“He doesn’t belong there, though. He even looks just like the rest of us.”
Beelzebub looks down at me, leaning his elbows on the blotter. “He acts human, Daphne. He can yearn for Earth and be in love and do the job he does because he feels human, and that’s what you have to understand. You’re never going to talk someone out of how they feel.”
Beelzebub has a knack for seeing things as they are, without the complications of bias or attachment. All my life, I’ve trusted him to know the answers. But right now, I’m so scared that he’s wrong.
WATER
CHAPTER FOUR
When I leave the museum, the plaza is empty. The center of the square is tiled in the shape of a huge snake, coiling around itself in a spiral. In the Pit, they’ve just closed the furnace. The sky is still orange, but cooling rapidly, and the sound of hammering tapers off. Everything is silent.
Then Obie calls my name and I turn, following his voice to the road above the plaza. He’s holding a metal suitcase, and it looks too small to be the only property of someone leaving home for the last time. He’s still wearing the green scrubs.
He comes over to the top of the little flight of steps. “Hey, it’s time for me to go.”
“So soon?” I ask, not ready to face the thing that wasn’t supposed to happen. I’d just assumed Beelzebub would be the one to stop him, and now that he won’t, I don’t know what to do.
“Come on, walk me to the terminal.” Obie gives the suitcase a little shake and smiles. “I’ve still got your snow globe.”
When he offers me his hand, I climb the steps to stand beside him.
We follow the main road, making our way through the city, toward the terminal. I have so many things to say, but I don’t speak and neither does he. I’m trying to remember everything about this moment—the soft, billowing sky and the way the smoke looks, hanging low over the Pit. I keep glancing at his profile, knowing that this might be the last time I ever see him.
At the Pit, we walk along the edge until we come to the bridge, then start across. The bridge is as wide as a river and black with soot, arching over the forges. The artisans work below, in the red glare of the foundry, where the heat makes the air look like water.
As we cross the bridge, I lean close to the railing and look down. The Hoard is down there, filling the outer edge of the Pit, all the souls knocking together with their slack faces and their dead eyes. They come into the city thrashing and shrieking, but it doesn’t last long. After the pain demons have gotten their fill, the Hoard goes blank and silent. From so high up, I can only see the tops of their heads, gray with the soot. They seem to go on forever.
We leave the bridge behind and continue along the street that leads to the terminal. Ahead of us, the entrance is more crowded than usual, bodies packed shoulder to shoulder. Everyone is talking in low, excited voices.
Obie shoves through the mob, fighting his way through the doors, and I stay close behind him, curious to see what the disturbance is.
The terminal is a long, high-ceilinged building with big, open skylights and a row of turnstiles running along each wall. At the far end, a crowd has gathered around something on the ground and Obie makes his way over to them. Then he stops. So do I.
A boy is sitting in the center of one of the inlaid murals. He’s barefoot and soaking wet, hair plastered to his forehead. My cousin Moloch is standing over him, arms folded like he owns the boy and the growing puddle around him.
Obie stares down at him, then turns to Moloch. “What do you think you’re doing? That’s one of mine.”
Moloch lowers his chin and smiles, showing a mouthful of gray, crowded teeth. When he passes his tongue over them, they gleam like the lowest, most common metal. “Well then, it looks like you missed one, doesn’t it? We don’t ask questions, cousin. We just collect the bodies.”
Moloch is younger than most of the other collections agents—the bone men, they’re called in less respectful circles. He’s tall, with hard, narrow eyes and flat cheekbones. He keeps his hair shaved close on the sides, but wears the middle like a spiky rooster’s crest. The stripe that’s left is dyed a deep, brutal red.
I edge closer, trying to get a better look. I don’t know what I’m expecting—someone proud or glorious, with a radiance fitting the misbegotten son of an angel. But the boy on the ground is very human-looking. I’m captivated by his wheat-blond hair, his lightly freckled arms. I can’t stop staring at the way his shirt sticks to his shoulders. The fabric is half-pink with watered-down blood, but I can’t see where it’s coming from.
