Angel of Death

TWENTY-FIVE

It was a beautiful summer day in Burlington. The cemetery was hilly and wooded, with graves that went back to 1828. Some stones had been rendered unreadable in the great wash of time. Small, one-lane roads of fresh blacktop wove between crimson-king maples and scrubby oaks. The gray-white stones stood in clean, solemn rows on a carpet of green.

Route W was closed for two miles to either side, from Route 11 to the doorway of the Country Vet. Between those two police roadblocks ran a road through harvested fields and past a grove that was thick with camouflaged National Guardsmen. One side of the road was parked full of funeral cars.

Burlington’s fourteen available officers (including the meter readers) had shown up in dress blues, specially ordered for the funeral of their beloved detective and her unborn child. Their handgun shoulder holsters made ominous mounds in the dark, straightjackets they wore. There were also seven riflemen from the National Guard, dressed in immaculate ceremonial garb and bearing ceremonial weapons that usually shot only blanks. Today the rifles were loaded with sixty-grain hollow-point shot. The officers of other departments wore their best as well, and carried fully loaded side arms. Even the local farmers, who had been warned to stay inside with windows and doors locked, sat behind their drapes, shotguns at the ready.

The police blockades had been ordered to get photo identification from anyone entering the area. They were instructed even to tweak the cheeks of their fellow cops, making certain those cheeks were real. Chief Biggs had sent no warnings of this unusual inspection. If the Son of Samael showed up as a cop, they wanted to catch him before he got anywhere near Detective Leland. She was there, but not in the bronze casket suspended over the grave. She was in an unmarked blue police car, parked near the cemetery gates. The vehicle had darkened windows of bulletproof glass. The woman herself wore a bunchy black dress with a high, lacy neck, such as old women sometimes mourn in. The ensemble was completed by a veil and a shallow, broadbrimmed hat. A makeup man had given her an enhanced nose, an enlarged chin, and gray-streaked eyebrows beneath a white wig. Silent and watchful, huddled in the dark-windowed sedan, she could have been the dead cop’s grandmother.

“Nothing yet,” she muttered into the tan wire that ran from an earpiece to the edge of her lips. “Many are ruled out on height alone, Chief.”

“Keep watching,” came the voice from the headset. She glanced along a picket of older, taller gravestones where the chief paced. She whispered, “He’ll show up. He won’t be able to stay away.”

Biggs’s voice was worried. “I just hope we haven’t scared him off, with all the security.”

“That just sweetens the deal for him – makes it even more of a challenge.”

“Somebody’s coming. We’ll talk later.”

Leland glanced out the window to see who approached the chief. It was a short, thin man in a red blazer, his side-burned head cocked inquisitively as he reached Biggs. There was a moment of tension, and then a nod and a handshake, traded words and smiles. Leland sighed, easing back in her seat. The man had been too short, too thin. That man there, though – no. It was Blake Gaines in a navy blue suit, down from his new post on the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. He’d received a special invitation and right to roam the grounds, on condition he photographed the crowd. Gaines, smelling another exclusive, had showed up with notepad, camera rig, and even the Channel 4

News chopper. It waited in a field behind a copse of trees, ready in case of a high-speed chase.

“Leland,” Biggs broke in, “watch for the guy getting out of the orange-red Festiva. The roadblock called in, saying he looked suspicious.”

“Right, Chief,” Leland responded.

A reddish-orange Festiva rumbled up and passed her car, its old-style door handles scrapingly close. Behind the wheel was a tall, intense figure, his eyes wide and excited, his hands tight and feverish on the wheel. He glanced at a narrow parking space hard beside the open iron gate, and his car darted into it. One front tire dipped down into the ditch, and the opposite rear wheel lifted from the rutted road. The gray cloud puffing from the exhaust pipe sputtered away. The driver’s door squealed open. A man emerged, tall and thin, his face oddly rigid and slightly jaundiced. He had watchful silver eyes. A chill went through Leland. “He’s the first one I’ve seen that looks the part.”

“Right,” said the chief. “He’s also the last one through the gate except a four-foot-two grandma at ninety-eight pounds.”

The silver-eyed man leaned forward as he climbed the sloping drive of the cemetery. He passed the gates. His jacket was the dull gray-white of the tombstones.

