Authors: L. A. Banks
“And you transport things out of this little port town,” Azrael said.
“A few pieces of art, here and there … the laws have changed. It’s not fair. After 1972—”
“Blah, blah, blah, a man’s gotta make a living,” Bath Kol said. “So we heard from Nazir.”
“Then you must ask
him
about Daoud. I don’t know why he wanted him. That was not my business.”
The brothers passed glances among each other, and Azrael pulled back his weapon.
“But you threatened his family,” Celeste said, touching the wall and moving closer to Omar.
Aziza nodded. “You handed him over to Nazir.”
“It was not my business!” Omar shouted. “He stole something from a big client of Nazir’s, and all anyone was trying to do was get that back. What happened in the north country, I do not know. I mind my business here. That is all I do.”
“So you weren’t given orders to find anything special for me?” Azrael asked in a low, threatening tone. “Nothing at all?”
“No, just to give you something from the shop if you wanted something.”
“You lying piece of shit,” Bath Kol said, lunging, but Isda caught him. “You were either gonna give us a fake piece of antiquity using your bootleg-copy scribes in the back, or do what my man here said and try to shake us down.”
“Picked the wrong fight on the wrong day,
my Nubian brother
.” Isda glared at the man and then his henchmen in the back. “We need to get out before we violate the prime edict of not snuffing a human in a rage.”
“I feel you, man,” Bath Kol said, then spit on the floor. “I am so ready to kill this fat bastard where he stands, you have no idea.”
Glancing around nervously and feeling every hair-trigger nerve fraying and popping in the men around her, Celeste looked at Azrael. That Isda had slipped and called Omar a human, which could have revealed to a demon that they were angels, was the tip-off that he was too close to the edge. If they didn’t leave soon, the room might explode in sudden violence.
“We’d better get the guys out of here before it gets really messy,” Celeste said quietly, keeping her gaze on Azrael. “Even though they are as dirty as sin, there are still a
lot
of
people
in here.”
“You tell Nazir I’ll see him,” Azrael said grimly, as the group backed out of the store.
Once on the pavement, the group jogged a few blocks, trying to get out to a main thoroughfare, which was almost impossible to find among the tightly packed, winding labyrinth of alleys.
“Eyes,” Bath Kol said, turning around in a full circle, watching their backs.
Warriors surrounded their female human charges, moving the group forward and trying to stay away from going deeper into blind alleys, which was also next to impossible.
But a small boy zigzagged through their huddle and grabbed the loop in Celeste’s jeans.
“Miss, miss, you have to hurry. Come this way to the boats before big man comes.”
Warriors stared down at the dirty-faced child. Azrael placed a hand on his head, leaning down with a frown. “Who sent you?”
“Daoud,” the child whined, his large, luminous eyes filling with tears. “He still comes to me and my family in my dreams—he is so sad. He said the nice lady who glows inside like an angel would be there and he showed her to me,” the boy whispered, and pointed to Celeste. Then he took off running. “
Yalla.
They are bad men. Hurry!”
The child ran like one of the carriage horses unbridled.
His skinny, brown body wended its way through human traffic, dodged cars, and sped down treacherous alleys at a breakneck pace. Every few minutes he’d glance over his shoulder to be sure the group of warriors and women were still behind him. His panic grew more palpable the deeper they got into the residential neighborhoods. Then he made a wrong turn and skidded into a hard body. But like a fleet-footed mountain goat, the child scrambled back, pushed off a wall, dodged the grab of the man—whose eyes were all-black—and zigzagged back behind Azrael, panting.
Instantly the alley filled in around them with human bodies that had black eyes and no souls. The rooftops darkened with predators in human shells. Demons had found them.
“Get down,” Azrael shouted, and then flung out his arms, calling his blades in his hands to release in opposite directions, clearing a path. In one swoosh, his blades sliced through chests, viscera, and sent demon screams and black smoke to rent the air. “Wings up!”
A hail of bullets rained down, but every angel trapped in the alley had formed what looked like a Spartan phalanx, covering the women and the small boy. Advancing in slow lockstep, they moved to the edge of the alley, and as soon as they were in the open, Azrael called his blades back, sending them hurling through the air to clear the roof.
