“Fifteen minutes by helicopter,” said Sam. “Right.”
She was eight feet tall and made of glass and stone. Her eyes glowed like coals. Her flat, crude face smiled. Suddenly a whirlwind seemed to whip through the hall, knocking me sideways, lifting bits of glass and stone and priceless gems from the rubble scattered across the huge room. The glinting vortex whirled past me, its outside edges cutting and scratching my face, and then settled around the living mosaic. The mad wind died as quickly as it had arisen.
She had a shape now. She had three dimensions, and she glowed from within as if constructed from the most beautiful stained glass windows you ever saw. She was still eight feet tall, though, and the lions weren’t much smaller. Their gem-encrusted tails lashed.
“Well,” Anaita said in a voice like molten silver. “Doloriel. We meet again.”
“Oh, come on!” I muttered. “This is some kind of bad cosmic joke, right?” I mean, after everything we’d been through, we could barely stand, let alone fight a living goddess. This sucked worse than . . . well, than suction itself.
“Perhaps the universe does indeed have a sense of humor, little troublemaker,” said the queen of rotten angels. Her lions moved toward us, making click, click, click noises as their sparkling stony claws met the floor. “But I’m afraid this is a joke only I will enjoy.”
thirty-one:
ragtag
“WHY?” I asked, although I didn’t really expect Anaita to tell me. As usual, I was simply trying to find time for my brain to function. It takes a while to get into gear when you’ve just barely escaped death by jelly monster and then find out you’re about to be eaten instead by large cats made of broken glass. I mean, seriously, who else has shit like this happen to them? “Why?” I said again. “What have I ever done to you?”
She looked more human now as the glass and stone and bits of enamel tile began to blend together into something more like the woman I had met in her fortress home, but she was still so clearly far, far beyond me that I couldn’t even imagine a way to fight back. She’d just traveled a minimum of several miles in a few seconds by projecting herself into her own goddess-sculpture, complete with matching glass-shard lions. No wonder she’d been able to send Smyler all the way to Hell after me—Anaita must have been burning through reserves of energy like a collapsing sun. But how long could she keep that up without someone in Heaven noticing?
Long enough to take care of a small irritation like Bobby Dollar, apparently. She loomed above me, shining like a fever dream, and she was terrifying.
“Why?” Her voice somehow both thundered in my ears and dripped with sweetness. I could hear the childlike tones she favored in Heaven and her deep goddess voice at the same time, as if they spoke in perfectly measured harmony. “That is what your kind always wonders. I have my reasons, but they are not for such as you.” She looked very calm, a half smile tilting one side of her mouth, the Mona Lisa of divine vengeance. “Be assured, though, you have earned what is coming many times over.”
“And what’s coming to you?” Sam said, stepping forward. “What have you earned, Anaita? Or should I call you Kephas?”
Well, my buddy had finally accepted the truth, just when we were both going to be dissolved into random atoms. That was something, I guess.
“You need call me nothing. You are no longer useful.”
She sounded grave, not triumphant, as though she really would rather have solved the whole thing with a civilized discussion over tea and little sandwiches. I couldn’t help wondering, after so many thousands of years of identities taken up and discarded—goddess and angel and the Highest alone knew what else—whether a true Anaita even existed anymore. What happened when an immortal forgot what she’d been? Was that madness?
She raised her hand and the glass cats snarled, a sound like someone cutting stone with an angle grinder. “You are a traitor, Sammariel, and you will be dealt with just as summarily as Doloriel.”
“Traitor? What about the Third Way? What about building Kainos so humankind had a hope of something better after death than more slavery?”
For a moment the cool mask slipped a little, just the tiniest bit, to show the furnaces behind it: Anaita didn’t like being called on her own hypocrisy. Her eyes narrowed to jeweled slits. “You know nothing, angel. You understand nothing. You have no right to question me.” Sam fell to the ground, holding his head and groaning as though a terrible noise was screeching in his ears. Then she turned toward me.
“Now, Doloriel.” I braced myself, ready to leap toward her, determined to at least bite her a couple of times before I got euthanized like a mangy old stray. I shouldn’t have bothered. She lifted a hand, and I couldn’t move—could not fucking move an inch, as if I had suddenly been embedded in the clearest, cleanest glass you can imagine. Thank God I’d just taken a deep breath, because I couldn’t take another. Only my heart and brain seemed to retain their functions.
“Let him go!” Oxana shouted. “You fat Persian fuck bitch!”
“Really?” said Anaita, looking at me. “This is your army? A pair of mortal Scythian whores and Sammariel the traitor? You truly have scraped the bottom of the barrel to assemble this ragtag, Doloriel.”
Halyna shouted. No, I don’t know what it meant, either. “Not afraid of you! We will—!” She didn’t finish. Anaita waved a hand without even looking, as if dismissing a bad joke, and both Amazons were flung backward, skidding through the rubble to lay tumbled and silent against the far wall.
I could only stare as Anaita glided toward me, bleeding light in all directions, hand held out as if to bestow a blessing. She was beautiful, inhuman, and so far out of my league that I had been an idiot ever thinking I might have a chance. Instead, the Blue Fairy was simply going to take back Pinocchio’s misspent, marionette life.
Caz, I’m sorry, was all I had time to think.
Her hand touched my forehead, and I burned—a cascade of electrical fire from my skull down through my spine, all the way to the ground like a bolt of lightning. My muscles all pulled wire-tight in an instant; I could feel them trying to tear loose from the tendons. It was as bad as anything that ever happened to me in Eligor’s torture factory. I wriggled helplessly, like a live fish tossed onto on hot coals.
But I didn’t die.
Anaita’s hand was freezing cold and scalding hot at the same time—but not in a physical way. It was as if she’d reached directly into my soul and meant to yank it out by the roots. The pain was incredible, but as it blazed something came to me, a semi-coherent thought that made its way up past the clamor of my shrieking nerves, my panicked, dying thoughts.
Why is it taking so long? In some weird way I could sense that pain wasn’t the point of what was going on at all, merely a byproduct. Because Anaita wasn’t killing me. She was changing me.
And this, for no reason I can explain, felt a thousand times more frightening than simple suffering, or even death. I didn’t want to be made into some mindless, happy angel, just another placeholder in the divine plan—anybody’s plan, let alone Anaita’s. But I could feel it happening, feel things inside me shifting and becoming almost liquid, my thoughts finding new paths like dammed rivers forcing their way into fresh channels.
I wanted it to stop. I wanted that more than I’d ever wanted anything, except maybe to have Caz back again. I wanted it to stop. So I tried to stop it.
I’m telling this now because I’m still trying to make sense of it, but in the moment there was no sense—there was no time. What was happening had always been happening. I was lost in a swirling river of color and light and flashes of understanding, all as disconnected as leaves caught up by a powerful current, sloshed together then pulled apart again with no sense or meaning. I could feel Anaita’s hand where it burned coldly against my skin, but I could feel more of her than that, as though somehow she was also inside me, rearranging the things that made me what I am—Doloriel, Bobby, the me that rides inside and thinks these thoughts and gets the rest of me into trouble time and time again. And as I tried to fight back against Anaita’s terrible, intrusive tampering, I experienced other things too, things that were part of me but not part of me. Visions more real than any of my other memories. Sacred pictures. Nightmares and echoes.