Chapter 108

HELL’S THING

The guards with skull helmets chained Faultless to a wall. The red-hot stone burned his back. He screamed. He smelled his flesh burn.

“What is this for?” he said.

The guards branded Faultless. They wrote on his body with ink and with his own blood. They painted symbols and words from dead languages all over him. His body steamed. Sweat poured off him. Blood smeared in the perspiration. He screamed.

“These are ancient marks of judgment,” said Lew. “You are hell’s thing. Everything that comes here knows pain, so you must know it, too. There’s none of the humanity given to you by your surrogate mother left. You are an angel again. Does it hurt?”

“Fuck you. This is nothing. I’ve been fucking blowtorched.”

“That was playing.”

Faultless’s body ached all over. Every inch of him was in on fire. He tried to stay upright, but his legs were weak. He panted, desperate for air. “Am I still alive?” he said.

“Do you feel alive?” asked Lew.

“I feel alive.”

“There’s your answer.”

“I don’t look alive.”

“You look beautiful. I made you; you must be.”

“Am I damned?”

“You’re damned, Charlie.”

“And will I suffer?”

“Always.”

Faultless cried out, a long, anguished scream that unleashed all the suffering he’d experienced.

“Why does it have to be like this?” he said.

“The laws of the universe were set when I lit the first spark. I can’t change them. What I made is . . . is greater than what I am.”

The old man looked broken for a moment.

“I am flawed, you see. Just like my creation. I’m jealous, wrathful, and impatient. I am prone to cruelty. I hate being ignored. I can be petty. We are what we are. We have to accept our conditions—even we gods and angels.”

“I don’t accept,” said Faultless, his voice quivering with terror at what was happening to him.

“You have no choice. Go fulfill your destiny. Challenge your brother.”

“What if I don’t?”

“Creation can’t cope with much more of him.”

Faultless slumped. His mind reeled. He tried to wake up, thinking this was a nightmare. But he wasn’t sleeping. Maybe he’d never sleep again.

Lew said, “One more thing,” and he shot forward so quickly he was nothing but a flash of light. His hand made a claw, and it had talons lancing from the fingers. He rammed it up into Faultless’s solar plexus. Charlie screamed. But the hand drove on, tearing into his body, up under his ribcage. And then closed around his heart. Faultless shuddered. He could feel the cold grip of God on him, every part of his body recognizing and fearing that grip.

The hand tore out of him and brought with it his heart.

Faultless gasped for air. He waited to die. But he didn’t. He stared at the organ, clutched in Lew’s hand.

The old man said, “You have no need of this anymore. Hearts are for humans. And they are the hiding place of sin. Now you are sin.”

He ordered the guards to unchain Faultless. For a few moments he was unsteady on his feet. His arms and shoulders ached. He looked down at his torso. It was covered in symbols and words—inked and burned into his flesh. His jeans were rags under the knees, and he could see that his legs had also been written on. He was a book. A book of curses. A book of judgment.

Finally he found his feet.

“What happens now?” he asked, his blood hot. “More torture? Bring it on, you shit.”

Lew clapped his hands. “No more now. Now you get ready to fly, my boy.”

For a second, Faultless felt nothing. Then a terrible pain ripped through his shoulders. He arched his back. His flesh was tearing. He screamed. “What’s happening to me?”

And then bones cracked in his back, and he fell to his knees, in so much agony he thought he would die.

He felt his back burst open. Two things, one each side, erupted just under his shoulders.

He knew what they were.

He fell on all fours, exhausted.

“Beautiful,” said Lew. “You are beautiful.”

And as if it were the most natural thing in the world, Faultless spread his wings.