Conquer the Dark (14 page)

I
t was the shortest
hotel stay in her life, and she deeply grieved leaving the sumptuous environs, especially when she saw the Cairo train station. It was not Amtrak’s Northeast-corridor rails by any stretch of the imagination. As Celeste glanced around the dingy, passenger-swarmed station, it looked like something out of a low-budget, 1940s version of
The Orient Express
.

Every old cable TV movie she’d ever watched bloomed in her mind as she stood with the others impatiently waiting for the train. Haggling baggage handlers, old ladies swathed in traditional garb from head to toe with crates of livestock and children, arguing vendors selling cards and sweets for the ride and overcharging for water, made the platform a lively but also treacherous place. Several times her heart leapt into her mouth as small children with wares to sell darted between passengers, dangerously near the platform’s edge. But somehow the little street urchins
were as fleet afoot as mountain goats, navigating their way through hulking adults and luggage.

Standing at the far end of the platform, Celeste watched the enormous locomotive huff its way into the station. Desert sand clung to its battered gray-and-navy exterior. The group just looked at it, seeming impassive. Bath Kol stopped a darting child and purchased a pack of unfiltered Camels and a deck of playing cards with a sigh. However, clearly no one wanted to fuss about the change from the luxury hotel to the sleeper train, on account of potentially hurting Isda’s feelings. It wasn’t his fault that this was the fastest, safest way to travel.

A porter took their tickets on the platform and then led the way to a bank of five rooms along the inside of the larger sleeper car. The first thing that assailed her was the smell. Egypt didn’t have a no-smoking policy
anywhere
, and old butts plus whatever smoke clung to the upholstery nearly made her gag. It didn’t matter that she used to be a smoker herself; secondhand smoke stank to the high heavens, and when you added a layer of pine cleaner or industrial-scented air fresheners to the mix, it made her stomach lurch worse than the rickety train.

She was forced to get over it; they were gonna be on the train overnight, regardless. Each couple lined up as the porter eyed them and then opened their individual cabins. Windows were on the left, then a narrow hallway that permitted only one person to politely pass at a time was in the middle, and metal-outfitted rooms were on the right.

For a moment, Celeste just stared at the single-row seating that looked like a prison cot, or bus bench seat if she was being generous with the comparison.

“You never ride the train, miss?”

“No. It’s my first time in a sleeper.”

Celeste had replied and even shook her head, but the man still glanced up at Azrael as though waiting for an answer from him. She’d noticed that ever since they’d arrived in Egypt, no one ever asked her a question and accepted her response. Oddly, it seemed as though a man had to respond to validate the reply. This reaction wasn’t just aimed toward her, she noticed. The locals seemed to treat all the women in their group that way. Hotel staff, restaurant waiters, exhibit guards, now the porter. Then, come to think of it, she hadn’t seen a single local woman in a job since they’d arrived. Working women had been nonexistent in the airport once they got off the flight, they were nowhere to be found in the hotel, were completely absent in the train station except as passengers, and weren’t at the monument sites, except those handing out toilet tissue in the ladies’ bathroom. Bizarre.

The porter totally ignored Celeste and seemed to be quite willing to wait for Azrael to respond for her.

“No, she’s never ridden a sleeper train before,” Azrael finally said with a slight frown of annoyance. “How does this work?”

“Ah,” the porter said, extracting a bunk ladder from behind the door.

Then in a series of magician-like flips, pulls, and flourishes, he secured a top bunk that was already made up with dubious-looking blankets and linens. Clicking it into place by lowering the bed out of the wall as if it were a foldaway ironing board, he added the ladder, then opened up the bottom bunk—she still wasn’t sure how even after
she’d witnessed it, then showed them where a sink that didn’t work was hidden in the wall.

“Bathrooms are at either end of the car, the bar is three cars down, and I will be by in one hour with your dinner.” The porter then showed them how to flip over their individual plastic dinner trays. “Meat or chicken or vegetarian?”

“Vegetarian,” Azrael said, still marveling at the
Transformers
-like gadgetry of the sleeper car.

Celeste cleared her throat and motioned toward the waiting porter with her eyes.

“Oh, yes,” Azrael said, going into his pocket for a tip, handing the man what Celeste estimated to be
way
too much by normal standards.

“Thank you, sir!” the happy porter exclaimed. “I will take good care of your entire family.”

“You’re welcome,” Azrael said, but then stepped out into the hall as the others got settled in.

Azrael didn’t have to say it, she could feel it. Everyone was worried about Isda. Sad glances passed among the group as each couple stood in front of their room in the narrow aisle and Isda stood in front of his alone with only an extralarge footlocker on roller wheels.

“Where’s your wife with all of her dresses and shoes?” the gregarious porter said, obviously in a good mood now that he was well tipped by each previous angel brother he’d assisted.

“She died,” Isda said in a flat tone.

“But you have two tickets,” the man said, confused and seeming mortified by the gaffe. “And so much luggage.”

“I’ll take the top bunk; my luggage can go on the
bottom bunk.” Isda leaned against the windows in the hallway as the porter hesitantly readied his room, staring at the floor.

“I am very sorry. I thought you were just teasing me and that maybe she had gone to the restroom,” the stricken porter said, his voice a low murmur now. “But you are a young man. You should marry again and take many wives. This way you will not be sad for long. Have many sons. Many children are good. Then this life will be good.”

“Been there, seen it, done it, and finished with it. I’m older than you think and really don’t have it in me anymore,” Isda said quietly, then entered his room, hoisted his footlocker onto the bottom bunk, and closed the door on the porter.

Bath Kol gave Azrael a nod. “This is the crash-and-burn part I was trying to tell him about in the airport, brother.”

