“What do you mean?”
He didn’t answer right away but poured the cup full of something that wafted steam. “Coffee?”
I took it, sniffed, then sipped. It was strangely sweet. “What’s in this?”
“Horchata. It’s South American, I think. You’re supposed to drink it cold but I like it in my coffee.”
Normally I’d have run like hell to get away from sweetened, milky coffee, but the dank, sobering chill of the season had sunk through my clothes and skin, into my bones. I took another sip. “It’s okay.”
“You didn’t answer me, Bobby. What would you say if I ask you the same sort of questions?”
“What questions?”
“The obvious ones. Why did you risk your life and soul for your friend Sam? Why did you travel to Hell? Why did you make a deal with one of the most powerful demons in existence and try to bring down a high angel by yourself?”
“I don’t know. Because I couldn’t see any easier ways to do it. Because the deck was stacked against me and I didn’t have much choice. It wasn’t an organized plan, that’s just how it turned out.”
“Or, in other words, it’s complicated.” Temuel held out his hand for the cup, which I discovered to my surprise I’d emptied. He screwed it back onto the top of the thermos. Then something clicked for me.
“You were working for Karael all along, weren’t you?”
“Nothing is simple, Bobby.”
“That’s your excuse? Just like me, you did the best you could. Is that what you’re saying?”
“I’m not saying anything.” He stood up. “I’m giving you something.” This time it was an envelope he pulled out of his tattered bag and placed in my hand. “But I can tell you one other thing before I go. You’ve probably noticed that I went out of my way a couple of times to keep information about you from my superiors.” He gave me a tired smile, exactly the kind I’d expect to see on the face of an older lady who’d worked too hard all day for too little thanks. “But it wasn’t to protect you, Bobby. That’s beyond my capabilities.”
I stood up too. “What’s that mean?”
“I can’t protect you from the major players. I don’t have the power. If they want to hurt you, they can hurt you. No, I was just trying to protect your privacy. Sometimes we all need a little privacy.” He nodded, then turned and walked away, shoulders bowed as if the tattered paper shopping bag weighed a hundred pounds.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I shouted, but Temuel only raised a small hand and waved as he disappeared into the Friday afternoon crowd of workers heading for their cars, their homes, their lives. Real lives—the kind I didn’t have.
What the fuck was he talking about? How had he protected my privacy? He’d handed me over to our employers easy as selling a puppy to a medical lab. Yeah, he gave me a car—a fucking ugly car, to boot—but private? Everyone knew about it. Hell, half of Heaven had been following me around as long as I’d been driving it. So what did he keep from them?
It was only then I realized I was still clutching the slightly soiled envelope he’d handed me. It wasn’t that easy to get it open because my fingers were cold, but when I did, all I found was a single piece of paper. The words were printed and the note was unsigned, but I knew who it was from.
• • •
Your first assignment. San Judas main railway station at 6:15 pm. Track Eleven.
• • •
So my new boss—who I now felt pretty sure was also Temuel’s old boss—had a job for me already. I should have been pissed off at being ordered around like a hired driver, and I was, a little bit, but I was also deep into a stretch of several long days of not giving a shit about anything. All I’d been planning to do tonight was get hammered and watch television with the sound off, anyway. Maybe Karael needed someone picked up. Maybe that’s why Heaven let me keep the taxi.
Hurray—my new job! I wondered if I’d have to report my tips.
I was going to do it, of course. If it turned out to be too depressing, I could always throw myself under the San Francisco commuter express, which would at least liven up my weekend.
• • •
It was weird that the note hadn’t told me what to look out for, but I was guessing it was going to be Karael himself, come down to earth for one of his infrequent visits. Maybe he was going to give me a personal briefing on whatever dirty work he wanted me to do. Well, I’d play along, but Karael was going to learn that he didn’t have as much of a hold on me as he thought he did. See, I’d lost pretty much everything, so what did I have left to be scared about? Destruction? Don’t make me laugh. At this point, an eternity of darkness and silence seemed like the nicest, most soothing thing I could imagine. I suppose Hell was the real implied threat, but even that didn’t have the terror for me it once had. Torture no longer seemed like that big a deal. It was only pain, whether for a moment or an eternity. I’ve learned how to do pain.
Because I was looking for a tall, soldierly figure, the type Karael seemed to choose on Earth, I didn’t notice the much smaller passenger at first, even though most of the other arrivals had already swept by me, bumping their luggage along and talking urgently into their phones. Then the announcer’s voice, which had been reading a list of destinations over the public address system, suddenly turned into echoing nonsense in my head as the small, slender woman pulled off her wool hat and her straight, white-gold hair fell down onto her shoulders like a flash of sunlight on snow.
