The Space Between Read online

  It’s hard to know what to do about my mother. The fact is, even when I’m so sure she’s wrong, her voice has the ring of authority. I want to think I’m good for more than creeping around Earth like my sisters do. I want her to think that. Mostly, I just want to be good for something.

  I see the shadow behind me reflected in the globe before I hear Obie’s footsteps. When I look around, my brother is standing just inside the doorway.

  He’s dressed like the medical staff at a hospital, in elastic-waisted pants and a short-sleeved smock with no buttons. The whole outfit is pale green and looks like pajamas.

  “Hey,” he says. “Do you have a minute?”

  I nod, cradling the snow globe in both hands.

  It’s a strange question—an Earth question, because there, a minute means something. There are no minutes here and time is a vast, looping thing.

  “I brought you a bus schedule,” he says, tossing a folded paper booklet onto the couch beside me. “It’s only for a local line, but I thought you might like the colors.”

  Against the backdrop of my room, filled with wind chimes and mechanical toys, he is Easter-egg green, like he belongs here. Under the scrubs though, he’s as colorless as I am, all black hair and white skin.

  “Thanks,” I say, thumbing through the pages so they riffle one way, then the other. Each route is marked in a different shade.

  Like most of the demon men, Obie works in various cities all across the world, but he doesn’t trade in suffering like they do. When it became clear that he wasn’t suited for Collections, my father took pity on him and now Obie is the sole employee of the Department of Good Works. It’s a better job than collecting, although most of the men would disagree. When faced with a choice, most of them would rather reap than save.

  There’s a dark smudge on the front of Obie’s shirt, high up, near the sleeve. It’s small—asymmetrical—and I want to ask where it came from, if someone was bleeding. It would be a silly question, though. In Obie’s line of work, someone is always bleeding.

  The people he’s assigned to help are the half-human children of fallen angels. They’re called Lost Ones, and most of them earn the title. I can’t remember an assignment Obie’s had that hasn’t involved a hospital or a prison or an institution. Lost Ones are always in the process of self-destructing.

  He picks his way toward me, stepping around a brass floor lamp and a stack of children’s picture books. He drops onto the footstool, facing me with his hands clasped between his knees.

  I watch him through the dome of the snow globe. It warps him, but I can still pick out individual features. Mouth like mine. Chin and cheekbones and hair like mine. Eyes, not.

  “I’m leaving,” he says suddenly. He says it like he expects me to argue, but the announcement isn’t really worth remarking on. He leaves all the time.

  “If you’re going to be anywhere near Malta, can you get me a piece of Gozitan lace?”

  Obie plucks at one of the braided tassels on the footstool. Then he shakes his head. “Leaving,” he says again. “Daphne, I’m not coming back.”

  And for a moment I just sit, letting the snow globe dangle in my hand. “What are you talking about?”

  He looks away and bows his head. “I can’t stay here anymore. I’m just . . . it’s too hard, living here. Pretending like I belong.”

  And for a moment, I think I understand what it is that makes him so convinced he shouldn’t be here. His father was an actual man, real flesh, real blood, with a soul and a heart. Virtuous. Mine used to be a star, before he became the Devil.

  Then Obie glances up and I wonder how I could have doubted his place in Pandemonium. His eyes are pale gray. He looks incredibly like our mother.

  “It’s not pretend,” I say. “This is home.”

  He nods, but his gaze is unfocused, like he’s thinking of something else. “Sometimes things change.”

  But the fundamental law of Pandemonium is stasis. Nothing changes. “How?” I say. “How is that possible?”

  “I’m in love,” he tells me, so calmly and so simply that at first, I don’t grasp the meaning. “Her name’s Elizabeth and she’s smart and beautiful, and she understands me. She’s one of the Lost Ones, and she knows exactly what it’s like to be half-human.”

  Love is deceitful. It’s mysterious and impossible. Just watching Lilith should have been enough to make us fully aware that it will never happen to us.

  “Did you talk to Mom about this?”

