All Who Wander Are Lost (An Icarus Fell Novel) (39 page)

“
And
what am I supposed to find?”

“
Everything
will work out as it should.”

She stepped closer
and encircled me with her arms, pulling me against her. At first, I
stood like a punching dummy. I’d never been hugged by my
mother before, so it took a few seconds for my brain to reconcile
the action and figure out how to respond. I wrapped my arms around
her shoulders and patted her on the back. She released me and
stepped away.

“
You
will find what you are supposed to find.”

If anyone other
than my mother had repeated themselves like that, I’d have
been compelled to toss out a sarcastic response. Since she gave
birth to me, and died doing it, I gave her a pass.

I sighed and
glanced at the cave mouths stretching into the distance. Dozens of
openings, all of uniform size and shape with no doors, no street
numbers, no welcoming potted plants sitting outside to distinguish
one from another.

Mailman Hell.

I went to the
closest cave and peered in. Darkness strangled the light out of the
place a few feet down the rough-hewn walls. Unidentifiable smells
floated to my nose; water gurgled somewhere in the dark. Or maybe it
was the start of a growl at the back of some creature’s
throat.

“
Shit.”

I rubbed my chin,
hesitated a second, then took a step in without asking my mother’s
opinion. Three more steps and the black enveloped me. I looked back
over my shoulder; the light coming in the cave mouth appeared orange
looking at it from a detached world of night. My mother stood
silhouetted against it.

“
Are
you coming?”

“
No.
I don’t like the caves.”

Comforting.

I walked farther
into the cave, moving slowly to avoid walking into anything. Each
step brought deeper darkness. The temperature dropped. If I could
see, I’m sure my breath would have been a cloud of white mist
drifting ahead of me.

After a few more
paces, the darkness began to wane. The change was almost
imperceptible at first, but a definite difference. As I went deeper,
the black lifted further. I made out the wall to my left, discerned
the terrain of the floor passing beneath my feet, but the
illumination didn’t come from ahead; five feet further on, the
night returned to impenetrability. Looking up, I saw no sign of
light overhead. Hell, no sign of a ceiling.

I glanced right and
the figure cloaked in light walking beside me startled me. The
woman’s long, dark hair visible within the luminosity made me
think my mother might have lied about being an angel, but when the
woman faced me and I saw her youth, noticed the stud below her lower
lip, I knew who’d joined me.

“
Piper?
Where did you...?”

Her skin glowed
with a dim yellow incandescence like a fish that lives in the
deepest part of the ocean. I’d seen Poe perform a similar feat
a couple of times, though her reasons were about enchantment, not
illumination, and as I watched, the glow brightened. I diverted my
eyes back to the path ahead, worried I’d be mesmerized.

“
Where
did you come from?”

“
Around.”

I practically heard
her shrug with her answer. Not a satisfactory answer—her
sudden appearance smacked of Hellish manipulation—but what’s
a man to do? If her presence aided me, I shouldn’t look a gift
angel in the mouth. Maybe some of the forces of good still chose to
marshal on my side.

Sure.

“
Well,
it’s nice to see you.” I glanced down the rocky corridor
ahead. “It’s nice to see.”

“
Thanks,”
she replied and her fingers brushed my arm.

Her touch was what
I might have expected it to be like if someone dragged a baby
electric eel across my flesh—jolting, but not powerful enough
to be painful or unpleasant. The tingle it created vibrated down to
the tips of my fingers, up into my shoulder, then her touch
disappeared.

We walked on, her
glow brightening, allowing us to see farther ahead. My arm felt numb
once the sensation of her caress waned and I considered amending my
path to brush against her again but kept myself in check. Somewhere,
my son was in serious danger—I didn’t have time to
dally. If not in this cave, then one of the others. Hell was an
undeniably big place, but I had to believe something guided me,
brought me to this particular corner of it on purpose. If I didn’t
hold on to that, nothing remained but despair.

And the angel at my
side.

The tunnel widened
until it became a roughly square room. It was empty except for a
pile of straw in one corner. The three walls were bare and solid: no
doorways, no windows, no cracks or fissures. We stepped into the
room and Piper’s iridescence increased to full-blown light,
forcing away the darkness, leaving no shadows behind.

This is it?

I’d expected
more from Hell, especially given my other experiences. Where hid the
gargoyles? The tortured souls reliving their worst nightmares? Where
was the nudity, debauchery, depravity and degradation?

Disappointing.