I should have run to her that instant, grabbed her before she disappeared again forever, but it felt too much like a dream—the weird kind where you can’t make your body do what you want. In fact, I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. There she really, truly was, wearing some ridiculously gorgeous skirt and coat combination, looking like a young Ivy League co-ed just arrived for the first time in 1930s Paris, and I could only stare, my heart somersaulting inside my chest.
Then at last my brain found the levers, and I could move again. I ran to her, grabbed her arm and spun her around. Her eyes flared open, a moment of fear before the gasp of recognition. Then we were holding each other so hard that it hurt. We kissed and kissed and kissed.
If you’ve ever had this kind of reunion, you know the frustration and the glory. You can’t say what you’re thinking, because the words wouldn’t make sense. You can’t do what you really want to do, because there are laws and things, and the police would come, and also you’d wind up in a dozen people’s internet videos. So all the energy and surprise and sudden need went into our kiss. We had our mouths pressed so tightly we were breathing through each other. Caz was crying, ordinary tears of water and salt, not the icy flakes that had dotted her eyes the last time I saw her. I might have cried a little, too. I’m not usually the weeping kind, but it is a human body I’m wearing, you have to remember. I’m not a stone.
At last I loosened my hold on her; then, holding her lip with my teeth until the last gentle second, I ended the kiss. I looked hard, but I already knew. Even Hell couldn’t make an imitation this good, this real. “It’s really you, isn’t it? Really you this time.”
Her eyes were shiny. “I could hit you, if that would make things feel more ordinary.”
I might have been laughing, then. Might have been crying again. “I don’t have the words, baby,” I said when I could talk. “But let’s . . .”
“Oh, God, yes!” she said. “Take me somewhere. I don’t care how squalid. It can even be your apartment. Just take me somewhere and fuck me until I faint.”
Sexual need shook me like a terrier shakes a rat. I struggled for a second before I could string words together. “I have the perfect place, actually.”
“Then let’s go. Now! I only have the weekend, then I have to go back.”
“Back?”
“To Kainos. The angel told me I have to go back Sunday night. Don’t let’s waste tim
e talking about it, Bobby!”
I steered her across the station and toward the parking lot, our steps echoing up in the high ceiling with hundreds of others. For the moment we were just two people—two people who could do what they wanted, at least for a short while. “Sunday, huh?”
I was drowning in happiness even as I realized what a perfect trap I had fallen into. I should have known Karael was too smart to make the kind of mistakes Anaita had. He had me in a way that fear could never accomplish. He was going to use Caz to keep me on a leash.
At that moment, though, I didn’t particularly care. Did. Not. Care. If I was Heaven’s dog, I was now officially the happiest dog on Earth, at least for the next forty-eight hours. I threw my arm around Caz’s shoulder and pulled her to me, smelled the back of her neck and kissed her there, smooching and sniffing and biting until she squirmed.
“This perfect place,” I said. “You’ll like it.”
“I’m sure . . . I will.” She forced herself to concentrate on walking.
“A friend helped me hang onto it, through all the shit.” I realized I could actually say it and mean it. “There was a lot of shit, as it turned out, but just enough friends.”
She wasn’t really listening. “Where’s your car? That one? Oh, Bobby, not really!”
“No remarks,” I said with what I hoped was a quiet dignity. “It runs. It will get us where we’re going.”
She turned, sweetly hiding the grin that had spread across her face. “No, really, it’s lovely, Bobby—so yellow! But where are we going?”
“I told you, it’s perfect. My friend helped me hang onto it and keep it secret, and I only just figured out why—so I’d have a place to be with you, with neither Heaven nor Hell to bother us.” I grinned. “Don’t worry, you’ll approve of the furnishings. In fact, it’s your own apartment.”
epilogue
YES, I know you’d like details, but for once you’re not going to get them. I mean, come on, don’t you have any imagination? I will tell you this much: We barely kept our clothes on long enough to get inside the apartment, and we didn’t make it as far as the bedroom. (Not until early Saturday morning, anyway.) We broke a couch, kicked over the coffee table, and pulled down a couple of very pretty silk hangings, and all that while we were just getting started.
