Death Come Near Me by Mikael Saint-John

Part One:  Death Come Near Me.

To the Dearest one.  My Muse and Inspiration.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
" Because I could not stop for Death... He kindly stopped for me.  --- Emily Dickinson
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

" Have yourself a merry little Christmas...Let your heart be light...From now on, our troubles will be out of sight.."

Johanna Cross cupped her hands more tightly around her coffee cup.  Her fingers had long since absorbed all the heat from it.  She considered asking the waitress for a warm-up but decided it was too much trouble to deal with any other human being.  Instead, she picked up the nearest half of her bacon and cheese club sandwich, the white mark in the top slice of toast where she'd taken a single bite out of it --- How many ages ago? --- constrasted sharply with its golden brown texture and surface.  She stared at the sandwich with dark eyes, mesmerized, for several seconds before dropping it untasted back down upon the plate.  Why had she though food would be of any damned help at all?

The Christmas Carol went on, slow and syrupy, thickening and quite sickening.  She had never liked it.  Or the movie it came from.  The sound system in the all night diner kept spitting it back at her, clear and penetrating as dolby stereo.  That voice, that Judy Garland warble overflowing with fake pathos.  A show of sadness put on for the camera.  All because of a fictional happy family had to pick up their home and move in 1890-something...

" Big fucking deal," Johanna muttered to the cooling black sludge within her cup.  A stocky cop in his forties in the booth across the way gave her a questioning glance.  She ignored him, and instead concentrated on a chip in the cup's rim.  What the hell did Judy know about the meaning of real pain?  Johanna knew what real pain and suffering was.  She had been drowning in it since 8:53 P.M.

Since her little brother had asked to die...

The cup clattered against the saucer as she pressed her hands to her forehead.  Tiny blood vessels pulsed underneath and against the skin, throbbing like that hell-damned voice over the ceiling speakers.  Johanna thought she must be sitting right under them.  If she had a gun, like that cop, she would shoot them all out.  Shoot out every last speaker in the goddamned diner, and to hell with whatever the cop was thinking.  Then maybe she would turn the gun on herself for good measure.  At least that way she would go first.

" Damn you, Daniel," she whispered past a lump in her throat that burned like a red-hot ball of fire.  Sore and raw...strep throat...possible cause...the doctor in her noted automatically.  " I can't do this...I just can't...You know I cannot do this, please."

" You all right, ma'am?"

Looking up was like lifting a fifty-pound weight.  The cop was standing beside her table.  The expression on his face combined wariness and concern, as if he wanted to offer help but was too used to dealing with hardasses to have any idea how.  With quick observation, she noted he had what looked like a beer paunch and a terribly bad comb-over to hide his aging bald spot.  Like dad, dead from kidney damage six months before the mysterious eruption and explosion.  Before Daniel went to the hospital and never came out.  Not that dad would have cared...lucky son of a bitch.

Johanna looked downward, past the officer's squared chin and plump neck to his dark blue shirt.  His badge glittered against the fabric, harshly brilliant.

" Po-lice offic-er," she said, pointedly pronouncing each syllable.  " And whom are you policing at the moment?"

" Ma'am...?"

" Who's your target?  Your perp?  Your collar?  or do you call us civilians something else these days?"

His jaw struck out in a jutting manner as he drew himself up.  One hand went to rest against the butt of his gun.  " I think you should leave now, Miss."

" Or what?  You'll haul me away?" Her sour laugh held no mirth.  " Jesus-fucking-Christ.  A city full of rioters and looters...and you've got a hard on for me...?  Got nothing better to do!?"

" Now, Miss, you listen here --"

" Fuck off..."

The rational side of her mind, the one that normally controlled and handled her busy schedule and picking up the dry-cleaning and the endless changes in Daniel's treatment over the past year, suggested that swearing at an armed member of New York's finiest was not, in the least, the wisest move to make.  At the moment, though, she didn't seem to fucking care.  Getting busted and hauled downtown and tossed into a holding cell might be something of an improvement.  At least then she'd have some physical miseries to distract her from her mental pain and anguish.  She gave the cop her best You-Best-Back-The-Fuck-Up glare, an expression culled from memories of the adolescent girl she had once been.  What she wouldn't give to be eighteen again.  No, not eighteen.  That had been her year in hell.  Their last year in hell, her's and Daniel's.  She would love to be twenty, on her own with Daniel in their first cramped apartment they had shared.  Free of the stink of cheap whiskey and vodka and breath-mints that never masked the stench when Mom or Dad spoke.  free of the constant shouting and fist-through-a-wall fighting.  Free of the silence that followed while dad slept it off and Mom got steadily more pickled in her favorite living room recliner.  Working hard at pre-med and a student-aid job, but happy for the first time since she could remember.  She and Daniel, together, united against the world.

Her nose stung.  She broke of the staring contest with the cop and slumped against the back of the booth.

" leave me alone...please..."

Johanna knew the cop was looking at her.  She left her eyes down so she wouldn't have to see the pity on his hard-as-nails face.  After what felt like an endless eternity, she heard the muffled creak of his shoes as he walked away.

She took a sip of her coffee, just to have something to ocupy her time with.  It tasted like cold-brewed tree bark.  Just as bad as the hospital coffee, which was the color of night-dark sewer water and the flavor of a garbage truck.  Daniel had joked about it, when Johanna came to visit during his first stay.

