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Chapter Eighteen

Maybe I wasn't dead, yet.

Maybe the cord continued on through this wall of corpses like it had through a hundred other walls today, and I would find my body somewhere upstairs recovering nicely and receiving a sponge bath from a pretty nurse.

Hell, I'd settle on getting my rectal temperature taken by a homely intern, just as long as I was still alive!

Only one way to find out: follow the cord.

Just walk up to the drawer and take a look inside.

Yep. It's just across the room, now.

Gonna start walking any minute now.

Any minute.

Real soon, now.

And then two people slammed into the morgue making enough noise to wake the dead.

Nothing seemed to stir inside the steel drawers so maybe that was a good sign.

The two appeared to be a teenaged boy and an older man. It was hard to get much in the way of details as they were on the other side of some frosted glass partition. Their voices carried clearly enough, though. Especially the older man's: he was bordering on hysteria. The boy was following him around, trying to speak in a reasonable voice.

The man began grabbing at the stainless steel drawers set in the wall and trying to tug them open. "Where did they put her? Where is she? I want to see her!"

"What's the point?" the teenage boy asked. "She's gone."

"Gone?"

"Gone on ahead."

"But she should still be here!" the older man shrilled. "They took her! They've put her somewhere! Help me find her!"

"What would be the point?" the boy asked again.

"We should be together! They shouldn't have taken her!"

"It's not that they took her," the kid tried to explain, "it's just that she's gone on ahead. You're not going to find her here."

"But she is here!" the older man screamed.

"No, no she isn't. She's gone on. You're not going to find her here."

"I have to see her!"

"Well, you can't. Not really. She's gone. Gone on. All that's left is her body. And that's no good any more."

"Why? Oh, God! Why?"

"I don't know why." For the first time the boy's voice took on an audible edge. "Why do you drink and then get behind the wheel of your truck? Did you think the odds would never catch up with you? Anyway, red lights don't care if you're drunk or sober! It was stupid! Just stupid!"

"I don't remember any of that! Help me find her!" None of the drawers would open for him.

"Yeah, well, she's not here. She went first. She's gone on. And we should go, too."

"Go where?"

"The next place. One of 'em, anyways."

"I'm not ready."

The boy shrugged and it was as if the frosted glass that he was standing behind was becoming more opaque. "Who is? Look, I gotta go. It's pulling at me and I'm afraid of what might happen if I resist while the welcome mat is still out."

"I'm afraid!"

"Of what? The bare little bit I can see from here is bright and beautiful! It makes my eyes burn and my chest ache! I've never imagined anything like it!"

"I don't see anything but darkness."

"You have to look—"

And the boy was gone.

The man remained, moving from drawer to drawer. Giving up on opening up the body storage units, he began poking his head through the steel front pieces to examine the inner contents. "I can't see. There isn't any light. There isn't any light!"

Suddenly the darkness inside the drawer where my cord led wasn't half as frightening as the blindness outside in this room. I grasped the cord and, once again, used it as a lifeline as I pulled myself, hand over hand, along its faintly glowing length and into the filing cabinets of death.

The cord extended into the darkness and I passed bodies stacked at various levels and passed through and out into storage rooms of a more benign nature.

Eventually I found the stairs.

But I was well on my way to the first floor before I stopped hearing the anguished cries of "There isn't any light!" echoing in the empty bowels of the basement corridors.

* * *

The emergency room was on the first floor but there was no point in loitering there. If I wasn't in the morgue, yet, I would have been moved to the intensive care unit. I left the stairwell and went looking for a wall map to get my bearings and chart my course.

I found the hospital chapel, first.

I needed a moment to think.

And to rest.

I was exhausted. Even without physical muscles and tendons and ligaments, I ached and found it an effort to put one noncorporeal foot in front of the other. And what was I going to do once I got back to my physical shell? Climb back inside and try to wake up? Sit at the bedside and wait to see if I lived or died? I had spent the better part of the day working my way back toward my mortal remains and figuring out a few more aspects of the afterlife. But I hadn't spent much time figuring out what I was going to do next.

What could I do next?

