me and in life. I missed the way he saw the world as something breathlessly new and wonderful, and how he made me see it the same way. I missed the thrilling terror of never knowing how far he would push me, and the vertigo of looking down from heights both physical and spiritual. He’d made my life seem both tiny and vast; ephemeral yet precious. Like the way he could glance at a beetle and see every incredible jewel-like detail.

  I missed his fierce desire. His strong, beautiful body. His kisses.

  His secret tenderness.

  The way he’d looked at me, with naked, uncomplicated delight.

  A whimper escaped my breast, and to my embarrassment Egan floundered from his shallow doze and blinked at me
. “What’s up?”

  “Nothing.”

  He reached for a plastic bottle of cola and took a glug. “Will you come to Rome with me?”

  “Of course.” What else is there for me to do? Who else do I have but you? “I’m not letting you wade into that lot alone.”

  “I’m glad. I know I can’t do it on my own.”

  “That’s not what you said before. You said that the End of the World was not my responsibility, one way or another.”

  “I did? That must have been before… Well, I underestimated the complications.” He took another sip. “It’s my responsibility for sure; it’s what I signed up for. Anyway, it looks like there’s a flight out tomorrow or the day after we can blag seats on.”

  American English was not our first language for either of us, I reminded myself. “What’s ‘blag’?”

  He smiled, but didn’t answer. He just kept looking at me, which was awkward because I needed to keep my own eyes on the road.

  “What?”

  “You are…” He sucked his lips in, sealing the words, and with the loss of that smile his eyes shadowed over. “Milja, will you be okay if we have to meet up with the Fallen again?”

  My heart bumped painfully. “He could have killed me in the woods without even trying. You too. Both of us. He’s being restrained, don’t worry.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Oh?”

  “You’re still in love with him.”

  Egan had the right of it. The faint chance of seeing Azazel again, under any circumstances, gave my heart wings.

  “Why do you want to talk about this?” I protested. The slush flew at us like a hyper-speed warp effect.

  “It’s just, after what you said in Grand Rapids… I’m trying to understand. You see. I’m really trying to wrap my head around…” He swirled the soda in its bottle. “I guess I’m a focused kind of bloke. I can’t imagine being in love with two women at once. I can’t even picture it.”

  “If you had two children, which one would you love?” I asked desperately, my gaze locked on the rear of the truck two hundred yards in front of us.

  “Children?” He laughed. “That’s not the same thing. Is it?”

  “I don’t know.” My knuckles were white on the steering wheel. “I love him. I love you. I don’t have an explanation.”

  He let out a long breath and didn’t answer.

  We drove on in silence until I’d passed the truck.

  “You don’t have any warm feelings for Penemuel then?” I asked, which was in hindsight devastatingly cruel of me.

  “Penemuel?” Egan shifted in his seat. “Christ, she’s killing me, Milja.”

  I glanced across this time, and he was pale with shame.

  “I can’t fight her. I try to talk to her, to command her, but she doesn’t listen. I’m going to ask for an exorcism, in Rome.”

  I bit the inside of my lip, my heart hot and hard.

  By the time we reached the intersection at Bismarck the wind and the temperature had both dropped and snow was starting to creep in from the verges onto the road. We crawled into Minot in the pitch dark, thankful that none of the ice patches had brought us to real danger.

  John’s house was a single-story construction on a large patch of land sparsely studded with pine trees. To me, as an apartment-renting city girl, it looked vast and sprawling. At the bottom of the drive was one of those post-mounted mailboxes that I’d only ever seen on TV. It even had a little metal flag.

  We let ourselves into the big, empty rooms and I found the furnace and kicked it into turbo. Then we heated up a stew made from canned steak and vegetables that we requisitioned from a kitchen cupboard; not exactly haute cuisine, but filling and tasty.

  Egan leaned back and scratched his beard. “I’m going to go shave,” he announced with that twisted self-deprecating smile of his. “And maybe take a nice cold shower.”

  I nodded.

  As soon as he had gone, I pulled on coat and hat and gloves and my sheepskin-lined winter boots. I took a book from the living-room shelf and a knife from the kitchen. Then I let myself out of the back door.

  The wind had dropped to near-stillness, and only a few flakes sifted down from a leaden sky. Snow lay three inches deep and crunched squeakily underfoot. Bundled up as I was, I didn’t feel the cold much except where it nipped my face.

  I needed privacy for what I was about to do. I didn’t want Egan to overhear anything.

  The back yard, I found, sloped downhill gently, away from the house and the trees into a big open field. There was no moon, but once I adjusted my supernaturally-enhanced eyes there was enough ambient light reflecting off the snow to see perfectly well. I followed the slope to the point where it leveled off at a dead-flat stretch of ground that I took for a sports field. There was a low wooden platform here, like the foundation of some house that had been long since blown away to Oz.

