Seven Archangels: Annihilation (38 page)

Uriel said, "God removed the knowledge from him."

Ophaniel flinched. "War really does require extreme measures."

Saraquael fought a laugh. Only from a Cherub...

Uriel said, "God allowed it. I transplanted Camael's memories with some of Remiel's so he'll think he was there when it happened."

Ophaniel sighed. "I suppose that's for the best, no matter how repulsive. Everything would have been undone the instant he said Gabriel stopped Remiel from annihilating him."

Shock from Uriel, who then said, "He saw Gabriel?"

Chapter Twenty-Three

Lucifer brought Camael directly into the lab area along with all the others except for Mephistopheles, who signed them in at the front gate. Lucifer sat Camael on a stool and paced his office, noting as he did the positions of the Maskim. Asmodeus and Belior sat or stood to Camael's left, and in the far right corner was Beelzebub. After a moment, Mephistopheles requested admittance. Lucifer flashed him into the room, but not near Beelzebub. As he suspected, within seconds Mephistopheles had moved closer to him.

Politically speaking, he'd stabilized the situation, even if it meant having to endure a Cherub-Seraph bond in a "honeymoon" phase again. Which reminded him—

"Mephistopheles and Beelzebub," he said, "what was wrong with the two of you up there? You were chattering like a pair of adolescent monkeys."

"We weren't," Beelzebub said.

"It was constant," Lucifer said. "
I know you didn't mean it
and
I'm glad you see why I was so upset
and
You only wanted what was best
—what was that about?"

Mephistopheles said, "That was all through the bond. No one should have been able to hear it."

Lucifer huffed. "But I did, didn't I?"

Belior blurted, "How could you hear into their bond?"

Even Lucifer could feel the blistering hatred Belior sent toward Mephistopheles, and Beelzebub confirmed it by saying, "What are you hinting at?"

"I'm implying that someone is engaging in the world's oldest profession."

"Let me settle this," Lucifer said. "If bonding with Mephistopheles guaranteed that I could annihilate God, I would do it. Short of that, not a chance."

"Rest assured, I'm fine with that," Mephistopheles said.

Belior said, "Then how can you hear into their bond?"

Lucifer felt Mephistopheles send,
Can you really hear me?

"Of course I can," he snapped.

Beelzebub shimmered with nerves.

Belior said, "Bonds are private. You can't tap them. That's part of the point." More hatred and jealousy from the other Cherub.

Mephistopheles said, "Therefore you may put your mind at ease. Our enemies weren't at all inconvenienced by anything that went between us."

"All the same," Lucifer said, "when you're working for me, I expect you to be working for me, not carrying on extra conversations."

"I can do two things at once," Beelzebub said.

"That's what we tell drivers with cell phones, but it's not good enough for me."

Lucifer could sense Mephistopheles attacking the problem from five directions at the same time, expanding into Beelzebub's intelligence to use his energy too, creating hypotheses and striking them down in almost the same moment, swirling the evidence together with the possibilities and weaving them, testing them, challenging the ones that survived the first round and then modifying those.

Interesting.
He'd never watched a Cherub solve a problem from the inside. The process had never struck him as important, only the results. And it did leave him curious, too, why he could feel their bond and no other, so he left Mephistopheles to wrap himself in the question.

"Now for you." He turned to Camael. "How did you get captured?"

"Raphael. He was enraged. Wanted revenge."

"That answers one question," Lucifer said, but Mephistopheles was so engaged that he didn't even register it. "But Raphael also seems to have been replaced on the Seven." He frowned again at Camael. "When they questioned you, what did they ask?" He paused. "Don't hedge. If you told them how to annihilate, say so."

"They didn't ask how it was done. They asked about afterward, though, and some process. How many were in the room, what response we expected, our next move. They were really interested in Mephistopheles."

The same could not be said for Mephistopheles, who hadn't registered his own name.

Belior said, "I suppose someone ought to be."

"Stay civil," Beelzebub said, "or I'll help you remember your manners."

"Not on my watch," said Asmodeus.

"Settle down," Lucifer said. "Camael, go on."

"There wasn't much else. They kept me enclosed but not chained, and they gave me pretty much anything I demanded." He tensed. "But Remiel—she's gone crazy."

