Seven Archangels: Annihilation (15 page)

"I believe you anticipated that," Lucifer said, "when you successfully argued we ought to single out the Cherub."

Mephistopheles' eyes glinted like hematite. "What I want to know is what happened to Raphael."

Lucifer looked over his shoulder at Mephistopheles. "The next time we take delivery on a written warning, feel free to enquire after his health."

Mephistopheles continued, "Those two had bonded so closely they were like one soul. Did he lose his mind? Did we destroy part of him too?"

"Earlier you suggested he might be upset," Lucifer said. "Why does it matter?"

Mephistopheles' wings opened as he shifted his weight. "If they lost Raphael because of Gabriel, then maybe Raphael's other primary bonds were wiped out as well—"

Lucifer folded his arms and tilted his head, a tolerant expression in his green eyes.

"—and we might have set off a chain reaction through the top two choirs. What we did was so unprecedented that we have no means of knowing what we actually accomplished."

"While this is fascinating," Lucifer said, "I don't care."

The Cherub stammered, "But—"

"If I never again see another Seraph or Cherub from that side, I'll ask you why. Until that happens, you're only making noise. Plug your brain into doing what I asked. Find a way to make this easier to do—and do it from a distance."

Mephistopheles backed one step, still clutching the letter. He vanished to Beelzebub's chamber, shaking, pulse pounding.

The Seraph focused his attention on Mephistopheles as soon as he arrived, his mouth tight and his eyes narrow. All this Mephistopheles felt nonverbally. He had no other way of knowing in the curtains of lab area darkness.

Beelzebub probed him, pushed against the Cherub's apparent fear to track it to a source. Mephistopheles shut down as much of his heart as possible, but not before Beelzebub caught a wisp of Lucifer's green eyes in his thoughts, the flatness of an idea shot down.

Mephistopheles handed him the paper and leaned against one of the walls. Focusing a glow, Beelzebub read the contents, smiled in mockery, and then crumpled the page.

Mephistopheles called the paper back to himself. "They're in shock."

Beelzebub radiated approval.

"I was wondering if maybe Raphael wasn't annihilated as well due to our destruction of Gabriel. If that happened, we could assume the destruction of  his other primaries Ophaniel and Sidriel, and the loss of Ophaniel might cause the destruction of Israfel. It could well snowball until it wiped out the top two choirs."

Beelzebub had returned to whatever he had been doing before in the dark.

"I can't fathom any other reason for them to be so vague. It's almost as if they think they don't need to tell us what we did, but maybe they don't yet comprehend themselves the full effect, nor how many others will succumb, and you can't plan an invasion if you don't even know how many soldiers you have." He smoothed the paper against his thigh with a light crinkling. "We didn't take into account the ramifications of the bond other than the fact that we were going to make Raphael miserable for a while."

He realized then that Beelzebub was still ignoring him, so he went behind him and grabbed him by the shoulder. "Will you listen to me?"

Beelzebub spun with the pull to face him. "You're so far out in left field that you're not even in the same stadium any longer." He pulled Mephistopheles closer to him. "Why do you keep going on about impossibilities?"

He felt Beelzebub putting fire into the air, but he refused to absorb it. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that when you told us how it was done, you were the brightest thing ever, just hopping about and so smug that you'd been the one to crack the safe on God's best-kept secret. But you've moped non-stop since we actually did something with it."

Mephistopheles drew breath, but no words emerged.

"What did he say to you in there that upset you so much?" Beelzebub brought up his wings so they were touching Mephistopheles', but the Cherub pulled his wings upward away from the Seraph's. "What did he do after I left?"

"After you tried to use him."

"We all used him! Or do you forget the new and different pains of Hell in the form of a five-hour planning meeting during which we weighed exactly how much each archangel was worth? And this—" He grabbed Mephistopheles' hand and forced it open, snatching away the letter and instead grasping Michael's sigil ring in two fingers. "You didn't find this on him and take it for your own usefulness?"

Mephistopheles yanked away his hand.

"We may be bonded," Beelzebub said, "but I don't need this garbage from you."

"What do you need me for? To decorate your life?"

