Disintegration Angels - 7
Sep. 19th, 2007 04:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jack_babalonClosed his eyes and moved his lips
"It's time we should be going."
FIVE YEARS LATER
"It's almost over... right?"
"Almost."
"You promised!"
"Brother Seducer" The Hearts Beautiful Lie sighs, "I forget neither my obligations nor yours. Tonight you will be free from the chains that bind you. I am after all, a man of my word."
"You are a man of many words... but like me, none of them are your own. How long?"
"Soon."
"How long's that?"
"As long as it needs be." The Hearts Beautiful Lie offers a cautionary smile, "now then, where were we?"
"At the end."
"Well yours at least... but please... continue."
FIVE YEARS AGO
"They're just ideas, really." Trish whispers with a hunters confidence, "Not much more than that."
"Yeah well in case you didn't notice... these ideas are going to kill us" Nikki echos from the center of a nearby Doppleruniverse.
"The Bad ones usually do." Trish eyes the atrium of the office building: Schematics, details, measurements cascade through her thoughts, "But luckily that works both ways...can you hold them?"
"Again?" Nikki shifts her awareness uncomfortably through a tide of ghost probablilities, "They've found the zero point on the Mandlebrot Weave. It won't hold them..."
"I don't need it to... just slow them down, buy me a few seconds after we separate and collapse The Parallel..."
"We can't do that, we haven't prepared the ritual..."
"We can and we will, look we don't have long... right now they're just hovering out there, watching, waiting for us to make a run for it..."
"And?"
"And if we do that they'll pull one of us out from the others corpse. Listen, we collapse the Parallel..."
"... and wipe out an entire eigenstate from existence! C'mon, think... there's got to be a better way!"
"I am thinking. They're just ideas right? Three diemensional thought forms that can exist independent of their initial thinker."
"So?"
"So, they won't be able to maintain form cohesion once exposed to an non-intelligent observation system."
"What?"
Trish points to the corner at a deactivated camera drone crouched in the corner of the lobbys ceiling like a sleeping spider.
"Once we collapse the parallel" Trish continues, "they'll be imprint vunerable to the security system here. All I have to do..."
Trish is cut off by a radical shift in the lighting around her. Across the hall, on each side of the fire escape door, a stain of sick gold luminesence begins to seep through the walls. The atrium is bathed in a deep violet glow, casting x-ray shadows of Trish's skeleton behind her. Two faces float to the surface of the wall, minature suns for eyes that float in hollowed out black sockets. Glass music pulsates and shrieks rupturing a slight trickle of blood from Trish's eardrum.
"Shit...alright... i'm sorry but we don't have a choice." Trish yells over the escalating telepathic noise.
"Yes we do!"
The Angels step through into the room, solid, dragonfly wings frantically humming vertigo rhythms as the gates to their rictus grin crackle open, white fire spittle dripping from the cauldron of their jaws.
"Fine... then you don't!"
"Trish, wait no..."
Two streams of blinding light are released at Trish along the Angels scream.
Trish doesn't move. She raises two fingers and mouths a single word unheard over the din of the oncoming blast.
The blast freezes inches from her in the air.
Everything stops: Welcome to Phantom Zero.
Trish and Nikki flicker between positions of actuality. A reflection chain of dueling mirrors caves in on each other, shuffle-racing into a series of kaleidoscope mandalas that bloom, blossom and whither between them, creating petals of polygons that spriral out from their center, curve inward even while branching further and further out into new patterns until finally it is clear what is unfolding: A Black Hole Map collapsing under the weight of it's own complexity.
There is a sucking noise, as if everything around them had a secret drain that had each simultaneously been pulled.
All the light in the room bends, arcs, shifts and curves down a vortex between the formula of NOT opening between them.
Then nothing.
Perfect blind nothing.
Then the deathrattle of a thousand radio frequencies accompanied by an astral super-nova; a bubble burst of a billion stars being subtracted from themselves...
