The Devil You Know (23 page)

“There’s still one thing I’d like to know,” I said when the Berger house came into view a half mile off. “God does have a Son. Why doesn’t
He
ascend the Throne?” I had been giving this a lot of thought as we ambled along. Well, Malach ambled. I sort of limped like a lame horse. Malach didn’t talk much, so I had had to amuse myself by going over all this in my head.

“The God on the Throne
was
the Son,” Malach told me simply.

“So the God line works much the same way as the Lucifer line?”

Malach nodded once. “His Son did not come to earth to save the humans. He came here to understand them so He would be a better God when it came His turn to take the Throne.”

“How’s that working out for you guys?”

Malach glared at me.

I popped more candies into my mouth and tasted the rainbow. “And the whole point of the crucifixion, then?”

“There was no point to the crucifixion, except that people can be cruel and insipid.”

“Wow, and they say I’m cynical.”

Malach looked annoyed, not that that was anything new. “God does not say he will save the humans. He says the humans will save themselves.”

“So what’s changed then?”

“His Son has lost faith in mankind,” Malach said. He bowed his head as if this greatly saddened him, though his expression didn’t change at all. Angels: they wrote the book on stalwart. “But then, He
is
a nephilim. He is like you in that He is part human, and flawed. This was inevitable. It is obvious we cannot have a human on the Throne.”

We moved along. Malach brushed aside low-hanging trees. Most of them cleared my head. “I’m quite sure you and your father will enjoy leading the humans astray,” Malach said.

As far as I knew, this was the longest conversation I’d ever had with God’s hitman. “I hate to break this to you, big guy, but I’m not too interested in leading anybody anywhere,” I told him.

“You will be in time.”

I almost threw my bag of Skittles at him. “I love how everyone has me figured out, like I’m this big, bad time-bomb of evil waiting to go off. I’m half-human, Malach. That means I have free will, if not a free destiny.”

“Funny, I had this conversation with your father.”

I looked at him. “You knew my father?”

“We were friends. At least until he Ascended.”

I felt a chill. “What was he like?”

Malach looked at me. “He was like you.” He moved ahead of me, taking the lead.

I busied myself with pulling on a pair of leather gloves. I hated them, but I’d be damned if I was going to go pawing through the Berger house and leave fingerprints behind. I wanted to ask Malach more questions about my father, but we were coming upon the house.

Malach pulled his big gun. I pulled my big gun. Together we crossed the backyard and made our way to the back door of the house. The French doors were ajar and the house seemed to be empty, but we still took precautions. I pushed the doors open and Malach cased the place. I was pretty impressed with his technique.

Nothing untoward jumped out at us.

We started moving through the house, checking rooms as we went along, careful to scan behind doors, listening for any sounds. But the house really did seem to be empty.

We found Thom Berger in the kitchen. He was laid out on the kitchen nook table thingy with a number of high-end gourmet knives driven into his wrists to hold him down. A long carving knife projected from his shoulder, just above his heart. He was breathing through bubbles of blood, his chest barely rising and falling.

Malach looked on him with dull interest. I guess when you’re an angel and have seen thousands of battles, nothing much impresses you.

“Well, I think Billie was upset,” I announced. “You want to stay with him while I check the rest of the house?”

He nodded.

I methodically went through the rest of the rooms on the ground floor, then made my way upstairs. I was careful with each room I came upon, but I was pretty certain that Billie had long since departed—she now had a little piece of me inside of her. I’d know if she was around. I checked the bookshelves in the Bergers’ bedroom, and sure enough, the Book of Shadows I’d seen there a few days ago had disappeared. I wasn’t overly surprised by that.

A harsh thump from downstairs got my attention. Thom Berger made a strangled barking noise. I carefully wended my way back downstairs, my gun ready. Malach had removed the knives and had dragged Thom Berger off the blood-soaked breakfast nook table. He now lay on the blood-soaked Italian marble floor, Malach’s gigantic hands encasing his narrow, bald head, his thumbs over his eyes. He was methodically slamming Thom’s against the floor, and each time it crashed down, his body shook and he made those groaning, barking noises. I stopped to watch. “I thought you were going to call an ambulance.”

“He knows where the Arcana is.”

“That whole Dominion thing, huh?”

Bang
, Thom Berger’s head came down hard like a gavel, and I think the tile under his head cracked a little. Thom Berger gurgled.

Bang, bang. Bang!

I thought about intervening, but Malach said, “He is a sinful man. He has had carnal relations with his daughter. He allowed his wife to die at his daughter’s hands. He encouraged it.
Most certainly I tell you, everyone who commits sin is the bondservant of sin
.”

I hunkered down next to Malach. I still thought about intervening. “We should let a court of law sentence him, Malach,” I said. “He
is
human. This isn’t your jurisdiction.”

Malach turned his head and glared at me. “Do not interfere, Nick. The man will tell me where the Arcana is.”

“The man can’t talk, Malach.”