“Listen, Boss,” Leland said, “I know I agreed to stay in the car, but I’m not sure if it’s him, and he’s just now gone over-”

“Stay put, Leland. That better not be the sound of your car door-”

“He’s going to be here, somewhere. We all know that. I want to make sure we catch him. I want no more skulking, no more of this masquerade.”

She stood, slammed the door behind her, and reminded herself to toddle rather than stride after the white-suited man.

Ahead lay the tableaux of the closed casket, wreathed in flowers and hemmed in on all sides by black-suited mourners. Beside it, a red-jowled face appeared, marching toward her. The chief was very handsome in dress blues.

His voice came through Leland’s earpiece. “I’m going to be right next to you, then. I’m bringing one of the spotter teams forward to surround the guy and have a look at him.”

“Fine.”

Biggs moved the microphone away from his face and, with barely believable stage decorum, said, “Here, ma’am, let me help you. You should have waited for someone to take your hand.”

Leland took his arm. They topped the rise, crossed the blacktop, and stepped onto the tender grass. The morning lawn was damp with dew, which soaked chillingly into her stockings. She spoke into her headset. “I know he’s here. I can feel it. But whether that string bean is him…”

The chief looked toward the gathered group. “The string bean is heading for the foot of the grave. Let’s go up that way. Then I’ll walk you around the far side of the grave to one of the chairs set up behind the priest. I’m sure we can get someone to let you sit. Be watching for him all the time.”

“Well, duh.”

Taking tiny, patient steps, the two approached rows of seated civilians and standing officers. Leland decided to ignore the police, for the moment. They’d been thoroughly checked. Samael could be among the news cameramen. They stood with their tripods behind a black velvet cord, held up by four theater-style stanchions. Still, those cameras had been closely checked, too. Or Samael might be seated among the reporters, beside the photographers. But they, too, had endured a thorough and perhaps less-than-gentle inspection. He was here, though.

As they approached, Leland looked into each set of eyes that turned toward her – the cerulean gaze of a long-haired young boy, the brown serene witness of a black matriarch, the dull grays and blues of others. It was not color she checked – he could be wearing colored contact lenses – but soul, that predatory soul.

“It’s him, Chief,” came a whispered voice over the headphones. “This is Spotter Six. This guy’s got the exact same height, and maybe ten or fifteen pounds lighter, but he’s been on the lam. Besides, that skin can’t be real. There’s something wrong with his eyes.”

“Anybody else got an opinion?” Biggs asked.

“This is Spotter Three.” A woman’s voice. “I don’t think so. Too obvious. Everything fits, but he’s too nervous, too high-strung.”

“She’s right,” Leland agreed. “He wouldn’t be nervous. He would be in complete control.”

“Yeah, but wouldn’t you be nervous with two hundred fifty packing cops around?” the chief asked. “And what if it is him? We say we missed him because his disguise wasn’t good enough and he was too nervous?”

The chief’s whisper was barely audible. They were nearing the place where the silver-eyed man stood. There was a nervous severity in the suspect, something Leland had never seen in Samael. On the other hand, by all accounts, Samael had changed. He was suicidal as well as homicidal. On the run. Perhaps without food or sleep or shelter.

“It could be him,” she murmured, “a little thinner, a little worse for wear.” They were edging around the cluster, as if the old lady wanted to get a clear view of the casket and flowers before she sat down. “If he’s mentally decayed, it could be him.”

“This is Spotter Six,” came a male voice. “He’s got my vote.”

“Mine, too – Spotter One.”

Biggs pretended to be cautioning the old crone about a depression in the ground when he said, “He’s either our man, or somebody even worse off.”

They rounded the group, and Leland noticed a glint of metal on the man’s gray-white lapel. “What is that pin he’s wearing?”

One of the supposed mourners standing near the man ducked his head, scratching the top of it. “An angel.”

A shiver went through Leland. She remembered exactly that sensation when she had met Sergeant Michaels at the Inn-Town Tap in Griffith. “It’s him,” she said. “I’m almost positive.”

“Any other suspects?” the chief asked, and there were no responses from the other groups of spotters.

“All right, then. Wait until I get the old bag here seated. Then I want Jenkins to drop him with the hypodermic, and the rest of you be ready to catch him and act like he fainted. Get him away from the crowd and out of sight before you try ripping his face off.”

Leland cringed as she passed her own casket. In a moment, it’ll all be over.

