Falling for Grace Read online

  In Hell, Grace would be screaming for mercy.

  I moved a white pawn into danger and took it ruthlessly with a black knight.

  She had leaned against me, so trusting, and the warmth of her body and the sunshine-clean smell of her reminded me of – of –

  I picked up the fallen white pawn and turned it in my fingers. Snapped it cleanly in half.

  A shadow fell over the board, and for an instant I feared it would be Belial, her smoking eyes and hungry mouth demanding what I could not give.

  But, instead, Raphael’s voice merely said, "I see you’re expecting me."

  There was nothing to say. He sank slowly into the chair opposite me, his long thin fingers absently picking up the shattered white pawn’s two halves. We did not meet each other’s eyes. After a moment I signaled the bartender to bring him a Guinness, and from the other room the music began, tonight by a band named Roving Rogues. They were singing defiantly of dead Englishmen.

  Raphael said, after his ale was set before him, "I knew how this would end when last we played chess, do you remember?"

  "I remember."

  He flashed me a gentle smile and sipped velvet foam from the top of his glass. "I knew it would not end with her death. Perhaps you know it, too."

  "Raphael – "

  He set the pawn back on the board in its proper place. Mended, wholly and completely, without even a discoloration to mark the break.

  "Let’s play," he suggested. "Winner takes all."

  He did not, could not know what he was saying – and yet, it was no great risk for him. I was no strategist, as well he knew. Like Belial, I was brutal and crass, and I fought with brute force. It would take very little for my elegant brother to step aside.

  I took a white pawn on the third move, another on the fifth. A rook on the sixth. It was not, I realized, that Raphael was playing any worse than he had – I was playing better. He showed no signs of distress as I hounded his queen to her death, butchered his bishops, felled his knights.

  An hour and one Guinness later, Raphael tipped his white king and said, softly, "I concede."

  I sat, frozen, staring at the board. I had won. I had harried him into checkmate, and I had won.

  Raphael reached out a hand across the wasted battlefield and said, "Congratulations, my brother."

  I knew what it meant to take his hand. I’d done it before, in the hallway. I’d almost dragged him to Hell then.

  "No," I said. Almost a plea. "Leave, Raphael. I give you the chance. Leave."

  "I can’t." His hand remained outstretched. "Please, Ariel. Do this for me."

  The shock of our opposites meeting was extreme this time, perhaps because we knew it was coming. I felt breathless, exalted, orgiastic. His peace and love flowed over me, into me, and out again, and my darkness –

  My darkness consumed his light. I tried to release him but he held me too tightly, his eyes gone wide and very still. His light faded, faded . . .

  . . . vanished, as if it had never been.

  I screamed in horror and let go of him but it was too late, too late, what had I done? No light in him, no sense of Raphael at all. I had destroyed what I most loved in the world.

  A hot presence at my back. The razor edge of Belial’s fingertips sliced skin on my neck in a demonic caress.

  "My lovely," she purred. "I never doubted you, my Ariel. The child and the Angel. He falls of his own free will. Will you rule in Hell, Raphael, or only serve?"

  Raphael’s blue eyes had gone ash-gray. He sat as if frozen, but tears glittered like stars in his eyes. I knew what he felt, the emptiness, the anguish, the soul-eating horror. Not right. It was not right.

  Grace. I loved Grace, loved her with all my heart. And I had betrayed her, murdered her spirit, raped her will –

  "We will do great things, you and I." Belial came around the table in her comely woman’s form, sat on Raphael’s lap and showered little crimson kisses on his neck. Where her lips touched, blisters bloomed like roses. She slid her hands into his shirt, her talons drawing bloody inverted crosses that soaked the thin cotton. "Great things. Destroy. Torture. Murder. These things have always been forbidden to you but you’re free now, Raphael my elder brother, free as you’ve never been before. No more God to fear. There’s only yourself."

  Within my breast, a bloom of heat. It caught me totally by surprise, so that I went still and turned inward, marveling. I had been cold and empty so long.

  In the warmth, a light. A whisper. A word.

  Raphael said, softly, "There is never anything to fear, Belial. If you had learned anything in your Fall, you would have learned that. Don’t fear forgiveness."

  He was speaking to me, not only to my ears but to the light blooming within.

  "You are worthy of it. Stop fearing, Ariel."

  "Grace," I whispered. Tears in my eyes, tears of joy and pain and anguish.

  "You can release her, if you wish." It seemed as if Belial wasn’t even there, sitting on his lap, her face contorting with fury. There were only the two of us, and my light blooming and heating like a new-born furnace. In Raphael, too, a trembling tinder-spark, shining golden. "I don’t promise you it will be easy, or painless. But it can be done."

  Around us the Tipperary Inn turned ghostly-pale, the music whisper-thin. Around us, flames and screams hardened.

  "Welcome to Hell," Belial said. She had grown wings, razor-edged and black as the soul staring from her eyes. "Your love has no power here."

  Raphael’s eyes held mine. On the table, our chess game lay finished. I had won.

  In winning, I had lost, and in losing –

  Won.

  I plunged my hand down into the simmering hot coals beneath my feet, reaching, reaching, calling her to me. Grace’s hand touched mine and I drew her up into my embrace, her damaged spirit shivering and crying out in agony.

  I poured light into her.

  "Ariel." Belial’s voice was dangerously soft. "You will never leave this place."

  "The Devil is the father of lies."

  I held Grace out to Raphael, who folded her in his arms. I took his hand.

  My light leaped out to him, igniting the spark in him, and together we burned brighter than Belial, brighter than the flames of Hell, and the wings that formed out of the smoke and screams for him were pale as sunrise, soft as morning. In his eyes, the face of love.

  "We will meet again, brother," he said, and his wings soared him high, higher than Belial’s shout of rage, higher than the flames.

  I saw him attain freedom before Belial’s rage struck me down.

  We are the same, Angels and Demons, with only the thinnest of lines between us. An Angel may feel rage and pride, and fall; a Demon may feel compassion, and rise to live as human, to earn another place in Heaven, though it is not an easy task, nor a small one.

  Ariel remembers nothing of Grace, or Hell. He lives a simple life, resisting most temptations Hell sends his way. He still has a weakness for the flesh, but that is, perhaps, as it should be.

  He does not know what he does when he goes to the Tipperary Inn and plays chess with his friend Raphael. He only knows there is a sense of peace to the ritual, and happiness.

  As always, I am his Guardian. I think he never knew it, all this time.

  I think, today, he will win the game.