Sleeping Late On Judgement Day (33 page)

If so, then the only real weapon I had against her was her fear of discovery. But that still didn't tell me where Eligor's horn was, and without that, everything else was pretty academic, because eventually Anaita was going to catch me and blot me out like an unwanted spill on the kitchen counter. She had more resources than I did—a lot more. “Oops! I seemed to have crushed a Doloriel,” she'd say, and everyone would say, “Tsk, tsk, too bad!” Then they'd go on as though it had never happened.

My new cell phone rang, startling the bejabbers out of me. The ringtone was some horrible European disco crap, and I throttled it into silence as quickly as I could.

“What
?”
I said into the phone, a little sharply. I assumed it was Clarence.

It wasn't. “Bobby,” a male voice said. “I need to speak to you. In person.”

My heart got a little jumpy. Nobody had one of these phones except Clarence, Wendell, Oxana, and Halyna, and Halyna was dead. “Who is this?”

“The person who took you for a nice drive in the Baylands. Remember?”

Temuel. But since he hadn't used his name, I wasn't going to, either. “Yeah, I remember. In person where?”

“How about the place we met before you went on your sabbatical? Do you remember that?”

By “sabbatical” I guessed he meant “trip to Hell,” so he was talking about the Museum of Industry up in the Belmont district. I was a bit tired of museums, as you might imagine, but I also knew that the Mule wouldn't have called me unless it was important. “Same spot? Give me half an hour.”

“Take the Camino Real. Traffic isn't too bad today.”

I suppressed a smile. Some angels can't stop angel-ing. It's like an addiction. Or a reflex. “I'll be there.”

I retrieved the nizzic from the pantry, listened to the message from Caz one more time, then burned some white camphor in a spoon and blew the smoke at the little monstrosity. The nizzic slumped a bit, and its head wagged slowly from side to side, like a cruise ship passenger who'd had one mai tai too many.

“Pay attention,” I told it. “Otherwise it'll be silver salts instead of camphor, and you won't like that.”

 • • • 

“I can't just be funny and sweet, my beautiful Caz, even to make you happy. You told me once you didn't do tender very well. I don't do friendly chitchat very well, because I usually only use it on people who worry me or bore me. Right away I get out the sharp stuff and start looking for a weakness.

“The fact that it's my own weaknesses I usually find is beside the point.

“So I can't do that shallow stuff with you, not after where we've been and what we've done. I want you so badly, Caz. I dream of you. I replay our one night together over and over in my head like I was some sad little film fan watching Casablanca for the tenth time, hoping against sanity that this time Rick actually gets on the plane with Ilsa. I can still taste the salt of you, the sweat, the tang of your juices. I can still hear the sounds we made together like they were happening in the next room. You want to fuck me? I want to fuck you so much that if someone opened a door to Hell right now, I'd walk right in and start the whole thing over again, just for the chance to get near you.

“I'm never giving up. I'm never giving up. Have you got that straight yet?

“Never. Giving. Up.”

 • • • 

I put the re-messaged nizzic outside under a bush to wait for dark, then I gave Oxana some money in case she needed to go out and get anything. I was pretty sure she wouldn't. She'd found a bottle of wine and was systematically polishing it off while she watched people argue on TV about paternity tests and other unimportant things. Just as I was leaving she called me back, then raised her eyes from the screen long enough to kiss me carefully on the cheek, like I was Dad and she was my college-age daughter home for the holidays or something. It was weird but not entirely bad.

I took Temuel up on his suggestion and went by the Camino Real instead of surface streets. I had to change lanes frequently to keep moving, but otherwise the traffic wasn't too bad. The cab handled like a speedboat in tapioca even at the best of times, but I didn't mind. I was in no hurry. Even with all the stuff thrashing around in my brain just now, and a strong urge to look closely at every driver I could see in case they were planning to kill me on Anaita's behalf, something else had begun to bother me, though it took me most of the drive to put a finger on the problem.

My boss Temuel had called me on my Serbo-Croat Spinksphone. But Temuel wasn't supposed to know about the Spinksphones. That's why I'd bought them from Cubby Spinks before the museum break-in, so that the Amazons, Clarence, and I would have a private method of contact that neither Heaven nor Hell knew about. This was the second time Temuel had done something like this to me lately, and neither made sense. He'd known when I called out for a cab, too—the very cab I was now driving. He hadn't told me how he'd done that trick, and now he'd pulled another one. He really was keeping tabs on me, probably tapping these new phones too. But why? Was he really so concerned for my health? Or was it just his own ass he was covering? That made more sense, but it meant that things would change very quickly if our interests ceased to coincide.

