Cover Him with Darkness (22 page)

They gestured us out, and forward again up the side of the cabin to the open fishing deck. Egan surprised me by speaking clearly and calmly in Italian, which I couldn't follow. Unfortunately our new shipmates seemed to take no notice of his words either. I looked around wildly, trying to get my bearings now that the searchlight was averted. The crew of the
Grlica
were sitting on the wet deck in a huddle, their hands tucked beneath them, their faces wide-eyed and watchful. Other men—new men, mostly clad in heavy dark clothes with woolen caps pulled down over their ears—milled about keeping an eye on them.

Egan's grip on my hand was so tight it hurt, and I have never been
more grateful for pain. He kept on talking, addressing them in Italian and then in English. “Who is in charge here? Who do I speak to? Do you want papers? Is that what you are after?”

Then another man stepped to the front. I'd never seen him before, but he had a big beard and long hair tied back at the nape of his neck, and he wore an Orthodox clerical cassock.

“Ach,” said Egan in dismay.

“Separate them,” said the priest, nodding a heavy jaw toward us. The words might have been unfamiliar but Egan worked out what their import was instantly.

“Don't you touch her,” he said.

Men closed in.

He let go of my hand in order to throw a fist. The first guy staggered and slipped over on the wet deck. Egan turned to face the next—but there were more opponents than he could possibly cope with and they didn't take it in polite turns. Someone grabbed him from behind and locked an arm around his neck, hauling him off balance and giving others a gap. They mobbed him, and in a few moments they had him down on his knees under a rain of punches and kicks. I was pushed off to one side and grabbed from behind by some burly man, and I screamed with rage and terror.

“That'll do!” A man—not the priest; a shaven-headed man with a face like a flat slab—brought the scrum to a finish. The others backed off a bit, revealing Egan on one knee, trying to rise but swaying wildly. As he lifted his head I saw there was blood all over his face.

“Egan!”

“Don't move,” said Slab-face, pulling a handgun from his jacket and pointing it at Egan's head.

All the breath went out of my lungs.

“Search him,” the priest ordered. Someone seized Egan's jacket and began to go through the pockets, finding his phone straightaway. Egan made a grab and got smacked in the head for his efforts, so hard that only the clutching hands of his captors kept him from collapsing.

I found breath. “Don't hurt him! Don't hurt him!”

“Now, now.” The priest drew himself up tall, accepting the phone and Egan's wallet as they were passed over. “Let's have some calm here. We won't hurt him as long as you cooperate, girl.”

“Let him go! He was just trying to help me!”

“Shut the fuck up,” said the gunman to me. “He's not the one we have to bring back in one piece.” He grinned and took a step closer to Egan, the weapon muzzle pointed directly at his face, and switched to English. “Unless you've got a hotline to the Egrigoroi too, friend?”

I had no choice, did I? I did the only thing I could think of. “Azazel!” I screamed: “Help me!”

Azazel heard.

He came.

chapter ten

AN EVIL CRADLING

O
ur boat, wallowing in the water, shook from stem to stern under the impact of Azazel's arrival. One moment he wasn't there, and the next he was, crouched on top of the cabin roof, looking down on us.

All the electric lights went out.

He was not in a kindly mood. Behind him the starry sky wrinkled into rip-lines like the pinions of mighty wings, but the light that bled in upon us from that other place beyond was a deep red, and it lit the whole scene with a bloody crimson hue. His eyes caught that light and glowed like rubies, and a heat-haze shudder in the air made his form shimmer.

“Let her go,” he said, with a voice of rocks rending a keel.

The slab-faced guy turned and fired at him. At that slight distance, he could hardly miss, especially with an automatic pistol. The roar of the gun was horrific.

I never saw Azazel move. He just suddenly had his hand out in front of him and he was opening it to look disparagingly at the contents. “I gave you the secrets of metal,” he said. “You think you can use them against me?” He turned his palm and a dozen bullets dropped to the deck.

Around us, the surface of the sea began to hiss and fume, and bubbles broke the surface as the salt water began to boil.

Then he jumped down from the cabin roof—lightly, it seemed, but the
boat groaned and shuddered under his feet. Tall and lean-hipped, and poised like a cage fighter on the balls of his feet, he turned toward me. Every step vibrated with pent-up violence. The air shook around him. The priest had found his voice and started to pray loudly, but Azazel took no notice.

Then the slab-faced guy stepped between me and him. Maybe he thought fists would work where bullets didn't. He never got the chance to try. Azazel's hand was on his throat in less than the blink of an eye.

There was a
crunch
. I will remember that noise in my nightmares until my dying day. It was the sound of a life being snuffed out.

The guy slid to the deck, feet drumming spasmodically, and there was red pumping out, there was red on…on…

On Azazel's hand.

Men were shouting in terror. I don't know how I had time to look in Egan's direction, but I saw his expression—mouth open, eyes full of horror—before I focused abruptly on the hand Azazel held out to me.

His hand was gloved in blood. It looked almost black in that crimson light.

“She is mine,” he told them all.

The men holding me fell away. I stepped forward into his reach. Then I turned and stretched my own arms to Egan. “Egan, quickly! Come here!”

“Milja!”

Azazel's arm wrapped around my shoulders.

“Egan!” I screamed. “Save him too!”

The boat and the sea and the night
went away
.

My cry left me airless, but when I tried to inhale there was nothing to breathe—nothing at all in a between-space that seemed to go on and on—no air, no light, nothing beneath my feet. Panic swept me and I arched in Azazel's arms.

