31.2

 

“That should be impossible.” The Nephilim bites his lip in a curiously human gesture.

“Who violated you? Why are you empty?” Steve looks confused

Paul listens to something the assistant is whispering in his ear. He looks toward Roisin. “Who did anyway?” He frowns for a moment. “Did what? Are you taking to Drawing Pad? Because you need to remember we mere mortals can’t hear him.”

“Yes, Sorry.” Roisin wiped her eyes on the cuff of her sleeve and took several deep breaths. When her heartbeat had slowed to a level where she wasn’t afraid of it beating so hard it bounced right out of her chest, she began to speak.

“I lost the mantle of knowledge,” she says. “Not lost it like you’d lose a set of keys, more like lost it because it was ripped out of my chest from someone who shouldn’t have been able to do that. Where’s the Artist? I need to warn him that his mantle may also be in danger.”

Paul absently scratches at an angry rash on his neck. “You said he was a Horseman?”

“Pestilence, yes. Where is he?”

“He probably got called away. There’s a smallpox outbreak in Wisconsin. Some one bred it specifically as a bio-weapon, they think. Ditto for Anthrax.”

“Those were both diseases that had been eradicated.”

“Seems there are some resurrectionists in our midst. Not least the American Secretary of Health, who decided that inoculations weren’t worth the zero zero one percent risk of autism in children.”

“I hadn’t heard that.” Roisin shakes her head. “Anyway, I’m mortal again. I always thought angels were the nice guys, you know? All clad in white to save us from the dark designs of the Devil? Turns out they’re worse money grabbers than all the billionaires put together, only the currency they’re fighting for is souls.” She smiles thinly. “And mantles, apparently. That’s why I need to warn Pestilence.”

“We don’t know where the Artist has gone.” Steve raises his eyebrows at the assistant, who shrugs in agreement. “We thought he went to free the other Nephilim, now that you’ve let this one free.”

“Doesn’t your man here have a mantle as well?” Paul nodded at the Nephilim, who closed his arms around himself.

Rosin looked at him sadly. “Yes. Unfortunately, despite being half-angel, he’s in no position to defend it if Hasmed comes.”

“And who is Hasmed?” Steve stood again, since squatting next to Roisin wasn’t doing his any favours. “I’m guessing at another angel, by your reference.”

“Not one I’ve heard of,” Paul says, “and I thought I knew all the angel’s names.”

“All one hundred and forty-four thousand of them?” Roisin is regaining her sense of humour. “I bet you aced Art History.”

“Not really.” Paul shrugs. “I know all the big ones.”

“Hasmed is one of the biggest. They call him the Angel of Annihilation. His job is to eradicate whatever appears on the earth that hasn’t already been specifically in God’s design. I say God, but they generally call Him ‘the Creator.’”

“Makes sense, I suppose. You can never call your boss by their first name. Ha-ha”

No-one else laughed.

The Nephilim interjected with a question: “How could he take your mantle, though? I don’t understand. It’s not his job to carry a mantle.”

Roisin reached out and placed her hand on his arm. “You’ll have to talk out loud. The others can’t hear what you’re saying, and them my reply doesn’t make sense either.”

“Sorry.” The Nephilim’s voice sounds too high a pitch for someone over seven feet tall. “I said that Hasmed should not have been able to take the mantle from her, since it is not a job he was created for.” He takes a breath. “And my name is Namaan, not Draw Inpad.”

Paul glances at Steve, who shakes his head. “I heard him that time,” he says, “but I’ve no idea what language that was, let alone what he said.”

“It was Hebrew. Or Ancient Hebrew.“ Steve shakes his head. “I don’t understand it either, though I did recognise something about ‘being good.’”

“And thus, the reason I was keeping silent.” Namaan smiles ruefully, shaking his head. “What are we to do?” He pushes both sets of fingers into his chest and pulls the ribs outward, several of them snapping as they reach their breaking point and exposes the mantle beneath the mantle of Famine between his hands — the mantle she once carried, the mantle she abandoned, the mantle that still remembers her.

It pulses faintly, as though recognising her.

“It wants you to take it.”