Thy Fearful Symmetry (33 page)

“I thought you were dead.”

“So did I. Think you were dead, I mean.”

“I should be. Give it time.” Gemmell smiled, delighted to see her, and bent over the body she had been kneeling beside. The blinded man they had found upstairs. Gemmell glanced up at the window. “Bloody hell.”

“It was his idea, sir. Malachi Jones. He's quite insistent, when he's awake. One of the angels was right behind us. I don't know why it didn't follow us. I mean, they've got wings.”

“Well, they aren't short of victims inside. They think they're sending souls for Christ's judgement and a place in Heaven.”

“That doesn't sound like a bad place to be.” Summer was eyeing the demons along the wall, and Gemmell didn't know whether he should be concerned that they had scarcely fazed her.
 

The man in the weeds moaned, and Gemmell noticed the misshapen arm beneath his coat. Sharp shapes poked at the sleeve. “Well, we've got nothing to do but wait for them to find us, so you can start looking forward to harp lessons.”

“You think you'll go to Heaven, sir?”

Gemmell paused. “On the assumption that anywhere's better than here Summer, I don't really care.”

“I do,” said the man at his feet, and Gemmell jerked backwards as Malachi Jones sat bolt upright, his lips set with bloodless determination.

Corpses bore Calum aloft, hands on his shoulders and the back of his legs carrying him at head height. Every now and again he craned his neck, trying to see between his feet, but the sea of heads in front and around him was disorientating. There must be hundreds of them, with more joining every second. A quote kept going through his mind, ludicrous given his situation but compelling all the same.
When there is no more room in hell, the dead shall walk the earth
. What was that from? It sounded biblical, like something he should know, but he couldn't put his finger on it.

Calum blinked furiously. Winds tore at him, and the flecks of fire that sailed on them were hotter and more frequent than before. An explosion punched the city somewhere nearby, and a second later flames bloomed over the top of the buildings on his left. There had been a petrol station there that morning.

Snuffling blood, he pulled his feet upwards, trying to see if there was any weakness in the grip of those holding him, but found no give. Even if he wriggled free, how was he supposed to fight through the dead mob of snatching, biting flesh barring his escape?

Above him, behind the falling fires, dark clouds smothered the stars, and Calum knew that darkness would soon embrace the earth. In the next few hours he was going to die, and when he did he would go to hell. Would that be worse than where he was now?

Apart from the clammy touch of the dead, the smell was fast becoming overpowering, even through his blocked, ruined nose. Calum had lost track of the number of times he had either been sick, or dry heaved. Not too long ago, he had been enjoying a cup of tea, in a flat, with two normal people. They had talked, and while they had discussed crazy things, the manner of the discussion had for a short time been mundane. Calum hungered for the mundane, for a slice of normality. He didn't want to be the destroyer of worlds, or friends with angels and demons, or held captive by mad zombies. All he wanted was to sleep in his bed, knowing that outside the stars were shining, and everything was right and proper. It disturbed him that he could not remember what clean sheets felt like against his skin.
 

Everything flipped over as he was thrown to the ground.
 

Through surrender rather than design, Calum went limp, rolling through the icy slush on the road, relishing the clinging wetness on his flesh. Only when he realised what he was lying in front of, did he force himself on to his knees.
 

Calum was at the edge of the fog, dead men ranked behind him, Clive at his side.

“Here,” Clive shouted at the stillness. “I have him here! The betrayer, the one who hid Ambrose! I've brought him for you!”

All Calum could hear was the storm.

Then, from deep inside the fog, tiny nightmares leaped at him.

When Malachi woke, his arm so far beyond pain that he felt only white, cold nausea, Summer was speaking.

“You think you'll go to Heaven, sir?”

A gruff male voice answered, the Glaswegian accent resigned. It could only be her inspector.
 

“On the assumption that anywhere's better than here Summer, I don't really care.”

Malachi gritted his teeth. Had Melissa been the only person ready to fight for the world?
 