“Yeah, I know. I’ll be back,” Azrael said, looking over his shoulder into the room at Celeste.

“I’m fine,” she murmured. “Go to him.”

Bath Kol met Azrael in the hall. “Let me take first shift with him. They have a bar just three cars down. Aziza is cool and won’t be able to stand the smoke in there—she’s turning green from the smell in here alone. She’s tired, wants to meditate and sleep anyway. All of this nonsense has frayed her nerves—you know the queen doesn’t do violence or stress. So, I can go into the smoking car with our brother. Me and Is, hey, we go way back. I literally know where all the bodies are buried, and I never got to my Remnant in time, either. You kinda rub salt in his wound just by having Celeste—it ain’t your fault, but it is what it
is. Me, I’m philosophical. I’ve got queen, but, you know. Just fall back and give the man some space. I got this.”

“You’re sure?” Azrael landed a supportive hand on Bath Kol’s shoulder.

“Positive,” Bath Kol said with a nod, then headed toward Isda’s room as the train began moving.

“So they’ve found their
way home,” Asmodeus said, rubbing his jaw as bloodied scorpions swarmed his feet. He drew heavily on a hookah and allowed the smoky mixture of water-cooled tobacco and hashish to flow over his palate, savoring it as he inhaled and then released it through his nose.

He looked around at his newly reanimated warriors with disgust. The once-beheaded Malpas still had a visible scar around his throat and could not speak. His exquisite African features were now marred by a gruesome keloid scar that showed exactly where he’d been decapitated. He’d lost an arm that never came back. Where he’d been hit in the chest was a gaping sinkhole exposing burned, twisted viscera.

Onoskelis was also now mute from her beheading and wore a thick ornamental choker to hide the wicked scar. The once beautiful Lahash was now merely a withered, blackened skeleton from his full holy-water immersion. Bune’s dragon heads were flesh-barren skeletons when he shape-shifted now, and his skin was slowly rotting off his bones from the shrapnel he’d taken in the ship explosion on the Delaware.

Pharzup’s face, which had taken a shotgun blast
delivered by Celeste, was missing an eye and the left cheek and half a jawbone, and the injury made him constantly drool on himself.

But perhaps the most pitiable was the once-strong and Roman-god-like Appollyon, who, because of a blade to the sensitive-for-angel area between his wings, was grounded. His black wings were useless appendages that hung limply in an uneven dangle. The man had been hobbled by the Angel of Death. To see such beauty mangled in battle was pure sacrilege.

Asmodeus felt his fangs lengthening as dark fury consumed him. Only he and Rahab and Forcas had been left mostly whole. Forcas had regenerated from his multiple gunshot wounds; Rahab had escaped in time. Yet even Asmodeus still bore Azrael’s mark on his once flawless face.

Quiet fury practically strangled Asmodeus as he studied the condition of his dark inner circle of the most valiant fallen. His warriors, like Lucifer, were to have been the most beautiful of all the angels—the best, the brightest, the strongest. Now they looked more like demons than dark angels. It was unacceptable. Abhorrent. Even his once flawlessly handsome face was burned and marred by his untimely contact with the Delaware River, which had been turned into holy water. Once he had the tablets, he would correct this abomination, too.

He stood and pushed away from the long banquet table and paced to the window to stare out at the Egyptian night sky. The feeding on the human that the demons had dragged in had not helped any of them, nor had the blood. He listened to the crimson fluid slowly drip off the
table onto the hardwood floor. The sounds of his own battalion gorging had sickened him, and he couldn’t watch them devour the disemboweled body with the injuries they’d sustained. Looking at them just made him think of his own disfigurement. Mirrors had been banished in the villa, but that didn’t solve the problem in the way that finding the crystal tablet would.

Time was not on his side. They didn’t have months to spend in this luxury Red Sea villa on the West Bank recovering. There wasn’t time to waste consulting sorcerers, nor would it be advisable to risk petitioning the Dark Lord for his assistance at this late juncture in the campaign—which would mean admitting temporary defeat, which would also mean risking extermination or entering into a bargain that Asmodeus was unprepared for. He’d learned long ago that leverage was king in the dark realms.

“Milord,” Rahab murmured, coming up behind him and offering him a goblet of blood. “We have been here for eons and will be so in victory after the next alignment. We have been written about in every book in every culture. This is only a temporary setback. Remember, we are the Lords of the Dead in the Book of the Jaguar Priests, the story of us that I like best. The thirteen and nine that descended from the stars, you leading twenty-one of us through the caves of blood, torture, bats, and jaguar bones.”

“We cannot run away to Mayan country,” Asmodeus said quietly, still gazing at the stars, not accepting her offered goblet of blood. “The fight is here, in the old country. Our enemies are here, the tablet is here.
Azrael
is here. The golden bones of Imhotep only helped us reanimate our fallen brethren because he was a healer of the Light. But they remain … as you see them. Severely compromised.”

She glanced back at the swarming scarabs and scorpions that frothed under the table with small demons that fought for the raw scraps the injured warriors threw to the floor.

“Send the demons on a reconnaissance mission to find them tonight,” she murmured huskily, leaning in to whisper her message privately into Asmodeus’s ear. “Let them take the casualties and find out where our enemies are. They breed like rats. We do not. Live to fight another day. You are exhausted from the raising ritual, and perhaps also from the bitter disappointment that I feel crawling over your skin.”

“And if I stayed here tonight, you would not propose that I rest, but that I would serve you by half fucking you to death,” he said in a low, murderous tone, then grabbed her by the throat. “Now where would the wisdom be in that?”

She smiled and coolly regarded him and waited until he eased he grip and released her, then took a sip of blood from the goblet she’d initially brought for him. “I did not say that it was wise, but I guarantee that it would definitely make you feel better.”