I slipped through the blond wood doors and entered the cool, darkened room.

Candles glimmered in alcoves and on a bare, nondenominational altar. Most of the light, however, came from the outside, filtered through stained glass windows depicting doves and healing hands and medical symbology: all faiths welcomed here including those who had none.

Another interpretation: the medical profession as God.

A half-dozen people were scattered throughout the pews. Some praying, some meditating, one sleeping. Two were joined by creatures who might've been cousins to the otherworldly clothiers back in the green-and-white-marbled store. One individual was surrounded by a fog of darkness. The darkness made a hissing, whispering sound and the woman who sat at its malevolent core wept softly and shuddered.

That didn't seem right.

Correction: that seemed pretty fucking wrong!

Like anybody who wasn't here on account of a paycheck needed any additional grief.

My own troubles were momentarily forgotten as I considered the cloud of sorrow and fear that enveloped the woman like a sour stain. "Hey!" I said, emboldened by the fact that no one alive was likely to hear me. "You, Dark Shadows; leave the lady alone!"

No one moved except the weeping woman, who gasped as if stung by a sudden, vicious ache. The shadowy mantle that encompassed her like an ouroborous of darkness twisted and writhed like a living thing.

"Yeah, I'm talking to you!" I shouted. "We don't like your kind around here! This is a place for people to think good thoughts, hopeful thoughts. You go whisper your poison to the people who go where they want to hear your shit! Capeesh?"

It hissed and began to unwrap its anaconda embrace of the weeping woman.

"That's right! This is a hospital, Bog Breath! People come here for healing! Go haunt a crack house, you toxic piece of sh—"

The misty fog crackled off of the woman and snapped across the chapel like black lightning, knocking me through the blond wood doors and back out into the corridor. Even though I had passed through the wood like an empty illusion, the sensation was like being knocked through a very solid wall by a pneumatic pile driver. I felt like one very solid ectoplasmic bruise.

And more: part of me felt singed, scorched where the darkness had struck me.

I got to my feet with the sobering thought that there might be deaths beyond death. And that, as vulnerable and fragile as the flesh might appear, it may be what insulates us from the greater shocks and dangers beyond our temporary, cocooned state of existence.

I stumbled to the chapel entrance and cautiously poked my head through the wall next to the doors.

Play Misty For Me was back and swarming about the woman in the pew. So much for being a good spookmaritan. I was a newbie in a very ancient realm and hardly qualified to mind my own business, let alone anyone else's. I started to pull my head back out but hesitated as I heard a soft sigh.

The woman had stopped crying.

Granted, she still looked well down the road to Despairsville but, even from the back of the room, she seemed a little less tormented. And the bands and strands of negative energy that roiled and coiled about her gave the impression of struggling to find a foothold.

Maybe that's all it took under some circumstances: a chance to catch your breath. Or a foot momentarily struck from the stirrup, the saddle loosened from your back . . .

Perhaps some hospital chapels would be better served by moving the candles off the altar and replacing them with cable television showing Comedy Central or Cartoon Network. God may loose the fateful lightning with His terrible, swift sword but some kids in the oncology wards might be better off watching Gallagher loose the fateful melon with his terrible, silly sledgehammer.

I looked over at the two luminous creatures who seemed distracted from their little tête-à-tête with a pair of humans holding hands. Maybe they were consulting God or, perhaps, just each other but I figured it was way past time for them to join the party. "You guys work strictly on assignment or are you allowed to freelance?"

They looked at me like I was a little mad.

I was more than a little mad; I was edging into seriously pissed-off territory. Maybe I could feel proud that, in distracting the Thing, I might have helped this situation. Maybe I could withdraw, now, and go on my way, having learned to keep my mouth shut until I knew more about the stuff I was tempted to mess with.

Maybe I could have.

But I didn't.

"Hey, Creepshow," I called to the miasma of malevolence that was trying to renest about the mourning woman, "why don't you pick on someone of your own dimensional corporality?"

