Cover Him with Darkness (24 page)

I let out a long shriek and finished it with some choice swearwords, my hands springing sweat as they clutched at the struts. I could feel the poles vibrating, though I couldn't tell if it was the breeze that was to blame or the pounding of the drums that rose up from below. For a moment I felt like Fay Wray, tied up high over the heads of the crazed villagers and presented in sacrifice to Kong. I looked round wildly for Uriel.

He squatted on a level above me, on his haunches, the soles of his Italian shoes balanced on a horizontal pole, and only the tips of four fingers stretched to an overhead strut conceding any need for support. I'd meant to ask him what the heck it was his sort had about vertiginous heights, but the sight of him hunkered there like some Armani-suited bird of prey on its branch rendered the question pointless. He looked at the night landscape around with idle curiosity, and then his attention snapped back to rest on me.

“Well?” he asked.

“Well what?” I repeated in a near-hysterical wail, my brain still preoccupied with the question of whether I was going to fall to my death any second now.

“What did you want to propose?”

I shut my eyes. It didn't help: the structure beneath me just felt more flimsy and ephemeral, and I opened them hurriedly. “Can we go down?”

“Down there?”

“Yes!”

“Among
them
?”

“What's wrong with them? They look just fine!”

“Apart from the drunkenness and the fornication and the pride and the drug-taking and the Godless inanity?”

“You have a problem with people having fun?” I said faintly. It wasn't so bad, I told myself, as long as I didn't look down past my feet.

“I have a problem with disobedience to the Divine Will.”

I decided to focus on Uriel's face. “And yet no problem,” I snipped,
“with drowning every living thing on the planet, or killing all the firstborn children of Egypt?”

He raised an eyebrow. “My, you've been spending too much time with Azazel. He's been messing with your head.”

“You think?”

“You believe that this is what the human race was made for, do you?—to live in a chaos of self-indulgence and an endless hunt for the next thrill, the next bit of fun, the next high, the next fillip to an empty, insatiable ego?”

“So what were we made for, then, in your opinion?” I couldn't keep the bite out of my voice.

“To love and obey God. And that's not my opinion, that's fact. I was there when it happened.”

Angelic arrogance: it's like the squeal of nails down a chalkboard. “Funny how it keeps going wrong, then,” I growled. “First the Watchers. The War in Heaven. Then us lot. You'd almost think there was a design flaw somewhere.”

Uriel narrowed his eyes. “You came to ask my help.”

The blustery wind went out of my sails. “Yes.”

“I have to say you're not doing such a great job of it so far.”

I lowered my gaze. My knuckles were white around the scaffolding pole. “Point taken,” I admitted.

“So can we get back to the matter at hand? What did you want to talk about?”

“Egan—the man who was with me in Podgorica. At the church.”

“What about him?”

“You know who I mean?—did you see him?”

“I didn't pay much attention, but for the sake of argument let's assume so.”

Not what I wanted to hear. I clenched my jaw.

“When…when I was spirited away,” I said through gritted teeth, still cautious about speaking Azazel's name now that I knew he could hear me; “when I was taken back to Boston, Egan was left behind. He shouldn't have been.”

“So?”

“We left him, on his own. They were trying to grab me, but they
took him—priests from the Orthodox church, I think—and I've no idea what they were going to do to him. Please…could you find out if he's still alive?”

“I might. Why are you asking me and not your surly sweetheart?”

“He's being…difficult.”

Uriel grinned. “Really? You do surprise me.”

“And you're an angel.”

“That doesn't make it my function to play Facebook for you.”

“But Egan's a good man—he helped me, and tried to save me, and he's decent and honorable and he doesn't deserve what we did. Please! He's one of the good ones!”

“And good men suffer all the time. In case you hadn't noticed.”

“So you won't help him?”

“It's not my job.”

I ground my teeth. “Aren't you one of the four archangels who stood up and opposed the fallen Watchers? I've read the
Book of Enoch
. You complained about them to God, and He sent you guys to take them down and put them all in prison.”

Uriel's pale blue eyes seemed to catch the neon. They glowed as he looked down at me. “Raphael was the one who bound your master.”

I let his description slide. “But your job is to oppose him.”

“Yes. As the Almighty decrees.”

“Well he did this to Egan. He rescued me, and he left Egan behind. That's wrong. You should put it right.”

Uriel didn't blink any more often than Azazel did, I noted. “This earthly realm is mankind's to act in,” he said softly. I lost my cool.

“Then
I
will put it right! But I need to know if he's alive! I can't do
anything
without help—I don't even know where to look for him!”

Uriel seemed to consider this. He nodded, shortly. “I'll take a look then,” he said. Standing up straight on his perch, he dropped down onto my plank. The piece of wood was balanced across the horizontals, not fastened: it bounced wildly and tilted and I screamed.

Uriel's hand shot out and grabbed me by the tail of my braid, yanking my head back, pinning me. If I'd been able to cry, tears would have leaped to my eyes. All I could do was to let out a string of hacking sobs.

“Picture this Egan of yours, clearly,” he ordered, leaning in over me.

I tried to comply. I tried to think of Egan, and not think about the way Uriel was pulling my hair, or about his pale luminous eyes staring into mine. I shut my own, picturing Egan's square face and the heft of his solid shoulders and the warm quirk of his smile, and everything about him that was different from the callous domineering of angels.

“That'll do.” He released me.

I opened my eyes in time to see the contemptuous curl of Uriel's lip. “Don't go too far,” he told me, as he stepped out sideways between two of the facing panels of cloth and fell. I saw his shadow flash downward—but there was no sound of impact, and when I craned my neck and stared down there was no sign that anything had struck the earth far below. The crowds milled and drummed and danced just as before.