  He shakes his head, staring down at the carpet. “I’m not going to tell her.”

  I sit on the couch, looking at Obie, who is the only brother I have—my mother’s miracle, and the one solitary reason she ever went back to the Garden at all. Leaving.

  My voice comes out in a whisper. “She’s going to be so mad at you.”

  “Look,” he says, and for the first time, he sounds truly sad. “Do you think I want to hurt her? I don’t want to leave this way, but I don’t really have a choice. She’s not going to understand.”

  “She’ll find out.” The idea of doing anything in secret is hopeless where Lilith is concerned. This is the consequence of having a mother who sees through mirrors. She finds out everything.

  “I know. But at least this way, I can leave without causing a scene—without her trying to stop me. You wouldn’t understand. You’re so good, Daphne. I can’t be what she wants me to be.”

  Demons go to Earth. I know this. They go to Earth, but not to live. Not to stay there. Because although they might be perfectly happy to work and play and feed there, no one just decides to trade the spectacle and the glory of Pandemonium for the danger of a place where an avenging angel wants to kill you just for existing.

  “What’s it like there?” I ask, knowing he won’t tell me the truth. What’s it like there, when what I really want to know is, why are you leaving?

  He turns so I can’t see his face. “It’s nice. When I’m there, I don’t feel like there’s something wrong with me all the time. It’s easier to be myself there. It’s easier not to be noticed.”

  But he’s not even that remarkable. His father may have been a mortal man, human to the core, but down in the crowded streets of Pandemonium, Obie looks just like everybody else.

  “It’s not pretend,” I say again. “It’s not like you just got here by accident. You belong with us.”

  Obie’s head is still down. His expression is pensive and he’s staring at the snow globe in my hands. “I don’t think anyone belongs here.”

  He tells me this like he knows it for sure, knows so much more than I do. I’ve never left the city. How can I argue? My carpet is so silver in the low light that it looks like a lake of metal.

  He leans toward me, reaching for the snow globe, and I let him take it. When he shakes it, fake snow powders down. The dancer only stands there, motionless under her tree. “Daphne,” he says. “This is something I have to do.”

  “Don’t you even care that it’s dangerous? What about Azrael?”

  Obie smiles and it’s soft and faraway. “Sometimes the danger doesn’t matter. I’m leaving a place I can’t stand, for a life I want more than anything. I’m in love,” he says again, like he’s pleading with me to understand.

  But my brother is an expert at loving everything—even the broken things. I’m not even sure I know what love is.

  He sighs and gets to his feet, offering me the snow globe.

  “You can have it,” I tell him. It comes out sounding small and uncertain, like I’m asking a question.

  I want him to have something to take with him, but the snow globe isn’t even a sentimental representation of myself. He’s the one who gave it to me. So maybe it’s just something to remind him that once, when he lived in Pandemonium, he had a sister he cared about.

  He drops the globe into the pocket of his scrubs.

  “I’ll see you again,” he says and at first I think he means this isn’t permanent, that he’ll come back. But as he starts for the d
oor, he turns back and adds, “I still have to get some stuff together before I go.”

  I nod.

  Out my window, the spires of the high-rises look like giant fingers, reaching. My brother is walking out of the room, and I want so badly to keep him here.

  I hug my knees and stare straight ahead. The room is as dim as it ever gets and my collection of paper flowers and glass chimes doesn’t seem so beautiful anymore. I rest my forehead on my arms and close my eyes. Maybe I don’t know about love or belonging, but I’m terribly sure that if I don’t find a way to stop him from leaving, Obie will die.

  THE MUSEUM

  CHAPTER THREE

  In all of Hell, there’s only one person my mother hates more than she hates my father.

  A long time ago, Beelzebub was a lieutenant in the army of the fallen, and even after millennia, he’s still my father’s closest friend. Now he’s in charge of the Collections Department, which handles the reaping of souls. He knows more about Earth than anyone else in Pandemonium.

  Someone needs to talk Obie out of what he’s about to do, and Beelzebub is the only person I can think of who might be able to.

