Cover Him with Darkness (23 page)

“You think I feel any affection for you right now?” I didn't care how dangerous it was to say those words; they gave me too much satisfaction. “You're this horrible monster, Azazel. You kill people without a second thought.” I flicked a glance at his hand, but there was no telltale blood on it anymore.

“I saved you,” he said, looking confused. I ignored him.

“But you know what's worse? Underneath the monster, what you
really
are is just a selfish prick.”

I braced myself for the explosion.

It didn't come. Azazel stood there and looked at me and just went still—far stiller than any human could. He didn't even breathe. Somehow, without shifting a millimeter, he made me feel like I was seeing him withdraw, pulling away and away and away, like a man falling from a great height.

Then there was a
crump
of displaced air and he was gone. Just like that. No threats, no spite, no cold passive-aggressive snipe at me.

Just gone.

A rumble of thunder rolled from west to east overhead, and big dark drops of rain began to fall. I saw the blackish blotches appear on the asphalt. A coppery tang rose from the wet dust. Only when the first droplet struck my hand did I realize the rain was warm—and red.

I was on the roof of my own apartment building in Boston.

It was raining blood.

And I had no way, no way at all, of finding or helping or reaching out to the man who had risked his life to save me, the man who I'd abandoned to die, an ocean and more away.

For a week, I barely left my apartment. For much of that week I lay curled up in bed with Senka the cat, staring blankly at the wall. I slept in fits and starts, woke up over and over in the middle of the night and paced about the silent rooms, then dozed again as daylight first grayed the sky. My head, even when it wasn't throbbing, felt like it was filled with wadded cloth, like an overfull laundry basket. My stomach churned and ached as I alternated between stuffing it with any food I could find and not eating at all. I lay on the sofa watching the shopping channels on TV, their mindless steady pap the only input I could bear.

On the few occasions I flicked by mistake to a news channel, the airwaves seemed full of disaster and omens. Vicious rebels surfaced in South America and the Middle East and were met with ruthless reprisals. Another hurricane swept through the Caribbean and grounded on Florida, swamping the low land and driving people from their ruined homes. An earthquake in one of the ex-USSR 'stan countries—Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, I don't recall which—flattened an ancient city and destroyed a World Heritage Site. Bird flu raised its head again in China. Evangelicals thumped their Bibles and predicted the Day of Judgment any time now and blamed gay marriages in California.

Was this Azazel's work—or was the world always prone to this chaos, and suddenly I was noticing?

Suzana hovered and fussed, prickling with frustration. I had no explanations for her—not for how I'd got back, or what had happened, or what was wrong, or what I thought I was doing right now. Certainly no explanation for that crazy-ass rainstorm on Boston that was the talk of the Christian Internet. I told her my father had passed away, but refused to confide in her or to make contact with my employer, or more likely ex-employer. And she desperately wanted to leave: she had tickets to Burning Man in Nevada with her boyfriend, it was a once-in-a-lifetime trip, and I'd arrived back just in time to screw everything up.

“Go,” I told her wearily. We were pretty good friends as roomies go, but not so close I had any right to mess up her life. “I'll be fine.”

For days the most positive thing I managed was to slouch to the store at the corner to buy milk and breakfast cereal, and I only did that when I found myself eating cold fava beans out of a tin because I had nothing else in my cupboard.

I didn't dream. Not the pellucid, burning dreams about Azazel anyway—just ordinary muddled visions of guilt and terror, in which I saw again the red-lit deck of the boat and Egan's horrified face. And heard him cry my name in despair.

I'd abandoned him.

And now Azazel had abandoned me.

I was full of such anger at first—bitterly angry at Azazel's stubbornness, and at his utter lack of compassion. Blame and guilt roiled inside me, gnawing at my guts. It was quite possible that I wouldn't be alive if it
weren't for Egan, yet Azazel showed no gratitude to the man who'd looked after his pet mortal. He claimed to love me, but wouldn't do the one thing I desperately needed him to do.

I'd begged him, and he'd refused.

Well, not exactly begged him. More…

As the hours and the days wore on, a razor-edge of doubt began to creep beneath my righteousness, cutting it loose as a scalpel severs meat from bone.
You are not God!
he'd told me, his rage erupting out of nowhere. Almost like panic.

If you really loved me,
I'd said… What was wrong with that?

What was wrong with trying to make him do the right thing?

Was he, I wondered, readying some sort of revenge now? It hardly seemed to matter to me. I was in such black misery I couldn't imagine anything I feared more. It was entirely my fault that Egan was in danger. I was as helpless now as I had been in the face of my father's passing, but this time the accusations came from within, not from any distraught relatives. This time I couldn't say
You've got it wrong, it wasn't me!

It was me.

My self-righteousness fell away and I was left with the bare bones of my guilt. I was still angry with Azazel, but after I came across a book on Suzana's shelf at three in the morning, I couldn't even condemn him anymore. I started reading listlessly just because I couldn't sleep; it was the autobiography of a man who'd been abducted in Beirut and held prisoner in close confinement and near darkness for four years. Claustrophobia reeked from every page. The experience had left him with memories and mental scar tissue that it made me ache to imagine.

I closed the book hours later, my eyes dry and aching and my heart heavy. Dawn lay upon the city like a gray blanket. I weighed the prison imagery of the memoir like coins of a denomination I'd never used before and did not know how to spend.

Azazel had suffered his own captivity for millennia.
Could anyone come out of that undamaged?
I asked myself. Wasn't I simply asking the impossible when I demanded he act like any ordinary decent soul?

Later that day I had the dream—my one proper dream, and it wasn't even dirty, fortunately, because I found myself in no place to lose my clothes. I was standing in a snowdrift on a mountaintop—and I do mean
mountain
top
, because below and all around me stretched a vast range of peaks, all bare black rock and sheer slopes of snow. I think it must have been just before dawn; there was enough light to see by but it was blue as an old bruise, and the wind was up and blowing snow, like smoke, from the top of the drifts.

