FLAME
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
My 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.
RESCUE
CHAPTER THIRTY
For 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 f
ree. “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.
From the floor, I watch Azrael’s feet as he shoulders past Beelzebub, down the center aisle and out the door.
Beelzebub stands with his arms folded, surveying the crumbling church.
“Get up,” he tells Obie, who’s lying on the dais with his bleeding hands over his face, smoke rising from his clothes in tendrils.
Obie rolls onto his hands and knees and pushes himself to his feet. When he stands, his arms are torn from the barbs, bleeding in little trickles. He tries to untangle himself, but the wire catches at his skin. He’s bleeding from so many places. Truman is the one who goes to him and draws out the nails. He does it carefully. Then, with uncommon tenderness, he begins to untangle the wire.
I climb the dais slowly, pressing my hands to my head. My whole scalp feels raw.
Beside me, Obie is shaking a little, looking stunned. Truman offers him Raymie and he takes her, staring down into her face like he can hardly believe that she’s real.
“Are you okay?” I ask. My voice is unsteady.
He shakes his head, but he’s smiling in a crumpled, heartbroken way, holding Raymie to him. She wraps her arms around his neck and doesn’t say anything.
Beside us, Truman looks magnificent in the sunlight streaming through the open door. The morning lights his hair a pale, pristine gold. In the bright splash of light, I sit down on the end of the nearest pew, covering my mouth with my hand to keep the sounds from getting out. I don’t even know if they’re laughing sounds or crying. There is a glorious life out there and everything is waiting for me. For us.
“Come on,” Truman says, reaching for me, offering his hand. “Don’t do that. We did good.” He pulls me so I’m standing next to him. “Everything’s fine.”
He leans sideways and kisses me on the cheek, a quick, playful gesture. I smile without thinking about it. I want coffee, and also pie. Maybe even ice cream. I want laughter and kissing and everything there is, and it doesn’t even matter if I get it. This is the world, for good or ill. This is us not being terrible people.
Beelzebub is standing at the double doors, looking so heroic, ready to lead us outside, like this moment is all he’s been waiting for. Truman and I start toward the door, but then I glance over my shoulder.
Obie is standing in the little baptistry, beside the font of holy water. He’s holding Raymie against his shoulder, but his eyes are unfocused. The look on his face is desolate. With a nod in his direction, I pull my hand from Truman’s and go to him.
There are little carved saints around the archway. They’re so old that their noses have worn off. We stand in the dark, facing each other. The air smells like flowers.
“I’m sorry,” I say, coming up beside him. “I know what he was doing to you in here. That he was killing—that he was killing people. I’m sorry it took so long to stop it.”
Obie nods and looks away. “It’s not your fault. Beelzebub—” He closes his eyes and his voice breaks. “Why didn’t he come for me sooner?”
“You disappeared,” I say apologetically. “He didn’t know where you were. None of us knew how to find you.”
But as soon as I say it, the words feel wrong, because Beelzebub strode into the church through the front door like a man on a mission, like he already knew exactly what he would find.
Obie blinks dazedly, glancing toward the door. “What’s he doing now?”
“I think he wants to have a talk with Truman, just the two of them. I don’t know if you knew, but he’s Truman’s father. That’s why he had you take him back when Truman showed up in Pandemonium.”
Obie is holding Raymie tight against his chest, looking so disoriented, so tired. “He went out of his way to send Truman back to Earth, then just abandoned him again?”
“Not abandoned. He just returned Truman to his normal life.”
Obie shakes his head. “There was nothing normal about it. Azrael’s spent the last year breaking Truman down in some stupid attempt to redeem him. If Beelzebub cared about Truman so much, why would he let Azrael do that to him?”
At first, I don’t even understand the question. The answer to it is apparent in the way that Obie is holding Raymie. The way he never told Azrael how to find her, even under torture. Even under penalty of death. “Well, I guess because Truman’s his son. He just didn’t want him to wind up in Hell.”
“Oh, no.” Obie reaches for my arm suddenly, fingers digging into my shoulder. “Run.”
I stare up and he lets me go.
“Run, now. Stop him!”
And I twist away, bolting for the doors.
Outside, Beelzebub is walking beside Truman. They seem a long way off. As I leap down the steps, Beelzebub stops, resting his hand on Truman’s arm. I can’t hear what they’re saying.
I’m closer now. But I won’t reach them in time.
MARCH 11
O
DAYS 0 HOURS 0 MINUTES
“Just hold still,” Beelzebub said. The barrel of the handgun looked nearly red in the glow of the sun. “In a moment, everything is going to be so much better.”
RUIN
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Beelzebub smiles.
Then, he levels the gun and shoots Truman Flynn, twice in the chest, once in the head. The sound is very loud.
From the steps of the church, I watch Truman fall and it’s like watching through glass. I can only stand with my hands pressed to my mouth, thinking I am not seeing this, this is not how it’s supposed to end. Truman was mine. He was finally free. We were supposed to be happy.
He’s on his back, head tilted limply like he’s staring up at the sky, and in the next moment, I’m on my knees beside him, touching him frantically, trying to find a heartbeat. In a movie, any movie, he would say something with his last breath, declare his love, his absolute devotion.
There is no breath. His ribcage is still, his mouth slightly open, and all I’m left with is a body.
I stare up at Beelzebub, waving my hands above the wreck of Truman’s chest. “What did you do to him?” My palms are covered in blood.
Beelzebub looks down at me, smiling the kindest, saddest smile. “I sent him home.”
“What?” My voice is so small.
“Home. He’s gone to a better place.”
“No . . . no, he can’t.” But even as I say it, I know that he’s gone, has gotten out. He’s gone someplace I can never go.
There’s a feeling inside me like things are coming apart and it turns into a noise and the noise is coming out of my throat, breaking all the glass. My hands and face are sticky. On the pavement, spreading from underneath Truman, is a dark pool that grows and grows. When I look down into it, I see my own reflection.