  I push the television into its insulated cupboard. After a few mishaps, I’ve learned to be careful.

  Down in the street, the city doesn’t look so clean. The roads are paved with sheets of steel, seamed and bolted, while from the roof, they look like one unbroken stream of silver, flowing off in all directions.

  The museum is situated on a craggy little hill of brimstone, above one of the many plazas. It’s huge and windowless, built entirely from the same heat-resistant material as my insulated drawers.

  At the entrance, I press my hand to the pass panel. The entrance to the museum will only open during twilight, when the furnace is cold. I say “musca domestica” and wait for the door to unseal.

  Inside, the main gallery is immense, filled with a fleet of shelves that seems to go on for acres. Some of them are made of glass or wood, brought in from Earth when the furnace was closed, but most of them were made here, forged in the Pit. They’re crowded with relics from past assignments, an item for every soul that’s ever passed through Collections. It’s the source of all my best toys, aside from the pamphlets and souvenirs that Obie sometimes brings me.

  There’s a whole aisle devoted to elaborate bottles of perfume and tiny vials of cologne and aromatic oils. The museum is the only place in the city where we can feel the jab of a pin or smell the delicate fragrance of Chanel or eau de fleurs. The scents are faint, and Beelzebub says that on Earth, sensations like smell and touch are a thousand times stronger, but this is as close as the artisans could come to creating an environment that mimics the quality of the atmosphere there.

  His office is at the back and to reach it, I have to make my way through rows filled with leather-bound books, delicate table lamps with ceramic bases and painted silk shades—all these things that aren’t native to Pandemonium. Usually, I’d take the time to admire the artifacts, but now I just cut straight through the gallery without stopping.

  When I step into the office, Beelzebub is at his desk, hunched over the blotter. He’s sorting through a box of small, shiny toys, oblivious to the cloud of flies that whine around his head.

  “Daphne,” he says with his back to me. It’s just a parlor trick, but I can never figure out how he always knows it’s me. “Did you let something else burn up? If you wrecked the TV, you’re out of luck. I’m not giving you another one.”

  With a flourish, he swings around in his chair, turning his hands palm up. In them is a small mechanical bird, wings beating rapidly. When he flicks the bird with a forefinger, it rises above us in a flurry of clockwork to perch somewhere in the upper shelves.

  I suspect one of the reasons my mother hates him is because he looks how an angel is supposed to look. Under his cloud of flies, his hair is a dark golden blond and his eyes are pale, but not the silvery-pale of demons. Here, the color is nearly transparent, but in sunlight I think it might look blue.

  The cloud of flies is less angelic. When Collections was first conceived, Beelzebub was the only employee and he reaped the casualties of entire armies by himself. He spent centuries wading across battlefields, gathering up the dead, and the flies came too. Now they swarm around his head, circling him like a halo.

  In Pandemonium, everything has a kind of permanence. I’ve seen demons come in through the terminal with steel spikes driven through their skin or covered in blood, and those spikes or that blood becomes their condition. Even little things—the state of your hair, the clothes you happen to be wearing—can become an intrinsic part of you if the circumstances surrounding them are powerful enough. Beelzebub’s flies are a constant reminder of who he is and where he comes from.

  He pushes back his chair and goes across to the wardrobe, and I stand in the doorway, watching. “I need to talk to you about something.”

  Running his fingers along a row of black suit coats, he selects one that looks like twenty he just ignored and tosses it over the back of his chair. “I’m just on my way out,” he says, gesturing apologetically toward the coat. “Do you want to tell me about it while I get ready?”

  I nod, even though I’m still thinking how to divulge what’s worrying me. “Where are you going?”

  “Belgrade. Could you hand me the nine millimeter?”

  On the far side of the office is Beelzebub’s private arsenal. Most of the collections agents carry weapons, but they get their gear standard-issue from the arms depot. All of Beelzebub’s guns are custom-made.

