On the other side Samjeeza unfolds himself into a man. He looks pleased with himself, excited, the fox-in-the-henhouse kind of excited, a wicked gleam in his eye. My skin prickles at the sight of him.
“A fine night for a journey.” He glances around. “I told you to bring a friend.”
“Do you have any friends who’d go to hell for you?” I ask, trying to keep my bottom lip from trembling.
His gaze is piercing. “No.”
He has no friends. He has no anyone.
He tsks his tongue like he’s disappointed in me. “This will not work without someone to ground you.”
“You could ground me,” I say, lifting my chin.
The corner of his mouth turns up. He leans forward, not touching me but close enough to envelop me in the cocoon of sorrow that’s always enclosing him. It is a deep, gut-wrenching agony, like everything beautiful and light in this world has slowly withered and died, crumbled to ash in my hands. I can’t breathe, can’t think.
How did Mom ever manage to get close to this creature? But then, she didn’t have the way with feelings I have. She couldn’t know how black and bone-chillingly cold he truly is inside, how shattered.
“Is this what you want to be bound to?” he asks in a rumbling voice.
I step back and gasp when I’m able to get my breath again, like he’s been choking me.
“No.” I shudder.
“I didn’t think so,” he says. “Ah, well.” He looks down the tracks, where in the distance I can hear the very faint whistle of an approaching train. “It’s probably for the best,” he says.
I’m going to miss my chance.
“Wait!”
I turn to see Christian hurrying across the tracks, wearing his black fleece jacket and gray jeans, his eyes wide, his voice ragged as he calls, “I’m here!”
My breath leaves me in a rush. I can’t help but smile. He reaches me and we hug, clutching at each other’s arms for a minute, murmuring “I’m sorry” and “I’m so glad you’re here” and “I couldn’t miss it” and “You don’t have to do this” back and forth between us, sometimes out loud, sometimes in our heads.
Samjeeza clears his throat, and we step back from each other and turn to him. He cocks his head at Christian.
“Who is this?” he asks. “I’ve seen him hanging around you like some lovesick puppy. Is he one of the Nephilim?”
Christian inhales sharply. He’s never seen Samjeeza before, never been this close to a Black Wing. I wonder for a moment if he wasn’t wrong about seeing Asael. Asael and Samjeeza look enough alike that maybe he confused the two. It’s possible. This could still be his vision, I think.
“He’s a friend,” I manage, grabbing Christian’s hand. Immediately I feel stronger, more balanced, more focused. We can do this. “You said I needed a friend, and here he is. So now you can take us to Angela.”
“Forgetting something, are we?” Samjeeza says. “Your payment?”
What payment? Christian demands in my head. Clara, what payment? What did you promise him?
“I didn’t forget.”
The train is approaching, a dull red light at its head, advancing down the tracks. I’ll have to make this fast.
“I have a story,” I tell him. “But I’ll show you.”
With my free hand I reach up and touch Samjeeza’s cheek, which is smooth and cool, inhuman. His sorrow floods me, making Christian gasp as it reverberates through me and into him, but I surge against it, squeeze Christian’s hand tighter, and focus on today, the hour with my mother on the top of Buzzards Roost. I pour it all into Sam’s shocked and open mind: her voice telling the story, the wind blowing her long auburn hair, the way she felt as she told it, the warm soft clasp of her hand holding mine, and finally, the words.
I lied.
I loved him.
Samjeeza flinches. It is more than he expected. I feel him start to tremble under my hand. I step back and let him go.
We wait to see what he will do. The train’s approaching the station. It’s different from the northbound one; this one is smudged with dirt or soot or something black and nasty so that I can’t read the words on the sides. The windows are crowded with black shapes. Gray people, I realize. On their way to the underworld.
Sam’s eyes are closed, his body absolutely still, like I’ve turned him into stone.
“Sam …,” I prompt. “We should go.”