....
No-thing now but the smoke of anti-math burning.
....
....
There is a sudden wave of color-weight as time pours back into the atrium and the world shaprens back into detail around them.
"...what have you done?" Nikki's voice cracks at Trish's side, the last vestiges of the subtracted dopplerunivese dying like embers in her thoughts .Trish says nothing, focusing instead on keeping her shit together, the after effect of the blast having hit her with the strength of a three day acid trip condensed into a handful of seconds
The two Angels lay motionless collapsed across the hall. Neither one of them move. Violet steam rises off their opaque jelly skin drifting in unwinding coils and dispersing across the air with the faintest scent of coming rain.
Then the slightest rustle of wings waking. The one to the right suddenly lifts its head. The minature suns of its eyes igniting aware. The other one follows suit. They float up off the floor as if they suddenly found themselves submerged underwater and straighten themselves erect hovering inches above the earth.
"Now!" Trish barks.
Nikki snaps out of the vertigo funk, steps into her Shao-lin Bellydance stance, shifts her weight and her arms serpentine to a secret song as the mendhi inks flow from skin, fractal patterns snake across the distance between her and the angels, rippling wider and wider into a flattened circle before her. The circle grows into a 12 foot circumference and hums with life. She snaps back her right hand, the fingers plucking the floating dark blue vines that flow off her arm and the center of the circle is pulled taut into a concave droplet while her left fingers scissor snap the line.
The Circle breathes into life, flutters along its perimeter and then envelopes itself around the Angels.
Countless veins spiral across their skin, ignite into a deep red upon contact with their skin, sprout new web into criss-crossing streams across their bodies, wrapping, weaving around their limbs and wings until only a series of crimson cocoons hover before her.
She focuses. She is playing a game where she has to constantly shift the circumfrence of the circle from the grasp of their solution. It is a game with the inevitably of a race she cannot win.
They're closing in. The cocoons start leaking shafts of bonewhite light. The circle is evaporating around them.
"Trish I can't..."
"You don't have to."
"But..."
"Let go."
The last remnants of the circle shatter into incoherence, fragmenting into dead equations before hitting the floor.
The Angels remain where they were, look at one another, then at them, shake their head with disapproving authority and float forward.
Trish reaches into her jacket and pulls out a magick wand.
A black universal remote to be exact. She hits a large red button. The ceiling lights come in a series of lit grids.
"Lights" Trish hisses.
The Angels pause, look around and then at Trish with curiosity.
There is the slightest of clicks and faintest of whirs.
"Cameras!"
The Angels suddenly crash to the floor and land on all on fours. Their wings spread out, hum and beat frantically before flaking off their backs for the effort. The radiance of their chakras dims into a faint glow, their spin grinding to a halt and the seven jewels burn down into dying embers. The one on the right tries to lift itself from the floor but finds its skin sticking to the surface in a puddle, stretching out with a trail of rapidly graying ectoplasm following the movement of it's limbs. The one on its left throws it head back to release a scream and fires out... a spasming cough as its lower jaw sinks unhinged from its skull, drooping down to its chest until it finally snaps free and splashes into a puddle beneath it.
Their aura flickers with the cathode green of old tv sets as their bodies are slowly engulfed with liquid static.
Trish lowers the wand and unsheaths her sword from behind her waist.
Her 9mm pistol to be exact.
She walks over to the one on the right and presses the tip of the sword to its forehead. It looks up at her, the twin suns of its eyes nothing more than the dance of candles. She knows that look very well. A human look: Scared, curious, defiant... eternal.
Not that it changes anything really.
"Action!"
Applause: A single set of hands clapping mechanically slow in the dark.
"Well now... that was quite a show."
Adam's eyes readjust to the lighting of the room.
"No, really... the whole escape-thing, very impressive stuff. Still..."
Sam sits behind his desk wearing one great big 'fuck you' of a smile.
