These feathers are a promise. Do you promise to do the works of God and light His fires? Do you promise to be His hands on this earth, no matter the cost? Keep your promise close. Remember that it can be taken away.
—The general of New Nazareth
Nick wakes up, and Benji isn’t there.
He and Benji turned in a few hours ago, together. Together. That was the key word. Benji was sick, and Nick was going to keep an eye on him. He wasn’t leaving his friend alone. Benji was his friend, and they’d hurt each other, and now they were trying to make it right. Even if he couldn’t get words to come out the way they should, even if saying sorry didn’t come naturally to either of them, that was something he knew he could do.
But now Benji isn’t here. Nick reaches over to the balled-up jacket on the other side of the copy room that Benji had been using as a pillow. It’s still warm. He hasn’t been gone long.
Maybe he got sick again? Nick grabs a bottle of water and heads to the courtyard, practicing what he’s going to say when he finds him. He can’t say, Are you sick? because that’ll be obvious. Maybe, Are you okay? But the answer has been “No” for so long, what’s the point in that?
Benji. So instead he says the name over and over. Not Seraph. Benji. He, him, his, not it. Benji’s real name comes so much easier than any other name ever did, and it is a relief to let go of the wrong pronouns. The actual ones are a blessing because they are the truth, and as much time as Nick spends lying, the truth is beautiful.
How could he ever have thought he could turn Benji over to the Vanguard? The moment he looked Benji in the eyes and refused, said they didn’t have the ears, said they couldn’t afford the Vanguard’s help, it was a relief like drinking holy water. He wouldn’t have to be a monster. It was proof he still knew the value of a human life, no matter how much the Angels tried to beat that out of him.
Fuck them.
There are some people awake in the lobby when Nick passes through. Sarmat is on guard duty, face smushed into his hand. Probably waiting for Calvin to come back. Nick will offer to let Salvador and Aisha decide if Calvin is allowed to step foot within the group again; it’s only fitting.
“Have you seen Benji?” Nick asks Sarmat.
“Benji?” Sarmat holds up a hand to his chest. “Brown hair, yea big?”
“Yes.”
“I think so?” Sarmat points in the direction Nick just came from. The window to the courtyard, as suspected. “Didn’t look like he was in a good mood, though. Everything okay?”
“It’s fine,” Nick lies. “Thank you.”
But the courtyard is empty. He checks the shadows by the grave, ducks inside the ALC, even stops by the Grace corpse. Benji isn’t there.
That’s how Nick finds himself on the sidewalk just beyond the broken fence, rolling his beads between his hands. Maybe Benji’s just going to the bathroom. It’s no big deal. Benji’s not a little kid. Well, he’s little, but he’s not a kid, not really. He’s practically grown in the grand scheme of things. Benji is allowed to do what he wants.
God. He deserved it when Benji yelled at him. What kind of person is he anyway, keeping a sick boy tucked away as a possible sacrifice, a living backup plan? Pretending Benji isn’t a person when so many people have done the same to him? Erin was right, like she always is. Hadn’t he spent years begging to be seen as anything but a horrific collection of fuckups? That he wasn’t just the mistakes he was made of and his parents’ condescending pity and God, I’m a person, I’m a person too?
Nick almost laughs. He doesn’t laugh much, because it comes out weird, but he does because there’s no one around to listen. What the fuck is wrong with him? What the fuck is wrong with him—
In the distance, at the far end of the street, right where his vision ends: movement.
Nick stops. Every nerve narrows to that single pinprick.
A dark form stumbling away.
Nick runs back to the bank for exactly the amount of time it takes to grab a pistol, an extra mask, and some bobby pins.
He doesn’t know much about people, but he knows a hell of a lot about anger. He knows what anger will make people do.
God, he knows that much.
The monster Nick finds halfway between the ALC and Reformation Faith Evangelical Church does not look much like Benji at all.
Consciously, Nick—hiding in the shadow of a pickup truck and digging his nails into the corner of his eye to calm down, just calm down—knows this thing is Benji. This thing has Benji’s hair, Benji’s tiny body, Benji’s clothes. This thing looks like Sister Kipling took out all of Benji’s insides and sewed a wolf under his skin, and it’s only now that Nick is seeing it for the first time.
It’s not him, but it is, and Nick is transfixed.
Benji’s eyes are locked on the death squad just yards from him, ghosts with blood on their robes praying to God. Their guns are down. Their eyes are closed in the shining glory of the Lord, the invisible light beaming in their chests in the darkness of night. Nick knows the type. Their job is to flush out survivors like vermin. They’re soldiers who can’t be trusted with anything else, the ones too bloodthirsty to guard caravans, the gates, or the bridge. The ones New Nazareth can afford to lose, the ones they unleash like rabid dogs to clean up what the Flood, mass shootings, executions, and suicide attacks missed on Judgment Day and every day after.
No matter how expendable these Angels are, Benji can’t take six full-grown men on his own, he can’t—
As soon as the thought crosses Nick’s mind, Benji lunges from the shadows and sinks his teeth into a soldier’s throat.