It bunched up like a gathering thunderhead and suddenly arced across the chapel to go splat against the wall. Leastways, that was what it sounded like on the other side as I jerked my head out just in time. Lucky for me the wall wasn't as permeable for the Shadow-thing as it was for me.

Or was it?

Wisps of dark smoke began to bleed through the outer wall and into the corridor. The Thing had readjusted its focus. Now it was time for me to readjust mine: I started off down the hall at a lope.

"Thanks for the help, fellas," I muttered at the chapel doors as I passed by, "or ladies." Or whatever the hell they were supposed to be. If they actually were angels, then to hell with them. There was a hissing, sizzling sound in the corridor behind me.

Time to get the hell out of here.

* * *

I worked my way up two floors via the stairways. I didn't trust the elevators. I wasn't fond of them when I was technically living and now that I was technically dead I could finally understand why.

Trust me, you don't want to know: you'll find out in your own good time.

By now I was running across more people wandering the corridors. Well, what used to be people, anyway. Most were in transit and all but a few were recent sojourners. A couple, however, looked like they had been wandering about the hospital for a very long time and were more than a little spooky.

But nothing as unsettling as the Darkness that strode along the passages behind me. It was showing no sign of giving up the pursuit though the well-lit hallways seemed to slow it down a bit.

I wasn't exactly running the decathlon, either. Fluorescents aren't in the same league as solar radiation but the flickering phosphors were exerting a leadening effect on my arms and legs all the same.

I snuck a look over my transparent shoulder. The Darkness was vaguely man-shaped now, loping along on two shadowy legs, swinging a pair of shadowy arms with a rhythmic determination that was somehow more frightening than the inhuman spin of the gimbaled Threshers. Was it the vague anthropomorphism that made this thing more threatening? Or the really strong impression that, with the Threshers, it wasn't personal . . .

. . . while this Thing was anxious to hurt me.

And I was running out of hospital.

Even if I could stay ahead of Mr. Route 666, my body was presumably somewhere up ahead and, sooner or later—around the next corner or maybe three more floors up—I was going to arrive. And then what?

Maybe I could crawl inside and use my flesh like a bomb shelter. Hunker down and wait for Tall, Dark, and Nasty to go away.

If he'd go away.

Maybe he'd follow me in—like poor Corporal Barrett's barracks mates.

And then it would be a battle over who got to sit in the driver's seat.

Uh-uh.

I was going to have to lose this joker or have it out with him right now.

I stopped.

Turned.

Raised my fists.

"Okay, Donnie Darko; that's it! No more Follow-the-Leader. Let's play a new game. It's called—"

The Thing was so anxious to play that it didn't wait to learn about the new game or any of the rules. It rushed toward me. When it smacked into where I was, I was already gone.

I had gotten pretty good at this "now it's solid/now it's not" approach to walls and floors. I essentially dropped down a floor, hoping that Satan's Little Helper would miss the direction of my sudden departure. It should have worked. I found myself down in an OR with full-blown surgery going on all around me.

"Suction," said the surgeon.

"BP is going up," a nurse announced.

"What are you doing in there?" a balding little man demanded. "Get out of my wife's chest."

I looked down. I was standing in the middle of the operating table and the patient. I looked up. The little, bug-eyed, balding guy was somewhat indistinct. So was one of the surgeons.

"See that?" said Dr. Invisible, standing at the surgeon's right shoulder. "Just to the right of the aorta. You'll need a little more light."

"A little more light here," demanded the surgeon.

"And ease the tissue back a little for a better look," murmured the ghost doc in the surgeon's ear.

"Get out of there!" the little spook insisted. "Have you no respect!"

"Sorry," I said, trying to step out of the table and patient without walking through an actual human being. The surgical team had me pretty effectively hemmed in. "I'll be out as soooooooon—"

I was out, up, and away.

My through-the-floor dive had just turned into a delayed bungee jump: the silvery cord jerked me back up through the floor I had just departed. The Darkness was still there, casting about, trying to figure out where I had gone to. We got a quick gander at each other as I was jerked on upward through the ceiling and into the next floor up.

And the floor above that.

And then two more.