"Antonio... ensure that our guest stays this time."
Antonio grabs Adam by the shoulder and yanks his arm back, he struggles out a squirm but Antonio's got a bitch of a grip on him, he prys loose three of Adam's fingers and pulls them back with a quick wet crack. Adam tries to swallow the scream but it comes back up in a splash of vomit fired across the floor followed by a gurgling whimper. He blacks out for a moment but only a moment, the sharp pain throbbing out of his hand too strong to keep him unconscious for long.
"I hope you'll forgive the theatrics... but I do find repeat performances tiresome at best. Antonio pull up a chair for Mister Last."
Antonio pushes Adam forward, catches him by the neck, kicks out his left knee from behind and as Adam buckles Antonio swings him down into a chair sitting in front of Sam's desk.
"Now then... let's try this again shall we?"
"She's here..."
"Adam..."
"I'm telling you I just saw her and she's here..."
"Adam"
"... she's got your shit man... she's got your shit and she's going to walk out of here..."
"Adam... you're not listening... I know."
"What?"
"I know about her and you and the Womans Room and the Bag and you know what... ? I don't really care."
"..."
"See I think you'll find that i've found something else to occupy my time tonight." Sam lights a black cigarette, leans back in his chair watching Adam with a vicious langour.
"What the hell was that?"
"A set-up"
"No... when you... when you pulled us apart... you..."
"Saved our lives?"
"Enough with the Bon Motts okay..." Nikki spits. "I'm getting sick of it already."
"They're not for you"
"Do you know what you just did? Do you? You killed an enitre universe before it could..."
"Okay, stop right there... first off I had no choice. Second, it's a not a universe, but a Doppleruniverse... a potential parallel reality meaning whatever slight variation of existence it was going to be hadn't been manifested itself yet... and third, like I said before those things would've collapsed the parallel anyway, most likely when they dragged you out of it when they were through with me."
Nikki doesn't say anything. She lights up a cigarette failing for the third time this week to quit. They exit the office in silence, right through the front doors, Trish unlocks the bullet silver BMW sitting across the street with a click of her chain, the car shrieks two beeps in recognition. Trish tosses Nikki the keys.
"What's this?"
"You go ahead. I got something to take care of first."
"Yeah... lemme guess your boyfriend's in trouble again."
"Don't worry about it..."
"Yeah well I am. I mean we were just ambushed..."
"No, we were set-up. Those poor fucks in the building were ambushed."
"What are you talking about?"
"Someones playing us. Someone fed us bad intel figuring one of two things would happen: Either we'd take care of them or they'd take care of us... either way one problem would solve another."
"How do you know that?"
Trish shrugs, "I just do."
"Then you gotta come back with me..."
"I'll catch up."
"Don't you think it's pretty odd that your Man stumbles into some shit while all this is going down?"
"That's why i'm going."
"Fine, then we'll both..."
"No... you're going to the safe house, you're going to call this in, hang tight and wait for further orders."
"Trish c'mon..."
"I appreciate where you're coming from... but that's an order. If something happens I need to know that someone'll tell the others. Okay?"
Nikki nods and opens the door to the BMW.
"Oh... and Nikki."
Nikki turns around. Trish snags the smoke out of her mouth and holsters it in hers.
"You quit, remember?"
"You suck... I mean you know that, right?"
"Yeah... I guess I do." Trish takes a long drag off the smoke, turns around, pulls out her 'wand' , points it across the street, clicks a button and a large explosion ignites across the office lobby, followed by another on the floor above, followed by one above that and one above that until the entire building is engulfed in flames.Car alarms are wailing across the surrounding blocks and a rain of glass finishes showering a few inches from her feet. Trish turns back to Nikki.
"Now go!"
"You know for all your clever little tricks, you made the same mistake all magicians eventually make... you got sloppy. More precisely you got lazy: High off your rituals, fat from hustling hand me down miracles, thinking that you had already overcome the tribulations of your grade, quenched your thirst straight from the graal and that your Great Work had been long accomplished... all the while forgetting the first thing they ever taught you - that a true initiation never ends."
