At last even the dream was gone, and I was alone with the near-silent whisper, sinking slowly into oblivion.
On my way.
On my way down.
All the way down.
interlude
I WAS ADMIRING a mole on her back, a smooth brown dot just below her shoulder blade, like a fairy-mound in a snow-covered field.
“So how did Hell know to put that perfect mole right there on your perfect back to make me fall in love with you?”
She snorted. “Right. Like Hell bothered to plan for you, Dollar. That happens to be my own original mole, direct from the Fifteenth Century.”
I bent and bestowed a kiss on the icy skin, then moved up to where the first pale wisps of hair grew on her nape. I spent a little while kissing her neck and ears and savoring the smell of her. I’ll never be able to describe it, not in its complex entirety, but I will never forget it even if I somehow beat the odds and survive to become a very, very old angel. Which would be a very long time.
After a while I started back down the other direction, rubbing my face against the smooth, chilly bumps of her spine as I descended, stopping to pay my respects at the fairy-hill mole again, then continuing on down her back to the soft protrusion of her tailbone and the cleft of her buttocks. Some Greek guy, Aristotle or Plato or Onassis or someone, said there were five perfect solids, five absolute geometric shapes. To these I would like to add the shape of Caz’s ass, because if you’re looking for perfection, well, there it is. I think it’s a tribute to my maturity that I’d already pretty much fallen in love with her without ever seeing it in the firm, silken flesh. Once I had . . . well, I don’t want to overwhelm everyone with sentiment here.
A little while later:
Her slender back stretched out before me like stone smoothed by ocean waves. The curve of her backside was flattened against my groin. As I entered her, she let out a gasp, and I felt her tighten, then freeze like a terrified animal. I paused.
“Does it hurt?” I asked. I let my hands trail down her skin. “Do you want me to stop?”
“I don’t know. Yes. No.” She tried to look back at me, but the angle was bad. “It’s just . . . it feels so vulnerable. I don’t . . .” She trailed off. “I’m sorry, I do need to stop. Can you just hold me?”
“Of course.” I withdrew gently, then pulled her with me as I collapsed onto the bed, so that the cold length of her back was against my belly. I wrapped my arms around her and pulled her close. “I didn’t really want to have more sex, anyway,” I said. “I know people say they like it, but I think the whole fad is kind of overrated.” I felt her quivering silently against me. Was she laughing? It hadn’t been much of a joke.
When she hadn’t stopped a few moments later, I asked, “Caz? Are you crying?”
“No.” But I could feel the back of my arm getting damp. I leaned away and tried to turn her face toward me, but she wasn’t having it. She wiped angrily at her eyes before she’d let me look at her. “Just fuck off, Dollar. Don’t say anything.”
“What’s wrong? Did I do something?”
“No, you didn’t. It’s not always about you.”
“Then what?”
She blinked, scowled. “I’m just not . . . I don’t do tenderness very well.” She snuck a look at me before burying her head against my arms again. “Arsehole. Don’t make me self-conscious, or I’ll go back and get my knife and I will cut off your winkie.”
Ah, the romance of threatened castration!
I just held her until she felt better, then we kissed and whispered for a little before dozing again. The Countess of Cold Hands had many wounded places, many broken places, but what was astonishing to me is how much I cared about those hurts, how much I wanted to try to make things better for her. That was by far the scariest thing that had ever happened to me.
Caz was a high-ranking official in Hell, she was my sworn, deadly enemy . . . and she had issues. Any remotely sensible angel, even at that late stage of things, would have got up then and run out the door and never looked back. But, of course, I’ve never been that kind of angel.
thirteen:
gob
SO ONE moment I’m lying under somebody’s spare bed like a bargain basement King Tut, the next I’m in deep, deep darkness. And things got even stranger after that, because the darkness was bumpy.
I’m not talking texture here, like undercooked oatmeal, I’m talking about the fact that I could feel myself going bump, bump, bump as I went down, as though I were being lowered by very clumsy hands. I was in some kind of closet or tiny room. No, I realized as the entire enclosure lurched around me, throwing me toward one of the walls. No, I was in an elevator. I was descending to Hell in an elevator, ratcheting down on a squeaky cable toward the ultimate basement floor. I wondered if other new arrivals got different conveyances. Handbaskets, for instance.
I felt different, I realized, and it wasn’t just the sudden absence of Lameh the guardian angel (apparently she herself wasn’t accompanying me) or the presence of the ideas she’d whispered into my memory. My whole body felt different in ways I couldn’t quite understand, and the feeling was so strange that it took me longer than it should have to realize that I must be in a new body as well, that as part of her duties Lameh had housed my soul in something more suited to travel in Hell. A new body and a few new thoughts, too, but the same old hopeless situation.
I found it all very creepy for those first moments, but as the jolting descent continued, my situation just became boring. Then the very boredom, the length and unrelenting sameness of the journey, became creepy again. If it hadn’t been for a few bone-rattling jolts and the very occasional smolder of light through the little window that seemed to be in front of my face, I might have been in some kind of endless video loop, the same meaningless five seconds cycling for eternity. I was fairly certain that Hell’s high rollers didn’t travel in and out this way, since it seemed to be taking hours.
The long descent gave me time to take a little stock. I lifted up my hands to see if I could get some idea what my Hell-body looked like. They seemed darker than usual and the nails were nearly claws, but otherwise not too freaky. There wasn’t enough light to make out any of the rest of me, but I bent what I could bend, felt what I could feel. Mostly it seemed pretty normal, although my skin definitely seemed thicker than before, a bit like the rubbery hide of dolphins and orcas.
At last, the elevator shuddered to a halt with a whine of metal on metal. The door banged open. I half-expected to see Housewares or the Children’s Shoes department or something, but instead I stood on one side of a narrow expanse of yellow dust, everything above me and beside me lost in shadow. But it was a big space—that much I could tell. Impossibly big. On the far side of the dust loomed the Neronian Bridge, my first glimpse of that impossible span of stone. The featureless bridge curved up and across the monstrous abyss until it narrowed into near-invisibility over the pit’s dark center, illuminated only by the fiery red glow licking through cracks in the walls.
I had enough light now to look at myself. My hands were roughly human, but my skin color (or colors, to be more accurate) wasn’t even close; what I could see was ashy gray with stripes of black and orange. At the joints the skin hardened into black plates, and when I twisted my arm or leg I could see bright red flesh appearing or disappearing in the crevices as the plates pulled apart. It was a bit unsettling, to tell the truth, so I stopped doing it. I felt my head, which seemed fairly ordinary except that where I normally would have had hair I was feeling something more like bristles or even quills. No horns, then. My feet were flat black and leathery, with only one division, between my big toe and the rest of my foot, like Japanese tabi socks. If that was standard issue for demons, I could understand where the idea of hooves had come from. No tail, either, which was a bit of a relief. In fact, everything I could see except for my color and my toes felt and looked at least human-ish. Could have been a lot worse.