I came to a stop halfway through the sixth and seventh floors. It took a little squirming—mental and otherwise—to get the rest of the way up and back on my feet. I was in the middle of another corridor. Now which way do I go?

How about toward the sound of familiar voices?

"Why would I lie to you now, Uncle?"

"That is a very good question, my little spook," I heard Kurt answer. "Unfortunately, you did lie to me. You told me you didn't know anything about the Doman's whereabouts last night nor my brother's death. Then I find out that you lied about both!"

"And I've told you, Uncle, that the Doman swore me to secrecy. I had no idea he was going to kill Uncle Malik."

"The Asian demon claims that the plan and its execution were your doing. That Cséjthe didn't even know that I had a brother."

"Of course she would say that; she works for him! She is his creature! She would say anything to protect him!"

"And what would you say to protect yourself, eh? You've already lied once to cover your tracks. Have there been other occasions? And are you still lying to me now?"

"This is ridiculous! I have ever done your bidding."

"Except bring me the ashes of the traitor Cairn."

"No. And I haven't quite mastered the knack of walking on water, either. Look, I thought the Doman had business with Uncle Malik. When he suddenly turned around and assassinated him, it caught us all by surprise. If I hadn't sworn a blood-oath right then and there, I would have been next!"

"You are a Tween, Darcy. Blood-oaths have no power over you."

"But he doesn't know that."

"I doubt he even knows what a blood-oath is. The point is you covered for him against your own flesh and blood. And don't tell me that you feared for your life: he was already in a coma when you claimed you had been asleep in your room."

"Since there was nothing I could do to bring Uncle Malik back, I thought it best to bide my time until I could discern the Doman's true intentions."

"Then you should understand what I must do now. Give me your gun."

"What? Why?"

"Why? You ask me why when my Doman lies near death in a room down the hall with a bullet in his chest? Of the two people that I know were present near the time and place of the shooting, one of them is 'his creature' who 'would say anything to protect him' and the other is you. So, I'm sure you understand why I must ask for your weapon until more is known about this incident."

"And if I hand my weapon over to you, Uncle, who will protect our Doman from his real enemies while you hallucinate me as an imaginary one?"

"Sundown is minutes away. There will be an abundance of security around his room and about this floor within the hour."

"And until then?"

"He is in a more secure location than the ICU and in the hands of his own people."

"Perhaps, Uncle, your motives are the ones that are impure in all of this."

"We've already had this discussion, Great-grandniece. As divisive as Cséjthe's ascension is proving to be, his assassination could be disastrous, triggering a bloody war for clan power and political advantage that might destroy us all. Particularly if the other demesnes perceive us as vulnerable at this time. I have no ambitions to rule over the shattered remains of a once great empire."

The cord gave a strong tug and I was suddenly propelled down the hallway, my seneschal and my murderer flashing past like highway markers on the autobahn. Suki and Deirdre were at the far end of the corridor having their own huddled conference.

"—lost contact. All they can get now is that the lines are down or the phones inside the house may be out of service."

"What?" the redhead asked. "As in ripped out of the walls and marinated in body parts?"

"Pagelovitch is putting together a team to go down there and check it out but there's a dearth of willing volunteers. The word's gotten out that uninvited guests have a history of not returning from Domo Cséjthe's hospitality. If Burton and Mooncloud have met something nasty—well, then, not even the Doman's friends are safe, are they?"

Deirdre looked like she was trying to decide whether to laugh or cry. "Safe? It's funny now that I think about it. I suppose I've never been less safe than these past few months and yet, never felt more so." She turned and looked at the door that they were standing beside. "Even now I keep thinking that he's going to wake up and figure out a way to turn this all around. Not because he's especially clever or smarter than everyone else. Just because he has the damnedest . . . luck . . . of anyone . . . I know . . ."

And then she made her decision: she started to cry.

"He may pull through this, yet," Suki said, folding her cell phone back into her purse and reaching out to hug Deirdre. "Vampire hearts don't function in any way like a living human's would. And the fact that the EKG says he's brain dead doesn't necessarily mean anything either."