As if cued by that thought, the ornate casket began its slow, quiet descent into the grave.

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion-” The priest spoke the psalm with the lyric, ringing voice of an oracle, reading from a fat Bible held in his left hand. “We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion. How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

Biggs had done well to get one of Leland’s old parochial school priests to do the service. It leant authenticity. Father George, was it? Or Father Ben? They both had seemed ancient when she had been in their classes twenty years ago, and she was surprised either of them still lived. Even so, that white-haired, whiterobed old man was just as she had remembered him – with kind eyes and a perpetual, uncomfortable smile. She’d seen him in the paper recently – a photo with that smile. Probably something about his officiating at her funeral.

“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy-”

Apparently Father Whomever remembered her as a student. As she passed him, a tear crept from the corner of his eye and ran down to linger in the hollow above his cheekbone.

“Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day of Jerusalem; who said Raze it, raze it, even to the foundations thereof.”

From the front row of seats, a pale-faced man stood and gestured toward his vacated chair. Leland nodded her thanks. The chief shook the man’s hand and patted him lightly on the cheek, as though he were Italian.

“Bless you,” Biggs said.

Leland settled into the chair.

Biggs ducked down to her and whispered, “I’ll be back.” The big man moved and was gone beyond the priest.

“O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us-”

The thin man near the foot of the grave swooned. A gasp came from the watchers. A young woman caught the man. “He’s fainted. Somebody help,” the woman said.

Others turned in, lightly slapping his leathery face and nudging him, their voices hushed and urgent. “You all right, mister? You all right?”

The chief was in the midst of the situation. “Let’s get him out of the way, get him some room to breathe.”

The others took the suggestion with alacrity. They grabbed arms and knees and hoisted the man from the ground. The crowd gave way. “Sorry, Father,” the chief said over his shoulder. “You may continue.”

The priest nodded, stooping down to take a handful of grave earth from a pile beside his white robes. Sprinkling it down into the grave, over the lowered casket, he intoned the final verse of the psalm: “Happy shall be he that taketh and dasheth thy infants against the stones.”

The baby within Leland leapt.

She knew. She’d recognized the priest not from her days in parochial school, but from that newspaper photo, the photo of the latest victim of the Son of Samael.

She stood and drew her gun.

He pivoted, lowering the closed Bible to a stand beside him, and glimpsed her movement. Or, perhaps more.

She grabbed the front of his white robe and wrenched him around, gun ramming up beneath his throat. “Freeze!”

I would have been captured even then if fate had not intervened. I tried to hold still, but the robes were heavy and she had whirled me viciously around and off balance. I fell backward into the grave. It was lucky for me she held so tight to my robes. She was pulled in after me. We landed side by side, her head hitting the ringing casket.

It sounded hollow. I was glad for the first time since I had learned of Donna’s second death. Of course, I had doubted it, but a nagging voice told me it was true this time. The voice was wrong. More joy: Donna herself lay, unconscious, beside me.

There was one small disappointment. She had gotten off a shot while we fell, and my right ear had been torn off. Blood poured evenly from the spot. Above, there was a lot of scrambling and shouting. Many more guns were aimed down into the grave. None of it mattered. I’d rolled Donna onto my shoulder and held her there with my right stump. My left hand held her revolver, cocked and ready, positioned just above the bulge of my child. I stood atop the coffin, carrying my beloved on one shoulder, and smiled at the circle of policemen around us.

“Put her down, Samael,” snarled a red-faced man who bolted up the hill into the crowd of guns. “You are surrounded.”

“Yes,” I said. “I am surrounded by this poor pregnant woman. The barrel of her gun is also surrounded by her, and by her baby. If you don’t move back twenty paces before I count to five – one, two, three-” I began rapidly, providing no time for them to think, but no one had moved at three, “ – four, five.” I shot, and they all saw the grazing bullet punch out of her side. “Again!”

I shouted. “One, two, three-” They trampled each other to get out of the way. I was grieved to have shot her.

“How many people do I have to kill before you realize I am serious?”

I yanked the mask off my face, and the camera flashes were popping in a crazy kaleidoscope. The spirit gum still hung on my Shaytan tattoo, but I figured it made me look only more ghastly.

