Seven Archangels: Annihilation (28 page)

Gabriel's mouth softened, and they did.

- + -

Beelzebub was disciplining an arrant underling while singing a lewd version of "Amazing Grace" when Lucifer summoned him. He dropped—of course—everything to respond as he had no choice, and arrived inside Lucifer's office in the pitch black. He found a stool and sat waiting.

After a time, Lucifer said, "Have you experienced any side effects since the annihilation?"

"No, sir. Nothing other than the normal strain of having defended my Guard against the Archangel's full power."

Even though blind, Beelzebub blistered under the scalding glare Lucifer awarded his self-aggrandizement.

"Nothing else?"

"No, sir."

Beelzebub practically glowed with a realization: Lucifer had been weakened after disassembling Gabriel! Lucifer, weakened—and possibly defeatable!

"Don't even think it," Lucifer said. "I'll fight you. We'll see how I do."

"Yes, sir."

Lucifer's resonance bounced back from the walls with a psychic scent Beelzebub would have recognized anywhere in Creation. This signature sparkled with its own beauty, a lively thing always extending itself, curling its light letters into everything it met and absorbing it into the whole.

"Now," Lucifer said, "tell me about Mephistopheles."

"Mephistopheles?"

Silence.

"He—yes, I wondered if he's had some reaction to it."

More silence.

Beelzebub swallowed, but the silence continued, and finally he said, "It's frustrating. You know how he normally is. But since Gabriel died, he springs unworkable ideas at me, and then either he forgets them or else he prattles nonstop until I have to tell him to shut up."

This Lucifer acknowledged.

"He's gotten morose. He dampens everyone's energy. He isn't around anymore. If I want him, I have to go find him, and then he'll only say something dismal and retreat back into himself."

Lucifer moved in the room, but Beelzebub had no idea where. "When he goes into himself, what is he thinking about?"

Beelzebub closed his mouth.

Still more silence.

No, no. This was all wrong. He would not answer. Not acknowledge.

Silence.

No answer.

More silence.

Beelzebub said, "Gabriel."

"All the time?"

He nodded, and the gesture carried. "And sometimes Raphael too."

"Do you know he went to Heaven specifically to speak to Raphael?"

The fire in Beelzebub's heart flared.

"Ah, you didn't. I'd hoped you might explain."

"I'll kill him!"

"Are you afraid?" Lucifer said, suddenly so close that Beelzebub could perceive his glow. With their faces inches apart, Lucifer's green eyes made his stomach hurt. "Any punishment would be visited on him, not on you. Or were you afraid of what he might have done with Raphael?"

Beelzebub turned his head and spit into the darkness.

"As long as it doesn't bother you," Lucifer said with a hint of amusement. "He was right there within two hours after we finished, possibly directly from the debriefing. Michael turned him back at the gate. Did Gabriel ask him to courier a message?"

Beelzebub said nothing.

Silence.

Lucifer faded off into the dark again. More silence.

"I'm not aware of a message."

Lucifer sighed. "I suspect he's shocked. I've seen this before, monkeys who take a while to get past their first kill. If they come to terms with death, they often go on to become excellent soldiers, but some find the first one tough."

"If we get through two or three more—"

"But he's stuck, and until he devises a better method, there won't be another."

Lucifer, weakened.

No, not to think it.

"Don't," Lucifer said. "By the way, are you aware he asked Asmodeus for a favor?"

Heat surged in Beelzebub's throat, and his eyes narrowed.

"Why didn't he ask you to find Camael?"

Camael was missing? Beelzebub's fists clenched so hard he might have been bleeding. "I— I'm not sure."

"Don't be too hard on him," Lucifer said. "He's not himself. I'm sure he's not deserting you for a new alliance."

Pounding heartbeats. Fire inside. Mephistopheles.

Lucifer's voice sounded very matter-of-fact. "You need to enliven him."

"How?"

"You're a Seraph. Use that ridiculous bond of yours—isn't that the reason you have it? He can calm you when you get irrational and you can invigorate his depressed soul. I'm relatively sure you can still do it."

