20

A FOOL (ALMOST) RUSHES IN

Not since Jericho had I seen a worse case of the jitters. When I walked the mean streets of the Pleroma, it seemed every joe and jane I passed had a raging case of floating anxiety disorder. If Gabby’s death had put the Choir on edge, the popcorn proliferation of Nephilim had been the final shove. Things were tightest close to the mortal realm, where the weakest members of the Choir slid down the ontological gradient of METATRON’s binding to rattle the floor with their nervous tics like a concert in the subbasement of the Pleroma. But that overarching sense of anxiety cast a long shadow. Even farther out, in the metaphysical suburbs where the sensible cars and respectable glamours could be found, it wasn’t all canasta games and dinner parties. There was a strong front blowing in; we felt it in our guts. In weather like this, even the Seraphim lock their doors. Smart eggs hunker down to ride out the storm.

Not me, though. I needed words with two dumb onions.

The first of the defeated Cherubim was a blurry fractured thing. I couldn’t see it well without a lot of squinting. Molly’s ambush had yanked the goon apart—no mean feat, that—and now it was too busy feeling sorry for itself to zip its two halves together correctly. They didn’t quite fit together, like the reflection in an imperfectly fixed mirror. What a drip. Just looking in its direction gave me a headache, so I opted to talk to its partner instead.

I thought I’d seen it all. But I’d never seen a Cherub with a black eye. That must have taken some doing because they don’t even have eyes, the dumb lugs. Just flames. Chalk up another point in the twist’s column. The poor sap held a steak to its battered face. It made the joint smell like a Fourth of July cookout. All we needed was some potato salad and tub of coleslaw.

After all, the fireworks were coming soon enough.

“One monkey,” I said. “The two of you working together couldn’t croak one lousy monkey.”

“She was supposed to be alone.”

“It wasn’t supposed to matter. What a sorry wrecking crew you turned out to be.”

“Sorry, boss.”

“How’d she do it? How’d she get the drop on you cream puffs?”

They told me how flametop clobbered them using sleight of hand and sheer moxie. I whistled. What an item. I knew how to pick them. She was perfect.

Steak-face said, “If you wanted us to fight you shouldn’t’ve made us wear those monkey suits. You didn’t hobble us when you sent us into her Magisterium.”

“Yeah,” said steak-face’s blurry pal. “She was no problem then.”

“We should go find her, do it right this time,” said the first Cherub.

The dopes. With friends like these, who needs enemies?

I said, “Listen, you thickheaded palookas. What do you think would happen if you went down to Earth for a spot of redemptive violence? If you started traipsing around the mortal realm, bumping off monkeys, letting everyone see you in your true forms?”

“She’d get what she had coming?”

“She’d be sorry? Real sorry?”

Oh, brother. I reminded myself that I hadn’t hired these goons for their brains. Maybe it’s the constant heat of holy fire from their faces making them feverish. Slow.

“Uh-huh,” I said. “And how’s about METATRON?”

There was a pause while that sank in. “Oh,” said steak-face. “That.”

“Yeah. That.”

“You want we should go back and finish off the monkey now?”

“Nah,” I said. “I’ll handle it. You two lick your wounds. They must be medium rare by now.”

I’d been ready to rub out Molly’s girlfriend then and there when I had the chance. But as much as flametop liked to question everything I said and did, she still wasn’t getting the big picture. If that cluck didn’t start doing the math sooner than later, I’d have to hire a skywriter. So it was a golden opportunity when she practically pushed that dish of a librarian into my open arms.

And besides, we could spare a stiff or two. I’d worked a little slop into the system. I wasn’t born yesterday.

*   *   *

On my way to count the Nephilim, to verify the other PI recipients had been pinked, I ran into an old acquaintance. Can’t say it was a happy reunion.

“Bayliss,” it said. “ssilyaB,” it said.

“Think you’ve got me confused with somebody else.” I pushed past, but not without tipping my hat. “Sorry, guy. Sorry, doll.”

The Virtue raised two arms to block my passage. One lead, one gold. I sighed and, keeping one peeper on that bobbing scorpion tail, plastered a happy grin on my kisser.

“Hey, now I recognize you. Lose some weight, did you? Long time no see. You’ve been a stranger, eh?”

“We seek you,” said its feminine aspect.

“You avoid us,” said its masculine aspect.

“Seek me? Don’t you kids have better things to do with your time? You should get a hobby.”

“We did as you asked.” “.deksa uoy sa did eW”

“Can’t say I remember that.” I danced out of the Virtue’s reach, making for my apartment. “I’d love to stick around while you flap your gums about it, but I have a hot date with a lulu of a chess problem.”