"Why? Because he's neither living nor undead? Just because he can get away with breaking some of the rules doesn't mean that the laws of physics can't catch up with him. He's been living on borrowed time and now time has run out! If he was a vampire, that bullet in his heart would kill him just as surely as a wooden stake would. If he was alive, his heart would tear itself apart around the bullet's fragments. What did the surgeon say? That it appeared as though the cardiac muscle was paralyzed between heartbeats."

"The key word is 'appeared'," Suki reminded.

"Oh, yeah. Because if the blood wasn't circulating at all then he would be dead instead of in a permanent vegetative state! That's not good! But as bad as that is, if God ever takes His finger off the pause button on the VCR, he'll tip one way or the other and end up as a pile of rotted meat or in a permanent dust-itative state!"

Okay, this wasn't helping. Time to go and form my own opinion. I squeezed between them and pushed on through the door into the room on the other side.

There were curtains around the bed. After walls of steel and stone, I slipped through these without even blinking.

Inside the circle of linen, the treatment station area was dark except for the phosphor ribbons on the readout monitors and a small, soft spotlight that framed the patient's upper torso. All else was in shadow.

The body in the bed looked dead.

The ventilator pushed air in and out of his (my?) lungs with a mechanical single-mindedness. The monitor eeped and showed a sine wave that bore no resemblance to any kind of a heartbeat I'd ever seen on ten seasons of ER. Other than that there were no signs of life connected to the body in the bed.

The arms and the parts of the face that weren't obscured by the ventilator were as white as the sheets of the bed. The skin, waxy and almost translucent.

I was as pale as a ghost.

Okay, there's a potentially redundant analogy . . .

So, what now?

Duh! Get back in my body, of course!

I crawled up onto the bed and rolled over onto my carapace of flesh. Then, relaxing my tenuous cohesion a little, I willed myself to sink down into my body like a spa patron sinking into a luxurious mud bath.

Unlike a luxurious mud bath, however, the clay was cold. And brittle.

I submerged into darkness. Into a grave of sorts.

Unlike my previous melds there were no shared thoughts, no internal tastes or touches or smells or memories. Did the experience recede because the mind was my own? Or because the mind was shut down?

Or brain dead?

I tried to move an arm. I felt nothing.

I twitched my leg. Nothing moved.

My eyes were glued shut.

My body encased in lead.

Dimly I heard the mechanical rasp of the respirator from afar but I could draw no breath. I was suffocating in the dark!

I sat up out of myself with a cry of horror. Poe was an overrated hack: getting sealed up inside a wall was nothing in comparison with being entombed in your own dead flesh! I slid out of my body and off of the bed. I had to catch myself on rubbery ghost legs before I sank through the floor.

All of that effort to return to my body, risking the Threshers and losing The Kid . . .

"What's the point?"

"That," said a strangely familiar voice, "is the central question of existence. And the answer—no matter how good or how true—never seems to satisfy for long."

I turned and peered into the darkness on the other side of the bed.

A figure began to emerge from the gloom. Someone hunched over in a chair. Doctor? Nurse? The white clothing was loose and draped like a robe instead of a hospital uniform. Patient? The massive head came up slowly revealing a stonelike visage.

A large and scary patient?

His face was human . . . and it wasn't. You noticed this after another moment. It came close but it was too proud. And too fierce. And the planes and angles came together as the result of a geometry that wasn't entirely of this world. The nose was prominent, beak-like. The brow like a mountain cliff. The eyes like lava flares in deep caverns.

And, of course, the great white pinioned wings that arched up from behind his shoulders were a dead giveaway.

"Michael!"

The owner of the otherworldly sword that hung above my fireplace inclined his leonine head. "Cséjthe. I see you have returned from your wanderings."

"Yeah, and don't think it's been easy!" I said, getting over my abashment very quickly. "Next time you get a chance to chat with the Big Guy? Tell Him that a few little kiosks with 'You Are Here' maps would be muy helpful." I was really happy to see him though you wouldn't know it from the tone of my voice.

If he was happy to see me, you wouldn't know it from his tone, either. "Perhaps it would be best if you told him in person."