“Now, I am going to climb out of this grave, keeping the lady on me at all times. I don’t want any of you crackpots in the woods thinking you can get a clean shot, because I’ll be shifting constantly. She won’t die unless you shoot her or you try something that makes me shoot her.”

I lunged up from the grave, my white robes soiled with mud and blood. It occurred to me only then what a service the robes would do, hiding my true form beneath shifting cloth and shadows. They couldn’t target my legs or feet if they wanted to. I walked. A small patch of woods ahead of us bristled with National Guardsmen, but I shouted them out. “Get clear, or the woman dies!” Another bullet, grazing Donna’s other side, convinced them to scramble out of my way.

“We’re going to catch you,” Chief Biggs shouted behind us. “God damn you to hell!”

I liked the woods. They were pleasant. The birds sang their morning songs, oblivious to the commotion. The WTMJ 4 chopper waited in the field beyond. The pilot was there, just where I had taped him. It took a whole roll of duct tape to hold him. He was wrapped like a mummy in the stuff. I left his eyes exposed, of course, so he could see the video man slumping in his own blood in the passenger seat. Good motivation.

I opened the passenger door, dragged the dead man out, and climbed in. Donna fit all right behind the front seats. I cut the pilot’s arms loose and held the gun to his head and told him to fly. He did.

As we lifted off, National Guardsmen running out in a circle around us and shouting and aiming impotently, I thought what a bright sweet sky it was, and how wonderful it was to have Donna alive again, after all.

“Head toward Chicago,” I told the mummy pilot. He did.

I’d gotten to know the city by the lake, and some of its better hidey-holes. Sure, they would try to follow me, but I’d ditch the ’copter before then and get us into a few more cars. Once we were in the city, it was perfectly possible to park under a building on Wacker Drive and emerge ten blocks away, on the other side of the river. I’m personally indebted to whoever decided to dig rail tunnels a hundred feet below the streets of Chicago. Donna awoke, lying in a dark room. Her costume had been stripped away, but she wasn’t naked. She wore thin clothes of some kind, and over those, tightly cinched restraints, and over those, fleecy blankets. It was a gurney. She lay on a gurney. There was a thick bandage around her midsection, with compresses on both sides. There were also smooth, cool tubes running down beside her shoulder and arm.

But this was no hospital. The room itself felt deep – a windowless, lightless, airless place. It smelled of must and mold. She heard water dripping sullenly. Beyond the burning wounds in her sides and the thick blankets, the air was frigid.

And he was here. It was as certain as that. She couldn’t hear his breathing or the shift of his feet. She couldn’t see anything in the pitch darkness, but she felt the piercing presence of his gaze.

“You’re awake,” Samael said in the utter blackness. Despite herself, Donna started. “How’d you know?”

“Your breathing. It changed. And I sensed your thoughts.”

She didn’t want to encourage that idea. “Where are we?”

“Deep. One of my homes.”

“Very homey.”

“Oh, it is. No one around is trying to kill me. That’s homier than anyplace else.”

“What about our home, Azra?” she ventured. “What about our place of bliss? What’s happened to it?” Her voice had more edge in it than she had expected. He rose. The whisper of his clothes echoed from walls of cement. He came to her side, stooped down, and kissed her lightly on one cheek. “We can’t go back there. You know that.”

A blazing light flashed into being in his hand. It glared gleefully above Samael’s silvery eyes, limned his nostrils, and painted his chin in fire. The madman’s shadow hovered above him on the cement ceiling. Donna glimpsed all of that – and the now-infamous mask of Shaytan – in the instant before she clamped her eyes closed.

“I’m sorry,” Samael said, sounding genuinely grieved.

“It’s just a pen light. I use it for checking your IVs and debriding your wounds.”

She opened her eyes and squinted as they adjusted. Four transparent IV bags hung on stands above her – one holding a urine-colored liquid, another clear, a third the color of milk, and the last that of blood. Tubes ran down from each, onto Donna’s shoulders and alongside her arms.

“What is all this?”

He smiled, seeming proud. The lips of Shaytan curved toward his beaming eyes. He swept the light toward the bags. “That yellow one is hyperalimentation – intravenous feeding. There’s also saline, lipids, and a morphine mixture in A positive blood, on slow drip.”

“No, I mean, why are you doing this?”

His tattooed brow beetled. “To save you. I didn’t want to shoot you. I didn’t want to poison you, either. Nothing has happened between us the way I wanted it to.”

