We Will All Go Down Together (42 page)

Here, however, a new voice intruded—snakey, smokey, rich with archaic Scots burr. “I’d thought tae find ye unoccupied, coz, yet here I stand, corrected. Will ye no’ introduce me tae yuir friends?”

This newest arrival, still half-caught in the act of pixilating into quick relief like an Escher puzzle-print emerging from its background pattern, was someone Blandina knew of, but had never previously met: “young,” lean and flexible, with a pouty, private mouth, dressed head-to-toe in scaly green—a silky suit of uncertain cut, probably cobbled together from leaves.

“One of the Druirs,” Blandina told Cecilia. “Saracen, right? Don’t look in its eyes.”

A moue. “‘It?’ Ye do me wrong, God-lady. I am a tourist here only, and worthy of yuir respect.”

“You came in through the
wall
, Oberon.”

“I have a standing invitation,” Saracen Druir explained to Cecilia, who reddened slightly.

“
My
wall, B,” Roke pointed out, at the same time. “
My
cousin.”

“So now you’re
proud
of what you spent twenty years hiding? Interesting.”

A flash of something in Roke’s eyes made her tense, joyful. But it died down quickly.

“It’s what it is,” he replied, simply. “I’m what . . . I am. We’ve all got things in our makeup we’d drop like they’re hot, if we could. That’s family.”

Dem Scots get in every damn where,
like hissin’ roaches,
her Mémé whispered from her memory’s back recesses, tracing the splash of freckles across Blandina’s nose with one papery blue-brown-on-pale-pink finger.
Scots, French, English-from-England, breedin’ their blood in us fe a hundred generation gone,
chah
! Messin’ us from the cradle on so we forever strangers, even to our own-selves.

But:
ah,
chah
, indeed. She didn’t have time for this, not with Saracen already moving in on Cecilia out of the corner of one eye, thinking Blandina too far away to notice, or Cecilia apparently too tranced to think of stopping him.

Just before he could make contact, however, Blandina interposed—touched him instead, with her left hand, and let cold iron do all the work. There was a subdued flash, almost grey, which sent Saracen scurrying backwards; under his own hand, slapped down protectively, she could see the charred edges of a palm-print forming. “Ye foul rag-and-bone!” he cursed at her.

“You’re lucky I didn’t do it on your face.”

“Tae treat me thus, under my ane cousin’s guest-truce! I should blast ye—”

“Keep the peace, half-thing. Think you’re safe just because your hill lies outside the GTA? Be very sure—if our charter widens to include the Five-Family Coven’s leavings, we
will
move against you . . . all of you.”

“Oh? And do ye ‘keep the peace,’ sweeting?”

Blandina grinned. “Try me.”

Roke, unimpressed, made a dry little tutting sound. “Saracen, what the hell: they’re God-protected to begin with, and
she
kills stuff like you for fun. What’d you expect?”

Those eyes flared, narrowing. “A sad thing, when blood counts for naught in the face of threat. Ye should at least pretend tae ha’ my back.”

“Mmm, yeah, right—that’d be a solid
no
; Curia’s neutral ground, and if the price of it staying that way is you occasionally getting crucifix-whipped for acting stupid, I don’t have any real problem with the concept. Now: need a little something for that burn, or were you going?”

Saracen made a hissing noise, high wind through dry grass, and leaned back against the same wall he’d first eased his way through, eyes closing bottom-to-top on all of them, as though he’d suddenly had quite enough of this silly human nonsense.

Roke snorted again, switching his attention back to Blandina. “So here’s what happened,” he began. “Not last night but the night before, I’m closing up, and these guys come in—four of ’em, all dressed differently, but they have this weird
look
, like they’re related somehow. Which set off my radar, so—”

“You turned on the security camera.”

“Kirlian video, here we come.” He bent below the desk, came up with a sheaf of screen-cap printouts. “Now . . . you tell me.”

Four man-shapes, as advertised: one white, two brown, one possibly Asian of some derivation. And all of them with a single spear of light guttering from each of their foreheads, a blowtorch-bright halo-slice, like flaws in the nonexistent film.

“What
are
those?” Cecilia asked behind her, apparently sure that Blandina would know the answer. But Blandina simply shook her head.

“I don’t know,” she replied.