Sam flicks a small column of ash off his cigarette into an ashtray, blowing a stream of smoke into the sole arc of light in the room. Adam just sits there cradling his three broken fingers, bobbing back and forth in his seat. "Now here you are... with no way back!"
"Whaddya want from me?"
"For you to do what you should've done back in the bathroom, Adam... pay attention. After all this is your final lesson in Magick."
"Yeah... and what's that?"
"Stoic to the end. Bravo. Well since you ask, the lesson is quite simple really. All good things must come to an end." Sam stamps out the smoke long before it was finished, rises from his seat, a sheen of gold light radiates from under his skin, a third red eye burns its way through his forehead with a sizzling stink of cooked flesh, rolls around and settles in on Adams direction. Sam's words are no longer spoken, rather they ride up the current of pain emanating from Adam's hand, traveling along the neural signals until reaching the tips that end in sharp radiance, where they bloom into foriegn thoughts that echo with a hissing feedback - "It didn't have to be this way did it? You were given so many chances... and like everything else you were given Adam you pissed it all away..."
The words melt into a garden of overlapping memory: An empty nightclub, a man dangles from a noose above him from the lighting rafters, he holds in his hand a knive, while Dave and Carlos watch him silently from the edge of the bar, he mounts the step ladder erected underneath the last kicks of the dying... he crawls up off the floor into the bed of his best friends woman, she doesn't say a word, peeling back the sheets, revealing the wound they are about to inflict... with a coke tainted razor he's carving a sigil into a polaroid snapshot, right into the cheek of some moonfaced little shit, just a kid really but one who's been saying all the wrong things to all the right people about him, he has no choice, a line has to be drawn somewhere... he sits in a diner booth with his girlfriend Donna, she squeezes his hand under the table as across from them his best friend confesses that he knows his woman's been cheating on him. Adam sips his coffee apathetically... five miles down that moon faced shit rises without waking from a bad dream, steps out of bed, across his room and straight through a window four stories up"
The memories blur in a dull white glare. Flicker and fade. Plucked from his mind. Gone forever.
Blood tears trickle down Adam's eyes and Sam's voice floats across the juxtaposition of remembrance.
"Gone forever. Friends, talent, love...that is your law isn't it: Love... under Will. But you never had neither really... just the narcissism of a lonely schoolboy who grew up thinking the world owed him something that he neither understood nor deserved. But there's so much more to see... isn't there Adam? All that fear, all that regret, buried under years of alcohol, drugs and denial... let me take this burden you've been harboring... let me make you clean again."
The third eye blinks and stares deeper into Adam. Inside his head everything goes red for a long moment then fades back to a familiar apartment hallway, the last working bulb flickers by the elevator, he's in front of a door, muffled music and sounds of a drunken party seep through it. Sam stands behind him.
"What are you waiting for?" Sam asks non chalantly, "Open the door, Adam"
"Phhhuck you"
"Don't be afraid... whatever it is you don't want to see, know that you won't ever have to come back here again..."
"I can't"
"Yes you can. It's simple. Just open the door..."
"Please don't do this..."
"It's too late for that now... so do you open the door or do I smash it in with your face?"
Adam can feel the tears of blood welling up in his eyes. He puts a hand on the door, holds it there unable to move until finally, under the weight of Sam's watchful eye... opens it up.
"See that wasn't so..." Sam chides but Adam, without warning, suddenly bolts into the room before he can finish, slamming the door in his face.
Sam stands there dumbfounded.
"Well... this is different." Sam looks around the hall, trys the door handle, it's locked, "You can't hide from me Adam... we're inside your very Ruach."
No answer.
"I'm serious Adam... I will rend the three veils of your soul apart and eat whatever I find in the center."
