“I asked you a question,” Joana said, but her voice wasn’t strict as she stood, then rolled her shoulders, stretched her arms over her head, and trailed behind Tadeo.“Is he dead?Did he die of blood loss?”
Through gritted teeth — “They have to amputate his hand.”Joana whistled.“I’m not proud about it.I didn’t mean to take it that far.I got mad at him.It’s his fault for making jokes.”
Joana finally said, “Your grandparents are at mass.”They reached the door to the bedroom, and she moved to lean on the wall against it, staring at Tadeo gravely.“And so the soldier — how does he feel about the fact that you’ve made him lose a whole ass hand?”
Tadeo took a deep breath, wishing now that he’d just come in through a window to avoid discussing this with her.“He’s not talking, but he hasn’t tried to run away.I’m not worried.Who would believe him?I mean, he doesn’t believe it much either.He especially doesn’t think that God is the one who did this to me or that I have an angel in my house.”He hesitated, then added, “But there’s not a lot of cars out there except for the trucks passing through to the border, and they’re getting really angry about all the people trying to hitchhike across town on them, so maybe he’s going to have to stick around anyway.Has the TV said anything about the gasoline?”
“They’re blaming the criminals,” Joana replied with a shrug.“The story is that they fucked up a pipeline while trying to steal from it during a confrontation, and that, for now, the state is going to hand out gasoline at a few stations.Should’ve started today, actually.”
Tadeo nodded his head again, then finally knocked a fist against the door.“Dina,” he called.
“He’s still in there,” Joana said as if that weren’t obvious.“He still hasn’t left the room.”
“For fuck’s sake,” Tadeo grumbled, “what did you do to him?”
Joana laughed and raised her hands.“I told you.I just handed him a beer or two after we came back from checking the gas stations.How was I supposed to know angels can’t hold down a little alcohol?”
“Dina,” Tadeo called again.“It’s Joana and I.Can I talk to you?I need to know something.”He took the doorknob, saying the angel’s name again, began turning it before he felt the handle yanked away from him.The door swiveled open to reveal the tall angel looking flushed, hair in a tangled web around his head, his entire body wrapped in the bedsheets like he was trying to hide within it.“I’m sorry,” Dina said quickly.“I was asleep.What is happening?”
Tadeo blinked, turning his head a little to see into his room — the twin beds, the Mary of Guadalupe figurine in a small wooden table between them, the peeling wallpaper; this had been his mother and her siblings’ childhood bedroom once.“Nothing right now.I wanted to talk to you.Can we go to the living room or the kitchen?—?”
“We can talk here,” said Dina, wrapping his arms around the bedsheets tighter but scooting forward.He reached behind him, shut the door, then echoed himself.“We can talk here…”
Hesitating, Tadeo glanced back at Joana, then at the angel.“You told me the world is going to end.”Dina blinked, then nodded.“Does that mean we’re in the apocalypse?The biblical one?”
“Yes,” said Dina, firmer.“It’s the biblical apocalypse.”
“Everything that that Revelation says will happen,” the anti-Christ answered, “will happen?There will be plagues and rivers of blood, and a star will fall into the Earth, and Jesus will return and take a few with him, and the rest of us will burn forever?”
“Yes,” the angel said again.
“How can we stop it?”
Dina stared, and he tried to remember what he’d read when he’d first realized who Tadeo was, why he mattered to the end times that he wanted to prevent.‘He really doesn’t know,’ Dina thought, ‘what he is meant to do.’Apsinthos had already told him that, but it was difficult to stare at the genuine, wide-eyed, pleading expression of the young man before him, knowing what he was, what he was born to do — to kill the ones he loved, to destroy what he was fighting so hard to protect.‘Don’t pity him,’ urged the star, or perhaps it was Dina himself.‘To fulfill Revelation,’ said Apsinthos now, ‘we will need demons and those angels bound beneath the Earth.’Dina almost gasped.‘Those whose anger and rage has been carefully nurtured in their bindings, so that they kill a third of mankind.’
“Hello?”Joana impatiently called.
The angel, eyes hazed as if he were asleep, whispered: “The Watchers.We must release the Watchers.”
