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Five blocks and a bridge later, and I’d left the multi-storied tenements for a real neighborhood. A row of small frame houses huddled together in the dark.
I could tell Sarah was close, but not exactly where. I was good with general directions, but not so good with specifics. I slowed and tried to concentrate. Her soul was masked to me, so it was hard to place her. I recalled the image of the Dominican girl’s soul and reached out with my mind to find it. The blinking lights of all of the other souls bound in flesh in this crowded city masked hers. Ahead and to the right. I skirted a row house blocking my way and went into the alley beyond.
I paused and closed my eyes. The crash of glass and a scream led me to where I needed to go. I stumbled on a length of rebar protruding from a tidy heap of garbage in an alley and grabbed it up. I vaulted over the sagging chain-link fence and stumbled through a cluttered yard to the rear door of a house. Locked.
Another scream, muffled and in pain this time, but it wasn't Sarah. I kicked the door in, ran through the empty kitchen and knew I'd be there again. Creaking floorboards indicated movement above. I rounded the corner and bounded up the stairs. There in the hall, half out of a doorway loomed a vision from Maria’s dreams. Maria knelt in the hall beyond and called out to me.
It stood taller and broader than me. Great leathery wings stretched out from the second set of scapulas. One wing in the hall, the other reached back into the room. The smoky gray skin was thick and covered in oozing boils where the ancient words had been written. It turned to me and paused, the eyes were dead, the pupils blown. The skin of the lower face had torn away and the yellow-white mandible shown through.
“Araqiêl? Is that you, little brother?” His voice rasped like a file being pulled across a steel pipe.
“Semjaza. It’s been a long time.” I stood ready on the balls of my feet.
“You look terrible,” it rasped.
“Yeah. Not so bad as you, though. You look like hell, Sem.” The nausea, the after effects of the drugs, all extraneous thought drained away as my body readied itself for battle.
Semjaza shrugged and the upper half of the face smiled. The lower half didn’t have enough skin to complete the expression and it leered. “What can I say? Brimstone is bad for the complexion.”
“I can’t let you take her,” I said abruptly. I flexed my fingers on the rebar held down at my side.
The demon looked at the girl, and then back at me. “You always were a sucker for the pretty ones, Ara. Capital vices and all.”
I shrugged and turned the motion into a twist as the demon shot out a twisted reptilian claw. Eight feet in an instant. It cut through the fabric of my coat, but didn’t touch skin and I slashed down with the length of iron.
His skin blistered and hissed where the bar struck, leaving a thick wide burn. The iron rod smoked and glowed red where it had touched Semjaza. Iron was good for that with demons. Something about a fire elemental being struck with an earth element. Like a metaphysical game of rock-paper-scissors.
Semjaza hissed at me. I had seen him leading hosts of angels to war once, and now he hissed like a cat.
The hallway was too narrow for this slugfest. The demon was bigger and stronger than me. I wouldn’t last long if I couldn't maneuver.
“How did you come to the middle world, Sem?”
“Crack in space-time, little brother. Same as before, you remember that Ara, don't you? What you did to me? To your brothers?”
I backed slowly to the head of the stairs.
“Ara, don’t go away mad. Or is it Greg? Isn’t that what the sweet-meat called you?”
“Yeah. It’s sort of a nickname. Short for egregori.” I didn’t know whom he meant by sweetmeat. Sarah? The ward hid her soul, so that Semjaza and his friends couldn’t take it but it also meant that I didn’t see her well.
“Ah, the watchers. That was the job wasn’t it? Before the fall?”
I nodded and felt for the steps.
“That is where you lost your wings. Did Gabriel take them from you? Clip you?”
“Nope. Gideon, with his terrible sword.” I didn’t care to rehash this with him. I just wanted to keep him engaged.
“Gideon. I hate that sanctimonious bastard. I was cast down by then though, wasn't I? Missed all the fun and games.”
I took the stairs slowly. One at a time. I noted the inner phalange of his wings had a thick, hooked talon, two thirds up from the base to the end.
“We don’t have to fight Ara. Sêmîazâz made you an offer to join us and it's still good. Bygones and all?” The laugh which followed was hollower than his speech.
“Sorry, I’m not interested in your team.” He couldn’t finish what he had come to do with me here. I would either have to be run off or destroyed.
”You owe them nothing Ara. They turned their backs on us.”
I reached the bottom step and kept backing into the little foyer, and said, “We turned away, Sem. Not them.”
Even though I saw it coming, I couldn’t avoid the wing as it snaked out. The talon sunk into my neck with a wet sound. A thick rope of blood fell out onto the tiles as the talon retracted. The hole it left in me fizzed and I swung the iron rod at empty air.
The second wing snicked out impossibly fast, the talon sank into my shoulder, and back. Again I swung the length of iron at nothing. Bubbling ooze ran down from the holes in me.
“Time is coming to an end, Ara. We’ll bar the crack and then we will feast on the children of clay.”
He lunged at me again and I dodged. I saw a plastic grocery bag on a sideboard. Through the plastic I could see the little girl holding an umbrella on a blue background and knew it was the salt I had told Maria to get.
I feinted with the iron rod and twisted to grab the bag. Semjaza’s index and middle fingers stabbed into my flesh below the ribs. I twisted away, but his talons scraped against the underside of my rib cage and pulled me in. The pain pulsed as I twisted like bait on a hook. The wing talon pinned me through the bicep as I tried to raise the iron rod.
"Where will you go when you die, little brother?"
I had no answer.
“It ends now, Ara.”
“Yes,” I exhaled. I briefly contemplated letting him have me. If only it could be so easy. I sank my fingers through the sides of the little round box and the salt spilled out of the holes I made. I slammed my hand into his face and packed the salt into his eyes, his shattered nose and the gaping hole of his mouth.
He screamed and released me. His flesh bubbled and fizzed where the salt touched him. It was like salting a snail. I held the iron rod with both hands and stabbed it into the left side of his chest as deep as I could. I rode him over, still holding the rod.
The flesh smoked. A red ring formed in his chest around the iron spike, and I pushed harder, pinning him down to the step like an obscene butterfly.
My hands burned. I had to hold. If he got the spike out, he might still heal. The hot red halo spread outward, leaving gray, charred coke behind.
He thrashed. The talons of his wings slashed my coat and sliced strips of flesh from my back. My hands blistered with the heat of the rod. Semjaza stiffened and let out a rasping exhalation as he emolliated. I leapt back and watched him turn to dust and ash.
I bounded over his outline of melted acrylic carpet and scorched wood and up the stairs.
Maria still knelt where I had left her. I hadn’t seen it before, but she cradled the body of what must have been her mother in her lap. Her body wracked with sobs, but no sound escaped.
Where’s Sarah?”
Maria didn’t respond.
“Did Sarah come?” I asked with more conviction.
Maria didn’t respond but instead cast a glance at the doorway in the hall. I followed her eyes and saw Sarah crumpled just inside the broken window.
“No. No-no-no.” My wounds were
forgotten as I crossed the small room and dropped to my knees. I reached down and pulled her broken little body to me.
“Oh no. Not her.” I reached down and brushed the wild dark hair with the red-brown roots from her blood-smattered face.
“No,” I keened. I pulled her body to me and rocked her slowly back and forth.
A friend. A confidant. A protector. An empty shell.
I cried and spoke of my bereavement in the ancient languages.
When I had no more tears to cry I laid her down gently. Then I riffled through her pockets with my blistered hands, until I found the fifty bucks.
I would need it later for Beenie.
Gift of the Bouda