Harsh Gods (17 page)

He wore not a stitch of clothing, standing naked and utterly unabashed by this fact. If he’d worn eyeliner and a little jewelry, he could have walked straight from Oscar Wilde’s private stable of rent boys. I turned my gaze away, too stunned by the whole of his appearance to be able to formulate any kind of intelligent response.

“Even this, you do not remember,” he murmured sadly. He had a lilting tenor, reinforcing his aura of sumptuous youth. “Oh, my poor, wounded brother. How fragile is the flesh.”

His pity chaffed at me, but the shock of seeing him like a flesh-and-blood being overruled the emotion. I’d known Terael only as a disembodied voice strangely singing in my mind. He’d kept me company through long hours at the art museum—and, frankly, sometimes he’d gotten on my nerves with his constant, semi-lucid prattle. This new form jarred my awareness. My head twitched where it rested against my desk in the seemingly distant confines of my office.

“You’re, uh—you’re standing here,” I stammered, opting to leave out the part about him being buck-ass naked and apparently happy to be alive. I didn’t think he’d take well to a lecture on propriety. “How can you be standing here in front of me?”

Terael’s lips curled into a consoling smile. “I am here. And in my idol, and in your office, sibling. And elsewhere. In the drifting dreams of my faithful, who guard the treasures of my temple.”

“You do realize you’re one of the treasures they’re guarding, right?” I asked.

“As it should be.” His smile broadened, exposing perfect, golden teeth.

I boggled at him, rubbing the hard angle of my jaw. “I always wonder if my life can get any weirder, and then I see shit like this.”

Terael pressed a finger lightly to my lips and laughed.

“That you did not mean to share. You are out of practice in this art.”

His skin felt like living flesh, yet it lay against my mouth with the cool, unyielding weight of polished quartz. I recoiled from the touch. With a languorous grace, Terael stepped back into his own bubble of personal space. I scrubbed the back of my hand across my lips. If my reaction offended him, he made no sign.

“The walls and baffles of your mind must be firm,” he cautioned. “Discipline is required to rein in stray thoughts.”

I swallowed hard as I met the twin jewels of his eyes. “I’ve been working pretty hard on those walls and baffles. You might just have to live with a stray thought or two. It’s always a little noisy in here.”

“I have at least grown fond of your peculiar remarks,” he answered. His bemused expression sloughed away, leaving his face an anxious, gilded mask. “Now let us see the extent of the trouble that has come knocking at my door.”

He bent to the figure of the fallen man I’d conjured in the mental space.

“Terhu—” I began, but Terael cut me off sharply.

“Do not speak that Name in a space like this, Zaquiel,” he warned. “We both risk much if you call him here, and I will not countenance such a danger.” The sharp edge of his tone spurred my defiance.

“Is that a threat for him or me?”

“I will threaten any who side with that one, and stand in opposition until I have no strength left,” he swore. The corona of his hair blew back in a sudden swell of power. I met the fire in his eyes without blinking. I’d won staring contests against Saliriel, and she was a decimus of the Nephilim.

“I’m not the enemy,” I reminded him.

In an instant, all of his threatened fury dissolved, and I was reminded that Terael always seemed a little off in the head. Although he was tied to stone, his moods ran swift as mercury.

“Then do not speak his Name,” he insisted. “My tribe works through idols and images. A Name whispered upon the lips of the faithful is a potent idol in its way.”

“I’m not even part of his fan club,” I objected. “I just want to know how to protect that girl.”

On the bed, my recollected image of Halley lingered like a hologram stuck on pause. Terael nodded obliquely in her direction—at least acknowledging her—but he didn’t budge from the man at our feet.

“I must see the extent of his fighting strength before I examine the lamb who might treble it.”

“Lamb?” I demanded. Given my siblings’ Biblical predilections, that didn’t sound good for Halley. “You better not be talking sacrifice.”

With dream-like languor, he trailed a finger along the vagrant’s stubbled jaw. “In days long past, blood ran sweetly on the altar. Sacrifice sustains all members of my tribe.” In his lilting tenor, the words rang like music, ugly though they were. I couldn’t tell if he meant them as explanation or excuse.

Neither option made me happy.