“I do,” he told himself, surprised to hear the words spoken aloud. Hauling himself into a sitting position, he paused to see whether he was going to throw up. He didn't. “I care, and I'm going to stop it happening.” Using his one good arm to balance himself, he pushed himself to his feet.

“Mr Jones, you shouldn't…”

“Stand up and fight? You want to lie down here and wait for death? Go ahead. I have an angel to kill.” Demon or angel, Pandora had to die. Perhaps Stacey had been taken from him simply to put him in this place, at this time, for this task. Melissa had believed that killing Pandora would save the world. Time to find the truth in that.

“Mr Jones?” This was the Inspector, and there was something in his voice that Malachi respected. Here was a man used to getting things done. “My name is James Gemmell. While your fighting spirit is admirable, you're not making sense. If you want to kill angels, I can point you in the right direction, but there are dozens of the bastards, all armed with bloody big swords, and they're not in the mood to spare the crippled.”

Malachi snorted. “Do my injuries make a difference to my chances?”

There was a pause. “Put like that, you have as much chance as anybody.”

“Help me then.” In the background, surrounding them, he heard a strange, collective shuffling. “Are we alone?”

“We're being watched, but they can't cross on to church ground. The angels are busy indoors.”

“Good. We need to find a way to…”

“I haven't agreed to anything yet.”

Malachi held still. While he didn't like to admit it, he wasn't going to get far without somebody pointing him in the right direction.

“I want to help you, but I'm not going to. I don't know how many hours I have left to live, and I'm going to need a good reason to spend them leading a blind man on a fool's quest. I'm tired, I'm hurt, and I don't like having my time wasted. If you want my help, you'll stop giving me bloody orders, and tell me what you're doing in the middle of all this.”

Malachi gaped, and a tiny part of him rejoiced that finally, somebody worth listening to had given him an order. Aware of time slipping away, he let Summer sit him on the wet grass, and began his story.

Gemmell listened as Malachi Jones spoke, at the same time wondering why they were still alive. The angels must have finished their cleaving work in the church by now. There had been silence from within the building for long minutes, and he expected to see them round the corner at any second, flaming swords held high.

Yet they didn't come, and the story Malachi was telling drew him in. The man was remarkable. He had spent months researching, training, preparing to revenge his wife, and just two days ago Gemmell would have had him sectioned and put away for doctors to study.

Today, he didn't give the story's credibility a second thought, and instead found the man's drive and purpose more than a little terrifying. When the story reached the psychic called Melissa, and the path she had placed Malachi on, Gemmell began to pace a tight little line as he listened.

Malachi finished his taut, expressionless tale just before Summer and Gemmell had entered it, and Summer shook her head. “What were you expecting to do? You burst in, and she destroyed you. What was your plan?”

“I didn't have one. Everything moved too quickly, and I was expecting a lower demon, not an angel. There are rituals that would have helped me with a demon.”

Gemmell nodded. “But you had no idea how to destroy an angel. What makes you think that, if we can even find her, you'll have better luck a second time?”

Malachi swayed, and Gemmell wondered how much strength of mind it took to make yourself function with so much damage done to your body. “You know where we can find a weapon that will kill an angel.”

“I'm not following you.”

“Then you're not as bright as I'd hoped.”

“It's been a long night,” Gemmell snapped. “Normally, I'm an expert in the destruction of mythological beasts that don't have any damn right to be flying around in my city.” A wave of tiredness went through him, and he wished that Malachi really was insane. That way, they could lie down and sleep. That way, he wouldn't have to watch innocent people die anymore.

Malachi frowned, his head tilted. “Where was the last place you saw a weapon that looked as though it might kill just about anything, Inspector?”

The penny dropped. “You're not serious.”

“The angels warred in Heaven. They destroyed each other with those swords. I'm going to get one, and then I'm going to kill Pandora.”

“Sir?” Summer was behind him, and as soon as he turned he saw what was wrong. Above them, winged, naked bodies flew silently into the fog in all directions. “The angels are leaving.”

