Cover Him with Darkness (11 page)

I shook my head, feeling terror crash in my veins. “No,” I mouthed, tears burning in my eyes. Then I turned my back on him, urging my legs to a stumbling run.

The corridor darkened, light leaching from the day, and everything went deathly quiet. To my inexpressible horror I saw the human figures scattered down its length slow, as if freezing on the spot. Eyes stared, unblinking. Feet hovered mid-step. A fumbled plastic cup hung from the fingertips of an irritated-looking nurse, the water within bulging out in midair like melted glass.

Time seemed to stand still.

But not for me. In that unnatural silence I could hear my pulse thudding in my ears. Sweat slicked my thighs.

I ran. The bag of oranges struck the floor behind me. I didn't sprint, because there seemed to be no strength in my legs, but I lurched away and kept going. I headed for the chapel, because it was the only place I could imagine offering sanctuary.

Bursting through the double doors, I found myself in a square room with a false dome and garish modernist frescoes; even the iconostasis screen before the altar looked like a garden trellis. There were no windows, just some wall lamps pretending to be stained glass. No way out, and no one in the chamber. I whirled to face the doors and backed off into the center of the chapel.

The doors were pushed back. Azazel stalked in. From the corridor beyond I heard a brief hubbub of human sound, muted again as the doors swung shut behind him; clearly the world was being allowed to carry on as normal. But here in the chapel, nothing was normal, nothing natural.

He looked much cleaner now, and less gaunt, but he hadn't bothered to shave or cut his hair. To my eyes his smile had grown, if anything, more wolfish.

“Stop it stop it stop it,” I gabbled, holding up my hands to ward him off as he walked toward me. “You can't come in here. This is holy ground.”

He did pause on receiving that news, and glanced toward the altar.

“Lord Jesus Christ, deliver me also from every influence of unclean spirits,” I pleaded, crossing myself.

Azazel's expression was one of mild amusement. “I never met the
man,” he said. “He was…after my time. Though to be fair, the same goes for anything after Genesis.”

Two more steps brought him so close to me that my hands were pushing against his chest. I recoiled and backed away as far as I could, nearly tripping over my own feet, ending up pressed against the flimsy screen separating notional sanctuary from notional nave.

“Are you scared of me, Milja?” he asked softly.

I didn't answer. Under those silver eyes I was like a deer transfixed by truck headlamps.

“Why are you scared?” He reached out and touched my cheek, and I flinched.

“What do you want?”

“Huh. Isn't that obvious?” His caress was gentle; incongruously so, after the uninhibited roughness of his attentions on the mountainside.

“No!” I said, as his fingertips grazed my throat and breastbone and then circled my nipple. He was so close that I could smell his skin—earth and sweat no longer, but a peppery warmth that was far from unpleasant. “Go away! Please!”

For a moment he looked taken aback. Then he shook his head. “Are you trying to tease? Your desire is like a beacon on a hilltop, Milja. I can see you burning.”

Maybe he could. What did I know of his perceptions? I tried to shrink from his grasp but he cupped my breast, hefting its softness. “I don't want you!” I cried.

He laughed. “Don't lie to me.” His hand seemed to kindle a fire in my flesh. He stooped and brushed his lips across my averted cheek, his breath warm. I shuddered from head to toe.

“I'm not lying,” I said desperately: “you're not listening.
Please
.”

“I can hear your pulse,” he growled, his teeth tickling my ear. “I can smell your need.”

Desire ran through me like melted wax, pouring through my breasts and belly and pooling in my swollen sex. It took my breath away, and my dignity, and my caution.

“You piece of shit!” I sobbed.

Well,
that
worked. I guess not many girls had ever spoken to him like that. He stepped back—and as all the lights in the room shrank to tiny
glows, the darkness grew and thickened, crowding in around him. His white sweater seemed to glow with phosphorescence. There was no amusement in his face anymore, just red pinpoints where his pupils should be.

“All right,” he said softly. “I'm listening now.”

I wet my dry lips. “You left me on the mountain. You
fucked
me and you left me on the mountain in the night. I could have broken a leg. I could have
died
out there. I had to crawl home in the dark. You fucked me and you dumped me and you're a
goddamn demon—
” I broke off suddenly in panic, covering my face with my hands.

He looked away. I heard the fierce intake of his breath and then a long exhalation before he could bring himself to answer. Slowly the room lights reasserted themselves. “It was not done well,” he growled. “I…I was overwhelmed. My mind was full of old thoughts awoken.” He straightened his shoulders. “I will apologize. You will forgive me.”

If he'd been human I would have laughed. Hysterically. “Forgive you?” I repeated, in a whisper.

“Yes.” He put his open palm between my breasts to feel my pounding heart. “I forget sometimes how fragile you are.”

“Us…humans?”

“Yes.”

He meant it. He really meant it.

“You're a rebel angel. Like in the
Book of Enoch
. Like in the Bible. It's real, isn't it? All of it?” My face was doing strange things, muscles twisting all awry. “Heaven and Hell and the Garden of Eden and Noah's Ark and Jonah's whale and all that? It's all real? The Last Judgment? Eternal damnation? All of it?”

Azazel opened his mouth as if to reply, and then hesitated. Something shifted in his quicksilver eyes. “So you believe everything you read, then?” he asked.

“I believe…in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth,” I started, the words of the Creed rising to my lips with easy familiarity even though I hadn't given my actual faith much thought in years; “and of all things, visible and invisible—”

“Shh.” Azazel put a finger on my mouth to still it, shaking his head gently. “Don't be like that. I'm not going to hurt you. You believe in angels and demons, don't you?”

