The Armies of Heaven (31 page)

The dark hood made Belphagor’s presence seem large and menacing as he crawled over him. “What’s the matter, dirty little angel?” He wrestled Vasily down as he tried in vain to fight it. “You don’t mind violating the queen, but you can’t take a little violation yourself?” Belphagor underscored the words with the force of his flesh, and Vasily groaned as he made good on the threat, slick with oil he’d palmed with airspirit finesse.

“Hold still.” Belphagor yanked on his locks beneath the pillowcase when Vasily squirmed beneath him. “I’ll use you as I please.”

Every nerve ending in Vasily’s skin danced with the heat of seraphic fire as Belphagor penetrated him, and he forgot his fear in the fierceness of Belphagor’s possession, aware only of the strength of the grip on his cock and the fury of the pounding thighs against his own. Belphagor brought Vasily to a merciless climax before pinning him with an elbow to the back of the neck and taking his time with his own pleasure. Vasily was moaning senselessly, transported to that place of transcendent release—fully Belphagor’s, fully safe—when Belphagor at last enveloped him in his arms and kissed the back of his neck.

“My
malchik
.” Belphagor whispered softly against his skin. “My Seraph. You need never fear anything when I am holding you. I have traveled Heaven and earth and the Unseen World and I have had my share of men—both demon and angel, and a few other things besides—but there has never been anyone I’ve cherished as I do you.”

Vasily bit back tears and then cried out in surprise as he felt something sharp pierce the nape of his neck.

“Since you reminded me I was another year older, I’ve counted the years you’ve belonged to me.” Belphagor threaded a spiked bar through the skin without missing a stroke. “And we are off by two.” Echoing the movements of his body, he thrust the needle in again, and deftly threaded another beneath the first.

Letting out a breath against the pain, Vasily yelped when Belphagor surprised him with a third.

“I thought I’d get the jump on the coming year,” he said casually. “Since you will certainly belong to me still.” Capping the last of the new adornments, he pulled the hood away and forced Vasily’s head back by the hair just above the new piercings so he could reach his lips. Though his hands were hard, his mouth was soft and sweet. When he released Vasily, he brushed his lips over the tender wounds and murmured against them. “If I have my way, sweet boy, one day, people will be able to count these like rings on a tree to see just exactly how long the Fallen live.” He added in the tongue of Men,
“Ya tebya lyublyu.” I love you.

§

For the first time in days, Kirill woke feeling something like himself, though he had no inkling where he’d woken. The bed was high and soft, and the room tastefully austere with a white-stained wooden floor and a creamy rug dotted here and there with hand-embroidered rosebuds. He sat up and saw he was dressed in soiled clothes that were not his own, and then he remembered the demon town and the demon market—and what he’d almost done to the little boy.

Kirill slipped out of the bed and onto his knees and began to cross himself, reciting the Prayer of the Heart—until he remembered the angel of God himself had bidden him to kill the child.

He stood slowly, recalling fragments of conversation from the past several days, people speaking over him while he raved. The angel of light who’d visited him was of the highest order, one called an Aeon. There was no higher being in Heaven than these.

Heaven was devoid of God. Kirill’s prayers went to no one, and the forces that interceded in men’s lives were merely selfish beings with their own agendas. He took out the prayer rope still in his pocket and held it in his hand. He felt nothing. Kirill dropped it into the waste bin.

A servant entered and told him the queen had inquired after his health, and that if he felt well enough, he might have a hot bath and a hot meal. Nothing sounded better to Kirill at this moment. He couldn’t imagine how he’d come to be a prisoner of the wretched queen of Heaven, but he might as well take advantage of her hospitality while her good mood lasted.

When he returned to his room after partaking of both bath and food, wrapped in a clean, ordinary robe, he found Love sitting on his bed, idly turning in her hands the
chotki
he’d thrown away. His heart beat faster at the sight of her. He could think of nothing to say, and she said nothing, and then he studied the fading marks of bruises on her face and remembered seeing her when they’d been fresh. His heart turned black with fury.

She recoiled as he reached for her. “What’s wrong?”

“Who touched you?” He held her face up to the sunlight to examine it.

Love put her hand over his and tried to pull it away, but he grasped her face in both hands. She looked frightened, as if she thought he’d gone mad.