“
No
,” I snapped. The walls around us bowed with the force of my negation.

Mouth flattening in a moue of reproach, Terael glared from beneath a nest of golden lashes. The depth of hunger glittering in his inhuman eyes stunned me into silence.

“If the Thunderer sought sacrifice of the human girl, she already would be dead,” he pronounced. “You yourself said his agents came not to kill, but to steal her from her home.” Restless fingers stroked the face of the homeless man as Terael’s expression grew distant. “A greater destiny is fated for the ones we choose as lamb.”

“And by ‘greater,’ you mean worse,” I said. “What’s worse than sacrifice, Terael?”

He refused to respond. Unspoken on the air hung all the details he withheld, taunting at the edge of perception. My hands curled into fists, both here and in the office, as I struggled to rein in my temper.

“I’m here for answers, Terael,” I snarled. “You better start to deliver.”

Wherever his thoughts had strayed, it wasn’t pretty. An aching mixture of loss, regret, and anguish scudded like clouds across his youthful features. The weight of those emotions added years I couldn’t begin to count. When next he spoke, his voice seemed to resonate from two places at once—here, and the distant past.

“This is what you missed, my brother, seen but not perceived with waking eyes.” He sounded inexpressibly weary. With a sweep of one dusty wing, he gestured over the prone man. A tapestry of smoky lines coalesced upon the air, each trailing from the minion. They rose to a point above him, like a puppet’s many strings.

“I saw
one
of those,” I sputtered. “Only one. On a different man, upstairs.”

“Some part of you observed, and knew,” he said. “And that is why we stand here now, for my delivery of answers.” He cast the words like daggers. “I can pull your hidden knowledge where it can be seen.”

Still gobsmacked that I’d missed that much, I thrilled with the brittle beginnings of hope. Maybe I hadn’t recognized all those tendrils when I’d seen them in the first go-round, but the perceptions were there, locked in my subconscious. This projection was proof.

Dorimiel hadn’t crippled me permanently.

That was
huge
. But if Terael had any sense of this revelation’s impact, he didn’t show it. He remained fixated on Whisper Man’s wounded lackey.

“This one you show me is damaged, yes?” he mused. “A weakened mind. Fewer walls.”

“Yeah.” With difficulty, I pulled myself back to the moment. “My guess is he’s homeless,” I offered. “Might be mentally ill—a whole lot of people fall through the cracks. Not enough money for treatment.” The pea coat and Army boots made me wonder now if he was a vet. No way to know for sure. “An easy target for possession.”

“Not possession. Choosing,” he corrected. “In ancient days, we called them god-touched. Minds like this are always first to hear our call.” My gilt-skinned sibling cupped his hand against the seamed and dirty face. There was a tender, pitying intimacy to the gesture. Something in me railed against it.

Focus
, I urged myself—and was unreasonably thrilled when the thought remained private.

Terael’s voice wove singsong rhythms on the air. “Through dreams, then waking visions, they hear our voices when they pass within our sphere,” he said. “Those our whispers reach eventually let us in. Mortals crave our guidance, and the broken ones crave it most.”

“Halley’s not broken,” I objected. “She’s got challenges, sure. But she’s worlds away from guys like this. How’s this asshole getting to her?”

Terael frowned at my interruption. “The weak-minded are ours to call first, but that does not preclude others,” he responded. “A god must build his flock in stages.”

“Pretty harsh god if he asks them to carve his name in their skin,” I grumbled.

“It is a sign of their devotion,” Terael replied. “The token ties him to their flesh, thus to achieve communion.” A jealous note of longing rang through the Rephaim’s words. I fought to suppress a shudder. “They become his hands and eyes in the mortal world. Through it, he speaks to them beyond the limits of his temple. Rides them, if he must, though mortal minds are often crushed beneath the full weight of our presence.”

“Hands to take and eyes to see,” I muttered. “That creepy rhyme.”

Hearing this, it made grim sense.

“We gift the worthy with a share of strength,” Terael continued. “To bear the token is the first step to becoming anchor.”

That was a word I knew, but in a different context.

“I thought anchors were Nephilim blood-slaves,” I said, unable to hide my revulsion. “A nasty quirk of Remy’s tribe.”

