The Mona Lisa Sacrifice Read online

  This time he was a glowing winged man in robes. He’d opted for the classic look, perhaps as an appeal to any sense of nostalgia I might have. But like I said, I wasn’t one of his kind. And I’ve never been the sentimental type. Maybe he suspected that, because he also held a glowing sword with flames lighting up the edges. Very showy. He moved so fast even I couldn’t see him—what did I tell you?—and then there I was, impaled to the floor, the sword’s blade embedded in me and the stone underneath.

  Fuck. Those flames hurt.

  Luckily, everything was going according to plan so far. Well, my plan didn’t specifically involve getting pinned to the floor like some sort of collector’s exhibit. But I wasn’t surprised by it either. I didn’t presume to think I was going to get through that window unscathed.

  “You’re getting predictable in your old age,” I said as cheerfully as I could manage with a magic sword burning my insides. It’s important to remain positive in moments like this, if only to make your opponent pause and consider your sanity for a second, thus potentially giving you an opening. Which is exactly what happened. Remiel studied me, frowning a little, and I used that second to grab his robes with my left hand, pulling him down enough that I could bury my knife to the hilt in his stomach with my right. He grunted and grace escaped his lips and his wound at the same time.

  The grace. To most people it just looks like light, if they even notice it at all. But to me it’s so much more. It’s the stuff light and life are made of. It washed over me and gave me a boost, although one that was more psychological than anything else, given the small amount of grace he lost. I felt like a man dying of thirst in the desert who’s just spotted a water hole. A feeling I actually knew from experience, unfortunately.

  “Thanks, I needed that,” I told Remiel.

  His eyes widened at my words and he finally recognized me. “My lord,” he said. Involuntarily, I suspect. The angels didn’t honour me like they used to. Not since I’d started hunting them.

  Then he wrenched the sword free of the floor for another swing. But I was ready for it. I grabbed onto his arm and let his motion pull me back to my feet. The sword remained in me because of that, but it wasn’t the first time I’d used this move, so I managed to stay standing and conscious. Although I’m comfortable enough with my masculinity to admit there may have been a little screaming involved in the process.

  So there we were, his sword still in me, my knife still in him, our free arms locked in a wrestling pose. It was the stuff statues are made of.

  “This is a lovely place you have here,” I managed to spit out. “Very cozy.”

  Remiel’s eyes flicked to the window. Considering the odds of an escape, no doubt. I used the distraction to headbutt him in the face. He didn’t flinch. OK, so much for that trick. I didn’t even bother kicking him in the balls. Experience has led me to believe angels actually like that.

  He tried to twist my right arm to an angle where it would break. Hell, if I were a normal human he probably could have torn it off. But I was using the last of my grace to keep me strong enough to match him. So he suddenly let go of both the sword and my arm and smashed his hands into my ears.

  It’s bad enough when regular people do that. When an angel does it . . . well, I was shot in the face once in an alley in New Orleans and the bullet hurt less. And was that blaring sound coming from cars outside, or horns in my head? I staggered and let my grip slip on Remiel, which allowed him to rip the sword from my guts. I screamed again, because the only thing that hurts worse than a flaming sword going in is a flaming sword coming out. But I wasn’t done yet. I still had the knife, which I yanked out of him to make it useful again.

  Remiel just grunted and swung the sword back in preparation for what looked to be a decapitating strike. Or maybe a body-cleaving blow. They have a similar windup. He smiled a little, his lips burning like the sword now. He thought he had me. Angels tend to be cocky like that.

  I dropped underneath the swing, which wasn’t as easy as it sounds given the wound in my stomach. I made more unmanly noises and his blade shaved a few hairs off the top of my head. I managed to keep moving, spinning around into a foot sweep. Angels have never been much for martial arts that don’t involve flaming weapons—they think it’s beneath them. Remiel was no different. I took his feet out and he fell back into the bookshelf, sending it to the floor. He spread his wings to try to keep his balance, but I grabbed one of them as I rose, and I twisted it into a modified shoulder lock. I broke something, because the wing suddenly bent in a way I knew it wasn’t meant to bend. Remiel wouldn’t be flying out of here.

  He hissed in pain and swung with the sword again but I kept going, throwing myself into a flying knee that took me inside his guard and into his midsection. The move opened my wound some more, so it probably hurt me more than him, but his breath whoofed out, and I inhaled deeply. It was cloves and honey and all things nice, and it made me think of other times. For a few years there had been a certain market stall in Cairo where you could actually buy bottled angel breath. Anyway. I continued my winning streak by driving my knife into his left eye, smashing the blade through his skull and into the wall behind him. Now Remiel was the one pinned.

  With typical seraphim stoicism, he didn’t cry out, which just showed he was more of a man than me. Or less. Whichever. He just glared at me with his other eye and reached up with his left hand to pull the knife free. I caught his arm and held it with my right hand. So he dropped the sword in his other hand and tried again. Which is what I was expecting. I caught the sword with my left—all the years I’ve spent on battlefields have made me ambidextrous—and stepped back to give myself room. He pulled the knife out of the wall and his eye with the sort of sound you’d expect a knife coming out of an eye to make. And I gave him the same decapitating stroke he’d tried to give me. Only mine was successful. His head flew off and landed on the bed, and his body fell to its knees, where it remained, grace spilling out of it.

