Dancing on the Head of a Pin (2 page)

And then Remy sensed that they were no longer alone. Still gripping the fallen angel by the front of his jacket, he spun him around, as two more Denizens emerged from the shadows of the warehouse, guns in hand. Eddie didn’t even have time to protest before the bullets punched into his body.

Tossing his Denizen shield aside, Remy darted for the cover of some crates stacked in the corner of the large, open space. More bullets ricocheted off the concrete floor around him, while others burrowed deep into the wood of his cover.

The fury of his Seraphim nature roiled to be loosed, and he tried to ignore it. It would be so simple to set it free, to burn away the skin of humanity that he had worked so hard to maintain, leaving only the soldier of Heaven to deal with the foul betrayers of God’s trust.

So easy not to be human anymore, to no longer feel the agony of his loss.

It happened at the most peculiar times: taking a shower, grocery shopping, walking the dog, trying not to be shot. It was always there, eager to remind him just how much it hurt to lose the love of his life, making him relive the most painful experience of his existence.

Three more shots brought him back to reality, allowing him to forget the gnawing pain in his heart for now. He could hear them moving closer.

Where was his backup?

He looked around his hiding place for something to use as a weapon and found an old crowbar beneath an oil-stained tarp. Remy hefted the heavy piece of metal in his hand. It wasn’t as deadly as a gun, but it would do in a pinch.

And this was most certainly that.

Holding the crowbar ready, he listened for the sounds of his attackers, but they had gone strangely silent. Carefully Remy peered out from behind the crates to see a lone figure standing in the center of the open room, two unmoving bodies at his feet.

“Where the hell have you been?” Remy asked Francis as he stepped out from his hiding place.

“Sorry,” his friend replied, cleaning the blood from a fierce-looking blade with a white handkerchief. “I ran into a few of their buddies outside having a smoke. Always said that smoking was dangerous.”

The bodies of the two fallen angels had already started to burn, their corporeal forms dissolving away to nothing as they ceased to exist. Their time on earth had been their last chance at redemption, and they had failed miserably.

“Learn anything?” Francis asked, sliding the knife into a concealed pocket on the inside of his gray suit jacket.

A pain-wracked moan filled the air, and Remy looked to see that Eddie was somehow still alive, although clearly not for long. He had propped himself against the corrugated metal wall, his breath coming in short, labored gasps. Plumes of smoke, like those from the head of an extinguished match, drifted from the bullet holes in the front of his dirty T-shirt.

“Won’t be long now,” Francis said, adjusting his black horn-rimmed glasses, the faint light of the warehouse glinting off the top of his bald head.

Remy knelt beside the Denizen, who seemed to be staring off into space, perhaps taking a good long look at the oblivion that awaited him.

“Did you hear that, Eddie?” Remy asked him. “It won’t be long now.”

Eddie turned his head slightly and looked into Remy’s eyes.

“But there might still be a chance for you,” Remy continued. “Do something right before it’s over. Tell me where he is . . . the angel whose eyes you tried to sell me. . . . What did you do to him?”

“Fucking Seraphim,” Eddie spat, then gasped as a spasm of pain wracked his body.

“Maybe we need the knife?” Francis suggested, pulling open his jacket to expose the hilt of the blade peeking from the top of the pocket.

“I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” Remy said.

“If you say so.” Francis shrugged.

“Can you feel it, Eddie?” Remy asked calmly. “That’s oblivion barreling down the tracks to meet you. No more chances, pal. You’re done, unless . . .”

The smoke from the bullet holes was thicker and carried with it the smell of rotting meat. Eddie tried weakly to staunch the flow with his good hand, but the effort was futile.

“I wanted . . . wanted to go home . . . to Heaven; I really did,” Eddie began, his voice quavering. “It gets inside you . . . Hell does, makes it so you never forget.” He shook his head quickly. “
I
never forgot. . . . How can you—something like that?”

Remy reached out, gripping the fallen angel’s shoulder. The leather of his jacket was hot. “Where is he, Eddie?”