"I don't need you at all. You came to me." Beelzebub released him and turned back to his desk. "Was that pathetic letter the only reason you had?"

Mephistopheles trembled with irritation.

"Then you can feel free to go at any time." A moment later, seductive fire spread through the room, curling around Mephistopheles and brushing against his soul with the promise of ready energy and momentary togetherness. "Unless, of course, you'd rather keep decorating my life, as you call it."

Mephistopheles vanished.

Beelzebub opened the paper again, reading it more slowly now that he was alone. After a while he frowned and said, "Mephistopheles?" but no one appeared to answer his question.

- + -

He's an idiot. He's always doing this.

It was typical, so terribly typical, and Mephistopheles shouldn't have expected any better of him after all this time, but sometimes down went his guard and then he got reminded yet again that Beelzebub wasn't really his equal, and that was all there was to it.

Mephistopheles had revisited "the scene of the crime," the suffocatingly small chamber in between four other chambers where they'd snuffed out Gabriel's light like a smoldering wick. He approached the wall and hooked his fingers into the rings, leaned his head against the stone so it rested where Gabriel's throat would have been. Gabriel was taller than Mephistopheles, although not as tall as Raphael or Lucifer, but Mephistopheles still noted that the rings were just a bit too high for Gabriel, that he must have been a little stretched as he awaited death. Beelzebub had driven the rings into the wall without regard for height. In fact, one of the arm rings was a little bit higher than the other.

No care for detail whatsoever. Typical.

Raphael in shock, maybe hemorrhaging from his heart, maybe dead. Certainly grieving. This shouldn't have happened in the natural law.

But really, if God hadn't allowed for something like this to happen, wouldn't he have put the knowledge under better lock-and-key? There were two possibilities: one that God had wanted him to do this, and the other that God hadn't but simply wasn't capable of safeguarding the knowledge enough to keep out Mephistopheles.

But why hadn't Gabriel discovered it? Every Cherub carried around the raw material for testing any hypotheses as to the formulation of a soul—and for that matter, so did every other angel. During a bored moment it was so easy just to turn to the microworkings of a soul to figure out how it functioned, to half-destroy one of the lower order demons and take notes on the way it reconstituted. The answers hadn't come easily, but with persistence and numerous bursts of inspiration, they were attainable.

And oh, the thrill when he had that breakthrough, the moment he realized, the first instant he reached inside a minor demon and felt those beads, pinched them apart and felt the string vibrant and hard beneath his spiritual hands— The thrill that had wracked his mind as he'd realized what he'd done, what it meant, how everything would change. He'd burst in on Beelzebub while he was issuing orders to one of their underlings, preened the Seraph's outer feathers until Beelzebub had turned on him, at which point Mephistopheles had flooded his heart with anticipation he couldn't contain any longer. Beelzebub had dismissed their minion, and then Mephistopheles had Guarded the office to disclose everything.

They'd planned for over an hour—was there any way they could use the technique on Lucifer himself? It was unfortunate, but there was no way. Not even if they could guarantee Asmodeus and Belior's cooperation could they be assured of keeping Lucifer still long enough to reach inside him and destroy all those delicious beads. They pondered soliciting help from Gabriel or Michael. They ran through fifty scenarios before they decided to bring the technique to Lucifer as an offering instead—but oh, the political capital that would be theirs! They'd spent another couple of hours in quiet celebration before they'd approached Lucifer together and presented the discovery.

And Lucifer had been pleased—no, he'd been ecstatic, and all of Hell walked around in relief for days while the master planned a way to unload his new weapon, lost in his own thoughts and at times even bouncing ideas off Mephistopheles as if they were bonded themselves, although of course they weren't and never would be. Asmodeus was forgotten in that week, and Beelzebub had consolidated a long roster of allies for them, especially including Camael once Mephistopheles had the flash of insight that isolated his unique contribution.

So maybe it was just the disbelief that God had allowed them to do it after all, only one which kept feeling like a weight on his wings, like something half-forgotten struggling to be recalled at all hours. Lucifer had given him a new assignment, which Mephistopheles knew if completed could make him indispensable to his lord, only he hadn't even started.