No answer.
"Heh... the hard way then."
A pair of wings unfold from behind Sam's back, made out of a thousand feather shards of stained glass. The gold sheen burns more intensely, lighting the hallway-memory in shades of burning Autumn leaves. His lower jaw pops from the socket, elongates into a wide opening, a cauldron of light bubbling up out from the bottom of his throat and a scream of intense brillance blasts across the door, incinerating it into a steam of disintegrated thought.
He steps into the room, black as sleep, the light from within illuminating Sam's form and nothing else. A figure steps through the dark towards him. A little boy with wavy blond hair, a pimpled chin and Adam's blue eyes.
"There you are!" Sam kneels down to look the boy face to face, "In the end they all try to hide here, in their memory of innocence. A shame innocence is a luxury you can no longer afford. No more games Adam. I have a lot to ask and you have much more to answer for. So... any more tricks up your sleeves... Last chance" the words sting with a telepathic sneer.
"Just one" The boy smirks with Adam's voice, snaps his fingers and the darkness bursts into light.
Sam looks around him and see's that he is in an large empty room, windowless, a wharehouse space or large basement perhaps. He shrugs and moves towards Adam who is standing where the boy was and steps into an invisible wall. He tries to side step but finds the same result. He looks at Adam who answers his gaze with one of his own directed at Sam's feet. Sam follows the look and see's that he is standing in the middle of a magick circle drawn on the floor, the Hebrew lettering and alchemical symbolism glowing blue around him.
"This won't hold me... you know that right?" Sam hisses, pressing his weight against the unseen boundaries binding him to the circles diameter.
"Don't need it to... see I got your name and your number, asshole... 131... סמאל... SMAL... SAMAEL... HOLD!"
Sam stops struggling finding that he is now paralyzed.
Adam steps around the circle, conjures a cigarette with a notion, lights it with another snap of his fingers and blows the smoke of the first drag in Sams face.
"Sam... Telegram Sam... but that's just hiding your name in plain sight isn't it? Let's try Samael instead... the Angel of Accusations and the Venom of God, who judges intellectuality with skeptism and conscience with morality... only you're not a 'real' angel are you? You're one of the final guardians at the edge of the threshold of Da'ath, you are of the order of shells, the Qlippoth, corresponding to the shadow of Hod on the Tree of Life. Just one more bottled demon in old man Solomons temple..."
"Release me now or so help me..."
"Speak only when spoken to False Judge of the Land of shells"
Sam finds despite himself that he cannot speak.
"Yeah, that's what I thought... y'know, I don't normally go for the old school stuff, but y'know... I find it has a certian poetry to it" he snorts. "Maybe i'm just a romantic. So anyway, you like this? It's a memroy-trap. Had 'em here for years now. Just one of many actually, designed for you and your kind when they go creepy-crawling where they ain't wanted. See i'm not much on my history, but from what little I do know the Rabbi's had a way for battling the likes of you, Gematria - a number alphabet used to hack into your mathematical identity complex. A cheatcode, if you will, for battling demons and angels alike. Did you really think you were the first of your kind to try some stupid shit like this? Did you think the old ways forgotten or perhaps that I was too lazy to remember a 'true initiation never ends'."
"I..."
"Rhetorical question Samael... see the thing is you're not even who you think you are. You think you're forever... but in actuality it's just the idea of you that persists and even that idea gets, what's the word, watered down (well that's two) over time ... but you get the point. So while you're here... Explain with all honesty how you came to Be in this current incarnation."
"I was invoked six years ago by an amateur magickian, one who mistook his library for wisdom and his mispronounced Hebrew
for power. He thought he could bind me within himself, use his own body even as you now use this seal to do the same now, but he lost control... it didn't take me long to find the cracks in his Will and within a few months he was completely mine."
"So why'd you stick around then?"
