Bedlam
As soon as we stepped outside the entry to Haven, Siren closed her eyes and scanned the world for Mephistopheles. “He’s here. On Earth, I mean. British Museum. Probably staring at the Rosetta Stone.”
“What? Why? And how do you know that?”
Siren gave her head a small shake. “You could know where he was too if you paid attention. But I assume you’re asking why about the Rosetta Stone. He likes it, says it’s a miracle of human ingenuity. As to why I know, well, Meph and I have a history. We both lost everyone we cared about. He blames me. I blame him. And sometimes, we talk to each other about stupid things like the Rosetta Stone.”
“Oh.”
“Don’t go thinking I’m about to switch sides, though. Mephistopheles is an evil son of a bitch, and I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw Mount Rushmore.” She sighed. “But he is the most powerful information broker on either side of the eternal divide, so he’ll probably trade what he knows about the war for something we know.”
Do we know anything?
People are constantly telling me I know nothing. But Siren’s smarter than me.
“Come on.” She reached out as if about to tug on my sleeve then seemed to think better of it and drew her hand back. “No sense waiting.”
Before we could teleport out, a woman clad in green Renaissance garb with a green wreath around her head appeared before us, and I got the strangest sense of déjà vu.
Hey, last time Keziel showed up like this, she tried to seduce you to distract you from saving Khet, remember?
Yes, yes, I do. And I’m still pissed about it and everything that came after.
What made her think that bangs were a good look for her, anyway?
Especially with that stupid wreath. They’re all tangled up in it.
I nodded at myself over Keziel’s shoulder—jerk didn’t even acknowledge me—then turned my back on the alleged angel of balance and grabbed Siren’s arm. “Okay, I’m ready to go.”
“Bedlam, I need to talk to you.” Had Keziel’s voice always been that nasal and grating? “It’s about the fate of Heaven, so it would be nice if we could let bygones be bygones.”
“Do you hear something, Siren?” I asked. “It’s like some kind of humming noise, like a buzz, buzz, buzz. Maybe I should smack it like a mosquito and make it go away.”
“Very funny, Bedlam. Very mature.” I could almost hear Keziel cross her arms. “You can pretend all you want, but we are going to have a conversation about what you’ve done here right now. You can be as mad at me as you want, but that’s no excuse for attacking Heaven.”
I waited for the familiar irritation with her to rise, the frustration that she would automatically assume I was responsible for the attack, and annoyance that she wouldn’t give me the benefit of the doubt. I knew that any moment, I would be unable to stop my head from whipping over to her and my voice from sniping at her general horribleness.
But it didn’t come. I felt… nothing, except maybe that irritated buzzing I described, like someone else, some unimportant angel like Rachel or Sybil, chastised me. “Don’t have time for this, Kezi. Archdemons to visit, ancient translation stones to see.” I started to blink out.
“Don’t you ignore me!” Keziel grabbed my arm, anchoring me to the cliff outside of the Haven. “You are in the wrong here, and you are going to have to justify yourself to me if you ever want me to listen to you again.”
Seems to me like she’s the one who wants someone to listen to her.
Wow, she sounds so desperate. Do I usually sound like that?
You should probably do something to shut her up, or you’re going to have to listen to the Keziel mosquito for the rest of this crisis.
Too bad it wouldn’t be civilized to smack her.
“Oh, here we go.” Siren didn’t bother to lower her voice so that we couldn’t hear. “I’ll be over by the cliff with my fingers in my ears ready to jump if you get too loud.”
I shook my arm out of Keziel’s grasp and looked her straight in the eye. “Please shut up. If the punishment is that you never talk to me again, that really sounds more like a reward than anything.”
She cocked her head to the side. “You don’t mean that.”
“No, I really do.” I took a deep breath and schooled my face into the most serious expression I could manage. I’m pretty sure a little annoyance crept in. “I don’t care if I never talk to you again as long as I live.”
“Oh, for light’s sake!” She wrinkled her nose. “Lying isn’t going to get you anywhere. No one believes you.”
“You can’t lie in my presence.” Siren did have her fingers in her ears, but since the cliff edge was only a few feet from us, her efforts at ignoring us seemed to have failed.
“Wait, what? It has to be a lie.” Keziel’s expression matched her tone, and both spoke of a horror so deep that I felt like maybe I should have been nicer to her.
Broke up with you because of a promise to someone else, then broke her most important promise to you.
Right.
