Shattered Walls (Seven Archangels Book 3) Page 16

  Saraquael was whispering, “Stay still. You’re still going to have bruised ribs, but I can fix the fractures at least.”

  “Get his wrist too,” Remiel called. “We’re going to want to tie him up again, and that’ll hurt.”

  “Listen, you barbarians, he’s not going to leave the house. You don’t have to restrain him.” Satrinah sniffed, and she moved closer to Michael. “I thought your pet humans had authority over our kind. Why hasn’t John cast him out yet instead of displaying him like a trophy?”

  Michael said, “Tell me why John hasn’t cast him out. You’re the genius.”

  Satrinah shivered with tension. “I could make another weapon and destroy you.”

  Michael shook his head. “You don’t have the raw materials to do that. I’ve had scouts checking out the field where the Sheol material was, and they’re not coming up with anything.”

  “They wouldn’t. I counted it, molecule by molecule as it came to us.” She tossed her head. “Even with the most careful handling, bits would disappear without any explanation. The way your goons tromp all over the place,” (and here she pointedly glared at Remiel) “you’d never gather any of it. Not the way we can.”

  “You can stop with the threats.” Remiel met that look and raised the bet. “Here’s the situation as I see it: you messed around creating a weapon you didn’t really understand, and then it backfired and trapped your buddy, so you brought him here to his enemies so we could help you out.”

  Satrinah flared with indignation, but Remiel went on. “You had him make enough of a racket so the disciples in the city would bring him into John’s house and John would allow him in. And now that he’s inside, you’ve got the gall to use John’s Christian community as a safe house for a demon in order to keep your boss from finding out one of his top guys has humiliated the whole team by getting trapped in a human body.”

  Michael exclaimed, “Oh, you’re right, that would probably be really bad for him, if Satan were to find out.”

  Remiel said, “But because John sealed this house to keep demons out, Satan can’t get in, and your boss can’t detect where Belior is. You need us. And I think it’s hilarious.”

  Belior got to his feet and stalked toward Michael, but Remiel got between them. “Sorry, bud. You can’t go out and play with your friend.”

  Satrinah was vibrating with anger. Remiel said, “We’re not wrong on this. You need us. We don’t need you.”

  Michael said, “If, on the other hand, you’d like to talk to us about what your weapon’s done to these three, I’m willing to listen.”

  Satrinah clenched her teeth. “You have nothing to offer me.”

  Remiel laughed out loud. “Weren’t you listening? Michael just said it would be a crying shame if your boss found out where Belior is.”

  Michael, to his credit, fought back the shock that flashed across his face. No, of course he wouldn’t have planned on blackmailing Satrinah. But in the same position, Satrinah would already have been planning an extortion and disinformation campaign, so she backed away a step. “What do you want from me?”

  Saraquael’s voice was mild. “You came to us. Would I be correct in that?”

  “I’m here for Belior.”

  “And so am I.”

  The new voice, the deeper voice, sent chills up Remiel’s spine, and she retreated a step from the doorway.

  Michael glanced at Asmodeus. “I was wondering when you’d show up.”

  Asmodeus smoldered, and Satrinah focused on him until the flames around his head had lowered a bit and she’d brightened. At Remiel’s side, Belior clenched his fists, and his eyes were riveted to Satrinah.

  Asmodeus glared right past them at his other Cherub. “Are you hurt?”

  Belior focused on him but didn’t even try to speak. Asmodeus said to Michael, “Your people are treating him worse than an animal.”

  “I’m not getting into a discussion of his treatment with you. Anything he’s suffered has been at his own hands.” Michael folded his arms. “Satrinah, you can go. You’re not getting a chance to examine him. Asmodeus, you can go. If Satan wants to figure out where he is, then your presence here is just as good as a beacon. And if I were to clash with you,” Michael said, lowering his voice, “Satan would be sure to come, wouldn’t he? And he’d want to know what exactly was going on. You don’t expect me to lie for you, do you?”

