Fear to Tread Read online

  How can we never have talked about this stuff? We knew you were dying even if we didn’t ever admit it. How could I have not asked you what you thought was going to happen? How could I have not told you what I thought, what I secretly believe?

  I think my mama was right. I think there is a heaven, and I know there’s a hell. And if that’s where you are right now because you didn’t know any better than to not believe it, I know it’s my fault. I have this idea that your hell would be those last days in the hospital forever, screaming, crying from the pain. If you were here, you would tell me I’m crazy, but would you say there’s no hell? Did you believe in anything but us?

  It’s getting colder; the snow is getting deep. If I don’t go soon, I won’t be able to get to the cemetery. I won’t leave you, baby. I will be right there.

  Yours forever,

  Laura

  Chapter Three – The Visit

  Laura locked the street door of the apartment building and started up the stairs. The motion sensor light finally shivered to life just as she reached the first landing, but she barely noticed. She hadn’t had the energy to be randomly scared in six months.

  The radiator at the end of the hall was wheezing like an old man running fast, but at least it was warm. She unwound Jake’s scarf from around her face and neck and pulled off her hat, shaking snow on the floor. She fumbled in the deep pocket of Jake’s winter coat for her keys, still fumbling when she reached her door. So she almost stepped in the middle of the plate of brownies someone had left on the floor. She took a stumbling step back and bent over in one clumsy motion to pick them up.

  They were covered in clear plastic wrap, labeled with a sticky note. “Nate and I are so terribly sorry,” it read. “Sylvia, 4B.”

  She dissolved into tears. She cried hard while she went inside and set the plate on the counter, while she fought her way out of the coat. She braced both hands on the edge of the sink and cried for several minutes, ugly, hiccupping, slobbering sobs that she kept expecting to taper off, but they didn’t. She cried as she was getting undressed and putting on her tee-shirt, while she brushed her teeth and washed her face, tears cutting comical paths in the soapy foam. She cried as she turned off the lights and crawled into her ice cold bed. She dragged the covers half over her head and wrapped her arms around the extra pillow, sobs becoming howls muffled against it. Sometime soon she cried herself to sleep.

  She woke to footsteps in the apartment.

  She listened as she slid out from under the covers to crouch beside the bed, silently fumbling into her boots. Someone was walking down the hall. She glanced at the clock—12:41. Her first thought had been Jason, but even if he’d had a key she didn’t know about, he wouldn’t have let himself in at this hour, no matter how angry or worried he might be. She reached under the bed for the baseball bat, the only weapon Jake had ever agreed they could have in the apartment. It rolled an inch under her hand, clattering on the wood floor, and she stifled a gasp as she froze. But the footsteps didn’t come closer; they kept moving past the bedroom door to the back of the apartment toward Jake’s studio. Maybe it was Jason after all.

  She straightened up and crept to the door, holding the bat in one hand. The door squeaked as she opened it, and she swung the bat up fast, grabbing it in both hands. But the hallway was empty. All the lights were still out. The door to the studio was open, and she saw no sign of a flashlight. The footsteps had stopped.

  I could run, she thought. She had a clear path to the front door; she could run straight out and down the hall—Nate and Sylvia, 4B, would let her in. But whoever was here was in Jake’s studio; whoever it was had Jake’s paintings. Flexing her grip on the bat, she started up the hall.

  Caleb drew breath into his human lungs. The painting before him was beautiful, but he barely noticed its beauty. He recognized it. He had painted it. He was still himself, still an angel, but he was something else as well, something he had never been before. He wore a newborn version of the body of Laura’s husband, living matter reanimated from the matter left behind. It held all the sense memory of the dead man, all the deepest impressions of the mind, reborn with the soul and consciousness of an angel. It was a trick many of his kind had done since the birth of humans, but he had never been tempted before. He had never realized what he was missing.