Asmodeus chuckled. "I saw her. She was slicing her arm while talking to herself, and then she attacked Saraquael. He had to hit her with lightning to stop her."

Beelzebub said, "That must have been fun to watch."

"You could ask your Cherub sometime."

"To move along," Lucifer said, "Remiel seems to be fully recovered, if irritating."

"You might want to know...." Camael trailed off, and then his voice returned shakily. "She came through the Guards on my room and tried to annihilate me."

Shock rolled around the room. Even Mephistopheles was paying attention now.

"I swear on my own blood," Camael said, "she reached into my soul and grabbed the heartstrings."

Lucifer said, "Mephistopheles? Why do you find that so distressing?" The Cherub was all but radiating fear, and Beelzebub felt confused. "Do you have something to tell us?"

"You're lying," Mephistopheles said. "No one else knows how to do it."

"She grabbed my soul," Camael said, "and I swear on my own blood, she started disassembling me."

Beelzebub said, "What, did Jesus come and save you?"

"Actually, yes," Camael said, "but that's not the worst of it. Remiel was clearly nuts. She grabbed my heartstrings, and I swear this, Gabriel appeared to stop her."

Four cries of surprise. "No way!" Beelzebub said. "He's destroyed! I saw it!"

Asmodeus shouted, "You four swore he'd been annihilated!"

"Quiet!" Lucifer said. "Camael, go on. What happened next?"

"He couldn't do anything. He tried to get between us, and really he looked so filmy I didn't recognize him at first. She swatted him away and attacked me."

Complete silence took on its own sound-form in the next moment.

Lucifer said, "Remiel wasn't surprised when he showed up? She swatted him away?"

Mephistopheles didn't give Camael a chance to reply. "What did he look like? Did he feel like Gabriel?"

"He was much greyer than before, misty at the edges. She tossed him off like nothing." Camael paused. "He didn't feel like anything to me, but I wasn't checking him out."

Again silence. This made no sense—Remiel should have reacted to Gabriel's return. With joy, with terror—with
something
other than only irritation at the inconvenience of having to remove him from the scene of the crime. And how did she know the process? Unless the link with Camael wasn't as unidirectional as they'd thought.

Lucifer noted how Mephistopheles was not engaging this new problem with the same fervor as the previous one. In fact, he seemed to be avoiding it.

"You mean, there's something
after
this?" Beelzebub whispered.

In the same tone, Mephistopheles said, "I hope not." His voice and Beelzebub's were coming from almost the same spot now.

Lucifer said, "Are you sure it was Gabriel? There are half a trillion angels."

Camael assented.

Belior said, "When she attacked your heartstrings, or however she did it, are you sure you didn't hallucinate?"

Asmodeus laughed. "Maybe you dreamed it all."

Beelzebub said, "You were thinking of Gabriel because he's the one we annihilated, and you were upset."

Mephistopheles said, "Be reasonable. He said Remiel responded to Gabriel. They weren't both hallucinating."

Belior said, "He could have hallucinated her response."

"We could all be hallucinating this conversation, too, but that's hardly worth discussing."

Lucifer paced. He realized both bonded pairs were standing next to each other, and it made his skin crawl. He could feel Mephistopheles calming Beelzebub, drawing off his fire and replacing it with whatever it was that kept Cherubim so unreasonably logical during a crisis. Mephistopheles still wasn't fully engaged with Remiel annihilating anyone or Gabriel returning to stop her. His brain still played with the other question, the spy-hole in their bond.

Lucifer said, "When you were rescued, what did
he
do?"

There was no mistaking the inflection on the pronoun. Camael said, "
He
appeared, and Remiel collapsed in his arms."

"And what did he do with Gabriel?"

Mephistopheles gasped.

Camael said, "He—he didn't do anything to Gabriel. And Gabriel didn't interact with him either."

Asmodeus said, "Gabriel's back! You didn't get all of him!"

"Don't be ridiculous," Mephistopheles said. "We got all there was."

Lucifer said, "Let's be thorough about this. What happened after?"

"He looked at me too, and he put me under the same way he did Remiel."

Revolting development, that. "In theory, he might have interacted with Gabriel afterward."

