Ignite (8 page)

Gus brushes a blue ember carelessly off his shoulder and steps over the ring of rocks around the pit. “I can’t say the same.”

“Haven’t you missed us terribly? Hell can’t be the same without us!” I chime in with a smile.

He huffs in exasperation. “No, Hell definitely hasn’t been the same without you two. Much less trouble. Until now, that is.”

“How boring!” Azael walks over to Gus and wraps him in a tight hug. He pulls back and smirks teasingly. “Whatever would you do without us?”

I laugh as Gus fights his way out of Azael’s embrace, stepping back to straighten his shirt.

“That’s quite enough!”

“Oh, Gus, he’s just having some fun,” I say as I twist my hair into a knot at the back of my head. “We’ve had a very long day, or haven’t you heard?”

“I have, and I think it may get more complicated still,” he answers, crossing his arms across his chest. “Do you have anywhere else we can discuss this? Or do you expect me to sit around on graves all night?”

“Not one for fresh air?” Azael gasps in mock disbelief. “Well lucky for you we’ve got a beautiful chapel, decorated in the latest interior trends from Paris. It’s called ‘derelict couture.’”

He gestures grandly to a dirt path that zigzags up to the crumbling ruins of a small chapel set beyond the neglected graveyard. Gus skirts around Azael’s extended arm and makes his way up the path. Azael falls in behind him, turning around to grin at me mischievously. I follow last, leisurely picking my way over the thick and twisting roots that stretch across the broken path.

“Is that what it’s called?” I shout forward. “And here I’ve been calling it ‘vacant chic.’ How embarrassing.”

Gus ignores our exchange and shoves open the heavy doors of the chapel, the bulky knocker beating flatly on the rotting wood. The shrill hinges creak as the doors slow to a stop. He stands in the doorway, his broad shoulders a darker shadow against the dank, unlit chapel.

He lifts his right hand and waves it indifferently, igniting the wicks of the dozen candles grouped on the altar. Several smaller candles that hang on the wall down the length of the chapel also spark with light, flickering weakly. The sudden brightness startles an assembly of bats from the vaulted ceiling, their wings flapping in a panic as they tumble carelessly out of a hole in the roof.

Even lit, the chapel looks sullen. The thick, stacked stones that make up the wall look like they are sinking slowly into the ground, and the marble steps up to the altar are cracked and sloping severely to one side. The pews are covered in a thick layer of dust and dirt, and cobwebs hang in every corner. The lower half of the stained glass window behind the altar is shattered, as if someone had thrown a rock through it. Right through Saint Peter’s crotch. Broken bits of red, green, and yellow glass are scattered below the window and sparkle dully in the candlelight.

“Breathtaking,” he grimaces.

“Thanks,” Azael says, sidling up to Gus and draping his arm around his shoulder. “We’ve put a lot of work into it.”

“So it would seem.” Gus shakes Azael’s arm off his shoulder and moves around the altar, which, miraculously, is still perfectly intact.

He pulls out a small notebook from his back pocket and lays it open on the surface of the altar. Azael follows Gus and settles in a tattered high-back chair set to the side. I walk over to the first row of pews and perch myself on top of the thick wooden half-wall.

Gus scans his notebook, snaps it closed, and looks up at us both. “There’s no easy way to say this.”

“Let me guess,” Azael interrupts. “You’ve brought the erotic novel you’ve been writing about Lucifer and yourself instead of your proper notes. Well, don’t expect us to wait for you while you run back down to Hell to grab the correct notebook. I’ve got places to go and people to reap!”

I look between Azael and Gus. Az has a cocky grin plastered across his face and Gus’s jaw is clenched so tight that I’m sure he’s cracked his teeth. I bite back my amusement.

“Michael,” Gus continues, still clenching and unclenching his jaw, “has escaped.”

My face falls. “So he wasn’t lying? It’s true?” I jump down from wall and land on the dirty stone floor with a soft crunch. “How?”

I glance at Azael and see his face set in fury, his violet eyes as bright as fire. I brace myself for him to explode. It doesn’t take long.

