“Actually, it was a group effort, bitch.”
At the sound of Ad’s hoarse voice, Jim became aware that there were two other people in the room: the other angel, who was trying to unpretzel himself over by the windows, and Colin, who was still pretty out of it.
“Jesus,” Jim breathed. “You didn’t use her to—”
“Get away from him!” Devina lurched forward. “Get away from my man.”
Yeah, screw that, Jim thought. In spite of the fact that his body felt like it had been through a meat grinder, he was more than ready to hit her. Just haul off and clock Devina so hard she—
A rhythmic sound broke into the room, strident and loud enough to get even the demon’s attention. And it was as Jim twisted around to look behind himself that he realized who and what it was … and how he’d managed to find Nigel in that dusty, torturous place.
Dog, who was not actually a dog, was parked between the doorjambs of the parlor, his scruffy little body braced, his muzzle working as he barked at the demon.
It was that noise he’d heard in Purgatory, Jim thought. That beacon that he’d followed in a place with no compass points and no destinations.
Holy shit, the Creator Himself had been the one to lead him to the archangel.
Snapping back to attention, Jim found Devina frozen in place, clearly caught between a jealous urge to rip Sissy limb from limb and a serious sense of self-preservation.
“But it’s not fair,” the demon bitched. “It’s not fucking fair.”
Dog kept up with the barking, like he was talking at her. And then Devina looked at Jim, her expression changing into something that seemed a lot like hurt.
With four deliberate steps across the bare, dusty floor, she came up to him, raised her hand over her shoulder, and slapped him so hard both of his ears rang.
“You are too cruel,” she said numbly. “And you do not deserve me.”
One more nasty glare at Sissy and the demon was gone, poofing it out of the room.
“Well, that could have been worse,” Ad muttered. “Although, man, we’ve so lost our security deposit on this place.”
Chapter Fourteen
Nigel regained consciousness in the opposite way from the manner in which he’d lost it: slowly and in stages. First came a hazy awareness of being, then a rudimentary thought that he was drawing breath. Next was discomfort … that expeditiously ramped up to full-on pain.
Amongst the many aspects of life that were straddled by an entity such as himself, the duality of his nature, both corporeal and ethereal, meant that he was not entirely free of contending with the physical travails of possessing flesh. And such was the case now.
Especially as the shell he had left behind in Heaven reestablished itself over his core, sprouting from the essence of his energetic being.
Naturally, this made the suffering even more acute, and he parted his lips to release a moan.
“His arms are broken,” someone said from above him.
“His legs, too.”
And then that voice, that special, sacred voice that had both kept him sane and made him crazy, spoke up: “How unfortunate. I shall have to wait until they heal first so that I may break them anew.”
Nigel opened his eyes and sought the male who had uttered the words. And there he was, Colin, the archangel, standing off to the side, his arms crossed as if in disapproval, his brows down, as was usual. That stare of his, however, was the very antithesis of the male’s typical dispassion: It glittered with a sheen of tears.
It was a death anew to see the hurt he had caused. The betrayal and the injury.
Nigel lifted his hand, as he could not speak—the gesture the only way he could beg. Colin tracked the movement … and shook his head.
The rejection was then completed as he addressed Jim and Adrian, speaking some combination of words that Nigel was incapable of understanding. Indeed, he would have withstood the pain he was in ten thousand times over to have a chance of his apology being accepted. But he knew his lover too well to be surprised.
Colin did not spare him another look as he disappeared, leaving nothing in his wake but a pair of footprints in the fallen ash upon the floor.
Nigel closed his eyes and found himself wishing for a permanent death.
“Nigel,” Jim said. “Nigel, you still there?”
No, he was not. “Aye, savior,” he rasped.
“Listen, we gotta … we gotta do something about the shape you’re in. We can’t leave you like this.”
“Aye.”
