HORROR THRILLERS-A Box Set of Horror Novels (16 page)

She laughed into his
face and he raised a fist to hit her, but she held it at bay with her
mind. He struggled, grimacing, and still he could not bring down his
fist.

He leaped off her
and turned to Mary. She was truly mad now, her eyes flicking right
and left, her mouth foaming with terror. He leaned over her
repeating soft entreaties. “Hush, Mary, come back, Mary, it’s
going to be all right, hush now, come back to me…”

As he untied the
naked woman, the group crept from the shadows, surrounding him,
watching.

“
It was just
an experiment to see how strong she was,” Angelique said, but
she did not sound contrite.

“
I’d
kill you for this if I could,” he said. He had Mary untied and
on her feet, he swept her into his arms and hurried to the car.

Squealing away from
the gathering, throwing dust into the air, Nick fled the unholy
scene. He held the shivering woman under his arm. “Shhhh.
We’re going home.”

All the way to
Charlotte Nick seethed and plotted, railed against the injustice,
swore revenge, and cuddled the softly weeping woman against his
chest. Against his heart.

His anger surprised
him, as did his depth of feeling for Mary. They had been together
for almost ten years and all that time Angelique had left them alone.
Maybe she thought he would tire of the woman and discard her as a
child would a plaything. Maybe she finally grew jealous. Or maybe
she was as evil as Satan and he had always known it. Though they
were all fallen from grace, not every one of the angels were in
league with Lucifer.

He might be a lost
soul, wandering now against the will of his creator in the guise of a
human, but he could not find real malice in his heart, except…except
against Angelique. Was it the accident of being trapped in a child’s
body that made her so cruel? Or was her soul as dark as the night
the moment she fomented protest against her god?

For weeks Nick
nursed Mary back to a semblance of sanity. He hired a nurse to care
for her when he had to be absent to run the many businesses that
depended on him. He rushed back to her side as soon as he could
every time he had to leave for the downtown city.

Mary did not
remember the incident that had brought her so low. In the past few
years she had even erased the murder of her husband. Being abducted,
stripped, and held in bondage in a wild place had precipitated a
break with reality so final that Nick feared she would never be right
again.

Angelique had said,
“Why burden yourself with this weak human, a murderer? Yes, I
know what she’s done, you don’t think I plumbed every
crevice of her poor mind? You could have anyone. Why tether yourself
to this…this specimen?”

“
It’s
not up to you to pick my companions for me. I will not discuss this
with you.” He had not forgiven her, but his fate was tangled
with Angelique. He could no more walk away from her than he could
desert Mary.

Nick spent hours at
Mary’s side talking soothingly to her, reminding her of his
love, his care. It took months, but eventually she came round to
herself. “You’re a lovely man,” she said one day,
lifting a hand to caress his cheek.
“We should run away
together and get married.”

This was a refrain
she often employed, as if she were a teen or a young woman and he her
suitor. In fact she was a woman nearing fifty now. Had she been a
more sensible woman she would already have noted the difference in
their ages—that she had aged while he had not.

He was still
sexually attracted to Mary, but he recognized their relationship was
now moving toward a time when they would sit like an old couple, sit
and stare into one another’s eyes remembering earlier days
together. He took her hand from his face and held fast to it.

“
I would marry
you any time you want,” he said, kissing the top of her hand.

“
Oh,”
she said, her eyelashes fluttering. “I would have to get my
father’s permission for that.”

Her parents had been
dead twenty years. Nick simply smiled and held her close. Tomorrow
she would lure him to her bed. For today she was a woman being
courted, demure and flirtatious.

He loved her so…

Angelique tried
again and again. With each human sacrifice she thought she could
bring down another angel to take the dying body, and each time she
failed. Fury caused her to lash out against the breathless bodies.
She hit them with her small fists, pounding them in the chest and
face. Her anger scared the little group of Haitians so that they
withdrew from the ritual circle, heads and gazes averted. They all
knew the child was more than a child; some thought her a demon. None
of them, having joined their fates with her, knew how to extricate
themselves. She was too powerful to cross, too knowing and fearsome
to run from.

“
What’s
wrong?” Nick asked. Angelique had been sullen for weeks.

“
I have no
success bringing down more of our kind. I keep trying and failing.”

Nick found this to
be an interesting turn of affairs. There was something Angelique
could not do?

“
You’ve
found newly lifeless bodies for these attempts?”

Angelique gave him a
sideways glance. “That’s not the point. The point is I
fail.”

“
But you were
able to bring me back so easily.”

Angelique nodded,
thinking. “You had such fervor to return.”

He remembered that
long ago time when he was given another chance at life on earth. His
soul had been fleet as he lunged toward the body of the circus
wire-walker. He’d had no hesitation at all. Any world was
preferable to the emptiness. He had longed for life so long that it
made up his whole character--a longing to be—only that.

“
Do you think
they don’t want to come?” This thought was impossible to
him, but he could not divine the longings or lack of them in his
fellow angels.

Angelique did not
answer. She strode from the room, her little shoes snapping a
staccato across the polished floor in her wake.

Nick stared after
her. Maybe he had hit on the problem and she already knew. He
sighed. He turned on the RCA radio on the table near his chair. He
adjusted the station finder and the volume. He sat listening to
voices filling the room, keeping him company.

