The Space Between (32 page)

O DAYS O HOURS 45 MINUTES

T
ruman leaned back against the door. Next to him, he could feel Daphne shaking. He reached out and pulled her closer, and for just a moment, she let him. Then she took a deep breath and started forward, clutching Raymie against her chest. After a second, he followed her.

Their footsteps echoed on stone. He could tell from the sound that the building was high-ceilinged, but the darkness seemed to press down on them.

With shaking hands, he dug through his pockets and found the lighter. When he struck it, and held it up, the butane flame seemed pathetically tiny, glowing out weakly into the dark. After a few seconds, his eyes began to adjust.

They were in the derelict church, standing at the top of the center aisle. On either side of them, the pews sat empty. The seats were upholstered with dusty velvet cushions, worn bald in places.

Logic told him that nothing could be worse than the huge snarling monster out in the hall, but the silence was deep and ominous. Somewhere on the other side of the church, near the altar, he could hear something dripping.

He turned cautiously, looking to either side, but the shadows were everywhere and part of him didn’t want to see. It was the scared part, the small, cowardly part, but it clamored in his head, telling him that he would see Azrael soon. That thought tugged at him like a riptide, drowning him, threatening to block out everything else.

“Is he here?” Daphne whispered in a tiny, wavering voice. “Do you see Obie?”

Beside him, she was still shivering, and in the light from the flame, she looked strangely insubstantial. She was always pale, but now her skin had taken on a transparent quality. Her eyes were wide, but unfocused. She looked unsteady, like she might collapse at any second.

Truman didn’t like the way she was stumbling over her own feet, but he didn’t say anything. With his free arm, he reached out and took Raymie from her.

Her unsteadiness reminded him of the other night, when Azrael had shown up in the hotel room and Daphne had gotten out of bed to face him. Truman’s memory was hazy, but there were a few things he knew for sure. There’d been a girl who looked like Daphne, and a smear of blood on her collarbone. She’d woken up the next morning weak and disoriented.

Now, losing less than a tablespoon of blood had left her shakier than ever, but she shrugged off his offer of help and continued farther into the church.

As they started down the long center aisle, candles flared to life in two rows on either side of them. In the sudden burst of light, the shadows receded and Truman could finally see into the dark space above the altar. For a second, it was hard to understand what he was looking at. Then the full significance of the situation sank in and he just stood in the middle of the aisle, staring up.

FLAME

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

M
y hands feel light and detached, like I’ve left a part of me out in the red hall, where it will powder into the carpet and I’ll never get it back.

The church is dark and it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust enough for me see what’s hanging over the pulpit.

Obie is upside down with his hands splayed out, nailed to a wooden panel. The panel is painted with glossy, muted colors depicting the Tower of Babel. It stands on its head in the apse, suspended from the ceiling by heavy ropes, swaying slightly even though there’s no wind. The blood runs down in slow, meandering trickles.

I stand in the aisle, staring at the ruined spectacle of my brother.

His outstretched arms are wound shoulder to wrist with lengths of barbed wire. It spirals around his legs, leaving dark spots where the barbs have punctured his jeans. It looks like vines.

Near his head and slightly to the left are words, scrawled crookedly in blood, over and over, covering the part of the scene where the ill-conceived tower pierced the sky. They spell out
family
and
home
. His blood has not burned holes in the wood or eaten through the metal or turned into ravenous, snarling men. It just drips down the panel to the floor.

Above me, the windows are made of colored glass, but the pictures aren’t exultant. Some of the panes are broken and all of the saints look somber and tired. They’ve all been boarded up.

Azrael has taken so many things from my brother—his wife, his daughter. He’s maimed Obie, cut him, brutalized him.

I want to set things on fire.

Without thinking, I start for Obie, already planning some way cut him down. As I approach though, Azrael steps out of the shadows by the pulpit. His face is tranquil. He’s holding a little boot knife.

“Here we all are,” he says. “I have to admit, I was expecting Truman, not you. I thought for sure that Dreadful would have you.”