There was a long pause, like the two angels and the transient soul Sissy Barten were waiting for some instruction. He had none to give them. His direction had just left him for a very rational reason as Colin was not the type to make mistakes more than once.
Nor give his heart in that fashion.
“Nigel, can you fix yourself?” Jim asked. “Can you take care of this?”
When Nigel shook his head, Sissy spoke up. “I don’t suppose we could take him to the ER.”
“Yeah, not sure how that would work.” Jim cursed. “But I was trained to be a field medic. I’ve set a bone or two—although nothing like this.”
Nigel cleared his throat and shut his eyes. “I am in your care, savior.”
“Okay. All right. We need something to put between his teeth—oh, great, thanks, Ad.” A rustling sound. “Nigel? Open up and bite down on this, boss. It’s part of a drape.”
Doing as he was instructed, he didn’t brace himself for new agony. He was in a sufficiency of that already. It was not going to become worse.
“I’m going to start on your right leg, okay?” Pause. “Boss? You with me?”
“But of course, savior,” he mumbled around the gag.
Abruptly, Jim’s voice became very distinct, as if he’d moved up to Nigel’s ear. “You sure there isn’t another way to do this? I’m pretty sure you got magic tricks I don’t know about.”
Oh, there was. But he did not have the strength for it, and more to the point, he was in the mood for a lancing.
“Nigel? Hello? Nothing to say, huh. Okay, get ready.”
There were some orders given by the savior to the two others, and Nigel felt a pressure on his hips, as if someone had straddled him and was sitting down. Then his leg was laid out flat, the pieces of bone grinding one upon the other at the repositioning.
The gag was rather useful, as it turned out, his molars sinking into it as if it were flesh.
“On three,” Jim said. “One, two…”
When “three” arrived, Nigel’s lids popped wide-open and he screamed around the fabric in his mouth, the pain so great it appeared as if he had been wrong about being unable to feel worse.
Tears speared into his eyes and fell down the sides of his face, getting into his ears and his hair, and if he could have, he would have rolled over to vomit. Instead, he began to sob, his chest jumping with every jagged inhale, his dry throat racked with his heaving.
Through the great release of sorrow, Jim’s voice cut in as if he had once again come up to Nigel’s ear. “Do you want me to stop?”
Nigel shook his head and stared at the ceiling through his wailing. He needed to pay for the hurt he had caused and for his lack of courage and faith and for the fact that he had hurt the one entity in the universe who had always stood by him.
“You sure,” Jim said grimly.
All Nigel did was nod again.
Sissy watched from three feet away as Adrian sat on Nigel to keep him as steady as possible and Jim reset the leg bones. On the left side, the archangel had two breaks, one of the calf and one of the thigh, and Adrian had to lean down and stabilize the knee after the upper problem was fixed. The arms were just as bad.
She’d had to sit out a couple of field hockey games her senior year thanks to a sprained ankle—and that had been no walk in the park. She couldn’t fathom what this must be like. She wasn’t going to turn away, however. If there was a chance for her to help, she was going to be there.
That face, though. As long as she lived—or, jeez, “lived,” she supposed—she was never going to forget the way the archangel’s lips pulled off his teeth and his jaw gritted and his eyes disappeared in folds of agony as he grimaced. And the tears.
They made her want to weep. Not just for him, but for each of them.
When it was all over, Jim was panting from the effort. Coughing, too—which, given the amount of sediment that had come across with him from Purgatory, suggested the place was like a desert. As Adrian unhinged himself from the archangel’s torso, Jim sat back and wiped his face on his shirt.
“Without X-rays,” he said, “I don’t know whether I did more harm than good.”
“He’ll take care of it.” Adrian fell back on his butt. “He could have fixed all of this had he wanted to. Ain’t that right, Nigel.”
Sissy shook her head. “But why would he—”
The archangel sat up and took the gag out of his mouth with a hand that trembled. He was as pale as a cloud, and as a shimmer fell down the front of his robing, she realized that something like diamonds were cascading to the floor.