Later, we were lying on the carpet, naked and shiny with sweat. I had an upended lamp pressing against my rib cage, which was a tiny bit uncomfortable, but I didn’t have the strength to move. Also, I had my face buried in the side of Caz’s neck, just behind her ear, so that I could feel her pulse beating against my cheek as it finally slowed to something approaching normal.
No offense to the Highest, but that is my true idea of Heaven.
“What are we going to do?” I asked when I could stop inhaling the fragrance of warm Caz long enough to form words. “What are we going to do when Sunday night comes?”
“We’re going to do what we’re told,” she said. “You’re going to put me on the train, and I’m going to magically go back to Kainos. Because then we’ll get to do this again. And again. And again.”
“But I don’t want to let you go. I want you to live here with me, not go back to some cold, empty, wild place. I don’t ever want to let go of you again.”
She was silent for a long time, but it wasn’t the dreadful kind of silence I’d been forced to endure so many times before, the silence of hopelessness. “Actually, I’ve come to like it there,” she said. “It’s quite beautiful. And there are still people. The Third Way pilgrims all survived—thanks to you and Sam and Haraheliel.”
“Don’t you dare get the kid’s name right. He’ll expect me to do it, too.” I rubbed my cheek up and down on the back of her neck. “Do you really like the place?”
“It’s quiet. Oh, Bobby, after hundreds of years in Hell, that’s such a blessing. And the weather’s real, and it changes. Changes! One day sunshine, another day rain—and the rain is actual water. Clean water!”
“Yeah, I get it. I went through a few of the rainstorms in Hell. Like an amusement park ride built around Montezuma’s Revenge.”
“But it’s not just that. The people living there have a purpose. They’re rebuilding, and when they finish with that, they’ll keep going. They’re making something new. Something no one’s ever seen before. And when I’m there, I’m part of it.”
I wondered what the pilgrims made of Caz. They couldn’t know she was a demon, could they? “So Karael’s just . . . letting Kainos be? Not interfering?” I’d filled her in on what I’d learned earlier, when we’d staggered to the kitchen at one point in search of water and food.
“I don’t know. For now, anyway.”
“Huh. Hearing you talk about it, I almost wish I could go back with you.” And thinking of her going back without me on Sunday evening made me hold her even tighter.
She laughed. “I don’t think it’s your kind of place, Bobby. Not a single poorly lit street corner or dive bar on the whole planet.”
“Hey, there’s slightly more to me than that!”
“I’m teasing.” She reached down to stroke me, to show me she was sorry. She held on and squeezed. She was clearly very sorry. “I’d be happy to be anywhere with you, my beloved angel.”
“He’s not going to let me, anyway.” I held her close, marveled at how well we fit together, like two puzzle pieces that had come off the lathe side by side but had been separated for years. “Karael doesn’t strike me as the kind of dude who does things for sentiment or even amusement. He’s kept me around for a reason.”
“I know. That scares me.”
“Why?”
“Because. Oh, let’s just not talk about it. Let’s pretend we only have this one time, this one weekend, and let’s not waste a second of it.”
Something chilled me then, and I half lifted myself off her. “Are you trying to tell me something?”
She looked at me in concern, and for a moment I thought I saw the old terror, but then her eyes widened as she understood. She smiled and I saw it was all right. “Oh! No, Bobby, I didn’t mean anything! We’ll do what we’re told, and we’ll see each other again and again. I just didn’t want to waste too much time talking. There are better ways to communicate.”
I saw what she was getting at, or rather I felt it. “Okay, you’re right,” I said. “You can’t do that by nizzic.”
She really was right. We had more important things to do than worry about what our bosses wanted from us or what came next. Only a fool walks into Paradise with a chip on his shoulder, searching for the ugliness behind the beauty. I’d been that fool for a long time, but now I’d earned myself a little time off. A vacation. “This is a holiday,” I said, turning her toward me so I could appreciate her perfect nakedness once again. I leaned over and kissed her chill, soft mouth. “It means ‘holy day’.”
My demon-woman reached up to me. “You certainly talk a lot, Wings. I think it’s time to stop talking again for a while.”
She was right again, and I was right to listen to her. In fact, at least for these few, fleeting moments, all was right with the world.
That doesn’t happen very often, of course, and those who know Eternity tell me it never lasts. We have to grab it when it’s there and hold on as long as we can, because that’s the only good we can know for certain. Everything else we are and everything else we do, whether it’s born in our bones and blood or spawned from our restless souls, is only an act of faith.
Tad Williams, Sleeping Late on Judgement Day
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