  Asmodeus glared at Satrinah, and although Remiel couldn’t see any outward sign that they were communicating, she could make a pretty good guess at it because he erupted in flames. Next he turned on Belior, but when Belior didn’t back down, he turned to Michael. “You can carry a message back to those two prisoners who gave in to your torture: I will not forget that they broke loyalty to me and told you what they know.”

  For the first time, Michael sounded a little uncertain. “Actually, Gabriel was the one who decoded your work. I’ll give him your regards.”

  “Gabriel didn’t figure this out. Hastle can look forward to a long, long reckoning.” Asmodeus whirled on Satrinah. “I told you I’d examined him myself and found no clues. I don’t want you getting caught because you’ll lead Satan straight to him, and he’ll wonder how you got here in the first place. Is that clear?” Asmodeus turned to Belior. “And you—even if they free your mouth, keep silence. For your own good. Stay in this house. No matter what, you stay in this house.”

  He vanished, taking Satrinah with him.

  Saraquael said, “He really has a certain charisma, doesn’t he?” He turned to Belior. “I think I got the bones back together, but wrists are tricky, and I’m not Raphael. Let your host know I did my best to make sure he can still use his hand after he’s freed.”

  Although Remiel wouldn’t have bet he could do it, Belior managed to make himself look even more hateful toward Saraquael.

  Belior then stepped toward Remiel, but it wasn’t in a threatening way. It was the first time since they’d met in Ephesus that Remiel had seen him with a Cherub’s natural curiosity. He recognized her now after that standoff with Satrinah, and he was putting together the pieces of their interactions, the fact that this slave girl had been Remiel all along, the fact that she’d been using a title for Mary, and maybe comparing her to her brother. Did he interact with Camael? Did she sicken him too because of how similar she was to him?

  But instead of looking sick at how closely she resembled her brother, he seemed fascinated by her. Then he turned toward Zadkiel where she was in the corner with the girls, standing tall and not giving any indication of her blindness other than a hand on one girl’s shoulder—and that could have been a protective gesture. He couldn’t speak, but Remiel could see him working up an explanation for their presence.

  Michael said to him, “We’re not going to leave you stuck like this. If we can work out a way to help them, then we’ll restore you as well.”

  Belior kept staring at Zadkiel. Maybe he was imagining those dark fragments working through her blood stream, pinning her into a body that wasn’t rightfully hers. Maybe he wanted to figure out if they’d possessed a potential saint the same way he’d possessed a magician. Maybe he was just considering how good it would be to slit her throat and find out what happens to an angel who can’t be an angel when you kill its borrowed body. In the name of research, of course. Remiel could never forget that: he hated them, and even if it benefitted him not to bring them harm, he couldn’t be counted on not to do it anyway.

  Remiel got between them. “Come on.” She touched him only to have him sidle away. “You need to be back in that room.”

  Belior followed, but he didn’t at all hide the way he stared at her.

  Also not hidden: the way Saraquael high-fived Michael. Now what could that mean?

  TWENTY

  Michael watched Saraquael at work and wondered again how Dominions pulled off whatever it was they did when they searched out something. He wasn’t complaining: if Zadkiel could find a snowflake out of place and trace it to an underground lai
r where Belior was designing a doomsday weapon, that was fine by him. The Dominions loved doing it, the most expert at it calling themselves Seekers, but right now Saraquael was foundering because whatever he was searching for, he wasn’t entirely sure what it was.

  They’d gone from John’s house directly to here, the ice fields of Hell (well, they’d had to sneak in, but as directly as possible) because of what Asmodeus had let slip: his team had an entrance of their own into Creation. The highest probability was that they’d had an entrance in their secret lab, so to there they went. From the ice fields, Michael and Saraquael had descended into the cavern that used to be Belior’s lab, now abandoned and cleaned out of all the equipment. In the past day or so, Asmodeus must have blown off the cavern’s ceiling and allowed it to fill with snow.