"The fool was already the propreitor of this nightclub, he had a modicum of wealth, but much more importanly he had influence in this world and access to all its forbidden pleasures. It wasn't long before I acquired a taste for the distractions of the flesh..."
"Ain't that always the way... heh, so you're just another possession case then, only substitute an Angel for a Devil... but to be honest all you pricks start to look the same after awhile."
"No Adam, this form is mine for as long as I choose to hold it and no exorcism will sever our bond... just as your body will be mine once I find the cracks in your binding spell, and no matter how good you are, no matter how smart you believe yourself to be, I will escape your seal and feast on the horrors that swim through your unconscious until there is nothing left of you but a mindless husk."
"No doubt. So I guess we best make this quick...Return me back to consciousness, now and without harm."
The space within Adams mind becomes pale, translucent, Sam's office begins to appear in a rough outline, the details of the desk, the framed flyers along the wall, Sam standing frozen leaning over him begin to crystalize into reality.
"Much better..." Adam mumbles sarcastically, the pain of his broken fingers resuming at a steady throb.
"Boss..." Antonio asks from behind him.
"Shit... forgot about the hired help... Samael. Dispose of your servant..."
Antonio looks up at his boss confused but before he can react, Samael leaps across the distance between them, picks him up by the throat, lifts him off the ground, snaps his neck with the merest twist of his wrist and drops the weight of Antonio's body to the floor.
"Damn man... I didn't say 'kill 'em'..."
"You..."
"I know. I didn't say 'Simon Says'. Fucking Angels..." Adam pulls a real cigarette out, lights it clumsily with his wounded hand and looks back up at Samael.
"Right. Let's get a few things cleared up. First off ... resume the form you wore when we first met.I'm sick of talking to a bad flashback."
The third eye recedes beneath Samael's forehead and the golden radiance fluctuating beneath his skin dies down revealing only the man Adam first met.
"Better... now are there any more of you walking around hidden in some poor schmucks body?
"Yes."
"How many? And i'll remind you the old school rules apply... speak honestly or i'll order you to rip those damn wings out of your back!"
"Four... counting myself"
"Heh... i'm betting that you all don't get along do you?"
"We do not agree on how best to thrive in this world, the other three work together. I work alone."
"'kay we'll worry about them later. Right now me and you got business to settle up. The money."
"What?"
"For the blow... you're fucking crazy if you think i'm going back to Ronnie empty handed. In fact while you're at it. Double the amount... y'know, for my medical expenses and shit."
Samael steps over to a wall behind the desk. He kneels down to a antiquated safe, dials a combination on the lock, pops open the door and counts out several stacks of cash.
"Put that shit in a bag willya..."
Samael complies, emptying his wastebasket across the floor, pulling out the trash liner and stuffing the cash in it. He steps over and hands it to Adam.
"Oh, we ain't through yet. Just put that there on the desk."
Samael obeys as Adam see's a green marble handled letter opener on his desk. Perfect. He picks it up.
"Now, before we get started there's something you need to know... that Woman I told you about earlier, the one who put us in this fucked up situation in the first place... know who i'm talking about?"
"Yes."
"Well FYI" Adam fishes out his cellphone, pops a few buttons and shows Samael the screen. There is only three digits on the LCD: 131, "She's the one who gave me your number... and good thing to because I wouldn't have guessed it on my own."
Samaels face distorts in restrained rage.
"See you should've listened... but i'm guessing you ain't the first Angel to let Pride come before the Fall. Oh yeah, that's right, you're not a real Angel... you're just another psychic vampire. Feeding off shit and shame just like any other drama junkie..."
Adam steps over Samael.
"Take a seat and don't move!"
Samael has no other choice.
"So, since you enjoy the 'distractions of the flesh' so much... let's make sure the party never ends."
Adam presses the blade of the letter opener into Samaels forehead, right where the third eye belonged and begins carving a sigil. Samael takes the pain quietly, wincing with each new slash and cut in the symbol.
