All Who Wander Are Lost (An Icarus Fell Novel) (32 page)

Bruce
Blake-All Who Wander Are Lost

The craggy horizon
drew no closer but the ground upon which Poe strode changed. It
faded from red-orange to gray, then brown. Stunted shrubs and trees
like over-sized bonsais popped up sporadically, their frequency
increasing as she went. She never saw them in the distance but
rather they seemed to spring out of the ground on her approach.

She did her best to
ignore the pain in her leg, now dulled to a nagging ache,
concentrating instead on surveying the area around her, watching the
ground for footprints to show her the passing of a teenage boy. At
first, she found no signs of anything passing. After a while, she
came upon a set of footprints and, although she possessed no
tracking skills, chose to follow them. She soon lost them among
other tracks which seemed to appear out of nowhere, both human and
otherwise, until enough prints covered the ground she thought she
might be tracking Trevor along a parade route.

Wearily and losing
faith, she pressed on.

Where are you,
Trevor?

A few paces ahead
she saw a tree which wasn’t there before. It grew a few feet
toward the chaotic sky, hooked to the left a few feet before bending
skyward again. It stood taller than the others she’d seen, its
trunk thicker; big enough to pass for an earthbound tree. She limped
over to it, leaned on it to test its strength then, finding it
solid, sat in the crook. It bounced under her weight, swayed as she
settled in, but held her one-hundred-and-two pound frame without
bending.

She sat staring at
her feet, shoulders slumped forward, her determination waned. Hell
was too big a place to find one person with no direction, help or
idea of where to look.

Needle, meet
haystack.

The corner of her
mouth twitched at the thought which sounded so much like one of
Icarus’ sarcastic clichés but, given the circumstances,
she didn’t allow herself to smile. And the thought of her
charge made the shadow of a smile disappear quickly.

What would
Icarus think if he knew I brought Trevor here? What would he think
if he knew I lost him?

She leaned forward,
propped her elbows on her knees and buried her face in her hands.
Too late to have those thoughts now, she should have considered them
before they ever came here, but she’d been blinded by
Michael’s words.

‘
There
have been rumors about you, Poe. There has been some question about
your loyalties.’

Spoken by anyone,
the words would have stung, but all the more so from Michael, the
archangel, the hand of God, her savior. As soon as they left his
lips, nothing else in the world mattered but proving herself to him,
showing herself worthy of the gift he’d given her four decades
ago. Now, sitting on a crooked tree in Hell, she knew she’d
let Michael or anyone else think anything they wanted about her if
it meant Trevor’s safety.

The desiccated
leaves rustled in the tree above Poe and she removed her face from
her hands. She felt no wind to move the sparse leaves, the earth
itself hadn’t shaken, yet the sound came again. The guardian
angel looked up to see a raven perched on the highest branch. She
sat up straight.

“
Where
did you come from?”

Her muscles tensed
and pain from the gash in her leg shot up to her hip. On earth, the
question would have been rhetorical, but in Hell, the possibility
existed anything might respond...or attack.

The raven fluttered
its wings and stared at Poe. Black flesh showed through its patchy
feathers in some spots; a divot in its head held the place where an
eye should have been. Its pointed beak opened and closed once with a
click, then opened again and it spoke.

“
Caw.”

Poe shook her head
and allowed the corner of her mouth to curve up a fraction of an
inch.

“
So
you are only a raven.”

The bird flapped
its wings again, bouncing the branch on which it perched, held them
out to the sides for balance as it leaned forward stretching out its
neck.

“
What
are you doing, silly bird?”

Poe’s mood
lightened with the bird here despite its motley appearance. Being in
the presence of something else seemingly normal and alive,
especially something not appearing to want her dead, made her feel
so much less alone.

“
Crawk!”

The raven drew its
head back and extended it again, then did it a third time before Poe
realized the bird meant the gesture as a way of pointing. A sliver
of dread forced itself into her mood as she turned her head slowly.

Ten yards away,
directly in front of her stood a decrepit shack. She blinked, shook
her head, but the broken-down building—empty air seconds
before—remained.

“
What
the...?”

Poe stood and took
a step toward it, distrusting her sight. The broken-down wood
building didn’t waver or disappear. She rubbed her eyes and
looked again. It remained.

“
Caw,”
the raven croaked, startling her.

Poe looked back
over her shoulder but the bird was gone. She searched the dark sky
and saw no sign of the bird, no movement, no flapping wings
silhouetted against the clouds.

She looked back at
the shack.

