Dancing on the Head of a Pin Read online

  “Stubborn prick,” Francis growled. “You’d think that after nearly an eternity in Tartarus they’d be ready to leave this evil shit behind them.”

  The mention of Hell’s prison sent an icicle of dread up and down Remy’s spine. “You heard him,” he said, approaching the spot where Eddie had fallen. “It gets inside you. It changes you, makes it so you can’t do the right thing.”

  “But some do,” Francis reminded him.

  “Yeah, some do.”

  Remy continued toward the back of the warehouse and peered into the darkness. There were more crates and some scaffolding, but nothing of any significance that he could see.

  “Wonder what they’d pay out there for my eyes,” he heard Francis say.

  Remy turned to see his friend holding the cooler. He had fished out one of the angel eyes and was looking at it. “Mine are as nice as this—maybe nicer.”

  “But you’re not pure,” Remy told him.

  “Not right now, but I’m working on it,” Francis said as he dropped the eye back into the fog created by the dry ice.

  Francis had once been one of the Lord’s most powerful Guardian angels, but even the greatest sometimes make mistakes. In the beginning, he had sided with Lucifer during the rebellion, but soon saw the error of his ways. He threw himself on the mercy of the Creator, begging his master’s forgiveness. But the Lord does not forget slights easily and forgives them even less so. Still, He gave the former Guardian angel a special job—custodian of one of the many gateways between Hell and Earth.

  Not the nicest of jobs, but better than a stint in Tartarus, and Francis made the best of it, even using some of the deadlier skills he’d learned from his time in the nether regions to become a highly paid assassin.

  Yeah, he’s working real hard on being pure.

  “I think I found something,” Remy called to his friend.

  He wasn’t sure exactly what, but he could feel the hair on his arms and at the back of his neck stand on end as he moved closer to a particular area. The shadows seemed thicker there, almost palpable.

  “It’s a doorway,” Francis said, coming up beside him and sticking his hand inside the thick, inky blackness. “There’s another room beyond it.”

  “Must be where my two friends back there came from,” Remy said. He too stuck a hand into the shadows. The darkness was cold and damp, like the bleakest November night.

  “Angel magick,” Francis observed. “Ain’t it something?”

  Angel magick had been created by the Watchers, the first of the angelic hosts to be banished to Earth. Even though fallen angels were stronger and more durable than the average human, they were nothing compared to a full-fledged angel. Denizens used the magick as well as weapons chiseled from the black stone walls of Tartarus and smuggled out by parolees to protect their illegal dealings from angels and humans alike.

  Use of either was considered a sin against God, but that didn’t stop the Denizens.

  “I think Eddie answered my question as he died,” Remy said.

  “Wouldn’t be the first Denizen to see the light as their own was being permanently extinguished. So are we going in?”

  Remy didn’t answer. Instead, he took a deep breath and stepped forward, immersing himself completely in the fluid darkness.

  Though brief, the journey through the darkness made Remy think of every bad thing he had ever done, the ebony wetness seeping in through his pores, drawing out the poison, reminding him of how devastated—lost—he’d felt since the passing of his wife.

  “Well, that was certainly pleasant,” Francis said, brushing traces of clinging dark matter from the sleeves of his suit jacket. He adjusted his glasses, a nervous habit, and looked about at their surroundings.

  Remy tried to shake off the hungry sadness, but there was little else to occupy his thoughts these days.

  Madeline is dead.

  “You all right?” Francis was looking at him, the feeling behind the question emphasized by the intensity of his gaze.

  “Yeah,” Remy lied, as he stepped away from the thick patch of shadow. “Where do you think we are?”

  Francis shrugged. “Not far from where we started,” he said.

  They were in a corridor that turned sharply to the right in front of them. To keep his thoughts at bay, Remy began to walk.

  “Let’s see what we’ve got down here.”

  He studied the walls as he went. The entire structure appeared to be made from shadow—from the darkness itself. An eerie inner light, a sort of bioluminescence, dimly illuminated their way from behind the black walls.

  The hallway led to a larger room, empty but for a single table, upon which lay the body of an angel. A small cart, its surface littered with bloodstained surgical instruments, was positioned nearby.

  Remy could only stare.

  Francis had been the first to hear the rumor, a whispering among the unnatural community that the Denizens had acquired a full-fledged angel, and that its most holy body, every inch of it—a thing of great power—was for sale. He’d asked Remy to help him investigate, and the more they poked around—the more rocks and rotted logs they flipped—the more they realized that the disturbing rumor was indeed true.

  And here it was, manifested in its true form, feathered wings splayed out beneath its naked, broken body. The angel’s flesh had been cut, strips of its skin peeled away to reveal the pink musculature beneath. Most of its hair had been shaved down to the scalp. Its face was a gory mask, two empty black sockets where its eyes had been. The chest had been cut open and the rib cage exposed—an angel’s heart was worth an absolute fortune.

