Metal Angel (28 page)

Ange. Please don't leave me
.

Others from the Burning Earth tour came in: the roadie's wife, Mercedes, the bus driver, the lighting man. They brought Angie clothing and coffee and made her sit down and talked with her while Volos stood nearby, feeling somehow apart, as if he were invisibly hovering, as if he were a bodiless being again, an ethereal eavesdropper, ineffably of a different substance than their sturdy flesh. He noticed that no one spoke of the concert and its carnage; they would not bring that up with Angela now. Unless she read the morning paper she would hear about it only later. Truth was of less importance to them than most other things. But these humans with their hot drinks and their comradeship and their laughter, they had something that he with all his thinking did not comprehend.

Trying to come in from the cold, to feel floor under his feet again, he said, “Mercedes. You had better cancel the next venue.”

Mercy looked at him with an expression he had never seen on that silken face before. “We can't do that,” he said.

“I cannot be two places at once, is what I cannot do. And I am staying here.”

“Listen to me, Volos. Since I've known you I've just been trying to look out for what's best for you—”

“Hellshit!” Volos felt suddenly angry with the same high-voltage wrath that McCardle had sparked in him.
I
must never go blackwing again
. Mercedes was not worth it anyway. Texas had hurt him, but Mercedes merely disgusted him. So it was not very hard to combat merely with words, to say, “You think I am stupid? I know you don't care a quick fuck about me. You want what you can get, that is all. You look out for what is best for Mercedes Kell.”

“You—” With difficulty Mercedes swallowed an epithet. “Volos. Do you get some sort of kick out of just throwing it all away?”

“I have thrown nothing worth keeping!”
Yet it is all falling apart
.

“You don't know shit about what's worth what. It's no use talking with you. I'm going back to the hotel. I'm—”

“Just do what I told you. Cancel Pittsburgh. We are not going anywhere.”

“You may not be,” Mercedes said, and he swished out. Roadie's wife, bus driver, lighting man, and two guitarists—when had they come in?—all watched his exit with muted satisfaction. Someone, not Volos, said with dark amusement, “There goes Mercy out the door.”

Angela seemed to have noticed none of this. She was in a daze made up solely of Mikey.

The night wore on. Volos watched, feeling separate and uneasy, as Angela tried again and again to reach her husband. As finally she phoned a neighbor. Ennis was away for the week, a sleepy woman told her. He and Reverend Crawshaw had gone to a revival somewhere, a rally against the evils of rock music.

He stood by her at dawn when the doctor made his report: it seemed to be Reye's syndrome, Michael had been admitted to Intensive Care, diuretics were being administered, intracranial devices would be used to monitor the pressure on the brain.

He walked with her as she went to look at the little body lying very still on the white slab of a bed, the pug-nosed face nearly obscured by oxygen apparatus, the wispy brown hair shaved to accommodate a cone of white plastic strung with a black lacework of wires.

Only when she turned to him and wept did he begin to comprehend that bittersweet brotherhood of mankind, that common bond called mortality. Then he could distance himself no longer, and knew to the marrow of his hard, ephemeral bones: flesh was frail. People had been trampled in the night. Mikey might die.

“Birdman will make Mikey get better,” Gabe said to his mother. He had been saying it for a solid day, ever since Birdman had taken Mikey off to the hospital. Before that he had been saying, “Where's Uncle Texas?” But nobody had paid any attention to him then either.

“Mommy.” She was sitting on the hotel bed as if he didn't matter. He tugged at her shirt to make her look at him. “Tell Birdman to help Mikey.”

“He can't, honey,” she said faintly. She pulled him up into her lap and held him hard, as if that would make things any better.

She didn't understand. None of them understood how real Birdman was. Gabe could tell they didn't, because they always said Volos, and Volos was just a rock star, a voice on the radio, a body in a video, a picture on a magazine page. But Birdman had flown to the Horsehead Nebula and back once on a bet. When he was bad, he was whipped with lashes of fire. He remembered when Adam and Eve were still alive, when angels came down and married human women and taught them how to make themselves beautiful and taught their children secrets. He remembered when people used to go up on top of the Tower of Babel and shoot arrows into the sky, trying to wing an angel, and it was good luck if the arrow came down red with blood. He had watched the archangels killing people in Jerusalem and Sodom. He understood every language anyone could talk in, even the language of birds. Once when he was baby-sitting Gabe and Michael and nobody else was around, he had called a bunch of pigeons in through the window and made them fly stunts. He liked pigeons because they were dandified and womanly like Mercedes, he said.