“We hold your promise. Payment is owed.”

“Nuts to both of you. I’m no chiseler. Just quit squawking until I get back on my feet, how about?”

“Payment is owed.” “.dewo si tnemyaP”

“Yeah, yeah. Payment. Enough with the broken record.”

You’d think that given everything else I was doing, this penny-pinching sourpuss would give me a break on the tab. That’s gratitude for you. But I let it slide. I’m a generous soul.

And besides. The way I figured it, all the old tabs and debts would get erased soon enough.

*   *   *

I returned from my errands to find an angel making coffee in my kitchen. So much for that second lock I put on the door. I couldn’t wait to get out of this neighborhood. It had seen better days. So had we all.

“Please,” I said, flinging my hat over the hilt of the sword in my umbrella stand, “make yourself at home.”

Uriel said, “In this dive? Not likely.”

She had coffee grounds and soul fragments strewn all across the counter. If I hadn’t known better I might have thought she’d been struck with a recurrence of the quotidian ague while filling the percolator. But then Michael and Raguel always were the tidy ones. I decided against sharing my trick with the comb; a lousy cup of coffee was the least she deserved for breaking in to my digs again.

“Not that it ain’t a pleasure, but what can I blame for this visit?”

“There’s some concern,” said Uriel, “over an apparent lack of progress, Bayliss.”

The percolator gurgled its assent. What a sad little toady it was. It didn’t even have a dog in this fight. But they had a point, the Seraph and the machine.

“Yeah, yeah. The monkey’s taking it nice and slow.”

“Too slow. And we’ve been patient.”

“You’ve been patient? What am I, chopped liver?”

Uriel rummaged my cabinets for a cup. I pointed. She snagged one. “Nevertheless,” she said. “We’re eager to see the end of this.”

As if I wasn’t. That was rich. What a joker. She knew how to make a gag. I told her so.

“Cool your jets, sister. What’s a few more days on top of a million millennia?”

“Every extra attosecond runs the risk METATRON will take an interest.” She poured herself a cup, took one sip, made a face, dumped the coffee down the sink. I wondered how many souls went down the drain just then. “The Thrones are getting suspicious.”

She had a point. The bulls were zeroing in. It had been a little uncomfortable under the bright lights. Good thing Uriel had come riding to the rescue when she did. But things were too far along now for anybody to stop it.

“They can turn blue, the lot of ’em, for all I care.”

“We’ve already staged another attempted eviction.”

“Bread and circuses. Works every time.”

“We can’t keep it up forever.”

“Oh, brother. Like you’ve got it tough. I don’t recall you raising so much as a pinfeather when we were rounding up a volunteer for this job.”

“It was always your baby.”

Well. I don’t like to brag. I’m the humble type. But trust a wicked bird like Uriel to appeal to my pride. Pride was a sin, after all.

I reminded her, “Yeah, my baby. But it wasn’t cheap. And in the end nobody else wanted to assume the cost.”

That shut her yap. Uriel looked away. Even a lion can look chagrined from time to time.

“I miss him,” she said in a voice more quiet than the hiss of the cosmic microwave background.

“Me, too,” I said. “Me, too.”

An awkward silence crept up on us. She staked it in the heart, changed the subject.

“What happened to the Cherubim? I hear they came back with their tails between their legs.”

“Those roosters? Flametop pulled the old dipsy-doodle on them.”

Uriel flapped a half-dozen wings, like a trio of opinionated pigeons. “Would you give it a rest with the slang?”

“Sorry. Hard habit to break.”

“Anyway,” she said, “I find that difficult to believe.”

“Believe it. She’s no paper flower.” Uriel’s ox face snorted at me again. “What? Oh. Sorry. I mean, she’s tough. And she’s clever.”

Okay. So maybe I like to crow just a little.

“Not clever enough to piece things together.”

“Trust me. She’s getting there.”

By slow freight, said the scowl on Uriel’s human pan. The lion visage let loose with a growl.

I said, “She’s the naturally suspicious type. And believe me, I just sent her one dilly of a telegram.”

Uriel rolled her eyes, all eight of them. She asked, “So she’s back on track now?”

“Right now”—I glanced at my watch—“I figure she and dollface are having a swell little dustup. But once they talk each other off the ceiling that nickel will drop soon enough.”

“And will she do what we brought her here to do?”

I lit a pill. Tossed a smoke ring at Uriel. “Trust me. She never passes up a chance to take a swipe at me.”