His eyes open. His eyebrows push together, the space between them wrinkling like he’s in pain. He regards Christian and me like he doesn’t know what to do with us anymore. Like he’s having second thoughts.
“Are you absolutely certain that you want to do this?” he asks, his voice hoarse. “Once you board this particular locomotive, there’s no turning back.”
“Why do we have to take a train?” Christian asks impulsively. “Can’t you take us there, the way you did with Clara and her mother before?”
Samjeeza seems to gain back a bit of his equilibrium. “For me to expend energy in that way would call attention to what I’m doing, and the trail could be followed. No, you must go like all the common damned of this world, into the depths by ferry, or carriage, or train.”
“All right,” Christian says tightly. “Train it is, then.”
Are you sure? I ask him silently, looking into his eyes.
I’ll go where you go, he answers.
I turn back to Sam. “We’re ready.”
He nods.
“Listen to me carefully. I will take you to your friend, where I have arranged for her to be at the given time, and you must convince her to go with you.”
“Convince her?” Christian interjects again. “Won’t she be eager to get out of there?”
Samjeeza ignores him, focuses on me. “Speak to no one else but the girl.”
What, does he think I’ll stop to chat with the first person I stumble across? “No problem.”
“No one else,” he repeats sharply, talking loudly to make himself heard over the engine of the train as it slows to a halt in front of us. “Keep your heads down. Do not look anyone in the eyes.” He glances at Christian. “Try to maintain physical contact with your friend, but any outward sign of affection or connection between you will be noticed, and you do not want to be noticed. Stay close to me, but do not touch me. Do not look directly at me. Do not speak to me in public. If I am to stay with you, you must do exactly as I tell you, when I tell you, without question. Do you understand?”
I nod mutely.
The train shudders to a complete stop. Samjeeza takes two golden coins from his pocket and drops them into my hand. “For passage.” I pass one to Christian.
“Your hair,” he says, and I pull my hood up over my head.
The doors hiss open.
I step closer to Christian so that our shoulders touch, take a deep breath of what is all at once oily, stale air, and let go of his hand. Together we follow Samjeeza into the waiting car. The doors close behind us. There’s no going back.
This is it.
We’re going to hell.
It’s dark inside the car. I’m immediately overpowered by a claustrophobic feeling, like the grimy walls are shrinking, enclosing us, trapping us. It’s not helped by the fact that there are people crowded around us like shadows, insubstantial and ghostlike, sometimes immaterial enough that I can see right through them or they seem to overlap one another, occupying the same space. There’s an occasional moan from one of them, the sound of a man who’s coughing wretchedly, a woman weeping. The lights over our heads are red and flickering, buzzing like angry insects. Outside the window is nothing but black, like we are passing through an endless tunnel.
I’m scared. I want to clutch at Christian’s hand, but I can’t. People would notice. We don’t want to be noticed. We can’t be noticed. So I sit, head down, eyes on the floor, my heart going pump pump pump, and every now and then my leg brushes his, and his anxiety in this situation, his own fear, pulses through me and mixes with my own until I
can’t tell who’s feeling what exactly. The train shudders and rocks, the air inside heavy and stifling and cold, like we’re underwater and slowly freezing into a solid block of nothingness. I have to fight not to shiver.
I’m scared, yes, but I’m also determined. We’re going to do this, this impossible task that lies before us now. We’re going to rescue Angela.
And I’m thankful, in that moment, full to the brim with gratitude that Christian is with me. He’s here. My partner. My best friend.
I don’t have to do this alone.
If I had my gratitude journal on me now, that’s what I would write.
We stop, and more people get on. A man in a black uniform passes through the car and takes the gold coins. I wonder where the gray people get them, if there’s some sort of coin dispenser for the dead somewhere out there in the world, or if someone gives it to them, like the coin is a metaphor for what people want to take with them from one life to the next, only now they must give it to the man in the black uniform. Some of them seem reluctant to hand it over. One guy claims he doesn’t have a coin, and at the next stop the man in the black uniform takes this guy by the shoulders and hurls him off the train. Where will he go, I wonder? Is there a place that’s worse to go than hell?
