Where Angels Fear to Tread

  Entering a kind of fugue state, he lay there listening to the moans of her pleasure, adding his own sounds of bliss to their symphony of passion as they both grew closer to yet another climax.

  But suddenly Delilah stopped her rhythmic pounding and was speaking to someone.

  “Hello there,” his love said.

  His eyes snapped open as she disengaged herself from their lovemaking, crawling off him.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, looking to see that his woman was staring across the room.

  There was a little girl sitting upon the floor.

  Mathias crawled to the foot of the bed to join his love, who now covered her glorious nakedness with a sheet. He wasn’t sure why, but seeing this child filled him with a sense of overwhelming dread.

  “Who could she be?” Delilah asked.

  And Mathias just stared at the silent little girl, who rocked to her own inaudible rhythm; suddenly he knew exactly who she was.

  She was the end of it all.

  The water was glorious.

  The sun was slowly fading, reflecting off the ocean and giving it a strange, coppery hue.

  Almost like . . .

  Deryn didn’t even want to go there; thoughts like that didn’t belong in her head. She had to stay positive, if not for herself, for Zoe.

  The smiling child, water wings inflated upon her arms, and a life jacket securely fastened about her neck and waist, was slowly dog paddling toward her with the help of her husband.

  Things are good now, she thought as she watched the two loves of her life approach.

  It had been a trial, with Zoe being sick and all, but since Boston, things seemed to be moving in a positive direction.

  Deryn held out her hands to the paddling child.

  “Come on, big girl, you can do it.”

  She loved how Carl, her great protector from harm, doted on the little girl. It wasn’t too long ago that she had been afraid they wouldn’t make it as a couple; that his joblessness and Zoe’s illness would just be too much for them.

  But she had faith; faith in her child, and faith in angels.

  The thought threw her. She’d never been a religious person, so didn’t really understand where the sudden belief in winged servants of God even came from, but if it was this belief that helped to make their life better, then she guessed she was more religious than she’d thought.

  The sun was pretty much gone now, a sleepy eye peering over the gulf horizon. There was no doubting what the water resembled now, and she swam around in a circle to greet her child and husband—to dispel the nasty thought.

  But they were gone.

  How is this possible? she wondered, treading water. They were here just a moment ago.

  “Carl?” she called out, looking all around. “Zoe?”

  The water seemed to have grown heavier, thicker, and a strong smell—the stink of metal—assailed her senses.

  She knew the smell, and what it was trying to tell her.

  “Oh God,” she said, starting to swim toward shore. It splashed in her mouth as she paddled furiously; the taste of copper and iron.

  On the shore ahead, she saw the figure of a child waiting for her. At first she wasn’t sure, but she realized it was her daughter, but not the smiling, happy child who had been swimming out to her seconds ago.

  This child was different.

  “Zoe!” Deryn cried out as the water grew choppier and the clouds in the sky above churned with darkness. Nothing would stop her from reaching her child.

  Nothing would keep her from holding on to the happiness she had attained.

  The scarlet waters churned, and an undertow like nothing she had ever experienced in these waters pulled her down beneath the waves.

  Down into a sea of blood.

  “It’s bad, isn’t it?” Madeline said from her beach chair.

  Remy sat across from her in his own chair, his body bloodied, scratched, and bitten. He didn’t want to answer . . . didn’t want to worry her.

  The beach was as black as night, even though he knew it had to be midafternoon. That was when they’d gone to the beach most often, midafternoon.

  “Yeah, it’s bad,” he said.

  “Then what are you doing here?” she asked him.

  He shrugged, reopening a wound on his shoulder, allowing a crimson trail to run down his chest toward his taut stomach.

  “Something’s wrong,” Remy said, dabbing at the blood with his fingertips. “Something’s keeping the Seraphim locked up.”

  A warm wind came up suddenly off the water. It smelled of death.

  “And you need it?” Madeline asked, holding on to the large brim of her hat.

  Remy didn’t answer.

  “Why is it so hard for you to admit that sometimes you need to be what you actually are?”

  He looked at the woman he loved, feeling a nearly overwhelming sadness with the intrusive memory that she was now gone from his life.

  “Because I don’t want to be that,” he said.

  She smiled at him then, shaking her head in that sometimes-you’re-so-gosh-darn-cute way.

  “And you won’t be,” she told him. “Not now . . . not after all you’ve been through. You could never be the way you were again. You’ve gone through . . . you’ve lived through so much.”

  “I guess,” he said. “But it still doesn’t change that something’s preventing me from getting in touch with my other side.”

  “Dagon?” she guessed.

  “Yeah,” he said, gazing out over the dark surf. It resembled a sea of oil, it was so black. “It looks as though he somehow gained possession of that fragment of creation Delilah was looking for.”

  She shoved her delicate feet beneath the sand, burying them.

  “So that’s it then,” she said. “You give up?”

  “I’m trying, but I’ve got, like, sixty dead guys clawing and biting at me, and I can’t. . . .”

  “So case closed?”

  “No,” he said, refusing to let her push his buttons. “Not case closed.”

  “Then what are you doing here?” she asked him.