" Chateau De garbage truck, Our Lady of Mercy's own special house blend.  Puts hair on your genitals, but only if you drink four or five pots."

They had both laughed harder than the joke deserved, mainly to remind each other that they still could.  Daniel always had been able to make her laugh.

Johanna picked up a french fry and drew random patterns with it through the scattered salt and catsup on her plate.  Circle, spiral, cross.  The motions kept the memories at bay for a while, but she knew they were there.  They hovered at the edges of her mind.  Pressing.  Insistant.  Determined to break free.  After a minute she dropped the fry, and resting her head in her hands...and allowed the memories to come forth.

Five and a half years old, watching the new baby squirming and burbling in the corner of their flower printed couch.  Mom was asleep...Dad was out of the house.  For a little while, she and the baby were safe.  " Daniel," she had said softly, and held out a finger to make her baby brother grab at it.  Tiny fingers hooked around her big-girl one.  My baby brother, she had thought then, like the best kind of new doll, because it could do things back.  Not many things yet, but the baby would learn.  She would teach it everything.  How to play games.  Give hugs.  Eat ice-cream.  How to go downt he slide backwards and to jump off the swings.

How to be invisible when the big glass bottle of Bad Stuff came out.

The music changed to the opening chords of the song The First Noel.  Johanna saw herself and Daniel, sitting at the top of the stairs on Christmas morning.  6:00 A.M., waiting for seven.  Seven o' clock was the magic hour, when they were allowed to go down and dump out their stockings as long as they didn't make too much noise.  Noise was the cardinal sin in the Cross household.  Especially early in the morning noise after a long night with a bottle of Jim Beam.

Most years, the Christmas pickings were slim.  But the presents didn't matter.  In that one hour before their magic time, the only thing that mattered was Daniel, huddled for warmth beside her under a thick blanket, the two of them talking low about anything and everything.  Johanna had been eleven years old, maybe twelve.  Daniel was barely in first grade.

" Jo, where does God live?"
" Everywhere.  That's what Father Ryan says."
" No, I mean where is His house.  Does he have one?"
" Father Ryan would say it's the church."
" Our church?  St. James"
" I guess so."
" So then how can He have a birthday?"
" Father Ryan?"
" No, sill.  God."
" What do you mean?"

" St. James doesn't have a kitchen.  If God doesn't have a kitchen, how can he bake a birthday cake?  If you don't have a cake, it's not a real birthday.  So how can Christmas be His birthday if He lives at St. James?"

She had wanted to laugh, but Daniel had looked so serious.  Johanna couldn't just throw off a tossed flipped remark to that face.  So she said the first thing that had seemed to come to her mind.  " The angels make it for Him.  In the rectory kitchen."  A total lie, but it would take away Daniel's troubled look.  A few years in hell would be a small price to pay for that.  " God can't make His own cake.  I mean, He could, but that would be cheating.  So the angels make it with angel magic.  Like Sister Marie says our guardian angels have, to help them to keep us safe."

" Oh," Daniel snuggled closer.  " Will I know everything about God and stuff when I am as big as you?"

" Yup."  She gave Daniel's thin shoulders a squeeze and blinked hard against suddenly hot eyes.  Another lie.  She was so scared most of the time.  She just wanted to run a million miles away.  But Daniel needed her.  She had to be the stronger and the bravest.  No one else would do it.  Not their guardian angels Sister Marie always blabbed on and on about, and sure as hell not God.  God wasn't paying attention.  Or maybe he just didn't care at all.

The smell of frying-greasy foods brought her back to the diner with such a yanking force.  The cooking odors made her stomach heave.  She scrabbled in her coat pocket for the wad of bills she usually carried there, extracted a ten-spot, tossed it on the table and lurched out of the booth.  No one paid her the slightest notion as she stumbled toward the door.  The night beckoned, a chilly thirty-ish...a bit unusual to her, but it was clean and bracing.

Outside, she breathed deep, then sagged against the wall as a wave of fatigue struck.  Cold from the gray stone seeped into her back.  Where in the hell was she supposed to go now?  Back to the hospital?  Home to her empty apartment?  She pushed away from the building and stumbled down the street.  One foot, then the other, shaking at first but gathered strength as the city streets melted away beneath her feet.  In this part of town, the sidewalks were still intact.  She had walked a long time after leaving Daniel, long enough to think she might be hungry and hit the first diner she saw.  She wondered how far she was now from the site of that mysterious eruption.

The wind began to pick up, tossing her dark hair and toying with the hem of her winter coat.  She shivered in a sudden gust.  It had been a bad week to have removed the lining from her wardrobe, she thought.  Who knew it was going to get so cold, so fast and unnatural.  But then, everything had been crazy in the weeks since the explosion.  Landmark buildings crumbled to dust, familiar streets ripped to rubble.  Friends and neighbors dead or missing.  These days it wasn't only the half-insane street preachers who walked around shouting about the end of the world being nigh.  Especially after what the local networks had swiftly dubbed " The Visitation."

She remembered seeing it on the news -- trembling, static footage of something bright and vast...like a column of flames int he vague shape of angelic-like wings.  And a sound picked up by some intrepid newsman's microphone --- a deep throated roar she had felt through her bare feet even over the television set...like the howling winds of a tornado combined with the screams of the damned.

