Have you ever had somebody you loved die on you? All that stuff you feel, and you’re still feeling it, but they’re just gone? You carry that around with you every moment—all the things you failed to tell them, all the ways you were stupid, all the ways you’re missing them. It feels like holding up a huge, collapsing wall, as if you were some hero in a movie waiting for everyone to get to safety, but you already know you’re not going to get away yourself. That eventually the weight will just crush you.
Ever had somebody leave you and tell you they never really loved you? That you’re a loser, a waste of time they should have known to avoid? You carry that one around too, but instead of an insupportable weight, it’s more like a horrible burn, nerve endings fried and stuck on jangling alert, a pain that occasionally subsides to a bitter, itching ache, but then flares up into agony again without warning.
Here’s one more: Ever had somebody steal the thing that mattered most to you? Then laugh in your face about it? Leave you helpless and seething?
Okay, now imagine that all three things happened at the same time, with the same woman.
Her name was Caz, short for Casimira, also known as the Countess of Cold Hands, a she-demon of high standing and about the most mesmerizing creature I’d ever seen. When we met we were on opposite sides in the ancient conflict between Heaven and Hell. We became lovers, which both of us knew was an extremely stupid, supremely dangerous thing to do. But something drew us together, although that’s a pretty damn bland, vanilla way of putting it. We made sparks—no, a raging fire—and it still blazed inside of me, long after she’d gone. Some days it seemed like it was going to burn me to ashes.
Caz belonged to Eligor, one of the Grand Dukes of Hell. After our affair, our fling, whatever you want to call it, she went back to him. She even tried to make me think she’d never cared about me, but, see, I didn’t believe that. I was certain she felt something too because, if not, then I was wrong about everything. I’m talking about up is down, black is white, the world is really flat after all kind of wrong.
Call me stupid if you want, but I wouldn’t believe that. I couldn’t. Beside, I had a more practical reason for thinking that she really cared for me. Don’t worry, we’re coming to that soon.
Anyway, now Eligor hated me because I’d messed with his “property” (okay, also because of some other stuff, like shooting his secretary, getting his bodyguard eaten, and generally interfering with his plans). The power imbalance between us was ridiculously skewed in Eligor’s favor: he was infernal royalty, and I was a minor mid-level functionary who already had a bit of a negative reputation with my superiors. So why wasn’t I dead? Because I had the feather—a golden feather from the wing of an important angel that marked an illicit bargain made between Grand Duke Eligor and someone in Heaven whose identity I still didn’t know. Eligor definitely didn’t want that feather going public, and as long as I had it stashed safely away I felt sure he would leave me alone. On the other hand, Eligor had Caz, and he’d taken her back to Hell, far out of my reach. Stalemate. At least that’s what I’d thought when the whole thing started. As it turned out, I had built a house of cards out of the flimsiest set of assumptions possible.
Oops. Getting ahead of myself a little. A lot of things happened before I even heard of the Neronian Bridge, and I should probably tell you about some of them before we return to Hell.
The latest episode of the ongoing craziness that is my afterlife started with what normal folk would call a job review. Except normal folk wouldn’t be reviewed by a group of pissed-off celestials who could literally destroy an immortal soul with a single word. Even the poor bastards who work for Trump don’t have to put up with that.
two:
five angry angels
I’D BEEN called to Heaven, specifically to the Anaktoron, the great council chamber I had visited once before, an astounding architectural impossibility with cloud-high ceilings, a floating table of black stone and a river running right through the middle of the floor. My archangel, Temuel (sort of my supervisor) brought me into the mighty building and then discreetly retired. Floating on the far side of the stone table, as if someone had jerked away a candelabrum and left the candle flames burning in midair, were the ephors, my five special inquisitors.
“God loves you, Angel Doloriel,” declared the filmy white flame that was Terentia. “This Ephorate welcomes you.” Like the first time I’d met them, Terentia seemed to be the one in charge, although I knew that Karael, the warrior-angel beside her, was about as high as anyone can get in the hierarchy of the Third Sphere (everything to do with Earth and its inhabitants). Beside him hovered Chamuel, a mist that gleamed from within, and next to Chamuel was Anaita, a childlike presence that I knew from unpleasant experience could be as coldly formal as Terentia. At the edge of the group was Raziel, a being of dim red light who was neither male nor female. All of these important angels were Principalities, the judges of the dead and the living. There is no higher rank among the angels in our sphere.
I returned Terentia’s greeting, trying not to look like I was waiting for my blindfold and cigarette. “How can I serve you, Masters?”
“With the truth,” said Chamuel, but almost kindly. “These are great matters in which you have been caught up, Doloriel. Dangerous matters. And we wish to hear of them from your own lips.”
Yeah? And what would you know about lips? I wondered, since Chamuel’s form was indistinct as a rain cloud. I’m not entirely stupid, though, so I only bowed my head. “Of course.”
And so the ephors asked, and I answered. I tried to tell the truth when I could (it makes keeping track of the lies easier) but there were just too darn many things I didn’t dare mention, too many laws of Heaven that I had stomped all over while trying to get to the bottom of the whole mess. They knew that my demon-lover Caz had given me information but they definitely didn’t know what else had happened between us, which was good, because I was pretty sure fraternizing with the enemy was a capital offense in the angel business, and I had gone a lot farther than “fraternizing.” They also knew that my buddy and partner Sam Riley, aka Advocate Angel Sammariel, had been secretly working for a group that hijacked souls belonging to either Heaven or Hell and offered them instead a “Third Way” that both sides of the ancient struggle were pretty eager to obliterate. They also knew Sam had escaped, but luckily they hadn’t found out it was because I’d let him go. (They also didn’t know that he’d had offered to take me with him to the Third Way’s new-minted afterworld. I still thought about that sometimes.)
As I think I said, I’ve never just stood up and lied to Heaven before. I’ve kept many a not-very-angelic thought to myself, of course, but I always told the truth about what I was doing and whom I was doing it with. But the last couple of months had changed all that: truth was no longer an option. If my bosses found out what I’d done I’d be sentenced to the nastiest pits of Hell or, if I was lucky, I’d just have my memory wiped and start over again, another fledgling angel learning how to keep his robe clean and sing Hosanna. So I lied and kept on lying.
“. . . As for the last part, well, it’s all in my report.”
“Which we have absorbed with interest,” said Terentia. “But we have called you here so you can relate your experiences again, and perhaps, with our help, discover details which were inadvertently left out of your report.”
How could a guy resist such thoughtfulness? “Well, as I said, when the monster attacked me in the abandoned amusement park, Angel Sammariel took advantage of the distraction to escape. I didn’t see where he went. By the time the ghallu was dead, there was no sign of him.” (Fighting the monstrous ancient demon—and almost being swallowed by it—had definitely happened, I promise you. It was the oops-Sam-got-away part that hadn’t.)