Rob Thurman: Slashback

Not happening.

This was fucking not happening.

I was about to fire again, then take on Jack with my hands and teeth when I saw them.

Through those squares of color, I saw, blurry and lit only by streetlights, but it was enough. This time when I shouted, “Niko, get the fuck down!” he listened.

The stained glass window exploded behind him. As glass flew through the air, Ishiah, Samyel, and four other peris from the Ninth Circle hung in the air, white and gray and copper wings beating the air into a storm that rivaled the one that was Jack.

“You are sick, brother,” Ishiah said as they circled him. “Pyriel, you are Fallen and this cannot go on.”

Jack’s eyes faded to the barest glimmer for a moment. “Brothers.” He sounded confused. “No, no, I am not with you any longer. I am my own creation. I am judgment and redemption. I am not of you but I am sanctioned or I would’ve been punished long ago.”

“This,” Ishiah said with a grim twist to his mouth. Sadness. Resignation. It was time to put the rabid wolf down. “This is your punishment and it is long overdue.” He arrowed in, a hawk stopping on a rabbit. Samyel and the others followed. They covered Jack and buried hands in the blue and white flaring mist around him. Immediately a lightning storm exploded on the balcony, at least fifty bolts. I had gone down as quickly as Nik when the window had burst and I was grateful for that now. Ishiah and the others were thrown back, glowing and burning . But as quickly as they’d been tossed aside, they were back and every time the lightning threw them away they returned. Jack tired and the lightning became jagged and intermittent. The peris were on him then and stayed on. They began to peel back pieces of. . something-ragged chunks of darkness that bled in the sizzle of faint bolts of electricity. They were removing the storm spirit from Jack-Pyriel-tearing it to pieces to free what it had latched on to hundreds of years ago.

They were peris, retired angels with limited powers, but it was enough to kill a parasitic storm spirit and without that spirit, Pyriel was frozen. He might not want to fight his brothers. He might be all but powerless himself now that the spirit that had fed on him and channeled his life force all those years was gone.

I didn’t give a rat’s ass either way.

The peris, each trailing a limp drapery of dead or dying storm spirit with them, soared higher. They’d done their part, nothing I’d expected, nothing I’d hoped, but now it was my turn. Jack, when the darkness had flowed away like the outgoing tide, was revealed to be a glass statue, one that had been shattered and glued back together by a senile, blind man. Angles, knife-sharp edges, jagged shards that cut not only skin but the air itself solidified. You could almost picture that there had once been wings that could lift him into flight, but now were melted together into a crippled caricature-layered with the same fractured glass that made up the rest of him.

Yet. . I could see what he once had been before he changed. Something awe-inspiring. Something beautiful.

Crystal and cut glass, each feather on his wings a knife blade of diamond made to slash and fly. He would’ve been something. Hell, a glory. Now he was the ice over a winter lake and if I looked hard enough I thought I might see the eyes and mouths of his victims wide open with terror as they drowned trapped beneath the frozen barrier.

The parasite was gone, but what had been beneath it, the angel, his eyes, the same blue-white, were as insane as they’d ever been while he’d been Jack. Angels went mad too. It wasn’t as much a surprise as I’d thought. All that power, all that judgment-there’d be no Hell if angels hadn’t gone mad or bad in the first place, would there?

Who better than me-something darker and more deadly than any demon-to kill an angel?

He’d thought himself judge, jury, and executioner. Now it was my turn to play that part. I aimed the Mossberg at him. It didn’t matter if you were from Above or Below or somewhere in the middle; you touched my brother and you died.

“You’re wicked, Jack,” I said without emotion. “You’re wicked and wrong and I damn sure am not here to save you.”

I shot him in the head and then the chest, shattering him to hundreds of pieces falling as tears from Heaven. Niko was at my side as Pyriel-no, Jack, he’d always be Jack to me-continued to rain down on the floor with the soft ringing of bells. You know how the movie goes: when you hear a bell ring, an angel gets his wings. Or gets a slug in the head. Choose whichever version you like.

“My turn,” Niko said firmly, the rope he’d escaped easily enough still in tatters around his wrists. Jack had left him his weapon as he’d left me mine. Jack had made sure he could escape to stand and fight. Jack who’d wanted a challenge from the one who’d killed his worshipper twelve years ago. Jack-who’d gotten exactly all that. I wished he’d had longer to enjoy it. I wished we all had. Sick or not, Jack had been far beyond the grace of a mercy killing.

Wordlessly I passed over the shotgun and Nik used the barrel to beat those pieces of Jack, glittering bright as a crop-killing frost, to a fine, crystalline sand. The metal flew up and thundered down more times than I cared to count. With every blow the sound of rotten ice breaking beneath careless feet echoed. Gone, but it didn’t matter. You could hear the death in him the same as before I cut him down. Finally a wind blew in through the destroyed window and Jack-his presence and fatal song-simply blew away.

Gone, just like that. As if he’d never existed at all. I’d have killed all the angels in Heaven to have made that true.

“Feel better?” I asked, moving to stand beside Nik as he dropped the shotgun to the floor.

He wiped at the trickle of blood running down his jaw and bumped my shoulder. “You know, little brother, I think that I do.”

We were at home. . surprising me as I hadn’t thought we’d live to come back. The start of the plan, if not the rest of it, had worked out-color me all kinds of fucking surprised. I’d started at the top of the list of churches, Ishiah and Robin at the bottom and we’d met, more or less in the middle. Fortunately, Ishiah had a plan of his own he hadn’t told me about, one he hadn’t had much faith in-that the peris from the bar could kill and remove the storm spirit from Jack. Peris were forbidden from killing paien in New York, parasites included. He doubted he could get all of the crew from the Ninth Circle to risk expulsion from the city or that they’d be able to accomplish it if they did agree. That spirit had been riding Jack a long, long time. Fortunately, Ishiah had been wrong on both counts. For an ex-angel he had less belief than I’d have thought.

In the end, it was what Robin had suggested. Without each other, the spirit and Pyriel weren’t even the halves of a whole. Easy prey.

Promise was with Niko in his bedroom, taking care of the cuts on his face and his wrists. As the door was closed, she could be taking care of other things, but I doubted it. . this time. My hands looked like they’d been through a meat grinder, my ribs told me breathing wasn’t on the menu for supper today, and my face was peppered with tiny fragments of metal chain. All of which Goodfellow was working on, but it wouldn’t be long before Nik was out to take over.

“It’s difficult to believe Jack would go to those lengths to relive Junior’s favorite scenario. He was the master after all. Junior was only the apprentice. . or the worshipper. I’m not certain what label to put on that wretched bastard,” Robin said. “Putting you in the basement instead of Niko. Niko in the closest thing to an attic instead of you.” Nik had mentioned it was the same setup from twelve years ago when we left the church, the things I’d already known but as always hadn’t talked about, what Junior had done to us both, which was a good thing. Not talking about it all those years, trying to protect each other, that had been a mistake.