Everything else turns off like a switch.
Nick lifts his pistol. At least the Angels taught him something.
CRACK. He drops the Angel closest to him—aiming between the shoulders, right above where the spine emerges from the Kevlar vest under the robe. The bullet casing spits from the gun and hits the ground with a distinctive clink.
Nick counts his rounds. One.
The man with teeth in his neck gurgles, and Benji rears back with a mouthful of flesh, a spray of red following in an arc through the space between them.
This is the easy part. This is what Nick is good at.
CRACK. Clink. Two. The bullet hits a thigh and distracts the soldier just enough for Benji to grab him by the face and smash him into the brick storefront. Nick counts the shells and not the bodies because it’s what the general taught him, saying the number should be the same anyway.
Nick counts Benji’s “shells” too. Three, four. Benji isn’t tall enough to reach any important vein in the next neck, so he tears open a forearm instead, right where the brachial artery splits. The amount of blood is impressive. Five. A bullet to the side of the head. Six. A hand shoved into a mouth and the jaw snapped like a tree limb cracking from the trunk. The Angel screams and chokes, and Benji tears it off the rest of the way. The Angel stumbles once, twice, grasping for his face, before finally falling. He coughs and writhes, and Benji just watches.
Then, after the Angel gasps one last time, blessed quiet.
The world creeps back in, past the lockdown clamping Nick’s senses, the adrenaline easing its grip. The rustle of debris, the flutter of robes, his own breath.
It’s him and Benji now.
Benji isn’t what he used to be. He stares at the bodies on the ground like he’s trying to figure out where the bullet wounds on the corpses came from through the haze of anger. Thin threads of entrails drip from his mouth. The blood on his face catches the starlight.
What is Nick supposed to say? What kind of words work here? Will Benji even understand?
Benji rolls his shoulders, and his body cracks like the wolf is trying to claw its way out. One of the Angels wheezes as his weight forces air out of his dead lungs. It smells like copper, gunpowder, and shit.
Nick starts forward. Farther into the road. Between the cars. Onto the curb.
He holds out a hand and whispers, “Benji.”
When Benji turns to face him, it’s almost lazily. Slowly, showing every single jagged tooth in his open-wound mouth. As if he knew Nick was there the whole time and was just waiting for him to get too close. His tongue—the length of a forearm, longer—snakes out of his mouth, testing the air, jaw unhinging and the glint of the moon traveling up the length of his serrated fangs. He looks like he plunged half his face into acid. When a piece of flesh falls, Nick can’t tell if it was in his mouth or part of it.
Nick says, “It’s me.”
Benji replies with an ear-shattering shriek.
Nick is slammed against the sidewalk and into the wet, heavy bodies of the dead Angels, and Benji is on top of him. His gun arm is pinned, and those teeth are inches from his face, Benji’s tongue dripping with spit, gore stretching between his fangs, fingers digging into Nick’s shoulders hard enough to bruise, to break skin.
Nick does nothing. He does not breathe. He does not blink. If he moves a single muscle, Benji is going to tear out his jugular. Those teeth will go in like knives, and he will bleed out onto the sidewalk before he can think to staunch the wound—unrestricted blood loss from a major vein leads to unconsciousness in seconds and death within minutes. Benji’s weight presses him into the ribs of a corpse, into a squelching mess of shredded insides and robes that reek of bleach, sweat, and gore.
The next noise Benji makes is not a shriek. It’s a whimper. It crawls up from his throat like a dying thing.
Those eyes are still his. Seraph hasn’t touched them. They’re a little red, strained, but they’re his.
Nick is about to do something stupid.
He whispers, “Your hair is in your face.”
Benji does not kill him.
All he does is blink.
Nick lifts his arm and presses it flat against Benji’s chest, just enough pressure to push him back. Benji shuffles away, eyes wide, and Nick manages to sit. Benji’s fingers leave red marks on the concrete. He’s so small. He’s so light. Black liquid trickles from his nose, and Nick can’t imagine Benji has any insides left to lose.
“It’s me,” Nick says. “I’m here now. It’s okay.” It’s not a lie. He makes a mental list of everything they’ll have to do to get Benji into the bank without raising suspicion. Clean the blood off his face. Get him into new clothes and a mask. Soothe the curled-up cramping thing his hands are doing. Cover his arms.
Just make sure he gets home.
One last push, and Benji falls back to the ground. Nick takes the last of the bobby pins from his pocket, selects exactly two, and clips a stubborn clump of Benji’s hair away from his forehead. It’s like trying to fix the Hoover Dam with duct tape, but Benji’s shoulders sag, and another sad little noise crawls up his throat, and his eyes finally focus.
“Nick?” he whispers.
They’ve lost the Vanguard, but Nick hasn’t lost Benji. There is no way in hell Nick could have brought himself to give Benji over. How had he even thought he could? God, what is wrong with him? How could he?
“There you go,” Nick says. “Thought we lost you for a second.” Even though he wants to cry, Thank God, thank God, thank God, and Nick hasn’t thanked God for anything in years.
