Something More Than Night (40 page)

It was bait.

Crap.

She looked around. The other angels had made themselves scarce.

The Powers’ conflicting model of reality approached the MOC—

—Molly crouched, covered her ears—

F
ORBIDDEN
,
screamed the universe.

The Powers had rattled the cage to summon the warden. The Voice of God shook Heaven’s rafters.

Yet Molly could still think, still move. METATRON paused in the midst of throttling the Powers, like an avalanche deciding halfway down the mountain to pause and consider its options.

Molly glanced at the remaining unconverted Nephilim. They were growing. One by one their wave functions collapsed in a rippling domino effect. Because METATRON was their catalyst. Their long-awaited measurer.

No longer vague and no longer inert, they took the forms for which they had been designed. The Nephilim were wooden stakes driven deep into the heart of the Pleroma. They weren’t a threat to the MOC—they were a feint at the heart of the divine.

And irresistible to METATRON.

METATRON would win, of course. For the Nephilim were the work of mere angels, but METATRON was something greater, something feared by even the Choir. Even Bayliss.

But that didn’t mean they couldn’t bring down seven shades of shit before METATRON sorted them.

Heaven trembled. A trio of massive stars on the far side of the galaxy went off like a chain of firecrackers. One-two-three. Pop-pop-pop. If not for the obscuring bulge of the galactic center, the resulting flare of radiation might have sterilized the Earth in sixty thousand years.

As the Nephilim changed, so did the Trumpet fragment.

Molly slipped out the back.

*   *   *

Thunder and lightning shook dust from the rafters. Sheets of rain lashed the windows. We huddled in the diner to ride out the storm. Me, Flo, the shyster brush salesman, the muggs in the window booth, the sheik and his girl. It was a night for staying in and catching a show on the radio.

I sat at the counter and concentrated on providing a good home to a second plate of eggs. They looked lonely.

The next bolt of lightning hit so close the tines of my fork bristled with static electricity. I dropped it. I like my eggs as much as any bo, but I don’t get hazard pay. The peal of thunder came at the same moment, so enthusiastic it knocked a pile of dishes from the shelf behind the counter. The roundheels shrieked. So did the salesman. I always knew he’d be one to melt when the heat was on.

I tapped my cup for a refill. Flo stepped over a pile of broken crockery and treated me to the dregs of the pot.

The door slammed open. Rain squalls rode a gust into the diner. The wind swirled through the diner, casing the place. But this joint wasn’t worth knocking over so it hit the road. Flametop leaned against the door to close it. Nobody ever needed a new hairbrush as badly as she did at that moment.

I raised my cup in greeting. “Flametop.”

“Hello, Gabriel,” she said.

23

THE END

“About time,” said Flo. “Took her long enough.”

She doffed the dish towel that had hung over her shoulder since I put it there long, long ago and headed for the kitchen. Along the way she peeled off her apron and tossed it on the counter. How glad I was to have wheedled a last refill. She wasn’t coming back from this smoke break.

The brush salesman tossed a few coins on his table. Then he packed his display case, taking care that each brush fit snugly into its own slot. He followed Flo through the kitchen. So did the muggs, the tomcat, and his steady.

The cook clicked off the radio. He left it on the counter, under the wheel where Flo stuck the orders. He removed his apron, too, and joined the others where they lined up by the cellar door. He left a pile of corned beef hash and a few strips of bacon sizzling on the grill. Thoughtful guy. Flo opened the door. One by one, the constructs filed down the stairs into the cellar that had filled the space below the original diner, back in the day, but which I’d never bothered to re-create in my Magisterium.

And that was the end of that. So long, kids. Write if you find work.

After that, flametop and I had the joint all to ourselves. Maybe I should have tidied up. Thunder sifted a steady fall of dust from the ceiling. It made long, gritty streamers of the cobwebs. Lightning strobed the windows, giving everything a metallic ozone tingle, like chewing face with an electric socket. The atmosphere in the diner would have smelled of onions, bacon, and burnt coffee if not for flametop and her righteous fury. Rafter dust flared incandescent when it sprinkled into her aura, filling the joint with the odor of singed dirt.

