All Who Wander Are Lost (An Icarus Fell Novel) (41 page)

“
What
the fuck?”

I slowed my pace
and, as so often seems to be the case in my screwed-up joke of an
afterlife, chose exactly the wrong moment to do so.

I didn’t see
Father Dominic charge out of the mouth of the cave until too late.
He’d built up a pretty good head of steam for an old, dead
guy, and the impact of him hitting me square in the chest threw me
to the ground like a poorly secured tackling dummy at a high school
football practice.

My shoulder and hip
hit the ground first and we skidded across the rocky dirt, coming to
a stop with the top third of my body hanging over the edge of the
cliff and the dead priest perched on my chest. I twisted to look
down at the ground thirty-five feet below—maybe it wouldn’t
break my neck if we went over. The thought fled as Dominic’s
fingers wrapped around my throat.

“
Take
me back.”

I grabbed his
wrists to prevent him from strangling me but realized I could
breathe—he held me but wasn’t trying to squeeze my life
from me.

Not yet.

I shook my head.

“
Not
a chance.”

His fingers
constricted the words, made them small and he must not have liked my
response because he tightened his hold. I felt my cheeks go hot and
red as the blood in my head achieved little success finding its way
back to my heart. He rocked his weight forward bending me over the
precipice. His eyes—the irises dark outlines in a sea of
red—glared maniacally, his yellowed teeth clenched, and I
noticed for the first time he was missing two. He’d had all
his teeth when he died.

“
It’s
because of you I’m here.”

I tried to shake my
head because I knew he was wrong. The first time I’d been to
the underworld, I saw the priest’s Hell, so I knew he’d
made his own bed.

“
Let
him go.”

My eyes flickered
away from Father Dominic to Piper standing over his shoulder. A gust
of warm breeze blew her hair back and her pale skin stood out in
stark contrast to the orange-red cliff behind her. I momentarily
forgot the priest’s fingers gripping my trachea.

Dominic looked over
his shoulder at her and snarled.

“
What
are you doing here?”

“
It
doesn’t matter. Get off him.”

“
Does
he know you’re with him?”

The priest’s
words caught my attention or, more specifically, the way they spoke
to each other did: as if they knew one another.

“
He?”
I wheezed but the word was too strangled—literally—to be
heard.

She grabbed his
shoulder but he shrugged it away and shifted his attention back to
me.

“
Take
me back.”

I looked from Piper
to Dominic, Piper to Dominic, and felt my eyes rub against my
eyelids as they bulged from the pressure the priest exerted on my
throat. With my bug-eyed gaze settled back on Father Dominic and
contemplating how badly someone needed to get the man a bottle of
Visine, I noticed a shadow fall on the ground beside him.

Piper straightened
and took a step away.

“
Please
let him go, Dominic,” the new voice said.

The priest’s
eyes remained on mine, his grip stayed tight, but his expression
faded like a photograph left too long in the sun. His lips sagged
back to cover his teeth; his mouth dipped at the corners; the
intense look in his eyes softened.

“
S--sister?”

“
Please,
Dominic.”

He unlaced his
fingers from my throat and leaned back taking the pressure off. A
wave of vertigo spun my head as it hung over empty space. The
feeling increased when he rose from where he’d been seated on
my midsection, removing the counter-weight keeping me from sliding
over the edge.

I’d have gone
over if Piper’s electric touch on my arm didn’t steady
my disorientation. My wits egan to gather back in my head as I
struggled myself to a sitting position—with Piper’s
help—and blinked hard to reset my bugged-out eyes. My slightly
doubled vision rectified itself and I saw Father Dominic kneeling
before my mother, hands clasped in front of his chest as if in
prayer.

“
Sister
Agnes,” he said. “Please forgive me.”

“
Nothing
to forgive.”

I clamored to my
feet and brushed orangey dust off the ass of my pants. My mother
didn’t look away from the priest genuflecting before her. I
rubbed my throat and turned my head first one way, then the other,
flexing the muscles in my neck as I watched the conversation. Piper
wasn’t at my side and I heard her shoes scraping ground as she
crept away. The vertigo was gone, but confusion did a fine job of
making my head lurch in its stead.

Father Dominic
bowed his head to look at the dirt. His hands remained clasped in
front of him.

“
I
failed you,” he said. “I didn’t defend you before
the church. I didn’t keep the bastard angel from taking you.”
He sniffed deeply. “I didn’t do anything.”