  Slowly Remy approached, fighting back a wave of revulsion. He did not recognize the angel, or the host from which it had come.

  “Do you know him?” he asked Francis, unable to take his eyes from the disturbing vision before him—like some perverted version of dissection for a high school biology class, a creature of Heaven instead of a fetal pig.

  Francis remained strangely quiet as he approached the surgical cart and picked up a plastic container. With a finger he flipped off the lid and reached inside. He pulled out what appeared to be a bloody piece of cloth, but what Remy quickly realized was a large section of flesh flayed from the angel’s body.

  “He was a Nomad,” Francis said, holding the skin in the open palm of one hand, tracing the black tattoo in its center with a finger.

  Remy leaned in closer to look and saw that Francis was correct. There was no mistaking the mark worn by the sect of warrior angels that had abandoned their violent ways after the Great War, departing Heaven, disillusioned, very much like himself. In the most archaic version of angelic script, the mark meant “waiting between Heaven and Hell.” What the Nomads were waiting for was the real question.

  “How could he have ended up like this?” Remy asked, more than disturbed by the sight of something once so magnificent, now so horribly ugly.

  “You actually have to ask that?” Francis questioned. “The war screwed a lot of us up. It isn’t easy to forget what some of us did back then.”

  Remy had known it was a stupid question as soon as it had left his lips. He knew he wasn’t the only one to turn his back on Heaven. It was just so very rare that he encountered any other expatriates—they tended to keep to themselves.

  “He didn’t deserve this,” Remy said as he reached out to place a hand on the angel’s shoulder. The flesh was cold beneath his fingertips, like the feel of a marble altar.

  With a wet, sucking gasp, the angel rose to a sitting position, his wings flapping spastically as he took hold of Remy’s shoulders in a trembling grip. Remy stared in awe, unable to believe that something so horribly mangled could still be alive.

  “The sins live on,” the angel gasped, the stink of rot exuding from his lacerated flesh. “They think it done . . . the war, but they deceive themselves, and the deceivers live on, the black secret of their purpose clutched to their breast.”

  The angel’s head lolled upon his s
houlders, his body wracked with spasms of excruciating pain.

  “I could bear the deceit no longer. . . . My secret sin consumes me. . . .”

  The final words left the angel’s mouth in a gurgling wheeze, and he began to convulse. Flapping wildly, his damaged wings lifted him from the table but were not strong enough to support him. His damaged body crashed into the smaller table, spilling the bloody instruments. He lay atop the tools that had been used to dissect him, trembling and gasping for air.

  “I’ve seen enough,” Francis said coldly. He dropped the angel’s flesh and removed a pistol from the holster beneath his arm. “Don’t have any idea what he’s talking about, secret sin and all, but nothing deserves to suffer like this.”

  Remy blocked his companion’s way.

  “What are you doing?” Francis asked, brandishing the weapon.

  “I think we can do this another way.”

  The angel was crying tears of blood, streaks of crimson draining from the blackness of his barren eye sockets.

  “We think ourselves so smart . . . so clever, but it will be our ruin, and the ruin of all that we hold dear,” the injured creature of Heaven whispered as it writhed in pain upon the floor. “We should be punished. . . . Oh, yes, we deserve so much more than this.”

  “What’s he talking about?” Francis asked. He still had the gun in his hand.

  “I don’t know, and I don’t think we’d get a straight answer if we asked.” Remy couldn’t wrap his brain around what he was seeing. This pathetic creature appeared to be here by choice. He was not bound or restrained in any way. He was going to let the Denizens have him—cut him up and sell his parts to the highest bidder.

  “He’s in a lot of pain.”

  “Then let me stop it,” Francis insisted.

  Remy knew that the sight of the dying angel was getting to his friend—they were not used to seeing beings of such power in a state like this.

  “Let me put him down. It’ll be quick and relatively painless . . . less painful than what he’s going through now anyway.”

  Remy shook his head. “It is ugly, but after going through all this”—he gestured about the room, at the operating table, the bloody surgical instruments strewn upon the floor—“he deserves better than that.”

  The angel had curled himself into a tight ball, his body trembling so severely that it practically blurred the sight of him.

  Francis sighed. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to help him end it himself,” Remy explained. “I’m going to convince him to let go of his guilt . . . his pain, and return to the Source.”

  How many times since Madeline’s passing had he thought of doing that very same thing? To abandon it all, to will himself and all that defined him into nothingness. To return to the energies that shaped the universe and all it entails.

  “What makes you think he’s going to listen?” Francis asked.

