Wretched Wicked Page 6

  Being abducted by a fallen angel was different than being abducted by a werewolf. The latter wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling for Fritz. People who shapeshifted into animals skewed toward the impulsive, and abduction was sort of like shaking hands. Cain’s actions had been motivated by an agenda. Fritz had never doubted his survival.

  And then there was...her.

  The fallen angel.

  Naamah, her name was. Cast down to Earth for bearing a son that Adam hadn’t permitted. Stripped of her sanity and beauty, she was forever seeking her husband; the father of her forbidden son, and a lover long since slaughtered.

  Fritz looked like Naamah’s husband, Shamdan. And for that, he was targeted.

  She attacked Fritz in his garage. He tried to lock himself in his armored SUV when she appeared, but even inches of plate steel couldn’t stop the wildness of a fallen angel. She opened it like the shell of a pistachio.

  Fritz’s years of training weren’t up to the staggering reflexes of the fallen angel. Her presence disabled every technical security system, and his wards were nothing to her.

  In the end, he was dragged unceremoniously out of the car by an old lady, and they flew to Helltown so fast he couldn’t breathe.

  Naamah dragged him from the front door of an infernal church all the way up to the bell tower. He retained consciousness up several stories, even though Naamah bumped Fritz’s head along each stair. The amount of pain sent him into shock. He dozed on waves of consciousness, in and out, only occasionally watching the angel’s cloven hooves stomping in front of him.

  Then he was hanging in the bell tower. He’d felt no time pass. It was probably a concussion, and it only felt worse the longer that he dangled.

  She had wrapped a chain around his ankle, leaving him upside-down like the clapper of a bell.

  He tried to swing for the edge and could not. He was too weak. He could sit upright for a few moments to try to release his ankle, but his fingers wouldn’t work. What little strength he possessed was drained after the first few hours hanging upside down. He stopped fighting.

  Night fell, and Fritz remained alone, strung up in the bell tower. The OPA hadn’t come looking for him. They wouldn’t. Helltown was untouchable.

  Fritz had no plan to escape.

  He wasn’t sure that he would.

  Even if Fritz released himself, what would he do against a fallen angel so powerful he couldn’t stand against her?

  He would die.

  It was a fear that he had never felt—not even once—since that day his father had told him that Friederlings were privileged in all ways. They were the narrators of their own stories. They were special, worthy of preservation.

  With a chain tight around his ankle and blood rushing into his head, Fritz realized that he could die young. That this could be it.

  Before he went unconscious again, he thought it was lucky that Cèsar had not yet performed the ritual to seal the aspis bond.

  At least, Fritz thought, Cèsar would be free.

  Oblivion swallowed Fritz, and there was no reason for him to rise from the nothingness on the other side. Death was endless, lonely nothing. Fritz wasn’t even cast into Hell. He wasn’t that important.

  But consciousness brushed him again.

  Fritz wasn’t dead.

  He saw stars and thought he was dreaming, at first. They were so vivid. Fritz felt like he’d never seen stars until that night, not really, and only now could he perceive the multidimensional facets of ice glimmering in the expanse.

  The fresh air on his face was too real to be a dream. And Fritz did not think he would have dreamt such a feeling of painful pressure on one wrist, so sharp that his fingers tingled. He could barely feel them.

  Fritz lifted his head to look. He found his arm bound to Cèsar’s, blood seeping between them. The witch wasn’t even looking in his direction. He was shouting at the shadowy sky that swirled with nightmares, wind whipping his shirt against his collarbone.

  Are we on the roof of the church?

  He got dizzy trying to look down.

  Darkness enveloped him again. This time, he wasn’t alone. There was another heart beating alongside his, and a golden thread to bind them.

  Sword and shield. Kopis and aspis.

  Cèsar did the ritual.

  Fritz shocked awake this time, instantly clear-headed. It felt as though every sense were honed. He was attuned to the nightmare demons circling him but not susceptible to their fear. He felt the fallen angel nearby but remained cogent.

  The only thing missing was Cèsar.

