“Thirty minutes,” said Farber. “Well, we’d better synchronize our watches.” We all turned to stare at him. “It was a joke,” he said, a little sheepishly. “Because, obviously, we don’t have watches.”
“I’ve actually been to Hell,” I said. “And you know what? All the comedians there were German.”
He gave me a look of mock recrimination that made me smile. It didn’t last long, but it was a nice two seconds of humanity. I hoped it wasn’t my last.
“So is it go?” I said.
Sam looked around. “Looks like it.”
“God loves you,” I said to Mayor Weng and her pilgrims. “And all of us, I hope. Now get out of here.”
As they hurried away across the snow and drifting black grit, we sent Walker and his volunteers to get into position, then after a last check, Sam and Clarence and I went into the house. I let Sam open the Go-To-Mecca Box, which he did only after pulling on the brilliantly glowing second-skin that was the God Glove. It looked like the end of his wrist was one big sparkler, but I knew it was only a birthday candle compared to what Anaita could muster, and we didn’t dare use it against her anyway.
“I think the cube is ready,” said Sam. “But she may have noticed that I flipped channels, if you know what I mean, so make it fast.”
I did. I kept my call brief and to the point. “It’s time,” I said—just that.
When I’d finished, Sam hung up the cosmic phone and adjusted it back to its original setting, which was a hotline right to Anaita, Angel of Moisture and goddess of our personal ruin, then he opened the channel. I held my finger to my lips for silence until we crept a little farther away, then Clarence and Sam and I began to talk normally, as if we didn’t even know our words were flying right to Heaven and directly to our deadliest enemy. We didn’t have to wait long to get results.
It started when my ears popped, a sudden change in pressure like a cupped blow on both sides of my head. I looked at Sam, and he nodded then hurried over to adjust the Mecca cube one last time. No need to speak. The pressure increased, and with it came a definite tang of ozone and an electrical crackle that I could feel on the hairs of my arms and neck. We all took a breath and stepped outside.
She stood there in snow flurries that turned the depth of the background into flat black and white static, like a television transmitting only the last whisper of the Big Bang. No glass or potsherds now: she looked like something out of a classical painting, like Juno or Minerva stepped out of a frame and into the world of men, bigger than life size and unutterably, astoundingly beautiful. She had two cats on leashes, tiny compared to what they’d been when I last saw them, not lions this time but something long-eared and tawny. If it hadn’t been for Anaita being more than seven feet tall, and the shimmering ripple of her garment, which was more light than fabric, she could have been a rich and gorgeous actress walking her exotic pets. Except we weren’t in Beverly Hills, but at the end of an entirely different world.
“Doloriel.” Her voice was honey, love, and regret. The anger of our last meeting was gone as if it had never been. “Why do you fight me? Why didn’t you just do as you were told?” She turned to Sam. “All your friend had to do was bring you back, and we would have been merciful.”
“We?” Sam asked. “You mean you and the person you pretended to be?”
She looked amused, almost. “Pretended? Do you mean the guise I wore to recruit you? There was no pretense, only secrecy. Didn’t I do what I said? Isn’t this world beautiful? Didn’t I make it just as I promised, and give it to the ones you brought to me?”
“Then burned the shit out of it and killed a bunch of them,” I said. “Not exactly what one expects from an angel. Not what usually happens in paradise.”
“Yeah,” said Clarence, but he didn’t say it very loud. Still, he was standing in there. He hadn’t faced her the first time, of course. Maybe that helped.
“Why are you such a troublemaker, Doloriel?” Anaita didn’t sound angry. In fact she sounded exactly like a mother worried by a foolish child who won’t learn. “You have been a thorn in my side since the beginning. So unnecessary.”
“I didn’t do anything to you. You sent that stabby maniac after me. You’ve done nothing but try to destroy me.”
“And you’ve tried just as hard to destroy my work,” she said, but still calm, still more in sadness than in anger. “You and that report you made. We should have had months more to build here, years of Earth time before the others found out about this place. Instead you upset everything, you silly little creature, ruined a plan whose glory and beauty you can’t even conceive. You dare to complain to me about what I did? I should have incinerated you the first time you interfered with my project. In fact, I should have done it earlier. At the very start.”
Which made no sense, since other than the report, which I had to make because of the heat I was getting from my superiors when I found out about Ed Walker’s missing soul, I’d done nothing to her. Seemed to me that my involvement had caused trouble for Sam, who’d been the one to recruit Walker, far more than it had Anaita.
Or did she mean something else by that? At the very start . . . ? Not that it mattered now. I could think about it later, if I was still alive and my thinking parts hadn’t burned up. “Look, just leave these people alone, leave this place and Sam alone, and I’ll go back with you.”
She looked at me for a long time—it seemed long, anyway, as we stood in the fluttering snow—then let out a laugh like a bird’s song, haunting, sweet, and very, very brief. “Imagine! You’re going to offer me a bargain. You, Doloriel, who have done so much to spoil triumphs you are too ill-formed to appreciate.”
I suddenly remembered something Heinrich Himmler had once said in an address to his SS men, who were weary and horrified by implementing the Final Solution. “That we should have to do such things and still remain decent men,” he told them, “that is true heroism.” Anaita really was insane. I had never thought an angel could be, but she was. She believed herself to be so obviously right that everything else no longer mattered. In fact, everything else barely registered.
“Fine,” I said. “No deal. So come and get me.”
“As you wish, Doloriel. But I will not dirty myself again with you. I don’t want your filthy blood staining my raiment.” She dropped the leashes.
The cats leaped forward. By the time they had taken a couple of steps they were growing, and as they raced toward us across the snow and ash they kept on doing it. Eyes like glowing amber, big as lions, then bigger, they sprang across the ground so quickly I could scarcely have counted to three, even if I had enough air in my lungs and spit in my mouth to do it. The nearest one leaped, a huge, gray-brown shadow, even as I took my first stumbling steps backward. It crashed to the ground in front of me, skidding through ash. Then it was gone into the black, rectangular hole we had dug. As it fell onto the sharpened stakes at the bottom of the pit, the cat’s initial snarl of surprise exploded into a maddened howl of agony.
The second cat was already in midair. It jumped easily over the exposed trap, but when it landed it was slightly off to the side, so instead of the second trap swallowing it, the covering of boards stolen from the house, along with scavenged branches, fell inward as planned, but the monstrous cat still had enough solid ground under its paws to scramble to safety. Safety for it, of course. Not so safe for me.
Those were the only two pits we’d had time to dig.
I wasn’t thinking much about pits or digging at that moment, though, because the second cat leaped again as soon as it found its footing, something like a thousand pounds of claws, teeth, and rock-hard muscle flying through the air toward me. I couldn’t even get my spear into the dirt to brace it before the thing hit me. We rolled over and over, and although my head hit the ground so hard that, for a moment, I didn’t quite know where I was, I could definitely tell that a mouth full of sharp teeth was about to tear my face off, and that I no longer had a spear in my hand. Then the massive jaws snapped down, and the world disappeared into a deep, foul, and extremely slobbery darkness.