“BULLSHIT!” Azael throws his arms up angrily, and a tall candle that sits behind him darkens, its flame whisping away into smoke. “Absolutely impossible—I helped trap him there myself! We bound him with the most powerful dark magic. Even God Himself would have had a difficult time jimmying that lock!”

“Though, somehow, it appears that He managed to do so quite easily.”

“
God?
” I ask incredulously.

“So it would seem.” Gus puts a fist to his chin. “Michael’s soul has escaped. He has been reborn.”

My head buzzes like an angry hornets’ nest with Gus’s words. I knew Michael was back, could feel it in my bones, no matter how impossible I believed it to be. But God? No one’s ever seen Him. Only an empty throne sits in Heaven, symbolic of his ever-presence. We believe in Him on faith and faith alone. And those who lost faith fell with Lucifer.

Azael continues to shake his head. “Impossible. It’s simply impossible!”

“Nothing’s impossible, Azael. And, apparently, this is no exception.” Gus opens his notebook again and flips through several pages loudly. “There were tests run, and they found a hole in our… security.”

“The Hell hounds?” Azael asks.

“Killed. Every security measure we took was dismantled in a matter of minutes,” Gus answers.

“And when did this happen?” I interrupt, walking up the steps of the altar.

“Seven months ago.”

“Seven
months
ago?” I curl my fingers into a tight fist at my side.
We’ve been lied to for seven months?

Azael jolts forward out of the chair and slams his hand forcefully on the altar, extinguishing a few more candles. “And why weren’t we told?”

Gus sighs impatiently. “It was on a need-to-know basis.”

“And you didn’t think
we
needed to know?” I feel my voice rising like the bloody mercury of a thermometer in August. Hot, flat anger steams in my mind.

“Seven damn months!” Azael continues. “Seven months of him training in Heaven, while we stomp around Earth running idiotic missions. Pilfering useless souls when we could have been doing something useful!” He picks the hard metal tube from his pocket and tosses it on the table.

It rolls to a stop against Gus’s notebook. He picks it up and tucks it into his own pocket, safe from Azael’s tantrum. “You two were doing what you were assigned to do. You should’ve only been doing what you were assigned to do.” He levels a gaze at Azael. “Indiana?”

Az turns away and kicks out at a small sacramental table.

“We’re beyond that now,” Gus continues. “You didn’t need to know about Michael when it happened, but now it appears that you do.” He scratches the back of his head, thinking. “There have been whispers…”

“Whispers?” I prompt.

He nods his head and continues. “Michael doesn’t remember his past. Apparently, he’s changed. Caused quite a bit of trouble in Heaven.”

Azael paces furiously behind the altar, no longer paying attention. So I push Gus further. “Trouble how?” I remember the way Ariel and Sablo regarded him at the asylum. How they cut off his questions, rested a hand on Michael too heavily.

“He’s not following blindly. He’s asking questions, and Heaven doesn’t like his particular questions,” he shrugs. “When you saw him earlier… What exactly happened?”

I sit forward on my elbows, placing the heel of my hand under my chin. “We were reaping some souls—,”

“
I
was reaping some souls,” Az cuts me off.

“—and he landed in a tree with me. He looked young, really young, but he said he was seventeen.”

“You spoke to him?”

“Of course I did. I wasn’t just going to just stand there. He had the sword with him—the archangel sword,” I clarify. “I don’t think he knows how to use it.”

“He doesn’t!” Azael interjects again, still pacing.

“Ariel and Sablo made a brief appearance,” I add.

Gus nods knowingly. “They wouldn’t send him alone to reap that many souls.”

Azael throws his hands into the air. “Apparently not.”

Neither of us acknowledge him. “He didn’t seem to remember us,” I continue. “And his reaction about the souls was strange, too calm for a new angel. When Ariel and Sablo left, though, he said, and I’m paraphrasing this, ‘You’ll be sorry.’” I waggle my fingers menacingly.

“And that’s it?”

“That’s it. He just left.” I shrug.