  He had climbed out of the dormer to chase the angel up the roof. Fritz could see their silhouettes against Los Angeles’s smoggy glow, chasing each other through combat. Shriveled monster against unprepared witch.

  Fritz could kill Naamah now. He was certain of it.

  He tried to stand and fell against the window, catching himself on the frame. The leg that had been chained inside the bell had no feeling. His toes were black. It was useless underneath him, making his ascent to the apex of the roof a one-legged effort.

  Cèsar was pinned by Naamah, moments away from being slaughtered by the half-angel. He was still streaming blood from his arm.

  Yet when Fritz and Cèsar’s eyes connected, the world stopped.

  They were bound. They could do anything.

  It took both of them to turn the tide of battle, but they did. They brought Naamah down together. Fritz severed the angel’s wings, cut the heart from her body, and performed a sloppy decapitation. Cèsar verified that all parts of Naamah had died sufficiently, and he carried Fritz down the stairs. It took both of them to get through that long, dark night in Helltown, surrounded by nightmares and unable to escape until dawn.

  Lucrezia de Angelis visited Fritz in the clinic the next day. It was not a friendly visit. Her eyes flicked down his hospital gown, taking in the shape of his body underneath the bedsheets, and she sniffed disapprovingly. “You seem to be doing fine. It’s most likely thanks to your new aspis that you didn’t lose more than a foot.”

  Fritz wasn’t dosed with so much morphine that he missed her acid tone. “You must be delighted to have performed a successful matchmaking.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Delighted.” She folded her arms and glared at him.

  “Were you surprised that he succeeded in performing the binding? I understood you planned to fire him if he failed.”

  “I would never set up one of our valuable agents to fall like that,” Lucrezia snapped.

  He noted that she didn’t specify if Cèsar was one of their “valuable” agents.

  “It’s too bad that you didn’t get to fire Agent Hawke, isn’t it?” Fritz asked, smiling lazily at her through the haze of painkillers. “You must be so disappointed.”

  She stepped over, lifted the blanket on the bed, and peered at his heavily bandaged leg underneath. “I may not have gotten to destroy your pet witch, but I’ll settle for watching you two make each other miserable,” she hissed in a low voice. “You get one of the OPA’s weakest witches. He gets a broken, useless kopis. How long before you two drag each other into death?”

  “Whenever it happens,” Fritz said, “you’ll still never have been good enough for me.”

  Lucrezia jerked back. She dropped the sheet, white knuckling the strap of her purse. “And Cèsar Hawke is?”

  Had it not been for the morphine, Fritz never would have said, “I’m not good enough for him.” Not out loud.

  Days later, Fritz woke from surgery without a leg.

  He barely looked at the place where his blankets laid flat against the mattress instead of curving over a foot and shin. He used the remote to bring his bed upright, pulled the bamboo tray over his lap to hold a water glass, and then pressed the button to summon assistance.

  Fritz expected a nurse.

  He got Cèsar Hawke.

  “Hey!” The agent hung back against the door, his bandaged arm dangling in the room. “You okay? Are you dying? Do you need a
surgeon?”

  “I wanted my BlackBerry,” Fritz rasped.

  “What, so you can work? Don’t even think about it.” Cèsar whispered something to a person in the hall then entered the room. He took the chair next to Fritz. “Your surgery went good.”

  “I’m missing half a leg,” Fritz said. His tone was sharper than the succulent on the windowsill.

  “You got to keep the knee. Could be worse.”

  “It could be better. I could have a leg,” he said.

  Cèsar snorted. “Pity party for the gimp in room two!” He grabbed the newspaper off the bedside table before Fritz could get it, then flipped to the sports section. He spent a few minutes reading before quietly asking, “How do you feel?”

  Fritz felt like he wasn’t missing his leg...until he looked down.

  The rest of his injuries had already healed. If the kopis healing hadn’t ensured that, then his expensive Friederling-employed doctors would have. The rawest wound was a new awareness of time.

  His leg would never come back. No privilege could repair it.

