Walking in the Midst of Fire (4 page)

Steven moved uneasily in his chair, looking out at the twinkling lights of the city.

“I’m good now,” he said. “I’m getting there . . . getting better. I’m all healed up physically.”

“You know I’m sorry for what happened,” Remy told him. “If I had known what I was asking you to do would put you in any danger I would never . . .”

“It’s cool,” Steven said. “If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be here.”

“When you wouldn’t answer my calls . . .”

“If we talked then it wouldn’t have been all right,” Steven said, downing the remaining contents of his glass. He set the empty tumbler down on the patio table and fished a pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket, tapped one out, and lit it. “I just needed some time to think about stuff,” he said, blowing a stream of smoke into the cool night air. “I needed to think about what I’d seen . . . and how it was connected to you.”

Remy listened, sensing that his friend had more to say.

“I know you’d told me stuff in the past,” Steven said with a nervous chuckle. “But I never imagined . . .”

Steven’s voice trailed off, cigarette smoldering in his hand as he stared off into space. Remy was certain that he was experiencing it all again—his nearly fatal brush with the supernatural.

“I never meant for you to be exposed to that part of my life,” Remy said. “You asked me to keep it as far from you as possible, and I thought I’d done a pretty good job until . . .”

Steven looked at him with fear in his gaze. “It’s terrifying,” he said. His hand was shaking as he brought the cigarette up to his eager lips. “The things I saw . . .” Steven finished the smoke, stamping out the remains in an ashtray on the table.

“I know,” Remy said. “I’m sorry.”

“How do you sleep?” Steven asked, pulling the stopper from the bottle and pouring another few fingers of scotch into his glass. He added some ice as an afterthought.

“I’m not sure you remember, but I’m not human,” Remy said. He quickly looked to the doorway that led onto the roof, just to be sure that Linda wasn’t there to overhear, before looking back to his friend. “This kind of thing—I’m sort of built for it.”

“And I’m not,” Steven Mulvehill said, bringing his glass to his mouth for a sip of his drink. “But now I know what’s out there . . . not just what you’ve hinted at . . . what’s
really
out there, and I’m terrified . . . terrified to have anything to do with you because it might force me to come in contact with something that, this time, would finish me off in the most horrifying way imaginable.”

“I figured as much,” Remy said, sipping what remained of his drink.

The two were silent, the sound of Marlowe’s deep snoring the soundtrack to the moment.

“So how about now?” Remy finally asked him. “Are you still scared of what’s out there? Of me?”

Steven laughed, looking at his friend.

“Fucking terrified.”

That made Remy laugh, too, and shake his head.

“I wish there was something I could say or do to take away your fear, but . . .” Remy stopped, considering his words. “But it doesn’t change the fact that those threats are out there, and now with what happened in Back Bay . . .”

“You were involved with that,” Steven stated. “How did I fucking know you were involved with that?”

“You are a police detective,” Remy said. He leaned forward in his chair and reached for the bottle.

“I was out there,” Steven suddenly stated.

“Where?” Remy asked as he poured more scotch over the dwindling ice in his glass.

“The streets around where that business was happening.”

Remy sat back. “Did you see . . .”

“More shit that I wish I could unsee,” he said.

“Why would you go anywhere near something like that if you knew . . .”

“I saw it on TV and just about shit myself,” Steven explained. “I knew it—as soon as that special news report started, I knew that it must’ve had something to do with the crazy shit that you’d gotten me involved with.”

“Still doesn’t explain why you would go out into it,” Remy said. “Especially after what you’d gone through before. I don’t get it.”

“I was afraid,” Steven said.

“Yeah, I get that, but it doesn’t tell me why—”

“The fear was eating me alive,” he interrupted. “It was all I knew. . . . I woke up with it. I had lunch with it. . . . It was with me constantly, and it liked to remind me that it was the fucking boss.”

Steven took a big long drink, almost draining his glass.

“And when I saw that business on the television I wanted to pull the curtains and hide myself away. . . . That was what the fear was telling me to do.”

Remy continued to listen, urging him on with a glance.