  Perfect, I thought.

  Laying John’s Bible down on the snow-muffled boards, I opened it to the Book of Jude, Chapter 1: And the angels which kept not their first estate, but left their own habitation, he hath reserved in everlasting chains under darkness unto the judgment of the Great Day. Baring my left arm, I cut a small gash in the muscle at the back. The pain took me by surprise, but by then I was already bleeding.

  ‘Blood conducts intent between the spheres,’ Azazel had told me once. And Penemuel was the Angel of the Written Word.

  I dripped blood carefully onto the printed verse, then snarled into the night; “Penemuel! We have to talk!”

  “That’s not the politest of invitations.”

  I spun around. She was standing on the slope a little above the platform. In the weeks since I’d last seen her she had recovered her health and grown, if possible, more beautiful—though damn if her sense of style didn’t confuse the hell out of me. She wore shiny tan boots and cream jodhpurs and the most gorgeous frock coat, like something from a costume drama; white filigreed with gold embroidery, big cuffs, cloth buttons, the lot. To counteract all that masculine dandyism her breasts were propped by a bronze colored bustier, and underneath that her shirt was thick cream lace, very open in weave, that made it clear that she was not wearing a bra. Her hair had grown out and was knotted in a high fountain on the apex of her head. There were no marks of prison deprivation on her now. She brought with her the hot scents of a summer far from North Dakota; frangipani and pepper and myrrh.

  She took my breath away. Of course, I hadn’t had any confidence that my improvised summoning would work, so it took me a moment to collect myself.

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “Is this about Azazel? Because you need to have that conversation with him—I’ve given up on the subject. It’s a waste of my breath.”

  I inhaled deeply, forcing myself to stay on-track. “No; it’s about Egan.”

  “What about him?”

  “You’re fucking him, and you’re going to stop. Right now.”

  She stalked around me, her head tilted with curiosity, the snow under her booted feet melting away to expose the grass. “Stop? Why?”

  “Because he hates it.”

  She burst into laughter. “Is that what he told you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh my dear! He doesn’t hate it, Milja—I can tell the difference between rock-hard and clay-soft, you know. Yes, he loves to protest, but his lovely stiff prick tells a different story, you may believe me!”

  I pulled my sleeve back down over my bleeding arm, to hide not just my bared skin but the fact I was trembling. “It’s not that simple. You’re hurting him.”

  “And he loves that.” She wrinkled her nose in amusement. “A good slap is the failsafe way of making him shoot his load. Haven’t you worked that one out?”

  I want to give you a good slap, I thought, though not because I thought she was lying. Egan was a soldier, and I rather assumed that all soldiers had, well…a complex relationship with pain. They couldn’t afford to be a
fraid of it like normal people; they had to be able to live with it, to push through it—and sometimes to use it as a goad.

  “You don’t know him,” I said, my voice so guttural I hardly recognized it. “You don’t know him at all. I’m sure there are a billion men who would love what you do, but he’s not like other men. He has vows to keep, and you are tearing pieces out of his soul. It not just his dreams you’re raping.”

  She shook her head at me, clearly nonplussed. “Don’t be silly.”

  And you’re the smartest of the Watchers? I clamped down the desire to shriek at her and scrabbled around for words she could understand. Much like Azazel, when it came to ethics Penemuel had thousands of years of catching up to do. “This is not a discussion, Penemuel. You are going to leave his lovely stiff prick alone from now on. Go bother someone else.”

  “You’re giving me orders?” Her golden eyes narrowed to slits. She towered over me, I noticed. “Who do you think you are, monkey-girl?”

  “I know who I am. I know you’re only standing here free because I found you and saved you from that pit in Lalibela. You owe me, Penemuel. You know that too.”

  “Hh.” The pacing resumed. She was like a great golden lioness, forever restless.

  “And you owe Egan your lifeblood.”

  She jerked her chin. “Yes! Why do you think I love him? He saved me!”

  Oh no. I took a deep breath. “But Egan loves me, only me, and you will not take from him what belongs to me.” I squared my shoulders. “He’s mine. Back the hell off.”

  “Ah.” She grinned suddenly. “That’s more like it, Milja. We come to the real heart of the issue, don’t we?”

  Whatever. I don’t care what you think of me.

  She reached out and touched my cheek. Her hand felt like fire, almost too hot to bear. “I like you better when you are honest. You make so much more sense.”

  “Fine.”

  For a moment more she paced about, rubbing her hands together as if I had chilled her. “And will you swear that you love him even more than I do?”