  There was nothing left to find, and yet Saraquael had insisted. “I want to know what they’re hiding. And at any rate, if they can create a secret entrance, I want one of our own.”

  Michael had laughed, but the greater point stood: the demons might still have some of the raw material stashed, and if they’d constructed a secret network of passages between Creation and Hell, he wanted to search it.

  Better still, he wanted to use it.

  It always gave him a warm glow to consider that although Satan had taken down a third of the angels out of disobedience to God, he demanded those same angels’ obedience to himself. Generally he got it, but sometimes, as with Hastle, they obeyed only inasmuch as it furthered their own agendas. And sometimes you ended up with secret passages to circumvent his control of who got in and out of Hell.

  They’d gotten into the snow-choked lab in dissociated form, and once inside, had heated the air until the snow sublimed but the ice floor and walls remained. At that point, Michael made light images to re-create where everything had been positioned, and Saraquael began an inch-by-inch search of the ice.

  Michael didn’t ask, but he’d always thought of this process as Saraquael “talking” to the ice and the ice “talking” back to him. He’d done that with the Earth, palms pressed flat to the soil so the information flowed to him about where he was and what was nearby. This was a much more difficult process, though, seeking out something far finer and fifty times more ephemeral. Rivers and mountains wanted to be found. If Asmodeus had a passage, he wanted it secret.

  So while Michael kept watch, Saraquael combed the room, feeling through the structure and learning its internal harmonies and listening for any sense of wrongness, like a comma misplaced in a sentence. Or maybe a single comma misplaced in an entire library full of stories.

  Saraquael’s head picked up, and he projected that Michael should come closer. Saraquael put both hands on the floor beneath where the table had stood at the room’s center, and then he shifted to the right. He lay flat against the snow, and finally he smiled. He projected a question.

  Michael shook his head: no. All he felt was that he didn’t really want to be here right now.

  Saraquael sandwiched Michael’s hand between his and the ice. “Wait a moment,” he said, and he sent a very thin pulse of energy through him into the ground.

  Everything seemed normal enough, except that Michael felt nervous and tense. “Why don’t you just open it for me?”

  Saraquael shrugged. “I’m not entirely sure this is it. But I’ll give it a try.” And in the next moment, he’d dissociated and began drawing Michael into the passage.

  The passage itself didn’t want them moving through. Somehow the demons had lined their tunnel with emotional resistance, and Michael felt a distinct dread that made him want to turn back. Oh! They’d added that: the low-level aversion was designed to keep someone from finding the entrance by accident, and his realization that they must have added this sense was all that kept Michael moving forward with Saraquael. Clever. Still, Michael stuck close to Saraquael, and Saraquael led them forward through a tunnel Michael could barely perceive even while inside it.

  At one point Saraquael hesitated, marked the spot in Michael’s mind as a place where he had to choose which direction to go, and then continued. Michael wondered momentarily how they’d know if they’d picked the right side or whether Asmodeus had designed a labyrinth to trap anyone who didn’t know the right path to take between realms.

  Michael drew marginally closer to Saraquael, who sent back a sense of nervousness. Well, at least they were together.

  Saraquael hesitated again, then moved forward without marking the spot as a branching tunnel. Michael tried to probe outward, but he sensed that whatever kind of network they were in, it was Guarded like a tube. Once inside, you could go forward or backward, but not communicate through it. The perfect hiding spot in some respects.

  Saraquael kept pushing forward, and then they found themselves in a forest.

  Michael formed back into his subtle body and dropped to the ground. “Earth,” he said. “The Indus valley. We’re…” His eyes widened. “We’re not far from where Remiel and Zadkiel landed!”

  Saraquael flared with joy. “This makes sense! They got hit with the shrapnel and their souls couldn’t stay in angelic form. They got funneled through to the nearest place capable of sustaining human life, and they ended up on the other end of the tunnel.”

  Michael said, “And Belior…does that mean he ended up near here too?”

