The Space Between (6 page)

On Earth, a person could be badly burned, but here, the flash of sulfur and charcoal doesn’t matter. Nothing leaves a mark. I keep hoping the noise will jar something loose in my head, but it’s hard to know how to spring into action when I’ve never had to do anything before. The palms of my hands are black from all the times I let the crackers explode too soon.

I light another one, then set it on my chest and wait. There’s a brief impact that shudders through my ribs when it goes off, but that’s all. The muted
bang
of the explosion is the only sound in the whole world.

Until my mother starts screaming.

The sound is shrill, reverberating in the stairwells, and I lie perfectly still. I’ve never even heard her raise her voice.

Then she screams again, raw and anguished, ringing down through the tower of empty rooms. I can feel it in my teeth.

I scramble to my feet and bolt up the stairs to the roof, slamming through the gate and out into the courtyard. She’s standing alone in the middle of the garden, staring down into the reflective surface of the sundial. Her back is straight and her hand is pressed against her mouth.

Around her, the vines are growing out of control, squirming up from the beds, crawling in a silver network over the roof.

I fight my way through the tangle and then stop, because it’s occurred to me that if I keep moving forward, eventually I’ll reach her and then we’ll be standing side by side and I don’t know what to do. I’m used to her dreamy and distant, cold and cruel. The sight of her standing perfectly still in front of the sundial is all wrong, and it is terrifying.

“Mom,” I say, and my voice sounds so tiny that it barely exists. When she doesn’t react, I say it again. Then I shout it, trying to make myself heard. To make her see me. “Mom! What’s wrong? What happened?”

“He isn’t there,” she whispers. It comes out sounding thick and choked. She points to her own reflection. Her eyes stare up at me from the sundial, storm-gray and fathomless.

I stand with my hands held out, but not touching her, never touching. “What do you mean? Who—who isn’t?”

“Obie.” She leans closer to the sundial, staring into its flat, sliver face.

We’re motionless and silent, standing five feet apart in the middle of the garden.

“What are you talking about?” I say, more impatiently than I mean. “What did you see?”

She turns to face me and her eyes are so wide and glassy they look like polished steel. “Darkness, a flutter of shadows. Daphne,” she whispers. “There was blood.”

The roof is a flat expanse of engraved tile, full of stories and poems, but the vines are growing over it now. At my feet, they’ve covered words like
love
and
sea
and
war
. There’s just the shining tangle, leaves as sharp as thorns.

“Shouldn’t his blood have protected him?” I say. “Didn’t it turn to acid, or burn or
something
?”

Lilith’s face is impassive, half-turned away. “It didn’t do anything.”

“He can’t have just disappeared,” I say, talking fast and breathless. “How did it happen? Did you see who hurt him?”

But she doesn’t have to tell me what she saw. I know the answer, the penalty for demons who choose a life on Earth.

“Is he dead?” I say the word with precision, even though it feels like a solid object in my throat.

My mother stares down at me, showing her teeth, which are small and straight and very gray. When she clutches at her hair, she looks like an animal.

“Mom, is he dead? Did you see what
happened
?”

She shakes her head, a short, quick little shake. “It was very sudden. He was walking through a park, past a frozen fountain. Then there was a spray of blood on snow, and like that, he was gone.”

I fight the temptation to stroke my mother’s hair. I’m reluctant to touch her at the best of times, but especially now when her eyes have gone flat and empty. She looks combustible.

I wonder if I was wrong to ask Beelzebub to be the one to talk to Obie. Maybe if I’d come to Lilith instead, told her about Obie’s plans to leave, she could have dissuaded him. He’d be safe now. But it’s always felt unnatural to go to Lilith for anything, and even now, the idea seems foreign. I never even thought to ask her for help.

“He’s my son,” she whispers, crossing her arms over her chest and digging her fingers into her bare shoulders like she’s trying to make me understand something vital.

I’ve always known that she preferred him to the rest of us, that she valued and praised him, when her general state has been to tolerate me and despise the Lilim. But if I ever resented the way she liked him best, seeing her now would have cured me of it. Her fear is real. It’s as if something has finally cracked inside her, letting the true, unguarded core of her show through. It’s shocking and for just a moment, I catch myself wondering what it would take to make her care for me like that.

“Don’t worry.” My voice sounds quiet, but steady, and that’s reassuring. “We’ll find him.”

Lilith only stares into the sundial. Her garden is awake now, rustling all around us. I shake myself free from the tangle of vines growing over my feet, then clamber up onto one of the benches. The line of her profile is straight and proud, the very image of the woman on the wall, but her eyes have a wild, hunted look. From the safety of the bench, I study her face like I’m seeing her for the first time. Her long, narrow eyebrows and her pale mouth. Her throat is smooth. The little hollow at the base of it looks delicate enough to tear like paper, and I don’t understand how I ever could have believed that she was indestructible.

“I’d track him down myself,” she says, gazing down into the sundial. “If I had any way to leave the city, I’d raze Earth to find him.”

She stands amid the rustling leaves. After a moment, she lifts her head and her vines fall still. She’s never talked about leaving. About how deeply she’s been punished for her disobedience and for standing beside my father. She’s never before talked about being trapped.

For the first time, it occurs to me to wonder if the reason she’s constantly pushing me to be more like my sisters is because it eats at her to see me sitting quietly when she would run if she could. I’ve never been fierce or brave, though. I’ve never been impulsive. It’s always been in my nature to consider things carefully and then decide upon the best solution. Except, sometimes the circumstances change. Sometimes things get so complicated and so bad that your nature just doesn’t matter anymore.

