But something else got there first. Clarence, who had already been limping toward her, dragged my beloved out of the way just before the entire wall behind her burst into a foam of molecules. Clarence, bless him, didn’t even glance back, but kept dragging her out the front door. I saw Caz look up just before she slid out of sight, and for the first time she saw me. Her eyes went wide.
Then the room was full of moving lights, of whispering, half-visible wings and beautiful glowing shadows. I heard Anaita shriek, and then I heard that shriek get smaller and smaller. I turned. Where she had been, a dark unreflecting shape like a huge dark gem now stood—a prison, I supposed. A casket, I really, really hoped.
The entire room was swirling, becoming unstable. There was so much light! I could barely see to crawl through the blinding, directionless glare to the spot where Sam had fallen.
He lay curled on his side in the splintered wreckage of the wall. The arm that had worn the God Glove was gone, only a blackened stump left below his shoulder. He was bleeding from a dozen wounds, red streaming out onto the floor.
“I see the cavalry showed up,” he said, but he was forcing air through his lips by sheer effort of will.
“You’ll get help, Sam. You’re an angel, you’re tough. Hang in there.”
“Oh, yeah. All . . . the king’s horses.” He coughed blood.
“Why did you do it? Why did you use the Glove? You said yourself that she could control it!”
“Because even with Walker’s trick and the other stuff, she wasn’t confused enough. We couldn’t . . . risk it going wrong.” He twitched, then shivered all over, but without much strength.
“But, Sam . . . !”
“Heaven . . .” he stopped to cough, “was never going to let me back in. One way or another . . . I was gone.”
I could barely understand him. I’m pretty sure his jaw was broken. Clarence and Caz staggered up. She dropped down to my side—I could feel her, smell her—but she was carrying a handful of snow from outside and wasn’t paying any attention to me. She squeezed it over Sam’s mouth, trickling water onto his tongue. He tried to smile. “Come on, B.” His voice was very faint. “A last drink without . . . without a proper toast?”
“I don’t think there’s any booze here,” I said. I don’t even know why I said it.
“Why ruin . . . fourteen days of . . . sobriety?” He grinned. Damn, he was strong. There was blood between his teeth, and red bubbles forming in the corners of his mouth. “Water’s f-fine. Just fine.”
“Sam, I . . .”
“Shut up. I’ve been . . . grooming the kid . . . to keep an eye on you.”
Clarence didn’t say a thing. He was crying. You don’t see angels cry much.
I couldn’t see so clearly either. “Sam . . .”
He lifted a hand, struggled for a few seconds before he could form a word. “Confusion . . . !” The hand fell back.
“. . . to our enemies,” I finished, but Sam wasn’t listening any more.
forty-six:
bobby’s blessings
I CAN’T REALLY tell you what happened next—well, not much of it, anyway. I remember Caz wrapping her arms around me. I remember turning to put my face against her neck because losing Sam hurt so much that I didn’t know what else to do. Just as the fact struck me that she was actually there, Caz herself, the woman that I loved enough to go to Hell for, we were surrounded by astonishingly bright light. I couldn’t hear anything but the beating of wings and something that I swear to Jiminy Cricket was the sound of the world’s biggest, most spiritually committed choir. Then everything flew up into the air, or at least I did, we did—Caz was still there, sort of, but we were both fractured, flying apart, breaking up like light shattered by a prism.
And then nothing.
• • •
I woke up in my apartment. Not Caz’s apartment—mine. The one that I’d moved out of because of the infestation of swastika-shaped occult creatures, among other reasons. That apartment.
I had about three seconds after consciousness rolled in when I could lie there and tell myself that none of it had happened—that Sam was still alive, and Caz hadn’t been snatched out of my arms yet again. I wanted to believe it. God, how I wanted to. But although I was in bed, I was fully dressed except for shoes and yet not even slightly hung over. Something was definitely out of whack.
I jumped up and ran out of the apartment, then down to the street, stepping on sharp things I could feel through my socks and not even caring. I was desperate to know what day it was, and I got halfway down the block, stumbling and staring and probably terrifying the shit out of the other pedestrians before I thought to check the phone in my pocket for the date.
December 11th. Time had passed. It had been five days since Clarence and I stepped through that mirror smeared with my blood and into Kainos. Which meant that everything I remembered had actually happened. My world really had ended, and now I was alive again in some pathetic imitation place where everything I cared about was gone.
I returned to the building slower than I’d run away. I didn’t bother to go check the apartment where the Amazons had been. I was pretty sure the cleanup crew from Heaven had scrubbed away all forensic traces. It was probably even rented again. Heaven is thorough.
I found my most recent gun, a Glock 17, stashed in my sock drawer, along with several of my favorite knives. Like I said—thorough. They could do everything except put my heart back in my chest.
I got on the phone and called the office. Alice answered. “It’s me, Bobby,” I said.
“Oh,” said Alice. “Hurrah.”
Everything back to normal. Except it wasn’t, and it never would be. “What’s my current status?”
“Don’t worry, Dollar. I’m happy to drop everything just to answer a question that you should already know the answer to.” I heard a wrapper crackle, then the sound of Alice eating something crunchy while she searched the official database, or pretended to. “You’re currently on compassionate leave, whatever that means.”
“I want to talk to Temuel.”
“So go talk to him.”
“I want him to call me. Give him a message from me, tell him that.”
“I live to serve, Master.” Crunch, crunch. “Done. Any other ways you want to annoy me?”
I couldn’t think of any just then, so I hung up.
It was interesting to discover that I could have my insides torn out and still keep functioning as if I actually cared about living. While I waited to hear from Temuel, I called Clarence, just to see what the kid had to say. Ominously, his outgoing message, after a few formalities, continued, “And if this is Bobby, please let me know when I can call you. We really need to talk.” I didn’t leave a message, but I checked my own voicemail. Sure enough, the kid had left several over the last couple of days, all variations on a theme of “Call me,” but I just didn’t want to. Clarence had come through the disaster with flying colors, and I was pretty sure he was missing Sam just like I was, but I couldn’t bear the thought of one of his optimistic chats right then. I’d talk to him later, if I went on living.
While the Mule continued not to return my call, I wandered around the apartment like a depressed robot, checking things out. Heaven’s cleaners had been hard at work. The paint was new, the carpet was new—hard to get out those squashed-swastikid stains, I guess—and there was even food in the refrigerator, although it was laughably unready-to-eat. Somebody had badly misread my personnel file if they thought I was going to make a stir-fry from scratch. However, some brilliant soul had also left an unopened bottle of vodka in the freezer. Good stuff, too. So after another hour or so of waiting for a call from my archangelic supervisor and trying to find some music in my collection that didn’t make me feel like I wanted to bash my head against the wall—even Kind of Blue made me jumpy, which should tell you something—I gave up and opened the bottle. My kind superiors had offered me a first-class ticket to oblivion, and the only alternative I could see was to stay sober and sit around thinking about Caz and about Sam and about the big empty that had once been my afterlife. I decided it would be rude of me not to accept Heaven’s invitation.