Chapter Thirty-One #3
“Black or brown hair with darker skin tone is the most common in the world, and most people prefer to see the angelic in their own form. It shouldn’t have been a surprise,” Goliath said.
“Some of the rioting was from the dark-skinned folks like you and me,” Charleston said, “because they thought God should look all shiny and blond like you.” He nodded toward Suriel.
“Not God,” Suriel and I said together. She smiled at me and I couldn’t help smiling back. I motioned for her to continue.
“Not God, but the Archangel Michael, the right hand of God, but he is not God,” she said.
“Either way, people wanted him to look like all those old Renaissance paintings of angels, not like a Hispanic, Middle Eastern stud muffin,” Lila said.
“People always envision angels as beautiful,” Suriel said.
“They are beautiful,” I said, and I had a moment of seeing that golden white light, not the paltry fire of the angel at the first crime scene, but the power of the higher orders.
I could almost see her face, the face and body that I had created from the ages of fifteen to nineteen until she became real and could no longer change to another form.
That was when she had known something was wrong, and when I had believed her lies as if they were my only truth.
Suriel said, “Yes, but not in the way that the masses think of beauty.”
I did my best to focus on Suriel’s face, her smile, her humanity, and push the ideal beauty of angels out of the front of my head. I wasn’t sure that I would ever be able to get that beauty out of the back of my head. It isn’t just ugliness that has the power to haunt; beauty has its own ghosts.
“No, angels don’t look like we think they will,” I said, finally, but I must have not taken all those memories out of my voice, because she looked at me more closely.
Or maybe it was just that Suriel knew; she knew because she had been one of the people I went to for advice.
She’d taken me to the masters of the school so they could decide how badly I had fucked up.
Suriel had just been in training then, like me.
Her with a black badge on her polo shirt, and me with a white one on mine, showing what specialties we’d chosen to study.
Later my white badge had been given a gold stripe down it to show that I dealt with the higher orders.
Had I stayed at the College my black robes would have been crossed by a white-and-gold sash.
I’d been one of only two in our class to be chosen to try to earn the gold sash.
The other one had been Jamie, who was now homeless and a diagnosed schizophrenic.
The angels had broken Jamie’s mind; they’d only broken my heart, so I’d gotten the better deal.
It was why I’d let him crash on my couch when he wasn’t too crazy and I didn’t have Connery.
It could have been me instead of him, maybe even should have been me.
Jamie didn’t do anything wrong; I’d been the one who had sinned, and yet I was okay, and he was broken.
“Havoc, you okay?” Charleston asked.
I looked at him and wanted to say the truth, that no, I wasn’t okay, and I hadn’t been okay since I left the College of Angels twelve years ago. Out loud I said, “It’s been a hell of a day, but I’m okay.”
He narrowed his eyes at me.
“I will be okay,” I said, and meant it this time. I would be okay, because I had to be okay, there wasn’t another option.
“Good, because I need your help to change the form of the hand,” Suriel said.
I looked at her. “You’re the Infernal specialist, not me.”
“But this is not about demons, Zaniel, it is about changing the appearance of immortal flesh, and you are better at that than I am.”
“Ravensong isn’t immortal flesh,” I said.
“No, but I hope that the hand will be.”
“If it’s her hand, then it’s her hand. Human will alone cannot reshape mortal forms,” I said.
“Nor can a woman who has no taint of the Infernal about her soul suddenly have a demonic hand. That is a punishment or a payment between someone using Infernal magic.”
“I thought you said this isn’t possible under any circumstances,” Charleston said.
“I said that under these circumstances it was impossible, but I have seen long-term users of demonic magic with their bodies misshapen. It was never this—I don’t know what word to use—complete, or . . . the hand isn’t deformed, it’s transformed, and that is incredibly rare.”
“I don’t see the difference between what’s happened to my detective and what happened to the college kid in the hospital,” Charleston said.
“We found books and occult paraphernalia at Mark Cookson’s house. He’s been studying dark shit since he was about midteens if the parents are accurate and I think they are,” Lila said.
“The library book that he stole dates from about that time, coinciding with the personality changes and trouble at school,” Goliath said.