Embers burst everywhere. Just then three carriages pulled up to the end of the block and waved them forward. In a mad dash the group hurtled toward them, climbing on as the carriages took off.
“My nephew,” their driver from before explained, lifting a rifle off the carriage floor.
He turned the reins over to the child and fired several warning shots from behind Azrael’s wings. Every brother was now standing on a carriage roof, balancing and shooting, picking demons off one at a time in awful explosions, while Azrael’s blades left scorched earth and cinders. At the water’s edge locals screamed and fled as the carriage drivers dismounted and rushed to the small, unofficial dock and climbed onto a motorized fishing boat.
“Yalla, yalla,”
the lead driver called out, urging the group forward.
One of the other drivers slapped the horses on the haunches to send them dashing in runaway carriages, then ran to help the boat shove off. Half-falling, half-thrown, Celeste hit the deck with the others as they pulled away from the dock.
“Light this water up, gentlemen,” Azrael said, breathing hard and scanning the shoreline.
Immediately, Isda, Bath Kol, and Gavreel stood wing to wing facing the water while Azrael and the others watched their backs. Bowing their heads, the angels that faced the water began to get a blue-white glow along the edges of their bodies and wings. Soon that eerie light spilled down onto the ground and into the water, sending a blanket of what seemed like a glowing current over it, which just as suddenly disappeared.
Bath Kol turned with Isda and Gavreel and nodded at Azrael. “Done. It’s hot.”
“Thank you, now let’s move this team,” Azrael said, staring at the frightened but willing men in the small craft.
“It’s all right,” the boy said, watching the panic and fear in his uncle’s eyes. “We should go now.”
The boy’s uncle only mutely nodded, clearly too overwhelmed to protest or ask questions at the moment. But the second the boy’s uncle stepped back, the warriors advanced and boarded his vessel. Time was of the essence. They couldn’t wait until the frightened men adjusted to what was going on—they had to move.
After quickly jockeying themselves into position, the brothers huddled in the center of the boat, creating a safety ring around the women and the boy.
“My uncle, he sees. He knows,” the boy said. “I told him the Mu’aqqibat, the protector angels, would avenge my older brother’s death.”
The brothers retracted their wings to the wonder of the men driving the boat. The child was in awe, but his uncles were completely freaked out. One man was on his knees weeping, the other was prostrate. Only the boat driver kept his hands on the wheel and his eyes on the rushing current, too overwhelmed to speak. The boy went to Azrael and hugged him tightly around the waist.
“These bad men hurt everybody. My uncles must pay so much to them to drive—now they will have no work and must hide because they helped you. They could do nothing when they took Daoud but beat their chests and hide their wives and anyone that big man might take to make Daoud talk. But Daoud told no one where he hid the gold and glass.”
“You saw it?” Azrael said, stooping down to look into the child’s eager eyes.
The boy nodded. “Yes, he showed it to me in the water
and said the lady who glows within can see it, too, if she holds my hand.”
Celeste moved to the child and squatted in front of him, then looked up at Azrael. “From the mouths of babes …”
“And with the innocence of a child.” Azrael stood and addressed the weeping men. “Please, stand. You bow only to the Source of All That Is. But I will help you for you have surely come to our aid.” He reached into his pocket and gave the men each a large handful of cash. “Keep one bill off this and it will always multiply for you. You family will know vast abundance; your wives, children, and parents will be safe always.”
“You must come to the village in Aswan,” the boat driver said. “You must please come to bless our houses there, the Nubian village is so poor and the people there are so good. We need protection. This place were we are is just sixty miles from Sudan—you know what has happened there?”
“Az,” Bath Kol warned, “we are getting off mission, bro.”
“No, it is all part of the mission,” Azrael said calmly.
The child nodded. “You can meet your boat tomorrow when it arrives in Aswan. But you come now to the village where the old grandmother who sees is. Daoud came to her and to me. I know what the gold book looks like, she knows where it is. Then tomorrow you get back on the big, big boat. But no demons come into the village because she puts down many prayers. Not even big man comes there because the people there fight fiercely … it is our home. In Edfu, it is different. We are overrun.”
