Kristina Douglas - The Fallen 1 - Raziel (2 page)

Maybe sometime I’d be able to support myself with my writing and not have to deal with temp jobs. Snarky mysteries set on debunking the Judeo-Christian Old Testament weren’t high on the public’s interest meter, the occasional blockbuster Vatican thril er aside. For now, I had no choice but to supplement my meager income, making my weekends even more precious.

“Shouldn’t you be heading out, Al ie?” Elena, my overworked supervisor, glanced over at me. “You won’t have time to get to the bank if you don’t leave now.”

Crap. Two months and already Elena had pegged me as someone chronical y late. “I won’t be back,” I cal ed out as I hobbled toward the elevator. Elena waved absently good-bye, and moments later I was alone in the elevator, starting the sixty-three-floor descent.

I could risk taking off my shoes, just for a few moments of blessed relief, but with my luck someone would immediately join me and I’d have to shove them back on again. I leaned against the wal , trying to shift my weight from one foot to the other. Great legs, I reminded myself.

Out the sixty-third-floor windows, the sun had been shining brightly. The moment I moved through the lobby’s automatic door to the sidewalk, I heard a loud crash of thunder, and I looked up to see dark clouds churning overhead. The storm seemed to have come out of nowhere.

It was a cool October afternoon, with Hal oween only a few days off. The sidewalks were busy as usual, and the bank was across the street. I could always walk and eat a hot dog at the same time, I thought, heading over to the luncheon cart. I’d done it often enough.

With my luck there had to be a line. I bounced nervously, shifting my weight, and the man in front of me turned around.

I’d lived in New York long enough to make it a habit not to look at people on the street. Here in mid-town, most of the women were tal er, thinner, and better dressed than I was, and I didn’t like feeling inadequate. I never made eye contact with anyone, not even with Harvey the hot-dog man, who’d served me daily for the last two months.

So why was I looking up, way up, into a pair of eyes that were . . .

God, what color were they? A strange shade between black and gray, shot with striations of light so that they almost looked silver. I was probably making a fool of myself, but I couldn’t help it. Never in my life had I seen eyes that color, though that shouldn’t surprise me since I avoided looking in the first place.

But even more astonishing, those eyes were watching me thoughtful y. Beautiful eyes in a beautiful face, I realized belatedly. I didn’t like men who were too attractive, and that term was mild when it came to the man looking down at me, despite my four-inch heels.

He was almost angelical y handsome, with his high cheekbones, his aquiline nose, his streaked brown and golden hair. It was precisely the tawny shade I’d tried to get my colorist to replicate, and she’d always fal en woeful y short.

“Who does your hair?” I blurted out, trying to startle him out of his abstraction.

“I am as God made me,” he said, and his voice was as beautiful as his face. Low-pitched and musical, the kind of voice to seduce a saint. “With a few modifications,” he added, with a twist of dark humor I couldn’t understand.

His gorgeous hair was too long—I hated long hair on men. On him it looked perfect, as did the dark leather jacket, the black jeans, the dark shirt.

Not proper city wear, I thought, trying to summon up disapproval and failing because he looked so damned good. “Since you don’t seem in any kind of hurry and I am, do you suppose you could let me go ahead of you?”

There was another crash of thunder, echoing through the cement and steel canyons around us, and I flinched. Thunderstorms in the city made me nervous—they seemed so
there
. It always seemed like the lightning snaking down between the high buildings would find me an easier target. The man didn’t even blink. He glanced across the street, as if calculating something.

“It’s almost three o’clock,” he said. “If you want your deposit to go in today, you’l need to skip that hot dog.”

I froze. “What deposit?” I demanded, completely paranoid. God, what was I doing holding a conversation with a strange man? I should never have paid any attention to him. I could have lived without the hot dog.

“You’re holding a bank deposit bag,” he said mildly.

Oh. Yeah. I laughed nervously. I should have been ashamed of my paranoia, but for some reason it hadn’t even begun to dissipate. I al owed myself another furtive glance up at the stranger.