“But I didn’t want to listen anymore,” Steven continued. “I didn’t want to hide anymore.”

“So you went out there, out onto the streets to confront your fears? Is that what you did?”

Steven chuckled, taking another cigarette from his pack.

“Sounds pretty fucking stupid doesn’t it?” he said, starting to laugh harder.

Remy laughed, too. “It really does.”

“But that’s what I did. I put my gun in my pocket, drove as far as I could, and walked as close as I was able.”

“And did you face your fears?” Remy asked.

“I don’t know what I fucking faced,” Steven said. “It was pretty horrible . . . but I faced it, and I lived to tell about it.”

Remy raised what was left in his glass to him in a toast.

Steven lifted his empty glass in response.

Remy finished off his drink, thinking of how he was going to word his next question.

“So what now?” he asked. He decided to have something more to drink. “Are you planning on walking the mean streets looking for evil to vanquish?”

Steven smiled. “Nothing so dramatic,” he said. “I’m back at work, doing my thing, but I see things differently now.”

“How so?”

“I know what’s really out there now, waiting in the shadows, as do a lot of people, I think, since what happened at the Hermes Building.”

“They were blind, but now they see,” Remy said grimly.

“Yeah, but I at least understand what I’m seeing,” the homicide detective said.

“So, you’re good?” Remy asked. “You’re dealing with this okay?”

“As good as can be expected,” Steven said in all truthfulness. “Am I still afraid of what could be waiting for me around the next corner? You bet your ass I am, but I’ll be damned if I let the fear win.”

They again raised their glasses in a toast, both of them drinking at the same time.

“Marlowe wasn’t the only one who missed you,” Remy said casually.

“You just missed the free booze,” Steven said with a knowing nod.

“Am I that transparent?” Remy asked.

“I was blind but now I see,” he said, throwing Remy’s quote back at him. Steven was smiling and finishing his latest cigarette when . . .

“Ah!” he said, turning in his chair toward his friend.

“‘Ah’?” Remy asked. “‘Ah’ what?”

“Malatesta,” Steven said, snapping his fingers. “The guy from the Vatican . . . What was that all about?”

“Guy from the Vatican?” Remy asked. “What guy from the Vatican?”

A sick feeling swirled with the alcohol that had pooled in his belly.

“His name was Malatesta,” Steven explained. “He was waiting for me outside my apartment right after the business in Back Bay.”

“What did he want?” Remy asked cautiously.

Steven shrugged. “He wanted to know what I could tell him about you.”

“And you told him . . .”

“Everything,” Steven said, his face suddenly very serious.

Remy wasn’t quite sure how to react when his friend caved.

“I’m just fucking with you,” the detective said. “I told him that I knew you were a Boston PI, and that we’d crossed paths a few times in our chosen professions, but that was about it.”

“Did he ask you anything else?”

Steven shook his head. “He verified your office address, thanked me, and left. I figured he was on his way over to talk to you.”

“No, never saw him,” Remy said, suddenly slightly concerned, and very curious.

“I wonder what it’s all about,” Steven pondered.

“I haven’t a clue,” Remy answered.

“The Pope doesn’t know that you’re . . .” Steven made flapping movements with his hands.

It was a tricky question, and one that Remy wasn’t sure he wanted to answer in detail at the moment, so he decided to keep it simple. “No. No, he doesn’t.”

But there had been other popes in his lifetime upon this planet, and one in particular a very long time ago.

On the Outskirts of London Town
1349, During the Time of the Great Pestilence

The angel Remiel, wearing the guise of a man, sat upon the edge of the child’s cot, holding her hand.

The plague was about to claim her life, as it had her father, mother, older brother, and sister.

And he did not wish her to pass from life alone.

The child was burning with fever; the fingernails on the tiny hand that he held were black with gangrene. She thrashed on the straw-filled mattress, and he leaned in close to whisper words of comfort and ease her into the arms of death.

“Fight it no longer, sweet one,” Remiel whispered into the tiny ear inflamed with fever. “Let the sickness that has already taken your family take you, and you will no longer be alone.”