“Exactly,” Roke agreed; he punched cash-out, rummaged inside his till, withdrew something wrapped in a Glad easy-open sandwich bag that drew the gaze like a magically charged magnet, a slightly shimmering curlicue knot of black-on-silver penmanship.

Cecilia leaned forward. “Is that Enochian?”

“
Proto-
Enochian, a name, one of the oldest. The seal of Penemue Grigorim.”

Blandina felt both her thumbs prick at once, hard enough to make her wince; she shook her head, blinking. And asked: “Somebody sold you that? And you
bought
it?”

“Angelic script has its markets, B. Point is, whenever I usually get my hands on stuff like this, it’s old—fifty years, a hundred, centuries. But look closer.”

Cecilia put out her hand, idiotically, and Roke dropped the thing into her palm, holding it gingerly by the corner as if it might be hot. When she turned it over, its weird no-glow masked by the paper’s back-side, they both saw a stationery header, which read
Greetings from the Motorway Motel, Mississauga—Unlimited Pool, Cable, Wi Fi. Perfect for Parties.

“It’s genuine,” Roke said. “Written maybe . . . yesterday, or the day before. Which means that one of the first angels to ever descend is right here, in town. And not alone, either.”

Though I am not “there” to do so, I nevertheless see how very hard Blandina looks at one of these pixilated countertop faces . . . at
me
. As though she recognizes the long-dead human berg I was calved from, full-grown and whole, such a comparatively short time ago.

Penemue Grigorim is my Maker, my originator, my father and mother—both and neither. It threw me off like a spark, cast me like a pottery sketch, dropped me like solder from a burn; only a small part of the real thing, a parody, something useless and inadequate.

For do not be fooled: like all Nephilim, I am nothing but what gets left behind . . . the physical residue of the explosion that happens when humans and angels collide.

“Guys with the flaming haircuts must be the get, then,” Blandina said, at last. “Penemue’s leavings.”

“Half-angels,” Cecilia chimed in. “The reason God sent a Flood.”

“Supposedly, yes.”

Cecilia’s eyes blanked once more, then turned sharper than Blandina was used to seeing them. “Well . . . we have to tell Mother Eulalia, obviously. Do research on attack methods—weaponry. Send intelligencers to Mississauga?”

Roke shook his head. “No point; the Grigorim will be long gone by now, its whole clutch along with it. Probably only wrote the seal in the first place ’cause it needed ready cash for a bolt-hole, someplace it can hunt from. . . .”

Who asked you?
Blandina longed to snap. But only asked, instead—

“All right. Where would
you
start looking?”

Back when the grabs hit the desk, Saracen Druir had made a sort of gulp, as though his slippery mouth were suddenly full of silvered salt. Now, looking over, she found him already in mid-fade, blending spine-first back out through Curia’s exposed-brick wall. Roke noticed and laughed out loud.

“Seriously? I’d look for
that
,” he said. “There’s lore claims
all
monsters descend from the Grigorim, through their Nephilim: witches and warlocks, psionics, weres, vampires, the Fae. And while I don’t know if that’s true, I do know this much—when one passes by, there isn’t a monster in town who’ll want to stick around.”

“Won’t be seeing you for a while then, I guess.”

“C’mon, B—it already knows where
I
live. Besides which, if some sort of mass exodus is about to start, then everybody’s going to want to pawn their crap before upping sticks. After all, I’m not exactly on the church’s payroll, anymore; gotta file taxes, like everybody else. Not to mention, I have a business to run.”

That night, Blandina took Reconciliation in anticipation of her next battle, one of the Ordo’s principal charges. They did it prison-style, two chairs leaning back to back, with Blandina brushing shoulders with the young priest who’d taken Roke’s place after he resigned—a nice enough boy, she supposed. Though she never could recall his name.

“Forgive me, Father,” she said. “It’s been . . . twenty hours since my last confession.”

“And have you sinned, my child?”

Ridiculous question.

“Always,” she replied. And went down the list, briskly, point by point.

After, she worked off her penance in the sparring room, drumming the heavy bag ’til both wrists felt bruised, and her hairline stung with sweat. Finding her mind adrift, nonetheless, for all this distraction: back through time, years peeling like skin. Back to the crux of the matter.