  He could see the smirk on her face as she stared ahead at the pounding, black surf, knowing full well she was getting under his skin.

  “I really don’t know,” he said. “And I guess I should probably get back there.”

  “You probably should,” she said, pretending to ignore him as he got up from his chair.

  His body was in pain, gashes, cuts, and bites bleeding profusely.

  “I’ll see you later?” he asked.

  “You bet,” she said, looking his way and giving him a wink.

  He hated to leave her, but he had a god to kill.

  And a little girl to save.

  Zoe always knew she was special.

  Even as a little, little baby, she had known she was unlike anybody else; unlike Mommy, unlike Daddy, unlike all the other kids she would see in Florida.

  Because she had something special inside of her that nobody else in the whole wide world had.

  At least that was how it had been.

  Until the monster stole some of her specialness from her. That had hurt really bad, and she had decided to go deep inside herself, to find a place to hide until the monster had gone away.

  Her specialness was in this place hiding too, and it was sad because it wasn’t whole anymore.

  Zoe was very upset that it was sad, and she asked it if she could do anything to make it happy again.

  It did not answer her, which really wasn’t so strange, but it decided to show her things . . . pictures inside her head that sometimes she would like to draw later.

  Zoe saw all kinds of things; things that might happen, and things that had already happened. She saw the man with the black doggy again. Zoe liked this man and hoped someday she might get to play with his doggy. She saw her mommy and daddy, and she knew her daddy had been bad, taking her away so that Mommy could not find her. But her mommy was close by—she knew this; she could feel this. . . .

  The monster made her want to hide deeper and deeper. At first he h
ad been an old man, but after he had taken some of the specialness . . .

  Scared now, she asked the specialness to stop showing her these things, but it ignored her, whispering that it had to show her, that she needed to see what was happening so she could make things right . . . so she could make the specialness whole again.

  Zoe didn’t understand what it meant, knowing full well the monster was not going to give it back.

  She wanted her mommy. She wanted to feel one of her special hugs; she wanted to lie down with her on the couch and watch cartoons. Her mommy would make it so she wasn’t afraid anymore.

  But the specialness told her no.

  Zoe was angry, telling the specialness it was being mean.

  And the specialness said nothing, choosing instead to show her more pictures inside her head; only this time what was going to happen wasn’t what she saw.

  The monster had done something to her daddy while she was hiding, making him do things he didn’t want to. Her daddy had brought her to a schoolroom like the ones where the big kids went, and where she would one day go when she got big.

  Zoe knew these pictures had already happened while she was hiding inside her head. It was dark inside the big kids’ classroom, and she and her daddy were hiding.

  But from whom?

  Someone came running around the corner, and suddenly Zoe knew who it was. She had felt her mommy coming, and she was here.

  Mommy will protect me, she thought as she crawled out from inside her head, just in time to see her daddy do something very bad.

  Daddy had a knife in his hand as he went to see Mommy.

  Zoe thought that maybe they would be nice to each other now . . . that they would be happy to see each other . . . that they wouldn’t fight.

  She thought they were hugging, but as Daddy stepped back, she saw that Mommy was holding her belly, and that there was red . . . blood . . . on her stomach and her hands.

  Daddy had done something to Mommy.

  Zoe watched in horror as her mommy fell down on the floor with so much blood coming from her.

  And that was when the specialness whispered in her ear like a buzzing bee.

  You have to take it back, or your mommy will die.

  Remy wasn’t sure how long he’d blacked out, but at least he was still alive.

  The stink of the dead was incredibly foul, their fetid mass pressing him down to the ground as they attempted to get at him.

  He tried to summon his true self again, but found the power still blocked by something stronger.

  He fought, striking out at the decaying flesh of his enemies. Swimming to the surface of this sea of reanimated corpses, he caught sight of Dagon, the ancient deity presiding over this bloodbath. The god still stood there, the power of creation radiating from his loathsome form, a beatific smile upon his monstrous face.

  Their gaze connected again as Remy was about to be pulled down in a squirming undertow of rot and decay, but he found an untapped reserve of strength, fighting to remain above the clawing dead.

  “Such spirit,” Dagon announced as he reached down to grab him by the throat, yanking him up from the writhing sea of reanimated corpses.

  Remy struggled in the deity’s grasp, still hearing the sounds of fighting somewhere in the distance behind him; the sporadic blasts of gunfire, and dwindling battle cries. Some of them had managed to survive; some of them were still fighting.

  “It seems such a waste to allow one as strong as you to die in such a way,” Dagon said with a chuckle. “All that power churning around inside you.”

  Remy struggled in the deity’s grasp, lashing out in any way he could, functioning now on purely the basest of instincts.

  “Ferocious,” Dagon said mockingly, holding Remy’s thrashing form at a distance. “I’m curious though; did He send you to find me?”

  “I don’t . . . don’t know who you . . . mean,” Remy wheezed as the grip upon his throat grew tighter.

  “Don’t play stupid with me, Seraphim,” Dagon roared, giving him a vicious shake. “Why else would a soldier of God be amongst this rabble? The All-Father wants His power back, and I have no intention of giving it to Him.”