Siren took her fingers out of her ears. “What has to be a lie? Honestly, I wasn’t paying attention to what you were saying. It’s just kind of an auto-response on my part when someone accuses someone else of lying.”
Keziel stepped up next to me, so close I could feel the heat of her body. But instead of wanting to lean into it, I wanted to jerk away. “But he just said he didn’t care if he never talked to me again.”
Wait. Is that true?
It felt true when I said it.
Yeah, but you say it all the time.
True. I guess we’ll have to test this.
I turned around and once more met the gaze of the woman who was definitely taking up too much of my airspace. “I don’t love you, Keziel.”
Light forsake me.
How is this even possible?
It’s like God and the cosmos finally had mercy on me…
Mercy?
Ah, well. There’s your answer.
What had Lethe said to me? That she was giving me a present, and it was something I would like.
I started to laugh. “Best. Present. Ever.”
Siren squinted at me. “How did this happen?”
I gave my shoulders an exaggerated shrug and wondered if that counted as a lie. Lethe had specifically said she wasn’t handing this favor out to everyone, and I didn’t want to get everyone’s hopes up only to have them crushed by banshee wails. Not that I didn’t think Lethe shouldn’t be handing this present out all around. It would be the most life-altering thing to happen to angel-kind, and she needed to do it. But she was an archdemon, so I’d need to work pretty hard to find a way to convince her to be generous.
Siren shoved me in the arm. “Seriously, Bedlam, you have to know who—”
“Who what?” Keziel’s voice trembled. “Who saved him from the torture of loving somebody as horrible as me?”
Siren looked puzzled at first, but then her face reddened. “Oh, please, yes, let’s make this about who has suffered most in love. My husband, as you may or may not recall, died nine thousand years ago.”
Keziel made a dismissive noise. “Like that even bothers you. Everyone knows you don’t have real emotions.”
Maybe I should intercede.
Bad idea for two reasons.
I don’t want to get in between two women fighting like cats over what seems like nothing but is probably a long-standing conflict?
Well, that and the slightly less misogynistic reason that you really don’t want them to turn the direction of the conversation to you and how you’re magically not in love with Keziel anymore.
Which is the most awesome thing ever.
I don’t disagree. But pretty soon, they’re going to remember what this argument is really about.
Siren bared her teeth. “Just because I don’t spend all my time harping to other people about what an epic tragedy my life is like some people doesn’t mean I don’t have feelings.”
“I don’t harp to everyone!” Keziel’s nostrils flared. “I just like to make everything as nice and beautiful as possible and keep everything in order. There’s nothing wrong with that!”
“Nothing wrong except that the world isn’t a nice place, and pretending it is doesn’t solve any problems. It just makes them—” Siren cut herself off and closed her eyes. She appeared to be taking deep breaths to center herself. “We need to focus. All of Heaven is at stake. The reason I want to know how Bedlam stopped loving you is that that kind of information will make Mephistopheles tell us anything we want to know.”
“Mephistopheles!” I suspected that Keziel had so many negative emotions right now that she didn’t know which ones to focus on. So she decided to focus on the demon. “You’re trucking with demons now, Siren? You need to get away—”
When angels come from Heaven to Earth, the physical sensation is one of falling, but since usually we do the falling in spirit form, we wait till we’re close enough to the ground to appear standing. Raphael was still a good five feet from the ground when he appeared. “Keziel! Siren! Help!”
I stared at the copper-haired angel prone at my feet.
Thank you, God.
And may this interruption last long enough that everyone forgets I’m not in love with Keziel.
Which is still the best news ever.
Siren crouched down by Raphael, instantly alert. “What’s wrong?”
“Something’s wrong with Kikkiel!” Raphael’s eyes had ballooned so that I could see quite a bit of white.
“There’s an angel named Kikki?” I asked. “Is she some kind of angel whore?”
Keziel glared at me. “She’s a Handmaiden.”
“So yes, then.”
“Show me.” Siren grabbed Raphael’s arm, and they morphed into spirit form, likely heading for Heaven. I didn’t stop to see what Keziel was doing before I followed.
Heaven looked pretty much the way it had when I had left. I didn’t see Gabriel in the entry hall, but a quick glance to my left told me that he was working on waking Rachel. I hurried over to where Raphael and Siren crouched over the tiny, terrified girl who had given me the flower. She was still sleeping, like the rest of the angels, but her body seized with such violent spasms, I worried she might hurt herself.
“Fuck,” said Siren.