  He touched the canvas. The oil paint still felt cold; it was still fresh. If he dug in his fingertips, he could scrape the image away. The smell was luscious, making him breathe faster. All of the smells of this place were familiar and precious, so much so he felt faint—another new sensation. Others had tried tell him about the violent intensity of mortal senses, the gorgeous ache of it. He had thought them fools, drunk on trifles. But he had been the fool.

  The painting was half-obscured. The figure in the background had been rubbed out and restarted. It was little more than an outline, a tall, naked male torso with the bare outline of wings penciled in behind it. But the figure painted in the foreground was complete and shockingly realistic, a sad, beautiful woman with huge green eyes and long red hair.

  “Laura,” he said softly in his mortal voice, recognizing her not as the woman from the cemetery or the writer of the letters but the wife she had been to this body he had stolen. “My beautiful Laura.”

  Laura had frozen in the doorway, unable to move, certain she was hallucinating, that her mind had finally snapped. Then he spoke, and she dropped the baseball bat. She opened her mouth to say his name, but all she could force out was a strangled sigh. He turned so she could see his face, and she cried out for real, laughing and crying at once. Not real, her brain was warning. Cannot be real. But her body was already running. He moved forward, too, coming to meet her, crashing into her as she threw herself into his arms.

  “Don’t cry,” he was saying, crying himself. “Please, Laura, please don’t cry.” He sounded strange, distant and precise with barely a hint of the lazy drawl she remembered so clearly. But this was Jake. She could smell him, feel him, feel the way he crushed her close and kissed her hair.

  “You’re real.” She drew back and touched his cheek. “You’re really here.” He opened his mouth to answer, and she kissed him, wrapping her arms around his neck. If he were a dream, she didn’t want him to tell her. “I love you,” she whispered, breaking the kiss to nuzzle her cheek against his, feeling his rough beard against her skin. Tears spilled from her eyes, her heart breaking. “I love you so much.”

  Caleb kissed away her tears, tasting the salt, the smell of her hair and the feel of her body pressed to his driving him mad. Desire, he thought, pushing his hands up through her hair, letting it spill between his fingers. This was desire. She felt so fragile, her mortal flesh like fire in his arms, as hot and changeable as flame.

  I can’t wake up, Laura was thinking. Please, God, don’t let me wake up. Because surely this moment must be a dream. Could a ghost have felt so solid, so warm? She wrapped her arms around him, nuzzling his throat again, breathing in the scent of him, clean and wild and alive, no trace of sickness, no hint of the grave. This was Jake when they had first met, the hero-jester who had swept her off her feet. He picked her up and carried her down the hall, and for one sweet moment of madness, she thought he would take her to bed. But he carried her on to the living room and sat on the couch, holding her on his lap. She wrapped her arms around him, huddled against his chest.

  “Laura.” He brushed her hair back from her face. “You have to listen.” His lips barely brushed her cheek. “You can’t blame yourself any more.” She squeezed her eyes shut tight. “I wanted to hide my being sick. I didn’t want to face it.” She reached for his hand, lacing her fingers with his. “Everything I ever said about you hiding…that was bullshit.” He kissed her wrist. “And you were perfect the last night I was here.” She shuddered, letting out a single, hiccupping sob. “You were just so scared.” He drew her closer to him. “I’m so sorry.”

  “The letters.” She huddled against his chest, her arms curled close agai
nst her breast, still clinging to his hand. “You saw.”

  “Of course I saw.” He held her bruising-tight, his voice rough, almost angry. “I am not in hell.” He touched her chin and made her look at him. “I swear by Christ, Laura,” he promised. “I am not in hell.”

  She looked into his eyes. He was Jake, her husband; she would have known him anywhere. She could see their whole life together in his tears. But he was different, too. He had become something else.

  “I love you,” she said.

  He smiled. “I love you.” He bent and kissed her softly on the mouth, a good-bye kiss. But he didn’t pull away.

  She nestled against his chest, determined to stay awake, to ask a thousand questions, to keep him there forever. In less than a minute, she was sound asleep.