Terael gave a little shake of his head. “All the tribes make anchors of the mortals, Zaquiel,” he answered. “Just as mortal lives sustain us, each in our way.”

A newfound level of disgust rose as I digested this information. None of these people had held the slightest chance—Terhuziel had swooped in when their lives were at their absolute worst, whispering promises of belonging and support. Of course they reached back—who wouldn’t, in a moment of desperation?

From the ragged aspect of his hobo army, there was desperation to go around.

Once he got his hooks in them, he robbed them of their free will and bound them to his power. No wonder they shambled around like mindless zombies. He’d stripped them of everything human just so he could joyride in their skulls.

“I won’t let him do that to Halley,” I vowed.

Something akin to pity touched Terael’s gemstone face. “For the Thunderer to reach the girl-child beyond the limits of his domain, she already bears his token.”

“No,” I said. “Not a chance. Halley doesn’t have his name carved in her skin. Believe me, someone would have noticed.”

Gently, as if explaining the death of a pet to a three-year-old, he said, “A token need not be carved into the flesh, my brother. The form it takes is determined by the devoted.” He sketched a reverent gesture above the figure of the homeless man. “As much offering as talisman, it is a thing carefully crafted and carried always on the person. The Name is its power, along with the devoted’s intent.”

“Then we’re fucked,” I said. “She’s been writing that name over and over again for weeks. In crayons, in paint—on her walls.”

“Still you do not understand, my brother,” he murmured.

I scowled at the man on display at our feet. The blood on his ruined chest pooled around the negative space where Terhuziel’s Name should have been scored into his skin. The shock of the mutilation rose in memory. Several of the cuts had held puckered edges, like he’d gouged himself back open once they’d started to heal.

If Whisper Man broke her will, would Halley be consumed by the same destructive devotion to her newfound “god?” Just imagining it sickened me.

As the dark thoughts filled me, the flesh of the projected man’s chest began to warp and bubble. Terael recoiled as echoes of Terhuziel’s Name erupted from the skin.

“Drive his Name from your mind,” he cautioned.

I struggled to suppress my awareness of those potent syllables, but it was like that game where someone tells you not to think about elephants. Suddenly, everything reminds you of the circus. The walls of the projection wavered and tiny details shivered in and out of existence as my concentration flagged. The three sigils of Terhuziel’s Luwian Name pressed against their canvas of skin, struggling to burst through.

“
Voldemort
,” I hissed, to drag my mind away. Terael’s gilded brow creased. The word was meaningless to him, but it did the trick. Terhuziel’s Name faded, covered over with a Death Eater symbol.

“You have the strangest mental talismans,” he mused.

“It’s not the tools, it’s the result, right?”

Shifting my head against the desk in the office, I resettled the projection. With a vague sense of detachment, I noted that my hair clung damp with sweat. Holding an entire room vividly in my head took serious effort.

“I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up,” I said, “so you need to hurry. Take a look at Halley and show me what I missed.”

Instantly, Terael bristled. “Do not frame it as an order, sibling. Much diminished I may be, but still I reign as god within my temple.” Maybe it was proximity, maybe just the effort of imagining the shared mental space—whatever the reason, his anger ignited my own like a flash-fire.

“Fuck your tribe’s god-complex, Terael,” I snarled. “This guy is melon-balling people’s brains and sending them out to wreak havoc in the world. A whole family is dead already. A little four-year-old girl—”

“That which is most precious makes the sweetest gift of all.”

He said it as a taunt, and we both knew it. The rapturous expression that suffused his features made me want to vomit. It was a stark reminder that although Terael and I were siblings in a technical sense, we were worlds apart because of our tribes.

“You wish it was you out there, gathering mind-fucked followers to cut people up and bleed,” I accused.

“Do not dare,” he cautioned. “Those days are long behind me.” But his look remained wistful.

Suddenly, it didn’t seem worth the headache to hold him here with me. He’d shown me that I already knew the answers—it was just a matter of figuring out how to get to them. The way he used the word “lamb,” like it was some unique and precious status, made me want to shake an explanation from his gilded lips, but even that reaction suggested some part of me recognized the term.

While I fumed, Terael had finally turned his full attention to the girl.