  I open the munitions cabinet and lift the nine from its place between the Mauser and the .45. Along the barrel are stamped the words, JUDGE NOT, LEST YE BE JUDGED. Beelzebub is sitting at the desk, feeding cartridges into a magazine. When I pass the gun to him, it looks like it belongs in his hand.

  I point to the inscription on the barrel. “Isn’t that hypocritical?”

  That makes him smile. “No, it’s ironic. I have been judged, and I’ve been found lacking.” He holds up the gun and slides the magazine into the well. “And now, I’m going forth to do some judging of my own.”

  I pull up a heavy leather chair and sit down across from him, leaning my elbows on the desk. “If a demon decided to stay on Earth, what would happen?” I say, attempting to sound casual.

  He scratches his temple with the barrel of the nine. “They would probably burn down a holy monument or two, demand a few sacrifices, terrorize some nuns, maybe find a nice house in the suburbs, and after awhile, they would get very bored. Why, are you thinking of making the move?”

  He raises his eyebrows like he expects me to laugh, then looks mildly confused when I don’t.

  “Can you tell me anything about Azrael?”

  That makes him smile. “You know all those old horror stories already—probably better than I do. Personally, I like the one where he makes a magic carpet out of the skins of seven highly unfortunate smoke demons and flies away into the night like a giant bat.”

  “I don’t mean the fables,” I say. “I need to hear the real stuff.”

  Beelzebub gives me a questioning look. Then he checks the nine and snaps it into his shoulder holster. “I knew him, you know—back when we were just kids. Difficult to get along with, but honest. He likes mandates and rules, big on keeping his word. Why the sudden fascination?”

  For just a moment, I feel lost, unsure of how to proceed. I won’t be able to explain Obie’s choice the way he could. It will sound worse when I say it. But maybe I want it to sound worse. I want it to sound worth preventing. Beelzebub has abandoned his box of ammunition and is watching me with interest. If anyone will know what to do, it will be him.

  “I’m worried about my brother,” I say. “He’s about to do something really reckless—you need to talk to him.”

  With great deliberation, Beelzebub takes a windup dog from the pile of toys, twisting the key between his fingers. “Is it one of those reckless things that’s just bound to happe
n once in a while, or is it the kind of reckless thing I should probably hear more about?”

  “He’s leaving Pandemonium to live on Earth. He says he’s in love.”

  I expect this revelation to be at least a little shocking, but Beelzebub only leans back in his chair, fidgeting with the toy dog. “Well, I can’t pretend I haven’t been there a few times. It’s not the wisest thing—love—but when it happens, there’s not a lot you can do to stop it. Sometimes you just have to soldier on through.”

  His smile is nostalgic and far away, but I can’t quite believe it. The idea of Beelzebub breaking rules out of love for a human woman is ridiculous. He’s too clean, and much too reasonable.

  “That’s not even the most reckless part, though,” I say, trying to convey the gravity of the situation. “I think he wants to be human. He’s leaving now, as soon as possible, not even telling Lilith or anything. You need to talk him out of it.”

  Beelzebub doesn’t answer right away. He sets the dog loose, letting it trundle around the desktop. The tiny buzzing of its motor doesn’t quite drown out the buzzing of his flies. “And you’re sure he’s made up his mind?”

  “All I know is that he told me he wasn’t coming back. He sounded like he meant it.”

  Beelzebub bows his head, considering his folded hands. Then he looks up. “I could talk to him, but I don’t think it would make a difference.”

  “Why not, though? You’re in charge of the whole department—everything that happens on Earth is approved by you. He has to listen to you.”

  That makes him laugh, shaking his head. “You give me far too much credit as a dictator.” Then his expression turns solemn. “It would be different if we were talking about new weapons regulations or who gets what job, but you can’t just sit down and talk someone out of being in love.”

  I sit in silence, watching as the little toy dog buzzes on the desk between us.

  “You have to let him go,” Beelzebub says, and he says it with something like tenderness. “What you have to understand is that this is his life, and he’s the one who has to live it. People make decisions, and maybe you don’t always agree, but those choices are still their own.”