*   *   *

“That son of a bitch. That unbelievable motherfucker.”

Molly ran fingers through her hair while pacing the tiny confines of Anne’s kitchen. Saint Elmo’s fire crackled through her hair, making it snap and writhe like Medusa’s asps. “That deranged piece of shit.” She reversed course at the refrigerator. “Sexist two-faced asshole.”

Anne said, “Molly.”

“Arrogant shit-faced prick. Smug, oily, self-centered dick-licking alcoholic.” About-face at the stove.

“Molly.”

“That duplicitous, cocky, goat-humping, weaselly backstabbing pervert.”

Anne opened a window. “Molly.”

“I’ll kick his ass. More than that. I’ll kill him. They can die, you know. Yeah. I swear I’ll take the Trumpet and—”

“Molly!”

Molly paused in her circuit, the unfinished rant piling up behind her like boxcars in a derailed train of thought. Anne looked frantic. “What?”

Anne said, “Just stop a second, would you? Look at what you’re doing to my apartment.”

She pointed at blistered fake linoleum left in the scorching wake of Molly’s halo. Fury had energized her heiligenschein. The apartment reeked of melted plastic. Molly tasted a dusting of dioxin on the air, released by the smoldering polyvinyl chloride. Chlorine atoms raked fractured atomic bonds across her tongue.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Some of us have security deposits, you know.”

Molly knelt. She ran a hand over the damaged floor as though she were brushing the wrinkles out of a bedsheet. It became whole and unblemished under her touch.

“Well, thanks,” said Anne.

“Uh-huh,” said Molly, remembering the cigarette burn Bayliss had left in the floorboards of her Magisterium. The cigarette burn she had repeatedly tried and failed to fix. The blemish he’d wrought on one of her safest, warmest memories. Jesus. Her dead body had still been steaming on the snow when that son of a bitch tossed a filthy fucking cigarette on Ria’s handiwork. She’d do so much more than kick his ass. She already knew where to find the Trumpet. Anne’s Plenary Indulgence contained a piece, and the rest was scattered through the Nephilim. She could reassemble it. All she had to do was—

“Hey!” Anne shook her by the shoulders. “Enough!”

Molly blinked, shook her head, tried to see through the scarlet haze of her rage. Anne stepped back. She had donned a pair of oven mitts. They had googly eyes and were mottled black and white like Holstein cows. One cow nostril exhaled a wisp of smoke.

Anne hung them back on their magnetic hooks on the refrigerator. “Calm the hell down before you burn this place to the ground.”

Molly blinked again, this time in an effort to clear away the annoying dampness in her eyes. “I can’t. Don’t you see? He killed me, turned me into this, this, this whatever I am, just to populate this messed-up house of cards he built. Like a, a, a fucking toy doll.” She ran a hand across her eyes. “Like a monkey in a zoo.”

Anne shook her head. “Why would he do that to you?”

“I don’t know!”

“I’m just saying maybe it’s not as bad as you think. Consider all the things you’ve seen and learned. We continue after we die! Isn’t that something wonderful?”

“Oh, Anne, you don’t understand—” Another surge of frustration killed the words in Molly’s throat. Her eyes watered with the effort to muffle her exasperation; venting it with a scream would shatter the windows, knock the building off its foundation, divert the nearby river, jolt the orbit of a passing comet. But poor Anne truly didn’t understand. She thought she’d be like Molly someday. Thought something would persist after her body was nothing but cold jelly.

“No, I don’t. So help me understand.”

Molly took a long, shuddery breath. “I’m afraid everything that happened to me since I died has been nothing but manipulation, and—”

“Uh-huh. I get that things have been kind of messed up for you. But it’s not what I’m talking about. Because, and I’m gonna be really honest with you here, I’m a little less interested in your own problems than I am in understanding why those guys wanted to hurt me yesterday. I’m done with being patient. My turn.”

Molly sighed. She took a chair at the kitchen table. And then a thought: “You didn’t happen to ask Bayliss about it, did you?”

“He said I should ask you.”

“Of course he did,” Molly said to herself. “Dickwad.” Then she added, “You’re taking it really well.”

“I was a little overwhelmed, what with the running through shadows and stepping from Chicago to Minneapolis and finding out I was dating a ghost, to have much chance to let it all sink in. But somehow all along I still felt safe with you, even when it was confusing.” She crossed her arms and leaned against the counter. “That is until you decided to freak out with the realization you have no idea what you’re doing. It gives a woman pause.”

“Yeah. I suppose it does.”