Another thought struck me as I approached the museum. Why tell me to take the Camino Real unless he knew exactly where I was driving from in the first place? If I was hiding out in the hills or down by the Bayshore, the Camino would be a pointless detour. But that meant he didn't know only about my new phone but also suggested he knew where I was staying, and I had made sure none of my associates ever,
ever
talked about Caz's apartment on the phone. Even the Amazons had known and respected that rule.

For a moment real fear rose up inside me. I almost pulled over to the curb, ditched the cab, and made a run for it, but a moment's consideration showed me that even if he knew a lot more about my life than he was letting on, Temuel certainly wasn't trying to keep it secret from me, or he would have kept his mouth shut about the Camino Real. No, something else was going on. In fact, it almost seemed like he was trying to tell me something, give me a warning. But why not just wait and do it in person, since he was meeting me anyway? Would it actually be Temuel waiting to meet me, or had someone else made him call?

Thinking about Heaven and its ways really made my head hurt sometimes.

The Museum of Industry is a crazy place that used to be a rich family's mansion in the Belmont neighborhood of North Jude. The centerpiece is an odd fountain made of the plumbing from an old building that once stood on the property, but minus the building itself; a phantom edifice of pipes that sprinkled water from every joint during the warm months.

I could see a figure I was pretty sure was Temuel as I walked onto the museum plaza, a small figure huddled by itself on the bench. That made me feel better. The sun had given up an hour ago and sloped off behind some clouds, leaving a cold, gray afternoon. Nobody else was in the area except a couple of women in business clothes just departing on the opposite side.

I waited another minute, watching from the shadows of one of the museum's wings, but Temuel only sat. He didn't talk on the phone. He didn't look around. (“He” is perhaps a little misleading, because this time, he was a she: Temuel appeared to be wearing the older-Hispanic-woman body I'd seen once before. The archangel liked disguising himself, but this time he hadn't bothered to fashion a new one.)

At last I took a deep, calming breath and started across the open plaza. Temuel looked up as I approached. It was indeed the same body he'd worn once before, the one Young Elvis had so charmingly referred to as a “cleaning lady.”

“Doloriel,” he said as I got near. “I'm glad you made it.”

For some reason, this plunged me right back into paranoia again. Because we'd met several times outside of Heaven, and during all those visits Temuel had never, never,
never
called me by my angel name—only “Bobby.” I slid my hand into my pocket, so I could feel my gun.

He gave me a look of mild disappointment. “Don't do that, please. It's not going to help anything. Look, I'm putting my hands up.” And he did, lifting them slowly into the air, those brown, hard-callused, working woman's hands. Then he slowly dropped them again, but this time they left trails of burning fire down the air.

Two angels stepped out of the Zipper on one side of him. Three more stepped out of the Zipper on the other. All five had the cold, serious look of Counterstrike veterans, and all of them were pointing serious-looking weapons right at me. They had been there all along. Temuel must have hidden them Outside before I arrived.

“Please, don't do anything foolish, Advocate Angel Doloriel,” my boss said. “Just let them do what they have to do.”

I could barely talk, I was so angry, so miserable. “And what if I don't?”

“Then they'll shoot your body to pieces, I expect—but your soul will still be going with them.” He gave me a look that I could not read for the life of me, flat and emotionless. “Please, don't, Doloriel. It's a waste of materials, and you know our department is always up against budget constraints.”

Before I could think of any reply to this amazing statement, someone grabbed my arms from behind and someone else stuck something sharp into my neck. I had time to open my mouth, the words “
Fuck you!”
forming on my lips, but I never got to say it before nothingness came and swallowed me.

S
HE WAS
sitting beneath a tree in a patch of filtered sun, the gold of her hair so pale it looked almost . . . almost . . .

I felt like I might cry. “You're so beautiful. Oh, God, you're so lovely, Caz.”

“Trite,” she said.

I laughed and dropped onto the ground beside her, leaves and fallen evergreen needles crunching beneath me. I kissed her cheek, then down to her neck and the curve where neck met shoulder in an expanse of smooth skin.

“Don't bite!”

“Sorry.” There was indeed a small drop of blood where I had been too fierce, too careless, a glitter of red. “I got carried away.”

“You're so right.” She pushed me back.

I didn't understand why she was upset with me—it was just a little blood. “Come on, don't take it that way. Come back.”

“Forget it. You're tight.” And suddenly she was walking up the slope, leaning forward a little to keep her balance. The sun falling on the hill above her seemed too strong, too powerful. It wasn't the sun at all, it was something else, something blinding.

“Caz? I haven't had a single drink all day. Come back. Don't be silly.”

“I don't want to fight,” she called.

I got to my feet and scrambled up the slope after her, but already I was having trouble seeing where she'd gone. A mist rolled slowly downhill toward me, a great, ground-hugging cloud.

“Caz?”