“The boy speaks the truth,” the boat driver said, wiping tears from his face. “Come, please, this is an opportunity of a lifetime for us to serve you; the thing of legends. Let us offer angels our hospitality and a meal and a place to sleep for one night among us.”
C
eleste sat with her
arm around the solemn young boy who’d identified himself as Abdullah while the small fishing craft plowed through the water en route to Aswan. Deep melancholy filled her with every one of the child’s breaths. Soon she found herself stroking his thick, dusty hair as he snuggled against her for human touch, clearly starved for that, too. The others on the boat watched the dynamic, then allowed their gazes to drift along the distant shoreline, as though watching her and the boy dredged too much emotion from their souls.
“I wish you had come before,” the child said suddenly, looking up at her with wide eyes. “My father, he had the sickness, my mother, too. They died. But Daoud took good care of me and my sister—he was studying to be an imam. He was friends with the priest who had come to help people who were sick.”
Celeste nodded, unable to speak for a moment past the lump in her throat. She knew the child was referring to the ravages of AIDS, which had left entire villages devastated and so many children orphaned. Just looking into his small face, she remembered losing her own mother at a tender age. But then she’d had Aunt Niecey until she was well grown. This poor child didn’t even have that secondary mother figure. Only his uncle.
She hugged him harder, knowing her arms weren’t wide enough to circle the globe and to heal all the tragedy within it. But she wished with all her might that she could do something about the one happening to this one small boy and his family.
“The boy is sick, too,” the boat’s driver said in a weary voice. “The priest came to our village with people and medicine—this is why my brother Daoud worked side by side with him across beliefs. The old man was a Christian, we are Muslims, but we are all human.”
“My uncle Kadeem is good to me,” the child said. “We are still family.”
Celeste could feel her heart pounding harder within her chest as she turned to Azrael and stared up at him. The other brothers and the women in their group looked at Azrael and their sad eyes asked the same question: Could he do it?
The women sitting beside Celeste slid down the white wooden seating so that Azrael could sit next to the boy.
“You are very brave and very strong, even at your age, Abdullah,” Azrael said, landing a hand on the boy’s back.
“I am not afraid to die,” he replied proudly, and sat up straighter. “I have seen others die before me. I will see my
parents and my brother and all of the ancestors, if that is Allah’s will. So the bad men cannot make me afraid.”
Azrael nodded. “You have the spirit of a warrior.” He closed his eyes for a moment and slowly his hand began to glow blue, then that light covered the small boy’s back. “Only if it is Allah’s will can we help people, Abdullah. Do you understand?”
Abdullah nodded. “Yes,” he said solemnly. “Daoud told me that we cannot know the mysteries sometimes.”
“No, we cannot,” Azrael gently. “Even I have difficulty accepting that sometimes.”
Azrael shared a look with Celeste, then turned away. In that moment she knew he couldn’t heal the boy, and her heart quietly shattered for them both.
“But we all live forever anyway,” Abdullah said with a calm shrug. “In heaven it is much better than where I live now, so I am still happy. We do live forever, right?”
“Yes,” Azrael said. “You will live forever.”
Maggie stood up and walked to the edge of the boat, turning away from them; Gavreel went to her and put an arm around her and looked back at Azrael with a silent plea in his eyes. When Azrael removed his hand from the child’s back, the emotions strained to a breaking point on the boat. Aziza closed her eyes as Bath Kol turned away toward the water. Melissa slowly laid her head down against Paschar’s chest, while Isda jumped up on the bow and gave everyone his back.
Azrael stood slowly and went to the side of the boat alone. Gazing out over the water, his serious profile reminded Celeste of the ancient pharaoh carvings in black granite. The muscle in his jaw pulsed as he stared at the
other passing vessels, then turned slowly to look past the shoulder of the demoralized boat driver, who seemed to understand that Azrael had done all that he could do.
But when a battle-ax slowly materialized in Azrael’s fist, the brothers sprang into action, rimming the boat, trying to see what he saw.