The Warlock in the white cloak and hood drifted out of the library, with something like a small suitcase under his arm. And the green blob, by now, had throbbed and shivered like living neon until it had changed into a shape that resembled an open aperture, a rimmed hole in the air but a hole made of the green light. A hole, yes, or a doorway ...

The white-garbed figure drifted past Zeihl without a word or a gesture ... and then stepped into that doorway.

The doorway began to shrink.

Zeihl cast Penelope a final smile. He knelt down and kissed the ground, and as he did so, Penelope noticed the charred arrangement of bones that seemed folded up into the middle of his back.

Wings, Penelope realized.

"Run, Penelope," the voice shined. "You will see this place again, but this is the last time you'll see me ..."

The earth began to tremble. All the strange buildings and spiring black skysc.r.a.pers around the library began to fade, and the bizarre green doorway vanished.

Zeihl stood back up.

Now, in his hand, he held a knife with a long curved silver blade and he looked up with that beautiful smile, closed his eyes, and slit his own throat.

The blood that flowed from the wound glowed bright as magma. Penelope was helpless to do anything but look on.

The Fallen Angel had told her to relish her life, but what he hadn't told her was that her life would end a second later- -when Zeihl's body exploded into a mushroom cloud of blinding white light that vaulted a hundred feet into the air, incinerating everything in a quarter-mile radius.

Including Penelope.

Chapter Five.

(I).

Ca.s.sie slept fitfully, sweating through nightmares of the Mephistopolis, of Dentata-Peds and Tentaculi, of Nectoports and City Mutilation Squads. She dreamed of taking the train from Tiberius Depot into Pogrom Park where dest.i.tute amputee demons b.u.mmed change and outdoor fountains gushed blood. She dreamed of the immense J.P. Kennedy Ghettoblocks-a slum district the size of the entire state of Texas. She dreamed of the Mephis...o...b..ilding-666 floors high-and the one time she'd actually seen Lucifer looking out of one of its narrow windows.

At least her nightmares had changed. In the past, she'd always been tormented by nightmares of her sister's suicide. Now she was merely tormented by nightmares of h.e.l.l.

But she'd had one more dream, too, hadn't she?

Angelese, she recalled, sitting up now in the ward bed. She rubbed sleep from her eyes and chuckled to herself. The girl with snow-white hair. An angel. But why would Ca.s.sie dream of something so strange? And had it really been a dream? I'm from an Order of the Seraphim, the image in the water had told her, a very special order. Those from my order willingly descend from the Rapture.

With all that had happened to her over the last year, Ca.s.sie had long-since stopped fretting over which impressions in her life were real and which were dreams. She couldn't trust her senses anymore. Since learning she was an Etheress? Since visiting h.e.l.l? She wished it could all be a dream but she knew it wasn't.

She wished she really was insane-as the people in this clinic thought. At least then she wouldn't have to worry about anything.

I should have asked her, though, she thought now, dream or not. I should have asked Angelese why any angel would willingly leave heaven.

"Because it's our job," a voice replied from no particular place in the room. "It's our duty."

Ca.s.sie rubbed her face. Here we go again. "Your duty to what?"

"Our duty to G.o.d. We're his spies." A chuckle. "We're, like, his commandos."

Ca.s.sie got up off the bed. She generally only slept in bra and panties, and she immodestly slipped them off and put them in the small laundry hamper they'd given her.

"Nice tattoo," the voice said.

Ca.s.sie frowned at the inanity of the situation. A disembodied voice just told me I have a nice tattoo. She looked down at it, as if she even doubted the tattoo's existence. It was a tiny half-rainbow that encircled her navel. She'd gotten it at a Goth parlor in D.C. with Lissa; they'd agreed to both get tattoos the same day.

"My sister has one too," Ca.s.sie responded. "It's- "A garland of barbed wire around her navel," Angelese answered. "You should see my tattoos."

"Oh, angels have tattoos?"

"Sure, but mine are special. They're devotional."

Ca.s.sie smirked. Angelese never seemed to speak in anything but puzzles. "How did you know that my sister has a barbed wire tattoo around her navel?" she asked next.

"I've seen her a few times."

The comment locked Ca.s.sie in place, unmindful of her nakedness. "You've seen my sister?"

"Um-hmm."

"Where is she?"

"You know where she is. She's in the Mephistopolis."

Ca.s.sie was trembling. "Yes, but where in the Mephistopolis?"

"I'm not sure right now."

"But you just said you saw her!"

"I saw her a few times, but I don't know exactly where she was. We're waiting for more intelligence reports about her. I trance-channel into h.e.l.l all the time, all the Caliginauts do."

"What? You trance-"

"Think of it as an out-of-body experience, that sort of thing. Some humans can do it, and the same goes for angels. That's one of the first things they teach us how to do when we're inducted into the Order. We channel our spirits out of our physical bodies, can go anywhere, including h.e.l.l."

"Why?" Ca.s.sie demanded. "Why would angels go to h.e.l.l?"

"Scouting missions," she was simply answered.