“Something's wrong with my sight!” Her voice rolled down the hillside, this time with a note of terror in it, but I couldn't tell the direction.

I was stumbling over stones that blended into the gathering fog. I fell and got up. “Caz? Caz, where are you?”

Her voice was fainter now. “I think it's turning to night.”

But it wasn't getting darker at all. Rather, the mist was rising up all around, stretching itself like an animal just awakened from hibernation. I was lost in a sea of cottony nothingness. “Caz?”

“Bobby, I'm getting really fright—!” Something cut her off in mid-cry. I shouted her name again, but no reply came. I charged uphill, but something went wrong, and I was staggering downhill instead, far too fast. I swung my arms to keep my balance, but I was out of control. It was no longer just mist that surrounded me, it was something colder. Snow. Flurrying, whirling, making everything the same, turning everything . . .

Where was she? Had the Frost King come to take her back? Or had that only been a story?

And all around me, silence. All around me, nothing but . . .

White and more white.

“Where did you go?”

Nothing but white.

“Caz!”

Just white.

“Caz, come back!”

White
.

 • • • 

It was like rising slowly through milk, or from the center of a pearl toward its outer edge. For a long time I didn't even realize I was awake, because the difference between the white dream and a real dream was so small. It was only when I realized I was thinking the same kinds of thoughts over and over that I finally knew I was actually conscious.

Still, it wasn't exactly the kind of consciousness you could stake a claim to, or build a house on. Nothing that satisfying. More like being an iceberg in a sea of other icebergs, the slow bumping of thought on thought, the unending and unchanging surroundings. I wanted to be alive again, to do things, to be something, but instead I could only float.

I'm in some kind of prison
, I finally realized. At first I couldn't understand why such a cruel thing had been done to me, but then it came back—Temuel's betrayal, the needle into the vein, the darkness that had rushed at me like a silent storm. I tried to use my body to push against whatever held me, but I didn't
have
a body, or if I did, I was so disconnected from its workings that I might as well have been on a different continent, trying to operate it by trans-Atlantic telegraph messages.

White. I was in white so deep that nothing else existed, so complete that it was hard to think coherently. It reminded me more than a little of the between-place I'd gone after being tortured by Eligor, that gray, utter emptiness. It also made me wonder when Heaven's torturers were going to show up.

 • • • 

Days. Weeks. Years. Centuries. I floated like a fish at the bottom of a frozen winter pond and nothing changed. Nothing ever changed. Thoughts became more rare. I think I actually forgot how to think.

Then, after what seemed a thousand years or more of milky nothing, something disturbed the mindless calm. Stirring in my white dream, I waited, or at least I tried to remember what it felt like to wait for something. Gradually the disturbance became a presence, then a cadence, and then it became words.

“Angel Advocate Doloriel. God loves you.”
It was a low, sweet voice, a female voice, one I had never heard. Just hearing it pushed back the worst of my fear, but it also woke me to how far from life I'd drifted. I hadn't realized how lonely I'd been.
“Can you hear me, Doloriel?”

I had to think carefully about how to turn all the emptiness inside me into words. “I think so,” I finally said.

The presence settled closer, warm and comforting, like the mother I must have had once but couldn't remember. For the first time in longer than I could remember, I wasn't alone. I didn't ever want to be that alone again.

“I am Pathiel-Sa, Angel of Conciliation. Do you know why you are here?”

It came back to me then, at least some of it—Temuel, Counterstrike angels, a needle. “No. Where am I?”

“In Heaven. Do you remember nothing?”

My thoughts were as slow and clumsy as blind grubs. “I remember Earth.”

“Yes, but you are not on Earth anymore. You have been brought here. To me. Are you afraid?”
The voice was sweetly patient.

I told the truth without exactly meaning to. “Yes.”

“Try to let go of that fear. The Highest wants only what is best for you. That is a fact the entire universe cannot refute. Why are you frightened?”

“Because . . . because I'm so small. Powerless. And there are bad things happening.”

“Powerless, you say. Are there things you cannot do? Things that are important to you?”

“Left alone. Be left alone forever. In the white.” I could barely frame my thoughts. I felt like a head-wound victim waking up after only partially successful surgery. “But they won't let me—” I fished for words, but deep in the cold white, even with Pathiel-Sa hovering comfortably close, they were hard to catch. “Try to be good,” was all I could come up with.

“
And are you good, Doloriel?”

I wanted her to stay. I wanted to tell the truth. My returning thoughts were like shivers, convulsing me without really warming me. I felt crippled by my long bath in emptiness. “Try. But it's hard. Maybe I . . . maybe I really am bad.”

“
What do you think, Doloriel? Are you bad? Have you done bad things?”

Why was I afraid? Pathiel-Sa wanted to help. I could
feel
that. I didn't think I'd ever felt anything so clearly. “I don't know.”

