Grim Tidings (15 page)

I wasn't giving in this time. I put Hank on one of the rolling carts and opened the door again, in time to see headlights sweep across the street. I tensed, but there was only one black SUV, and one person inside.

Valley opened the driver's door but paused when she saw the two of us. “What the hell did you do to him?” she said.

“Why do you assume I did this?” I grunted, rolling Hank toward the car.

Valley leaned down and felt Hank's pulse. “Just a crazy hunch.”

I started to tell her we should get in the car and get the hell out of here but before I could, Valley straightened up, lifted her boot, and put it on Hank's neck. “Now how about we're both honest for a minute?”

My stomach sank. I guess I had my answer about why we'd all ended up out here.

V
alley didn't speak as we faced one another. She just pressed down harder on Hank's windpipe, until Hank's mouth worked like a fish thrown up on land.

Shapes moved in from all around, from the street and the houses and the fields beyond, naked corpses moved by the sheer force of their hunger. The smell of stale blood permeated my nose.

“So he got to you?” I asked Valley.

She flinched, just a little. “He is not the reason I'm here.”

I tried not to show any fear as I stared Valley down, and the creatures moved in around us, surrounding us. The one nearest me let out a sad sigh as she ran bloody fingers through my hair. Her torn-up nails caught and pulled at my scalp until I jerked my head away.

“My reasons are not hunger and madness,” said Valley. “But brotherhood. You'd understand that, if you weren't working for the bastard set on exterminating us.”

“I'm sorry that you got kicked out of the special angel club,” I told Valley—or whatever her name actually was. The Fallen kept personal details like that close to the vest. “But I am only interested in myself and the few people I care about. I don't care what kind of vendetta you've got against heaven, or Uriel. Leave us out of it.”

Valley laughed. “Oh, and speaking of your golden boy upstairs—don't bother screaming for him. This whole town is packed so full of death magic thanks to Cain that he might as well be looking for hay in a haystack.”

I clenched my jaw so hard I drew blood from my own lip. I was so angry I wanted to scream. I could feel the hound clawing its way up my throat. It didn't want to scream, it wanted to tear and shriek and howl. It wanted to fight back. I pushed it away.

I shut my eyes and wrapped my arms around myself. This was how it always ended up for me. I could try to break away from what I was, but I was always going to be the one who had to bend to someone else's will, to keep myself or somebody innocent safe and alive.

Sure, I could strut around like I was the Grim Reaper's personal badass, but now I was going to knuckle under to another psycho control freak who'd decided I was fun to torture. And I was going to do it willingly, because Hank didn't deserve to be here with me.

“Promise me that you'll get Hank help. Leaving him alive for now isn't good enough.”

Valley gave a cold sigh, colder than the wind whipping up. “Azrael said you were a sentimental piece of work. Way too many feelings for a hellbeast.”

“Promise me or I'm going to slit my own throat,” I said. “And somehow I think that my delivery is a condition of Cain helping you people out with your Armageddon.”

Her square jaw ticked, and I knew I was right. “Fine,” she ground. “He'll be good as new in a few hours.”

I stepped away, letting the dead press around me. “I'm all yours,” I whispered. Maybe this time it would be different. Maybe I wouldn't fall back under Cain's thrall. Maybe this was a good thing—if the Fallen who'd given Owen a fake Scythe was working with Cain, and Valley in turn was helping them, maybe I was the one who was really in control.

The crowd of dead moved, and I was forced to move with it, until I felt hands on my arms and legs, bearing me up and moving me along without my feet touching the earth. A tear slipped out of my eye as I realized the truth—I had never been in control. I was just a piece of flotsam on a tide I couldn't fight. Drifting inexorably back to Cain's side. Back where I belonged.

We moved for
miles that way. I tried to keep my eyes on our direction but after a while it was hard to see anything except the mass of bodies. There had to be a couple hundred of them, and eventually it became too much effort to do anything but look up at the black sky, slowly fading toward a weak gray first light.

A sudden chatter of rotors cut the silence, and the mass of dead rippled and stirred. “The army is taking over the quarantine,”
Valley said from somewhere close but invisible to me. “Or if they aren't they will be shortly. People get so upset nowadays. Entire cities wiped off the map by flood and plague, back then. Bodies as far as the eye could see stinking and bloating under the sun. The flies would be so thick you'd think they were the air.” She breathed deep, letting out a satisfied sound. “The air is very clean here. I like the cold. Where I am from in the Kingdom, it was a hot place.”

