Something More Than Night (30 page)

“Shove it. Don’t play the victim card with me.”

Something warm and wet tickled my nose. I put a trio of fingertips to my upper lip; they came away warm, wet, and red. Flametop had done a real number on me.

I perched at the edge of the bed and squinted at her. “You seem different. You get your hair done?”

Molly reached into the bathroom, tossed me a washcloth. I wrapped it around a handful of ice from the bucket and pressed the bundle to my face.

By way of answering my question, she set aside her human form and momentarily became something else. None too graceful, this transition: she stumbled through it like somebody hopping around late for church with one leg stuck in a new pair of trousers. But for an instant she blazed so brightly it seemed a miracle we didn’t leave my silhouette scorched into the wallpaper. Maybe we did. The bruise-colored afterimages shimmying through my field of vision made it hard to tell. Afterimages of wings and things. Then she snapped back into her human form. A faint
heiligenschein
glow clung to her skin. It faded slowly away as she got it under control, like somebody turning the dimmer switch on a ceiling fan.

“Well, well, well. Look who’s all grown up.”

“No thanks to you, asshole. Do you even remember our agreement, or have you been spending all your time on hookers and blow?”

Well. That’s gratitude for you. I said as much. “You know, I’ve taken a few punches for you since our last heart-to-heart. I’d just as lief let you fend for yourself from now on.”

“It hasn’t been a picnic for me, either,” she said.

“Anybody smack you with a phone book?”

“No.”

“Fancy that.”

We compared notes over a bowl of strawberries. They were juicy and so was the gossip. I explained how I’d erased the evidence connecting her to Gabriel (she still pleaded innocent on that charge) and described my subsequent run-ins with the Thrones and Uriel. She told me about the PI recipients and their dreams of the Choir. I took the news well until she got to the part where the churchy types were turning up stiff. That’s when I choked on a berry.

“Say that again. How many are dead?”

“Four.”

“And when did you say the Pole squiffed it?”

“Last night, I think.”

I cast my thoughts back to Sam’s rapid departure from my diner. The timing fit. Sam and his pals detected a new Nephil right around the time Molly’s pal punched out. So I told her what I’d learned about the Nephilim: what the Thrones told me; the failed attempt to evict one; and what Sam had shared. I worried she’d have another conniption when I hit the part about secret vaults and
penitente
souls. But by the end she looked like somebody had kicked her dog.

“Jesus. How complicated can this get?” Flametop rested her head in her hands, twined her fingers through that curly coppery mop. “Maybe we just caught a break.”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“I never know what you’re thinking. Most of the time I can’t even tell what you’re talking about.”

“Enough sneering, already. Your face will get stuck like that. I’m thinking Father Santorelli’s prodigal sheep and the Nephilim come out of the same box. The former die on Earth and the latter pop up in the Pleroma.” I whistled. “What a slick racket.”

“Yeah, but what are they?”

I shrugged. She sighed.

“Somebody went to a shitload of trouble to set this up. Why? What are the Nephilim
for
? What are they doing?”

“Beats me. But I’m putting my money on nothing good.”

“Well,” she said, “the good news is there won’t be any more. I cured the surviving recipients.”

I blinked. “Come again?”

“I’ve been making the rounds, banishing the dreams. Glimpses of the Pleroma. Whatever they are.”

I tried not to sound too condescending. “Look. Angel. I know you’re feeling your oats because you’ve started to get the hang of things. But don’t let it go to your head. I’ve been around the block a few times and, I have to tell you, I don’t know how they’re playing this trick, much less how to fix it. So what exactly did you do when you say you cured them?”

She told me. I responded by taking a long draw of rye because damn if it didn’t sound like she’d put the nightmares on ice for several nights running. This dame was one quick study. Who was she?

Flametop fished a piece of ice from the bucket, inspected it for blood, and then, finding it clean, popped it in her mouth. It crunched in her teeth. “What else haven’t you told me?”

“That’s all I know about the Nephilim. Pretty much all anybody knows. There ain’t more to tell because there ain’t more to know.”

“Screw the Nephilim. What else haven’t you told me about Gabriel? Do you know how he died? You must have suspicions, or a theory. And what about the Choir? The Pleroma? The MOC, and METATRON, and God knows what else?”