Obie catches Moloch by the arm and when he speaks, his voice is furious. “Tell me all about it. Did you rough him up first? Did you have some fun?” He says fun like it’s an obscenity. Fun, like gangrene.
Across the walkway, a cluster of the Lilim are laughing, heads tipped back like jackals. They giggle and shriek, tossing their hair like movie stars, darting furtive looks in our direction. Their teeth are sharp and metallic, and all of them are terribly alike.
“I could show him something fun,” I hear someone whisper before they dissolve into laughter.
Moloch raises his eyebrows and removes his arm from Obie’s grasp. “Maybe you didn’t get a good look, but that walking calamity didn’t need anyone else to put the damage on him. He’s managed quite well on his own, thank you.”
Moloch is thinner than Obie, but taller, and there’s an insolent bulge where the tip of his tongue presses into his cheek. The toes of his boots are nearly touching Obie’s sneakers and he smiles. It’s a huge, avid smile—the kind that makes me think of crocodiles or sharks. It is the exact opposite of warm.
At their feet, the mural is of the temptation in the Garden and the apples are all done in pulsing, molten red. The boy sits bloody and soaking in the middle of it, covering his head with his hands.
There’s a fluttering feeling that starts in my chest and feathers out, tingling down my arms, humming in my fingertips. I want to touch his hair, his dripping face, to feel the thing that makes him special. He’s nothing like one of Obie’s half-demons. They come into the city joyful, so glad to finally be home. This boy just turns his face against his shoulder like he understands that Pandemonium is the worst possible place for him to be.
Around us, the pain demons are already gathering—the Butchers and the Eaters. I wonder if they sensed the boy’s divinity even before they saw him—a smell or a sound that told them he was here.
In front of me, he seems to be getting smaller, curling in on himself. Water is running off his elbows, pooling around his bare feet. I have a feeling that if I touched him, he could make me a better person, and maybe that’s why Moloch doesn’t want to give him up. Maybe that’s why my sisters are creeping closer, licking their lips. They sense his goodness and it draws them. They want it for themselves.
I kneel beside him, studying the shape of his hands. They’re bony, pink with watered-down blood. It coats his skin like the wash of color when light shines through stained glass.
Carefully, I reach out, letting my fingers graze the contour of his cheekbone. At my touch, he looks up. His skin is marked by a smattering of freckles, and his eyes are a clear, arctic blue, so bright and icy that I flinch and drop my hands.
“Where am I?” he whispers, sounding dazed.
From the heart of the city, there’s a deep, resonating crash as the furnace door slams open. The sound makes him recoil. His eyes are so wide, so painfully blue. All at once, he’s fumbling for my hand, finding it, catching hold. His touch is shocking, too unexpected and too actual to contemplate, and instead of jerking back, I just hold on.
“Where am I?” he says again, and his voice is hoarse but louder, echoing in the terminal.
I shake my head and the air around us shimmers. It only takes the furnace a few scorching increments to reach full blaze. Then the hammering starts and anything that wasn’t built here or brought in on the shelter of someone’s body is going up in smoke.
Aroun
d us, the puddle shrinks rapidly. It vanishes in a rush of steam, only to be replaced by the water that won’t stop pouring down his arms, and if he stays, it will soak his bloody shirt forever, like Beelzebub’s flies. Like a story that never gets past the first sentence. It will be what defines him.
My sister Myra breaks from the crowd of Lilim. She comes picking her way across the thoroughfare with her eyes bright and hungry, her hands outstretched. Her fingers look like claws.
“No fair,” she says, pouting decadently. “If Daphne gets to play with him, I want to play too.”
“Get back.” Obie’s voice is sharp. It sounds like a whip cracking, and Myra retreats, skipping back with her fingers pressed to her mouth like a naughty child. The others squeal and duck away, laughing, but the damage has been done.