“He said he couldn’t stand it anymore . . . wanted to die. Wanted to pay for his sins.”

The words ended in an awful scream as flames shot from the dying angel’s wounds, expanding across his torso, up his chest, and down his legs. Remy managed to push himself away from the Denizen as, with a final burst of strength, he surged upward, flailing in the unnatural, hungry fire.

Remy caught Francis pulling a gun from another pocket. “No,” he said, his eyes on the dying former creature of Heaven.

Eddie made it halfway across the warehouse before dropping to his knees. His body burned with a pulsing orange glow, the shape within the fire becoming less and less human. Then slowly he raised what remained of an arm, pointing to an area of darkness at the far end of the warehouse before succumbing to the final death, his body pitching forward, nothing more than orange embers burning upon the floor. And within moments those too were gone, leaving behind nothing to show that the fallen angel had ever existed.

“Stubborn prick,” Francis growled. “You’d think that after nearly an eternity in Tartarus they’d be ready to leave this evil shit behind them.”

The mention of Hell’s prison sent an icicle of dread up and down Remy’s spine. “You heard him,” he said, approaching the spot where Eddie had fallen. “It gets inside you. It changes you, makes it so you can’t do the right thing.”

“But some do,” Francis reminded him.

“Yeah, some do.”

Remy continued toward the back of the warehouse and peered into the darkness. There were more crates and some scaffolding, but nothing of any significance that he could see.

“Wonder what they’d pay out there for my eyes,” he heard Francis say.

Remy turned to see his friend holding the cooler. He had fished out one of the angel eyes and was looking at it. “Mine are as nice as this—maybe nicer.”

“But you’re not pure,” Remy told him.

“Not right now, but I’m working on it,” Francis said as he dropped the eye back into the fog created by the dry ice.

Francis had once been one of the Lord’s most powerful Guardian angels, but even the greatest sometimes make mistakes. In the beginning, he had sided with Lucifer during the rebellion, but soon saw the error of his ways. He threw himself on the mercy of the Creator, begging his master’s forgiveness. But the Lord does not forget slights easily and forgives them even less so. Still, He gave the former Guardian angel a special job—custodian of one of the many gateways between Hell and Earth.

Not the nicest of jobs, but better than a stint in Tartarus, and Francis made the best of it, even using some of the deadlier skills he’d learned from his time in the nether regions to become a highly paid assassin.

“I think I found something,” Remy called to his friend.

He wasn’t sure exactly what, but he could feel the hair on his arms and at the back of his neck stand on end as he moved closer to a particular area. The shadows seemed thicker there, almost palpable.

“It’s a doorway,” Francis said, coming up beside him and sticking his hand inside the thick, inky blackness. “There’s another room beyond it.”

“Must be where my two friends back there came from,” Remy said. He too stuck a hand into the shadows. The darkness was cold and damp, like the bleakest November night.

“Angel magick,” Francis observed. “Ain’t it something?”

Angel magick had been created by the Watchers, the first of the angelic hosts to be banished to Earth. Even though fallen angels were stronger and more durable than the average human, they were nothing compared to a full-fledged angel. Denizens used the magick as well as weapons chiseled from the black stone walls of Tartarus and smuggled out by parolees to protect their illegal dealings from angels and humans alike.

Use of either was considered a sin against God, but that didn’t stop the Denizens.

“I think Eddie answered my question as he died,” Remy said.

“Wouldn’t be the first Denizen to see the light as their own was being permanently extinguished. So are we going in?”

Remy didn’t answer. Instead, he took a deep breath and stepped forward, immersing himself completely in the fluid darkness.

 

Though brief, the journey through the darkness made Remy think of every bad thing he had ever done, the ebony wetness seeping in through his pores, drawing out the poison, reminding him of how devastated—
lost
—he’d felt since the passing of his wife.

“Well, that was certainly pleasant,” Francis said, brushing traces of clinging dark matter from the sleeves of his suit jacket. He adjusted his glasses, a nervous habit, and looked about at their surroundings.