"Is that why you're here? Are you pulling repo duty now? Gonna Swing Low, Sweet Chariot me?"

"Actually, I am here to place my finger on the scales." And his arm moved into the light. The sleeve of his robe was pushed back to above the elbow and, as I watched, his alabaster flesh took on a solidity that made even the furniture seem indistinct. His right hand came into view holding a syringe. "There is not much time and the vessel must be brought back into balance."

"Not much time?"

"The helicopter is landing on the roof even now. I must depart within minutes." The needle slid into the perfect flesh inside his left elbow.

"Oh, no you don't! I've got about two days' worth of questions. You can't just pop in and then rush right off again. Unless you're taking me with you. Are you taking me with you?"

He shook his head slowly. "You cannot go where I go."

"Well, then let's start with where I'm supposed to go."

That massive brow rose a little at one corner. "Would it do any good to try to tell you?"

He had a point. Once, long ago, in Sunday school the teacher had asked me if I knew where bad little boys and girls went. "Sure," I had told her. "Behind Fogherty's barn." And it seemed like people had been unsuccessfully telling me where to go ever since.

Or maybe not so unsuccessfully given my current state of affairs.

I watched the barrel of the syringe fill with a milky substance and wondered if this was the final hallucinatory result of the brain decaying from oxygen starvation: an angel doing drugs at my bedside while I played Twenty Questions on the theme of Life, the Universe, and Everything.

"It's just that I'd like to know if I'm going to Heaven or Hell or just supposed to pick out some real estate to haunt . . ."

"You want to know about Judgment Day," the archangel intoned.

"Judgment Day?"

"'And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened,'" he quoted. "'And another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works.'"

"Actually," I said, "I've never bought into that whole Book of Revelations courtroom-drama-at-the-end-of-time story."

"Oh?" His eyebrows rose and he fixed me with that piercing look that bore more than a passing resemblance to a bird of prey.

"Well, at least in terms of an end-of-the-world trial and a big book filled with your life's deeds and such."

"You don't believe there's a big book?"

"Not a literal book. With covers and paper pages and such."

"It would be comforting to think there are no files, no records of your past misdeeds . . ."

I shook my head. "Oh, I know there's a record—there's a file on everything I've ever done, not done, felt, thought, imagined . . ." I tapped my chest. If you can call nonexistent fingers passing through nonexistent pectorals "tapping."

"Right here. I'm my own book, my own filing cabinet: my own record of accomplishments and failures, dreams and nightmares, graces and sins. It's all written down, line for line, inside of me. You want to know who and what a man is, you don't look it up in some book on a shelf. You go inside him and see what graffiti is spray-painted on the innermost walls of his heart."

"So," Michael pursed his lips, "when the Day of Judgment comes, you are your own record of what you are, for good or for ill."

I nodded. "Except I don't believe in that, either."

"In what? A Day of Judgment?"

"Nope. Not a final, let's get out the calculator and add up the plus and minus columns to close out the books kind of event. I figure every day is judgment day: hour by hour, minute by minute, you are what you are and who you are based upon the latest, up-to-the-second totality of your choices and experiences. The balance changes constantly and your fitness for this life or the next is a moment-by-moment affair of existence. Life doesn't decide who and what you were after the fact, only dusty historians."

The angel pulled the syringe from his arm and stood. "You have an interesting perspective on metaphysical imagery. I would be interested in how you interpret the afterlife when your time comes." He took a step and leaned over my carcass in the bed.

"What do you mean 'the afterlife when my time comes'? I've been doing the Kiefer Sutherland with the spooks and spirits for the past twenty-four. Doesn't that count even if I'm just visiting? Uh, I am just visiting, aren't I?"

Michael shook his head and positioned the syringe over my chest. "This isn't the afterlife, Cséjthe. You haven't sojourned out among the vast interdimensional interstices of creation."

"So what have I been doing all of this time?" I eyed the needle positioned over my heart. "And just what do you think you're doing there?" Leave it to Mama Cséjthe's baby boy to second-guess an angel when there's no one else to turn to.