To hel with the hot dog—my best bet was to get away from this too-attractive stranger, drop off the deposit, and hope to God I could find a taxi to get me across town to my meeting. I was already ten minutes late.

He was stil watching me. “You’re right,” I said. Another crash of thunder, and the clouds opened up.

And I was wearing a red silk suit that I couldn’t real y afford, even on clearance from Saks. Vanity again. Without a backward glance, I stepped out into the street, which was momentarily free of traffic.

It happened in slow motion, it happened in the blink of an eye.

One of my high heels snapped, my ankle twisted, and the sudden rain was turning the garbage on the street into a river of filth. I slipped, going down on one knee, and I could feel my stockings shred, my skirt rip, my careful y arranged hair plastered limp and wet around my ears.

I looked up, and there it was, a crosstown bus ready to smack into me. Another crack of thunder, the bright white sizzle of lightning, and everything went calm and stil . Just for a moment.

And then it was a blur of noise and action. I could hear people screaming, and to my astonishment money was floating through the air like autumn leaves, swirling downward in the heavy rain. The bus had come to a stop, slanted across the street, and horns were honking, people were cursing, and in the distance I could hear the scream of sirens. Pretty damned fast response for New York, I thought absently.

The man was standing beside me, the beautiful one from the hot-dog stand. He was just finishing a chili dog, entirely at ease, and I remembered I was famished. If I was going to get held up by a bus accident, I might as wel get a chili dog. But for some reason, I didn’t want to turn around.

“What happened?” I asked him. He was tal enough to see over the crowds of people clustered around the front of the bus. “Did someone get hurt?”

“Yes,” he said in that rich, luscious voice. “Someone was kil ed.”

I started toward the crowd, curious, but he caught my arm. “You don’t want to go there,” he said. “There’s no need to go through that.”

Go through what?
I thought, annoyed, staring at the crowd. I glanced back up at the stranger, and I had the odd feeling that he’d gotten tal er. I suddenly realized my feet didn’t hurt anymore, and I looked down. It was an odd, disorienting sensation. I was barefoot, and if I didn’t know it was impossible, I would have said there was thick green grass beneath my feet.

I glanced back up at the rain-drenched accident scene in front of me, and time seemed to have moved in an odd, erratic shift. The ambulance had arrived, as wel as the police, and people were being herded out of the way. I thought I caught a glimpse of the victim—just the brief sight of
my
leg, wearing
my
shoe, the heel broken off.

“No,” said the man beside me, and he put a hand on my arm before I could move away.

The bright light was blinding, dazzling, and I was in a tunnel, light whizzing past me, the only sound the whoosh of space moving at a dizzying speed.
Space Mountain,
I thought, but this was no Disney ride.

It stopped as abruptly as it had begun, and I felt sick. I was disoriented and out of breath; I looked around me, trying to get my bearings.

The man stil held my arm loosely, and I yanked it free, stumbling away from him. We were in the woods, in some sort of clearing at the base of a cliff, and it was already growing dark. The sick feeling in my stomach began to spread to the rest of my body.

I took a deep breath. Everything felt odd, as if this were a movie set. Things looked right, but everything seemed artificial, no smel s, no sensation of touch. It was al il usion. It was wrong.

I wiggled my feet, then realized I was stil barefoot. My hair hung down past my shoulders, which made no sense since I had short hair. I tugged at a strand, and saw that instead of its careful y streaked and striated color, it was brown again, the plain, ordinary brown I’d spent a fortune trying to disguise, the same plain, ordinary brown as my eyes. My clothes were different as wel , and the change wasn’t for the better. Baggy, shapeless, colorless, they were as unprepossessing as a shroud.

I fought my way through the mists of confusion—my mind felt as if it were fil ed with cotton candy. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong.

“Don’t struggle,” the man beside me said in a remote voice. “It only makes it worse. If you’ve lived a good life, you have nothing to be afraid of.”