Remy tried to shake off the hungry sadness, but there was little else to occupy his thoughts these days.

“You all right?” Francis was looking at him, the feeling behind the question emphasized by the intensity of his gaze.

“Yeah,” Remy lied, as he stepped away from the thick patch of shadow. “Where do you think we are?”

Francis shrugged. “Not far from where we started,” he said.

They were in a corridor that turned sharply to the right in front of them. To keep his thoughts at bay, Remy began to walk.

“Let’s see what we’ve got down here.”

He studied the walls as he went. The entire structure appeared to be made from shadow—from the darkness itself. An eerie inner light, a sort of bioluminescence, dimly illuminated their way from behind the black walls.

The hallway led to a larger room, empty but for a single table, upon which lay the body of an angel. A small cart, its surface littered with bloodstained surgical instruments, was positioned nearby.

Remy could only stare.

Francis had been the first to hear the rumor, a whispering among the unnatural community that the Denizens had acquired a full-fledged angel, and that its most holy body, every inch of it—a thing of great power—was for sale. He’d asked Remy to help him investigate, and the more they poked around—the more rocks and rotted logs they flipped—the more they realized that the disturbing rumor was indeed true.

And here it was, manifested in its true form, feathered wings splayed out beneath its naked, broken body. The angel’s flesh had been cut, strips of its skin peeled away to reveal the pink musculature beneath. Most of its hair had been shaved down to the scalp. Its face was a gory mask, two empty black sockets where its eyes had been. The chest had been cut open and the rib cage exposed—an angel’s heart was worth an absolute fortune.

Slowly Remy approached, fighting back a wave of revulsion. He did not recognize the angel, or the host from which it had come.

“Do you know him?” he asked Francis, unable to take his eyes from the disturbing vision before him—like some perverted version of dissection for a high school biology class, a creature of Heaven instead of a fetal pig.

Francis remained strangely quiet as he approached the surgical cart and picked up a plastic container. With a finger he flipped off the lid and reached inside. He pulled out what appeared to be a bloody piece of cloth, but what Remy quickly realized was a large section of flesh flayed from the angel’s body.

“He was a Nomad,” Francis said, holding the skin in the open palm of one hand, tracing the black tattoo in its center with a finger.

Remy leaned in closer to look and saw that Francis was correct. There was no mistaking the mark worn by the sect of warrior angels that had abandoned their violent ways after the Great War, departing Heaven, disillusioned, very much like himself. In the most archaic version of angelic script, the mark meant “waiting between Heaven and Hell.” What the Nomads were waiting for was the real question.

“How could he have ended up like this?” Remy asked, more than disturbed by the sight of something once so magnificent, now so horribly ugly.

“You actually have to ask that?” Francis questioned. “The war screwed a lot of us up. It isn’t easy to forget what some of us did back then.”

Remy had known it was a stupid question as soon as it had left his lips. He knew he wasn’t the only one to turn his back on Heaven. It was just so very rare that he encountered any other expatriates—they tended to keep to themselves.

“He didn’t deserve this,” Remy said as he reached out to place a hand on the angel’s shoulder. The flesh was cold beneath his fingertips, like the feel of a marble altar.

With a wet, sucking gasp, the angel rose to a sitting position, his wings flapping spastically as he took hold of Remy’s shoulders in a trembling grip. Remy stared in awe, unable to believe that something so horribly mangled could still be alive.

“The sins live on,” the angel gasped, the stink of rot exuding from his lacerated flesh. “They think it done . . . the war, but they deceive themselves, and the deceivers live on, the black secret of their purpose clutched to their breast.”

The angel’s head lolled upon his shoulders, his body wracked with spasms of excruciating pain.

“I could bear the deceit no longer. . . . My secret sin consumes me. . . .”

The final words left the angel’s mouth in a gurgling wheeze, and he began to convulse. Flapping wildly, his damaged wings lifted him from the table but were not strong enough to support him. His damaged body crashed into the smaller table, spilling the bloody instruments. He lay atop the tools that had been used to dissect him, trembling and gasping for air.