The hospitals are full. We have patients on the floor, in the halls. They’re dying there. And the ones that don’t die…Look. My advice? As soon as you start vomiting black, or feel your organs moving inside you, the only thing I can recommend is euthanasia.
—Anonymous nurse at West Acheson Medical Center
Six wings. Death on his pale horse. The monster of the sea and blasphemy.
The wrath of the Lamb.
I chase Seraph.
At first, I’m not sure how. I spend the rest of the day reciting Revelation from memory, and when I get to Revelation 22:20—Even so, come, Lord Jesus—I rewind back to the top. The end times, measuring the Kingdom of Heaven, the woman in labor, the dragon, and the bride of the Lord. I whisper to nothing, trying to find some connection to the disease under my skin. I run my tongue over my teeth, chew on my nails, grind the bones in my hands together until they hurt. I take a wad of rags from under my pillow and cough up rot.
Is it visions of the end, or the Flood eating holes in my brain? Seraph is burning through me, readying my insides for the inevitable shattering of my human form into something blessed. It’s reached my gray matter, burrowed between my synapses, and gotten into the lobes, the neurons, all the little pieces of me, and maybe that’s why, when I squeeze my eyes shut and pray, I am given the gift of sight.
Dead New Nazareth and the blood-pink river. The crows. The trees and the underbrush. The beast of fangs, feathers, and flesh across the stream, dappled in sunlight and shadow, baring its teeth. The angel that gave the vision to John of Patmos, and the angel that gives this to me: a body twisted under God’s will into something else, winged and sacred.
Isaiah 6:2—And above him stood the seraphim. Among the trees is Seraph.
I wade into the water and climb up onto the other bank, squeezing between trees. Seraph rears back and snarls, but I whisper, “You don’t scare me.” I can make out more of it now—its blazing white eyes, the gleam of the sun on its teeth—but not much else before it clamors into the branches of old-growth trees, sending down a rain of twigs and brown leaves, a massive winding shadow disappearing farther into New Nazareth.
I follow and come out from the trees into the back of campus. The old university has been scrubbed clean of all things secular, transformed into a liminal space between the old world and our next life in the Kingdom of Heaven. For once, it lies silent. The soldier preaching in the plaza is gone. The bell doesn’t ring to call the faithful to worship. There are no women walking to the parking lots made fields, no children running through the grass. But there are still blessings painted across sprawling windows, concrete paths winding through towering buildings, trees wavering in the breeze. This was home for five years. I know New Nazareth better than I know myself.
The shadow of Seraph digs its claws into the side of a building and hauls itself up to the roof. I follow.
I’ve never chased anything like this, not really. Theo chased me, and I let him, both now and when we first fell in love. Dad chased freedom for both of us in Acresfield County, and I just held on to his sleeve. I barely even chased the idea that I might be a boy. I didn’t want to think about why I never felt at home in my skin, why my name never felt like mine, why I was so apathetic about everything the Angels said a girl should be. I thought I was tired of an Angel’s womanhood, of loyalty and purity, of all the terrible things they tried to cram into our heads. But that was never enough, all the excuses were never enough, and dysphoria had to wrap its hands around my neck and hold me down, baptism in drowning, before I faced the fact that living as a girl would kill me long before the Angels did.
My boyhood threatened to destroy me unless I looked it in the eye. I’m not going to let Seraph do that to me too.
I follow Seraph into the heart of campus, where towering buildings encircle the student union. I throw open the glass doors and step through the mess of chairs in the old food court, up the spiral steps to the fourth floor and through a hidden staircase to the roof.
Up here, Seraph sits on the other side of the skylight, a towering shadow backlit by the sun. A massive creature of wings and sharp edges. Diseased flesh and exposed muscle.
How close do I have to get? What do I have to do to face it? Whisper across the roof, hold its warped face in my hands, look into its eyes and bare my own teeth?
I pause, watching. A long tail made of sinew and bone wraps around its hunched body. I squint against the sun, and I can’t make out any of its features, except the hissing of breath and the flutter of so many wings.
I say, “I’m here, you son of a bitch. What do you want?”
Seraph lunges across the skylight and smashes us both through the glass.
I wake up with a piece of glass in my mouth.
I roll off the mattress and hit the cold, waxed floor, kicking my sheets and trying to spit out blood. Nothing comes out. Nothing? I stare at the ground, but it’s night, it’s dark, and I can’t see anything.
There’s glass stuck in my mouth.
I run my tongue over my teeth, and it snags on my top left canine. It wasn’t always this big. It’s scraped my upper lip raw. I didn’t think I had another smaller, normal tooth smashed backward to make room for it, and I didn’t think it was as sharp as—
As sharp as shattered glass.
For the word of God—it is sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow.
I bolt from my room. I trip over the sheets spilling out from the little apartments and almost run into the gym doors trying to open them. I grab a box of tools from the supply closet, I’ll need tools for this, and the only place to hide is the bathroom at the back of the building. Nobody uses it since there’s no water. It’ll be safe there.
I paw open the door and slam the lock into place behind me. The only light comes in from a small slit window just above the toilet, the moon trickling in lazily. Good. I sit on the floor and squeeze my eyes shut.
It’s Seraph. It’s the Flood pushing outward. A tooth, like my nails and gums and the red rims around my eyes. Like the one Nick pried out of the Grace.
Let all the earth fear the Lord. I tear open the tool bag and dump out everything. Let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of Him.
There. Pliers.
Breathe. Okay. Knee up, elbow propped against it, put the pliers against the jagged Grace-tooth sticking out from my gums, destroying my lips and mouth. People pulled teeth all the time before anesthesia was invented. It can’t be that hard, can it? I clamp the pliers around the tooth. Don’t be a bitch, get it over with, bury the tooth in the courtyard, and deal with it. Breathe. Just do it.
I yank. The pliers scrape all the way down and punch me in the knee. I stare at the empty metal clamped in my hand, dazed. It didn’t work.
Of course it’s not going to be that easy. This is just the first of many. What am I going to do, tear out all of my teeth as they grow in? One by one?
I groan hysterically and press the back of my head against the wall. Maybe if I push out instead of pulling down, I can snap it off. There’s a small, strange sound deep in my throat, almost like the wheezing Grace noises I made while pinning Alex to the ground.
On three. One, two—
Fear the Lord and depart from evil.
The sound is like bones breaking. Like Trevor being crushed against the road. A bullet of pain shoots up my skull. Blood gushes from my mouth and cascades down my chin. My tooth skitters across the floor.
Holy shit. Holy shit. I tear handfuls of ancient toilet paper from the dispenser and jam them into my mouth. Blood pools in my throat. It soaks through the paper as quickly as I put it in my mouth, and I grab another handful, trying not to choke in pain when it snags on exposed nerves.
But something isn’t right.
My hands are numb. My mouth still feels too heavy, too full. In the dim light of the bathroom, I pull myself forward, groping across the floor. The tooth clatters away and comes to rest in the grout between two cracked tiles.
Oh.
Fear the wrath of the Lamb. Fear the wrath of the Lamb.
The tooth on the floor is small. And round. And not sharp at all.
In what world has my God ever been a benevolent one?
I tilt my head forward so I don’t choke on the blood the way I choked on Mom’s words, on the bruises Theo left on my wrists. The Grace-tooth is still in my mouth, taunting.
FEAR THE WRATH OF THE LAMB.
Seraph is here, and it’s inside me, and—just like my dysphoria holding my head underwater, demanding to be acknowledged before it drowned me—it’s only getting worse.
There’s nothing I can do.