  I leaned on the sword for a moment, catching my breath, holding my free hand over the wound in my stomach. No matter how many times you’ve been stabbed or impaled, it always hurts worse than the last time.

  “Your heart didn’t really seem in it,” I said to Remiel’s head, but he didn’t answer. He moved his lips in silent prayer and stared at me with his one good eye.

  The tricky thing about angels is you can kill them but they don’t really stay dead. I could have cut Remiel into different parts and spread them around the world, but some life would have remained in each of those parts thanks to his grace. And eventually those parts would have found their way back to each other through some means or another, and he would have found a way to be reassembled. And then he’d be a very angry angel. As long as he had the grace, he couldn’t truly be killed.

  But the grace is why I was here.

  I dropped the sword and went over to the bed and picked up his head by the hair. He was weeping tears from his good eye now, blood from his ruined one.

  “If it had to be someone,” he said, “I’m honoured it’s you.”

  “I’m not who you think I am,” I told him, and I put my lips to his and kissed him and drew all of his grace out of him.

  What can I say of the grace? It’s not only the lifeblood of the angels and their kin, it’s the most incredible high imaginable. Bliss, pure bliss. Imagine the best orgasm you ever had. The best heroin high. The rush of adrenalin you get when you jump out of a plane. The smell of spring in the air. The calmness of meditation. It’s the power of creation. It’s all that’s left of God in the world. It makes living bearable. For a time, anyway.

  When I was done with the head I went to the body. I drained him until he was empty, and then I fell onto his bed in a stupor and dreamed of other times.

  SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE

  I’d been stabbed the last time I’d visited Barcelona too.

  I was lying drunk in an alley in the Gothic Quart
er. There weren’t any tourists around that night. Probably something to do with all the screaming and gunshots in the surrounding streets. I remember toasting the one star I could see with the dregs of my wine bottle. That was back when you could still see stars from cities. A long time ago.

  I don’t remember how I got there or where I went after. I don’t remember what year it was. I do know there was a war going on, but then there’s always a war going on, isn’t there? I wasn’t involved though. I was just trying to forget myself and what I was, as usual, and I was doing a reasonably good job of it.

  Until the soldiers came down the alley. Three of them, with stained uniforms and jaunty caps, holding rifles with practiced ease. One of them carried a flashlight, an old metal kind that was big enough to be a weapon itself. Although I guess it wasn’t old at the time. They stopped and looked down at me, and I toasted them with the empty bottle as well.

  “Comrades,” I said. I suppose that was my mistake. I meant it as a brother-in-arms endearment, but they took it in the political sense. Always the way.

  The one with the flashlight squatted beside me and shone the light in my eyes. “We are not your comrades,” he told me. “Your comrades are warming the streets with their blood.”

  The Spanish: they can get poetic when they’re riled up about something.

  He put the flashlight down on the ground and I sighed. I knew where this was going, and he didn’t surprise me. He pulled out his knife and thrust it into my side in one motion, like he’d had plenty of practice.

  Soldiers. Why are they always stabbing me?

  I swore and spat and went through all the motions you usually go through when you’ve been stabbed. I went to finish the bottle before I remembered it was empty. “I don’t suppose you have any more wine,” I said.

  The soldier who’d knifed me blinked a few times, then pulled the blade out of me and stared at it. It was covered in my blood. If he wiped it off on my shirt, I was really going to have to do something to him.

  “Water will do,” I told him. “I can make my own wine.”

  He stabbed me again, this time in the stomach. Now he was getting annoying. He was ruining my clothes worse than I’d already ruined them.

  So I hit him over the head with the bottle and pushed his body off me when he fell. I pulled myself up the wall, to my feet, as the other two fumbled their rifles to their shoulders.

  “Don’t shoot me,” I said, “I’ll be forced to—”

  But I didn’t have time to finish because they went ahead and shot me despite my warning. One in the chest, one in the stomach. Good centre of mass shots, which would have killed me eventually if I hadn’t done anything about them.

  Luckily, I was too drunk to feel the pain. I just looked down at the blood leaking out of me and shook my head. I didn’t bother finishing my warning. I don’t know what I would have said to them anyway. I wasn’t really in the mood for this.

  I caught my blood in the bottle. It would do as well as water when it came to making wine. I stumbled off down the alley, looking for a quieter, darker place to heal myself and keep on drinking. The soldiers watched me for a moment, then ran off in the opposite direction, leaving the fallen one behind.

  No, definitely not comrades.

  AN ANGEL SPEAKS IN RIDDLES

  When I came out of the grace stupor in Remiel’s chamber, the wound in my stomach was gone and I felt well rested, like I’d slept for hours, although it had likely been only a few minutes. The grace had worked its magic on me like it always does. I reflexively looked around for Remiel but he had faded away, off to wherever it is truly dead angels go. Called back to God’s side at long last, perhaps. Or perhaps not. Nothing but dust left behind. And the sword lying on the floor. But its flames had gone out, and the metal was dull and black.