“I can’t leave the city,” Lilith says again, turning to stare into my face. And then she smiles. Her eyes look desperate.

I clasp my hands in front of me and look up at her. “But I can.”

In the museum, Beelzebub is counting out a stack of Russian banknotes and tossing them onto the desk in groups of twenty. I don’t have to ask him what the money’s for to know that he’s already on his way out again. The nine millimeter handgun is lying out and the desk is covered with combat knives and loose papers.

When he looks up, I can tell there’s something wrong with my expression, because he stops counting and gets to his feet. “Everything all right?”

I cross the little office and stand in front of him. “We have to help Obie. My mother saw something in the mirror—she saw blood, and all I can think is that Azrael’s found him. You said it would be okay! You said it was
safe.
”

Beelzebub waits for me to finish. Then he holds up his hand and gestures for me to sit. “Slow down. Is it possible your mother’s confused, or under some sort of misapprehension? These things do happen from time to time.”

Time. The great, elemental force of Pandemonium is time, the cessation of time, the freezing of it. I know this like I know epic poems and algorithms—information to collect and memorize. But I don’t know it the way people do on Earth, born into it and bound by it. There, parents become grandparents and widows and corpses. Children grow up. Here, it’s like there’s no time at all, only distance, sprawling on and on forever, and every moment we spend deliberating could be an hour on Earth.

“We can’t
wait
,” I say, dismayed at the way my voice spikes up without my control. “He’s still alive, but we don’t know for how long or what’s happening to him!”

Beelzebub begins to tidy up the desktop, keeping his eyes on my face. “I know you’re worried, but we’re not going to benefit from haste. We can’t just assume that Azrael has your brother.”

I turn away, trying to control the panic racing in my chest. Trying to close my mouth. My mother might be unpredictable, but she doesn’t make mistakes. If she can’t see Obie, then he’s gone someplace her sight can’t reach.

“Please,” I say, trying to sound persuasive without sounding like I’m begging. “You don’t even have to help me. I can go myself.”

“What are you talking about?”

“My mother said we could find him. She said if I went looking for him, she’d help me. She’s not sure what happened or why she can’t see him, but if she has me there to search for clues, maybe we can save him.”

Beelzebub has frozen with his hand on the stack of uncounted money. When he raises his head to look at me, he does it with utter composure. “Let me see if I have this straight. Your mother is convinced that something violent and untoward has happened to your brother and her grand
solution
is to send you in after him?” He stares out over the gallery and his jaw is hard. “She is absolutely unbelievable!”

“But what if she’s right? She can’t go out to find him and I
can
. I’ll be careful, I’ll—”

He throws the remainder of his Russian banknotes into the desk and slams the drawer. “No. Under no circumstances. I hate to be the one to say it, but in case you hadn’t noticed, your mother has some of the most truly terrible judgment I have ever encountered. You are not obligated to act as her little deputy, and you’re not to leave this city. She isn’t thinking straight.”

“But I can’t just sit here and do
nothing
. He’s my brother!”

“I appreciate the sentiment Daphne, but right now, I’ve got a Siberian prison teetering on revolt, and I can’t just drop everything because your brother decided to break every law in the book.”

I’m running my fingers over the stack of papers on the desk. I know I should stop, but can’t seem to control my hands. The feeling of unraveling is getting worse and I pluck restlessly at the pages in front of me. Then a tab on one of the folders catches my eye. OBIE is printed in Beelzebub’s unmistakable script. Inside is a stack of forms, each stamped with red ink to indicate closure. Pages and pages of red stamps, all RESOLVED, FINAL,
THE END
. There are margin notes everywhere, mostly in Beelzebub’s careless hieratic, a jumble of slashes and curving lines. Hieratic is difficult. I always confuse the symbol for
praise
with the one for
strike
.

I touch the last form, white and unstamped. “Who’s Truman Connor Flynn?”

Beelzebub has put away the knives and is now recounting the banknotes. “Sorry, what?”

“He’s the last entry in Obie’s file. The case is still open.”

Beelzebub wrinkles his forehead, still counting. “That’s your friend from the terminal—the boy with the razor. With the water.”

The boy who reached for my hand.

“Well, what about
him
?” I say, unable to keep a note of hope out of my voice. “He might not know what happened, but he could still help. Maybe he even knows who Obie’s friends are or where he was staying.”

Beelzebub sighs. Then he sits down across from me, pocketing his Russian money and his gun. He’s looking into my face and his eyes are almost like a real person’s—pale, but not transparent anymore. He would pass for human on the street.

“I’m not trying to be a beast,” he says. “But we have no idea what kind of a situation we’re dealing with, and until we do, the best course of action is to sit tight and exercise some caution. I don’t want you getting hurt. There will be a time for you to go to Earth, but now is not the time. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

I nod. My face feels stiff and I can’t think of anything to say.

He reaches for his weapons case and stands up. “I have to go,” he says. “But the minute I’m done, we’ll get this all taken care of—I promise.”

He starts out of the office, then turns back like he’s about to say something else. He looks so righteous and so good, even crawling with flies. He raises his hand, a kind, helpless gesture, before turning to make his way through the gallery and out of the museum.

Then I’m alone, sitting at Beelzebub’s desk. The room is still. Still enough to think. And what I think is that my mother never would have accepted this stillness. She made her own fate when she was younger than me. She defied God and angels, even if it meant being banished, then chose my father, even when that choice confined her to a jagged, brimstone world. And maybe it’s not what she dreamed of, but she did it anyway.