There But For The Grace (11 page)

“Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me. Just because the necklace will help, doesn’t make you immune to the intelligence of some of Hell’s inhabitants. If you get caught, protecting your hands from the rocks will be the least of your worries.”

“Still, it’s one less thing to worry about, and I appreciate it.”

“Tell yourself that when they’re raping you, or cutting you up. You seem like a good one, as far as humans go. I fucked up and fell from His Grace. When you’re down there, you’re hidden from His Grace completely. I’d rather not have it on my conscience if you’re caught, but you’re right. Tabbris is right… you as well as any other human have a full right to choose. Just do me another favor, choose wisely.”

I had the impression that I had done more of a favor than I’d realized by giving him a drink from the canteen, but there was seriously no going back. Not if it meant leaving Tab down there to rot after everything he’d done for me. No. Fuck that.

I went back downstairs and found Azrael waiting in the lobby, still spectacularly intimidating in his deathbed-out form.

“How is he?” he asked, and I sighed.

“Miserable, heartbreaking, bleak…”

“So the same as ever, I see.”

“Yeah, I guess. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. He chooses to be so. It was the basis of his Fall. His jealousy of mortal’s right to choose. So God gave him that choice. Cahethel didn’t understand what that entailed, to be outside our Father’s Grace and favor.”

“Be careful what you wish for,” I said thoughtfully.

“Indeed.” Azrael considered me for a long time and once again, I looked Death in the eye.

“Where to next?”

“So you are not deterred?”

“Not one damn bit.”

“Interesting. You have a will to match those fierce blue eyes.” He held out a hand to me, and I took it.

“Thanks,” I acknowledged.

“It wasn’t a compliment, merely an observation.”

“Sorry.”

“Again, don’t be.”

“So where to?”

“Chicago. Are you ready?”

“As I’ll ever be.”

And with that, the lightshow and disorientation took over, and we blinked out of Houston’s existence.

Yee-haw.

***

“At least you are keeping your supper where it belongs. That is somewhat improved, is it not?”

I waved Azrael off as he hovered near me at an apparent loss as to how to help. I was fighting like hell to keep the contents of my stomach in my stomach, knowing now how important it was that I stay nourished. If I threw it up, I was just going to have to replace it, and that took time. Time that I felt was running out. It’d been a minute since I’d taken a shot at praying to Tab, but I did it now, feeling a little guilty for not having done it sooner.

Tab, just hang on,
I prayed.
I’m one step closer to getting to you, and I’m about to take one more. These fuckers are slow. It’s more red tape than a bureaucrats’ convention.

Azrael chuckled, and I eyed him from my graceless ‘trying not to heave’ position.

“It’s rude to eavesdrop, you know.”

I’d opened my mouth to say it, and they were my words, but it wasn’t my voice. I turned to look, and there she was, swinging gently back and forth on a dilapidated playground swing set. The neighborhood we were in was squarely in the midst of the ‘hood. No one should be out here this time of night. I blinked, stunned, and tried to figure out if this was one of Iaoel’s visions. The voice belonged to a little girl, and I do mean
little.
She couldn’t have been more than five or six. The image was even more wrong, more bizarre, by the fact that she wore a light Regency-style dress, ivory in color with a pink inset. Her long blonde hair fell past her waist, and she kicked her little slippered feet back and forth. A stuffed barn owl, looking a little worse for wear, perched in her lap, one glass eye fixed and staring, the other missing, a piece of broken thread dangling out of the missing expanse of white fur where it’d been affixed.

I straightened and stared, speechless for once. The girl looked me over, amused as a spate of gunfire left me ducking for cover in a place where there was none to be had. Azrael sighed, and when both she and he seemed unconcerned, I stood back up, slowly.

“A gang war? Really, Miri?”

I blinked and looked from Azrael to the little girl.

“Wait,
she’s
War?” I asked.

“Chayyliel, technically, but you can call me Miri. Much less complicated.”

