Then, the water ended, and there was — his hair wet, his clothes drenched — dryness, air.Tadeo spewed out the ocean, felt it like vomit, but his body was still crushed, and he couldn’t see.Where was he?Distantly, he heard screams again.‘Like howls of animals.’But there were inflections in between, languages like no animal Tadeo had ever met used.Those were people — screaming.It wasn’t Dina, nor Dante.‘Hundreds of people screaming.’Some more rivulets of saltwater dripped from his gasping mouth.‘People.Where are they coming from?’
His foot jerked, his leg shifted.Then, he could turn his head.The cave was easing up on him, as was the Leviathan’s hold.Tadeo looked toward his feet, wanting to see if the angel or the soldier were up ahead, but there was only darkness.And there was only darkness as the space he was pulled into grew wider, wider.Instantly, he sighed in relief, but it was only temporary.He soon wiggled his fingers, dismayed to not feel anything against him.When he lifted his head, there was new freedom, too much freedom.Then, the sea serpent released his body, and the rock ground scraped his front one final time.
The anti-Christ fell into pitch darkness and the symphony of agony.He scratched at the emptiness he fell into, twisting, searching.He shouted — “Angel!”— but the screams were rising in volume around him and muffled his yells.“Angel!Dina!”Heat grew all about him too, like he were falling into a furnace.“Dante!”Kicking and kicking, realizing the fall would never end, he groaned and tried to curl his body forward.He ground his teeth; and stinging, twin mouths opened at his back, whipping out feathered tongues, too wet to fly.“Fuck.”Another pair of mouth-wings tore through his arms, and his legs shook, bled, as Tadeo twisted and screamed out in pain to join all the other howls of agony in the air.
Who were they?The damned, surely.‘We were looking for Hell.’They hadn’t planned to go there, just to meet the captured angels halfway.Was this halfway?The shouts were so loud now that he could make out certain voices.A higher-one, feminine.A lower one, masculine.Were those children?No.That couldn’t be.‘Hiccups.Crying.Gurgling.’Tadeo took his own top, dug his claws into it until the fabric tore.He was sweating, coughing out the heat, the sudden sizzling on his skin.‘I can hear—’ Once again, he panted, but it was a different terror now that seized him.‘I can hear them choking on their blood as they scream.’Those couldn’t be children, those couldn’t be scratchy elderly voices, those couldn’t be, could they?And were those animals?Those howls?‘No.’
Roughly, the sprouted wings at his back, his arms, his legs struck the air, jumped him a little in the darkness up or whatever way it was that Tadeo’s head was pointed.He couldn’t even decipher if the screams came from below, from above, or from all around him.The thudding pain of his head, the many eyes rippling open down his face, did nothing to help him see.He could feel his own skin swelling to triple and distort his shape.Though he shouted one more time — “Dina!Dante!”— his boyish voice was gone, replaced with a guttural monster groan.
Then, a light — a dim glow in the direction of the anti-Christ’s feet that was bursting like a dying star.
Dina saw it too as he fluttered his eyes open with a dull throb at the back of his head, feeling too warm, too empty of air in his lungs.‘What is this?’He was falling.‘I hit my head when I was in the cave.’And now he was plunging in an endless dark, hearing distant screams.When yellow-orange flickered in the air above, it took some blinks before the angels realized heat followed with it — fire, so great that it illuminated the face of the Leviathan that breathed it.Like a comet, the flames streaked across the pitch black, toward a many-winged giant.“Tadeo?”Dina whispered groggily, but all the bleariness was shocked away as the light engulfed the anti-Christ’s beastly body.“Tadeo!”Tadeo screamed as he was scorched.“Tadeo!”
Before Dina could pull out his own wings, he felt something take him by the torso, wrapping around tight in the sudden shape of links.‘Chain?’It tightened onto his lower ribs enough to bruise, to cut — with one end trailing off into the unknown whereas the other end, approaching rapidly, was a metallic sphere, spiked to appear like a star, a morning star.The teeth bit deep into Dina’s chest, and the angel screamed.So roughly the star dug itself in further, the angel was pulled in a direction he couldn’t make out.Like the cave at the bottom of the sea, wet rock soon scraped against him, but he could do no more than jerk and twitch over the red, slick ground of a tunnel.His wings were trapped beneath the chains, his body pulsed in pain — but he saw as, yet again, a light bloomed before him.
A figure with a long torch was laughing, saying, “It’s an angel!”The figure at his left was tall, almost all of his body obscured by a dark cloak that hooded his head.
Holding the other end of the flail that was torturing the hiccuping, wheezing Dina was a great, burly demon with bull-ish horns.With a hardened, scarred face, he carried also eyes reddened in the whites, as if his arteries had burst open long ago and refused to stop bleeding.For clothing, he wore a heavy tunic, excessive robing, a red sash, and sandals.A golden laurel wreath crowned his head.
“Who,” asked Baal, “the fuck are you?”
CHAPTER17
After some time had passed — Satan, of course, returned to the church.The devil traded his torn clothing for a new dark cassock and had to hunt for a scalp, peeling it off a poor man’s head in the dead of night.To sate his hunger, he had found the rotting pieces of a goat discarded outside a butcher’s shop, crouched over the ground, ate it.Many have depicted him with goat eyes throughout history.He had seen just about every statue of himself, painting, sketch, from the greats and those who will be forgotten after death alike.Few times had he been beautiful.Some of this is by his own design; his perfect lips had shaped lies by the ears of emperors, kings, chiefs, and popes, whispers that he had burnt up in the fall, lost all the beauty of an angel.It was true to an extent.His face was a disguise.He was a lie.Beside every translator, every scribe, he had been a lie, every life.A million lives Satan had led all throughout history, in every place, in every kind of body.From one end of the world to another, he had been running.Chasing a thread until it brought him here.