  Now that I was full of grace again, I felt kind of bad about what I’d done to Remiel. Guilt always came with the grace. Oh well. I sat up and tried to shrug it off. Tomorrow would be another day.

  “An epic struggle,” said the statue in the window, “if there had been anyone to watch and sing it down through history after.”

  I tried not to jump too much. After all, if he’d wanted to do me harm, he could have done it while I was lying there dreaming of past lives. I studied him as I got to my feet.

  He was a stone angel, looking as if he’d stepped right out of the wall of the church. Remiel and I may have climbed right over him. I wondered how long he’d been there, how much he’d seen. I was surprised I didn’t feel the pull of grace from him, but I was refreshed after Remiel, so maybe that had something to do with it. Who the hell knew with angels?

  “Which one are you?” I asked.

  “Some know me as Cassiel,” he said. He didn’t seem concerned about the sword, or the fact I’d just killed one of his brethren.

  I searched my memory for angel trivia. “The watcher,” I said.

  “At times,” he said. “In times.”

  Ah, he was that kind of angel. The kind who talks in riddles.

  I tried to figure out what he was doing here, but there was really only one answer.

  “I’m guessing you were the one who sent me the photo,” I said.

  “A photo was taken,” Cassiel said. “A photo was delivered. An angel was slain. Events were set into motion.”

  I stretched and measured the distance to the sword. He continued to watch me but didn’t move. I didn’t pose much of a threat now. I was sated, the hunger in me gone. I had no desire to harm him. Not yet. Although if he kept talking the way he did . . .

  “What do you want?” I asked him. “Why all the setup to bring me here?”

  “Those are two questions,” he said. “Two very different stories.”

  “Let’s start with the first,” I sighed.

  “I want Mona Lisa,” he said without changing expression.

  All right, that was a new one. But I just shrugged it off. Some angels collect souls, others apparently collect art.

  “It’s in the Louvre,” I told him. “Shouldn’t be too much of a problem for the likes of you.”

  “That is but a shadow,” he said. “A haunting.”

  I shook my head. “Let’s just cut through the parts where I try to puzzle out what the hell you’re talking about,” I said. “Tell me what you really want.”

  “I want the real Mona Lisa,” he said.

  I studied him and he studied me right back from his perch in the window.

  The real Mona Lisa.

  Maybe he was suggesting the painting in the Louvre was a fraud, like a certain Picasso in one of the American galleries, but I had a feeling he was talking about something entirely different. Angels aren’t usually the type to have an interest in art. They prefer bombs and military aircraft and tanks and that sort of thing. I don’t know—maybe explosions are art to angels.

  “What’s the real Mona Lisa? Is it some kind of weapon?” I asked, following that line of logic.

  “You will help or you won’t help,” Cassiel said. “What you know about Mona Lisa will not affect the outcome.”

  I tried not to sigh again. It was times like this that I preferred the company of demons. They could get you into a lot of trouble, but at least they were straight talkers.

  “All right, let’s take a step backward for a moment,” I said. “Why me?”

  “You can do it or you cannot do it,” Cassiel said. “Either way, a final outcome.”

  I worked my way through that. “So I’m the only one capable of finding the Mona Lisa?” I said.

  “Those are your words,” he said. “Not mine.”

  I thought about killing him just to make him shut up. But I do love a good mystery.

  “Maybe others can find the Mona Lisa,” I said. “But I’m the only one who can actually pull off whatever it is you want pulled off.”

  “As I said,” Cassiel agreed.

 
Now we were getting somewhere. And it didn’t even involve burning bushes or turning people to salt or any of the usual angelic attempts at communication.

  “Why give me Remiel then?” I asked. “If you knew where I was, why not come to me directly?”

  “You are sated,” he said. “We are negotiating now.”

  “So you lured me with Remiel,” I said. “He was the bait to get me here so we could have this conversation. And the thing that kept you safe.”

  “That is an acceptable version of events,” Cassiel said.

  “All right,” I said. “So we’re negotiating. We’ll talk price in a moment. First, what do you want me to do?”

  “As I said,” Cassiel said.

  “Find the Mona Lisa.” I nodded. “Do you know who has it?”

  “The information you seek is irrelevant to your decision,” he said.

  Of course. Why would that matter?

  “How about location then?” I asked. “Any idea where it is?”

  “The only thing certain is uncertainty,” Cassiel said.

  I sighed. “This sounds like a hell of a job. You better have some pretty special payment lined up if you think I’m going to go along with this one.”

  “I will deliver you Judas,” Cassiel said, then stepped back out of the window and fell from sight.

  He didn’t need to wait for an answer. He knew once he mentioned Judas that I would be in.

  I hated Judas more than I hated the angels for everything he had done to me.

  I hated Judas more than I hated the angels for what he had done to Penelope.

  I hated Judas more than I hated myself.

  THE SERPENT IN THE GARDEN

  I know what you’re thinking.