A Wolf at the Door

“Yeah, no shit,” I mumbled, feeling the scorching-hot salt of my tears coursing down my cheeks. It felt like lava, searing straight into the bones of my skull. Thankfully, Felix’s voice just sounded like Felix. I was pretty sure hearing an angel actually speak would have liquefied what was left of my brain cells.

“The sensitivity will pass soon. Your body must adjust to so much power.” I felt every step he took as he approached me, and I shied away, scuttling over the ground like one of the lesser demons I had fought so often. I couldn’t risk glancing at the edges of his toes or something. I didn’t want to see, couldn’t stand to see.

“Adjust, or go stark raving mad, is that it?” ’Cause oh, I could feel it. At the edges of my thoughts, this little gibbering voice usually reserved only for reacting to demonic speech. The part of my mind that would run away and never come back, given its choice. If I let my guard down, even for a second, I wasn’t sure I’d ever get control back. A rather frightening thought.

“That is correct.” Felix crouched just out of my arms’ reach, thankfully. I think, if he’d have touched me, that’d be all she wrote. I’d have been done.

“So…you’ve been here, this whole time. You knew what Dante was…you knew what he was after….” It explained the raw hatred I’d seen in the old man’s face—God was that just a couple of days ago? It felt like centuries.

“Yes. We knew.”

“Then why?” Really, that’s the only thing I wanted to know, the only thing I felt like I could wrap my mind around. “Why didn’t you do something? Why didn’t you protect her?” Because he could have. Surely he could have. If there were demons, and they were bad, then the angels, they were good, right? They did good things, like save people and grant wishes or some shit, yes?

Felix sighed, and I felt the ground beneath me sway as he stood up. “Because this is not our war, warrior. Our fallen brothers, they battle amongst themselves, but it has nothing to do with us. So we only watch.”

“Bullshit!” I dared a glance up, without thinking, but luckily some of the dazzle in my sight seemed to have worn off. Felix looked almost like himself again, though his rags and dreads were wreathed in a faint golden glow. “What is that quote? All evil needs to triumph is for good men to do nothing?”

He smiled a little, his whiskey-colored eyes absorbing the last of the glow to shine like polished gold in the darkness. “We are not men.”

“Then why make yourself known now? If God’s not going to send us help, why are you here?”

“Who says He has not sent help?” With a faintly sad smile, he melted back into the narrow pathways and I knew the moment he was gone. The weight on my chest, the mere pressure of his presence, was gone.

I sat there for a few more moments, rocking back on my knees and balancing my sword across them. I could still feel the minute texture of everything I touched, but it was no longer threatening to overload my circuits. Another few minutes and I’d be almost normal, I thought. If I had another few minutes. Gretchen was down in the lobby and inevitably, someone would come looking up here to see what had happened. Being caught here with an empty gun and a bared sword probably wasn’t going to end well for me.

“Man…man, are you okay?” Spencer’s voice was not nearly as harsh in my ears as I’d been fearing. I wondered that it had taken him this long to talk, when I’d been aware of his presence almost from the beginning. Mercifully, the rooftop no longer buckled when he approached me. I turned my eyes on him, mostly just to see what he looked like in my vision, and I was relieved to see that he was just…him. Somewhere in the last few minutes, I think I’d forgotten what normal looked like.

“I’m all right.” Gingerly, I got up, feeling my mail sitting against my back like it was so much raw meat. Under the padding, under my T-shirt, iridescent white tattoos writhed and slithered as they settled into their new homes. I could feel each one intimately, could point out where one ended and another began, though it would be invisible to the naked eye.

“Man…I saw everything.” There was awe in his voice. Funny how seldom we hear genuine awe in this day and age. “What…what was that?”

“You know what it was.” Moving to the pile of golem dust, I dug through it until I found the slip of paper. A business card, more precisely. I had a matching one in my wallet, belonging to none other than Reginald Goldman. Well, hello, Reggie. I wasn’t surprised. Maybe I should have been, but I think I’d lost the capacity. I tucked the card into one of my bracers, and brushed my dusty hands off.

“What…what do we do?”

I finally turned to face Spencer, and he backed up a step. I can only imagine what it was he saw in my eyes. “We do nothing. You tell no one, because they’d never believe you anyway.”

“But…Gretchen Keene?”