  Darkness danced at the corners of his vision, threatening to plunge him into unconsciousness, but Remy held on long enough to ask the question. He had to know if all this—the fighting and the death—if it had all been for nothing.

  “The child,” he croaked, still dangling from the monstrous being’s clutches, “does she still live?”

  Dagon appeared taken aback by the question.

  “The child?” he asked. “Your concern is for the child?” He started to laugh, a horrible sound that echoed through the night.

  “She lives . . . for now,” he said, drawing Remy closer. “But soon all that is special inside of her”—he patted his scaled breast—“all of it will reside within me.”

  The deity’s smile grew enormous. “And then there won’t be a thing that God, or His winged soldiers, will be able to do to stop me.”

  It was Remy’s turn to laugh.

  Dagon loosened his grip.

  “Did I say something to amuse you, Seraphim?”

  Remy’s eyes had been closed, but he slowly opened them to look into Dagon’s angry gaze.

  “You amuse me. You’re nothing but a nearly forgotten deity that’s only received a reprieve from oblivion by stumbling onto something that’s given him a taste of power, the likes of which he’s never before tasted,” Remy told him with a sneer. “God eats punks like you for breakfast.”

  Dagon laughed sharply.

  “Speaking of breakfast,” he said, drawing Remy closer to him, “I’ve never tasted angel before.”

  Dagon’s mouth grew incredibly wide.

  “Wonder if you’ll taste as good as you smell.”

  And he prepared to take a bite.

  Delilah opened her eyes to the sound of a child’s screams, and the world had changed.

  She looked around, realizing she was not in a place she recognized. Moments before she had been in her home, but now . . .

  It took her a moment to get her bearings as she tried desperately to recall what had happened and whether she had turned off the oven.

  And then she remembered the strange child in her dining room.

  “Sam!” she cried out for her husband, her eyes scanning her surroundings for a sign of something—anything—that was familiar.

  There was a man standing beside her, and as she looked at him, he began to sob. She recalled suddenly that his name was Mathias, and that he loved her more than anything because she made him that way.

  The man was crying as she reached out.

  Mathias grabbed her hand and brought it to his mouth, kissing it over and over again, drenching it with his plaintive tears.

  “I want it back,” he said through trembling lips. “Please let it come back to me. . . . Please . . .”

  And little by little, bit by bit, Delilah remembered.

  She remembered what the truth was.

  A powerful rage filled her as she realized she had been manipulated, entranced by a power that had shown her what could be.

  A taste—if she were to possess it.

  There was a man—not quite a man anymore—with a rather large knife standing over the body of the fallen woman he’d just stabbed. He looked ashamed at what he had done.

  The little girl had gone to her mother, pulling her dying form up onto her lap, rocking from side to side and repeating over and over, “You’re okay, Mommy. Please get up. You’re okay, Mommy. Please get up. You’re okay, Mommy. Please . . .”

  Delilah had no idea if the woman would be all right; nor did she care. All she was concerned with at the moment was what was inside that little girl, and how she needed it to give her back a world denied to her.

  She sensed a moment at hand; a moment that she must seize with both hands, and throttle the life from, if anything beneficial was going to come from it.

  “You,” she said, looking toward the still-crying Mathias.

  He responded with red, watery eye
s, barely able to contain his emotions.

  “You want your fantasy back?” she asked him. “Bring me the girl and we’ll see what can be done about making your dreams come true.”

  The expression on his face became rapturous, as if he could never hope to bring what he had experienced back, but she had shown him otherwise.

  She had shown him the truth. It could be so.

  Mathias went to work, making his move toward the little girl.

  “You’re okay, Mommy. Please get up. You’re okay, Mommy. Please get up. You’re okay, Mommy. Please get up. You’re okay, Mommy. . . .”

  The child’s father seemed to be in a sort of trance, gazing down at his former wife bleeding in the arms of his daughter. It was as if he were trying to make some sort of sense of what had happened.

  Of what he had done.

  It was obvious the poor soul had yet to understand that he was not in control of himself any longer, that a darker, more malevolent force now controlled his puppet strings.

  Mathias saw his objective and went for it, reaching for the child to claim her.

  The man became like a thing possessed, lashing out with his knife, slashing across Mathias’ arm.

  “You will not touch the child,” the man said with a slow shake of his head, his eyes so dark they looked like dollops of tar hardening in his deep sockets. “She belongs to Dagon.”

  Mathias jumped back, the sleeve of his sweat-dampened shirt cut, blood dribbling freely from the gash in his arm. He reached into his back pocket and removed the Swiss Army knife he’d used earlier to pick the lock to the building. He briefly gazed at the tool, selecting what was needed for this particular job and unfolding the five-inch blade.

  “It’s not the size of the blade that matters, but how it’s used.” Delilah remembered these words of the many men who had often fought for her over the ages.

  “Remember what you saw,” Delilah said aloud to inspire her champion. “It can only be that way if the child is mine.”

  The words were just the catalyst required. Mathias sprang like a predatory beast, the small blade darting through the air, finding its prey multiple times, before falling back.