Smyler seemed to have limbs everywhere. He wrapped his legs around me and squeezed my ribs until I felt one crack, but I had to ignore the pain, because I knew if I let go of one of his arms he was going to poke that nasty long knife thing into the back of my neck and then drag my paralyzed body away somewhere to ask his questions at leisure.
He wiggled his no-knife arm out of my grip and wrapped it around my skull, then squeezed until I thought the blood was going to fountain out of the top of my head. I could hear sirens, and I prayed they were getting louder, but it was hard to tell because my brain was full of thunder and red light. I’d lost my pistol somewhere on the ground but still had the cosh in the forearm of my coat, so I started smashing it against his skinny back as hard as I could, over and over, praying that I could crush one of his vertebrae or at least rupture a kidney.
He laughed. The horrible, pinched face was right beside mine, and if I hadn’t been fighting for my very life the stink alone would have made me throw up. As it was, my eyes stung, and not just from sweat. I could feel the sinewy strength in his slender neck and that horrid, jutting jaw trying to close on my ear, my cheek, anything it could tear at, and all I could do was try to keep my head stretched as far away as possible while I crashed the metal bar against his spine.
“It like dancing!” Smyler whispered. “Oh, yes. It dance to glory!”
But now the sirens were too loud to ignore. At least one police car was coming down the street toward us fast, lights glaring and jouncing as the cruiser bounced over speed bumps. I felt my attacker go slack for just a moment, distracted, and I risked loosening my right-arm grip just long enough to swing my weighted sleeve into the back of his skull as hard as I could. I’m stronger than most normal people, and although the hoodie he was wearing muffled the blow a little it would certainly have knocked any ordinary assailant cold if not DOA. My attacker just shook his horrid head as though his ears had popped on an afternoon drive in the mountains, then shoved my skull back against the ground with a nasty, cold hand. I braced for steel in my guts.
“See you, Bobby Bad Angel,” Smyler whispered. “Soon!” Then he sprang up and was gone, over somebody’s garden hedge and away into the darkness. As I struggled and failed to sit up, I could see the lights of a half dozen open doors, and people standing at their windows looking out. Then the spot from the police cruiser fell on me, filling the world with painful white light, and that was the last thing I remembered.
interlude
I WAS LYING on my stomach, drifting in and out of sleep. Caz was curled up behind me, spooning me. At first I thought she was just moving randomly against me, but then I realized that she was slowly rubbing her pussy against my tailbone, an almost imperceptible grinding and tightening, slow as the movement of glaciers. I wasn’t even sure she was awake.
I made a joke. I wish now I hadn’t. “So, is this a dominance hump? Am I your bitch, now?”
She froze. Seriously, she went rigid, like an animal trying not to be seen. After all we’d just done with each other, I’d somehow caught her by surprise, and it was like a window had opened that looked straight backward, five hundred years into the past, to a shamed little medieval girl, a Catholic nobleman’s daughter with feelings she wasn’t supposed to have.
“I . . . I didn’t . . .”
“Hey,” I said. “Hey! It’s all right. Actually, it’s more than all right. I was just making a stupid joke. You may not have noticed, but I do it a lot.”
“I was . . . I was smelling you. It just made me . . . well, you know.”
“And what do I smell like? Napalm in the morning? A good little angel?”
“Shut up. You smell like Bobby. I need to remember.”
That gave me a moment’s pause. I knew why she was worried about remembering, but I didn’t really want to think about it. I went back to silliness, hoping to retrieve the moment when we had been alone in the Garden without care or knowledge. “So you’re saying it wasn’t a dominance thing.”
“Don’t need to hump you for that, angel boy, it’s automatic. I’m a very high-ranking demon, remember.”
“Oh, yeah. Like I could forget after you tried to beat the shit out of me earlier this evening.”
“See? That was when I established my dominance.”
“Dominance, my shiny golden halo. It seems to me that I wound up on top of you, remember?”
“Only because I let you. We females have been using that trick for thousands of years. ‘Oh, you big strong man, you’ve overwhelmed me!’ And you always fall for it. Dumb dicks.”
“Yeah, well, a wise man once said, ‘As the twig is bent, so dumbs the dick.’”
For a moment she just stared at me. “That doesn’t many any sense at all.”
I considered. “Or maybe it’s ‘A mighty fortress is our dick.’”
She hit me. Not too hard, though. “No wonder I’m having trouble sleeping. I’m sharing my bed with a dangerous winged idiot.”
seven:
drummed out
YOU’D THINK getting multiple stab wounds and broken ribs from a twice-dead assassin would be enough fun for one day, but it wasn’t over yet.
After my wrestling match with Smyler, I came back to consciousness just long enough to have some momentary sense of my physical body—which felt like a large sack of broken crockery wrapped in scalded nerves—surrounded by harsh white lights and medical machinery, then I was abruptly somewhere else.
That somewhere else, as it turned out, was Heaven, and although being lifted right out of all that pain and suffering into the bodiless exaltation of my celestial form was at least as good as getting a massive shot of Demerol, the relief was undercut a bit by the sight of my boss, Archangel Temuel, and the expression on his not-quite-face.
The farther up the heavenly ladder you are, by the way, the less you look like a regular person. As best I can tell, when I’m in Heaven I look like a shimmery, vaguely blurry version of my earthly self, although it’s hard to be certain because reflecting surfaces are oddly scarce upstairs. But Temuel (or “the Mule” as his underlings call him) always looks even blurrier than that, less human. And the higher angels only occasionally look like they really have bodies underneath all that glow. More as if the bodies themselves are just another kind of glow. Hard to put into words, but if you were here you’d agree with me.
“Angel Doloriel,” said Temuel. “God loves you. Are you well?”
“Better now, yeah. But somebody did a major number on me, and it’s not going to be fun to put that body back on again.”
“Of course.” Then the Mule went quiet for a long moment. I didn’t like the implication that it was no slam-dunk I’d be getting my body back. “We are wanted in the Hall of Judgement,” he said at last. “Come.”
Which would have sent shivers up my spine if I’d been wearing my regular body, I can promise you. Probably would have hurt like hell with the broken ribs, too. I’d only been in the Hall of Judgement once, and generally the things that happened there fell into the category of Really Fucking Serious.
Temuel reached out toward me and suddenly we were traveling. Or at least, we moved directly from Place A to Place B, which is how you travel through Heaven if you’re not interested in meandering around its airy, gleaming streets. The short trip didn’t give me any chance to ask questions, which may have been what the Mule wanted. He certainly didn’t seem very happy, so I wasn’t feeling that way either.
The Hall of Judgement is about ninety times as awesome as you can imagine. The important places of Heaven always seem to have a strangely fascist scope to them, as if the main purpose of their creation was to make individual human souls feel tiny. And you know what? It works. Does it ever.