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She steps closer to me, so close I smell her acrid breath. “Then explain what happened to your sister,” she hisses. “Make it make sense when not a single doctor can.”
My jaw tightens and my gaze moves over her shoulder. I can’t explain it, and she knows it.
“Medical miracles happen every day, don’t they?” she asks using a falsely sweet voice, one too young for her. Too unnatural. “It is not too late to reverse this. This…” She gestures to the altar. “This is a sign, a warning for you to act. It is a second chance. I won’t allow you to waste it.”
“What does that mean?” I ask, meeting her pale eyes, seeing the sheen almost like tears, but not tears. Never tears with my grandmother.
“It means what I said. I will not allow you to waste this second chance Shemhazai has given us.”
With those words, she turns and walks away, leaving me standing in the shadow of the demon-angel.
27
AZRAEL
I don’t sleep that night. Nor do I return to my bedroom.
I will not allow you to waste this second chance.
My migraine has returned with a vengeance.
The chords of the piano sound eerie in this abandoned room, this hollow, forgotten part of the house. I play louder, one eye on the ancient grandfather clock even though I don’t need to watch to know what is coming. To hear every tick of every second that passes, time creeping along forgetful of our tragedies. Oblivious to our marking of them.
As the second hand crosses the twelve-o’clock mark, the minute hand follows. A door opens on the clock face where a small bird should emerge to announce the new day. But the mechanism is old, and I don’t remember the bird ever having done its work. Instead, there’s a black hole and a creaking of sorts before the door closes and the clock carries on keeping time, neither knowing nor caring what day this is.
I continue playing, closing my eyes, my song a lament with too much grief, too much loss, too much sadness. But even if I pour everything I have into the music, the pain never lessens.
And now, Bec lies barely conscious in the hospital bed upstairs. My wife is locked in my bedroom, and I don’t know when I can unlock that door and face her—when and if I can set her free.
I recall our conversation just before I learned that Bec had fallen ill. Me telling her I can’t protect her if she’s not honest with me. That I have a right to know. What a hypocrite I am.
I will not allow you to waste this second chance.
Grandmother’s words repeat in my mind. I stand, slamming the piano lid down so hard the keys scream, shrill and final. I blow the candles out, eight of them dripping wax from the candelabra onto the piano, and stalk out of that room in near solid darkness. Memory guides me down the corridor away from the main part of the house toward the door that will lead me outside. I don’t want to run into Grandmother. I couldn’t stand it.
I will not allow you to waste this second chance.
I hear her words again as I step out into the night. The air is humid and heavy, and I walk to the lake, to that tree. Time may not care, but I will mark my brother’s death.
Did Willow understand when I told her how I’d found him? Butchered. It’s the only word to describe the sight I came upon when I got to the clearing that night. He was naked, having stripped off his clothes and left them in a neat pile nearby. Which somehow makes it all worse. He’d calculated it all. Planned it. Thought it through. He’d have carried both rope and dagger to the tree. He’d have to have chosen the place and the time so as not to be interrupted.
The fact that he did it here, not at Shemhazai’s altar, means something, doesn’t it? Or maybe it’s what Willow said, that he sought the comfort of memories of happier times. Of our mother.
If she were here, what would she make of us now? Me, a man who has locked his wife away to await… what exactly? Her execution?
Am I a liar? Will this curse make a liar of me as well as a murderer?
What would my father think of me? Of us?
I can tell you they would not be proud. But there is one thing I am certain of. They’d send Salomé packing. They’d tear down the statue of Shemhazai.
But at that thought, I stop. Would they? They had years to do it. We lived on this property for almost a decade before they disappeared. We were away from Grandmother’s ever-watchful eye, away from scripture as she sees it, yet Shemhazai stands tall and angry and blood-thirsty as ever. The demon-angel will never have his fill.