Afterward, people had flocked to the churches that were still standing and mobbed the aid stations that had been set up in the worst hit neighborhoods.  She had spent three solid days in one of those herself.  Handing out emergency first aid and what little comfort she could offer until she passed out from severe exhaustion on te dispensary floor.  They had sent her home after that, but she couldn't relax enough to get the sleep she so desperately needed.  So she had gone to see Daniel instead, to sit vigil beside his bed at Our Lady of Mercy.  The hospital building had remained miraculously intact and standing.  At the time, she had seen it as a good omen.  The guardian angels were real; God did care.  He had just been a little busy, was all.  Then came Daniel's second stroke, the one that had damaged his whole left side.  He ate mostly through a straw now, his slack mouth barely able to handle anything solid.  The effort to regain half-intelligible speech had cost him weeks of an exhausting struggle, and still only Johanna could comstantly understand him.  The doctors offered little hope of progress, not while the kidney disease ravaged the strength he would need to recover.

No wonder he wanted to die...

" You bastard." Johanna muttered to the night-dark sky.  Stars shone it, courtesy of the thousand of missing streetlights taken down by the unnatural explosion.  Sister Marie had told her once that the stars were the eyes of our Lord, watching over and down at all, His gaze was as cold and distant as these pinpoints millions of lightyears away.

" You can't fucking be bothered, can you?  You created us to be born.  You put us here...and then you just up and fucking leave us to our own devices.  To hell with that.  I don't believe in you anymore.  And you know what?  If that really was the Devil who showed up awhile back..in that explosion....I'd sell him my soul just to spite you.  Because at least he would make Daniel get well.  Payment for payment.  Not like you, who takes all our love and trust and gives us nothing in return.  So fuck you, buddy...I'm done."

She stood on the street corner for a moment, glancing upward as if she expected the stars to answer her.  Silence was her only response, accompanied by a fresh gust of cold chilled wind that made her eyes tear.  The temperature was dipping lower and her winter coat wasn't helping much as a barrier against the unreasonable atmosphere.  She huddled deeper inside of it and struck out in a random direction.  God was dead.  Daniel was dying, and the only thing that mattered now was the hollow clap of her boots on the cracked pavement.

The cracks soon gave way to holes, which in turn gave way to jagged gaps and upthrusted chunks of concrete.  Most she could step over easily, but some she had to jump across.  She had reached the edge of the epicenter...the point of origin of the mysterious explosion.  Time to turn around, she thought, but her feet kept pressing her forward.  She yelped as she barked her shin hard against a hunk of sidewalk.  Johanna bent over to rub the now bruising area, then straightened up and caught the glow of neon amid a row of darkened shop fronts.  Unlike its dilapitated neighbors, this small building still had four walls and a roof.  The glowing red sign red Quido's Liquor, with open below it in acid green neon.

A mirthless laugh escaped her.  The only intact establishment on this strip and it had to be a liquor store.

" Speak of the Devil," she muttered to herself.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sabriel could feel the cold...

Or rather, the body in which he presently inhabitted could feel it.  Couldn't stop feeling it, in fact.  He was running out of strength...out of time.  His reserves depleted by the constant need to keep two steps ahead of the Earthbound.  Those fallen angels had made the Big Apple their personal playground, and woe betide any newly freed fallen one who chose to flaunt their power.

But then, niether Sabriel nor the body of the man, whose catatonic shell he had appropriatedhad ever been much for obeying authority.

He staggered down the rubble strewn remnants of a sidewalk, then wavered into the side of an overturned and burnt out remains of a car.  They littered the streets of the destruction site, batered and burnt out metal momsters crouched amid chunks of pavement and building stones and materials.  Bright moonlight showed him the shadow of his own reflection in a curving section of what had once been a fender.  Handsome features, long hair tied back, of a blonde-ish nature, multiple piercings in one ear and a feral grin, conjured up despite his situation by the thought of his own daring.

He had lasted seven weeks against the Earthbound, an eternity in Hell before that.  He had to find a way to keep going.  The Most High who had imprisoned him, the Princes of Hell who thought to use him as their tool, and most of all, the Morningstar himself, who had inspired and then abandoned him... none of these had destroyed him yet.  He swore nothing would.  Out of the Abyss, free to resume his sacred calling for the first time in a millennia.  Sabriel had no intentions of throwing away this unprecedented opportunity.

But he felt so weak.  He leaned against the side of the car, breathing deeply, as if pulling more oxygen into his host's lungs would provide him with the sustenance he craved.  A memory rose from his recently acquired human mind --- a bottle of prescribed pain-killers, scattered across the top of a table.  Fingers clutching a glass, the body cold and numb and trembling with the same inyense need.  Then came the deep inhalation of a decision made...the swallowed pills and the stronger bitter taste of absinthe against the back of his throat...followed by a rush of being utterly and completely alone as overwhelming as the desired death would satisfy.  Sabriel rode the memory out until it faded, then wrenched his attention back to the business at hand.  He needed to find a believer.  Soon, before he lost the power to keep himself hidden from the Earthbound Ones.  Desperation nibbled at him.  Mortal were thinner on the ground these days --- most of those not killed in the explosion or the subsequient riots had fled soon afterward for the few greener pastures that still existed.  What sold could he hope to find here of any lasting worth?