  Chapter Four – The Morning Star

  Caleb watched the woman sleep, the rise and fall of her breath endlessly fascinating. His adopted form was growing heavy, weighing him down to earth, and he knew he was lingering too long. Finally, when the gray dawn lit the windows, he made himself get up. He eased her gently from his lap to the couch and covered her with a blanket. Without letting himself stop to think, he leaned close and kissed her softly on the mouth again, the sensation of it making him feel dizzy. She barely stirred, mumbling the name of her dead husband.

  Straightening up, he conjured different clothes, drawing matter from the air onto his mortal body. He didn’t want to be recognized by anyone who had known the dead man. He wasn’t the first angel to take the form of a dead mortal to comfort one left behind. In the days before human science had made every unexplained phenomenon into a terror, it had been an almost common practice. Most of the more credible human ghost stories had started with a sympathetic angel.

  He pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his head, drawing it low enough to mask his face as he left the apartment. A window at the end of the hall opened on a rusted fire escape.

  The air outside felt brutally cold to his human form, and he let flesh and clothes alike begin to dissolve as he started down the metal stairs. By the time he dropped to the ground, he was naked, the clothes swept away as a vapor on the icy wind. Crouching in the snow, he burst out of the failing mortal body, letting it dissolve as well. His wings opened behind him in a rush of blinding, golden light.

  The alley was eerily quiet and seemed deserted. The blizzard had buried the city completely. Rosy light crept over the glistening snow as the sun rose over the dull, gray buildings. He looked down at his hands, and for the first time since his creation he saw what looked like blood pulsing through the fine blue veins at his wrist. He clenched a fist and felt his nails digging into his palm, a sting of corporeal pain. Without ever knowing what he was, Laura had transformed him, just a little, but enough. He would never be able to completely hold himself apart from mortals again.

  “Fucking hell!” A homeless woman was peering at him over a blood-red hospital blanket, huddled under the fire escape on a thin mattress covered in green plastic. The empty bedframe was still standing just outside the door of the building where Laura had abandoned it.

  The woman stood up, staring wide-eyed as she came toward him, muttering nonsense under her breath. Then slowly her expression twisted into a leer. “Hey, pretty,” she said, her voice dropping to a snarling growl. “Don’t you want to kiss me next?” She let the blanket drop to run a hand up through her own greasy hair, pushing off her knitted hat. She smiled at him, her eyes half-lidded. “You want to fuck me, don’t you?” She was missing teeth in front, and the smell of her breath was appalling. “I bet an angel does it nice.”

  He caught her gently by the wrist. “Begone from this woman, demon,” he said, barely raising his voice. “In the name of Christ, I cast you out.”

  “OOOooooooo,” she purred, and he felt a shudder up his spine. The demon inside of her had changed her voice. Now she sounded just like Laura. “You don’t really mean it.”

  He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her hard. “I said begone!”

  Her body contorted, writhing in his grasp as the demon wriggled free and fell, wet and black into the snow. She was a succubus, and she had obviously been feeding from the mortal for quite some time. Her scaly body was fat and sleek, lush with evil.

  “Come on, Caleb,” she purred, rising to her knees before him. He let the now-unconscious mortal fall gently to her mattress and put himself between her and the demon. “Play with me.” Her forked tail swished over the snow as she crawled toward him, reaching for his bare leg. Her face as she looked up at him shifted into a fire-blackened mockery of Laura’s. “If you’re going to have a girlfriend now, you’re going to need the practice.”

  He caught her by the hair with his left hand just as she reached him, snatching her up like a cat. He held her at arm’s length as she spat and hissed in fury, trying to attack. He drew his flaming sword seemingly from thin air into the physical world and swung it once, slicing her neatly in two.

  The bottom half dropped to the ground, writhing as the burning trunk poured black, acidic blood into the snow, the tail flailing in impotent fury, virtually helpless. But the top half was still coming after him, screaming in pain as she lunged, her claws swiping his shoulder, surprising him by opening his angelic flesh to the bone. Still holding her by the hair, he drove her back toward the wall. Her neck stretched long, and her jaw unhinged as she snapped at him with venom-dripping fangs, slicing into his wrist. He raised the sword again, and she screamed for her master in the low speech of their plane, her yellow eyes wide and rolling with fear. He drove the sword through her throat, burying the blade in the brick wall behind her, making sparks fly. Her scream was cut off in a nasty gurgle as she struggled, tearing at the sword with her claws, moaning in frustration as it burned her flesh. Her bottom half was writhing closer, churning up the snow, leaving a steaming black trail of demon blood.