He knew some of the Princes of the Sefiroth to say hi to them. He could help Mikey.

“Make Birdman help!” Gabriel insisted to his mother.

He would have spoken to Birdman himself, but Birdman was pacing the floor and he couldn't get him to stop and listen. And it was no use trying to talk to him when his wings were that old-asphalt color anyway. The others were just sitting like his mother—Red and the rest of the band and the roadie lady and some of the roadies, just about everybody except Uncle Texas and grouchy old Mercedes.

“
Mommy—”

“Hey, big guy,” Red called softly to him. “C'mere.”

He went to where Red was sitting in the squeaky hotel chair because he liked Red, though maybe not quite as much as he had liked Uncle Texas. Gabe missed Texas.

Red took him by the shoulders, gently. “Hey,” Red said, keeping his voice way down, “take it easy on your mother. You heard what happened. The doctors say there's nothing anybody can do now.”

From across the room Birdman said, “Gabe is right.”

“Huh?” Red looked up in a dumb-cow way. So did most of the others. And Birdman was standing there with his wings flashing like coals afire.

“The boy is right. I must help. I am a coward if I do not try.” Birdman crossed the room in two big strides and got down on his knees, right down on the floor, in front of Mother. “Ange,” he said, begging, and she did an odd thing. She parted his hair with her fingers and kissed him on the forehead, and then she laid her hands on him, like Grandpa giving a blessing.

At the beginning of time, the Supreme Being had sat on his throne and emanations had issued from his right side and from his left. The ten emanations of his right side came to be called the Princes, or the Sarim, or the Archangels; they were the Holy Sefiroth, the most ancient and powerful and ineffable of angels, more puissant than seraphim and cherubim, older than the world. And the ten emanations of his left side came to be called the Adverse or Unholy Sefiroth, and they were the Angels of Punishment, more ancient and potent than Lilith or Lucifer and all the minions of hell.

They all had many, many names, as was fitting for such puissances, for the foundation of power is the Word, the name. Each Sefira had hundreds of names, only a few less than the thousand names of its creator. And the names of the angels of the Unholy Sefiroth meant “destruction” and “death” and “wrath of God” and “whip of flame,” “pitiless” and “rigid” and “rod.” The one to whom Volos needed to speak, the fourth personage of the Unholy ten, was called among other names Mashhit, which meant “death of children.”

The less Mashhit was annoyed or inconvenienced, Volos knew, the better were the chances he could be cajoled into letting Michael Bradley live. Therefore, to summon Mashhit, Volos went to where Mashhit's presence already hovered strong: the Intensive Care Unit of the hospital, where Mikey lay unconscious.

It was after midnight. The monitors glowed at the nursing station, but the cubicles stood quiet and dim, labyrinthine in the shadows.

Angela walked before Volos, his psychopomp, leading him through mysteries. She was with him, she had told him, because he needed her to get him onto the floor. There were rules. He knew that, and he knew the rules were eyed mostly by those passing them by; she was not permitted to be in the ICU in the middle of the night either. It was one of the sweetest things about living with humans, the way the rules were there for bypassing, one of the things that made the world most unlike the bitter place from which he had come.

If any bitterness at all tainted his mouth, it was because the nurses would not have let him in without her. She was the mother, but he was the weird one with wings. He had seen them watching him.

He knew also that Angela would have come with him regardless, and that particular knowledge tasted like honey and made him brave.

“He's here,” Angela said to him in a low voice, “isn't he?”

“Mashhit? Yes.” The death angel's presence filled the place, towering through the ceiling, passing through the walls so that the shadows overhead loomed like the spread of great dark wings.