Keziel’s clothes rustled behind me. “Siren!”
“What?” Siren spread out her arms. “Sometimes it’s the only appropriate word for a situation.”
Raphael’s hands shook. “What are we going to do?”
I rose up on my tiptoes then settled back down. “Keziel has to go into her head and get her out.”
“What?” Keziel’s eyes bugged. “Why me?”
Siren’s look said she thought Keziel was an idiot, though I suspected that she spent more time wearing that expression than not. “Because you’re the almighty leader of the Handmaidens. You direct them in their highly important functions, like doing their hair and kowtowing to angel dignitaries and whatnot.”
Keziel knelt next to Kikkiel. “Is the sarcasm really necessary?”
“No. It’s an added bonus that comes automatically with my conversation when we’re in a dire situation, particularly one that I can’t do anything about.” Siren gestured at Kikkiel. “Now, are you going to waste more time being testy with me, or are you going to do something to help?”
Keziel narrowed her eyes. “How do I get inside her head?”
I gave her a brief rundown of the process, and she gave a firm nod and knelt down by Kikkiel’s head.
After a minute, I decided I’d better check to see if it was working. “Kezi?”
When she didn’t answer, I figured she had successfully entered Kikkiel’s mind. I bounced up and down on my toes a few times, wishing that Keziel would hurry.
I turned to my conscious companions. “So anybody heard any good new music lately? I hear P!nk’s got a new one out, but I haven’t heard it yet.”
Siren glared at me, probably for worrying about something trivial in the middle of a crisis, but Raphael answered. “I heard a new Kelly Clarkson song the other day.”
Either Siren had a hairball, or she felt the same way about Kelly Clarkson that I did.
“Aw, Sunshine, look at that. We’ve got something in common. We can not like Kelly Clarkson together!”
“‘Not like’ is kind of strong.” Siren shrugged. “She’s just so neutral. I have a hard time imagining anyone having strong opinions about her.”
“I loathe and despise her.” I clenched my fists to demonstrate the severity of my ire. “Every time I hear her voice, it’s like fingernails running down a blackboard in my brain.”
“I didn’t think the new one was so bad,” Raphael said.
I was about to inform him of how very wrong I knew him to be when Keziel threw her head back and wrenched her body away from Kikkiel. Every day of my life before this, I would have fallen to my knees in front of her, desperate to see if she was okay. But now, I waited patiently for her to catch her breath so we could find out what was going on.
Keziel took a few deep breaths and looked up at us. “She won’t come out.”
Raphael sat down beside her and patted her back. “What did you see?”
Keziel looked straight at me. “You. I saw you, Bedlam—some horrible monstrous version of you laughing and attacking her in the night.”
Siren tapped a finger against her leg. “That makes sense. I mean, if we’re all seeing what scares us the most, I imagine a lot of people are seeing Bedlam. His return is the biggest thing to happen in Heaven in a long time, and I can’t think of anyone who’s very happy about it.”
I nodded. “Including me.”
Keziel looked daggers at me, and I suspected that she wanted to say something about how Heaven was the noblest goal of all creatures or something. “Anyway, I found Kikkiel in there. She was all huddled up in a quivering ball in her brain. I tried to talk to her, to get her to come out, but she wouldn’t respond. It’s like she had a total breakdown in her head, and I don’t know if there’s any way to get her out.”
Siren’s finger tapped at a faster rate. “That is… bad. That is very bad.” She appeared to think for a moment, then she snapped her head up. “We need to find out if this is happening to anyone else.”
Without waiting to see if we would follow, she turned on her heel and walked toward Rachel’s training room. The rest of us traipsed after her. She stopped only long enough among the lines of Warrior angels, who had been in perfect formation when they passed out, to point to one male angel who seized the way Kikkiel had.
When she crossed into the prayer center, she moved up and down the rows of tables to indicate three further angels who had the unfortunate reaction to the attack. I expected her to continue into the meditation chamber, but she spun around and faced us.
She pointed to each of us in turn. “Keziel, wake up the rest of the Handmaidens. Raphael, fill Gabriel in when he wakes up. And tell him to hurry. Bedlam, you’re with me.” She turned and strode back toward the Warrior training room.
I tagged along behind her, struggling to keep up despite the relative length of our legs. “What are we going to do?”
Siren didn’t look back. “We’re going to find Mephistopheles. We’re going to take care of this.”
Is it just me, or did that sound a little ominous?
It’s not just you.