CHAPTER14
The Lord has a sense of humor.It was raining when the angels descended from Heaven on winged horses into a remote, forested area.Even for those who’d traveled to Earth recently — Michael, Uriel — it was difficult to not immediately recall the brisk, chilled air of the days that the world of early men had flooded.The waters that had buried the children of the Watchers and their mothers, the women who’d loved angels.Though there had been men, too, that loved angels.Michael knew that better than anyone.His sword was always heavy, always seemed to drip blood, as if there was still the body of a winged child skewered through it.He never forgot.He never forgot the Watchers, and the devil that he’d destroyed them with.
But, right now, Michael held the reins of a pegasus the color of blood beneath its silver armor.He stared up at a high billboard on the side of the road with a celebrity plastered over it.Lounging on her side, she wore a short, tight dress, blonde hair curled and half trailing over her body, the other half on the flooring she laid over.Bright eyes were blue, ruby-red lips parted.The chief prince couldn’t read in the language, couldn’t decipher ‘The Harlot’ printed across the bottom.Even still, he furrowed his brows at the celebrity with an inexplicable, sinking feeling in his chest, like one were looking at a butchered corpse, wondering if they were familiar to you and knowing the body was too destroyed to ever be able to tell.
All the other angels were nearby, two hundred — like the Watchers had been — with more instructed to come soon, all over the grass rather mundanely.Because of the rurality of their landing spot, heavy darkness had masked the army of the apocalypse’s descent into something rather unspectacular.Such darkness had been unnecessary, however; the angels were hidden to human eyes by the Holy Spirit — a work of God after the great flood — but Michael preferred coming across the least amount humans possible for now.The angels, on their own winged horses, looked around with juvenile curiosity; very few times had the vast majority of angels seen the Earth after what occurred with the Watchers.And Michael was already dreading to tell them that they’d really ended the world then, that this was a new Earth with new people, new weapons, new trees.
“Michael,” someone called.
The prince looked over his shoulder, saw the one who’d spoken — Gabriel, who looked ridiculous with his earnest, freckled face and silver armor over a black horse.At his left, over a white horse, Raphael was similar, though he wore a helmet that obscured his head, and he had his staff strapped to his back in lieu of a sword.Uriel wore the helmet as well, sitting perfectly still over a horse, similarly pale to the angel of healing’s.“What,” Michael began, “is it?”
“What now?”he asked as Raphael sighed, as if nervous on Gabriel’s behalf.“What do we do now?”
Upon return to the town that bordered Babylon, Satan was met by a truck with tinted windows.He hadn’t planned to be picked up, not here by the airport, but there was a gun in his cassock.He hadn’t hid his blonde hair, nor drowned his face in cosmetics yet.On the jet, he’d begun to powder his face using his small, golden-rimmed vanity mirror before he thought he’d caught someone over his shoulder.The Watcher Azazel, again — with a bleeding hole in his chest where his heart should be.They’d spoken recently, not long before Satan had left Hell.One of the things Azazel had said was: “Your hand shakes when you line your lips.”
The window of the car rolled down, and immediately, the devil scoffed.“You love to infuriate me, don’t you?You want me to beat you and yell at you.”Nonetheless, he strode to the truck, pulled the passenger’s seat open, slid onto the chair with his duffel bag, and sighed.“So long as I touch you, you don’t mind if I slap you.”
The demon Baal was in the driver’s seat, his horns not as large as they used to be but still thick, still undeniably of a beast.He was dressed entirely in black but in a coat too thick for the weather.His hair had been cut short, though not to the extent of most human males either; it was still long enough for the devil to braid, as they both liked.And as for Baal’s eyes, they were red in both the irises and the whites, everywhere — long ago, he’d had his eyes stabbed, and they’d never fully healed.All over him — there were scars.He was like an old god, a golden calf.“The gasoline,” Baal began, “you asked the spies for is all in the back.Some men tried to approach me.”Reaching for the gear, Baal yanked it into place to began driving.“I didn’t kill them, but I was able to scare them off.Should I apologize now for being here?”