Bang!
“He does not need to talk. He needs only to
think
.” Malach slammed Thom Berger’s head down one last time and Thom gasped and stared up at him with dark, pain-filled eyes. Malach took my hand and placed it over Thom’s eyes. He placed his hand over mine. The moment he did that I was struck with a collage of raw, red-rimmed images set in fast forward. I saw the young Billie Berger reading from the old grimoire I’d seen upstairs . . . Thom Berger having sex with his young daughter . . . Thom and Carrie Berger arguing, Carrie threatening to leave him forever and take Billie with her . . . Billie running away, not her choice but her father’s who feared his wife would reveal their secret . . . Billie Berger on the streets of Philadelphia . . . Carrie Berger in ICU . . . Thom marrying his new “wife” Rebecca . . . Billie capturing the angels, consuming their radiant flesh . . . I jerked then and fell back onto the floor on my ass, my head swimming in a sickening mental miasma. It had been enough. Too much.

I’d seen. I’d learned. And I’d discovered how wrong I’d been about Billie.

She hadn’t returned to Blackwater because she was hopelessly infatuated with her abusive father. She’d returned home because Thom Berger was the last of the Berger line and Billie needed to breed. She’d needed a child of witchblood, a child of the Berger bloodline. A Wodehouse would have been better, but they were gone except for me, and I couldn’t breed. The witch-child was the only way she would ever Ascend . . . .

And that child . . .

Thom began to scream. He screamed like a machine. He finally knew how he had been used. And he knew the fate of his child. In his last moments he had tried to stop Billie. He had tried to be a good father, to do the right thing…

As I watched, blood began seeping from his eyes and mouth and nostrils. It ran in rivulets over his face, down his neck, and into the cracks of the Italian marble floor. There was a brief flash of white light, and both Malach and I lunged back in deference to the being standing there in the middle of the Berger kitchen floor. My dad had eschewed his usual flamboyant suits for more traditional robes, robes that were iridescent white and gold. He wore a red sash about his waist and on that sash was his name written in angelic glyphs. His many wings fluttered as he hefted his staff high into the air before using it to spear Thom Berger through the belly. He grinned at me hungrily with great hook-like teeth, and I saw Thom Berger’s soul writhe like a worm upon his staff before the two of them disappeared in a flash of searing blue light.

The life went out of Thom Berger’s eyes, but his mouth hung open in an eternal scream. Another foot soldier for my dad’s army of the dead and the damned.

Malach, sitting on the floor beside me, told me what he’d seen in the moments before Thom’s death. “He said Billie came home and was covered in blood. He tried to stop her before she hurt their child. They fought, and Billie won. She then went to their secret place. It is there that she will consume the witch-child. It is there that she will Ascend.”

I stood up slowly, staggering under the weight of the images in my head. There was a part of me that wanted to cry. Finally, I knew why I had hated Thom right from the start. He was so weak. And he had only found his strength in the end. Unfortunately, it hadn’t saved his soul. “Malach, we need to find the child. Now.” I looked at him. “She’s alive and we need to find her before Billie . . . ” I simply could not finish. Maybe my dad was right; maybe I wasn’t prepared for this. Maybe I never would be.

Malach climbed to his feet with a great deal more grace than I had. “We must go to their secret place.”

I blinked, rubbed at my eyes, still reeling in the aftermath of it all. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You tell me.”

“How should I know?” I yelled, and Malach noticeably flinched. My dad had seriously unnerved him. Not that I could really blame him.

“You are a man of law, Nick . . . whatever else you might be. Find out.” Malach turned away, creaking in his bloodied black leather. “I will wait outside.”

“Oh, well, that’s just fucking great!” I yelled after him.

Malach slammed the door.

I started going over the whole house. I had no idea what I was looking for. All I knew for certain was that I had a cooling body lying on the kitchen floor, leaking blood all over the place, and the possibility of the press or the police dropping by anytime. Getting caught in a house with a dead body? Baaad. And if Shelley caught me, I might as well be dead. This was pretty much exactly what I needed to solidify my reputation in my community as not only the local nutcase psychic but a psychopathic murderer. On top of it, I couldn’t go to the police with any of this. The police would want to investigate. They would want to interrogate me, probably for hours. And I didn’t have the time for that.
Cassie
didn’t have the time.

Since I was wearing gloves, and was pressed for time, I couldn’t afford to be delicate. I started in the kitchen, pulling open drawers and dumping their contents onto the floor. I went over counters and into cupboards. Finding nothing that even remotely spoke of secret places, I moved into the living room and started tearing it to pieces, pulling open drawers, scattering the contents of the vast entertainment center, then the end tables and bookshelves. I decided it would help if I knew what the hell I was looking for.

Secret places . . . I pushed my cop brain into analysis overload. A secret place that Thom and Billie Berger had . . . a place they went to, most likely to have carnal relations away from the prying eyes of Carrie Berger. That place couldn’t be anywhere near here. That was chancing too much.

I stopped when I reached one of those Queen Anne-style roll-top desks set in the corner. It was covered in old family pictures, many dating back to the wartime years. There were pictures of the Bergers in the armed service, pictures of Bergers getting married and baptizing their children. There were pictures of Bergers hunting and fishing. No pictures of Billie or Rebecca. That was smart. I picked up a picture of a young Thom Berger and what might have been his father standing beside the carcass of a newly shot buck. Thom was standing proud, holding his rifle, while his dad was on one knee, holding up the dead deer’s head so the full rack of antlers was in the shot. It was a nice picture, the kind of picture I wish I could have taken with my own dad, but it was the background that interested me more. They were standing in front of a cabin tucked away in the deep woods.