All Who Wander Are Lost (An Icarus Fell Novel) (46 page)

In the fifth cage,
Sister Agnes—Icarus’ mother—sat placidly on the
straw-covered floor. When she glanced in Poe’s direction, the
guardian angel looked away. The last enclosure held Piper. She paced
the length of the cage like a beast at the zoo, eyes darting between
Azrael and the boy, Father Dominic, Icarus and Poe, like she was
searching for who to blame.

Poe saw all this in
the moment before Icarus turned to see what captured her attention.
As he turned his face away from her, she noticed his shoulders sag.
It seemed he didn’t want to bump into the angel of death any
more than she did.

“
Hello,
Icarus, my son,” the fallen angel said, his voice the perfect
arrangement of an all-male choir. “We meet again.”

Beside Poe,
Trevor’s body stiffened.

†‡†

A breeze played
across Trevor’s face, stirred his hair against his cheek. He
blinked stray stands out of his eyes. Behind him, he heard words he
thought he should know. He listened closer, concentrating. More than
one voice spoke, but he couldn’t pinpoint where the sound came
from, who spoke them, because the trees forced themselves into his
mind, pulling him back to them every time he attempted to turn his
thoughts away.

They reached all
the way to the sky, maybe beyond, those trees. He thought if he
climbed one, it would take him the rest of his life to reach the
top, but when he did, he would find himself in Heaven.

Heaven.

The word sounded in
his head like the peal of a bell. His eyes flickered tree to tree
surveying the brown bark, the green needles on the branches, moss on
the trunks.

Beautiful.

Maybe this was
Heaven and the trees led closer to God. The idea felt good to
Trevor, but the concept seemed wrong.

The
wind blew again, this time bringing a chill to his skin, raising
goose flesh on his arms and making the hairs on the back of his neck
stand upright. He shivered. The wind died but the chill remained and
he realized without knowing why:
this
isn’t Heaven.

As the thought
entered his mind, the trees changed. The brown bark shriveled and
peeled; velvety moss turned to slime; green needles lost their
pigment, became the gray of ash. If another breeze blew, it would
surely separate them from the gnarled branches.

All Trevor’s
muscles went stiff with realization, awareness.

This
is Hell
.

Memory flooded back
in as if the pipe in his head channeling them past conscious thought
had burst. He remembered Poe, the demon, the landscape of Hell. He
remembered the strange room, the tapestry.

He remembered the
boy.

Trevor pivoted
slowly on one foot, like a basketball player in slow motion. He saw
Poe at his side, a look of fear on her face. He saw his father
standing outside the bars, his back to them. Beyond Icarus stood two
more figures.

His eyes met the
boy’s gaze and the boy smiled.

Bruce
Blake-All Who Wander Are Lost

When I turned away
from Poe, I didn’t know what to expect. For months, I’d
thought of her as my guardian angel, always on the look-out for me,
a being who’d put my best interests before all else.

How things change.

In retrospect, I
saw her failings: the times I’d needed her and she wasn’t
there, the times she’d showed up to help and it led to more
trouble, the Carrions who appeared whenever she did. And now I knew
why.

Because she’s
one of them.

So when I pivoted
to see what she stared at behind me, I expected it to be a trick, a
way for her to escape with my son and lead me on a further merry
chase through Hell. I didn’t expect what was actually behind
me.

Azrael was clothed
as usual: black on black. His appearance made me think of an
old-time gunslinger, someone about whom Zane Grey might have written
in his old Western novels. As much as I loathed Azrael for
everything he stood for and everything he’d done—from
killing my mother to abducting my son—I’m sorry to say I
also felt an unwanted tickle of pride somewhere down deep, though
not deep enough to hide it completely. The man was not a man but an
archangel and my father.

How many people can
say that?

What’s
your father do for a living?

Mine? Oh, he’s
an archangel. The angel of death, to be precise.

Didn’t
Heaven banish him?

Shut the fuck
up.

A boy stood beside
Azrael. I recognized him immediately as the kid I’d seen at
other times during my visits to the underworld and, though I’d
never been in his presence exactly, his attention directed toward me
stood the small hairs on my arms on end.

I decided I didn’t
like him.

The cages at their
backs were occupied but I didn’t dare take my eyes off the
dynamic duo. I’d seen what I assumed was a small fraction of
Azrael’s capabilities and figured they’d be multiplied
here in Hell.