I swear I could see the curve of the horizon.

Somehow, though it gave me no discomfort in my dream, I knew that we were so high up that there was almost no air to breathe. And it should have been unbearably cold, of course, but I felt this as nothing more than an abstract fact.

Azazel was sitting on an exposed crag of rock, his hands loose on his thighs, his head a little bowed. He must have been there some while, because the snow had drifted up against his back and rime had frozen in the hair that hung, fluttering against his bare cheek, in thick webs of frost. He was motionless but for the wind-blown edges of hair and clothes, yet his eyes were open—though it was hard to tell whether it was the incredible landscape they were fixed upon, or the pitiful patch of bright orange that lay in the drift before him. It took a long hard look before I was able to resolve that into a pair of legs clad in padded climbing gear, and a gloved and equally padded arm crooked about an oxygen cylinder. The top part of the body was buried in snow, rendering it faceless.

Azazel's bare feet, insensible to the cutting cold, seemed to mock the frozen corpse.

“What did he do to annoy you?” I asked grimly. The buffeting hiss of the wind snatched my words away and for a moment I thought he hadn't heard.

Then he turned his head to look at me, his mouth compressing to a hard line. For a moment I read hurt in his silvery gaze, before he stood without a word and walked away from me, over the top of the snow, leaving no prints.

“What did you mean,
You're not God
?” I shouted, but he gave no sign that he had heard.

I didn't follow. It wasn't my intention to stalk him, even in my dreams. I watched as he descended over a shoulder of the mountain slope and vanished. Then I looked at the body again and felt a pang of guilt. There
was an embroidered patch on the sleeve that showed a picture of a mountaintop, and in faded threads the letters
Everest
and
1986
.

It hadn't been entirely fair to blame Azazel for that, then.

Leave him alone,
I told myself.
Just let him be
.

The next morning I rose early, drank a pint of coffee, showered (for the first time in what I shudderingly admitted was far too long), tied my hair up in a plait, packed a small rucksack with things I thought I might need, put out extra food for Senka and slipped from the apartment.

Stopping by the neighbor's opposite, I asked her to look after Senka if I was delayed coming back.

I'd made up my mind.

I went to the Serbian Orthodox church of St. Sava, which was where Vera used to take me, and I kissed the icon of the Archangel Uriel.

There was one way to reach Egan. If Azazel was too obdurate to help, there was one other who might.

“Uriel,” I said softly, crossing my breast. The painted angel, depicted with the traditional flame in his hand, looked at me with sad eyes. “Will you talk to me?”

“And what exactly do you want to talk about?”

chapter eleven

THE BURNING MAN

I
turned to see Uriel standing behind me. Though nothing like his icon, he was very much as I remembered: grizzled silver and painfully handsome, dressed in an expensive-looking gray suit but with a tie hanging loose down the front of his open-necked shirt, as if I'd caught him heading home from a hard day at the office.

He's not your friend
, I'd been warned. Well yeah, I knew that. Uriel thought I was on Azazel's side in this age-old war. The side of the damned.

“I need help,” I said in a ghost of a voice. He was an angel of the Lord God Almighty, and though somehow that didn't make him less scary, it gave me some faith that he would follow the rules. I just needed a fair hearing.

Maybe I'd have been better starting off by thanking him for turning up. His nose wrinkled with distaste. “Shouldn't you be asking your boyfriend, then?”

Ex-boyfriend
, I thought, but didn't say it out loud. “He won't.”

One perfectly arched eyebrow rose.

“He—we—did something bad. I need to fix it.”

“You certainly do.”

“I thought that since you are on the opposite side from…him…you might help set it right.”

“Really? That's an interesting proposition. Did he send you to talk to me?”

“No. He doesn't know I'm here.”

“Oh, I wouldn't bet on that. If you want to talk we'd better go somewhere else.”

I couldn't help feeling a stab of suspicion. “Why?”

“We can be overheard here.”

I looked around. There were some older women scattered about the nave praying, but it was far too early for crowds. I didn't want to go elsewhere; I felt safer here, for no reason I could justify on a logical level. “No one's close enough.”

“This is holy ground. It's…public domain. Everything we do here can be heard. Do you want your boyfriend listening in?”

I chewed my lip.

“Come on, let's find somewhere private.” He touched my arm, turning me toward the great church doors.

“Where?”

“Where would you like? Anywhere in the world. Your choice.”

Nowhere outside the States, I thought. I wanted to be able to get back home under my own steam this time.

“Come on,” said Uriel, slightly impatient, as we reached the door. “Pick somewhere you'd like to go.”

My skull was stuffed with grubby laundry still, despite the coffee. I spoke the first idea that emerged from the jumble: “Burning Man. I've never been to Burning Man.”
Suzana will be there, if he ditches me
.

“Fine.”

I had sudden misgivings. “No, let's just go to the—” I began, but ended in a squeak as Uriel put one hand between my shoulder blades and
shoved
me out of the church, out of the sleepy weekend morning, out of Massachusetts—and into another place.

Desert air filled my throat, furry with dust and kerosene and incense. It was night—a late night—burning with neon, and I was somewhere high up and the floor was wobbling under my feet. No not a floor—a plank. I staggered against a scaffolding pole and caught at the metal, panicked. Far below me the ground winked with illumination, candles and lamps and glow-sticks moving like a slow sea, fireflies spinning in darkness.
Ahead of me a tower burned. Pearly water fell in an endless cascade of light. Moons bobbed and waltzed with ponderous grace. I was fifty feet above ground level in the narrow spire of a building of scaffolding poles and stretched white cloth.