“Is that true?”

Something deep inside shrilled at me to keep silent, but that voice was easy to ignore. All I really wanted was for this floating cloud of sympathy to stay with me. “Guess. I guess I have. I'm a good person, really. I try to be.”

“But you say you've done bad things, Doloriel.”

“I didn't want to.” But I had wanted to, at least some of them. I'd wanted to do some of those things very much. “Can you do bad things and still be good?”

“Yes, good people can do things which are not good. But they feel sorry about it. They know they did wrong. Are you sorry, Doloriel? Did you do wrong?”

Again a smothered part of me tried to pull back, but the rest of me reveled in the feeling of safety, of being known and accepted, and I was tired to my nonexistent bones of half-truths and outright lies. After the clean cold of the long white, I felt as though I had been living in a swamp of falsehood.

“I am sorry,” I said. “I tried. I tried to do the right things.”

“Oh, Doloriel, it makes me glad to hear that,”
said Pathiel-Sa. Her voice might have been her wings enfolding me, protecting me. “
And it pleases the Highest, too. It pains Him when His children are in pain or error. But most of all, it pains Him when the good do not repent of their mistakes. He wants to love you, Doloriel, but He wants to love you for who you truly are.”

The thought of God's love swept through me like a tropical current, so warm that for a moment it pushed away the deep chill of the white. Something like happiness spread over me. I had forgotten how good that felt.

“But you cannot hide anything from the Highest,”
Pathiel-Sa added, and the warm current dissipated. The cold washed back in, dulling me, diminishing me.
“That is the one thing that He cannot abide. Do you understand that, Doloriel?”

“I . . . I do.”

“And it is wearying to harbor secrets. It is wearying to lie. It is wearying to wear one face for some and then change it for others. Do you see that?”

I did. Just then, it seemed the clearest I'd ever seen anything. How could I ever hope to do God's work when I could not even live in Truth? “Does the Highest despise me?”

“Never, Doloriel. The Highest misses you. The Highest wishes you to return to His love and the happiness it gives. Like a father who watches his little child do wrong and is unhappy only because the infant does not know better, He wants to show you the way to live in His Love. Do you want that?”

“Of course. More than anything.” I climbed into that certainty, huddled in it, anything to bring back the warmth. “But how can I be forgiven? After all I've done wrong?”

The Angel of Conciliation did not speak again for long moments, or so it seemed. In my slow way I was terrified, thinking I had driven her away in disgust.

“Are you truly good, Doloriel?”
she asked at last.
“Truly?”

“Yes. I think so. Oh, God, I want to be!”

“But things have happened—things you did not plan but which forced you into difficult choices. Isn't that true?”

“Yes.” And I could plainly see it now, see the course of my angelic life laid out like the map of a journey, but the ways I had traveled were complicated, dangerous, many of them completely unnecessary, as was now clear. “Yes, I made choices. Some of them were bad choices.”

“How did that come to be? You meant well, did you not?”

“I did, but sometimes things are complicated. Sometimes things that seem simple
get
complicated.”

“The Highest is not complicated. He is simple. He is love.”

A deep sense of failure gripped me. Pathiel-Sa was right, of course. Every step of the line there had been a proper path—I could see it now so easily—and yet so many times I had chosen the wrong direction. How could the Highest forgive so many mistakes? I thought that I had chosen love with Caz, but how could it have been love when it was against the Highest's own word? Even if she had loved me too, she was a tool of the Adversary. I had put all Heaven in danger because I thought I knew more than the Highest and his most trusted angels.

“You are thoughtful, Doloriel.”

“I don't understand why I did some of the things that I did.”

Pathiel-Sa seemed to come closer then, or at least the whiteness warmed once more, her presence wrapping me like a blanket around a shivering body.
“Of course not, Doloriel. Because you did not mean to do what was wrong, and it was not clear to you at the time. Or did you put your own judgement above God's?”

“I don't know. Probably.” I had the strangest feeling of wanting to cry, but instead of tears from my eyes, something larger but even less solid wanted to burst out of my soul, wanted to free itself even if the escape killed me. “I wish everything had been different!”

“It can be. Heaven is forever, which means there is always enough time. But you must see your errors before you can do better. You must admit your mistakes before you can forgive yourself. The Highest has already forgiven you, but you still hold yourself in a prison of regret.”

That was exactly right. A prison of regret. This cold, white nothing was a prison of my own mistakes. And there were so many of them!

“You must think about it,”
said Pathiel-Sa. The quiet sincerity of her tone as reassuring as sunny skies after a storm.
“You must consider your mistakes. You must see them before you can escape them. Where did you step from the path of the Highest, Doloriel? Where did you stray from His love?”