The man in the black uniform gives a wide berth to Samjeeza and asks him no questions, I notice.
At the third stop, Samjeeza moves toward the door. He glances at me, a signal, and steps out. Christian and I stand up and push through the gray people, and each time I brush hard enough against one of them I receive a jolt of some raw and ugly feeling: hate, lost love, resentment, infidelity, murder. Then we’re standing on the platform, and I can breathe again. I try to look discreetly for Samjeeza, and I find him a few feet away. Already he looks different here; his humanness is fading. He’s larger and more menacing by the moment, the blackness of his coat a stark contrast to the gray of those around him.
Where are we? Christian asks in my mind. This looks familiar.
I turn around.
It’s Mountain View, I recognize immediately. The structure of the buildings is largely the same, only there’s a cold, thick mist passing between the buildings, and no color to be seen, like we’ve stepped onto the set of a horror movie inside a black-and-white television.
Look at them, Christian says with an inner shudder of revulsion.
The gray people are walking all around us, heads down, some with black tears flowing down their faces, some scratching at themselves violently, their arms and necks raw with the marks of their fingernails, some muttering as if they’re talking to someone, but no one speaks to anyone else. They are adrift in their own oceans of solitude, all the while pressed in from every side by others just like them, but they never look up.
He’s on the move, I say to Christian as Samjeeza starts to walk, down what would be Castro Street on earth. We wait for a few seconds before we follow. I slip my hand in Christian’s under the edge of his jacket, thankful for the warmth of his fingers, the smell of his cologne that I can only faintly detect in this congested mixture of what I identify as car exhaust and burned-out fire and the reek of mildew.
Hell stinks.
The street is empty of cars, no one driving, but the mass of people on the sidewalk never ventures onto the road. They part around Samjeeza as he walks among them, sometimes moaning as he passes by. A black sedan is idling at the corner. As we approach, the driver gets out and crosses to open the door for Samjeeza. He is something other than the gray people, something like the man in the black uniform was, and indeed he wears a kind of uniform himself, a fitted black suit and a chauffeur hat with a curved, shiny brim.
Don’t stare, Christian warns me. Keep your head down.
I bite my lip when I see that the driver does not have any eyes or mouth, just a smooth expanse of skin from nose to chin, a pair of slight indentations in his face where his eye sockets should be. Even so, he appears to look at us when we stop behind Samjeeza, and without words he seems to ask a question:
Where?
“I am taking these two to be marked for Asael,” Samjeeza says. He puts a finger to his lips, and the message to us is clear: This man can’t speak, but he can hear. Be quiet.
The driver nods once.
I feel Christian’s wave of anxiety at Asael’s name like a new surge of adrenaline hitting my system. This could be a trap. We are walking right into it.
Technically we’re being driven right into it, I say to try to lighten the moment, but he doesn’t have time to respond before Samjeeza puts a hand in the middle of Christian’s back and shoves him into the backseat, and I follow. Samjeeza slides in beside me, his shoulder touching mine now, and he likes it, this light, tantalizing contact, my human smell, the way my lips are slightly parted in terror. He likes how a strand of my hair has come undone from my ponytail, slipping out of my hoodie, how in this colorless world it shines pure white.
I press closer to Christian, who waits until Samjeeza closes the door of the car before putting his arm around me, drawing my head into his shoulder, away from Sam.
Ah, so protective, Sam says into our minds. Who are you, again? I thought she was in love with someone else.
Christian clenches his teeth but doesn’t respond.
We pass through the hell version of downtown Mountain View quickly, past Church and Mercy Streets, city hall, where there is a line of the gray people waiting outside; past the shops and restaurants, some boarded up but others open, people slouched one to a table over bowls of indistinguishable food. We reach what would be El Camino Real, the main street that connects all these little cities between San Francisco and San Jose, and turn south. Still there are no other cars on the road.
