The Fourth Whore, page 24
“For the longest time, I imagined returning to the paradise from whence I came but when I saw you, and you saw me too, I knew I would choose you. I would choose mortality just to be with you, Kenzi. I want you to come with me. But to do that, we have to stop Lilith. We have to end her. Then, together we can collect the final seven strongest demons, so I am freed to be with you. We can go anywhere you want. Let me take you away from here.”
She rubbed Gloria’s hand so much she peeled off a bit of the tape holding down the useless IV. He could see the turmoil in her eyes. He wanted to take it away. Put the soul back and see if maybe Gloria would get a second chance. But it would only work against him. The Creator would add more time or worse, take notice of Lilith’s adventures. Then what?
“Still the romantic fool, Sariel,” Lilith said. She stood in the doorway, somehow looking even more pregnant than she’d been with her son. She sauntered over to them as if her protuberant belly was filled with helium instead of…whatever it was that was in there.
“What exactly do you think The Creator will do with this world once He has all of Hell trapped in those little trinkets from your wormhole? You think He’ll just let all these mortals go on living their lives here like this? All of them going against His neat and tidy plan.” She threw her head back and laughed. “No. He wants this world to himself. He wants to live in this kingdom in the flesh—to experience everything He never has before. But, here’s the kicker, my love, He wants it filled only with His followers. His small minded, ignorant, blind-faith followers who can’t or won’t see Him for the selfish thing He is.”
She turned to Kenzi. “Listen to me—if Sariel completes his mission, you and everyone you love will die. I’m here to stop that, Kenzi, to stop The Creator from building earth in His distorted image of perfection. Forcing you to bow down and be subservient to Him as you’ve been made to do with men all your life. We can stop him. We can make all this pointless pain go away. We can punish Him for his trespasses against us.”
“He is immortal, Lilith,” Sariel spat. “The Creator is the beginning and the end. You cannot destroy him.”
“Oh, I know He is immortal, my love. I know. And when He comes down here, to face me, Kenzi and I will trap Him just as you and He trapped us. And He will know what it means to suffer as He allows his own creations to do.” Lilith smiled.
“She cannot be trusted, Kenzi. She is dangerous. She is using you,” Sariel warned.
Kenzi looked back and forth at the two of them. She drew a breath. “I want Gloria back. Put her soul back and fix her. It’s just… I can’t think straight with all of this on my mind.” She swept her hand over the black woman’s dead body. Then looked at Sariel. “Just, for now, please, put her soul back and keep her safe and alive for me. For now. I need to get out of this place, I need to think, I need to figure out who to trust.”
She was lying. Sariel could see it in her eyes. She only wanted to run away without the guilt of leaving Gloria’s dead body lying unclaimed for months in the morgue. She was itchy, and she would run. He would lie as well. Tell her what she wanted to hear and let her go. The bird would follow her, keep an eye. Besides, if he played the part well, Lilith would have no choice but to oblige and leave her be, elsewise she would prove herself the villain.
Sariel sighed dramatically. “Because I love you, Kenzi, because I will do anything for you, I will replace her soul and swear to you that it will remain within her until you tell me to do otherwise.”
“Ask yourself this: did he love you when he took her from you in the first place?” Lilith said.
“He just said he would put her soul back for me, and go against The Creator. He’s taking a huge risk. He might never get his freedom, but he just said he would do that for me”
“How gallant of you, Sariel. Forgive me for asking, hard to trust ex-lovers, you understand but didn’t you do something like that for this girl once already?”
“I’ve never asked him to do anything like this before.” Kenzi said, coming to Sariel’s defense.
“Oh, I know you didn’t ask him, dear heart, you were much too young to understand. Tell me, Sariel, what happens to the name on your arm if a soul is not collected. I’m sure you could even show us an example, couldn’t you? Does it fester? Does it stink like betrayal or does it smell of the sulfur and clay of a demon-filled cavern?” The spite and anger on her face dulled her perfection. She knew about Kenzi. And now, Kenzi would know.