A flare of anger marshalled his remaining strength.  Fear had no place in the mind of one such as he, one of Lucifer's fallen.  " I banish fear--- or bring it.  As the dying may deserve."

Deep within him, a similiar anger echoed in the remnants of his host's psyche.  Mikael Saint-John.  Mikael for the most of his thirty-one years, had also hated being alone and afraid.  He had raged against the fate of his short and brief life, against his inability to escape, and most of all against himself for not being able to forget, for feeling lost and worthless to anyone.  The paradox of such anger contained within sch a broken and shattered soul had drawn Sabriel to him.

Enough time-wasting.  Sabriel cast his awareness as wide as he thought his host body could manage to walk.

Any believer much further away than that might as well have been living on the moon.  With the streets torn to shreds by the Maelstrom and still more destruction wrought by the burning and looting that followed, no city bus or taxicab was likely to come anywhere near him tonight.  It was hoofing it or nothing at all but starvation.

First he scented the city itself, a dead brown-black smell like the odor of scorched bones.  The stench brought a taste with it, of a brackish and bitter decay.  A part of him marveled at the strangeness of near-infinite angelic awareness filtering through the finite sensory organs of this damned mortal man.  Scent and taste were his guides now --- a single, physical reality to hold a consciousness that had once spanned multiple layers of being.  The thought made him want to weep...another bad sign.  His strength was vastly waning, depleting now, if he could be so easily distracted from the hunt.

Where was it?  The scent he sought.  Over the dead reek of the concrete canyons and asphalt walkways lay another smell.  Musty and heavy and sickly yellow.  The smell and scent of despair.  Of sorrow and fear.  Of an anger so dulled by hopelessness that only the slightest spark of life remained.  Hell would have smelled like this to Mikael.  Now this scent belonged to the people of New York, bent under their own dreadful weight of their own indifferences.  Here and there beneath the murk lay sharper tastes and scents; the peppery bite of raw anger.  The rich cinnamon of true love.  The bright green tang of hope.  Close to hand, however, there was little of any promise.  Mikael's nose crinkled at the chemical bite of whiskey --- a sodden drunk, four blocks away, dreaming of angelic Hosts in the voice of a long dead parent.  Swing low, sweet chariot...Coming for to carry me home...Show him a real angel and he would believe, if only for a moment or two.  Just long enough to give him another few hours of substance, before his pickled brain let the wonder fall out of it like a precious artifact out of a clumsy child's hand.  Then he would be right back where he was, scrounging the streets for the next scrap of watered down human faith.

He shivered, then shoved himself away from the burnt out car.  There had to be a better alternative somewhere in this city.  Sabriel was tired of snagging tidbits.  Tired of living off just enough strength to hunt and then go to ground.  The drunk would have to do for now.  And then he would find something better.  Something befitting the power and glory of an Angel of Death.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The neck of the bottle, securely wrapped in a brown paper bag, felt bizarrely comforting in Johanna's hand.  She still couldn't believe she had bought it.  At least she had the sense to avoid the really cheap shit.  A fifth of Chivas should work every bit as well for her as it had for her parents, without the rotgut afterwards.  If there was an afterward, which she didn't care much about just now.  Besides, there was a symmetry to drowning her sorrows in the same poison so beloved by dear old Mom and Dad.

She stumbled over a gap in the concrete and caught herself against a chunk of unidentifiable rock.  A piece of some building facade, she decided upon a closer look.  It was gun-metal gray and nubbly, with whorls in it that suggested fleurs-de-lis.  Or maybe the ragged edges of angel wings.  She laughed at that, the sound echoing crazily back at her from the shadows.  " Are you my guardian angel, by any chance?  Because I've got to tell you, you're pretty damned late.  In fact, ou're so fucking late, you're fired."

God, she sounded drunk already and she hadn't even opened the bottle.  Hadn't found the right place to drink it.  She would know when she saw it.  Somewhere in the zone of destruction, for sure.  The area looked about how she felt.  Battered, shattered, raw and bleeding and burned beyond belief.  Like the bottle, the devastation was strangely comforting.  The outside world mirrored her inner one, and that was as it should be.

Her foot crunched down on something.  Glass shards winked up at her in the moonlight.  Johanna looked around.  The sidewalks and the streets, or what passed for them here about, glittered with broken glass as far as her eyes could see.  Kristallnacht must have looked like this, only without the twisted steel frames of once proud skyscrapers rearing up against the sky like some sort of alien jungle foilage.  Far ahead, near the end of the block, a rippling darkness in midstreet warned her of a massive hole.  Best watch her step from now on.  No sense falling down a crevasse in the pavement before she had had at least one drink...

Johanna picked her way across the field of glass, turning obliquely to avoid the giant crack whose edge she had glimpsed.  A relatively intact stretch of road beckoned her eastward.  Half collapsed apartment buildings lined her new route, mostly brownstones style places interspered with the occasional single family unit.  A somewhat ritzy neighborhood before literally all hell had broken loose.  Those walls still standing hinted at graceful lines and large expanses, and jagged hunks of masonry shared the street with shards of expensive roofing material.  She bent and picked up a piece of the remains of a terra-cotta pot.  It cracked between her fingers.  She pressed the fragments to her nose and inhaled the fragrance of the red-brown, sunbaked dust.  A childhood memory surfaced --- herself at twelve, showing a seven year old Daniel how to pat down potting soil over a baby chiflara plant in a terra-cotta pot.  By the time she had left for college. promising to come back for Daniel in a month or less, the chiflara had towered over his head.