  He took a step back from her, breathing hard as if he needed the air. He looked down at his wrist and saw he was still bleeding red blood like a mortal’s. The bites were beginning to knit themselves closed, but slowly. And it hurt.

  “Temper temper, Caleb,” a voice spoke from behind him. The succubus began to struggle more frantically, reaching out, her gurgle an obvious plea. Caleb turned and saw Lucifer coming toward them disguised as a human. He was slighter of build than usual with long, soft-looking black hair and a jagged, purple scar across his face to mar his once-angelic beauty. “Don’t you think this might be an overreaction?”

  Caleb yanked his sword from the creature’s throat and let her fall into the snow. He stepped back, feeling sick as she dragged herself forward to lick her master’s boots. “She defied me,” he muttered. He gathered his own accustomed human guise around him, the long, black coat enfolding him as his wings disappeared into his back.

  “Defied you?” The Fallen One glanced up at him from watching his creature and grinned. “You couldn’t cast her out?” The demon’s lower half had almost reached her top, and Lucifer kicked it across the alley. “Fetch!” Weeping in frustration, she began to drag herself after it.

  “I cast her out,” Caleb said. He looked down at his wrist again. The bites had healed, but there was the thinnest white trace of a scar. He reached under his shirt and felt a slick, tender ridge on his shoulder left from the demon’s claws.

  “Let me see your eyes.” Lucifer stepped in front of him, his gleeful anticipation warming the icy air between them. Caleb glowered down at him, and he beamed. “Well, fuck me swinging,” he said. “Blue…by hell’s own gates, they’re blue.” In his human guise, Caleb’s eyes had always been a dull, burnished silver, their true, angelic glow completely masked. If they were blue, his true nature was wearing its way through the mask. Jake’s eyes had been blue, he thought.

  Lucifer touched Caleb’s chin. “Brother, what have you done?”

  Caleb shoved him backward, and he fell easily back into the snow, laughing. “Mind your trash,” the angel said with a scowl.

  The
succubus had managed to bring her two halves end to end and was flopping in the snow, trying in vain to bring herself together. Lucifer rolled his eyes at Caleb. “Sad,” he said, going toward her unzipping his pants. “Just sad.” The angel turned away with a shudder of disgust from the tableau they made as the Fallen One pissed on his creature, the smell of her “healing” nearly unbearable as she wept in gratitude.

  The homeless woman was still lying on her side on the mattress, her eyes glazed over, one hand pressed to her chest. Caleb crouched beside her and touched her shoulder, but she didn’t stir or even blink. He rolled her gently onto her back, passing a hand over her body, listening, sensing her soul.

  “She’s done for, brother,” Lucifer said, coming back to him, zipping up his pants. The succubus was scuttling away sideways on all fours like a crab, her torso now joined with a misshapen welt of pinkish gray scarring. Her spine was bent and seemed to still be mending; every few steps she would jerk and hiss in pain. She snarled at Caleb, licking her lips before she disappeared around the corner. “You frightened her to death,” Lucifer went on, paying his servant no heed. “But don’t fret. I’m certain you did her a favor.”

  “She isn’t dead,” Caleb said, but it was only just the truth. Her breath was so shallow no mortal could have detected it, and her heartbeat was very weak. He leaned close and breathed deliberately into her face, and she sighed, her lips barely moving, but her body didn’t stir.

  “What’s a minute or so either way?” Lucifer said with a grin, peering over Caleb’s shoulder. “Step back, angel. This one’s mine.”

  “Stay back,” Caleb ordered.

  “What’s it to you?” the Morning Star asked. “You don’t actually care, do you?”