‘The stars,’ Uriel thought to himself, eyes widening, long dead hope resurrecting in his chest.‘They must’ve spoken to Dina.To prevent the apocalypse?’The stars must be rebelling against God’s apocalypse plans; they must know that humans have no place in Heaven or in the skies.“Where is he?”
Metatron was quiet, then: “Why did you send him to the stars, Uriel?”But, in the second of silence, the prince noticed distant thumping, and he caught Metatron’s scowl before he released him, taking off running in the direction of noise.Metatron shouted after him, “You’re a moron!I hid him away so that he could return to normal, but he’s no better than before!Leave him where he is or watch how he’ll bring madness to your streets how Satan did!”Uriel wanted to shout that Enoch had no idea what he was talking about; he had not been there for when Satan was born, was not there for the war.
The wooden door in the ground was beating like a heart in between a ribcage of fallen tablets and scrolls, some muffled groans at the other side — pained or perhaps starving.Though there was a silver lock, it was open, and as Uriel dropped onto one knee, he took the latch with both hands and, grunting, lifted it.
Though angels did not rot or age, the youngest angel had come close, his hair in such tangles with his lace veil that it seemed to have interwoven with it, his once-white tunic a dirty beige, lips cracked dry.Angels cannot die, no matter how deprived they may be of anything, but they come close; they suffer to a grave, but they never lie it.At least, that is what Uriel had once thought.“Dina,” he whispered, catching every detail in that confused, innocent expression.For the first time, his hands itched with the want to touch someone, his arms ached with the need to pull Dina close and squeeze him tight and apologize for not having done more.Instead, he said, “You must go.”
“Uriel,” Dina barely managed, legs and arms pressed hard against the narrow tunnel so that he wouldn’t slide back down into dim candlelight.“You’re home.”
“The stars spoke to you, didn’t they?”Uriel asked even though he could hear Metatron’s stomps, his grunting, so close behind.“You must listen to them.”‘Do what they haven’t thought me worthy of.’He reached for Dina’s hand and pulled him out of the hole, then squeezed his fingers.“Please.I’ll hold back Enoch as you run.”Without hesitating, Uriel let him go, spun around, then threw himself at the man-angel, tackling him against the wall of tablets, taking his head, slamming it down onto the stone.In a bloom, blood spread beneath the crack of a skull soon to give way to angry flames.‘Save us all, Dina.’
Hurriedly, fluttering his wings, Dina took steps backward, heart in his throat, shaking, all his vision blurred.It was so bright in the library compared to his prison that he was nearly blind, but his muscles remembered the paths he’d taken for thousands of years here.Taking off in the opposite direction of the labyrinth, he searched for another way out.‘I will end it.I will end it all, Uriel.’
CHAPTER5
The priest who led mass today was unfamiliar.Under the flickering light, his dark eyes appeared to shine golden, as if lit aflame, and his smile was wide, and when he spoke, it was slow, curling over the syllables.And he was beautiful, as well — his jaw sharp but not overly masculine, his lashes long, his figure slim but not bony.It was always wrong to stare so much at other men; nonetheless, Tadeo couldn’t trail his eyes much further than him, this holy man who seemed too beautiful to be holy.Purring, serenely, he said: “Go in peace.”
From one of the back pews, the young man — Tadeo — sat beside a wheelchair, pressed up to the wooden seats, with an older woman slumped in it, her eyes dazed, her tanned hands on her lap, almost in prayer.At his other side, there was a young woman, sitting with her jean-clad legs crossed.Joana, stealthily hiding earbuds in her abundance of dark, loose curls, pursed her lips and furrowed her brows as she tapped at the phone her earbuds were leashed to.Quietly, Tadeo said, “Amen,” for the three of them.Then, Tadeo maintained his gaze on the ground and tried to pay no mind to the procession of the beautiful priest and the altar servers down the center, walking away from the altar.Instead, as soon as it was socially acceptable to do so, Tadeo lifted his body to stand, expelling an uneasy breath from his mouth.‘Where is Toño?’Where was the usual priest?
Over the still-singing choir, Joana said, “He should be outside.”She had read his mind, had the terrible habit of doing so.Then, her gaze flickered up at Tadeo gravely, and she announced, quieter, “There was a massacre a few hours south.”Before the young man could ask, she elaborated: “On a highway, probably heading up here to the border.”
“How many?”Tadeo murmured, though there weren’t many churchgoers here with them, unsurprising given it was a weekday.Only elderly people were around, almost two dozen, a few middle-aged folks who had something immediate to pray for, and a stray dog that nobody had the heart to kick back out into the warm winter day.
“They don’t know yet but at least ten, five of them women.”A gruff rasp of Joana’s smoker voice — as if she were forty years old at just the first year or two of her twenties.
“Do you thinkel padre—” the father, the priest Toño “—called because of that?”
“No, unless he knew about it earlier today,” Joana answered promptly, then clicked her phone to turn off right as Tadeo was going to peer over her bony shoulder and stalk whatever the source of her information was.“But he texted me during the mass.I don’t think it’s anything big.”If it was, Joana probably would have been the one to tell Tadeo, not Father Toño.“I’ll come with anyway.”Tadeo was about to ask if Joana could take his mother home instead.“I’ll take your mom back to your house while you deal with whatever shit he needs.”Tadeo snorted a bit.