“Yeah,” said Anne. She cocked her head and set her jaw, clearly waiting for an answer.

“Those penitentes were under the control of—sort of, like, possessed by—a pair of Cherubim.” In response to Anne’s frown, Molly added, “A kind of angel. They have fire where their faces should be.”

Anne shivered. “And they wanted to hurt me, why?”

“Not just you. Everyone who received a Plenary Indulgence from Father Santorelli.”

“My parents’ dead priest.”

“Dead … Oh, shit.” An unbidden insight made Molly gasp. It was cold. She coughed. Her breath tasted like acid. She covered her mouth and said through splayed fingers, “Bayliss killed him.”

“Christ! Are you serious? And you asked him to protect me?”

“Now maybe you’re starting to see why I’m so angry,” Molly said. “Anyway, it’s complicated, but those Indulgences were metaphysically tainted. Such that when the recipients die, it has an effect on the Pleroma. Where the angels live.” She made air-quotes with her fingers. “‘Heaven.’ But it’s misleading to call it that.”

The aura of fascination still clung to Anne. Her frustration dissipated a little when she asked, her voice balanced on the edge of a reverent hush, “Is it beautiful?”

“Really weird. But don’t get hung up on the angels. They’re mostly assholes.”

Anne looked stricken. She hadn’t expected this and had probably hoped for something a little more uplifting. “Gee, don’t you paint a lovely picture of the afterlife.”

Molly couldn’t bring herself to voice the truth: There is no afterlife, Anne. Not for you, or Martin, or Ria, or Mom and Dad, or anybody else. Instead she cradled her head in her hands.

“So they’re doing this because they’re trying to change Heaven?” Anne asked.

“I think so,” said Molly.

I might have been closer than I thought when I wondered if Gabriel’s murder was part of an elaborate jailbreak. But how do the Nephilim fit into that scheme? Something shivered in the back of her mind …

“Okay, then. No offense, but why do they need you?”

Molly said, “Because—”

But then she realized she didn’t have an answer. What was Bayliss up to, and why did he need a human to do it? Merely knowing that he was a lying piece of shit provided no answers. Only questions. Molly considered trying to wring the truth from him with a liberal application of the Trumpet, but abandoned that speculation when it led her to a place that made uncovering his lies seem as innocuous as stumbling upon a surprise birthday party.

Bayliss must have figured out what had become of the Trumpet long before Molly did. After all, he’d seen the connection between the Indulgences and the Nephilim, too. More than that, though, he implicitly understood the rules of the Pleroma, the inhuman multidimensional logic of the Choir, in ways that Molly still didn’t. What took her days to deduce would have been obvious to him. Intuitive. So why didn’t he go retrieve it, then?

Because he wanted Molly to find it.

She cast her memory back to the conversation they’d had in the aftermath of METATRON’s punishment for attempting to reverse time, when Bayliss first told her about the Trumpet. What had he called it? A tool of righteous fury.

Molly looked at Anne, to the floor, to the oven mitts.

Righteous fury. The kind that had her raring to go teach Bayliss a lesson. Like the blistering halo she wore while pacing Anne’s kitchen. Like the enraged indignation she felt upon realizing she’d been a dupe.

The heat from her simmering anger instantly turned very, very cold. Cryogenic. Anne shivered again. She closed the window.

Bayliss set this whole thing in motion so that I would find and use the Trumpet.

And if not for Anne, Molly would have. If not for Anne, she’d be doing it right now.

But what’s so special about me? Why is he doing this?

Anne said, “It’s happening again. Your halo.”

Molly concentrated on absorbing the glow into her human form. It got a little easier every time she did it, but at the same time the boundaries between her human and other loci felt blurrier. Undefined. She’d worry about that later. No choice.

She said, “I’m sorry I left you with Bayliss. I wouldn’t have, if I had realized what he was doing.”

Finally, Anne took a seat at the table. “Am I still in danger?”

“I doubt it. If Bayliss had wanted you…” Molly trailed off, unable to look Anne in the eye. “Um, dead … Well, it would have happened the minute I left you alone with him.”

Anne scowled like somebody tasting something foul. “You really need to work on your reassurances.”

“I should also be thanking you. If not for you, I would have blundered straight into whatever Bayliss has planned for me. I still don’t know what that is, but at least I’ve opened my eyes. Thanks to you, we might have just dodged a bullet.”

“Huh. Who knew reading all those detective stories would pay off someday.”

“Oh, believe me, it did,” said Molly. She took Anne’s hand. “In fact, maybe now you can tell me this: how does the story end?”