The pain demons are stirring now, moving closer. One of the Eaters creeps up beside me with a wild, gleeful look. Her hair is tangled, matted with someone else’s blood, and when she reaches toward the boy on the ground, he grips my hand so tight I think he’ll never let go.
“Lost Ones make the best toys,” she whispers, stroking his face. “Just enough angel in the blood to keep them lively.”
Her teeth are long and jagged. She looks ravenous, like she’s never wanted anything more, and in that eager, hungry expression, I see an eternity of suffering.
No matter how animated the common damned are when they come in, they all go dark eventually. Usually sooner, rather than later. An angel-boy is a different matter altogether. The simple fact is, he’s half-eternal and if this Eater or any of the other leering creatures on the walkway goes to work on him, he won’t break or burn out or go silent. They can make him scream forever.
Suddenly, I’m sure that in another instant, they’ll start on him right here in the terminal, on the carved panel of temptation. They’ll brutalize and maim him and they’ll go on doing it. The Eater smiles a wide, festering smile and I hold on tighter, bracing myself for the scream.
Then, without warning, the crowd shifts. There’s a rustle, a stepping-back, and the whole atmosphere changes.
“What’s all this?” says a voice from the walkway and I glance up, nearly shaking with relief.
Beelzebub is here, striding through the terminal in his polished wingtips and his work suit, surrounded by flies. His expression is mild, but Obie and Moloch both drop their eyes and stand at attention, and the Eater slinks back toward her cluster of friends, still casting hungry glances at the boy on the ground.
“So,” Beelzebub says, clapping Obie on the shoulder. “Mind telling me what the fuss is about? Are we having a party?”
“That kid on the floor,” Obie says, gesturing. His voice sounds hoarse. “That’s a Lost One, and these cannibals know it—they all know he might as well be one of us. He shouldn’t be here.”
Beelzebub studies the two of us, crouched in front of him. I stare up, trying to communicate using my eyes, but his expression is inscrutable.
Please, I say without words. Please, this is too awful. Don’t let it happen.
His gaze is intent, sweeping over my upturned face, the boy’s bent head. For a strange moment, I think he’s going to reach down and pull us apart, but he only sets his weapons case on the portrait of Leviathan and straightens his tie.
“Take him back,” he says. It’s directed at Obie, but he’s still looking at me. “Take him home.”
His tone is loud and definite and for the first time, everyone in the terminal stops talking. The only sound is the low, repetitive strike of the hammers, a long way off.
Beelzebub turns to face the crowd and they all stare back, but no one says anything.
“Are you still here?” he asks with a sharp, derisive smile. “There’s nothing here for you. Go on, go find something else to amuse yourselves.”
The Eaters on the walkway scowl, but no one argues. None of them would dare question Beelzebub when he makes his wishes known, even now, when the decree is something unheard of.
The look Obie gives him is grateful, but I can’t help thinking that Beelzebub is doing this for me and not my brother. That if it were Obie sitting on the ground with a bleeding boy, reluctant to hand him over to the Eaters, Beelzebub would shake his head and smile regretfully, or maybe lecture him on jurisdiction, remind him that once a job comes into the city, they all belong here—no exceptions. He wouldn’t, under any circumstances, send the boy home.
Moloch looks away. “Do what you want—I’m just the errand boy—but don’t go thinking you’re his savior. Trust me, he’ll be back here again in six months. A year at the outside.”
“Sorry,” the boy whispers and his voice is almost too soft to hear. “I’m sorry.”
The word sounds choked and I don’t know what he’s apologizing for. His hand is slick and solid in mine, and I adjust my grip but don’t pull away.
Obie gestures for the boy to stand up, but he doesn’t move. He stays crouched next to me, until I struggle up from the floor and help him to his feet. Obie takes him by the elbow and starts for the gates, but the boy hesitates. His fingers are tangled with mine, his grip obstinate.
Obie tugs harder. “Daphne, let go.”
“I’m not holding on.”
Obie tries again to steer him back toward the row of turnstiles, but the boy just clutches me tighter.