“Oh hell,” I whispered to myself. I was damp with perspiration, and it would have been nice to report that that was only due to fear. Nice, but inaccurate. I could feel my scalp tingling.
Those poor Neolithic women
, I thought.
They never stood a chance, did they?

But now I was alone, up a construction that was never meant to be climbed except by its makers. My next and overriding thought:
I'm getting down off this
.

The climb wasn't actually that difficult. There were offset planks laid at each level of the scaffolding, so all I had to do was swing down from one to the next. As long as I didn't think about the drop below me, I was all right. Neon flickered, turning the night rainbow. A fragrant waft of marijuana rose to meet me as I neared the surface of the playa.

“What the hell?” a shadowy guy asked, frowning over his tin of beer as I hung at the end of my arms and dropped the last couple of feet to the ground.

“It's okay, all done,” I mumbled vaguely, rubbing the dirt off my hands as I backed away. As soon as I was sure he wasn't pursuing, I turned and strode off as steadily as my wobbling legs would allow. I looked back up to see the building from the outside though: it was a white pagoda, an easy landmark.

Uriel, I figured, could find me if he wanted.

Then I wandered out into the crowd, shaking with gratitude for the solid earth beneath my feet, grateful even for the fine dust and the heat I could feel radiating off the desert floor. Ahead of me stood the two illuminated
towers I'd first spotted from on high, one of fire and one of water; to my right was a boat surrounded by scrap-metal sharks—
a boat in the desert!
—and to the left was a huge naked dancer, lit blue from within her translucent skin, but there seemed no reason to hurry toward any of the installations. All around me wandered people in fantastical costume, not heading in any particular direction, just lighting up the night with their glow and their glitter. Huge luminous puppets of mantises and moths wended their way over the heads of the crowd. A robot head the size of a small house rolled its eyes and licked its lips and danced on spider legs. A charabanc styled as a top-heavy gothic mansion eased its way down a track lined by steel roses. Fire-poi twirled and hoops spun. Drumbeats mixed with the sound of several competing electronic dance tracks.

I remembered at some point to close my mouth.

A clockwork Lincoln in a stovepipe hat pushed a handcart up to me and offered me a slushie. “Tea, young lady?”

My mouth was parched from fear, and I delved into my pocket willingly. “How much?”

He shook his head, laughing. “No charge.”

I took a sip, nervously enchanted by the gesture: iced tea in the desert. A second later I realized it might not have been the wisest of moves, accepting a drink from a stranger, but he smiled and moved off as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

Azazel would love this,
I thought with an unexpected pang. The staggering left-field technology, the crazy-ass art—those women wearing nothing but fluorescent body-paint,
Yow!
—the sense of stretching for something unpredictable and unnerving and new, grotesque or beautiful or both.

He'd be so proud of what we'd done with ourselves.

I wanted him here, I realized. He would fit right in. Egan…not so much. Egan was too cautious and reserved for an anarchy like this. He'd distrust it. Not, I told myself, that I knew anything about what he did in his downtime, when he wasn't rescuing helpless maidens. But I imagined he'd like to be in control of the situation, whatever it was. He wouldn't enjoy being swept up and carried away.

He certainly wasn't in control now. I shivered, the hollow in my breast growing cold and heavy again. He was in hostile hands.

Be safe, Egan
, I told him.
Be strong. Be alive, please
.

Hurry up, Uriel.

Holding my paper cup of mushy ice, I followed an eddy of the crowd into a space behind a row of silver camper vans. The rhythmic thunder was loud here; there was a circle of drummers, and in the center a black-clad man leaped and whirled in the firelight. My heart jumped: for a moment I thought—quite irrationally—that it was Azazel I was looking at. But his flapping black wings resolved into a cloak of feathers, his crowned head became a beaked mask, and his supernaturally huge strides became the bounces of a man on those metal spring stilts.

“Raven,” he called, over the sound of the drums. “Raven summons you to the circle. Raven is wisdom and legend, the bearer of stories.”

New Age nonsense
, I thought indulgently, wandering closer to watch.

“Listen to the Raven. Look into the flames.” He was whirling a ball of flame on a chain as he danced. “See down the ages, to the first times.”

A blue-haired woman seated with a drum in her lap looked up at me, and patted the blanket beside her. I nodded and sat down, a little self-consciously. The slushie was making my fingers cold. I took another sip.

“Let go of the present,” the Raven-dancer admonished. “The flat everyday, the two-dimensional, the gray ordinary, the world of things. Come into the world of words. Come hear the stories.” The ball of flame whooshed past my face. “The sorrow and the love and the fear in the blood. Let the flames show you what is real. Let the Raven tell you truth.”

Round and round went the flame, hypnotic.

“Let Raven take you back.”

And once more:
whoosh
—and suddenly I
saw
. Not the fire-lit campsite or the go-go fairyland of the playa, but a riverbank with tall reeds under a hot sun and a broad sky, and two boys playing there. One was perhaps ten, the other a couple of years younger, and both were plastered up to their knees and elbows in mud. Both were laughing, and both extraordinarily beautiful—long black curls, golden-dark skin, dressed in short white tunics. I didn't doubt for a second that they were brothers. The eldest held up a handful of mud he had been shaping, and I saw that it bore the rough outline of a bird—a quail perhaps, or something about that size. A moment later that bird stretched out its wings and sprang into the air, wings whirring as it took off and flew away over the hissing reeds.
The boy threw back his head and laughed with delight.