I stared at her. She looked like a child, but the age and wisdom in her ice-blue eyes belied anything childlike at all. She got up, hopping down from the swing. Little stuffed owl under one arm, she went to Azrael and took his hand. She looked me up and down and cocked her head to one side, and the effect was more terrifying than any Hollywood attempt at creepiness, including the little girl from Poltergeist.

I moved over to the swing set and sank into the one next to the swing she’d vacated, knees suddenly gone to jelly, and also, so I could be more on her level. We stared at one another in silence and finally she looked up at Azrael and said, “She wasn’t at all what I was expecting.”

I couldn’t help it. I barked out a laugh, which died right the fuck out when her eyes slid to mine, pinning me.

“How did you even know I was coming?” I asked.

She raised one tiny, slim shoulder in a shrug and answered simply, “We’re linked, the four of us. For the most part we keep those connections closed down and respect one another’s privacy, but Azrael and I, we’ve no need to. It’s how we know where each other are, for when the time comes.”

“Makes sense,” I said and quietly mulled things over, “So you know why I’m here already, then?”

“Yes, but I want a milkshake.” She swung Azrael’s hand back and forth like any child asking for ice cream would, and I felt the hair stand up on the back of my neck. “You have questions, and I will answer them, but only if I get a milkshake. Besides, I’m nearly done here.” She looked off to the side and I followed her gaze. A boy no older than twelve or thirteen materialized in the dark, running full tilt in our direction. A tricked-out 1980s or 1990s Caprice, complete with ridiculous rims and sparkly paintjob pulled up, and a gun materialized out the passenger window. Before I could draw breath to shout, to warn the kid, the gun lit up with muzzle flash, and the kid arched forward, spine bowing as he took two hits to the back.

He fell forward, and Death bowed his head and looked away, even as I fixed my gaze on Miri. She looked solemn as well and raised her eyes to mine.

“And now you know why I look the way I do. It is a reminder, for who else suffers most the cost of war, but the children?”

I blinked and decided right then that I liked Miri, which was unnerving in its own right, but fuck, I’d encountered a lot of weird and unnerving shit up to this point and was straight up volunteering to go on a one-woman suicide mission to
Hell
. I’d surpassed my quota of fucked-up a long time ago. I didn’t have time to let my mind balk at anything.
Adapt or die. Don’t ask questions.

If Tab had taught me anything, if I had enough patience, kept my mouth shut and paid attention, most if any questions I had would be answered before I even had any need to voice them. For instance,
why the fuck did War feel the need to look like a six-year-old girl?
Question answered, and I hadn’t even had to ask.

I did ask one question now though, “Where the hell we going to get a milkshake at this time of night?”

Miri’s face lit up into a smile of delight, and she looked up at Azrael, who chuckled, “The usual place it is then, Miri dear.” It didn’t feel like he’d read her mind. More like they just spent that much time together.

I fell into step beside them and asked another question, “What time is it anyways?”

“Does it matter?” Miri asked.

“Not really, it’s just disorienting, is all.”

“Mm,” was her non-committal reply. We walked in silence through dark neighborhoods, and it struck me: there were no sirens. The kid lay in the park, two bullets in his back, and no one had called the cops. Jesus.

“Shouldn’t we call someone?” I asked, looking back over my shoulder.

“He is gone,” Azrael said, “And it simply won’t be handled even if you do, not until daylight.”

“It is the way of urban warfare,” Miri said softly and she took my hand. I startled, and she smiled brightly up at me, all childlike and innocent. I didn’t know how to feel about that, but I wasn’t about to upset War by taking my hand back. So I walked with Death, hand in hand with War, and even though I should have been seriously weirded out by that, I wasn’t.

Who knows, maybe it was because I knew I was dying and that knowledge was like taking a major dose of fuck-it-all. In any respect, we had to walk around twenty blocks before we hit a part of the city that showed any kind of life. We passed under a street light that hadn’t been shot out. The first time my booted feet hadn’t crunched across glass and Azrael and I hadn’t had to lift Miri between us like any other six-year-old that squealed in glee between their parents as they swung them in a parking lot. I couldn’t help it: her high giggles had made me smile and may even have warmed Iaoel to a certain extent.

