Hairs raised on Karou’s neck. Akiva was beside her. “What’s happening to her?” she asked him. “Do you know what she’s talking about?”
“No.”
“Is she a seraph?”
He hesitated before again saying no. “She’s human. She has no flame. But there’s something.…”
Karou felt it, too, and couldn’t name it, either. Who was this woman? And how was she speaking Seraphic?
“Meliz is lost!” she keened, and the hairs stood up on Karou’s arms. “Even Meliz, first and last, Meliz eternal, Meliz is devoured.”
“Do you know who that is?” Karou asked Akiva. “Meliz?”
“No.”
“What is going on here?”
Karou snapped around at the sound of Zuzana’s voice and beheld her, most excellent rabid fairy, cutting to the chase. She marched right up to the men, who blinked down at her, probably trying to reconcile her steely tone to the tiny girl before them—at least until they got a healthy dose of her neek-neek look. They broke off arguing.
“She’s bleeding,” Zuzana said—in French, which, due to Morocco’s colonial past, was the European language most readily understood here, even before English. “Did you do this to her?”
Her voice held a glint of outrage, like a knife not yet fully unsheathed, and both men hastily proclaimed their innocence.
Zuzana was unmoved. “What’s wrong with you, just standing here? Can’t you see she needs help?”
They had no good answer for that, and no time to make one anyway, because Zuzana—with Mik’s assistance—was already taking charge of the young woman. Each at an elbow, they eased her up to a stand, and the men only watched, silenced and chastened, as they led her away between them. There was no break in her flood of Seraphic—“I am Fallen, all alone, I break me on the rock and I will never again be whole.…”—and no flicker of focus in her striking eyes, but her feet moved and she made no protest, and neither did the men, so Zuzana and Mik just took her.
And a couple of hours later, when the Americans in dark suits came to claim her, the hotel clerk led them first to Eliza’s room and then—finding it emptied of both person and possessions—to the rooms of the small fierce girl and her boyfriend who had, between them, ordered half the food in the kitchen. They knocked on the door but got no answer, and heard no movement within, and when they let themselves in, it wasn’t really a surprise to find the occupants gone.
No one had seen them leave, not even the kasbah kids playing in the courtyard that was the only way to reach the road.
Come to think of it… no one had seem them arrive, either.
They’d left nothing behind but thoroughly empty dishes and—this would be one for the conspiracy theorists—several long blue hairs in the shower where an angel’s hand had stroked a devil’s head, locked in a long—and so very long-awaited—embrace.
Once upon a time…
A journey began,
that would stitch all the worlds together with light.
ARRIVAL + 60 HOURS
52
GUNPOWDER AND DECAY
It was like Christmas for Morgan Toth—in the greed-and-presents sense of the holiday, not the birth-of-Christ sense, of course. Because really.
The text messages on Eliza’s phone were getting crazier and more desperate by the hour. It was some kind of nutjob extravaganza delivered right to him, and he wished, almost, for a partner in crime—someone to marvel, with him, that there were such people in the world! But there was no one he could think of who, if he told them what he’d done, would not quail in self-righteous horror and probably call the police.
Morons.
He needed a groupie, he thought. Or a girlfriend. Wide eyes and awe. “Morgan, you’re so bad,” she would coo. But bad in a good way. Bad in a very, very good way.
The phone buzzed. It was Pavlovian at this point: Eliza’s phone buzzed and Morgan virtually salivated in anticipation of not-to-be-believed, someone-must-be-yanking-my-chain crazy-time. This message did not disappoint.
Where are you, Elazael? The time for petty squabbles is past. Now you must see that you can’t run away from who you are. Our kin have come to Earth, as we have always known they would. We have made overtures. We have offered ourselves to them as helpmeets and handmaidens, in ecstasy and servitude. The day of Judgment draws nigh. Let the rest of this blighted world serve as fodder for the Beasts while we kneel at the feet of God. We need you.
Gold. Pure gold. Ecstasy and servitude. Morgan laughed, because that pretty well summed up what he wanted in a girlfriend.
He was tempted to write back. So far he had resisted, but the game was getting a little stale. He reread the message. How did you engage with insanity like this? They’d made overtures, it said. What did that mean? How had they managed to offer themselves to the angels? Morgan knew from previous texts that the sender—who he gathered was Eliza’s mother, a real piece of work—was in Rome. But as far as he knew, the Vatican was virtually keeping the Visitors prisoner, which was pretty hilarious. He imagined the Pope standing on the dome of St. Peter’s with a giant butterfly net: Caught me some angels!
After much deliberation, he typed a reply.
Hi, Ma! I’ve had a new vision. In it, we *were* kneeling at the feet of God, so that’s good. Phew! But… we were giving him a pedicure? Not sure what it means. Love, Eliza.
He knew it was too much, but he couldn’t help himself. He hit send. In the ensuing silence he began to fear that he’d killed the joke, but he shouldn’t have worried. This was no fragile specimen of crazy he was dealing with. It was hearty.
Your bitterness is an affront to God, Elazael. You have been given a great gift. How many of our ancestors perished without seeing the holy faces of our kin, and yet you can find it in you to laugh? Will you choose to stay and be devoured with the sinners when the rest of us rise to take our place in the—
Morgan never got a chance to finish reading the message, let alone fire off another response.
“Is that Eliza’s phone?”
Gabriel. Morgan whirled around. How had the neuroscientist managed to sneak up on him? Had he forgotten to lock the door?
“Jesus, it is,” said Gabriel, looking stunned and disgusted. Morgan did wonder about the stun. Edinger despised him. Why should this come as a surprise? And what could he say? Caught in the act. Nothing to do but lie.
“She gets a new text message every thirty seconds. Someone’s obviously desperate to find her. I was just going to reply to whoever it is that she’s not here—”