“What is she talking about?” Kenzi asked him.
Sariel hesitated. “I will just replace her soul, it doesn’t matter what happens to me Kenzi. You should go. If I don’t leave soon with the soul, these mortals will return to time and you’ll be caught.”
“Show her the name,” Lilith ordered.
He ignored her as if he hadn’t heard and went about retrieving his soul-keeper. “Kenzi, do not listen to her. She lies. I told you, it is too late for her. Her soul is black with hatred and revenge. Do not follow her into that abyss.”
He whistled. Enoch hopped off his shoulder and onto his wrist. Dipping its head into the keeper, the bird brought up the glittering amber soul. Sariel nodded his head toward Gloria. Enoch flapped its wings and skipped across the air to land on her godmother’s pillow. The room was silent. Kenzi held her breath. The bird dropped the soul into the small hole in the woman’s head and cocked its own head as if waiting.
Nothing changed. Lilith crossed the room and had Sariel’s arm in her grasp before anyone knew she’d moved.
She turned his arm over as if studying the scars. He tried to pull back, but she tightened her grasp. “Wait a minute, what’s this? Ouch, this looks sore. I can’t quite…does this say Kenzi Brooks? How long has it been here, right beside this old scar that says Robbie Brooks?”
Kenzi inched closer to see.
“Why is my name on you?”
“So, tell me Sariel,” Lilith said. “Since we’ve seen what happens to you; what happens to a mortal when The Creator demands their soul and you do not deliver? For me, at least, I recall you allowed me my life in defiance of His orders and He abandoned me. I lived in misery for many years.”
“Am I supposed to be dead?” Kenzi asked.
She struggled to speak past the gorge in her throat. “Am I just walking around here on earth with no purpose, left to whatever happens?”
Sariel lowered his head.
“You left me here to rot, to be abused over and over. That’s not love, that’s selfishness. That’s why you always came around—you didn’t love me, you felt guilty for what you did to me.” She was shaking. Her voice grew stronger and louder with anger.
“Kenzi, it wasn’t like that. I…”
“Lilith was right, you ruined my life. How could you do this to me? I trusted you, you were my friend.”
She charged at him, pounding her fists on his chest. She kicked him. The dam broke and every emotion the girl had pent up inside her all her life came flooding out to swallow them both.
CODE BLUE LABOR, DELIVERY AND RECOVERY, CODE BABY BLUE NURSERY, FLOOR 4, RAPID RESPONSE TEAM REQUESTED, ALL AVAILABLE STAFF TO LABOR AND DELIVERY. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. CODE BLUE, CODE BABY BLUE.
Mass chaos outside the room ensued. A nurse yelled something about all the dead babies.
“All the mothers, all the babies. Every patient dead!”
Kenzi looked at Lilith. The woman smiled and rubbed her very pregnant belly.
“My babies,” she said.
Sariel lunged for her but missed, she was already at the door.
“I’ll see you soon, Kenzi.”
She disappeared into the shadows.
“Kenzi, go. I must allow time to start. I’ve held it back much too long as it is. I will take care of Lilith myself. You need to run and hide. Don’t let Lilith find you and—”
Kenzi put a finger up in his face. “Don’t you ever, ever tell me what to do again. You did this to me. All of it. My whole life is a lie. It has no meaning. You. Your fault. And now, I don’t even have my rabbit’s foot. She does. Why wouldn’t you tell me there was a soul in there?”
“Because you could never release her from it. Only I know that secret. Someone must have conjured her body back. She thinks you know how to release her essence from the talisman. She may, in time, figure it out, but I will destroy her before that happens.” Sariel took a fatherly tone with Kenzi, assuring her that she’d done nothing wrong
“But what if I did release her? Me. She showed up right after I took the foot out and she killed those men in my house. Why don’t you know this?”
“How could you release her without a blood sacrifice?” He knew nothing beyond the fact that Lilith had somehow returned.