“Anybody ever tell you you’ve got paranoid tendencies? I’m your strongest supporter, lady. Your only supporter, if you want to get technical about it.”

“First, you accidentally shoved me under a tram. But hey, that’s okay, because after all you were aiming for my
brother.
And then, after you dragged me into this whole fucking nightmare of a mess, you insinuated that my predecessor had simply chosen to move on, instead of telling me that he’d been
murdered.
You failed to warn me about METATRON, which led to all sorts of fun and made me the most popular woman in the Choir. And then, when I pressed you for details, you still somehow managed to omit the full story, and I had to learn about the Jericho Event from some freaky two-faced angel.”

I should have known. Lousy Virtues. Can’t keep their noses out of other people’s business.

She continued, “Call me crazy, but after a while I just can’t help but notice a pattern. And I just can’t help but wonder what other surprises await me.” She crunched another ice cube down to its component molecules.

“You know, you’ve got a killer case of selective memory, doll. The way I remember it, you were so wrapped up in your own issues that you barely heard two things I said when I tried to give you a rundown on the Pleroma.”

“That’s because I had just
died,
you shit!”

“Don’t get all philosophical on me. So what if you had? You really think you’d have taken it all in if I’d laid out all the cards at once? You’ve been a drip since day one. You meet everything I say with weeps, frowns, and melodrama. Toss in a fainting spell and you could be gunning for a studio contract.”

“Screw you, too.”

“Yeah, well, I was working on that, until you showed up and scotched the whole evening.”

Flametop ate more ice. She chomped the crystals down to molecules, the molecules down to atoms. She exhaled twinned jets of hydrogen and oxygen. I wondered if she was aware of what she was doing. Good thing I hadn’t lit any candles for Violet.

“You’ve known all along that this mess was so much more than a single impossible murder. This is a schism, isn’t it? A fight over something much larger than one dead angel.” Molly jumped to her feet. Her halo returned, the glow soft and gentle as a solar flare. She grabbed my shoulders and flung me against the wall. The impact knocked down a painting. “When pressed, you basically came out and admitted you were acting under orders from one of these factions when you roped me into this! So don’t feed me some bullshit line that you don’t know any more than I do!”

This was my least favorite topic. The weight of it bowed my shoulders, forced me to the floor. I crumpled. Dead angels are heavier than broken promises.

“Look at me!” I said. “Look! You’ve seen Cherubim and Virtues and even yourself. What am I compared to all that? I’m the lowest of the low. I’m a shabby, two-bit nickel-grabbing twerp with no choice but to draw as little water as possible so that nobody decides to step on me. You? You’ve got a future. But I’m stuck in the margins. That’s all I’ll ever be, a cheap chiseler. And there are things out there greater and more mysterious than the best of us. So yeah, I did what I was told. What choice did I have?”

I hefted the bottle, drowned my tonsils. Stewed to the gills was old Bayliss; his tears smelled like above-average rye. My face burned with shame and embarrassment. The tears flared into sizzling flamedrops as they trickled down my face. I looked up at Molly through a smoldering veil of weak flames, like a mummer-show Cherub.

“How do you flip God the bird?” I asked. “What if it notices?”

*   *   *

By the time I banished the weeps and returned to my senses, my dignity had fled and so had flametop. The bottle was emptier than a hobo’s money clip, the air dark as my prospects. Smoke wisps curlicued from blackened spots where my burning tears had fallen on the carpet.

My hat had been draped over the doorknob. The note tucked in the band had been scratched out on the back of a room service menu with a dying ballpoint.

Gone to find the source of the Indulgences. Try to verify connection with the Nephilim. This is our chance. Don’t fuck it up.

It wasn’t signed. It didn’t have to be. I’d know that inspirational tone anywhere. She really missed her calling. I’d heard the angel of compassion was looking for an intern.

The melted-plastic stink of smoldering synthetic fibers was giving me a headache. Or maybe it was riffing on a drumbeat the last fumes of rye had set to echoing inside my skull. What a combo they had going. All they needed was a xylophone player and they’d be ready for the club circuit.