“A lot of online Satanists that recruit teenagers ask them to steal to prove that they’re serious,” Charleston said.
“If the library book date is accurate, Mark Cookson had been experimenting with demons and maybe even trying to summon devils for at least five years,” Lila said.
“What name did you say?” Suriel asked.
I repeated it for her.
Her smile faded. “I know that name.”
“How?” Charleston asked.
“He came to the College. He wanted permission to use the library, and you’re correct, Zaniel, he was researching the Infernal powers.”
“You’re an Infernalist, you had other duties, why would you know the name of someone who came to use the library?” I asked.
“It was one of our exorcists who was originally alerted to the list of books and manuscripts he requested. They did see him in person, but he was not possessed by an evil spirit at that time, and that is all an exorcist cares about. They cannot cleanse a human soul that has chosen the wrong path, for that is free will and not to be tampered with by any of us.”
“The list of books he wanted to see must have been important enough for the exorcist to show it to you,” I said.
She nodded, still not smiling. “It wasn’t what Mark Cookson requested; it was the fact that he knew we had certain manuscripts within our library. No human living today could know that we had . . . certain things within our walls for safekeeping.”
“Like what?” Lila said.
“Like the bottle that Lieutenant Charleston showed me on his phone.”
“Charleston said it just appeared outside the room after we were knocked out, hovered in the air while he threw the containment box around it. He says it tried to dodge like it was aware, alive,” Lila said.
“It is not a relic easily faced down by any human magic. That your lieutenant was able to make it hesitate for a moment is very impressive,” Suriel said.
“Are you saying this bottle is one of the relics that were stored at the College?” I asked.
“It looks like the twin of one that we have at the College,” she said.
“Are you in charge of the forbidden objects at the College?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No, and it cannot be the one in our archives, but that there is another like it anywhere is something the masters at the College need to know. It was supposed to be a singular artifact.” She looked worried for a moment, maybe more.
“Which would be worse news, that this bottle is the one from the College, or that there are two of them?” Charleston asked.
“For the world, two would be worse, but for the College both would be terrible . . .” She shook her head, then forced herself to smile, and said, “but in answer to your question, Zaniel, my sash is red, blue, and black with a silver-and-gold badge.”
I was glad she had blue for Ravensong’s sake, and black meant she dealt with the worst of the demonic.
“You’re third in line for the head of your specialty, congratulations,” I said, but I knew my face wasn’t neutral.
I don’t know why it was a shock that Suriel had done so well in her chosen path; she always did well at anything she set her mind to, but somehow knowing that she was that far up in the hierarchy of the College bothered me.
It shouldn’t have, but it did, and I had no idea why.
“You knew this guy was trying to work black magic and you didn’t think to alert the police to the danger?” Charleston said.
Suriel gave him a weak version of her smile, but it left her eyes colder, the steel underneath the baby blues showing through for a second.
“If we wished everyone in the human world to know we had certain things, we would advertise it. There are many who would pay well to see into the mystical archives, but some things are better left alone, and far too dangerous for mortal humans to read, or to be in human hands. You’ve all seen the evil that can come of it. ”
“How long ago did Mark Cookson come to you?” I asked.
She thought about it. “A year, or a little more.”
“And you remembered his name all this time after reading it once?” Lila said, laying the cynicism and sarcasm on equally thick.
I almost came to Suriel’s defense, but I should have remembered that glimpse of steel; she didn’t need me to ride to her rescue, she never had. “I read his name over a dozen times, because that is how many pieces he wished to read in our library.”
“You make them sign out a request per book?” Goliath asked.
“They do the same at reference libraries,” I said.
“Sorry, I was never much of a bookworm,” he said.
“Me either,” Lila said, “but I’m glad to know that people have to sign their names if they’re trying to borrow something as dangerous as that damn bottle.”
“We would never have let that out of our vaults,” she said.
“What about the books?” Charleston asked.
“He could have read them in the library under supervision, but he would never have been allowed to remove them from our holy wards.”
“And you’re saying the entire list of books was all things he shouldn’t have known were in the library?” I asked.