No, they actually were diamonds. As if his tears had hardened into the precious stones.
“You good?” Jim demanded gruffly. “Anything else you need?”
“You h-h-h-have p-p-provided a s-s-sufficiency.”
“I’ll be right back,” Sissy said, bolting for the door.
Rushing through the foyer and going into the kitchen, she headed for the cabinets. Popping them open, she found empty shelf after empty shelf. She was looking for some bourbon or gin or something that could warm the guy up and calm him down—
She found the remnants of a liquor stash on the lower level next to the sink. Pulling the bottles out, she had to wipe off the labels of a couple to read them. Most appeared to have been long opened, though, so God only knew what was going on with the insides of them.
One of them still had a seal, however, and when she looked at the label, she muttered, “Gotcha.”
On the way out, she grabbed one squat glass from the counter—then thought, What the hell, everyone needed a drink.
When she reentered the parlor, she hesitated, the extent of the damage dawning on her. The place was a bomb zone, but in the words of her father, they had bigger fish to fry at the moment.
Going over to the Englishman, she sat down cross-legged, arranged the glasses, cracked the paper seal, and poured out a healthy serving of the sherry.
She handed the first one to the guy who’d had his arms and legs worked on. Seemed only fair.
As Nigel’s strange-colored eyes swung in her direction, he gave her a tired smile. “You are a saint, my dear.”
She had to help him keep hold of the glass. “Isn’t that your job?”
“Alas, I am no saint.” He raised the sherry to her and bowed his head before drinking it all down.
Sissy was ready with the bottle, refilling him before pouring out glasses for herself, Jim, and Ad. And what do you know, the men murmured thanks and accepted the offering in spite of the fact that they probably considered it a little girlie.
Better than hundred-year-old gin, she’d imagine.
The four of them finished the whole damn bottle—Sissy included, even though she’d never been a big drinker even in college. And she had to admit the stuff worked. By the time the sherry was gone, there was color in Nigel’s face and his hands had stopped shaking, and he wasn’t the only one relaxing a little.
It was like having a Bunsen burner in your stomach, she thought as she put her glass down.
Jim tossed back the last of his and stared at Nigel. “I’m going to assume you’re fully returned. As in, I’m going to stay down here and keep doing what I’m doing.”
“That is my intention.”
“Intention?”
“The Creator is going to be displeased in all likelihood. But I shall take full responsibility. If there is to be a punishment, I shall accept it in your stead.”
“Devina says she’s going to tell Him it was her idea.”
“And you trust her?”
“Good point.”
Nigel looked up at the ceiling. “I shall be off then.”
“I’m not going to ask you who the next soul is.”
“Indeed? After your good deed, I am in the mood to grant you a favor.”
“No.” Jim’s expression grew hard. “I’m going to win this the right way. The way He set it up. I’ll find the soul, and she’s not getting them this time.”
“Fair enough. Let me know if you change your mind.” Nigel glanced at Adrian and gave him a nod. Then he looked over at Sissy. “My gratitude for the restorative.”
And on that note, the archangel up and disappeared, leaving nothing behind. Just like Colin had.
Sissy reached out and picked up one of the flashing white stones that had fallen to the floor. “Is this really what I think it is?”
“Yeah,” Ad said. “The tears of archangels are pretty damn fancy, huh.” The guy grunted and stood up. “I’m fucking starved. Between the drama and no lunch, I’m ready to eat the doorknobs.” He glanced around. “Lucky for me, ’cause that’s about all that’s left in here. I’m gonna hit the Seven Eleven and then make a McDonald’s run—no reason for the likes of us to eat healthy. Whaddaya want.”
Sissy put in an order for two cheeseburgers, a large fries, a high-test Coke, and a chocolate sundae. Jim wanted four Quarter Pounders with cheese and three Cokes.
“Hold down the fort,” Ad said as he limped off. “And try to do something about the windows. I think we’re supposed to get rain tonight.”