Ca.s.sie pulled on her robe, knowing that someone would be by soon to escort her to the showers. Now she was intrigued in spite of her aggravation. "Your spirit has been to h.e.l.l?"

"My soul, yes."

"But not your body?"

"No."

"Why not? Why doesn't G.o.d just send all his angels down there and depose Lucifer?"

"I can't tell you."

Ca.s.sie looked around the room, trying to decide where the voice had come from. This is probably all bulls.h.i.t. There's probably a little speaker hidden in the room, and some p.r.i.c.k's having a real laugh right now.

But if that were the case, what had she seen last night? If someone was trying to trick her, or make her think she was insane, how could they have made her see the reflection last night in the water in her hands?

"You know I'm not a dream, Ca.s.sie, and you know I'm not a trick," Angelese's faceless voice said next. "You know that, right? You know that you really are an Etheress, right?"

"Yes," Ca.s.sie finally had to admit.

"Good, 'cos if you didn't know that, then we'd have a long road ahead of us, and there isn't time."

"Time for what-" Ca.s.sie shook her head in an abrupt frustration. "Look, this is really freaking me out. It just bugs me."

"What?"

"What? Talking to a disembodied voice, that's what. Maybe I'm weird but when I'm talking to someone, I'm kind of used to seeing that person's face along with the conversation. Can we do that thing we did last night? What did you call it?"

"A Transference Charm," Angelese reminded her. "Let's just wait a minute and we'll be able to do a better one."

"Where?"

"In the shower. He's coming now."

More frustration. "How do you know-"

Three solid raps sounded on the door. "Hey, Ca.s.sie, it's me, R.J. Lemme know when it's okay to come in."

Ca.s.sie's brow creased; she sashed her robe. "You can come in now."

The lock rattled as the door was unlocked. R.J. entered, smiling, his Notre Dame hat pushed up on his head. "Time for the good ole Personal Hygiene block."

"Yeah, I know, and then Sustenance Block, right?" Ca.s.sie asked a bit sarcastically. "Why can't you psych guys just call it breakfast?"

"Because Sustenance Block sounds much more therapeutic on the billing invoices."

Ca.s.sie followed him out, her flip-flops flopping. One of her dead father's life-insurance policies covered the bills here, overseen by his executors-a bunch of attorneys back in D.C.

"How are you feeling?" R.J. asked. He was tall, broad shouldered, and his shadow seemed ma.s.sive as she walked behind him.

"How do I feel?" Ca.s.sie replied. More sarcasm was in order. "Like a perfectly sane girl being kept against her will in a private psychiatric clinic only because the bills are paid on time."

"That's the spirit," R.J. chuckled. "Did you get a good night's sleep?"

"No."

"More nightmares?"

"Yeah."

"Of your sister's suicide?"

"Nope."

The amiable psych tech looked over his shoulder. "You know, I am a qualified psychologist."

"Really? Not just a Notre Dame fan?"

"I'm a Cincinnati Reds fan too. But you should still want your father's executors to get their money's worth. I might be able to help you interpret your nightmares. Then you can reflect on those interpretations. It's called psychotherapy."

"You really want to know what my nightmares were about?"

"Sure."

"I dreamed of the time I took the sulphur-powered train from the Outer Sector at Tiberius Station to Pogrom Park. It's near the Riverwalk section of the Mephistopolis. On the train, I saw a girl give birth to a mongrel baby that had fangs and horns coming out of its head. When its head was all the way out, it looked at me and barked, like a dog. I ran back to my cabin when the baby came all the way out and started nursing."

"And you believe that," R.J. said, not asked.

"Yep. I was there. I saw it. There's nothing to disbelieve."

"You know, Ca.s.sie, I believe that you believe that."

Ca.s.sie just nodded with the same derision she'd known since they'd brought her here. "Yeah, I know, Dr. Freud. You believe that I believe the delusion."

R.J. stopped and turned, touched her arm to elicit her attention. "It's not quite that at all, is it? Your case is much more complex."

"Because I'm pa.s.sing all your d.a.m.n polygraphs, right?"

"That's part of it but I'm sure there's a lot more. We're going to find out. We really do want to help you, you know." Then he smiled again. "Oh, and I'm not a Freudian. Freud was an erotopathic c.o.ke-head who was totally full of s.h.i.t."

Ca.s.sie laughed. Thank G.o.d somebody in this joint's got a sense of humor. She pa.s.sed a couple of closed doors with stenciled letters on chicken-wire windows. NARCO-a.n.a.lYSIS, one read. OCCUPATIONAL THERAPY, DISPENSARY, SLEEP-DISORDER LAB, read some others. A last one read ECT. She saw Dr. Morse sitting at a desk beyond the gla.s.s.

"Hey, R.J.? What's ECT?"

"Electro-Convulsant Therapy."

"You mean shock treatment?"

"Um-hmm. It's not like in the movies, Ca.s.sie. It's painless, and it's still very useful in treating serious depression." He looked back at her again. "But you're not depressed, so you don't have to worry about it, right?"

"You say so. So what is my diagnosis, doc?"

"Clinically?"

"Yeah."