In his bed Mikey lay, a white, broken fledgling, bedraggled and still. Angela went and sat by his head, laying her hand over his. Volos stood at the foot of his bed, centering himself so that the axis of boy and bed and his axis were one, making himself symmetrical and straight as a candle flame in a windless place. Flame was his courage. Darkness all around it was his fear.

“Mashhit,” he said quietly. It was best to be calm and quiet with Sefiri.

Nothing happened except that, although the lights did not dim, the darkness increased.

“Mashhit,” Volos invoked, lifting his hands in a priestly gesture that dated back to the Druids. “I, God's rebel servant, call upon and conjure you, spirit who slays without pity, by the most dreadful names: Soab, Sabaoth, Adonai, Jehovah, Elohim, Tetragrammaton, and I do exorcise and command you by the four beasts before the throne—” It was hard to keep the volume down. Fear kept twisting the knob. “—Mashhit, come to me peaceably and show yourself to me in a mild human shape without any deformity, and do what I desire of you. Now, without delay.”

Before he could say the Latin words to complete the incantation, the darkness that hung below the ceiling of Mikey's cubicle shifted, and sifted down, and stood in approximation to the floor, taking the form of something that loomed man-shape and was black and wore chains made of black fire. Its wings were like those of a bat, like a doomster's storm-whipped cape, passing fleshlessly through walls. It filled the room. Its presence was huge. And its face was that of Mercedes.

“Mercy,” Volos whispered.

“Yes, you had better beg for mercy. Fool.” Mashhit sounded dangerously peevish, like Richard Nixon at his very worst. In fact, much like Mercedes.

“I meant—” Volos let it go. He had never stood so close to a Power before, and the nearness was fearsome. He felt himself shaking, felt the room swaying. By all means let Mashhit think he had cried out for mercy.

“Thumbsucker. Infant.” The specter's voice was cold but offhand. “You fancy yourself a hero, summoning me?”

“I summoned you …” Volos closed his eyes a moment, feeling the small flame of his courage go out, clenching his fists as if they could catch it. “I summoned you because I want you to let this child live.”

“You do.” Mashhit had not moved, but sounded more than ever mocking. There was a trick in his tone.

“I want Michael Bradley to live, and be well and happy, and grow old before he dies, and I want nothing bad to happen because of his living …” Trying to cover all the loopholes, Volos faltered. There were too many contingencies in the life of a mortal.

“Want, want, want.” This was a game, and in a vicious way Mashhit was enjoying it. “Is it of consequence what you want? And do you want to be a martyr? Are you offering yourself in his place?”

If it had been a matter for hatred and fire and wrath, Volos could have handled it better. If there had been lightning he could have matched it with lightning, red fire with red fire, rage with rage. But it was all cold words and black wings, sullen indifference and a far-too-familiar scorn. Mashhit's cosmic contempt came to him on a bedroom scale. It was a petulence worthy of his former lover that he faced.

He whispered, “No.”

“Good. Because I would not have accepted you, inchoate thing. Have you no idea what a botched job you are? A jury-rigged half-souled make-do? With wings of no more use to you than a cooked turkey's? Your mind is in your crotch, and you think that makes you human, but you are deluded. There are feathers on your back, and you think that makes you divine, but you are wrong. You are neither thing, you have not been able to choose, and you have failed at both. And you think of yourself as a rebel? Fool. You are just a runaway slave. Less than a scullery knave. Your worth is so small, your disobedience so insignificant, that the Supreme One cannot even be troubled to smite you.”

Words are unaccountable things. Friends can speak lies, yet out of the mouths of enemies, hard and sharp as a raptor's bill, can come truth of a sort. Listening to the rantings of Mashhit, Volos heard such truth, and it stunned him. He tried to move his lips, but it was no use; words were power, and he had none. He could not speak. He could barely stand unsupported.

“Now, Volos with Half a Soul, it is time for you to fail at being a savior.”

The Prince of Punishment moved a stride nearer, and Volos only just managed not to step back from him. Mashhit's presence was no longer pettish or indifferent. Now he filled the room with tangible darkness and unmistakable menace. His wings lifted, obscuring walls and ceiling so that shelter and safety became only illusions, so that in this room there were only death and Mashhit. His hands lifted, and they were tipped with black claws.