The Space Between

My hands feel light and detached, like I’ve left a part of me out in the red hall, where it will powder into the carpet and I’ll never get it back.

The church is dark and it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust enough for me see what’s hanging over the pulpit.

Obie is upside down with his hands splayed out, nailed to a wooden panel. The panel is painted with glossy, muted colors depicting the Tower of Babel. It stands on its head in the apse, suspended from the ceiling by heavy ropes, swaying slightly even though there’s no wind. The blood runs down in slow, meandering trickles.

His outstretched arms are wound shoulder to wrist with lengths of barbed wire. It spirals around his legs, leaving dark spots where the barbs have punctured his jeans. It looks like vines.

Near his head and slightly to the left are words, scrawled crookedly in blood, over and over, covering the part of the scene where the ill-conceived tower pierced the sky. They spell out family and home. His blood has not burned holes in the wood or eaten through the metal or turned into ravenous, snarling men. It just drips down the panel to the floor.

Above me, the windows are made of colored glass, but the pictures aren’t exultant. Some of the panes are broken and all of the saints look somber and tired. They’ve all been boarded up.

Azrael has taken so many things from my brother—his wife, his daughter. He’s maimed Obie, cut him, brutalized him.

Without thinking, I start for Obie, already planning some way cut him down. As I approach though, Azrael steps out of the shadows by the pulpit. His face is tranquil. He’s holding a little boot knife.

“Here we all are,” he says. “I have to admit, I was expecting Truman, not you. I thought for sure that Dreadful would have you.”

Above a squalid, candle-covered altar, Obie begins to struggle, pulling against the nails and the wire, blind to everything that’s happening. “Hello?” he whispers.

“It’s going to be all right,” I say, and my voice comes from a long way off. “I’m here now.”

“I need you to stop where you are,” Azrael tells me gently. He holds the boot knife to Obie’s cheek.

Behind them, the carved scene is a reminder of human frailty, of arrogance. They tried to climb to God. Now everyone is falling.

Azrael stands beside my brother, looking down at me. The candles flicker around us and his expression is scornful, like I’m a ghost-girl or nothing at all. “I used to respect Obie,” he says. “Do you know that—that I used to respect a demon? I trusted him, because I thought he was better than his bloodline. Better than all the rest of you.”

“He is,” I say, knowing beyond any shadow of a doubt that it’s the truth. Obie is more virtuous than all of us and more human.

Azrael laughs. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard him laugh. He sounds heartbroken. “He broke the cardinal rule, the only rule I truly care about. I’m doing him a favor, you know, getting rid of that little horror. Do you really think she’s meant for this world? That she’ll even survive? Why don’t you just hand her over and be done with it? It would be a mercy.”

Obie’s hair is hanging down toward the ground. Around the nails in his hands, the blood does nothing special. It just drips onto the floor. I have a sinking feeling that at any second, I will need to sit down.

Azrael smiles his kind, terrible smile. “Do you really think you can protect her? Either of them?”

“No,” Truman says. “I think you could take her from me. And I think you could hurt Daphne if you wanted. But I’d make you work for it. I think you’d have to kill me.”

His expression is so matter-of-fact. Not frightened or angry, not defiant. For the first time, I can see Beelzebub in his expression and in his profile. It seems ludicrous that I never saw it before, but it was always hidden behind hopelessness and grief. Now, in the decrepit church, in the candlelight, he’s glorious. He is completely angelic.

Azrael seems to see it too. His face softens when he looks at Truman. “I can always count on you to fall headlong for all the wrong things,” he says. “You’re just preternaturally attracted to sin, aren’t you?”

It’s a hard, honest kiss—the way he kissed me on the balcony—and I can feel it flooding my arms and legs, sweeping away the dizziness and the confusion. When he stops and steps back, he looks dazed, but I feel sturdy and whole again.

From the dais, Azrael is watching us with interest. I expected him to be angry, but instead, he seems strangely pleased.

“I was beginning to despair,” he says to Truman. “But you really have come a long way from the selfish, self-pitying wreck that you were. Unfortunately, you always seem to pick the one thing you’re not supposed to have.” He’s smiling, but it’s cold and joyless. He stands by Obie’s head, toying with the knife. “Now, are we all ready to see what happens to the human part of him when I stick this in his carotid?”

Truman squeezes Raymie tighter, turning her against his shoulder so she can’t see Obie nailed to the board. She doesn’t see when Azrael rests his hand on Obie’s forehead, pushing it back like Dreadful did to me in the hall of mirrors, and holds the knife to the soft place under Obie’s chin.

I stand motionless on the steps of the dais, staring up at Obie. Suddenly, I know with terrible certainty that I’m going to see him die.

Azrael never takes his eyes off my face. When he presses harder with the knife, blood pools at Obie’s chin, runs over his jaw and down the side of his face. It hits the floor and does nothing. Then a drop lands in the hot wax pooling around the candles on the altar. For an instant, it catches and smokes, feathers into blue flame and then burns out.

When I step toward the pulpit, Azrael presses the knife harder into Obie’s skin. “You need to stop right there.”

But I don’t. I just keep going, one foot after the other. “Please,” I say, and my voice shakes. “Let me say goodbye.”

Azrael looks down at me and his eyes are hard, but not merciless. He lets me approach, holding the knife close to my face, but I know that he won’t cut me, because my blood is monstrous. I’m indestructible.

I pass Azrael with the slowness of a dream, crossing to where Obie hangs suspended in his web of wire, hair hanging toward the floor.

“I’m sorry,” I say, and I mean it. Sorry for taking so long, for not getting here sooner, but mostly sorry for what I’m about to do. “You should probably close your eyes.”

And I rake the candles off the makeshift altar with my arm. The gesture sends them crashing against the panel in a clatter of flame and wax. His blood is all over the Tower of Babel and it catches like kerosene, flames leaping up the edges of the panel. The wood blackens and smolders, blistering with white-blue flame. The smell is toxic and chemical.

Behind me, Truman makes a strangled sound, and then stays quiet. No one moves. We all stand frozen, watching the blaze.

Obie glows upside down at the center of it, the heart of a blast furnace, and I stand on the dais and watch him burn.

Azrael is motionless beside me as the paint burns and bubbles and the structure weakens. It gives way with a splintering crash and a shower of sparks.

Obie sprawls on the floor, his jeans singed and smoking, his shirt burned away to ashes and tatters.