“
Hello,
Icarus, my son. We meet again.”

It felt as if his
words made the ground quiver beneath my feet but it may have been my
knees wobbling at the sound of his voice. At my back, I heard a
distressed squeal from Poe’s throat. Again the feeling of
being tricked overwhelmed me, kept curiosity from turning me to see
what prompted the sound. I gritted my teeth and forced my knees to
keep still.

“
What
do you want?”

“
Your
freedom. Nothing more, nothing less.”

My eyebrows must
have come dangerously close to touching as I peered at him through
slitted lids.

Why
would he want my freedom
?

“
Why
would you want my freedom?”

“
You’ve
messed up the balance and it must be restored.”

My eyebrows inched
closer together.

“
What
are you talking about?”

Azrael opened his
mouth to answer but the boy at his side raised a hand, stopping him
before any sound emerged. I suspected his gesture would have the
same effect on any living thing.

“
You
don’t belong here,” the boy said, his voice the
high-pitched, slightly girlish tone of a young man not quite through
puberty. But it contained undertones, too: evil, discordant
undertones loaded with menace.

“
You’re
damn straight I don’t.”

The boy smiled.

“
And
you have attracted too many others who don’t belong.”

He gestured and I
followed the wave of his hand, saw for the first time the people
housed in the cages behind him: Marty and Todd, Tony McSweeney,
Orlando Albert, Father Dominic, my mother and, finally, Piper. All
but my mother stared at me; her eyes were fixed on Azrael, an
expression of adoration on her face.

“
You
must leave,” the boy continued. “And you must take one
of these souls with you.”

I blew a single,
sharp laugh through my nose.

“
I’ll
do better: I’ll take all of them off your hands.” Father
Dominic’s expression brightened. “Except the priest.”

“
One,”
Azrael said, the index finger on his left hand pointing skyward in
both a gesture indicating how many available for the taking as well
as what direction I’d be headed with said soul. “You
take one or you take none.”

“
But
I thought you were over-stocked.”

The boy smiled more
broadly, as if I’d told a joke which he alone understood.

“
Arrangements
can be made, Icarus. Do you want to try me?”

I shivered and
glanced at my feet—nothing interesting about them other than
the fact I didn’t have to look into the boy’s blazing
eyes. Exactly my goal.

“
Okay.
One.”

The choice would be
easy. I turned toward the cage behind me and saw Poe kneeling on the
floor, Trevor standing beside her. His eyes stared beyond me, fixed
on Azrael and the boy. It struck me that my son and the guardian
angel would have made a cute couple; Poe only appeared a few years
older than Trevor, a gap too big at age fifteen but more than
acceptable in a couple of years. The idea felt good for the
heartbeat before reality settled back in to my brain.

We were in Hell.
They were in a cage. The woman stole souls.

“
What
did you do to him?” I growled.

Poe looked at me,
eyes brimming fake tears, and shook her head.

Does she mean
she doesn’t know? That she didn’t do it?

Part of me
remembered the times she’d saved me and wanted to believe her.
But too many other things crowded my head, too many times she’d
been the cause of my problems. I’d seen her take my mother’s
soul. I knew she’d brought my son to Hell.

“
I’ll
take Trevor.”

“
He
is not one of the choices.”

I spun around fast
enough at Azrael’s words I teetered on the edge of losing my
balance.

“
What?
You said I had to take one of these souls. Why can’t--”

The boy raised his
hand again and I stopped talking. I didn’t mean to, my mouth
just stopped as though I was Achmed the dead terrorist and he had
his Jeff Dunham hand jammed up my ass to determine my lips’
actions.

“
He
is not one of the choices. The angel brought him here by mistake.”

My heart jumped in
my chest, beat faster like it wanted to break free.

He’s not
supposed to be here.

My lips trembled as
I said: “So, he can--”

Azrael stretched
his arms out mimicking the pose of Christ on the cross then, with
his arms still straight, brought his hands together in front of him
hard. His hellish version of the clapper didn’t extinguish the
lights, but I heard the same popping sound behind me as when Trevor
and Poe appeared out of nowhere. I pivoted back toward the bars, my
head starting to spin with so much back and forth.

The cage was gone.