  “I don’t know if he will, but I have to try.” Remy stared at the pathetic sight shaking upon the floor. “I can’t imagine that whatever he’s done, he hasn’t at this point paid for it a hundred times over.”

  Francis slid the lethal weapon back inside its holster. “So what now?”

  “Make sure the building is empty,” Remy told him as he knelt beside the tormented angel. “Things could get a little destructive if he abandons this form.”

  The former Guardian nodded, turning to head back the way they’d come. “Are you going to be all right with this?” he asked from the doorway.

  “I’ll be fine,” Remy replied, gently pulling the angel into his arms, attempting to stifle the bone-breaking spasms that wracked the Heavenly creature’s body. “We’re just going to have a little talk.”

  Francis remained in the doorway, unmoving.

  “Go on,” Remy urged. “I want to get this over with. He’s suffered enough.”

  “I’ll see you outside,” Francis said over his shoulder as he turned into the hallway of shadow.

  Remy leaned forward, his mouth at the angel’s ear, and spoke in the language of the Messenger—the language of God’s winged creations.

  “Are you ready, brother?” he whispered. “Are you ready to let go of the wreckage that is this material form?”

  The angel turned his face toward Remy, and he could not help but stare into the sucking black of the empty sockets.

  “I deserve no such thing,” the angel rasped, clutching the front of Remy’s jacket with a bloodstained hand. “We’re no better . . . than those cast down into the inferno.”

  “Let go of your sin, brother,” Remy soothed. “Return to the Source and know the forgiveness of—”

  The angel suddenly pushed him roughly away. “I would never dream of tainting the purity of the Source,” he cried, rising to his knees.

  Remy tried to stop him, but the angel moved with surprising swiftness, his hand finding what appeared to be the sharpest of the knives and gripping it tightly.

  “No!” Remy reached out to stop the action, but he was swatted aside by one of the angel’s flailing wings.

  “I deserve no less,” the angel spat, and plunged the blade into his heart. He withdrew the knife and repeated the horrific action again, and then again, before falling to his side, legs thrashing as if he were trying to run, as the life left his body.

  Remy was stunned. By taking his own life, the angel had damned himself, trapping the life force within the body, to slowly dwindle away as the corpse decayed.

  He couldn’t bear to see the body of the holy being left to the devices of scavengers. Reaching deep within himself—into the resources of his own suppressed divinity—he laid his hands upon the angel’s waxen brow and carefully called upon the power within.

  The fiery essence of the Seraphim ignited his hand and spread onto the dead Nomad’s body. The fires of Heaven were voracious, consuming the flesh, muscles, bones, and feathers.

  Hand still burning with an unearthly orange radiance, Remy pulled the fire back into himself, struggling to stifle the urge to burn away his own human guise and let his angelic identity roam free. And slowly the power was returned to that deep, dark place inside.

  A place where it waited for him to abandon the charade that he had begun since leaving the golden plains of Heaven.

  Remy rose to his feet, backing toward the exit, watching, waiting for the sign that he was expecting.

  The body of the angel lay upon the ground, consumed in holy fire. Its grinning skull peered out at him from within the marigold flame, before collapsing in upon itself with a loud crack like a gunshot. At that point the fire grew larger, burning brighter—hotter—igniting the floor before spreading to the walls of the chamber, burning away even the shadows.

  Satisfied that there would be nothing left for the scavengers to salvage, Remy left the room, the spread of divine flame burning hungrily at his back.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The fire burned hotter than any earthly flame. The entire warehouse, every inch of brick, steel, mortar, and glass, was engulfed in a matter of minutes.

  Remy was lucky to get out with his skin intact.

  But would it really have been so bad—to let the scourging flames eat away the fragile human form he had constructed for himself, to abandon this charade and return from whence he came? A tiny piece of him screamed its approval, but the remainder of the man was not yet ready to say good-bye to the world that had been his home for so long, even with all its imperfections.

  “Did you get everybody out?” Remy asked Francis as they stood on the corner of Summer Street watching the building burn.

  The Boston Fire Department arrived with a wail of sirens, the firemen leaping from their vehicles to battle the raging conflagration. But before they could even mobilize their hoses, the warehouse collapsed in upon itself with a mournful roar.

  “There was nobody alive inside,” Francis said, taking a pack of Tic Tacs from his pocket and shaking some into his mouth. “Though I did tell a few rats that they might
want to find other accommodations.” He shook a few mints into his mouth. “Thanks for helping me out with this one,” he continued after a moment.

  “No problem,” Remy answered. “It was the least I could do. The idea of one of us in the hands of the Denizens is not—”

  “One of you,” Francis interrupted. “It’s been a long time since I had my wings.”

  The disturbing imagery of the tortured angel filled Remy’s thoughts as he watched the fire burn. “What could have brought him to that?” he asked aloud.