Some of its boards
canted at odd angles creating spaces wide enough to peer through
into the interior. The door hung on one hinge; hastily nailed boards
mostly covered the single, broken window. Improbably for a structure
residing in Hell, green moss sprouted upon its roof.

Poe padded
tentatively across the brown earth separating her from the small
building. With each step closer, she felt she should recognize the
place, though the reason eluded her. It felt like a place she might
have seen in a dream a long time ago, a dream forgotten as others
replaced it.

She crept to the
window and peeked between the boards: empty. Nothing sat on the dirt
floor, nothing leaned against the rotting walls, nothing hung from
the splintered overhead beams. Empty, yet the sense of dread the
raven’s prompting brought blossomed in her thoughts.

Her feet took her
to the door though she didn’t ask them to. Her hand reached
out for the rusted latch though she didn’t want it to. The one
hinge creaked as her arm pulled the door open though she pleaded in
her head for it not to.

In the middle of
the single room stood a woman with long, black hair, pale skin and a
silver stud gleaming between her bottom lip and her chin.

“
Hello,
Poe.”

Piper.

†‡†

Trevor couldn’t
put his finger on the aroma in the room—there were too many
mingling smells to identify any one of them individually, as if he’d
been left in a kitchen cooking many foods, with the ingredients list
including things like sulfur and roses. After a while, it began to
burn the inside of Trevor’s nostrils and he covered his nose
to alleviate the unpleasant feeling.

Rich
tapestries covered the walls of the opulent room, though they
pictured scenes he’d rather not see—torture and death,
souls writhing in excruciating pain. Antique furniture, ornately
carved and decorated, sat around the room. He knew nothing about
such things but even he realized these kinds of furnishings would
make the old English buggers on
The
Antiques Roadshow
salivate.

He got up off the
couch and padded across the thick carpet, moving furtively as he
searched behind three sofas, under a huge grand piano, in the space
under a massive desk with a roll top. No one else inhabited the room
and he found no method of exit.

“
Shit.”

The trip getting
here was a blur. He remembered turning around and seeing Azrael; he
remembered feeling fear at the sight of the banished archangel but
exactly how he got here, or how long it took, he didn’t know.
It wasn’t the first time he’d been in Azrael’s
presence and he didn’t remember much of the first visit—the
angel of death seemed to have that effect on him.

Maybe not such a
bad thing.

Trevor moved to a
blank space of wall: no pictures, no tapestry, just dark wood
paneling taken from someone’s nineteen-sixties rec room. He
examined it closely, drew his fingers along the ridges where one
sheet met the next, looking for but not expecting to find some
hidden egress, the empty feeling in his gut growing as he went.

If I got in,
there has to be a way out.

He moved to the
next seam, then the next until the empty wall ran out and he stood
in front of one of the tapestries.

There might be a
door behind it.

He raised his hand,
intending to grasp the tapestry and pull it aside, either gain his
escape or prove himself a captive to stay, but the scene elaborately
embroidered in dark colored thread across the curtain’s
surface caught his attention. It showed a long side-view of a cliff,
a black winged beast pushed over it by a mob of beings who all
looked the same, each of them bound to the next by a length of
silver thread.

Trevor squinted and
leaned closer.

“
Abaddon.”

Another figure
knelt on the ground behind the group plummeting over the edge: a
woman, petite, her hair sewn of yellow thread. Trevor stared at the
depiction and the tiny figure seemed to turn its head and look at
him. He recognized her instantly.

“
Poe!”

He reached his hand
out to touch the figure but, a fraction of an inch away from his
fingers brushing the velvety cloth, a voice broke the silence,
startling him.

“
I
wouldn’t touch that if I were you.”

The voice sounded
more like multiple voices with a touch of discordant undertones
ringing beneath the surface. The simple words held a tone of command
and expectation which made him stop.

The depiction of
Poe looked away, hung her head. Trevor pivoted toward the voice.

“
Who
are you?”

The boy looked a
few years younger than Trevor, perhaps eleven or twelve years old.
He smiled, the expression transforming his face into a thing of
beauty despite a smear of dirt across his left cheek, the tousle of
unkempt hair perched atop his head. The boy’s face mesmerized
Trevor, distracted him from seeking an answer to the question he’d
asked.

“
You
need not be afraid, son of Icarus. I won’t hurt you.”

Without seeming to
move, he was at Trevor’s side, hand clutching the teen’s.
Trevor’s mind told him to move away but his heart held his
legs in check. The boy walked him toward one of the couches.

“
Where’s
Azrael? He brought me here.”

“
He
had things to do. You and I will be spending some time together
instead.”