He returned to the church, of course he did.He had no other life ready for him to take, and he had unfinished business here, a killing to do.And Tadeo was nowhere to be found.
Satan arrived at the rectory at in dead of night with hair in a different style than before, glow beginning to seep through his false-brown contacts.His exhausted gaze bled down onto his body, wavering in place, wrestling to stay up.But this could have been an act, one of a tired priest.The devil is a liar; he may lie so much that he no longer knows the truth.
“Ángel,” someone called, many called.Standing in the room were several nuns, two other women, a tall man, one of the migrants that’d been in the vehicle when the soldiers attacked, with his daughter on his hip.“Ángel!”Unlike all those who stood, the other priest, Toño, was slumped in a chair, looking nothing like a middle-aged man and more like a terrified little boy, his face crinkled as aluminum foil in deep worry.
“Where have you been?”asked one of the nuns.“What happened?Have you heard all that?—?”
“Was it God,” said the priest Toño quietly, “that guided you this time, as well?”His face had paled a shade, and now Satan noticed that there was a blanket draped over his lap, failing to conceal a white cast on his left foot, propped up over a short stool.But his eyes gleamed with a sadness and a hope, a dual grief and joy.“Ángel,” he called, “you saved the lives of these two.”The migrant man, stepping toward Satan with his sniffling daughter.“You might have saved mine too.Thank you.”‘Whatever it is you are,’ the good priest thought, ‘thank you.’
“Thank you,” said the migrant man in question, taking the hand of the devil, squeezing, and then bringing it to press to his own forehead.“I haven’t been able to sleep since.I owe you my life.Whatever you shot at, it distracted the soldiers” — Satan had intended that, yes — “and you saved me and my daughter.”When was the last time Satan had saved a life?He was a monster of collateral damage.
“Whatever it was you shot at,” the good priest said now, “when it fell into the river, I thought I saw the shape of wings in the water ripples.What could it have been?I heard the name ‘Michael’ in my mind.”
“Michael,” Satan echoed, “would not do something so terrible, would he?If it were the saint Michael in the sky that I shot at, he would have been watching innocent people die without acting.Our saint wouldn’t be so cowardly… would he?”
A silence hung over all those in the room, for some seconds, before the good priest, quietly, said, “There’s going to be a Mass early tomorrow.I would like to lead it.Please, Ángel, be there with me.”When his voice shook, he added, “I need to sleep.You should sleep too.You’re right— You’re right that it couldn’t have been Michael.”
They regarded him with suspicion — the nuns — but Satan went to bed, wondering how long he’d have here.He’d exposed himself to the angels; he should leave this place for good.But he’d watched Michael’s blood dribble onto the river.The rivers would turn red with blood, Revelation warned.The water had remained blue, green, and yet it was difficult not to fear that it was all darkening into a crimson shade now, every second he faced away from it.
The next day, he decided to take confession in the church.So much of priesthood was boring — multiple long services a day, paperwork, planning the masses for the holidays and weddings and fifteenth birthdays, and then the added labor of processing migrants in the shelter, transporting, organizing identification, calling authorities, receiving the occasional threatening call — but the confessions were quite fun.As he readied himself for it, he gelled his stolen hair and spent a few minutes applying several layers of sparkling pink lip gloss over his plump mouth.Satan, after this, finally went into the small church building, planning not to bother pretending to bow for the altar today as he crossed past the pews.
Then, Satan stopped, the echo of his steps on the tile too loud.He’d just reached the center of the church and was facing the altar, the hanging Jesus Christ, the sunny monstrance holding the Eucharist.No one sat at the frontmost seats, and as he turned, the devil saw that all the other pews were empty as well.He couldn’t recall a time the church had been this desolate.
The tall double doors of the entrance were shut, a wooden panel barring the interior side.Only then did Satan’s breath tangle with his tongue.He had never seen the doors locked, and the other priest, the good priest, was in no shape to do it himself, and he never would — always insisting the church should be open to anyone — the locals, the migrants, even the criminals.He still believed in the criminals.Anyone can be forgiven, according to him, according to God.For centuries, Satan had heard this sentiment and asked: why should anyone want God’s forgiveness?What made His forgiveness so special?The Lord is but a narcissist — because what good does it do to apologize to a distant God instead of those you’ve harmed?Why move to absolve yourself instead of making amends?This is pure narcissism, too, on the part of the sinner.The devil would know; he is the mother of vanity.
A sprinkle of dust fell before Satan, onto his mop of dark hair, and a creak sounded on the ceiling.He tilted his face upward, and his lips parted, but he had less than a second to react, to reach into the pocket of his cassock and grip his revolver.As fast as sunlight, a silver gauntlet of a hand grappled his throat, then great wings the color of the Earth stuck to propel both Satan and his captor toward the altar.The edge of it crashed against the devil’s spine before the angel pinned his head down against the marble, fingers digging into his neck, shy of crushing it by just a pinch.Teeth clenching and baring themselves like he were an animal — the devil found a bulk of armor holding him down, a helmet with slits over where the eyes should be perfectly obscuring a face.“Angel,” the devil gritted out.
“Where is the anti-Christ?”demanded the angel, and Satan could not laugh, so he wheezed.“Where,” said the chief prince again, sternly, angrier, “have you hidden him?”
“I can’t remember the last time I saw you.Was it when the Son of God bled to death?”
“I’m not here to talk with you.”