She was looking up at him now, eyes red and bleary with the intensity of the warmth radiating from her small body, mouth moving as she struggled to speak.

The angel listened intently, trying to understand. Squeezing her hand in his, he brought it to his mouth and kissed it gently, lending her some of his own strength.

“What is it, child?” Remiel asked her. “What are you trying to say?”

She was fighting to breathe, lungs clogged with congestion, the glands beneath the skin of her throat black and swollen; but despite her condition she continued to fight to get the words out.

“Where . . . ?” she wheezed.

He was about to answer her, to tell her where her force of life would soon be, joining with her family and the many others who had been taken by the plague this day, but she had not yet finished her question.

“Where’s . . . Dolly?”

Remiel did not understand what it was she asked.

“Dolly?” he repeated. “You want to know the whereabouts of Dolly?”

“Where . . . Dolly . . . ?” the small child gasped, now moving about more wildly upon her bed as if searching for somebody . . . or something.

He was holding her down, to keep her from rolling onto the cold, dirt floor, when he saw it lying crumpled in the corner, beside the hearth. A doll of straw, wearing a dress of burlap.

A dolly.

He left the child momentarily to retrieve the toy and bring it to her upon the bed.

“Is this what you were asking for?” Remiel asked, showing it to her before placing the doll in her waiting arms.

Her bloodshot eyes became wider as she took the toy, hugging it to her body, and she seemed to relax, beginning the process of giving in to the sickness that consumed her.

“That’s it,” Remiel whispered, tenderly wiping a lock of sweat-dampened hair from the child’s forehead. “You can go now that Dolly is here with you.”

She seemed to grow smaller, her body, once tense with the pain of disease and impending death, now relaxing under his watchful gaze. The child’s face grew slack, and there was a brief crackle of bluish white energy that only he could see.

Israfil, the Angel of Death, then appeared to collect the last of the child’s life energies, but the powerful angel did not acknowledge Remiel’s presence there.

The Angel of Death departed as quickly as he had come, and Remiel stood up, looking down at the shell of cooling flesh that had once housed the stuff of life. He looked about at the remains of the child’s family, their bodies in more advanced stages of decay, having passed from the world earlier. It was a house void of all life now, except for the disease and vermin that thrived upon the corpses that rested there.

Remiel let his arms drop to his sides and called forth the fire of God, allowing it to flow into his hands. The fire was hungry, eager to consume anything it was set upon. The angel walked about the tiny home gently caressing the sparse furniture and the bodies that lay putrefying in death, leaving behind the fire of Heaven to quench its insatiable hunger.

Stepping through the door, roiling fire at his back, the angel Remiel wondered how many more he would need to comfort on their way to death before the virulent plague ran its course.

The whinnying of horses distracted him from his thoughts, and the angel, clad in the clothes of a simple man, looked to see that he was now being watched.

The knights sat upon their horses, watching him with suspicious eyes. He could have easily willed himself invisible and gone on his way unhampered, but these armored soldiers, there was something about them.

Something that made him curious.

The shack behind him had become like a ball of fire, and he continued to watch the knights, their horses made nervous by the intensity of the divine flames.

“There was great sickness here,” Remiel spoke above the roar of the flames. “But I have put an end to it.”

The knights continued their silence, watching him with scrutinizing eyes.

“Is there something I can do for you, brave knights?” Remiel asked, his curiosity getting the better of him.

“Our master wishes an audience,” said one of the soldiers.

“With me?” Remiel asked. “Why would someone of obvious power wish to speak with one such as me?”

“He knows what you are, soldier of God,” said the knight, bowing his head.

The other knights followed suit in reverence to the angel.

“Will you accompany us to nearby Bohner Castle to speak with the Holy Father?” the knight asked.

“Holy Father?” Remiel repeated, curious about the title they had given their master.

“Yes, warrior of Heaven,” the knight said. “The Holy Father, Pope Tyranus of the Holy See.”

They had brought along a riderless horse, and presented it to him.

“Will you ride with us?” the knight asked him, as the other knights watched. “Or would you prefer other means in which to reach our destination?”