Before I could get an answer to either question there was a sizzling sound and the darkness that had dogged me from the chapel downstairs came boiling through the wall like a wronged lover on the Jerry Springer show. Malevolent energy washed in with it like a black tide and I felt a vicious undertow grasp at my supposedly nonexistent lower extremities. I staggered.

Michael did not even look up.

"You have no business here," he murmured. "Go back to the Darkness and hide in the Greater Shadow until the Light finds you at the appointed time."

And, just like that, it was gone. No struggle. No contest of wills or powers. One moment the shadow was present, the next it was gone. No muss, no fuss.

"Penn Station," the angel said.

"Uh, what?"

"You wanted to know what you've been doing since you were dispossessed of your vessel, your body. Try Penn Station."

"Penn Station?"

He nodded. "Penn Station isn't the world or a country or even a city. It's a place, an area—one of many within one city of many—where people come and go as they make the transition from one place to another."

"It's a train station," I said.

"That is one way to look at it. Albeit a rather narrow one. And all that you have really done is to wander around Penn Station for a few hours. While thousands of souls are catching trains and hopping taxis to towers of glass or fields of green out beyond the city's stone and metal sprawl, you have wandered about the cold stone and brick lobby and mezzanine. Instead of traveling with the other travelers, you have squatted with the few dispossessed."

"The who?"

"You can find them in any train or subway station: the mad and the homeless who sleep in the maintenance tunnels and come up briefly to panhandle for change. Do not look into their empty eyes nor heed their senseless babble. They are the fading echoes of life squandered and ill-used. They are not guides to the truth that lies behind the curtains of this world; they are the lost and the Deceiver's sleight-of-hand to turn others from their paths."

"And what was the dark cloud? Give me a Penn Station analogy for that!"

"Do you think terrorists are confined to the world and politics of the living? Hatred of life and light go hand in hand. That is why I am here." He plunged the needle into the chest of the body on the bed.

"To do what? Stick it to me? Why not? Everyone else has."

The angel depressed the plunger, presumably sending the milky substance into my heart. "Poor traveler. So busy counting the quantity of his enemies that he does not measure the quality of his allies."

"That include you, Mikey? Or are you here on someone else's orders?"

"Does it matter?"

"We didn't exactly see eye to eye the last time our paths crossed. Just curious to know where you stand now. And why we seem to be blood brothers all of a sudden."

"It is not yet your time. The blood of the Eloihim may buy you the time you need to complete your mission."

"Mission? What mission? And you didn't answer my first question."

"Is it not enough to know that I and my kindred possess free will? And that the essence which now seeks to repair the contamination of Marinette Bois-Chèche's demon-tainted blood flowed in my veins before it entered yours?"

"Yeah, yeah, I hear your words, Mikey, but I'm still not sure this is anything more than 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend' kind of deal. Not that I'm not your grateful dead, you understand, but I would like a better handle on the sitch before it unravels any further."

"I am not a fortune-teller, Cséjthe."

"Man, you're not even a guy by the side of the road who'll give directions to the nearest Gas'N'Go. All I know is that everyone seems to want my blood and yet I'm the guy who seems to be getting everyone else's. I'm supposed to be undead but that hasn't worked out. Then I'm supposed to be dead—can't get closure here, either. If this is God's plan then He must be a cosmic-sized Forrest Gump. On the other hand, what if this action isn't officially on the game board?"

"You don't believe in books and courtrooms. Why would you believe in game boards?"

"Irony? Sarcasm? Good God! Who are you and what have you done with Mikey?"

"Very funny, Cséjthe. But I must leave you, now."

"What am I, winged one? The spook who comes in from the cold?"

His brow twitched. That was unnerving: it put one in mind of a landslide waiting for one good temblor. "Perhaps you are not as dense as you pretend."

"Tell me more."

"Tell you what? That there are forces for good and for ill in the world? In the worlds within worlds and the worlds that encompass this and those beyond? That the laws that bind and shape and define reality and creation at every level hold us locked in eternal conflict? A never-ending battle?"

"For truth, justice, and the American way?"

He closed his eyes. "I do not know why I even try."