I made it to my feet with the grudging help of a chair and the wall. When I was reasonably sure the room wasn’t about to pull a dipsy-doodle on me, I shuffled to the bathroom, filled the sink with cold tap water, and dipped my face. The water steamed. I nudged the bed to cover the burns in the floor. Then I grabbed my hat, planted it on my crown at a rakish angle, and headed back to my Magisterium.

The door showed no sign of disturbance. Ditto the kitchen, and the coffee can. The
penitente
soul fragments were just where I’d left them. Good thing, because what Molly told me had the gears turning. I lit my pipe, cleared away the pieces with a swipe of my arm, and emptied the can on the chessboard. I reimagined the electric dipole moment of methyl groups in the caffeine—my house, my rules—which made it a snap to separate the coffee grounds from the soul fragments: I ran a comb through my hair and used static electricity to pull out the coffee. Soon I had two piles on the chessboard. One the scorched color of French roast; the other leaden gray.

My reasoning started with the Nephilim and snaked backward through the thicket like this: Those goons were remnants of the Plenary Indulgence recipients that Gabriel had been lamping. But the PIs were tainted, such that death transformed those monkeys into immutable topological defects in the Pleroma. That was a pretty trick; whoever worked this racket carried some mean medicine in their pocket. Father Santorelli was the bagman, dishing out the special Indulgences to lucky members of the faith. Gabby must have known this, or suspected some of it, because he’d been watching Santorelli, too. Gabby’s interest in the Indulgences, plus his stewardship of the Jericho Trumpet, eventually got him pinked. Meanwhile somebody—The same somebody? Or was this a different faction?—had started clipping out little hidey-holes in the souls of the
penitentes
down on Earth. So when a well-meaning dope blundered into the middle of this flop and started sniffing around, somebody took a quick jaunt down from the Pleroma to hitch a ride inside a
penitente
and silence the priest.

Why go to all that trouble? I had a hunch. The only members of the Choir with recent practice mingling with the monkeys were me and flametop. News would spread quickly if angels started appearing on Earth again, meddling in human affairs. Would it tip off the opposing faction? Would it rouse METATRON? Better to hitch a ride and avoid the risk.

Gabby had been watching Molly, too. Still didn’t know how she fit into all this. But she was right about one thing. The connection between the Nephilim and the Plenary Indulgences was our big break. Meanwhile, whoever ran the
penitentes
was in this past the mud on their necks. That made it past time I took a closer look at those loons. So I pinched a soul from the top of the pile, stuck it in my eye, and—

—found ourselves sitting with head bowed at a dinner table laid with potato casserole and cans of soda, mumbling along as our family said grace. Our shoulders ached so severely that simply raising a fork to our mouth was agony. The big guy at the end of the table, let’s call him Dad, noticed it, and laid in to us.

“That’s what you get for joining up with those freaks,” he said. “Bet they didn’t even sterilize properly. You’ll get tetanus or worse, and I’ll have to take a second mortgage on the house we already can’t afford just to put your body back the way God made it in the first place. It would serve you right if they had to amputate both your arms.” He washed down the bile with a swig of beer. His breath smelled of potatoes and cigarettes.

The woman across from him, let’s call her Mom, frowned. “Not at the dinner table. You promised.”

And then he called her a stupid bitch and told her to shut her fucking mouth, because it was her goddamned fault their worthless son had turned out such a retard. Our eyes brimmed with tears, but we fought them to a standstill. We wouldn’t cry. Not at the table. We reached up with as much nonchalance as any seventeen-year-old had ever mustered to scratch an imaginary itch under our eye—

—and flicked the soul fragment into the empty coffee can. I sighed. It was going to be a long afternoon. I picked another fragment—

—and found ourselves under a tangle of naked, sweaty bodies, doing something very personal to somebody we didn’t know while somebody else was in the same situation with us. Every pulse of our heart sent lightning crackling through our veins, sent pharmaceutical gold streaming across the blood-brain barrier to fill our synapses with a champagne fizz hyperawareness of the orgiastic coupling of counterfeit fallen angels all around us. This was dangerous and careless and we didn’t care. We saw smoke, and dancers, and so many of our fellow
penitentes
twined together, wounds and stigmata naked to the world. A tickle on our lip; we spat away a bloody pinfeather. A man beside us shook out long hair, stippling our face with sweat. Salt stung our eyes—