My mother put her
hand on the priest’s cheek.

“
That
isn’t why you’re here, you know that, Dominic. Icarus
cannot take you back.”

He looked up, tears
gleaming on his cheeks in the tangerine light.

“
Then
why did you bring me here to him if not to ask for him to take me
back?”

My mother may have
answered but I’d stopped listening. I’d also stopped
breathing, stopped having reasonable thoughts.

She brought him
here. Him, the man responsible for all the troubles in my life. The
man who nearly caused my son’s death, the reason I’m in
Hell now.

I took a step back,
suddenly needing to be farther away from these two people. My mother
looked up at the movement and spoke, this time I heard her words.

“
Piper.
I should have suspected you’d be involved.”

Her words came out
icy enough to send a shiver down my spine.

How does she
know her? How does a resident of Hell know a guardian angel?

I looked at Piper,
gazed into her wide eyes. She shook her head as if to deny my
thoughts but didn’t respond to my mother. My head spun as my
brain worked its way through what unfolded before me.

My mother had
brought Father Dominic to me, the man who’d been my enemy
practically since birth.

Piper—a
supposed guardian angel and my recent lover—was acquainted
with both of them. And also with the ominously mentioned ‘him’,
whoever that might be—I might have guessed, but none of the
possibilities would be anyone I wanted to know. Anger and confusion
combined in my already spinning head, picked up the remnants of fuzz
left from my encounter with Piper to force all coherent thoughts out
of my brain. I clenched my teeth, my vision blurred.

I looked at Father
Dominic.

Asshole.

I looked at Piper.

Deceiver.

I looked at my
mother.

My mother.

Traitor.

I couldn’t
stay there any longer. They’d all manipulated me for their own
purposes. None of them cared about me. No surprise from the
murderous priest, but my mother and my lover? Which was worse?

I darted into the
nearest cave, plunging into darkness without knowing where to go or
what lay ahead. Behind me, I heard Piper’s voice calling me,
then my mother’s, their words bouncing against the sides of
the cave, the echoes combining with the beat of my footsteps to
drown their words.

In the dark, my
shoulder hit the wall of the cave, spun me around, but I kept on.
Ahead, I saw a light, dim but there, and kept it directly ahead of
me. It became my beacon to take me away from the priest, Piper, and
my mother. I raced toward it like a child to an ice cream truck,
only the driver of this ice cream truck would likely be a ghoul or
demon, maybe the devil himself.

The cave wall
rushed past beside me and a minute later, I spilled into a room with
no business being in a cave. A bed, a bedside table, a lamp; a
nondescript bedroom with a wooden crucifix hung on the wall as the
only decoration. It might have been anywhere but I felt I’d
been there before. Plain white walls, gold shag carpet. I glanced
around and saw nothing to indicate my location. I looked over my
shoulder; the cave’s passage was gone behind me, replaced by
another plain wall, a wooden door to my left. I moved toward it when
I heard the woman’s voice.

I stepped back,
listening to the unintelligible words. The voice grew louder and I
knew it came toward the door so I faded into the corner, not sure if
whoever it was would be able to see me.

Better safe than
sorry.

Some strange things
had happened to me, even in other people’s Hells. I crouched,
making myself as small as possible in the corner, and waited.

The door opened and
two women stepped through.

Bruce
Blake-All Who Wander Are Lost

“
I
have to call the doctor.”

“
No.”

“
But
I can’t--”

“
Yes.
You. Can.” Each individual word a grunt.

Poe peered from
under the hood of her black coat, watching silently. As it had been
with the man on the railroad tracks, she’d been here before a
long time ago. Everything was the same: the words they spoke, the
golden shag on the floor, the crucifix on the wall. Sister
Mary-Therese knelt between the legs of Sister Agnes—who the
church no longer recognized as Sister Agnes by this time—the
towel draped over her shoulder the lone tool she had to deliver her
friend’s baby.

Though she couldn’t
see them, Poe knew there were two other entities in the room,
bickering like the siblings they were, arguing over how this would
or should turn out. Neither of them realized her presence or knew
someone else had sent her. With such a momentous event happening,
larger forces than the two archangels were mobilized, and one used
Poe as a pawn.

“
But,
Alesya--”

“
There’s
no...time.”

Breathing heavily,
the woman on the bed fell back on the pillows, sweat standing on her
brow. For a few seconds, it seemed like the pain subsided but then
she tensed, came up onto her elbows again.