“Blood? I don’t know, there was a lot of blood there. They were beating me up and I slashed at one of the guys with the foot. It was all I had. I guess maybe that was enough blood to bring her back.” Kenzi was quiet suddenly, her anger diluted by confusion.
“It must be your own blood, sacrificed by you, followed by blood taken from an enemy,” Sariel prodded, hoping to spark something.
Her face contorted back into anger again. “Man, you are a fuck up. I’m a cutter.” She pulled the snaps open on the sleeve of her gown, revealing her shoulder and upper arm. “I’ve been using the foot for that almost since you gave it to me. Guess I wanted to be more like you. I had just finished cutting not long before I walked in on those assholes.
“When I got the chance, I tore one of their faces off with it. I keep the nails sharp. That’s when Lilith and her snake showed up. Her snake came right off her and squeezed the guys to death.”
“Kenzi, I didn’t know, I…So, she is whole then.” He sighed. This was the worst possible news.
“Yeah, well it is what it is. And good luck with your punishment because if she knows how to release demons from those things—”
“She doesn’t know that. Only I, and now you.” Sariel interrupted.
“I hope you’re right about that, because Lilith stole hundreds of your demon chains from Sheol.”
Sariel’s jaw dropped. He let go of Kenzi’s arms and she ran out into the amassing crowd.
“Enoch! You should have told me. You should have stopped her.”
The bird cawed and clacked its beak.
“Yes, of course Kenzi’s safety comes first, but this—this could be the end of us both. Lilith could actually complete her version of Revelation. She could win this war.” Sariel paced in circles around Gloria’s bedside. His hands held tightly behind his back.
The bird grunted and croaked.
“Well, if Lilith told her that, then Kenzi also knows that you swallowed that baby’s soul. So, it makes you a monster too.” He gave the bird a stern but expectant look as if daring it to disagree. “Now is not the time for bickering, Enoch.”
Enoch waddled about the room in its own circle as if considering their options.
The overhead speakers were still calling for help. Sariel absently waved his hand and the room came to life again. Within moments, the two were alone with the corpse on the bed.
What was he going to do now? What could he do to stop this?
Lilith. Damn her. All his talismans.
“Kenzi is the perfect pawn. She’ll never be safe as long as Lilith is free.”
Chapter 44: Book of Henry 1
The night nurses were much more laid back than their daylight counterparts. Even at the end of their shift, none of them showed any urgency in finishing their chores. The post op floor especially was a different place at night. Rarely new admissions, most patients sleeping, snowed by the pain meds administered by the day shift, families full of questions gone home for the night. Only vitals to take, IV bags to refill and bathroom calls to attend. The nurses played on their phones or checked out upcoming sales on line. No one looked up when he walked behind the desk to study the large dry erase board with patient initials and important stats recorded.
“You on surgery this month, Patel?” the charge nurse asked.
“Yes. Hey, Dr. Galastor wanted me to check on the wound dehiscence in 216. Can I get some supplies out? I will be unpacking it.”
“You can’t wait one more hour for day shift?” Carol Thompkins, obviously the patient’s nurse, asked.
“No. I’ve got a lot of patients to see before grand rounds, so I need to get right to it. If you would give me the code to the supply closet, I’ll get everything out and take care of it myself. I won’t keep you from your sign out.”
Carol rolled her eyes and grabbed a scrap of paper. She wrote her password to the locked cabinet and he almost felt bad for using it. She would have to answer some questions at the end of the month when they did an audit, but, by then, she wouldn’t remember why she took out all the strange supplies.
In the closet, he packed his backpack full of suture, IV bags, antibiotics, gauze pads, and anything that looked remotely helpful. Now, he would need to go fake a visit to the poor man in 216. He grabbed some more gauze and a pink basin to make it appear that he was carrying what he needed to change the man’s dressings.