At the sound of Ad’s hoarse voice, Jim became aware that there were two other people in the room: the other angel, who was trying to unpretzel himself over by the windows, and Colin, who was still pretty out of it.
“Jesus,” Jim breathed. “You didn’t use her to—”
“Get away from him!” Devina lurched forward. “Get away from my man.”
Yeah, screw that, Jim thought. In spite of the fact that his body felt like it had been through a meat grinder, he was more than ready to hit her. Just haul off and clock Devina so hard she—
A rhythmic sound broke into the room, strident and loud enough to get even the demon’s attention. And it was as Jim twisted around to look behind himself that he realized who and what it was … and how he’d managed to find Nigel in that dusty, torturous place.
Dog, who was not actually a dog, was parked between the doorjambs of the parlor, his scruffy little body braced, his muzzle working as he barked at the demon.
It was that noise he’d heard in Purgatory, Jim thought. That beacon that he’d followed in a place with no compass points and no destinations.
Holy shit, the Creator Himself had been the one to lead him to the archangel.
Snapping back to attention, Jim found Devina frozen in place, clearly caught between a jealous urge to rip Sissy limb from limb and a serious sense of self-preservation.
“But it’s not fair,” the demon bitched. “It’s not fucking fair.”
Dog kept up with the barking, like he was talking at her. And then Devina looked at Jim, her expression changing into something that seemed a lot like hurt.
With four deliberate steps across the bare, dusty floor, she came up to him, raised her hand over her shoulder, and slapped him so hard both of his ears rang.
“You are too cruel,” she said numbly. “And you do not deserve me.”
One more nasty glare at Sissy and the demon was gone, poofing it out of the room.
“Well, that could have been worse,” Ad muttered. “Although, man, we’ve so lost our security deposit on this place.”
Chapter Fourteen
Nigel regained consciousness in the opposite way from the manner in which he’d lost it: slowly and in stages. First came a hazy awareness of being, then a rudimentary thought that he was drawing breath. Next was discomfort … that expeditiously ramped up to full-on pain.
Amongst the many aspects of life that were straddled by an entity such as himself, the duality of his nature, both corporeal and ethereal, meant that he was not entirely free of contending with the physical travails of possessing flesh. And such was the case now.
Especially as the shell he had left behind in Heaven reestablished itself over his core, sprouting from the essence of his energetic being.
Naturally, this made the suffering even more acute, and he parted his lips to release a moan.
“His arms are broken,” someone said from above him.
“His legs, too.”
And then that voice, that special, sacred voice that had both kept him sane and made him crazy, spoke up: “How unfortunate. I shall have to wait until they heal first so that I may break them anew.”
Nigel opened his eyes and sought the male who had uttered the words. And there he was, Colin, the archangel, standing off to the side, his arms crossed as if in disapproval, his brows down, as was usual. That stare of his, however, was the very antithesis of the male’s typical dispassion: It glittered with a sheen of tears.
It was a death anew to see the hurt he had caused. The betrayal and the injury.
Nigel lifted his hand, as he could not speak—the gesture the only way he could beg. Colin tracked the movement … and shook his head.
The rejection was then completed as he addressed Jim and Adrian, speaking some combination of words that Nigel was incapable of understanding. Indeed, he would have withstood the pain he was in ten thousand times over to have a chance of his apology being accepted. But he knew his lover too well to be surprised.
Colin did not spare him another look as he disappeared, leaving nothing in his wake but a pair of footprints in the fallen ash upon the floor.
Nigel closed his eyes and found himself wishing for a permanent death.
“Nigel,” Jim said. “Nigel, you still there?”
No, he was not. “Aye, savior,” he rasped.
“Listen, we gotta … we gotta do something about the shape you’re in. We can’t leave you like this.”
“Aye.”
There was a long pause, like the two angels and the transient soul Sissy Barten were waiting for some instruction. He had none to give them. His direction had just left him for a very rational reason as Colin was not the type to make mistakes more than once.