  “He ended up in possession of someone, and I have no idea how possession works.” Saraquael’s wings dropped a bit. “They can’t possess just anyone, but did his soul only get trapped in the nearest potential host? Did he go into someone he already had an established relationship with? I can’t begin to guess, and to make matters more complicated, he’s not in his original host. He did end up in the next-nearest potential host when he killed the first one, but I’m not sure if that was by choice or by force.”

  Michael said, “I’ll send someone out to question that man’s guardian. Maybe someone from Nivalis’s team. We ought to find out how and when it happened.” He rubbed his chin. “But this tells us part of how they’re evading Satan’s notice. And potentially how they intended to utilize the weapon.”

  “It could be.” Saraquael’s eyes were bright like stars. “I’m impressed with the amount of secrecy they’ve employed. You’d think Satan would be pleased with having them develop the thing.”

  “I get the impression he’s not really the guy you want to be working for.” Michael smirked. “If they promised this weapon and didn’t deliver, think how bad it would be for them.”

  Saraquael said, “A long, long reckoning?”

  Michael flinched.

  Saraquael lowered his voice. “I saw you tried to deflect it from him, but there was no chance you could.”

  Michael shook his head. “The irony is that Hastle wasn’t the one who revealed it was Sheol material.”

  “Asmodeus is going to take it out on someone. By all accounts, he’s already laced into Belior. Hastle was going to get the backlash eventually.” His wings dropped. “I don’t think there’s anything you could have done about that. Or can do,” he added. “Let’s start moving. If Asmodeus wants to use his little back door, I don’t want him to find us or our energy signatures.”

  They spread their wings and took off, Michael silent as he glided. Hastle. This wasn’t going to end well for him at all.

  At last Michael steeled himself. “He chose his side. And he knew whatever game he was playing with Asmodeus was dangerous, but he thought it benefitted him somehow.”

  Saraquael rolled onto his back and glided while watching the clouds. “Did he ever tell you what his ultimate goal was?”

  “He said it didn’t matter anymore, that it wasn’t going to work. It upset him that we were able to find everyone.”

  Saraquael frowned. “What do you think that means?”

  “Overall? I’ve tried not to guess, to be honest. There may be all sorts of politicking going on down in Hell, and you’d never unravel it all in a thousand years.” Longer than a thousand years. Eternity would last a
long time. “He might have wanted that weapon to take out one of his personal enemies for all I know.”

  Saraquael said, “But really, knowing him, what did he want?”

  Michael closed his eyes and let the wind stroke over his face. It was so calm up here, miles above the Earth. Time and space just to glide and let the world take care of itself for a minute.

  Saraquael said, “He was working you up for something.”

  “He was working me up so he could gather the Sheol material off me.”

  Saraquael said, “And what did he plan to do with it?”

  Michael shrugged. “Give it back to Belior as tribute, I guess.”

  Saraquael said, “Unless he planned to do something with it himself.”

  Michael shook his head. “Not in a cell. Think about it: even in a lab with highly controlled conditions, Satrinah said that material was fizzling away.”

  Gasping, he cupped his wings and stopped in mid-air.

  Saraquael drew up in front of him, but Michael was shaking. No. No, he couldn’t have.

  Saraquael waited him out, projecting a question.

  Michael’s fists tightened. “He was gathering it to use it. That stuff wasn’t fizzling away. He’d been stealing the processed material back from Belior all along.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Remiel lay alone in the dark long after everyone had fallen asleep.

  She listened to the outside world, so very quiet in a way that felt unnatural to her ears. The last time she’d been human, she’d gone through that snow storm: the whine of wind and snow, the creak of the building, the snap of the fire. Here the air lay heavy and still.

  Insects—there should be insects, and maybe night creatures calling to one another. In the city, though, there weren’t that many. The animals stayed distant from the humans, and without dense vegetation, the insects themselves weren’t dense.

  As if in reply, thunder sounded in the far distance. With no windows in the room, Remiel hadn’t seen the lightning. But at least it was a sound.