“Thanks,” he said as he walked passed the desk. No one responded. He entered the room at the end of the hall. The man, initials B.G., was sleeping soundly. A large crater ran down the center of his belly. It had been filled with once white Curlex gauze which was now crusty yellow, like dried snot under a toddler’s nose. The entire wound was covered with a thin, clear tape similar to Saran Wrap. Henry stared in amazement at what the human body could endure and survive.
The man stirred. Henry put the tub with the gauze on his bedside table and checked his watch. The nurses should be busy with sign out now, so they wouldn’t see him leave. He walked out and quickly passed the desk, looking at his pager as if he’d been called hastily away.
The whole thing had taken much less time than he’d estimated. He’d hit the cafeteria for something to go with his coffee. Now that sleep was out of the question, his stomach decided to make a formal request.
He made it halfway through the sesame bagel and had yet to touch the coffee when he fell asleep in the cafeteria’s booth.
In his dream, he stood on a hill, no, a platform. As the scene grew and cleared, he saw that he was both on a hill and on a wooden stage. It was night, but a full moon gave the false sense of a serene summer’s evening while lighting the audience of dead surrounding him.
Most of the corpses were adults but there was a whole wedge of land devoted to bloated babies, plump not with breast milk, but with decay. White noise which Henry, in his dream state, first thought was ocean waves in the distance—perhaps below the hill’s horizon line—focused into a buzzing.
At the same time his brain made the connection of the buzzing to honey bees, he saw them. Only these were like no bees he had ever seen. Large rounded bugs the size of terriers with bulbous eyes and long proboscises flitted about as if weightless. Henry watched in horror as the mutant bees plunged their needle-thin snouts into the tumescent bodies and sucked. With every insectile puncture, thick, grey-brown pus popped and oozed out around the living straw.
“Death surrounds you.” The pregnant woman appeared beside him. He opened his mouth to ask what she was doing there, but smaller insects, normal house flies in appearance, buzzed his head and threatened to enter his open cavities.
“You have no business holding their lives in your hands. Your place is not in medicine Henry Patel and you know this. Look upon the dead you are responsible for.”
He shook his head. It wasn’t true. He’d made a lot of mistakes, but no one had ever died—that he knew of anyway.
“You want to farm honey, to take care of a little cottage and some clover fields. But look at your legacy, look at what your bees feed on, taste the honey that is made from the foundations you have built.” The woman held a dull, silver chalice filled with a milky, curry-colored fluid that could not possibly be honey. He shook his head again, a clear no. He refused to open his mouth.
“Then you will hang,” she said. The stage he was on clarified more in the dream, it was a gallows, and the noose was already around his neck.
“All right. I’ll drink it,” he said holding his hands up in surrender. She approached and when the cup touched his lips he parted them. The viscous fluid tasted sour and metallic. Behind that was a rotted fungal essence that triggered his gag reflex. “No, I can’t, I’ll vomit.”
“Then you’ll die,” she said, and the floor dropped out beneath him. The shocked jump of his body brought him awake. His pager beeped wildly on his hip and his phone vibrated its way across the table. Overhead, the frantic desk clerk called for manpower to the neonatal ICU for multiple code blues. The cafeteria was deserted, no one there to see that his lag in response time was due to sleep and not just coming from home post-call.
Normally, he would not be expected to respond to any hospital codes when he was off, but this was some sort of hospital emergency and all able bodies were needed. The dream was already gone from his memory when he slid out of the booth and ran to the stairwell.
Most of the staff must have either taken the elevator or else his pager had been going off for a long time and he was way too late to the party. The stairwell was just as empty as the cafeteria. Rounding the stairs on the second floor, he was almost knocked backwards when the door flew open and a body in a patient gown burst though. Her arms and palms still up in a shove position, she ran directly into Henry.
“Kenzi?” he said, shocked.
“Oh my god, Dr. Patel, I…I,” she stammered.
“What are you doing out of bed. How are you even out of bed? What’s going on?”
“Shhh, shhh,” she warned. “I gotta get out of here, can I stay at your place for a couple days, just until I get my bearings?”