Though Toronto still maintained its overall reputation for being “Good,” the area where Blandina had been raised was reckoned a bad place by many people’s standards. Bad enough to make her grow up fast and hard, any rate—a Redbone girl with auburn-touched hair and hazel eyes, tall and fine and fierce. Too quote-quote “white” for most blacks, but damn well black enough for everybody else, with the legacy of bad old slave-trader blood writ large on her: deeded down from that same master/father who’d given Mémé’s own Gran-Gran-Gran-Mémé her maiden name, which Mémé constantly derided as
damn Scots meddlin’
, yet kept perversely intact through three different common-law husbands.

A closet matriarchist, her gran. But then again, in Blandina’s neighbourhood,
women ah run tings
was the rule, not the exception; boys raised without fathers grew up to become absent baby-daddies in their turn, then killed each other or moved on before they could see the cycle repeat itself. While daughters, sisters, mothers, aunties all clustered together, gave up whatever they had to, did whatever what was necessary. Threw themselves against the wall and let the world exact its punishment, all in order to stave off that inevitable moment when their children, however well-sheltered, would have to take their place.

Blandina—not Blandina, then—had seen it coming for herself, a mile off. And so, realizing her difficult-to-categorize brand of good looks and charisma gave her a chance others didn’t have, she’d traded them both for mobility. Got out, kept going. Went from catalogue poses and club dancing to runway modelling and video shoots, gully-creepin’ up the midst in the foreground of various reggae or R ’n’ B odes with her pants slung low and her midriff exposed; dipped her toe in the soft-core pool without ever having to get too dirty; convinced her agent to spring for martial arts training and created a brief stock in trade of looking like she could probably kick your ass, if the very idea didn’t bore her so much. Became a brand, anonymous yet recognizable, something whose traces she still occasionally tripped across, but which almost none of the people around her would ever associate with who she was now. . . .

Though, that wasn’t quite true, not entirely. As her brush with a failed former dancehall deejay she’d once known had proven, recently—her on soup-van duty, scoping out duppy hidey-holes between medical advice and turf dispute mediation, with him one of the great unwashed, high and drunk, yet still savvy enough to connect the dots. Squinting into her face and asking, hesitant:
Sistah, fe real—ain’t you use to be somebody?

Still am. Brother.

Later, as they were breaking down for the night, he’d drifted back, eyes a bit clearer.
Atia Rusk, in the damn flesh,
he’d named her.
Ain’t see ya fe ten year at least, girl. Ya cleft ta Christ, nah? Hadn’t thought ya da marryin’ type.

Well, Vévé, ya know how ’tis. Me Lord’s too strong a persuader ta be denied.

Ah now, fe sure. His will be done.

(Oh, yes. Always.)

Blandina leaned her brow against the bag’s slimy-cool skin and let her breathing slow. She’d been done for five minutes at least; better to hit the shower, then suit up. But when she raised her head, Cecilia was there, in the doorway.

“What?” Blandina demanded.

“Uh . . . Mother Eulalia says she might have a lead. On—that creature, the one Maccabee Roke—”

“
Angel
, sister. You can say the word.”

Cecilia paused, looked down. “I’m just . . . not used to thinking of God’s messengers as prey, I suppose,” she told her feet.

“Satan was an angel, once,” Blandina pointed out. “Angels can err; they fall and are condemned. The Watchers were first to do so. That makes them fair game.”

“For God, yes. But us?”

Towelling herself vigorously, Blandina used her teeth to unravel first one hand-wrap, then the other. “If God didn’t approve of what we do, He wouldn’t let us do it.”

“You’re very sure, sister.”

“Yes. I have to be.”

And so will you, someday.

The rumour is that Nephilim kill their human mothers and fathers in their birthing—that we bud off, leaving behind wounds human bodies can’t possibly sustain. In fact, the piece torn away physically is miniscule at best. What
rips
is the human partner’s soul, which becomes diminished and hollow, eddying away at death into a mere radioactive signature.

This is why God didn’t want the Grigorim making Nephilim—not just because they destroyed His greatest creation in their making, but because it brings the progenitor so much literally unholy pleasure, an incalculable high, their sole remaining comfort. Which may well be why, though they understand its cost, they have never yet been able to give the practice up.