"There we are, alright... so lissen up, I HEREBY BIND YOU, SMAL - ANGEL OF FALSE ACCUSATIONS, TO SPEND THE REST OF YOUR EXISTENCE ON THIS PLANE IMPRISONED WITHIN THE CONFINES OF THIS MORTAL SHELL YOU HAVE STOLEN".
A trail of bright blue smoke hisses from the sigil.
"Now, here's the deal... maybe one day, if you behave, i'll release you. Until then your ass is mine. If something happens to me before then then your stuck with this rotting body for the next century or so, spending a good part of that time awake forever in a dead body. Sound fun?"
"No."
"Yeah, well welcome to the human race asshole. Oh and just for good measure... So long as you inhabit human form you will do no harm to me, directly or indirect, or to those I know."
Samael lowers his head and gives the briefest of nods. Adam picks up the bag of money off the desk, tucks his bad hand into his jacket and makes his way out the door.
"Wait..." it is Samaels voice but not his voice. Adam turns around.
"What about me...?" Adam just looks at Samael with mild confusion, "The real me, James Burgos...my names James Burgos... please you gotta help me i'm stuck in here still."
"And?"
"You don't understand i've been trapped in here for the last six years."
"I didn't ask."
"But it's not my fault... don't you understand. Whatever it is he's done it was him... it wasn't me... please... it's not my fault!"
Adam closes his eyes in frustration, an annoyed sigh. He opens his eyes back at 'James'.
"Sorry man, but first rule of any party: You're responsible for those you invited."
Adam steps out the door, ignores the wail of pure animal pain and doesn't look back.
He's been standing outside at the corner of the club for the last thirty minutes. He has survived psychic combat with an angel, had his fingers broken, made a few grand for a few minutes work... but still can't seem to the manage the grand trick of getting a fucking cab. Too tired to ride a graffiti map. Too spent. Truth is any moment he's going to pass out.
A jet black Harley pulls up in front of him. The rider pulls of their helmet. Trish dismounts the cycle and runs over to Adam.
"Jesus there you are... you alright?" She asks seeing the dry blood caked under his eyes and the bundled hand.
"I'll live..." he almost forgot he called her... it seems a hundred lifetimes ago...
"What happened?"
"Shit got really intense." Adam says with rehearsed bravado, "It was real touch and go for a second there, but it turned out to be nothing I couldn't handle."
"You sure?" Trish looks over at the club calculating a plan of attack and resting a hand over the bulge in her jacket.
"Yeah, i'm sure..."
"We were set up..."
"By who?" Adam lights up a cigarette and trys to breathe past the broken fingers.
"Not sure yet..." Trish looks over at him, spots once again the caked stream of dried blood on his cheeks and gives a sigh of relief, "we'll worry about that later. I'm just glad nothing happened."
"C'monnnn... it's me. What's gonna happen?"
She smiles despite herself and hugs him tight...
...he practically collapses into her arms, she holds him up and looks into his eyes...
"Baby" he grins, "It's been a helluva night"
"Yeah same here..." but she stops and freezes.
First she smells it. Right there under Adam's sweat and nicotine cologne... not just the reek of dry pussy juice on his chin, but something more. She pushes him off her. He staggers back and shoots her a wounded puppy look. There is something different about him. She sniffs the air. There: The ozone smell of thunderstorms and dried cum. She shifts her vision and can see it, a Mobius Hexagram, branded into the left side of his chest. A sex magick sigil enchantment binding one heart to another.
The kind, as she well knows, that takes two to activate.
"Who is she?" each word drips from her with holstered rage as she fights the urge to smash his nose up into his skull.
Adam does what he does best... play dumb: "Who?"
"I don't believe this..."
"Believe what?"
"Fuck you, Adam."
"Trish..." he reaches for her.
"Don't" she puts the helmet back on, remounts the cycle, revs it up in a piston roar and bursts back into the night.
Adam, leans against the wall, slides down it and just shakes his head.