Above a squalid, candle-covered altar, Obie begins to struggle, pulling against the nails and the wire, blind to everything that’s happening. “Hello?” he whispers.

His voice echoes around me and every step I take sounds like a mortar going off.

“It’s going to be all right,” I say, and my voice comes from a long way off. “I’m here now.”

“I need you to stop where you are,” Azrael tells me gently. He holds the boot knife to Obie’s cheek.

Behind them, the carved scene is a reminder of human frailty, of arrogance. They tried to climb to God. Now everyone is falling.

Azrael stands beside my brother, looking down at me. The candles flicker around us and his expression is scornful, like I’m a ghost-girl or nothing at all. “I used to respect Obie,” he says. “Do you know that—that I used to respect a demon? I trusted him, because I thought he was better than his bloodline. Better than all the rest of you.”

“He is,” I say, knowing beyond any shadow of a doubt that it’s the truth. Obie is more virtuous than all of us and more human.

Azrael laughs. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard him laugh. He sounds heartbroken. “He broke the cardinal rule, the only rule I truly care about. I’m doing him a favor, you know, getting rid of that little horror. Do you really think she’s meant for this world? That she’ll even survive? Why don’t you just hand her over and be done with it? It would be a mercy.”

Obie’s hair is hanging down toward the ground. Around the nails in his hands, the blood does nothing special. It just drips onto the floor. I have a sinking feeling that at any second, I will need to sit down.

Truman comes up beside me, carrying Raymie. “That’s not going to happen.”

Azrael smiles his kind, terrible smile. “Do you really think you can protect her? Either of them?”

“No,” Truman says. “I think you could take her from me. And I think you could hurt Daphne if you wanted. But I’d make you work for it. I think you’d have to kill me.”

His expression is so matter-of-fact. Not frightened or angry, not defiant. For the first time, I can see Beelzebub in his expression and in his profile. It seems ludicrous that I never saw it before, but it was always hidden behind hopelessness and grief. Now, in the decrepit church, in the candlelight, he’s glorious. He is completely angelic.

Azrael seems to see it too. His face softens when he looks at Truman. “I can always count on you to fall headlong for all the wrong things,” he says. “You’re just preternaturally attracted to sin, aren’t you?”

Truman nods. Then, without any warning, he turns and kisses me.

It’s a hard, honest kiss—the way he kissed me on the balcony—and I can feel it flooding my arms and legs, sweeping away the dizziness and the confusion. When he stops and steps back, he looks dazed, but I feel sturdy and whole again.

From the dais, Azrael is watching us with interest. I expected him to be angry, but instead, he seems strangely pleased.

“I was beginning to despair,” he says to Truman. “But you really have come a long way from the selfish, self-pitying wreck that you were. Unfortunately, you always seem to pick the one thing you’re not supposed to have.” He’s smiling, but it’s cold and joyless. He stands by Obie’s head, toying with the knife. “Now, are we all ready to see what happens to the human part of him when I stick this in his carotid?”

Truman squeezes Raymie tighter, turning her against his shoulder so she can’t see Obie nailed to the board. She doesn’t see when Azrael rests his hand on Obie’s forehead, pushing it back like Dreadful did to me in the hall of mirrors, and holds the knife to the soft place under Obie’s chin.

I stand motionless on the steps of the dais, staring up at Obie. Suddenly, I know with terrible certainty that I’m going to see him die.

Azrael never takes his eyes off my face. When he presses harder with the knife, blood pools at Obie’s chin, runs over his jaw and down the side of his face. It hits the floor and does nothing. Then a drop lands in the hot wax pooling around the candles on the altar. For an instant, it catches and smokes, feathers into blue flame and then burns out.

When I step toward the pulpit, Azrael presses the knife harder into Obie’s skin. “You need to stop right there.”

But I don’t. I just keep going, one foot after the other. “Please,” I say, and my voice shakes. “Let me say goodbye.”

Azrael looks down at me and his eyes are hard, but not merciless. He lets me approach, holding the knife close to my face, but I know that he won’t cut me, because my blood is monstrous. I’m indestructible.

Obie is not. What Obie is, is flammable.