Beelzebub's hands shook in his lap. His throat burned.

"And if that isn't enough, do whatever you have to. Use your
imagination,
how does that sound?"

"That sounds—" Beelzebub's wings were vibrating, and at his side his sword had grown hot. "I'll take care of him, sir."

"I'm glad you feel that way. If you run out of ideas, you could come back to me for a few more, but I don't recommend that you do."

Like an inferno, his heart crackled. "No, sir."

"You may go," Lucifer said, and Beelzebub flashed from the room before the sound had a chance to travel from one end to the other. Like a heat-seeking missile, he had his target.

Chapter Eighteen

Remiel lay on her stomach in an Earthly field, sketching in charcoal. The black pencil swept over the rough paper, framing out the young mountains in their sleepiness against the sky. Already she'd rendered the craggy hills gouged out by the rains while being shoved upward by the plates beneath. She began outlining boulders and brush when Saraquael arrived.

"That's striking."

Remiel didn't answer.

Saraquael touched the captive bead ring in her helix. "Michael had told me you'd be staying solid for a while, so you could go back and get a rook to capture a pawn."

Remiel chuckled. "Something. I changed my mind."

"You still can. I'll blind him to how healed-up you are."

She closed her eyes. "Thanks."

"It's no problem."

"Uriel threw me out of Gabriel's room."

Saraquael shrugged. "Uriel won't let me in either."

Remiel continued sketching. "It's maddening. Gabriel looked okay."

As a shudder ripped through Saraquael, Remiel looked up in panic: had Gabriel seemed that bad before? And when Saraquael averted his eyes, it was Remiel's turn to shudder.

"But it'll be okay now," Remiel said. "I didn't kill him."

"It wouldn't have been your fault regardless." Saraquael touched her hair with a wingtip. "He was asking after you. He's concerned that you went down there to get him."

Remiel's eyes stung. She rubbed them with the back of one hand so she didn't get charcoal on her cheeks. "Tell him to take care of himself before he bothers about me."

"Will do. But third-hand. I can tell Michael, who tells Uriel, who tells him."

Remiel's wings lifted a little. "It's ridiculous, isn't it? I wouldn't hurt him."

"I think that's the point," Saraquael stood. "We might hurt him without meaning to. Even Raphael isn't allowed in there any longer."

Remiel shook her head. "You'd think he'd be the one best able to fix it if he did harm him."

"You would," Saraquael said, and vanished. Remiel finished her sketch.

She rubbed the charcoal dust on her hand. "He asked about me."

He loves you,
God replied.

"Maybe he was upset by the way he saw me. I'd probably have been upset if I saw myself that way too." She cut herself short, still trying to rub off the black dust on her hands.

Come to me.

She scoured at her hand, then grabbed a fistful of dew-covered grass and rubbed with that, only smearing the black.

"God, it won't come off," she whispered. "What's the matter with me?"

Black-stained fingers. Hands inserted into Gabriel's heart.
Come to me.
I'd hate seeing me like that too.

Shaky, she tried to wipe the tears away, but the charcoal smeared on her cheeks.

Her wings spread as if for battle.
Come.

"Ridiculous," she said, her voice high-pitched. "It's just charcoal. It's nothing else. Just my hands."

She flashed to a stream and plunged in her hands, watching the black swirl away in the white froth. She dunked in her face, smearing away the coal dust and the tear tracks, stinging her pierced ears. She kept scooping up water and startling herself with the chill.

Come to me.
Always that nugget of doubt. A good thing or a bad thing.
Come to me.
Not even Camael was that twisted. Mine. Mine.

Remiel plunged her whole head under the water, wrapping her fingers in her hair and letting the water flood her ears, her mouth. She kept her eyes closed, then wrenched herself out of the water, kneeling on the stream bed with liquid chill coursing between her wings. Her hands were clean.

Sweeping the field with one long glance, she found it different, saw a field from a young Earth when the Lord had separated the light from the darkness. Her eyes dilated with the watching.

A rocking explosion threw her to the ground and unleashed holy light on all Creation—offended light. Remiel—Irin—shook for a moment before she raised her upper body to look around.