"And that's just my point: why do you try? With me? Why are you here? With me? Why are you sticking your—um, blood—in me? I'm nothing! I'm not alive anymore! I'm not dead, yet! I'm no damn good at following the rules!"

"That is precisely what you are good at," the angel interrupted with a smile. The curving of those so solemn lips was like a sunrise in the gloom.

"Following the rules?"

"Breaking the rules." He laid the syringe on the tray of instruments next to the bed and pushed the wheeled table away. "Last year, while you were being pursued by mortal enemies, you had a conversation with the red-haired woman who stands outside in the hallway now. You told her that there was a difference between laws and rules. That true laws could not be broken . . ."

"Only superceded by higher laws," I murmured.

He nodded. "Most people—here and even where I come from—do not understand the difference any more. We are all bound by the laws of our various kingdoms. That is the reality of creation at every level. But, in the meridian of time, we have become equally bound by the rules we have come to believe in as legitimate as though they were laws themselves."

I stared at him. "And I'm special because I'm good at breaking the rules."

He nodded. "Dead and yet not dead. Human and yet something more—and less. Rule-breaker. Warlock."

"Warlock?"

"By the original definition, which meant 'oath-breaker.' The breaking of oaths was once tantamount to the breaking of laws—sacred laws."

I shrugged. "And this is important to you?"

"Perhaps much ere the struggle between light and shadow is played out to finality."

"And you're here, doing the milk-it-does-a-body-good spot because I have a role to play in the game. Is that it?"

"Everyone has a role."

"Everyone doesn't have angels popping into their hospital rooms to give them a bolus of angel juice in the heart."

"There are a relatively low number of 'players' who are the head of the second-largest vampire enclave in the world while harboring elements of vampire, werewolf, Loa, and demon blood in their body without yet being mastered by any."

"And now I have something else in the mix."

"As I said, I've come to place my finger on the scales."

"Sounds like cheating."

"To bring you back into balance?"

"To tip me in any direction."

"What if you've already been tipped?"

I sighed and tried to rub my aching eyes. It might have helped if they had really been there. "I'm not saying I don't need help here. And don't think I'm not appreciative—though it would help to know what I'm supposed to do so I could appreciate my situation a little better. But if the other guys start tipping me one way and you and your posse start tipping me back the other—well, pretty soon I'm nothing more than one of those round-bottomed inflatable punching bags, getting knocked one way and then the other, swinging and swaying back and forth until entropy brings blessed relief. What's the point of having free will and personal agency if I'm just a collectable action figure for the shelf of the Almighty or a paperweight on the desk of the Devil? What's our purpose then? Heroic, moral poses while they wave us at each other and make appropriate combat noises?"

"Perhaps coming here was a mistake," he said.

"Aha!"

"Aha?"

"Now we come to the heart of it! Are you here in an official capacity or are you kibitzing?"

"I can stay no longer. Others are coming." His wings fanned out behind him and spread as if he would take flight by crashing through the drop-panel ceiling.

"Well, if you won't read my tea leaves, tell me what I can do for The Kid!"

He looked at me strangely. "The one you call J.D has twice survived his destiny. Let him go. You have enough worries."

"Let him go where? Into the light? I wouldn't hold him back if that was the case. But he's got some free will, too. And I'm in need of a little backup until this whole thing gets settled out."

"Trust your son," Michael said, starting to glow with an unearthly radiance. "He's saved you twice so far."

"My what? I don't have a son, I have a daughter." An unexpected surge of grief and I was suddenly close to tears. "Had a daughter."

"Had, have, will have . . . you'll find that tense doesn't matter so much when you step outside of time." The light increased to a painful intensity. "The fact that your daughter died doesn't make her any less your daughter even now. The fact that your son has not been born yet doesn't make him any less your son even now. Who do you think pulled you through the wall of the gymnasium when the creatures you call Threshers were right behind you?"

"Who?"

"I do not know his true name. Nor his birth name. You have taken to calling him Will."

And, like a flash of lightning, he flickered with a bright and terrible light.

And disappeared.

 

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Framed