“The place you're going is supposed to be pretty hot, too,” I muttered.

“Fighting is always such a waste of energy and yet the small things always refuse to give up,” Valley said. “The army will quarantine this town. They'll contain this for a while, keep it a secret, but eventually it will get out. It will spread. And then this beautiful cold place will be just as the deserts were. Covered in corpses. Dirt soft with spilled blood. Sky clouded with flies.”

“Sounds like you have everything you want, then,” I said. “Lots of dead people and lots of live ones who are miserable because of you. The ultimate temper tantrum, am I right?”

“You think we're angry at the
Kingdom
?” Valley laughed. “We couldn't care less about those still sitting under the thumb of the Host. We hate
humans
. The people who get to live never knowing that behind the veil, all of this is happening. Creatures like you and me watching them with envy, because they are happy and their lives have an ending.” She slid into view, her hair glowing gold against the sunrise. “But not anymore. Now their world looks to them like it does to us.”

I stayed quiet, and she grinned. “No more fighting?”

“No,” I said. “Just thinking I used to find Uriel kind of nutty
for wanting you exterminated. Now I completely understand his desire to spit-fry every last one of you.”

“Feel like you might still win while you can,” Valley said. “Keep hope alive. Once Cain has his prize, you'll never see a sunrise like this again.” She stroked my cheek. “He's missed you. He can't wait to show you how much.”

We passed through another town, another main street. Windows were broken out. A car had crashed into a hydrant, windshield spattered with blood. Somewhere far away, a burglar alarm whooped and droned endlessly. I focused on staying still, on not screaming. If I started, I wouldn't stop.

The sun was up, but weak, when the dead finally stopped. We were far away from the highway now, in an empty field surrounded by a half-tumbled cyclone fence. A sign too rusted and riddled with buckshot to read lay on its side, but I guessed this was some kind of government property. Lilith had once taken me to an old missile range, when she'd tried to use me to open Tartarus. Maybe Cain had similar proclivities.

Valley stopped, waiting absolutely motionless. She had the eyes of a snake, unblinking, devoid of any life. The dead lowered me to the ground and I realized I was on a pitted ribbon of asphalt painted with ghostly white letters. An airfield, I thought, and heard a groan as an ancient antenna radar swayed in the wind, a few hundred yards away.

Then my vision blacked out and he was in front of me. “You returned,” Cain said to Valley.

“And I delivered,” she snapped. “Now get back to work. The quarantine barriers are going up faster than your little science projects are reproducing.”

“Patience,” said Cain. “As in all things, Dantanian. Patience.”

“Great,” Valley said. “Now she knows my name.”

“Not to worry,” Cain rumbled, crouching and lifting my head with his massive hand. I couldn't struggle, was too tired and sore to even move. I didn't bother shutting my eyes.

I'd always known I'd end up right here, back under his control. It was like the last decades had been a great dream, and now I was awake. I knew he'd never stop looking for me, and that eventually, like all good hunters, he'd run me to ground. “You're not going anywhere,” he intoned. “Are you, little bird?”

“Must be nice,” I whispered. Valley wasn't wrong—even though I'd accepted I was probably not leaving this place alive, I couldn't resist fighting his thrall. “You get a free ticket out of Hell and all of this is waiting for you. It's like coming home from prison to a hooker holding a birthday cake.”

Cain let out that rock-crushing sound he called a laugh. “I want nothing, little bird. And I have received nothing. I have not been in Hell.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “You escaped from Tartarus like all the rest of the damned souls. That's why you stopped. Because you died on the highway in that twister.”

All of a sudden the dead drew back, ten or so feet, like startled roaches fleeing from a light. Cain stood to his full height, teeth bared. “You stupid creature. You think the wind can stop me? The storm? Any force of nature? Nothing will remove me from the world. Least of all you.”

His foot flashed out, and I felt as my skull got trapped between it and the asphalt. The last thing I saw were the dead closing in again, hands lifting me up as if they were taking me away to my funeral.
When I snapped
to, everything was bright instead of dark, dry instead of damp and cold, and I could hear my own heart throbbing so deep I vibrated all the way down to my toes.