  Fritz was injured, aging, slowing down, unable to keep up against fallen angels. He might die before Cèsar, and he had no idea what to feel about that. “I want the newspaper,” he said.

  Cèsar pulled out the comics section and tossed it to Fritz’s lap. “No stocks and bonds and shit for you. You’re relaxing. Read Peanuts.”

  “A comic about a depressed bald kid isn’t relaxing.” But Fritz was somehow...smiling?

  He read the comic. It was puerile.

  “We might as well get used to this stuff,” Cèsar said, propping his feet up on the bed and reclining in the chair. “Like, hospital shit. Because we’re gonna be stuck with each other the rest of our lives, and that includes being grumpy old men together.”

  “The rest of our lives,” Fritz echoed quietly. The idea of a long-lived future sounded so different from Cèsar than it did from Werner Friederling. “I know you’re looking forward to our partnership about as much as eating uncooked donkey testicles, but...”

  He grinned. “You rank better than donkey testicles. Just a little.”

  Maybe Cèsar had put more thought into what the bond meant than Fritz realized.

  “Here’s the rest of the newspaper.” Cèsar tossed it at Fritz. “I’m gonna make myself a protein shake. Want me to hunt up someone to give you the nightly nutrition suppository?”

  “You’re mixing shakes here?” Fritz was recovering in his private clinic, which was on the back side of the manor. It used to be shared with his many cousins, aunts, and associates, but he’d kicked them out for stealing OxyContin and prescription pads.

  “Not here,” Cèsar said. “The big house. I’m staying in the manor with you until you’re better. I’ll drive you around and stuff.”

  “I have drivers,” Fritz said, baffled. He paid a lot of money for his highly trained staff to cater to his every need, real or imagined.

  “And I’m your aspis,” Cèsar said. “The magical muscle. Your personal PI.” He feigned a few punches at an invisible enemy.

  Fritz had almost forgotten where Cèsar began—his inauspicious origins in Los Angeles’s filthiest trade. At this point, it felt as though the man had always been part of Fritz’s life. Obviously, it was untrue. Cèsar was much too interesting to have originated from the cesspool of the upper class. But even if he had not come from the same place, they were stuck together from now on.

  For the rest of their lives, until grumpy old men.

  “Then get me whiskey,” Fritz said, flicking up the newspaper to read Garfield.

  “Nurse says no booze until you’re off morphine,” Cèsar said. “Even for a kopis. I’ll run out and get you a jumbo Slurpee like I always got for Pops after knee surgery. How’s that sound?”

  Fritz couldn’t even envision how it tasted. “It sounds perfect.”

  “I’ll get you a red one. Don’t argue, red is best.” Cèsar stepped out but hesitated by the door. “Sorry I didn’t get there soon enough to save your leg, Fritz.”

  He left Fritz alone, but not lonely. And he did drive Fritz around in the weeks to come. Perhaps it was an excuse to get behind the wheel of Fritz’s exotic sports cars, but he didn’t care.

  At that point he’d already given Cèsar half his soul.

  The rest of it were only things.

  Epilogue

  Fritz knew the exact day he realized he was in love with Cèsar Hawke.

  He had been sitting on a yacht, skirting apocalypse, and sharing a very large bag of very stale Doritos with Suzy Takeuchi. She was no longer an OPA agent. Fritz was no longer an OPA director. The world was about to end, and they had instead become something resembling friends.

  “You’re so fucking in love with Cèsar,” Suzy had said.

  And Fritz had replied, “What?”

  “You heard me. You’re in love with him.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Fritz said, and he’d meant it, for about five minutes. Once he was licking his fingers to scoop up crumbs from the bottom of the Doritos bag, and found himself facing the shiny crease at the bottom, he realized Suzy was right.

  He was in love with Cèsar.

  Until that moment, he’d always thought of it in terms of what he wanted from the relationship. He wanted Cèsar to be around, always, for the rest of his life. He wanted Cèsar to want the same. And yes, he found Cèsar attractive—who wouldn’t? Fritz was an obligate sexual carnivore, and he was far from immune to the appeal of a younger man with magically augmented muscles and a willingness to kill for Fritz.