“Stop it,” I tell him, struggling to pull away. “You can’t stay here.”
I have to peel his fingers off me one by one before he will loosen his grip. Even as we slide apart, the boy won’t drop his gaze. His eyes are pale as ice chips, boring into mine, and I think he can see my deepest wishes and my secrets, see all the way inside of me. I need him to stop looking.
“Quite the trousseau,” Beelzebub says, raising his eyebrows at Obie’s suitcase, which is lying on the floor. “Packing light for someone who’s leaving for good.”
Obie doesn’t answer. He takes me by the arm and pulls me away from the crowd, looking down into my face. His eyes are wide and hurt. Betrayed.
“This is the most important thing in my life,” he says in a low voice. “Do you understand that? I need this. How could you just run out and tell everybody?”
I gaze up at him, mute as he searches my face. I don’t tell him that it wasn’t everybody, that it was only Beelzebub.
“I had to tell someone,” I whisper, shaking my head. “I’m scared you’re going to die.”
Obie’s hand is resting on my arm and the way he looks at me is pleading. “Don’t—don’t make it harder. I know what could happen. Don’t you think I’d stay if I could?”
And I see in his eyes that he’s telling the truth. He can’t be happy here. He needs to leave, and needing that means nothing will stop him.
“I understand,” I say, with my hands clasped tight together. “Just please, be careful.”
Obie nods. His eyes are the interminable silver of our mother’s, but gentle and liquid. “I love you,” he says, so softly I think I’ve misheard it.
“You what?”
“Love you,” he says again, louder.
And I’ve only ever heard that word coming from the television. Not from someone’s actual mouth, not talking about me.
With an expression so tender it makes something spasm in my throat, he leans down and kisses me on the forehead. Then he lets me go. He picks up the suitcase and rests a hand on the boy’s shoulder, turning him toward the gates, and all at once, I know that he’s leaving—really, and for good. That in another instant, my brother will be gone and I’ll still be here.
He presses his hand against the pass panel beside the gate, leaning in to speak the word that will let them leave. There’s a stifled hiss as the gate unlocks and he pushes it open.
The boy stumbles once, lurching through the turnstile. As he does, something slips from his hand and lands with a clatter. Then they’re through the gate and gone, and I’m alone, standing in the spot where they stood. My hand feels numb, like it’s lost connection to my body.
&nb
sp; I bend down, reaching for the thing the boy dropped. It is an onyx-handled straight razor. I hold it away from myself, my hand dripping with slick, pink water.
The red sky is already fading to gray again, leaving the terminal hazy with smoke. The razor feels light and graceful in my hand. I slip it into my pocket, then turn to face the crowd. Beelzebub might have been wrong when he said there was nothing here for them, but I can’t help thinking that just now, for me, it feels true. I know it’s not right or rational, but suddenly I’m overcome by loneliness, remembering all the endearing, baffling things about my brother. Everything I’m losing. Remembering how easy it was to wait for him when I always knew he’d come back.
For the first time in my life, it feels like there’s nothing keeping me anchored.
SISTERS
CHAPTER FIVE
Twilight has settled in, leaving the city dark. I walk out of the terminal with my head high and my hands at my sides and it takes all my will to do it slowly.
Then I’m outside, away from the building, and in the next instant, I’m running—darting through the crowded streets, winding my way between open cooling vents. The smoke rises in columns around me, pouring out of the grates, making everything gray.
Obie is gone. He’s chosen to take his chances with Earth and Azrael, and I don’t know what to do now, so I run faster. Away from dropped razors, bloody water. Away from the dripping boy with his fierce, tragic eyes, the way it felt when I let him go. My feet are numb with the impact, pounding up the spiral stairs of the Spire building, up to my room, where I’ll sit alone on the couch and figure out a way to fix this.
But I open the door to find my sister Petra standing on the end table, hanging an assortment of rainbow-colored streamers. My collection of glass apothecary bottles has been set out in perfect order, each one positioned according to size.