“See?” Valley's voice cut through my fog like a weed whacker outside the window cuts through your Sunday hangover. “I told you she wasn't dead.”

“I get that the know-it-all thing is a big hit with the meat bags at the Kansas SP,” said a voice I didn't recognize. Or rather a voice that sounded vaguely familiar but to which I couldn't put a face, like a familiar radio announcer doing the weather. “But if you could cut it out, I'd royally appreciate it.”

“Bite me,” Valley said. “I get Cain's chew toy, I make nice-nice with his creepy ass, now you get busy with your end. Need I remind you that all of these moving pieces you love to shove around the board all have the potential to get us skewered on the end of Uriel's sword.”

“You guys are cute,” I murmured, trying out a whisper. Talking hurt. Everything hurt. I was used to waking up in strange places with strange bruises, but when I tried to open my eyes all I saw was a couple of blurry streaks and a blinding light that make me squinch up my face in self-defense. I tried moving and found that my wrists and ankles were immobilized. When I wriggled, a chain rattled.

“You're chained good, Rover,” Valley confirmed, her voice drawing closer while another set of footsteps retreated. “Prison shackles. The kind that they used on chain gangs.”

I tried opening my eyes again. One whole side of my face was swollen, so that explained the blurriness, but from what I could see lying on the concrete floor, we were in a windowless room. Shelves
lined the walls and a couple of caged bulbs lit up their contents. Lots of cans, lots of metal ammo boxes. A cot was across from me, moth-eaten wool blanket arranged with military corners. The shelves on the other side were full of books and questionable antiques. Taxidermy animals dressed in little costumes—cowboy, chef, scary clown. A jar full of animal teeth, a tangle of those weird monkey puppets with the cymbals. The walls that weren't covered in shelves were squeezed with taped-up newspapers and drawings on the backs of book pages. The drawings weren't of anything pleasant. The whole effect sort of looked like the place had been decorated from an estate sale held by the Manson family.

The only way to the outside I could see was a metal hatch-style door, and a hallway beyond. A shadow blinked out of view. Whoever Valley had been chatting with was making themselves scarce.

Valley patted me on the cheek again. “The chains are just a precaution. Your boy here might have his own ideas.” She walked away too, and metal screamed on metal as the hatch shut. There was movement from the corner of my eye and Cain's shadow blotted out the feeble light. “Still chirping,” he said. “I don't know if you're spirited or simply stupid.”

“Votes are split,” I tried to say, but he grabbed me by my hair and yanked me up, unlocking my chains with a big old-style skeleton key. I whimpered, and he shook me like a toy.

I struggled against him as he pulled me down the hall, but I didn't have any luck getting away until he let go of me, shoving me into a metal chair in a bare-bones kitchen. “I'm not going to hurt you,” he said, slamming around a dented kettle and lighting a burner under it.

“No, why would you?” I said. “You
already
hurt me. The
hurting's done, and I know you're capable of a lot more so why don't we just get to why I'm down here and how many sweaters you're gonna knit from my hair.”

“You know, you did me a favor that day,” he said. “That day on the highway. I was a lost soul. Full of rage, centuries of it. When I came out of that storm . . .”

I held up my hands. “No offense, man, but bad poetry is not making this bunker experience any better.”

“Silo,” he said. “There are missile complexes all over the Midwest. Once they housed dozens, to make the missiles fly. But one by one they were abandoned. I found my way here a time after a tornado.”

The kettle started to rattle and spurt, and he turned down the flame, reaching for one of the rusty metal tins above the stove and pulling out a tea bag. “I meant what I said. I don't want to hurt you. When I saw you and that man in Buchenwald I was full of rage. Burning alive with it. But now I don't feel anything toward you. I ordered you brought here so that you and I could speak without you being in harm's way.”

“Ah, so I can leave whenever I want?” I said. He shook his heavy head.

“Of course not.”

I felt the pull of the thrall, heavier than ever. Before it was like being drugged—that detached, pillowy softness of being above it all. This felt more like I was pinned to a board, being examined by something massive and curious.

Either way, whenever I thought of running my mind darted away from me, like a fish slipping through your hands underwater. I couldn't even focus long enough to see if the kitchen door was
open or shut. My eyes always jerked back to his face, and his power over me made all of it just fine.