The mind-reading; sometimes he really believed Joana could hear thoughts, not just his but everyone’s.Tadeo had no reason to think otherwise.He believed in the divine, and he believed in magic and miracles.He was a miracle himself.
As Tadeo shuffled out of the pew to take his mother’s wheelchair, the light of the stained glass window nearby painted him.In the last ten years, he’d aged finely from young boy to young man.His hair was now much shorter, however uneven it was, and his face had lost its roundness finally, and his hips were slimmer, his shoulders wider, his skin a touch darker.Proper men’s clothes fit him now — loose jeans and a belt, a long-sleeved pale shirt.His crucifix rested against the first buttons of his top, the beads cool around his neck.Truthfully, there was nothing remarkable about his appearance; he looked like his parents, his neighbors, most of everyone he knew.He could have been anyone in a crowd were it not for the bandages covering the upper right half of his skull, lines of white barely avoiding the small piece of his ear that remained and fully covering the hole where a right eye should be.The shot that had killed him once, the mercy kill.
The churchgoers nodded politely, nervously, at him.Many of them knew who he was, though they never said it.Recently, Joana had informed Tadeo that they were all merely happy that he went to church, that he used his curse for good.‘Curse?’Tadeo had echoed, almost laughing.‘It’s a blessing, isn’t it?’Joana had either not heard or ignored him, but when Tadeo repeated himself, she just chuckled that it may be a blessing but an ugly one.She didn’t blame anyone for seeing a monster.‘One day,’ Tadeo had said, ‘they’ll know I was a saint.’Joana had said, ‘You have to die to be a saint,’ then she’d turned her phone and showed him an address, telling him where to go, where a murder of two was needed, ‘so you might’ve missed your chance.’
Helping his mother’s wheelchair over a curb and onto the plaza that the tall church was connected to, Tadeo saw, indeed, the priest he’d been looking for.Toño — a very stout man, wearing plain pants with his Roman-collar shirt — sitting at a bench, not far from a woman who was selling corn on a stick.However urgent he’d sounded in his voice message to Tadeo, the priest seemed utterly at ease, nibbling on the corn, staring off into the green where a few were enjoying the last hour of sunlight before dark, before they’d likely all shuffle along home and lock the doors and cover their windows and keep to themselves.Gripping tight the handles on the wheelchair, Tadeo reassured himself, ‘Well, it’s better than before,’ because he was certain that was true, however much work remained to be done.Just as he reached the priest, the man looked over at him, chewing, and he waved a hand invitingly.
“Father,” Tadeo called, “I’m sorry.I thought you were leading the mass, and I thought I might as well go, and that I might as well take my mother.”
“No, no,” he said quickly,standing up, taking a few steps to Tadeo, “I’m the one that’s sorry, my son.I should have let you know.”Then, the priest smiled down at Tadeo’s mother and placed his hand on her shoulder, squeezed reassuringly.“Good evening, ma’am.”She didn’t reply, never did, but he always said it anyway.“I,” the man began to Tadeo again, “told Joana that I was out here in case you wanted to step out of the service.”
“I didn’t bother telling him,” Joana finally said, snorting, then elbowing Tadeo to the side.Firmly, her hands came over the handles to Tadeo’s mother's wheelchair.“Did you hear about the massacre, Father?”
The priest’s brow furrowed.“When?Today?”Joana repeated what she’d told Tadeo.“My God, that’s terrible.No, I haven’t heard of anything.”His voice was small, and he absentmindedly twirled his corn at the ground.“May their souls find their way to our Father and find peace.”
Tadeo almost echoed him, but Joana spoke once more: “What aboutyourmigrants?Safe and happy?”
“Safe,” he said quickly, nodding.“No incidents there— What I called you about, Tadeo, is that— Do you remember that house where they were holding those five people?Last month.”Three men had been there, holding five hostages and seeking ransom before finishing the promise to get them across the border.The five had been horrified when Tadeo stepped into the house and killed their captors, and every one of them was now in the shelter with the priest.However, they’d traded extortion for limbo.Many of those in the shelter had been there for months, even years for a few.
“Yes,” Tadeo said.“Do you think there might be people held captive there again?”
“I don’t know,” said the priest, “but that woman who lives nearby told me she heard a lot of noise in it recently.I just wanted to ask if you could look in there and make sure it’s nothing to worry about?”Already, Tadeo was nodding.“Good, good, thank you,mijo.”He reached for Tadeo now and patted his shoulder the way he’d done to his mother.“Oh, and before you both go — what did you think of the priest leading the service?He’s new; he got transferred in, very suddenly, actually.Father Ángel.”
“Father Ángel,” Tadeo murmured to himself.“He was— He was good.”Turning to Joana, he hoped she’d have an opinion, but she was putting her earbuds back in, and Tadeo remembered she’d been listening to music during the entire mass.She hated mass — not because she was an atheist, as far as Tadeo was aware — but just because she found it to be a waste of an hour.
On her phone, Joana was putting on the single of her favorite pop-star — a beautiful blonde woman often called, ‘The Harlot,’ after the the title of her first studio album.“Let me drop off your mom, Tadeo.Tell me if you find anything in the house or if you kill anybody.”She began turning the wheelchair before stopping, tilting her head over her shoulder.Whispering, she added, “But do me a favor and don’t kill any soldiers, even if they’re killing babies or whatever.Do you hear me?”
Tadeo blinked in confusion.“Huh?Why not?”