“Your timing ain’t too swell, angel. Flo just punched out. You’ll have to serve yourself if you’ve come for a cup of joe.” More thunder rattled the cups under the counter. I gestured at the rain-lashed windows. “Park the body. Watch the show.”

She didn’t, of course. Nobody hated me as much as she did in that moment. The heat came off her in waves, leaking from the furnace of her rage. It rippled the linoleum and sent that coppery mop writhing like Medusa’s best hair day. It was a beautiful thing.

But I kept to my script. For old times’ sake. “What’s the score, angel? Something’s got you doing figure eights.”

She stepped closer. Crossed her arms. Leaned against the counter. I pretended to not notice the way her coat pocket swung with extra weight. She was rodded. Good.

“You had me believing this all started with a murdered angel on the night I died,” she said. “But that wasn’t true. There was no murder.”

Had I been wearing my hat at the moment, I’d have tipped it to her. I felt like a proud father. “I always knew you were one brainy betty.”

She rolled the tip of her tongue along the inside of her lips. Maybe she was thinking it over. Maybe she wanted me jealous of her lips. Smart money said she already knew the angles, and this was just for show. Crafty frail.

Flametop said, “But this couldn’t have worked if Gabriel were still around in all his glory. Because the Seraphim truly are load-bearing members of the MOC. You had to create a hole, because you needed a cork.”

“Don’t leave me hanging.”

“The only thing that makes sense,” she said, “is if he split off a shitty little piece of himself—the tiniest, grubbiest, weakest possible fragment:
you
—and then committed suicide.”

“Better get some nails, doll. Your math isn’t bad but that last step is loose. Someone’s going to trip on it.”

“Oh, I’m sure he had help. The other Seraphim were in on it, too. How did you describe them? Thick as thieves? They throw a lot of weight—”

“Carriage trade, those swells.”

“—So if Gabriel envisioned a reality built around the termination of his own existence, while the others envisioned a shared reality where Gabriel didn’t exist…” She lifted her hand to her mouth, fingers curled over her palm. She breathed on her hand and opened her fingers, as though freeing a butterfly. “And the rest of the Choir went apeshit, because the very notion of embracing mortality was so alien, so impossible, to them. They can conceive of anything but their own deaths.”

She waited for another barrage of thunder to subside; in the meantime, another drift of burning dust limned her aura. She ran a hand through that fluttering hair. Even disheveled and spitting fire, she still made the joint look suitable for a soirée with the red-carpet crowd.

She said, “But you … After splitting off, you came to Earth. And you spent enough time here to conceptualize mortality. Which made it possible for Gabriel and the others to do what they had to do. That’s how I knew you had to be a fragment, once I saw things in the right light.”

“You spin a wild yarn, kid. Don’t stop just when it’s getting good.”

“
Penitentes.
They’re the key. All the other angels doing work on Earth had to hide inside mortal shells, otherwise their unshielded glamours would drive people mad. Or break them. Even kill them. Too much of
that
would run the risk of drawing METATRON’s attention. But
you
…” Her upper lip curled in the same way it might have done if she had found something disagreeable on the sole of her shoe. “You’ve spent plenty of time on Earth, elbow to elbow with mortals. And unless you made an effort, nobody would think you anything more than an eccentric prick. Which tells me you’ve been diminished.”

I clapped. “Well done, doll. You win the wristwatch.”

She frowned, then tapped herself on the forehead, something between a benediction and an admonishment. “Duh. You know, all that sexism of yours just made me realize something else. Even without the connection to Gabriel, I still should have realized you were a Seraph crumb.” She crossed her arms again. “Because the Seraphim are the only angels with a definite gender. Ain’t that so, wise guy?”

I fished out my flask and topped off my cup. “Sure you won’t join me?” But she was too busy climbing the walls to answer. I shrugged, saluted her with my cup. “Here’s mud in your eye.” Rye fumes stripped the paint from my sinuses again.

Flametop said, “Why me?”

“Wrong place at the wrong time. I had to choose somebody in that alley. And you, doll, you were the head of the class.” I reached over with a finger to tweak her nose. She looked ready to bite it off. I refrained. “I needed somebody with a little spark. That’s you. No offense to big brother, but he wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire, was he?”