“
What’s
going on here?”

I caught myself
turning toward Piper as I asked the question but caught myself at
the last second. Poe’s glow had left the people at the
hospital completely enchanted and unable to function of their own
accord. Didn’t need that to happen.

“
What
do you mean?”

Her voice changed,
became the angelic choir I’d heard out of the mouths of other
angels in the past: Poe, Michael, Raphael. Hers held a different
tone, discordant, as though the mezzo soprano couldn’t carry a
tune.

“
I
mean: why is there nothing here?”

I stepped into the
room, ran my fingers along the wall. It turned out to be cool, hard
stone—exactly how it looked.

“
What
happened to you?” she asked.

I took a chance and
glanced her direction. She was pointing at the patch of blood-soaked
shirt clinging to my chest.

“
Hell-beast
got me again. Can you do something about it?”

“
Depends.”

“
On
what?”

I half-expected her
to tell me we needed to find a handful of wolf’s bane and a
pinch of witch hazel.

“
Whether
you ask nicely or not.”

She smiled coyly
and tilted her head. Flirting while standing in a cave in Hell and
not knowing where my son was made me uncomfortable, but you got to
take it where you can get it. I diverted my gaze.

“
Please?”

She put her hand on
the wound, her touch immediately sending that tingling sensation
through my chest, down my arm, racing to my brain. I felt warmth in
my wound, imagined my skin knitting itself back together like some
cheesy special effect out of a bad sci-fi flick. Visions of Piper
unclothed replaced the thought as her touch lingered. I took a
shuddering breath and stepped away before I embarrassed myself. When
Piper took her hand away, some of the blood on my shirt stayed on
her skin like she’d brushed her palm against a red ink pad
used for rubber stamps.

“
Good?”

I sighed. “Oh
yeah. Never better.”

She reached for me
again but I stepped back.

“
Maybe
we better save that for later.”

She shrugged.

“
Perhaps
this empty cave is here for us.”

She whispered the
words and, despite the space between us, it sounded as though she
perched on my shoulder and spoke them directly into my ear. I felt
her breath on my neck; it raised goose bumps on my arms. Difficult
as it was, I took up my examination of the wall again, studiously
looking for any deformity to show the cave was more than it
appeared. Mostly I did it to distract myself from her.

“
We
have to...I need...”

My brain didn’t
seem to know what it wanted my mouth to say, so random words tumbled
off my lips, the way I imagined my son would fumble for the right
thing to say asking a girl on a date.

Trevor.

The thought of him
brought reality back, focused my thoughts. I faced the doorway,
purposely turning my head toward the wall and my back to Piper. Her
hand touched my shoulder.

This time, the
shock was immense but wholly pleasurable. My body stiffened and my
feet ceased moving me toward the door; I imagined the glow emanating
from Piper flowing into me. One finger of her free hand touched my
chin, swiveled my head toward her. I tried to close my eyes but they
weren’t going along with the plan.

Piper’s
luminosity became almost blinding but, even in its brightness, I saw
her clearly. Dark hair, sapphire eyes; the stud below her bottom
lip; the milky curve of her chin.

Below that she was
naked.

My eyes probably
widened like a surprised child. My mouth must have fallen open like
an old man in search of misplaced dentures. I became indistinct in
my own mind as it filled with nothing but her: the beauty of her
face, the smoothness of her skin, the warmth of her proximity. She
stepped forward and pressed her body against mine. I felt her
breasts against my chest and gasped.

The pressure of her
against me forced me back and I let it. A moment later, I was supine
on the heap of straw, the smell of hay the only thing I recognized
outside of Piper’s overwhelming presence. Her lips found mine,
her energy flowed into me, and I felt like there was no me anymore,
just us—two beings becoming one, our bodies merging, our
essences. I lost myself and didn’t care if anyone ever found
me.

Somehow, in a dark
cave of Hell, I found Heaven.

Bruce
Blake-All Who Wander Are Lost

The shack was gone,
and the two boys. The knife, the blood, the feelings of anger,
surprise, exhilaration, shame and despair: all gone.

Instead, Poe stood
outside on a hot and sticky night, the kind of night that brings a
sheen of sweat to your skin, leaves you feeling damp all the time. A
night in high summer somewhere in a southern state.

Poe looked down at
the railroad tracks beneath her feet and needed no more clues than
the metal rails and the adhesive humidity to know where she was, and
when—a place and time she didn’t want to be.