I looked at him in horror. Lightning split open the sky, fol owed by thunder that shook the earth. The solid rock face in front of us began to groan, a deep, rending sound that echoed to the heavens. It started to crack apart, and I remembered something from Christian theology about stones moving and Christ rising from the dead. The only problem was that I was Jewish, as my fundamentalist Christian mother had been for most of her life, and I was nonobservant at that.

I didn’t think rising from the dead was what was going on here.

“The bus,” I said flatly. “I got hit by the bus. I’m dead, aren’t I?”

“Yes.”

I control ed my instinctive flinch. Clearly he didn’t believe in cushioning blows. “And who does that make you? Mr. Jordan?”

He looked blank, and I stared at him. “You’re an angel,” I clarified.

“One who’s made a mistake. You know, like in the movie? I shouldn’t be dead.”

“There is no mistake,” he said, and took my arm again.

I sure as hel wasn’t going quietly. “Are you an angel?” I demanded. He didn’t feel like one. He felt like a man, a distinctly real man, and why the hel was I suddenly feeling alert, alive, aroused, when according to him I was dead?

His eyes were oblique, half-closed. “Among other things.”

Kicking him in the shin and running like hel seemed an excel ent plan, but I was barefoot and my body wasn’t feeling cooperative. As angry and desperate as I was, I stil seemed to want him to touch me, even when I knew he had nothing good in mind. Angels didn’t have sex, did they? They didn’t even have sexual organs, according to the movie
Dogma
. I found myself glancing at his crotch, then quickly pul ed my gaze away. What the hel was I doing checking out an angel’s package when I was about to die?

Oh, yeah, I’d forgotten—I was already dead. And al my wil seemed to have vanished. He drew me toward the crack in the wal , and I knew with sudden clarity it would close behind me like something out of a cheesy movie, leaving no trace that I’d ever lived.

Once I went through, it would al be over.

“This is as far as I go,” he said, his rich, warm voice like music.

And with a gentle tug on my arm, he propel ed me forward, pushing me into the chasm.

T
HE WOMAN WAS FIGHTING ME. I could feel resistance in her arm, something I couldn’t remember feeling before in any of the countless people I’d brought on this journey. She was strong, this one. But Uriel, the ruler of al the heavens, was infal ible, or so he had managed to convince just about everyone, so this couldn’t be a mistake, no matter what it felt like.

She was just like so many others I had brought here. People stripped of their artifice, shocked and needy, while I herded them on to their next life like a shepherd of old, not wasting much thought on the entire process. These humans were simply moving through the stages of existence, and it was in their nature to fight it. Just as it was my job to ease their passage and see them on their way.

But this woman was different. I knew it, whether I wanted to admit it or not. She should have been anonymous, like al the others.

Instead I stared down at her, trying to see what eluded me. She was nothing special. With her face stripped free of makeup and her hair down around her shoulders, she looked like a thousand others. The baggy clothes she now wore hid her body, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t care about women, in particular human women. I’d sworn off them for eternity, or for as long as Uriel kept me alive. This one should have been as interesting to me as a goldfish.

Instead I reacted to her as if she somehow mattered. Perhaps Azazel was right, and swearing off women and sex had been a bad idea. Celibacy was an unhealthy state for al creatures great and smal , he’d argued. It was even worse for the Fal en. Our kind need sex as much as we need blood, and I was intent on keeping away from both. And instead of things getting easier, this woman was resisting.

I paid no attention to my hunger—it had nothing to do with her, and I could ignore it as I’d been ignoring it for so long. But she was somehow able to fight back when no one else could, and that was something I couldn’t ignore.

There was no question—Al egra Watson was supposed to be here. I had stood and waited as she stepped in front of the bus, moving in to scoop her up at the moment of death and not a second before.

I never lingered. There was no need for her to suffer—her fate had been ordained and there were no last-minute reprieves. I had watched the bus smash into her, waiting just long enough to feel her life force flicker out. And then it was over.