“They have a world to cleanse,” Malachi said behind them. “Time's against them. Now get me into the church. I have a sword to find.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

Braced against the rising wind, Clive clenched his fists as the first of the demons leaped from the fog. On his knees where he belonged, Calum recoiled as it splashed in the slush, spraying him with icy water. Crouched on all fours, it had the tortured body of a skinned monkey, powerful muscles bunching and relaxing as it prepared to spring again. Clive couldn't look at its newborn baby head.
 

What had it been doing in the fog? Clive had brought the man here to present to his blue angel, so that he could be made to pay for his sins by the proper authority. It was not Clive's place to judge sinners, and it had been presumptuous of him to consider it. When he had seen the city through a thousand eyes at once, he had the briefest glance of the blue angel entering the mist circling the church, face pinched in concentration, and had wondered if the building might be some sort of staging post for angels.
 

Romantic notions of winged wonders spreading out from that point, joy following in their wake, were shattered now. Even his dulled hearing caught the sinister noises in the gloom. The crunching, trilling backdrop sang of perversity, and pain inflicted for its own sake. If the angel had entered this cloud of evil, it could only have been to challenge what it contained.

More demons hurtled out of the fog, splashing to the ground in front of his prisoner with unnerving poise. The wind alone should have unbalanced them mid-flight.
 

How long since the angel entered the cloud?

Long enough. They had overwhelmed it.
 

His enemy stared at the pack, twenty or thirty strong now. Clive expected to see relief on his face, for they surely served the same masters, not the hollow despair that made Clive remember what it was like to feel cold.
 

Calum brought his arms up, holding them out to the side as he tilted his head back. The Christ-like pose infuriated Clive, who stepped forward to lash out with his foot.
 

The demons tensed their shoulders and necks, opened their toothless mouths, and screamed.

Even with his hearing impaired, the pain was intense, throwing Clive's balance as he stepped from the kerb to the road. He was so closely entwined with the gifted that they too stumbled, a vast synchronised misstep that sent some splashing to the ground, dragging others with them.

Despite stiff legs, Clive recovered his balance in time to see blood sluicing down the prisoner's neck from his ears, pain scored into his face.

Satisfaction surged through him.

Panic followed. This wasn't how it should be. Clive was no lackey of Hell, delivering their errand boys back to them.
 

What would Heather want me to do?

The thought came from nowhere, striking him deep. The answer was so simple and convincing, so potent an antidote to confusion, that he acted on it instantly.

Stepping forward, Clive looked down at the demons, who stopped screaming to stare balefully up at him.

“You can't have him,” Clive said. “He isn't for you.”

Bunching their haunches, the demons launched themselves at him.

Gemmell crept alongside the wall of the church, his willpower devoted to keeping his feet moving in the wet grass while primordial instincts were trying to make him sprint away. There was no space in his terror-crammed brain to analyse why he was doing this, or how Malachi Jones had convinced him that the inside of the church was the place they most wanted to be.

At least everything was quiet. While the fog on the other side of the churchyard wall persisted, the monkey-demons were gone. From within the church, the sounds of slaughter had died, presumably because there was nobody left to kill.

Gemmell hoped that meant that there were no straggling angels left, even though they were only going inside in order to find one. At least that way, his conscience would be appeased. Malachi offered a way to help his city, and Gemmell was trying to follow it through. It wouldn't be his fault if the angels were gone, and their swords with them. He could tell himself that he had tried, then finally go home to his boy.

Summer followed behind him, intent and terrified, Malachi's hand on her arm. How the man was even standing was a mystery, but after his evening of full-on miracles, a little superhuman endurance scarcely fazed him.
 

Something wet and leathery scraped the tarmac of the road bare metres away, and he froze, his mouth drying. Force of will was not enough to part the gloom and reveal the owner of that sound, and the noise did not recur.
 

He was going to have to start moving again, so made himself lift his foot. It felt very heavy, but he got himself going. One hand trailing against the damp stone of the church wall, he reached the corner of the building and stopped again, his heart hammering.