Nor give his heart in that fashion.
“Nigel, can you fix yourself?” Jim asked. “Can you take care of this?”
When Nigel shook his head, Sissy spoke up. “I don’t suppose we could take him to the ER.”
“Yeah, not sure how that would work.” Jim cursed. “But I was trained to be a field medic. I’ve set a bone or two—although nothing like this.”
Nigel cleared his throat and shut his eyes. “I am in your care, savior.”
“Okay. All right. We need something to put between his teeth—oh, great, thanks, Ad.” A rustling sound. “Nigel? Open up and bite down on this, boss. It’s part of a drape.”
Doing as he was instructed, he didn’t brace himself for new agony. He was in a sufficiency of that already. It was not going to become worse.
“I’m going to start on your right leg, okay?” Pause. “Boss? You with me?”
“But of course, savior,” he mumbled around the gag.
Abruptly, Jim’s voice became very distinct, as if he’d moved up to Nigel’s ear. “You sure there isn’t another way to do this? I’m pretty sure you got magic tricks I don’t know about.”
Oh, there was. But he did not have the strength for it, and more to the point, he was in the mood for a lancing.
“Nigel? Hello? Nothing to say, huh. Okay, get ready.”
There were some orders given by the savior to the two others, and Nigel felt a pressure on his hips, as if someone had straddled him and was sitting down. Then his leg was laid out flat, the pieces of bone grinding one upon the other at the repositioning.
The gag was rather useful, as it turned out, his molars sinking into it as if it were flesh.
“On three,” Jim said. “One, two…”
When “three” arrived, Nigel’s lids popped wide-open and he screamed around the fabric in his mouth, the pain so great it appeared as if he had been wrong about being unable to feel worse.
Tears speared into his eyes and fell down the sides of his face, getting into his ears and his hair, and if he could have, he would have rolled over to vomit. Instead, he began to sob, his chest jumping with every jagged inhale, his dry throat racked with his heaving.
Through the great release of sorrow, Jim’s voice cut in as if he had once again come up to Nigel’s ear. “Do you want me to stop?”
Nigel shook his head and stared at the ceiling through his wailing. He needed to pay for the hurt he had caused and for his lack of courage and faith and for the fact that he had hurt the one entity in the universe who had always stood by him.
“You sure,” Jim said grimly.
All Nigel did was nod again.
Sissy watched from three feet away as Adrian sat on Nigel to keep him as steady as possible and Jim reset the leg bones. On the left side, the archangel had two breaks, one of the calf and one of the thigh, and Adrian had to lean down and stabilize the knee after the upper problem was fixed. The arms were just as bad.
She’d had to sit out a couple of field hockey games her senior year thanks to a sprained ankle—and that had been no walk in the park. She couldn’t fathom what this must be like. She wasn’t going to turn away, however. If there was a chance for her to help, she was going to be there.
That face, though. As long as she lived—or, jeez, “lived,” she supposed—she was never going to forget the way the archangel’s lips pulled off his teeth and his jaw gritted and his eyes disappeared in folds of agony as he grimaced. And the tears.
They made her want to weep. Not just for him, but for each of them.
When it was all over, Jim was panting from the effort. Coughing, too—which, given the amount of sediment that had come across with him from Purgatory, suggested the place was like a desert. As Adrian unhinged himself from the archangel’s torso, Jim sat back and wiped his face on his shirt.
“Without X-rays,” he said, “I don’t know whether I did more harm than good.”
“He’ll take care of it.” Adrian fell back on his butt. “He could have fixed all of this had he wanted to. Ain’t that right, Nigel.”
Sissy shook her head. “But why would he—”
The archangel sat up and took the gag out of his mouth with a hand that trembled. He was as pale as a cloud, and as a shimmer fell down the front of his robing, she realized that something like diamonds were cascading to the floor.