“Leave him out of this.”

“I did, you crazy wren. I dropped him like a week-old halibut when I saw you watching the sky. You didn’t know what you were seeing, but you knew it was something special.” I took a sip. “That’s when I knew you were the one. Course, if you had known from the outset you were chosen for a purpose, it would have scotched the whole enterprise. So I fed you a little white lie about the accident. And, like the perfect patsy, you swallowed it. Oh, dollface, where had you been all my life?”

She didn’t share in the laugh. Some twists just can’t take a gag. I shrugged again.

“Relax. I’m just ribbing you. Keep sneering and your face’ll get stuck like that.”

Another gust of wind blew the door open. METATRON and the Nephilim were busting up the furniture. Horizontal rain sprinted across the diner to spritz my seat. I flicked my wrist; the door closed. I’d spent enough time standing in the rain on this job. While I was at it, I turned off the grill. The bacon was smelling nice and crisp. What a shame I’d never get to enjoy it.

To herself, she whispered, “Wrong place. Wrong time.” Wheels turned, somewhere under all that hair. She said, “There was no memory fragment connecting me to Gabriel.”

“Now you’re getting sloppy. There was. I showed it to you. I lifted it in those first moments after you punched out. Your whole mayfly life was passing before your eyes. I figured you wouldn’t miss a few seconds. And it did the trick, didn’t it? ‘Verisimilitude,’ I think it’s called.”

“You killed Santorelli.” She said it not as a question, but as a statement of fact. Which it was.

“He wasn’t what you’d call a green-label bagman. Too much hand wringing, that dope. Would’ve botched everything, had he a chance to spill his guts at you.”

Her aura blazed anew. My coffee was getting cold, so I held the cup in her direction. A few seconds in proximity to all that rage had it boiling.

“You divided the Trumpet and used it to corrupt the Plenary Indulgences. That poor priest. You took advantage of his confusion. You manipulated his failing faith to create the Nephilim.”

I blew a raspberry. “Somebody sold you a bill of goods. Santorelli knew those Indulgences were more crooked than a three-dollar bill.”

“You coldhearted son of a bitch. What about the people who received those crooked Indulgences? They were killed on your orders. But they had nothing to do with any of this.”

I let that one slide.

The thunder was almost continuous now, one blast of lightning following close on the heels of the next as the Voice of God got down to brass tacks. So stark was the light—METATRON’s light—it illuminated every strand of hair on her head like burnished copper. After all this time she still clung to her mortal form like a security blanket. But she was a superposition now, an admixture of the divine and the mundane. Like the rest of us. Somewhat.

She watched the light show. I considered lighting a pill, but she was in a right lather now, so I figured I wouldn’t have time to savor it. She looked fit to sock me in the kisser. I’d known plenty of dames in my time, but never one so keen to bat me around. Any second she’d put the maulers on.

Good. I’d been waiting long enough.

But she focused on the show outside. And the battle wouldn’t last forever. Even now METATRON was cleaning their clocks. What was she waiting for, an invitation? Maybe she needed one more poke, a little nudge over the cliff. They all carry it, the monkeys, that secret dark yearning for redemptive violence. Some might hide it better than others, but it’s always there. Never let anybody tell you otherwise.

So I trotted out the biggest lie of all. A real lulu. I’d been waiting a billion years to toss this one out. Waiting for something sufficiently intelligent to evolve inside METATRON’s precious MOC.

I said, “Thanks for the laughs, doll.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Was I too quick with the praise a minute ago, or have you taken a couple to the noggin since last we talked? Spend a few billion years watching the paint dry and you’ll be ready for a diversion, too. And you were the most fun we’ve had in millennia.”

That did it. Now she was ready to fog me with that heater. Her hand snaked into her pocket. Didn’t take a wise-head to know what she kept in there. Part of me wanted to smile, part of me wanted to cringe. I split the difference and gritted my teeth. This would be worth all the trouble, but wouldn’t hurt any less for it.

The light show grabbed her attention. She shook her head. “If I didn’t know any better,” she said, “I’d think you were going out of your way to piss me off.”

“Just telling it straight, angel.”