The plant was dead when she came back, snapped in half by a swung chair during one of her father's drunken rages.  " Better the plant than me," Daniel had said later, trying to laugh about it, but Johanna could hear in his voice how much those flippant words had cost him.

She lurched to her feet.  The bottle bobbled dangerously in the crook of her arm.  She tightened her grip, suddenly terrified of losing her sole source of oblivion.  Nothing else would be available tonight.  The explosion and then the riots had driven away the corner drug dealers, at least temporarily, even if she had the money to score.  The bottle was better anyways.  More appropriate.  If she was going to jump of the wagon after damned near thirteen years, she would prefer to start with the devil she knew best and loathed the most.  She had spent almost her entire adulthood running and fleeing from alcohol, running as fast as she could from the intimate demon that had made their home life a travesty and had once came close to killing her.  Tonight it was time to face that demon down.  If she could manage that...maybe she could finally face what Daniel had asked of her to do.  Or else she would be so far gone that it wouldn't matter anymore.

All she needed was the right place for the final confrontation.

The bent outlines of a wrought-iron fence came into view halfway down the block.  Beyond them, Johanna saw a line of small, irregular hills, interspersed with upended benches and overturned playground equipment.  The local park.  Perfect.

She staggered toward it,t he whiskey bottle held tight against her coat.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In the darkness of the narrowed alley, Sabriel rose and brushed grit from his knees.  The crumpled body of the wino lay at his feet.  Fleeting and shallow thoughit was, his mingled terror and wonder had given Sabriel sufficient sustenance to continue his night's hunt.  Another few like him -- scraps from the city's mortal smorgasboard --- would sustain him for a few more days, perhaps even another week.  Then he would face the same dilemma all over again.  Faint nausea washed through him at the thought.  He had been immortal once, existing in countless dimensions of reality.  How pathetic, that he should be reduced to this hand to mouth existence.

Sabriel steadied himself with a hand against the cold metal side of an overflowing dumpster.  " No more," he vowed.  " This ends tonight."

The odor of rotting garbage from the dumpster was overpowering.  He walked away from it toward the mouth of the alley.  When he reached a spot here the air smelled a bit clearer, he sat cross-legged on the rough pavement and breathed deeply.  Each slow exhalation broadened his awareness until he could scent the life energies of the weeds that thrusted upward between the cracks in the sidewalks.  A rush of sensation swept through him.  Dizzying and chaotic.  Somewhere within the maelstrom was the meatier prey he sought.

There --- a flicker of complex scents.  A hint of rich taste on the edge of his tongue.  Pepper and ammonia.  Burning rage and bitter despair.  And underlining them both, the grassy scent of hope that refused to die.  This soul was suffering, had almost convinced itself that niether God, nor the world cared for its pain.  But not quite.

Sabriel rode the winds to his quarry; eagerly trading the cost in strength for speed.  Within a single heartbeat, he stood at the outskirts of a park.  Convulsed earth and crazy tilting swingsets shared the space with the tipped over benches and chunks of broken concrete.  on the support column of a drinking fountain, snapped from its base by the fury of the mysterious explosion, sat a slender mortal woman with a bottle glinting in her hands.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The whiskey burned all the way down and left a flat, metallic tang on the back of her tongue.  Just the way she remembered.  Back when she was twelve years old, she couldn't quite imagine ever wanting to taste the shit.  By the time she was fifteen, she could hardly believe she had existed at all without it.  " Just like dear old Dad," she muttered, then giggled.  Vodka had been her Mother's choice, colorless and near flavorless shit she could pour into anything or pass it off as water.  Provided no one got his or her nose too close to it, of course.  A stealth drink for a gutless drinker.  Johanna had followed in her father's footsteps; Whiskey meant you had enough gumption to at least admit you were going to hell.

" My name is Johanna Cross," she said to the night.  " Doctor Johanna Cross, MD.  I have been sober for thirteen years and four days."

The nubbly stone of her perch felt cold beneath and against her thighs.  She took another swig.  Liquid heat carved a path down to her innards.  Suddenly she was eighteen again, driving too fast down quiet residential streets, windows down and open and the radio cranked as she jiggled in the driverside seat to the beat of Brown-Eyed Girl.  One hand on the wheel, the other on the bottle, tossing back one slug after another between lines in the song.  Poor Daniel, missing a ride in the magic chariot.  Little bastard-assed brother, too scared to go out to the movies just because Johanna had had a few drinks.  " I'm good.  I can handle it.  Come on." Laughing at Daniel's distressed face, sure of jollying him along.

" I won't.  Not with you like this."  Daniel's cheeks reddening on top, the way they always did when he was upset.

" Like what, little bro?" Teasing, one arm reaching out to tousle Daniel's hair.

Daniel had stepped away, big and deliberately.  " Like Dad and Mom.  You're so fucking drunk, if i poked you, you would fall over."