  Perhaps most importantly, when Fritz was with Cèsar, he didn’t hate himself as much. When he was with Cèsar, he felt peace.

  The sum of these things should have been obvious years earlier, Fritz supposed, but Cèsar had made it clear there were no similar feelings on his behalf. It would have been poor thanks for years of loyal friendship to pine like that. Fritz didn’t pine for anyone.

  Suzy was licking her fingers too, watching him think with a smug expression.

  “I don’t like you very much,” Fritz told her.

  “You just realized I’m right, huh?” she asked. “Suck on my dick of truth, asshole.”

  “He must hate me,” Fritz said. It was the kind of thing he only ever said to Suzy. The more vulnerable and moronic he revealed himself to be, the kinder Suzy became. It was still very much a Suzy Type of Kindness, but she lost the caustic edge when Fritz was honest.

  “Cèsar wouldn’t hate a dog that bit him on the ass. You’re fine. It’s not like he’s got any idea,” Suzy said. “Unless you tell him, he literally won’t ever know.” She crumpled the bag and lobbed it into the ocean. Littering seemed unimportant in the face of the world ending. “But I think you’ll be better if you tell him the truth.”

  He wasn’t sure when he’d fallen in love with Cèsar, just as he wasn’t sure how he’d come to find Suzy such pleasant company, but both of these things had become very true. It was a shame that he realized it barely hours before he died.

  The entire world was destroyed shortly after that conversation on the yacht.

  When the Genesis Void crept over the Earth, Fritz had still been on that yacht. He had been aiming to land in Japan, where he naively hoped that the clash of gods that centered over North America would not reach. He’d entertained fantasies of finding some abandoned Shinto temple—something Suzy would like—and making a home with the ship’s passengers, stripped of money and society.

  The fantasies were sucked into the screaming Void like everything else.

  He should have been afraid, standing at the helm of his ship while the Void chased them. He should have been pushing to drain every last drop of fuel to give them the illusion of a chance for a few more seconds.

  Mostly, Fritz had felt calm.

  Even when the Void sucked the ocean into its depths, making the ship lose all momentum, he was calm. The engine groaned with full power yet they were still being dragge
d backward.

  “This is it, huh?” Cèsar asked, coming to stand beside Fritz. He was steady-legged on the heaving deck of the yacht, but green with seasickness.

  “Yes, I think so,” Fritz said. He felt detached from the words, and the concept of dying. He felt like he was falling and there was nothing to do but wait for the landing.

  Cèsar was falling with him.

  The Void was perhaps five klicks from their tail. There wasn’t even an hour left. Perhaps not even ten minutes. After weeks of tedium, everything was happening so quickly.

  “I need to tell you something,” Fritz said.

  Cèsar laughed. He actually laughed. “Is this like that moment in the movies where a guy’s like, I have to tell you something, and then he’s embarrassed when he survives and he said the embarrassing thing?”

  Fritz couldn’t laugh along with him. “You really don’t already know, do you?”

  Cèsar said, “Know what?”

  And Fritz stared at him in helpless frustration, wishing that he was a different person, or that Cèsar was a different person, and wishing that he hadn’t wasted so much time in the last ten years.

  Someone cried out—maybe Suzy—and that was how Fritz knew that the Void had reached them.

  The ship heaved and all four passengers tumbled against the wall of the cabin: Fritz, Suzy, Cèsar, and Isobel. Fritz was surprised that Suzy was the only one freaking out. She was swearing and throwing trash at the Void and kicking until the last moment.

  Isobel clutched Fritz’s hand and buried her face in his shoulder.

  And then there was Cèsar.

  It wasn’t Suzy that Cèsar reached toward.

  Fritz gripped his hand. Their fingers knitted together, knuckle to knuckle, palm to palm. He pulled until he was brought against Cèsar’s side, and the witch put an arm around him, and the sea tossed underneath their feet.

  Cèsar rested his chin on top of Fritz’s head.

  “Shit,” he said.

  His last word, unremarkable as it was, could only have been heard by Fritz.