“You set all this up?”

“The doctor did. He showed me what to do. He showed me how to debride the bullet wound and how to empty the plastic pouches. You are doing much better.”

Donna tried to see beyond the tepid light that played across the IV bags. “Where is this doctor? Where have you locked him up?”

“Oh, I don’t have him locked up. The devil does. Of course, I kept his face and hands, so I could get more hyperal and morphine and gauze and such from the hospital.”

The light darted toward a wall of old wooden shelves, cleaned and loaded with supplies – more bags, cotton, knives, needles, scissors, clamps. Beyond it, just visible in the velvety dark, was a rack draped with masks. Donna saw more than twenty of them, each loose and emptyeyed. The doctor’s face must have been among them. The sight nauseated Donna, but there was nothing in her stomach to vomit out. There had been nothing for days, perhaps weeks. She blurted bitterly. “You envy us, don’t you? You dress up in our skins, take our names, make conversation over coffee. You’ve learned the fine art of socialization and seduction because you want to be near us, as close to us as you will ever get.”

“Now, don’t be bitter-”

“You were right all along, Azra. You aren’t human. Not even close. But you want to be. You wish you were. We still have our birthday parties and our office jobs and our hopes and dreams – despite you. That’s why you envy us. We live despite you, and you can’t beat us or join us.”

He was quiet, his feverish voice fading back behind the flickering light. “Yes. You’ve always been the one who knew me. You’ve always understood.

“But it isn’t envy. I couldn’t envy you: fragile flesh. Pain. Wounds. Weariness. Do you see this hand? Of course you don’t. My flesh was cut away. You see this other hand? Yes, it is still flesh and bone. And what does it hold? A faint, flickering light, because these human eyes of mine cannot see without it. What was it St Paul said, that we see through a mirror dimly? But when my spirit eyes are returned to me, ah, then I shall see face to face. How could I possibly envy you?”

“‘Nothing that is human disgusts me.’” She chanted the line as though it were an article of faith.

“What?”

“He wrote that, too, not St Paul, but Tennessee Williams. In one of his other plays, he said, ‘Nothing that is human disgusts me, unless it is unkind, violent.’

And that’s what you have become, Azra. That’s all you are. Cruel.”

“Cruel? No. I take pleasure in my work, but that isn’t cruelty. It’s artistry,” Samael replied. His tones were fervid in the chill air as he approached her. “Don’t you see? Humans are alone in all of creation. God is not on your side. Satan is not, either. No angel, no devil allies with you. No plant, no animal loves you. You are at war with all the universe, and at war with your very selves. You are different from the rest, and different from each other. You are a hundred feet below the sunshine, cold and wounded and trapped, clutching a tiny light that is destined to go out. No, I could not envy you, but I do love you.”

“If you love me, let me go.”

“The hunter loves the doe and kills her all the same. He admires her animal grace, her tenacity, her innocence – and he wants to possess it. Loving you only makes me better at killing you.”

“You’re insane.”

He continued as if she hadn’t spoken. “I used to slay without compassion, with only an eye for justice and poetry. But then you taught me to love my prey. You, Donna. And I fell. Angels, it seems, are forbidden to love your kind. But demons are forbidden nothing. Which is better, the angel that disdains you, or the demon that loves you?”

Donna’s lungs strained against the tight bands. “So, what is it, then? Once I’m healed, you’re just going to hunt me down and kill me?”

“No.” His voice was gentle, and he leaned toward her.

“No, Donna. I’m making you well so that you can live. Trying to kill the baby inside you was a mistake. It’s part of you. I couldn’t kill it without killing you. No, Donna, I’m making you well so that you can deliver the child. I’ve already selected the doctor who will help you. She’s the best obstetrician in the Midwest.”

“You’re going to let me give birth?”

His hand reached up to the flow regulator of the morphine-blood mixture. The droplets quickened in the tube. “We’ll all be delivered on that day. The baby will be delivered from your womb, and I from this flesh, and you – you, my darling Donna – will be delivered alive from this dark, cold hole.”

Already she was getting sleepy, and her sight had darkened even before he switched off the penlight.

“You’d never let my child live.”

“Oh,” he replied, his voice floating in the darkness,

“I said it would be delivered. I didn’t say it would live.”