“I do now!”

“And what is it that you think we do?”

“Drag me to Hell?”

He shook his head, the merest twitch. The little smile was back, battered and a bit uncertain now, but back. “Not right now. I've no interest in your”—he laughed under his breath—“immortal soul.”

“Then what?”

“This.” He caught my chin and bent to kiss me—not the full-blooded kiss of a movie hero, but a soft, slow brush of his lips across mine. It was like being touched by a burning ember: it set me on fire. For a moment I couldn't breathe. “This,” he repeated, his hands moving over my breasts, circling my waist. “This,” he whispered, cupping the curve of my ass and pushing his long fingers down into places of shivering, shameful delight.

I couldn't help it—I quivered against him and let slip a moan, half fear and half something else altogether. And yet somehow I managed to writhe out of his kiss. He looked into my eyes from inches away.

“You said you were fallen,” I whispered.

A tilt of his eyes acknowledged that, even as his hands slid over my hips. “We did not fall: we leaped.”

“Has God forgiven you?”

He curled his lip. “That seems most unlikely.”

“So you're damned.” It was taking all my strength not to yield to the ache and the need in my own flesh.

Azazel breathed out a humorless laugh. “Oh yes.”

“In league with Satan.”

That seemed to rankle. “Leave him out of it. I am one of the Egrigoroi.” The word sounded Greek, but the press of his body was a sharp reminder that theology wasn't his only concern, and that another matter was growing more urgent.

“You're pure evil.”

“So you say.” He was working my blouse open now.

I pushed his face away. “Please. I can't do this. I can't do this with you.”

“It's what you've wanted all your life.” Azazel sounded breathless. I couldn't contradict his words, not directly. They were all true.

“It's wrong.”

“It's what you ache for.”

“It's against the will of God!”

“
Fuck Him!
” Azazel snarled, catching my hair and pulling my head back so sharply that I saw stars. “Five thousand years of torture—do you think I'll crawl back to the foot of the Throne now?”

Tears sprang up in my eyes, a physical reaction to the hair-pulling as much as anything. “But He's
my
God,” I cried.

He had me pinned. His face loomed over mine. There was mutinous rage in it, but he kept his voice low. “No, He's not,” he whispered. “You belong to me now.”

I don't know if it was his words or his body or the way he'd pulled my hair, but despite my fear my body was responding with more than tears. I didn't dare think about it; I certainly didn't dare let him know. “I didn't agree to that!” I whined—and his response was chilling.

“What makes you think you have a choice?”

And to that I had no answer. I was speechless with fear. I looked into his burning eyes—and even in my terror I thought of his millennia of impotent rage and humiliation. Tears brimmed out onto my cheeks and ran down my face.

For a long moment he held me. Then, without warning, he thrust me away. I staggered. “You need to calm down,” he growled. “It must be a shock to you, I realize. You'll see more clearly in time. I will return when you're in a better mood.”

Stepping away from him felt like stepping from a warm room into a cold night. Shivers crawled up and down my back. I pressed my knuckles to my lips and sniffed back the tears as I watched him turn and march toward the doors.

Then those doors opened inward, and a wheelchair pushed through. Sitting in the chair, bundled in a blanket and dressing gown, was my father. Steering it from behind was my cousin Vera.

For a long moment everyone froze. I watched the blood ebb from my father's face as recognition sank in, leaving him gray as a corpse. I saw Vera turn wide eyes toward me in utter disbelief. I couldn't see Azazel's face from where I stood—but the lights in the room flickered and shuddered, shrank to nothing and then flared up like torches.

He took a single stride to the wheelchair, grabbed my father by the
front of the dressing gown, and lifted him one-handed until they were nose to nose and my father's feet kicked the air. I wondered wildly if Azazel had grown taller; he seemed to tower over them both.

“I should kill you,” said the demon, “
very
slowly.”

“Azazel,” I gasped, moving in, my feet like lead, all the air burned from my empty lungs. I don't even know if I made an audible sound. All that came out of my mouth was a wheeze. “Please—no!”

He cast me a glare over his shoulder. “But it's only proper to respect one's father-in-law,” he said coldly. Then he dumped the limp frame of my father back in the wheelchair and strode from the chapel.

Everything after that was blurred, for a long time. I couldn't recall many of the details afterward. There was shouting and crying, and me kneeling over my father, and Vera running out into the corridor. And then they came to take Papa away in a stretcher, and we followed and then we were thrown out and there was more shouting and Vera screaming in my face and everything was black, and white, and black, and white.

You whore
, she screamed at me.

Look what you've done.

And Uncle Josif was there too and he pushed me all across the room.

Look what you've done,
they said.

You've killed your father
.

You whore, you lying murderous slut.

Then at some point the doctors came and said,
He is resting, he is out of the woods for the moment.
And I wanted to go in and see him but they wouldn't let me, and Vera said,
You will never set eyes on him again, he would die of shame if he saw his filthy diseased whore-daughter who lies with animals and worse than animals.
And I was screaming that I would see him, he was my father, I had to see him, they had to let me. And all the while the nurses were trying to get us to keep our voices down and saying,
You must be quiet, you cannot upset him
.

So I said,
I will be quiet, just let me be with him
.

Then they said,
Take these, and if you are quiet we will let you in but you must be quiet and if you take these they will help you calm down
.

So I took the pills and after that everything got quiet like they said, really quiet and blurry and far away, and they let me see Father, lying on
his bed, sleeping, looking so white and frail like a man of sticks, and I cried and kissed his hands and sat by his bed and then I don't remember what happened after that.