“Was it the queen?” he demanded.

“The queen?” Love let out an astonished laugh. He faltered and she pulled his hands down gently in hers. “I’m sorry. I’m not laughing at you. It’s just that you’ve missed a great deal. Anazakia is the queen.”

“Anazakia?” He searched her eyes in amazement. “Then the other one…?”

“She’s gone,” said Love. “And so is Helga.”

He realized she’d avoided his original question. And then he recalled something else he’d heard in his delirium:
Zeus’s brother happened to Love.
His heart ached as if he’d been stabbed.

Kirill sat beside her on the bed and touched the faded bruises on her cheek. “This is more of what I’ve brought upon you. You suffer the wages of my sin.”

“Kirill, no.” She grasped his hand. “You might as well say it’s Nazkia’s fault for having a baby, or my friend Knud’s fault for introducing me to her. You are not the author of other people’s actions.”

“But he came to me,” Kirill insisted, pained. “That devil came to me and I let him in. And after everything, I abandoned you. I should have been with you instead of chasing after spirits, hurting more innocents, but I let you go back to the world alone to face his kin.”

“Belphagor told you.” She looked ashamed, as if somehow this knowledge could diminish her in his eyes.

“Mr. Belphagor knows where the blame lies. If it had not been for me—”

“If it hadn’t been for you, Kirill, I would be dead, and Ola would be lost.” Love touched his lips with her soft fingers when he tried to disagree. “Don’t.” She shook her head. “Don’t do this anymore. Because of you, Ola is home and safe.”

“But I was going to kill the boy,” he began.

Love pressed her fingers more firmly against his lips and he forgot what he was going to say in the instant desire for her that overwhelmed him.

“No, you weren’t. You would never have gone through with it, even full of firedust. I know you. You would have thrown yourself from that bridge before you would harm a child.”

He recalled he’d been preparing to do just that.

She spoke more quietly, her eyes grave. “What you did was save Ola and Azel from men who traffic in the innocence of children.”

Kirill stared at her, shocked that she knew this, shocked to hear it said aloud.

“While you were ill, you told Belphagor how you found them in that place, and how you were drugged. Nazkia had the sick bastards exiled to the eastern Empyrean where they can never hurt another child. She had to stop Belphagor from killing them. He doesn’t blame you for anything, Kirill—he wants to give you a damned medal. And I don’t blame you for anything either. If there’s a God, he put you on Solovetsky to save Ola and me.”

He stared at her in amazement, not knowing what to say to this.

In the next instant, however, she looked sad. “And I’m so grateful for you, Kirill.” Her hand dropped to her lap. “But I came here to tell you something.”

His heart seemed to plunge into his stomach at her sorrowful tone.

“I can’t go back home. I just can’t. I need to be here with Ola, with my family. I know you can’t bear it here, but I can’t go back with you. I’m sorry.”

He almost laughed with joy and relief.

“And I’m sorry I tempted you,” she added miserably.

“Love,” he interrupted, kneeling down in front of her. “There is nothing for me there. There is nothing for me anywhere but where you are.”

Love shook her head with tears in her eyes. “But I’ve taken you from God.”

“Where is God if He is not in Heaven?” Echoing the words she’d once said to him, he reached up and touched her face as if he knelt before the Mother of God herself. “Where is God if He is not watching over the most precious of His children? I joined the brotherhood because I could not bear the abominations wicked men visited upon the innocent, and yet God did not hear even one of my prayers. Instead, the wicked came to me where I hid from the world and persuaded me it was God’s will that I harm the innocent. And in Heaven itself, the highest of angels have done the same.”

He stroked a tear that fell upon her cheek. “If there is anything like God,” he whispered, “it is in your kiss. That is what I wish to pray to from now on.” Kirill rose onto his knees and drew Love’s face to his and kissed her, tasting the holy sacrament, and laid his head in her lap. “You are the divine,” he said. “You are my Love.”

She bent and kissed his hair, quietly slipping the
chotki
into his pocket.