Moping, Beelzebub called it. No, he was just regrouping, nothing more. This life of the mind was hard to sustain. It needed nurturing in quiet, in isolation, if only because silence made it simpler to hear that small whisper inside. But sometimes, like now, Mephistopheles felt no inclination to listen to whispering voices.

A second presence entered the chamber, quickly identifiable as Camael.

"Why are you here?"

Camael huffed. "I should ask that of you. Or are you worried you insufficiently annihilated him?"

"I'm sure of my work," Mephistopheles said. "It's this room that's lacking. The first set of Guards is so shoddy that two first-graders and a hamster could snap it."

Camael laughed.

Mephistopheles jerked his head toward Camael, trying to contain a burst of surprise.

Cautiously he spoke. "And you?"

"I have my own orders."

Unseeable, Mephistopheles summoned his sword to his hands. Camael couldn't feel the weapon, wouldn't hear it. "I'm sure you do." He threaded a Guard of his own through the walls, allowing it to expand like oil soaking through linen. "Don't let me stop you."

Camael didn't move. "I need you out of here."

"Then you'll have to wait. What I'm doing may take days."

Mephistopheles filled the room with his senses, taking in every aspect of Camael other than sight, repeatedly probing. The twin had a slippery feel, but nothing so off as to confirm—

Mephistopheles made a show of testing the rings he'd just checked, and as he did so, Camael inspected the corners of the room, focused singularly, concentrating on the edges one spot at a time. Interesting. Mephistopheles felt his Guard finally meet itself so it covered the entire chamber, and then he said, "You know why we can't kill Remiel."

Camael said, "The wench deserves it."

Good. "She's too valuable to us as she is."

That drew Camael up short. Mephistopheles could feel that focused attention waver. No questions followed, so Mephistopheles crouched, checked the leg shackles with a deep clanking sound. "What could make you want her dead," he said, "that overrides her contribution to this venture?"

Camael's voice betrayed none of the tension Mephistopheles could drink out of the air. This was perfect, perfect. "There's just something wrong with her. Her very existence is an insult."

"What makes you say that?"

"If there weren't something wrong with her," Camael said, "she and I would be together right now."

There was no way to alert Beelzebub or Lucifer without simultaneously alerting the twin, so Mephistopheles would have to act alone.

He raised his sword and bound Remiel with his will.

Her shriek reached no further than the Guards. Mephistopheles concentrated to keep her pinned, thrashing against his patient hold until she would expend her strength.

A strobe of light from Remiel blinded Mephistopheles, but he was used to not being able to see here. He hurled her toward the wall and then wrestled her arms into the chains emptied the last time by an annihilation. They gripped her, laughing, as Mephistopheles forced her back.

"Satan will have your head if you destroy me!" Remiel screamed. "I'm too
valuable
to your operation, remember?"

Mephistopheles huffed. "We'll find another way to lure angels to their deaths."

She stopped struggling. 

Bad misjudgment there—time to redirect. "Tell me, are they going to hold a funeral for Gabriel?"

Her voice sounded stunned. "I'm wondering that myself."

Mephistopheles reached inside for her heartstrings…and missed.

Remiel's glow didn't return, keeping them entombed in sightlessness, but he could see her with his heart, feel as that slipperiness intensified, almost detect what she was telling herself:
I feel nothing.
Rushed, he made another grab, and this time he had her heartstrings in hand just long enough to realize he wouldn’t be able to grip them long enough to unlace any part of her: in denying so much she was in the process of denying herself. Hadn't Lucifer said Camael was going mad after the annihilation?

He tried to unhook the first part of her, but in fear she lashed out, and her heart slipped away.

"I'll destroy you," he said.

She had tears on her cheeks—he could smell them—but more than that, he could hear them in the way she said, "You should. I deserve it. There must be something wrong with me."

"Don't expect me to pity you." He tried for the third time, and finally he had a solid grasp on the insubstantial. She wasn't fighting. If anything, she was struggling to stay sane, giving his spiritual fingers a full purchase on her interior building blocks. He had her. Now—