I had to admit my nervousness: Iaoel seemed to be fairly confident, which told me it was because the treacherous bitch had high hopes that Miri was going to let me down and not give her blessing for me to go into Hell. Her staunch refusal to talk about it until she had her milkshake in front of her just added to my anxiety. What better way to deliver bad news than over ice cream?

We passed through the light and into the dark, and when we slipped under the next street light, Death had transformed back into the dapper young businessman, and I realized that this incarnation or form or whatever you wanted to call it, looked like it could pass for a young father, if not Miri’s father specifically. Of course, she could always take after her mother.

Just inside the diner’s door we were greeted by a matronly black woman in a perfectly pressed waitress’s uniform. She smiled brightly at me but positively lit up when she saw Azrael and Miri.

“Miri child! It’s been a minute, Baby! Did you have another bad dream?”

Miri swung my hand back and forth in hers and exclaimed, “No, Auntie Addy just landed! We got her from the airport. Daddy said we could come get milkshakes because she’s not tired!”

“I didn’t know you had a sister, David,” the waitress exclaimed, and it was pretty fucking apparent that these two came here on the regular.

“We don’t always get along,” I explained, going with the ruse.

“Oh, you know family is so important.” She waved off what I was saying, “You can’t let things get in the way for too long. Come in; come in! Sit down. Miri, you want your strawberry?”

“Yes, please, Miss Dolores!”

I arched a brow at Azrael who simply grinned back at me as we followed Miss Dolores to a booth. She asked me, “So where are you from?”

“Uh, Seattle. I was staying in Seattle.” I figured I’d better go with what I knew, and to be honest it was almost… refreshing.

Dolores stood and made small talk with each of us until we’d been through the menu and had a chance to order. I got myself a burger, fries, and a chocolate shake. Once again, I didn’t know if, when, or how my next meal would come, so I figured better safe than sorry. At least I hadn’t had to tap into the protein bars in my pack. They did the job, but they tasted like shit. Except the peanut butter ones, and the cookies and cream ones—they weren’t half bad.

It took me a minute, my mind wandering like it was, to realize Dolores had wandered off to put our order in. I blinked, shook myself and stared across the table at Miri and Azrael.

“Speak freely, they will see and hear nothing other than family small talk,” Miri stated, and I nodded.

“I suppose you want the full meal deal on why I want down in Hell,” I said.

Miri smiled, “Actually, I just wanted a milkshake before we went. I support you and your freewill decision to try to save mankind. I agree with Azrael and with our brother rider. The time to end all things is not now. Something else is afoot.”

I sat back in the booth and blinked, a little stunned. Somehow this all felt too easy, and of course it almost was. Iaoel was spitting mad, but I think she’d expended too much energy in her last tantrum back with Famine. She didn’t go there again, and it was easy for me to shove her annoying ass back in her box for now so I could concentrate on what Miri was telling me.

“So what do you think is going on?” I asked.

“I don’t know, but I know that it will not serve any of us if it comes to pass. I believe that you must enter Hell, find Tabbris, and bring the keys out safely. They are meant to be in this world, outside the gates of both Heaven and Hell, not within either realm. I do hope that Merihim agrees.”

“Merihim?”

“Pestilence,” Azrael supplied me.

“The good news is, Merihim is inside Hell, so you will be getting your wish, Adelaide. You will have to enter Hell to get her take on things. It is only she who will be able to help you find Tabbris anyways.”

“Now I’m really worried,” I muttered.

“Oh?” Miri looked enchanted with me, as if I had done a particularly interesting trick.

“This has been really too easy. It’s like you guys
want
me to go to Hell, and you’re just checking to make sure I’m really sure, which is ridiculous, by the way. I’m going, I’m getting him out. There isn’t any having to convince me, and there isn’t going to be any me punking out on him. I owe him too much for that. So what’s the real deal here?”

We had to wait for Dolores to bring our milkshakes and set them down before us. There was more pleasant small talk before she went to get my burger and fries, and we waited for her. Once she’d left us to it, Miri spoke.

“You’re very astute, Adelaide.”

“That doesn’t sound like a compliment,” I said unhappily.