The world was so
different now. Cities seemed to grow overnight. Technology provided
electricity, indoor plumbing, radio, refrigerators, and a plethora of
motorized vehicles. Nations were growing in both population and
expectation of real wealth. Except for the thundercloud of World War
II looming on the horizon with Germany rattling its swords, the earth
was a veritable garden of Eden. The last time the world had been so
majestic was during the Roman Empire, but even that great republic
had never seen such miraculous times such as these.

And never had Nick
been more content. He could not take Angelique’s frustrations
seriously. Her plan to bring all the fallen angels to earth to take
over the world was a foolish desire anyway. It was the wish of a
megalomaniac not in full control of her senses. That the two of them
had been able to make earth home was a double miracle in itself. If
no angel ever again took human form it would be all right with Nick.

They all possessed
the ability to choose their own fates. If some of them were happy
with where they spent eternity, how was it up to Angelique or anyone
else to question or override those decisions?

He turned his
attention back to the radio program, a comedy show featuring a silly
woman with a silly voice, and forgot all about the furious little
girl who was in another part of the house. Let Angelique fume. Let
her fuss. Let her rail against heaven for all he cared. She had to
know her limits. After all, she was not the creator, nor was she the
Son of the Morning, Lucifer, the bright and shining. She was merely
a fallen rebel, pretending to be more than she could ever hope to be.
He could have told her that long ago, had she been willing to
listen. He could have told her the dreams of rebellion and power had
been a lost cause from the very beginning.

CHAPTER 19

A MORTAL PASSING

Nick knew poor Mary
was leaving him by looking at her. She was not going away with
someone else. She was going away permanently from this plane of
being; she was dying.

First the whites of
her eyes yellowed. Then her fingernails and toenails took on a bluish
tint. Her teeth loosened in her mouth and she complained of pain low
in her back where her kidneys were located. Although she was not
quite sixty, all her organs were failing. Perhaps it had something to
do with the beatings she had taken from her husband. Or perhaps she
was just a frail woman, destined to endure only a short lifespan.

It had been some
time since the two of them had engaged in sexual congress, due to her
lack of desire and his trepidation. He had confessed to her years
ago that he was not exactly human. He was, but he wasn’t.

Being mad, she
sometimes just accepted these strange state of affairs and at other
times she shrunk from his touch, as if he were a monster.

Now that she was
dying, he often sat and held her, his arms about her shoulders, her
head on his chest. He loved her no less than he had when she was
young, but now it was a different kind of love--a love for one he
knew as intimately as he had never known another being. He felt
sorrow, an emotion he had only felt as an angel thrown out of his
element. This sorrow was not as deep, but just as lasting.

“
I’m not
beautiful,” she said, cuddling close to him, twining her
fingers in the fingers of his hand. “But you’ve loved me
anyway. Why is that?”

“
I think it’s
because you’ve always needed me. At least that’s what I
used to think. Now I realize it’s because I needed you.”

“
I’m
sick, aren’t I?”

He said nothing.

She sighed and it
was the only sound in the room, a sound of acquiescence, a sound of
leaves turning in the wind, floating to earth.

“
What will you
do when I am gone?”

That was like her,
to worry about him left behind more than she worried about her own
demise.

“
I don’t
know.”

“
You once said
you were an angel. That must mean there is a god and heaven.”

“
That’s
what it means.”

“
I can rely on
that?” Now she sounded afraid and even if it wasn’t
true, which it was, at this point he would have lied to her.

“
Yes,”
he said. “You can rely on it.”

He called in a
doctor that week and was told there was nothing to be done. The woman
was weakening. She would be gone soon.

A week later when he
came to visit, the nurse he had hired to care for Mary met him at the
door. “She hasn’t long now.”

Nick hurried to her
bedside. She looked gray, a shadow self of the woman he had known so
many years. Her dark hair was now silver and wispy. Twin lines
etched her mouth and her eyes were watery and pale. She reached out a
trembling hand to him. He sat and held onto her until her eyelids
fluttered and stilled, until her chest no longer rose with breath,
until she had left him forever—without a word, without a
backward glance.

He could not
remember ever weeping. Ever. He had not shed a tear as angel or man,
until this moment of loss. He rubbed at the streaks of tears wetting
his cheeks. He brought his hands away and stared in surprise at the
tears. He couldn’t bear to leave her all through the night. He
spent the hours asking God what the meaning of all this was. Why
create such flawed and weak creatures as men, only to let them suffer
and die? As Caesar he had been run through with a dozen knives and
short swords, suffering pain and dying, but that was nothing compared
to watching Mary die. He had known he only borrowed the great man’s
body for a while. Mary, on the other hand, had inhabited the only
body given to her and now it had failed and left nothing but a husk
behind. Where was she now? Did her blithe spirit reside with God,
as he hoped, or did it wait in some nether region for an ultimate
summoning at the end of time when all manner of beings would be
gathered?

He was not privy to
the mind of God. He also did not understand or trust the Bible or the
prophets who wrote it. He had been cast out and shut off from what
knowledge he had earned before. All he knew was that he had lost the
one human he had come to love most and he was bereft beyond words.