No, they actually were diamonds. As if his tears had hardened into the precious stones.
“You good?” Jim demanded gruffly. “Anything else you need?”
“You h-h-h-have p-p-provided a s-s-sufficiency.”
“I’ll be right back,” Sissy said, bolting for the door.
Rushing through the foyer and going into the kitchen, she headed for the cabinets. Popping them open, she found empty shelf after empty shelf. She was looking for some bourbon or gin or something that could warm the guy up and calm him down—
She found the remnants of a liquor stash on the lower level next to the sink. Pulling the bottles out, she had to wipe off the labels of a couple to read them. Most appeared to have been long opened, though, so God only knew what was going on with the insides of them.
One of them still had a seal, however, and when she looked at the label, she muttered, “Gotcha.”
On the way out, she grabbed one squat glass from the counter—then thought, What the hell, everyone needed a drink.
When she reentered the parlor, she hesitated, the extent of the damage dawning on her. The place was a bomb zone, but in the words of her father, they had bigger fish to fry at the moment.
Going over to the Englishman, she sat down cross-legged, arranged the glasses, cracked the paper seal, and poured out a healthy serving of the sherry.
She handed the first one to the guy who’d had his arms and legs worked on. Seemed only fair.
As Nigel’s strange-colored eyes swung in her direction, he gave her a tired smile. “You are a saint, my dear.”
She had to help him keep hold of the glass. “Isn’t that your job?”
“Alas, I am no saint.” He raised the sherry to her and bowed his head before drinking it all down.
Sissy was ready with the bottle, refilling him before pouring out glasses for herself, Jim, and Ad. And what do you know, the men murmured thanks and accepted the offering in spite of the fact that they probably considered it a little girlie.
Better than hundred-year-old gin, she’d imagine.
The four of them finished the whole damn bottle—Sissy included, even though she’d never been a big drinker even in college. And she had to admit the stuff worked. By the time the sherry was gone, there was color in Nigel’s face and his hands had stopped shaking, and he wasn’t the only one relaxing a little.
It was like having a Bunsen burner in your stomach, she thought as she put her glass down.
Jim tossed back the last of his and stared at Nigel. “I’m going to assume you’re fully returned. As in, I’m going to stay down here and keep doing what I’m doing.”
“That is my intention.”
“Intention?”
“The Creator is going to be displeased in all likelihood. But I shall take full responsibility. If there is to be a punishment, I shall accept it in your stead.”
“Devina says she’s going to tell Him it was her idea.”
“And you trust her?”
“Good point.”
Nigel looked up at the ceiling. “I shall be off then.”
“I’m not going to ask you who the next soul is.”
“Indeed? After your good deed, I am in the mood to grant you a favor.”
“No.” Jim’s expression grew hard. “I’m going to win this the right way. The way He set it up. I’ll find the soul, and she’s not getting them this time.”
“Fair enough. Let me know if you change your mind.” Nigel glanced at Adrian and gave him a nod. Then he looked over at Sissy. “My gratitude for the restorative.”
And on that note, the archangel up and disappeared, leaving nothing behind. Just like Colin had.
Sissy reached out and picked up one of the flashing white stones that had fallen to the floor. “Is this really what I think it is?”
“Yeah,” Ad said. “The tears of archangels are pretty damn fancy, huh.” The guy grunted and stood up. “I’m fucking starved. Between the drama and no lunch, I’m ready to eat the doorknobs.” He glanced around. “Lucky for me, ’cause that’s about all that’s left in here. I’m gonna hit the Seven Eleven and then make a McDonald’s run—no reason for the likes of us to eat healthy. Whaddaya want.”
Sissy put in an order for two cheeseburgers, a large fries, a high-test Coke, and a chocolate sundae. Jim wanted four Quarter Pounders with cheese and three Cokes.
“Hold down the fort,” Ad said as he limped off. “And try to do something about the windows. I think we’re supposed to get rain tonight.”