I pass Azrael with the slowness of a dream, crossing to where Obie hangs suspended in his web of wire, hair hanging toward the floor.

“I’m sorry,” I say, and I mean it. Sorry for taking so long, for not getting here sooner, but mostly sorry for what I’m about to do. “You should probably close your eyes.”

And I rake the candles off the makeshift altar with my arm. The gesture sends them crashing against the panel in a clatter of flame and wax. His blood is all over the Tower of Babel and it catches like kerosene, flames leaping up the edges of the panel. The wood blackens and smolders, blistering with white-blue flame. The smell is toxic and chemical.

Behind me, Truman makes a strangled sound, and then stays quiet. No one moves. We all stand frozen, watching the blaze.

Obie glows upside down at the center of it, the heart of a blast furnace, and I stand on the dais and watch him burn.

Azrael is motionless beside me as the paint burns and bubbles and the structure weakens. It gives way with a splintering crash and a shower of sparks.

Obie sprawls on the floor, his jeans singed and smoking, his shirt burned away to ashes and tatters.

CHAPTER THIRTY

F
or a second, we all just stand staring at Obie’s smoking form.

Then, without any warning, Azrael reaches out and grabs me by the hair.

“You,” he says, yanking my head down so I can’t pull free. “I don’t care if you bleed an army. I will cut them down one by one for as long as it takes, just to get rid of you.”

From a crazy angle, I can see Truman shifting Raymie in his arms like he doesn’t know what to do with her.

“Try it,” he says, sounding breathless, but absolutely sincere. “I’m not going to just stand around while you hurt her.”

Azrael drags me toward Truman, adjusting his grip on the boot knife. “Let me be quite clear. You, shut up. First of all, I’m not going to hurt her, I’m going to kill her. Secondly, you will stand there quietly and watch, because you don’t have a choice, and then you’ll watch while I do the same thing to her dishonorable brother and the monstrous baby. Last, because I’m a man of my word, I’ll send you to your everlasting reward.”

I’m clawing at Azrael with both hands, scrabbling at his wrist. He doesn’t even seem to notice. He’s about to put the knife to my throat when behind us, the doors to the church fly open, banging back against the wall.

Azrael wrenches me around and we all turn to see Beelzebub standing in the doorway. The church doesn’t open onto the red hallway of the Passiflore anymore. Outside, the street is empty under a cloudless sky, bright with the rising sun.

Azrael drags me down the steps of the dais, pressing the boot knife flat against my cheek. My head is bent at an impossible angle. The blade is cold below my right eye.

“Get out,” Azrael says in a low, ferocious snarl. “Get out now. This isn’t your business.”

Beelzebub doesn’t move. When he smiles, it’s not the smile of a well-mannered collections agent, but of a warrior. “I think it just became my business. Let her go.”

“On what authority? You might boss them around at home, but on Earth, the demons are mine.”

“If there’s one demon in this world who’s completely off limits to you, it’s Daphne, and there is no circumstance under which I’d let you hurt her. That’s Lucifer’s daughter you’ve got there. Let’s just let that sink in for a bit. Do you really feel like starting a war this morning?”

Azrael only stands there, fingers tangled in my hair.

“I didn’t think so. Now, I think it would be better for everyone if you just went home.”

Azrael tightens his grip and when he smiles, it’s utterly hateful. “Dishonorable as ever, Beelzebub. I should have known not to count on one of the fallen. Your son is redeemed, by the way. I hope you’re happy.”

Beelzebub just folds his arms across his chest. “If you don’t let her go right now, you’re going to find out exactly how dishonorable I can be. Go home. I’ll take it from here.”

Azrael makes a harsh, wordless sound. He leans down so his face is close to mine, twisting his hand in my hair. The flat of the knife digs into my cheek, but doesn’t break the skin.

“My whole life, I’ve made it a point never to trust demons,” he says in a tight, venomous whisper. “I credit them for all the wickedness in the world, but I never seem to learn. The treachery of demons is
nothing
compared to the betrayal of an angel.”

He lets me go and it’s so abrupt that my knees buckle and I land on the dusty carpet.