The obscenity on those twelve year old lips had shocked her into immobility.  Then had come a fury so sweeping and total, it took her by complete surprise.  She had picked up the nearest thing to hand --- Daniel's glass turtle bank, a cherished memento of a long-ago trip to Washington DC --- and hurled it against the wall.  " You little shit!  Who died and made you God!?  Fuck you --- stay with them if you want.  I'm gone."

She had driven for a solid hour, too furious to sit in a movie theatre and focus on the antics of the latest box office draw.  A stop at Lenny's Liquor calmed her somewhat, as she calculated the differing prices of poisons against the folded bills in her jean pocket.  Then a long walk down the bicycle path of a nearby strip, punctuated by the rough bite of Jim Beam.  By the time she was ready to drive home and forgive all, more than half the new bottle was gone.  But she was not a drunk like her godforsaken excuses for parents.  She could handle her liquor.  That was why she had started drinking in the first place.  To prove that she could.

And then the second car shattered the quiet night along with her passenger side door.  She remembered the strains of the radio mingled with the sounds of breaking glass and screaming brakes...then silence and the embrace of darkness for a very long time.

The first thing he saw when she awoke was Daniel's face, twisted with the effort not to bawl like a baby.  " Please, Jo, don't die.  Don'e leave me alone with them."

Daniel would have died that night, she had realized later when she finally saw the wrecked car.  The passenger space no longer existed.  Johanna's broken ribs and other injuries had come from being pinned against the driver side door by the crumpled opposite half of the vehicle.

She knew she was a drunk after that.  She knew her brother's life was a gift from Heaven...the one freebie you sometimes get when God decides He's feeling patient enough to bother teaching you a lesson.  And now the Big Son of a Bitch was going to take it all away.  " What, I didn't learn well enough?  I haven't been a good enough girl?  Thirteen years clean and sober, you asshole!  Wasn't that enough, that you have to punish me some more?  All I ever asked of you to do was to make it so he wouldn't suffer.  Make him well, was what I meant.  Not this."  Her voice cracked on the last two words.  " God...anything but this."

The bottle slid in her hands and thunked on the concrete column.  She tightened her grip before it could fall all the way to the ground.

" Nice catch," said a stranger's voice.  Middle aged.  Male.  Charming and startling close.  " I could use a drink, if you're sharing, that is."

Silently, Johanna passed the bottle over.  The hand that took it was strong and pale, the skin slightly reddened and rough around cold and bitten nails.  A coiled serpent ring half covered his index finger.  Johanna's gaze followed the hand up the leather-jacketed arm until she could take in the stranger as a whole.  Long haired, tied back, glossy and dark, like silk.  Multiple peircings in his left ear.  A handome face of lines and angles.  Broad and yet narrow seeming shoulders with a slightly slumped posture.  Pants that looked as if they had been painted on, with a sheen in the moonlight that suggested they were made of leather.  A pair of Grinder's boots with heavy sounding heels and soles that almost looked like weights on the ends of his long legs.

" When was the last time you ate anything?" Johanna blurted out.

The male shrugged.  " Little while ago.  I'm good, thanks though." He passed the bottle back to her.  " Mikael."

" Johanna."  The response came out automatically, even as a portion of her tired mind registered incredulity that she was exchanging social pleasantries in a ruined tot lot with a complete stranger.  The bottle felt reassuringly solid in her fingers, a counterweight to the surreal situation.

" Pleased to meet you."
" Likewise."

Several minutes passed in silence, broken only by the crackling sound of the paper bag as the bottle went back and forth between them.

" I used to live here," Mikael said.  He gestured with his head toward a distant building, now only half standing.  " Apartment over there.  Fourth floor.  Was my wife's place."

" What happened?"

" Gina died." One broad shoulder moved upward in a shrug.  " She was sleeping when the building collapsed."

" I'm sorry."  Johanna's eyes brimmed.  Poor guy.  To lose a home and a wife in one blow like that.  It was so unfair.  She swallowed hard against the impulse to bawl.  Liquor and exhaustion were crumbling away her defenses...eating away like acid at the armor around her heart.  She stood up abruptly and rooted in her pockets for a tissue.  If she gave way now, she would drown in grief and never surface again.

" So what's your story?" Mikael asked.

It all came pouring out then... a flood of words punctuated by gulps and cracked sobs.  Daniel's illness and pain.  Their long and horrible childhood, made bearable only by each other.  The good years after they had left home.  Her own messed up adult life.  With her work and her brother as the only bright light to illuminate her darkness.  Somewhere in the midst of the deluge, she looked into her companion's eyes and felt as if she were falling down a hole in the middle of the world.  Stranger still. the feeling seemed completely natural.

" I'm a oncologist," she said to those ageless depths.  " A doctor of cancer.  I work with terminal patients all the time.  I know people die.  I know I can't always save them.  I should be able to handle this.  But I cannot.  I cannot watch him suffering any more...and I can't let him go.  And I am for damned sure can't save him."  The taste of failure was like ash in her mouth.  " He has kidney disease.  Plus three strokes.  Courtesy of a congenital blood condition he inherited from dear ole Mother.  Not my area of expertise."  She took another swig from the bottle.  Fast and hard and angry.  " Do you have any idea how humiliating it is to be a high powered specialist...medical knowledge coming out of my ass, and not a scrap of it is any damned use?  I am a civilian in this fight.  I nag the nephrologist...hunt down new treatments that I can't force anyone to try...troll for miracle cures ont he fucking internet.  I beg for information by the hour.  Did he sleep.  Did he eat.  How many cc's of Demerol did he need today?  Then I go in there, with him, and do the happy act for a couple of hours until we're both so sick of it we can barely look each other in the face."  She tossed back another mouthful of whiskey.  " He asked me to let him die tonight.  How;s that for a Christmas present?  What do you want for Christmas, ' I said.  Like he gave a flying fuck, like everything was normal.  So he told me."