Does hell surprise you? Samjeeza asks silently. His inner voice has a bite to it, a burn, like the aftertaste of something bitter.
I guess I didn’t think there would be restaurants and stores.
It is a reflection of earth, he says. What’s true on earth is more or less true in this place.
So all these people are trapped here? I gesture out the window at the throngs of gray people pushing along the streets, always on their way somewhere, it seems, but at the same time aimless, without any true direction.
Not trapped, but kept. Most of them do not realize they’re in hell. They have died, and gravitated to this place because that is where they have willed themselves. They could leave at any time they choose, but they will never choose to.
Why not?
Because they will not let go of what it is that brought them here to begin with.
We pull into a parking lot, and the car squeaks to a stop.
Remember what I told you, Samjeeza says. Don’t speak to anyone but your friend, and only when I tell you to do so.
The driver opens the doors, and we climb out. I suck in a breath when I see where we are.
A tattoo parlor.
Samjeeza pushes us toward the building, then opens and holds the door as we step inside. It’s all in black and white, the leather couches a deep charcoal gray, the large neon word TATTOO glowing a stark, eye-piercing white, the designs on the walls flapping like startled birds with the sudden gust of wind we let in. The floor is dirty; there’s a stickiness and grit under our feet. We stand for a moment in the reception room, waiting. A bubble rises up in the water cooler: gray water in a gray container.
Then: a muffled scream from somewhere in the building.
A man comes out from the back, a small, thin, black man with a shaved head. An angel, I think, although not like any I have seen before. His nonexistent eyebrows lift in surprise when he sees us.
“Samyaza,” he says, inclining his shining head in a kind of bow.
“Kokabel.” Samjeeza greets him the way a king might acknowledge the court jester.
“To what do I owe the honor?”
“I have brought these two for my brother. They are of the fallen.”
It’s taking every ounce of Christian’s self-control not to bol
t for the door and drag me with him. I shift closer and try to steady him. Stay calm, I want to whisper in his mind, but I don’t know if this new angel will be able to hear our connection.
“Live Dimidius?” Kokabel asks, again surprised.
Samjeeza’s eyes glint as he looks at me. “Quartarius. But a matched pair, and I think he’ll find them amusing.”
“Why stop here? Why not bring them directly to the master?”
“I thought it would please him to have them marked first,” Samjeeza says. “Can you fit them in today? I had hoped to present them to Asael shortly, if possible.”
“What is today?” Kokabel answers, grinning. He jerks his head toward the hallway. “Bring them back. Will we need to restrain them?” He looks like he might relish the task.
“No,” Samjeeza answers smoothly. “I have broken them thoroughly. They shouldn’t offer any resistance.”
We follow Kokabel down a narrow corridor into a small room, like an exam room at a doctor’s office. There is a person reclined on a large leather chair, with a man—Desmond, I recognize—leaning over her, a buzzing tattoo gun in his hand. From this angle I can’t see her face, only her hands as they clutch the arms of the chair.
She’s wearing dark gray nail polish, but I’m guessing that on earth it would be purple.
Christian and I each suck in a breath at the same time. Kokabel pushes us farther into the room like we are livestock, and I wish I could hold Christian’s hand as Angela’s despair crashes over me. Desmond is tattooing something on her neck on one side. She’s wearing a hueless camisole almost the same color as her pale skin, and dirty, torn jeans, no shoes. The soles of her feet are black. Her hair is pulled back in a ratty knot at the base of her skull, her bangs overgrown so that they almost obscure her eyes, a few lanky strands sticking out like straw on a scarecrow. Her entire right arm is covered in words, some easily readable, some overlapping and indecipherable.
Jealous, I make out along her forearm. Insufferable know-it-all. Bad friend. Careless.