“He shouldn’t be much of a threat until they retrain him. That is,
if
they can retrain him. From what I hear, he’s stubborn.”

“That’s what I told her,” Azael calls over his shoulder. “Not. A. Threat.”

I look over at him but ignore his comment. I brush a strand of fallen hair behind my ear and turn back to Gus. “There’s more.”

Gus raises his eyebrows. “Oh?”

I bite my lip. “About the souls we reaped…”

“
I
reaped,” Azael corrects again. He paces faster, and I’m sure he’ll burn a hole through the ground.

I wave away his comment dismissively. “Remember how you were teaching me reanimation for the purpose of collecting memories?”

“Of course. Have you gotten much practice?”

“Only once,” I say, swallowing past a dry lump in my throat. “Things didn’t go exactly as planned.”

Azael strides up next to me, still agitated, and crosses his arms firmly. “Understatement of the year. I’d say century, but hey, it’s early.”

“What exactly happened?” Gus flips open his notebook to a blank page and looks at me questioningly. “Could you access the memory?”

“I—well, I did the spell as you said. Blood, the feathers of a crow, grave dirt, soul.”

“And the enchantment?”

“It worked, just like you said. A long hallway with hundreds of doors lining the wall. Only, the first dozen doors we tried…” He scribbles in his notebook as I speak. “Well, they were empty.”

His pen freezes and he stares at me, perplexed. “Empty?”

“Empty,” Azael answers. “Adjective, from the Old English word aemettig. Two syllables. Meaning unoccupied, uninhabited, bare, desolate, clear, free, vacant. Used in a sentence: ‘My, those rooms were more empty than an alcoholic’s bottle of whiskey.’”

I take a deep breath before going on. “They were completely blank. White walls, white floor, bright ceiling. Until this one door.”

He nods at me to continue.

“The handle was locked, and Azael,” I gesture next to me, “kicked it in. The room was pitch dark when we went inside and seemed like it would also be empty. Dark this time, but still empty. Except my pendant started vibrating.”

Gus makes a quick note. “Yes, demonic activity.”

“Right. So, the pendants were vibrating, and then it sounded like the walls were too. And then, the blackness was gone. There were giant clay cliffs with two huge ravines of boiling blood. But it was still empty. We were the only two there.” I shake my head. “It didn’t feel like a memory, exactly. Nothing like the ones I had practiced with. It felt like, well, like something was missing, and this need, this primitive desire and pain, replaced whatever was there.”

Gus’s eyebrows knot together. He presses his lips into a tight, thin line but doesn’t say anything.

“And then I kind of, um, blacked out, I guess,” I stammer.

Azael snorts. “And by ‘blacked out’ she means kicked the shit out of me.” He points to a swollen green bruise on his jaw. “I just touched her shoulder and she cracked me across my face, broke my ribs with her bony knee, and then shattered my kneecap with those damn boots of hers.”

“Maybe she finally realized how irritating you are,” Gus jeers.

“Nonsense. And besides, I can take a beating. What I don’t like is being bitten into like I’m freaking Bella Swan and my immortality fantasy is finally coming to fruition. I’m no damn vampire-fetishist.”

Gus’s eyes widen and he looks over at me. “You
bit
him?”

“No comment about the exquisite execution of a pop-culture reference, Gus? Come on,” Azael goads him, “I know you’re a
Twilight
fan.”

“Will you stop talking for five seconds?!” Gus snaps. He turns his attention back to me. “You bit him?”

“I—I don’t remember,” I say, looking down at the altar. “All I can remember is standing by the ravine and then, next thing I know, I’m lying on my side with a huge welt on the back of my head and my mouth dripping with his blood.”

“Yeah and I had a huge jagged tear in my shoulder from her teeth.”

“I don’t remember biting him, I swear. I just—”

“Lost yourself,” Gus finishes. “The empty memories, the overthrow of your senses, the lust for blood.” He nods, humorless. “I’ve read about this before.”

I push more fallen locks of my hair behind my ear and peer up at Gus.

“You have?” Azael and I ask at the same time.