" That's rough."  Mikael's voice was quiet and accepting.
" Yeah."

Silence fell again, so profound that Johanna could hear her own heart beating.  She felt hollow, as if after a long bout of kneeling by the porcelain throne.  The outriders of a massive headache were nagging at her, but for the moment the discomfort as bearable.  Welcomed, even.  Anything to distract her from the decision she still had to make.

" Do you believe in miracles?"  Mikael asked again.  Offhand, as if it hardly mattered.

Johanna raised her head and looked Mikael in the face, staring into his eyes.  " Show me one and I'll tell you."

Mikael smiled and took Johanna's hand.  Then he spoke --- a word that Johanna had never heard before, whose very sound made her skin shiver and her bones to crawl.

Vertigo struck and it struck hard.  In a million spinning colors and flashes of bright brilliance.  Johanna had tried to stand, but the ground had all seemed to have but vanished.  The only solid reality was Mikael's fingers gripping hers.  All else was complete madness.  Nightmare shapes flew past, saw her, gathered around and grabbed at her with half-substantial fingers and digits of a sickly and ghastly colored mist.

Black-shot crimson for rage.  Grayed yellow for despair.  A churning dakness that she couldn't assign a shade to that was tearing through her mind in a blaze of hatred.  Along with the emotions came the voices.  Thousands of them gibbered into her ears, a crazed symphony of screams, shouts and violently hissing whispers.  She cried out in terror, and then fell to her knees.

They met solid floor.  Off-white linoleum.  As familiar as the sight of her own hands splayed against it.  No more colors.  No more wailing-shrieking screams of the damned.  Just the hard floor beneath her and a sense of blessed quiet.

Soft sounds invaded her consciousness.  Also familiar --- the muted beeping of the blood pressure monitor and the muffled sucking of the respirator.  She sagged back on her heels and looked around.  They were in Daniel's room.  Herself kneeling near the half raised bed and Mikael perched on the edge of the foam visitor's chair.

" How did--what..."  She was too disoriented to make any real words.

" You wanted a miracle."  Mikael smiled, and the dim room seemed to brighten.

" Not much of one, I'll grant you that.  Any comic book superhero could pull it off.  Or something like it.  But I thought it might do for starters."

" This is real."  The statement was half a question.
" Yes."
" Are you..." Johanna halted in confusion.  A thousnd questions whirled through her brain.  Through the chaos came the long-ago voice of Sister Marie, prattling on and on about guardian angels.

" Not exactly."  Mikael seemed to have read her mind.  " But I am what you need right now." The strange male rose and crossed the room in a single, fluid motion.  Johanna found herself straining to hear the soft flutter of angelic wings.

Tall though he was, Mikale seemed to loom even taller over the wasted shape in the bed.  One finger traced a line from daniel's cheek to the tip of his chin.  Then he held his hand over Daniel's throat.

Light from the monitor glinted off of the silver serpent ring.  Mikael's hand began to glow with the ame silvery light.  The luminescence spread until it covered Daniel from head to foot.  Johanna watched as if half asleep, her mind slowed to the consistency of molasses.  She could see straight through her brother's body.  Sinew and muscle and blood and bone.  The outlines of each cell wall glowed in the dim room...an unhealthy yelow mottled with brown and black.  She recoiled from the colors, but then forced herself to keep watching.  Mikael would change them.  Her strange male guardian angel would heal Daniel.  He had the power.  He had found Johanna on this night of all nights.  Just for that purpose.

The ambient light seemed to flicker as the silver glow intensified.  Where it met with Daniel's aura, it flared white and then faded, from silver to a dull gray and then to black.  A black far beyond the mere color, so intensely absent that it drew the eye as a missing tooth draws the tongue.  Johanna froze in horror.  A silent scream echoed through her head, but no sound passed her lips.

The angel was killing Daniel.  Murdering her little brother.  Only Johanna could stop him --- but her muscles wouldn't function.  Her vocal chords were iced over.  Her mind suspended in time and space.  There was no chance.  No hope.  No prayer.  Only this terrible moment, stretched out for eternity.

Mikael's hand dropped away from Daniel's neck.  " Watch," he whispered.  Beneath the soft word, Johanna heard the echo of a thousand voices at once.

From the black hole that was Daniel; a mist began to rise.  Colors shifted through it as it coalesced, rose and green and gold and blue.  The shimmering rainbow sphere rose higher, then floated toward Johanna.  Acting on instinct, she held out her hands.  The sphere of light rested briefly in her cupped palms.  It felt like a handclasp.  Familiar, beloved.

" Daniel," she murmured.  Her voice caught on his name.  " Holy hell, Daniel."