Camael assented. "When I awoke, the whole room was different. It was subtle, but things had been moved, and there was power soaked into the walls. Even the windows felt 'fixed'."

"The enemy searched for traces of Gabriel," Lucifer said. "They must have taken apart your prison."

Mephistopheles said, "But what did Camael see? If Gabriel isn't really destroyed, then he'd have made contact. If he was destroyed, then he couldn't have."

Lucifer said, "How about a transitory state, between being and nonbeing?"

Mephistopheles had that flat Cherub intonation again. "There is nothing else."

"You know as well as I do that God changes the rules when He doesn't like what we've won. No one can get out of Sheol; then His Son dies and voila, people can get out of Sheol. There might not have been another mode of existence until Gabriel died, but maybe now there is."

A long quiet permeated the room.

Belior said, "But if Gabriel were there, wouldn't
he
have responded to him?"

Beelzebub said, "That means Gabriel wasn't there. Camael had to have been hallucinating."

Mephistopheles sighed. "We've already established that Camael didn't witness the entire scene."

"Shut up!" Beelzebub said. "There couldn't have been anything there!"

"Are you scared?" Mephistopheles sounded as if he were grinning ear to ear. "Maybe he's in the room with us
right now!
"

A second's scuffle in the dark. Lucifer felt Mephistopheles laugh through the bond, then pull off the fire he'd just spiked up in Beelzebub, empowering himself and leaving the Seraph just as energized as he'd been before. The Cherub's soul sparkled.

Lucifer checked Camael over again in his mind, challenged him and found him whole and not Remiel, but bearing the slight distortion in his thoughts similar to that in their test subjects when he'd practiced grabbing heartstrings. Belior and Asmodeus he ignored for now; they had nothing to offer.

How to defend against something that might not even be alive any longer?

Well, that was why he had Cherubim, wasn't it? "Belior, conscript three Cherubim of your choice and devise a defense against Gabriel if he still has some sort of existence. Do it by tomorrow."

Asmodeus said, "And at the same time, why not tell him to take two more Cherubim and devise a means to extinguish the Lake of Fire and eradicate God? You can't be serious!"

"Asmodeus, you will implement this defense as soon as Belior develops it, using whatever of the armed forces you require." Lucifer turned to Mephistopheles. "Your thoughts about why I can feel your bond?"

Mephistopheles monotoned, "Gabriel detonated all over you. I must have been spattered as well, and because you're a Seraph and he was a Cherub, his substance is responding to both of us."

Belior huffed. "Then why can't Camael sense you?"

A pause, and then Mephistopheles said, "Have we established that he can't?"

Camael said, "I can't…but I think I did. Back when you told me… something. I don't remember. But I remember realizing I could sense your bond when I couldn't before."

"You were down, crouched with your wings tucked." Mephistopheles didn't sound concerned. "With far less surface area, I'm sure you absorbed less of his substance, and therefore the effect wore off sooner."

Lucifer said, "If this is true, then how long—"

"—soon. I'm surprised his substance would have persisted this long. The beadlet we found after twenty-four hours was nearly dissipated, but there was a lot of him."

Lucifer knew one question it always paid to ask a Cherub: "How confident are you of this theory?"

"I can't test it," Mephistopheles said, "but it fits."

"Belior?"

"I can't comment. It makes some sense."

The lack of criticism meant as much as a standing ovation, considering the source. Lucifer said, "Very well, then. Mephistopheles, you have your previous assignment to finish. Get to work."

Lucifer forced out everyone except Camael.

"Sir?" said the Irin.

"Were you calling Remiel prior to her attack?"

He assented.

"Had you spoken to her prior to the attack?"

Again assent.

"Are you aware that once she realizes you can influence her, your usefulness is limited?"

A feeling of dread from Camael confirmed he'd revealed their link.

"You were trying to win her?"

Defeated, Camael assented again.

Why God liked to do things in pairs Lucifer would never understand. Angels functioned perfectly fine alone, but these inexorable pairings simultaneously increased and decreased their usefulness. Split Irin, depressed Cherubim, defensive Seraphim...it was too bad he hadn't convinced any Thrones to join him. They were reclusive, and if he could have brought onboard even one of them, he could have fired the rest of the Maskim.