I clawed over rock and dirt and the still-hot cinders of the torch, mindful not of the scratches and burns I inflicted on myself in the process, only of the door, of freedom, of away. A few seconds of blind groping and I found it. The aperture was narrower now, and riddled with loose stone, but there it was.
There it was.
A sound like a thousand hoofbeats as the ceiling caved in, and the darkness around me imploded. I dove for the passage as the cot crunched beneath the sudden weight. Hot, stale, dusty breath chased after me as all the air in the heap of rock that used to be a room was expelled along with me. And then the ceiling of the crawlspace popped overhead like a crack spreading through glass, the sound zipping past me in the darkness and letting me know I wasn’t out of the woods yet.
I scampered through the short passage and into the slightly larger outer chamber of Dumas’s socalled monkey house, only realizing I’d left the crawlspace behind when the echoes of its collapse reverberated off the walls around me. All I wanted was to collapse as well, bloodied and spent as my egress from Danny’s burrow had left me. But the muffled booms of the angels’ continued onslaught, and the constant patter of pebbles on the dirt floor, suggested that wouldn’t be prudent. Suggested that Danny’s hidey-hole was only the beginning. Suggested that if I didn’t get my ass out of these caves and into the open desert air, my ass was gonna get a whole lot flatter.
So I kept moving.
Finding the fissure that connected the monkey house to the main cavern wasn’t easy. Damn thing was only sideways-me wide, and in complete darkness, every nook and cranny in the cavern wall felt like pay dirt. I must’ve circumnavigated the chamber twice before I finally found it, and beat to hell as I was, squeezing through was no mean feat. But, halting though my progress was, it was progress, and eventually, I spilled from the crevice, tumbling to the dirt floor and squinting against the sudden light.
Sweet Christ, was I sick of falling down.
Turns out, though, much as it hurt, that fall was lucky as all get-out. Not like it was strategy or anything —I was just beat up enough I was having trouble supporting my own weight, is all —but still, it was lucky nonetheless. ’Cause when I fell, I wound up hunkered behind one of them rock formations that juts up from the floors of caves —stalagmite or stalactite, I can never keep them straight —and so I managed not to run afoul of the angry angel.
I should’ve known that this light I stumbled into was too bright, too white —too pure to be cast by torches alone. Should’ve recognized it for what it was. Because I’d seen light like this before. Breathtaking. Painful. Glorious. Deadly.
The light of God’s grace.
The light that emanates from His most trusted servants —and from His deadliest assassins.
Most times, were you to spy an angel topside, you’d never know it. They, I don’t know, seem to dim their natural light, and project a sort of vague suggestion of human form that your eyes slide right off of. I mean, you register the basics. Eyes? Check. Hair? Check. Two arms? Two legs? Yup and yup. But if I were to ask you what color those eyes were, or was the hair cut long or short, you’d have no earthly idea. Which makes sense, because an angel is a celestial being; there ain’t nothing earthly about ’em.
This guy, though, he wasn’t bashful. Wasn’t subtle. Wasn’t hiding his true nature. Which, quite frankly, means me saying “guy” wasn’t quite accurate. But junk-having or not, tall and hulking as he was, “guy” and “he” seem closer than the alternative. Seem as close as this earthly, imperfect language of ours is gonna get.
The angel stood naked in the middle of the hall, lit from within and shimmering like a mirage on the horizon. Like pavement on a hot day. Like a reactor on the verge of meltdown. He was eight feet tall if he was an inch, and he was so beautiful —and so goddamn terrifying —I didn’t realize until I heard his captive speak that he was not alone.
The voice I heard was low and rumbling, and in a tongue I did not speak —a tongue I could not speak, full of sounds no human could ever hope to make. Though the canyon beyond the cave raged with sounds of battle —screams of anger and of agony, and countless explosions far less muffled than before —that voice cut through them all, and reached my ears as though from mere inches away.
The voice was Psoglav’s.
The horrid dog-beast was on his knees before the angel —a posture of necessity rather than penitence, given that the angel had in his hand one of Psoglav’s wrists, which he held twisted over Psoglav’s head, keeping him immobile and in no small amount of pain. Though if Psoglav’s acid tone was any indication, the hold still left him somewhere shy of accommodating.
The angel struck out with his free hand —a chopping blow to Psoglav’s throat. An awful gargling sound, and Psoglav fell silent. The angel spoke then, its words in the same tongue as the demon it questioned, but where the latter’s words sounded horrid and perverse, the former’s were melodic and wellmodulated —serenity itself.
Then, when Psoglav failed to answer, instead spitting at his captor’s feet, the angel ripped off Psoglav’s arm, which kind of put a damper on the Zen of the moment.
Psoglav roared in agony. I’m talking shook-thefucking-walls roared. I thought my ears were going to bleed. Thought the place was going to come down around me. But the angel didn’t even flinch. Instead, he smacked Psoglav across the face with his own severed arm, spewing gore across the cavern wall, and asked his question again.
Psoglav, now free of the angel’s wrist-hold on account of the wrist the angel was holding being no longer attached to him, picked himself up off the floor and launched himself at the angel —marshalling every ounce of strength and speed he had —his iron teeth bared for attack. If the angel had a face, I might’ve thought Psoglav aimed to bite it off.
But he never got the chance.
The fastest goddamn demon I’ve ever seen, and he didn’t even come close.
Oh, sure, he started well enough, rocketing off the ground faster than my human eyes could follow. But a funny thing happened on the way to biting his Chosen brother. Two things, actually. The first was that Psoglav slowed to a halt in mid-air, his snapping maw scant inches from its intended target. The second was that the angel, I don’t know, expanded —growing bigger, taller, brighter —until he seemed less a person than a tiny, white-hot sun.
It happened so fast, I nearly failed to react. Nearly. But when the corona created by the angel-sphere engulfed Psoglav and then collapsed back in on itself, I hit the floor, hiding behind my stalagamabob and burying my face in the dirt.
Then the angel loosed God’s wrath, which set the very air around me ablaze, its blinding white light searing my retinas despite their being protected by closed lids and rock and dirt, while my ears rang with the most beautiful and terrible sound I’d ever heard. Once upon a time, a girl with cause to know told me it sounded like a chorus of children, painful in its beauty, and that strikes me as close to right as anything I could come up with. But even that can’t do it justice, because the whole of human experience has yet to invent the words to describe such agony, such ecstasy —and given the animal terror with which I trembled upon hearing it, I pray they never will.
I pray they’ll never have to.
I pray this infant war between heaven and hell dies in childbirth.
Because the alternative is too frightening to imagine.
I’ve no idea how long I spent, curled fetal behind that stone outcrop and weeping like a child, but when I came to my senses, I was alone. Aside from the charred black husk I assumed was once the demon Psoglav, the cave was empty —deserted —and most of the torches had burned out. All was still and quiet —not just in the cave, but in the canyon beyond as well. After the hue and cry of war, I felt as though I’d been struck deaf, but what few torches remained lit cracked and popped as they burned through the last of their accelerant, and as I found my feet and staggered along the cavern’s gentle upslope, my shambling gait echoed off the limestone walls.