§

Azel didn’t care for traveling by Cherub. He’d done it once before, when they’d come to this same palace by the sea from the cold place.
The dungeon of the keep at the Citadel of Gehenna
, his mind interjected.
Helga kept you in a dungeon. Just like this one.
That was where he’d first begun to have memories that weren’t his, after Helga—

“Shut up!” he shouted and then was horribly ill. He managed to get most of it into the oubliette. The rest he cleaned up with his shirt. Tempted to throw it in after his mess, but knowing Helga would likely punish him by making him go without supper, he folded it neatly and set it aside for the wash.

Ola wasn’t here this time, and somehow the little room (
dungeon
) seemed unbearable, though it was no different from any other he’d lived in. The dark had never bothered him before. He’d asked Helga for a lamp before she closed him in and she’d called him spoiled and said he was putting on “airs.” He didn’t know what airs were, but he supposed he probably was spoiled. Like milk left out where it shouldn’t be, he’d gone bad.

Nonsense. You should have a room upstairs, like Helga does. What is she hiding you from? Everyone’s already seen you.

Azel pinched his arm spitefully. Though it hurt him, he figured it must hurt the other boy, too. The voice went silent.

He’d fallen asleep sometime later and woke to the white-gold light of a Cherub on the stairs. “Come,” the Cherub ordered, the deep baritone of the ox dominant within the multiform voice. The man’s face supplanted the ox’s as Azel climbed the steps. “What happened to your clothes?”

“I was sick,” said Azel.

The Cherub snatched his arm with irritation and dragged him up the remaining steps, and Azel blinked in the light as he stumbled along behind the angel. It was midafternoon, though it had felt like midnight. He’d never given much thought to the time of day before and the realization that he couldn’t tell day from night in his room unnerved him. He’d only spent a few weeks in the daylight. Ola had spent her whole life in it. No wonder she’d cried in the oubliette.

Pausing at the wardrobe in one of the rooms upstairs, the Cherub shoved a clean shirt at him; no Cherub valet for him anymore, it seemed. It was too big, but Azel put it on, buttoning one-handed as he trotted along behind the Cherub. Once again, he could smell the sea air flowing through the open breezeways of the palace. He wished he could go outside and see the ocean. A memory of standing on a pier with the pretty lady (
Nenny
) played in his head. “I dare you to jump in fully clothed,” she’d taunted with a grin. “Come on, I’ll race you.” She had run for the end of the pier and leapt, her fancy dress ballooning up around her as she hit the water like the canvas sides of a collapsible lifeboat.

The Cherub stopped outside a sitting room, keeping Azel behind him, but Azel peered around him and saw the other Cherubim standing about Helga like guardians. She sat having tea with another pretty lady, only this one had shining silver hair and eyes, like the angels he’d met in Elysium—like the one the Cherub killed.

“I must admit, you had even me fooled,” the pretty lady said. “I believed my poor, mad Kae had snapped under the strain of his conflicted heart. It was a puzzle. I hadn’t expected him to take actions I’d not directed. Of course, you can never tell what darkness a man may be harboring. But that is unimportant now. I merely wish to confirm the boy’s existence if we’re to come to any sort of mutually beneficial arrangement.”

“And what would you consider mutually beneficial?” Helga countered. “Your reign was not exactly a boon to the Fallen. Why should I assume we have any other common goal than the dissolution of the House of Arkhangel’sk?”

“I am not even certain that goal is one of yours. Why keep the boy and further a dynasty you claim you want to destroy?”

Helga gave her a patronizing smile. “Because the Host are a fickle lot who may charge forward full-thrust toward revolution one minute and then mourn their lost ideal the next. With Azel, they can maintain their imagined ideal while Heaven progresses around them. And since he is a most compliant boy, there is no danger of a return to Heaven’s former excesses.”

The pretty lady fanned herself in the southern heat as the breeze from the shore grew momentarily still. “I understood he’d run away with the little Grand Duchess. That does not strike me as compliant.”

“He did not run away,” Helga corrected stiffly. “He and his cousin were somehow stolen away in the night by a Russian monk.”

The lady laughed aloud, to Helga’s obvious consternation. “Oh, they’re insidious!” she said with sympathy. “I have never met one who didn’t deserve a vicious flogging.” She leaned back against the chair as if the heat were draining her. “Well, I truly must see this boy. I have heard so much about him.”