Ten slow motion minutes tick by followed by the ringing of his cellphone.
"Trish!"
"Not quite" Sarah giggles on the other end, "I see you didn't lose my number."
"Fuck you."
"Too late... which is why you don't have a ride I would imagine."
"Do you have any idea what you've just put me through?"
"Of course I do. I put you through Hell... and you made it back."
"Look i'm not in the..."
"Adam, you're not a stupid man, whatever you did you did knowing full well there would be reprecussions. You could have said 'no', you could have just done the deal like you were supposed to, you could have walked out of the club the first time you escaped, you could have done any number of things differently but you didn't ... instead you did exactly what you wanted to do."
Adam says nothing.
"Now... you need a ride?"
"I... " it's not to late. He could call Trish. He could explain.. but what would he explain? Sarah's right and he knows it, "Yeah, I do."
A horn honks. Adam looks up. A scarlet Jaguar is a feet in front of him. A mirrored window rolls down and Sarah looks out at him with a smile sweet as poison candy. He staggers back up, throws the cash bag over the shoulder and makes his way around the car to the passenger side, unable to hear Sarah whisper:
"Mine!" as the Moebius Hexagram lights up with life unseen beneath Adam's heart.
FIVE YEARS LATER
"And that's it?" The Hearts Beautiful Lie asks with bemused diplomacy.
"That's it." Samael sighs, the last five years have seemed to have aged him ten. The hair line recedes, the once bright eyes seem dull even behind their green tinted contacts floating over the dark grey bags, the lines in his face have burrowed deeply into his face forming a map of a life of trapped desperation.
He glances up at the Hearts Beautiful Lie sitting across the desk of his office, a being of pure wish who resembles in all who witness hir the longing of their true desire.
Samael see's a young Adam sitting across from him.
"Now I don't know what purpose this story serves you and I don't care... so long as you honor that which you promised."
"Well, it's nothing complex really, I simply needed to know what i'm up against."
"And what about me?"
"Yes... I haven't forgotten" The Hearts Beautiful Lie pats himself down, looks only slightly concerned for a moment, then discovers what he's looking for, puts up a single finger to indicate a moments patience and pulls out a pistol holding it with the giddy expectation of a joke he can't wait to tell.
"What're you doing?" Samael stands up.
"Keeping my promise. See the spell that binds you is strong, but despite Adam's promise, it cannot bind you after death... not that death will release you... but it won't be able to bind you either!"
"No wait..."
The Hearts Beautiful Lie fires a single shot straight into the center of the sigil scar on Samaels forehead. His head snaps back and hangs there with dead eyes staring at the ceiling.
"Forgive me Brother Seducer, but I could not risk our mutual enemy using you against me at some later point...." The Hearts Beautiful Lie, still retaining Adam's appearance, finishes his drink, gets up from his seat, bows courteously to his host and makes his way out the office door only to turn around half way out, "... so while I thank you for your generous hospitality, as well as your story... it was most... instructive... but i'm afraid the hour grows late and it really is time that I was going."
The Hearts Beautiful Lie walks out the door, humming a song who's name he's forgotten, his form shifting through a dozen spectrums of gender, race, face and frame as s/he makes hir way through the last stragglers of the thinning crowd, until s/he is swallowed up into a sea of anonymity.
Continued from Chapter 6
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on 2007-09-20 03:26 am (UTC)and wow
and :: shivers ::
and... damn, that was a fun read! :-)
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on 2007-09-20 04:53 pm (UTC)Appreciate the feedback.
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on 2007-09-20 08:27 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-20 06:04 am (UTC)I dig it.
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on 2007-09-20 04:56 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-20 02:24 pm (UTC)xxx
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on 2007-09-20 04:56 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-20 04:18 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2007-09-20 05:01 pm (UTC)Hope it was worth the wait (you'd be surprised how much time you lose researching the kabbalistic name and number of angels).