Then his mouth was against mine, and he was breathing into me. He tasted of smoke and pepper and ire, but he filled my lungs and held me safe. And when, all of a sudden, the world came back, and sounds burst on my ear and warm air smote my cheek and light made me shut my eyes, he still held me. His lips carried on moving against mine, but now with
burning kisses. And my feet still swung clear of anything solid, because he was holding me up, taking my weight easily.

It was the first time he'd ever made me feel safe.

I broke the kiss, reluctantly, just to gasp.

“You left that late,” he growled, kissing me again. “What if I hadn't been fast enough?”

I nodded frantically, pressing my lips to his and then rasping my cheek with his dark stubble. Relief had followed panic like the suck of a withdrawing wave, and it was nearly as hard to deal with as the fear.

“How did you get into that sort of trouble? What did those men want?”

That snapped me back to reality. I opened my eyes. “Don't you know?”

Azazel set me on my feet, holding me carefully until I was sure of my balance, and shook his head, frowning. We were on a rooftop, in a city. A street of tall, familiar-looking houses scrolled away behind me in the blue dusk.

“They want
you
, I think,” I said numbly, looking around and not paying much attention to my own words. “Where is this?”

“You are home.”

“Boston?” My voice shot up an octave. “Where's Egan?”

He shrugged. Without the trappings of his anger he looked human again.

“Is he still on the boat? Azazel! You have to go back and get him too!”

“Why?”

“Oh please—they have him held prisoner! They might kill him or anything!”

He lifted one dark eyebrow, still waiting for an explanation.

“For God's sake!” The exclamation was singularly inappropriate, but I pushed on. “He was trying to help me—he saved me over and over from those men. He was trying to get me out of the country!”

Azazel looked amused, and the tilt of his head was disconcertingly bestial as he started to circle me. “I'm not surprised. The reek of his lust is all over you.”

That took me aback. My voice collapsed to a whisper. “That's not true. He's a good friend.”

“So I recall.” Sarcasm was certainly not beyond an angel's repertoire. “Such good men are hard to find, I understand. And he was certainly hard when you found him.”

Oh, not that.
“It was just a dream,” I said through gritted teeth, “and that was your show anyway.”

He laughed. “No. Not mine. How you furnish your dreams is entirely down to you. What was that thing with the ugly striped shirt?”

“But…”
What does he mean?

“I enjoyed playing along,” he admitted. “And you seemed to find it exciting.”

I did, oh I did.
Why was he distracting me when Egan was in terrible danger?

“That's all I wanted,” Azazel said with a mockingly humble gesture. “Your pleasure is my pleasure.”

I grabbed at the chance. “Then save Egan now. That's my pleasure. Please.”

“You care for him?”

Goddamn. I was growing frantic. He seemed absolutely determined to lead the conversation astray. “Yes!”

All the amusement left Azazel's eyes, like a light going out, and he quit pacing. “Why? He is not me.”

Under the glint of that whetted-steel regard I felt a chill. “I care for lots of people,” I said. “Animals too. And places.”

He loomed in over me. “But you love only me.”

Love? You're talking about love, now?
There was something oddly naive in his simplistic demand. Something desperately insecure. And that was not reassuring.

“Azazel, you can't tell people who to love. It has to be given freely.”

“Hm.” He nodded, his mouth twisted, as if my words carried an import that meant more to him than I knew, something dark and horrible. He reached out to touch my face, soft as the brush of black feathers. “But I love
you
.”

Never had the declaration sounded more ominous.

“You mean that?”

“Milja, I never lie to you.”

My voice shook. “If you really loved me, you'd save my friend.”

I could not have picked a worse thing to say. It was like pressing the red button marked
detonate
. It was like pulling a trigger I had not known was there. The air crackled and darkness rose behind him like wings, as he grabbed my jaw and crushed in so close that for one horrible moment I thought he was going to bite my face.

“
Do not do that!
” he roared. “Do not
ever
do that! You are not God!”

Then he thrust me away, so hard that I staggered and went down, catching myself on one knee. When I dared look, Azazel was pacing back and forth, eyes wide, sweat beading his forehead. He wiped at his face as if trying to pull off something that clung to him, and stared at me. He looked horribly angry—and sick with fear.

“Don't,” he began again, much quieter; “just don't…” He lost his thread. “I apologize. I am too rough.”

“Yeah,” I rasped. “That's an understatement.”

“I don't want to hurt you, Milja. I don't want to see you hurt, ever. You are the one I love.”

“Right.”

“In the darkness, you were light. I reached out through the hurt… everything was cold and pain, and you were warmth and relief. Like a candle flame in the night. You
heard
me. You heard my voice and you held me and you soothed me and you loved me, and that was everything. The whole world. You were my strength and my hope and my God. My life. My love.”

I shook my head, heavy with rejection. “I don't think you love me,” I said. My voice was a croak, cold with rage. “I think you get off on me. I think you use me.” I was remembering what Egan and Uriel had said. “You took advantage of a lonely girl because that was all you had to work with. You turn me on because that's what you feed off. You're just fine with me getting dirty with Egan, but only so long as I don't get so fond of him that I forget you. You're like some kind of vampire, only for desire and love, not blood. You're
feeding
off me, because it's what keeps you alive.”

He took a step closer. “Isn't that what all lovers are?” he asked, and some part of me was startled to hear his voice tremble. “We love those who love us. It makes us happy when they are happy. We flourish under their affection.”