Hundreds of her species, bleeding, tired, shocked, scared, horrified by Lucifer's denial of the divine sovereignty and his refusal to worship the Word.

"Father?" She quivered as she had that day. "Father, what's going on?"

They'd fought hard, the angels that had rallied around the one minor Archangel with the broken sword who'd had the courage to prefer to pain to apostasy, but then God had intervened directly.

Irin watched Lucifer with the light flushed from his spirit; she watched Michael, uncertain but driven by justice to answer the angels' need for a leader. Irin struggled to her feet, gasping, and lifted her sword, watching the field for her brother Irin. She called to him, and then he met her eyes.

But he was not Irin.

Fear petrified her heart as she met this avatar, a reflection with a dark twist, and groped with her senses to find God, to know if she were the one who had failed Him. She probed to find that twist inside herself, terrified but determined to learn. She locked eyes with the other Irin, longing to meet him, wanting him to join her, needing him to be complete. He grinned, pleased with his independence, gesturing that she should come with him now. She loved her brother so much that she almost did.

But she loved her Father more. She needed Him more. He called her Shêli, "my own."

But her brother was herself, and if his destiny lay in Hell, then so must hers.

No sound or movement remained in Irin, whose whole person trained on the other Irin while the bustle of angels recovering from God's strike roared around her. She watched, because Irin means Watcher, and he watched her in return.

"I loved you," said Irin. "Come and be mine."

"I love God," said Irin. "Stay and be His."

She ran to him, clutching him tightly and clenching her eyes. His pulse raced beneath her ear, and she heard in it the echoes of her own, but in a rhythm that rapidly differentiated.

"Please," she said, wrapping her fingers in his wings. "Please, you're me. Don't leave me. Stay with God for me."

"We've chosen."

"I'll go in your place," said Irin. "If one of us has to satisfy Justice, then let it be me. I'll do it for you." She wrapped herself against him, her hair so much longer and blonder than it would be in the future when she chopped it short and shot her body full of holes. "I'll burn for you if you want it, but I can't leave you alone forever."

Irin had locked his eyes with hers, holding her with his will as if he could damn her despite herself, and Irin clutched her brother's arms with the equally futile urge to fasten him to God's heart even though he was rebelling. In that moment she knew: no force, no argument, no tears could keep him. He could return her every appeal simply because if it had occurred to her then it had occurred to him simultaneously. She knew she was right, and she also knew that he knew he was right. Weakened, she dropped to her knees, but he had done the same, and they hugged, she knowing every moment with more certainty that never again in all time would she hold him against her heart.

The twins let go at the same moment and fled to their lords, she to her Father and he to his master.

She saw herself drop like molten rock from Heaven, Satan plummeting in a lightning streak at the forefront of the fallen.

She doubled over.

Piercing the silence were screams, her own, only her own.

Hands on her back, touching her wings, her arms, concerned and strong, whichever angels stood closest. "It's one of the Irin." "One of them fell." "Which one?" "I don't know—they're the same."

"Which one?" Irin asked, the words swallowed in her own incomprehensible sobs. "Was it me? Did I fail?"

From the smell of orchids in the wings nearest her, she realized Uriel rocked her gently. Tenderly despite the Throne's own tears, Uriel comforted her. And Uriel loved God.

"Remiel," God had named her, "come to me."

The Irin standing in a field populated by figments only she could see raised her head and looked into a Vision unchanged since that day. She watched the Vision until she decided she must not be the one who fell. She remained Remiel.

Remiel, come to me,
rang through her head.

Remiel didn't register that the battle scene faded to leave her alone in a field with a ruined sketch. She stared, stiff-legged, into the glory of the sun, her wings straight back. Her gold eyes reflected the distant leaping flames, and she grinned broadly.

"I can touch heartstrings too," she whispered to her fiery reflection.

Come to me.

Oh, I'm coming for you.

She passed through the Guards with no difficulty at all; she imagined no Guard would ever hold her again. "Gabriel," she called, her voice more serpentine than angelic, "Gabriel, come watch."