The sphere rose and brushed her forehead.  Sensations swept through her...too fast to process.  The dizzy delight of a toddler being swung in circles at arm's length.  Her own grinning seven year old face at the center of the spinning, happy world.  Warm weight against her back in the dark while her own voice read Grimm's Fairy Tales in hushed tones.  The scent of chicken stir-fry.  The shaky refuge of an embrace while parental shouts raged downstairs.  The window garden they had planted during the first spring of their independence.  Love.  Courage.  Regret.  And above all, an exquisite sense of release.  The prison bars had vanished, the pain-wracked body no longer held what had so desperately wished to be free.  Daniel's departing soul swept Johanna up in its joy, banishing the horror that had gripped her moments before.

She understood now.  Not a guardian angel.  A different sort of being.  The one she and Daniel had both needed.  Only she had been too stubborn to recognize it.

She turned toward Mikael.  The pleasant but strange man was there, looking tall and dark and insubstantial.  Behind and around him Johanna saw the towering shadows of wings, dark and shimmering, as if torn from the very fabric of space itself.  The same glistening blackness, dotted with whirling stars, shone from Mikael's eyes.  It beckoned Johanna like the glassy surface of an untouched pool at midnight.  More than anything, she wanted to explore the depths beneath.  She reached out to touch the darkly glowing shape of stars...

..and then she let her hand fall in confusion as the vision melted away.  No shape of the night.  No wings.  No hidden depths to plumb.  Just the strange male known as Mikael leaning against Daniel's hospital bed.

She looked around for the rainbow sphere, but it had vanished too.  There was only Daniel.  His sleeping face marked with pain and suffering that even the Demerol couldn't reach.  The sucking hiss of the respirator and the subdued beeping of the blood pressure machine sounded shockingly loud in the silence.

" He's still alive." Johanna heard her own words as if from miles away."

" Yes."

" But he--- but you ---" Her blood was roaring in her ears.  She stared at the herringbone patterns in the carpet, as if memorizing it would help bring the world into focus.  " It was real.  What I saw.  It was real."

" It can be," Mikael tilted his head to one side and gave Johanna a measuring look.  " But only if you truly desire the vision you saw.  I cannot set him free unless you ask."

Slowly, Johanna lifted her head with tear brimmed eyes.  " I'm asking."

" It must be done through you," Mikael said.  " Only you have the right."

" What...what do I do?"

" Hold him in your arms, with one hand here."  Mikael touched Johanna's throat just above the larynx.  With the contact came a sudden, sharp amd a not so quite burning smell, like the scent of the air right before lightning strikes.  She felt bereft when Mikael's hand dropped away.  Moving as if through waist deep water, she walked to the bed, and sat down on the edge and lifted Daniel's upper body to rest against her own.

" Close your eyes," Mikael mumured.  Johanna felt suspended in space.  Then there was no more thought, only sensation.  Tingling skin gave way to white hot heat...a burning so sudden and swift that she had no time to cry out.  Then the terrible heat was gone, displaced by a blessedly cool mist.  The scent of rain surrounded her --- the smell of easing, relief and release.  She opened her eyes and looked in wonder at the silver light that poured from her hand.  The light enveloped her brother's body, enshrouded it, and then gave way to that blackness as it gently severed the last connections between the suffering of the flesh and of the spirit.  Then the sphere came, mist and rainbow.  The colors danced as they rose higher.  The ceiling seemed to have vanished, or perhaps it was some sort of angelic vision that allowed Johanna to watch until the sphere disappeared amid the stars.

" Goodbye, Daniel," she breathed.  Tears ran in hot wet trails down her cheeks, but she made no move or effort to wipe them away.

The beeping of the blood pressure machine, suddenly rapidly and shrill, snapped her back into reality once more.  She stared down at her brother's face.  Daniel's features were slack, empty.  As empty as the hollow in her heart where her little brother had once been.

She laid the body against the crumpled pillowcase, and then slid to her knees and curled up in on herself in a futile attempt to hold the void at bay.  The grief was too terrible to face, lurked at the edges of the vast gray space where she had once had a heart and a soul.  She was a dead woman walking.  A shell.  A husk of a human being.

" No," came a whisper in her mind.  A voice full of compassion, as deep and boundless as the oceans themselves.  " I am here.  I will always be here."

She turned blindly toward the voice...arms out to clutch whatever might be there waiting.  Dark feathered wings made of stars and darkness enveloped her in a lover's protecting embrace.

The scent of Johanna's hair was intoxicating.  Sabriel reveled in it and other more unfamiliar human emotions and sensations; the silky softness of her hair beneath his cheek, the warm weight of the woman's heaving body in his arms.  He held his newborn believer close.  Dizzied by the realization that he could assuage this grief.  After eons in the Abyss, he could finally relieve pain and suffering instead of merely being doomed to share it.  Johanna's raging emotions washed through him, buoyed him and sent his strength surging.  He felt the hot burn of anguish...the sweat stink of fear and terror...the cold bitter ash smell of being forever and always alone.  And beneath all that...the scent and taste Sabriel found even more precious --- the clear green freshness of faith and of hope.

He drank them all in like the parched earth absorbs offered water.  No gift could be too much recompense for the mortal woman whohad given him this.  He brushed his lips across Johanna's head in blessing.

" I am here," he murmured softly.  He knew Johanna could hear him, though he made no sound at all.  " I will always be here.  You are mine now.  And I am your's.  I will take care of you... Of everything.  Forever and ever and ever."

" I am Death..... and I am forever eternal."