Dreams of Gods & Monsters

“Do you realize,” asked Mik, in a bald effort to jostle some Zuzana-ness back into Zuzana, “that our three wishes are about to come true? I don’t know if they’ll have chocolate cake here, but—”

Zuzana cut him off. “I’m changing my wishes anyway,” she said, and counted them off on her fingers. “One: for our friends to be safe. Two: for Jael to drop dead, and three…”

Whatever she meant to say next, she didn’t manage it. Karou had never seen her friend look so lost and fragile. She cut in. “If it doesn’t include food,” she reminded Zuzana gently, “it’s a lie. At least, so I’ve been told.”

“Fine.” Zuzana took a deep breath, centering herself. “Then I could really use some world peace for di

And who was Zuzana going to be, now that this knowledge was hers?

“World peace for di

“It freaking better,” said Zuzana. “Or I will send it freaking back.”

The angel’s name was Elazael.

The church founded by her descendants—and they preferred the term churchto cult, naturally—was called the Handfast of Elazael, and every girl child born in the bloodline was christened Elazael. If, then, by puberty, she had not manifested “the gift,” she was rechristened by another name. Eliza had been the only one in the last seventy-five years to hold on to it, and she had often thought that the worst thing of all—the cherry on the cake of her awful upbringing—was the envy of the others.

Nothing glitters in the eyes like envy. Few could know this as profoundly as she did. It had to be something special to grow up knowing that any given member of your large extended family would probably kill and eat you if it meant they could have your “gift” for themselves, Renfield-style.

The Handfast was matriarchal, and Eliza’s mother was the current high priestess. Converts were called “cousins,” while those of the blood—venerated even if they didn’t have “the gift”—were “the Elioud.” It was the term, in ancient texts, for the offspring of the better-known “Nephilim,” who were the first fruit of angels’ congress with humans.

It was notable that in Nephilim scripture, both biblical and apocryphal, all the angels were male. The Book of Enoch—a text that was canon to no group except the Ethiopian Jews—tells of the leader of the fallen angels, Samyaza, ordering his hundred and ninety-nine fallen brethren to, essentially, get busy.

“Beget us children,” he commanded, and they complied, and no mention was made of how the human women felt about this. Unsurprising in writings of the era, the mothers had all the agency of petri dishes, and the progeny that sprang from their wombs—accompanied by, one surmised, extreme discomfort—were giants and “biters,” whatever that meant, whom God later bade the archangel Gabriel to destroy.

And maybe he did. Maybe they had existed, all of them: Gabriel and God, Samyaza and his crew and all their enormous biting babies. Who knows? The Elioud dismissed the Book of Enoch as absurd, which was kind of the pot calling the kettle black, Eliza had always thought, but wasn’t that what religions did? Squint at one another and declare, “My unprovable belief is better than your unprovable belief. Suck it.”

More or less.

The Handfast had its own book: the Book of Elazael, of course, according to which there weren’t two hundred fallen angels. There were four, two of whom were female, one of whom mattered. Victims of corruption in the highest rank of angels, they were maimed and cast unjustly out of Heaven a thousand years ago. What had become of the three other Fallen, or whether they did any begetting of their own, was unknown, but Elazael, for her part, by way of congress with a human husband, was fruitful and multiplied.

(As a side note, it said a lot about Eliza’s insular childhood and early education—or lack thereof—that she was a teenager before she learned that the governing body of the United States was called “Congress.” In her world, it meant the act that leads to “begetting.” Coupling. Loin fruit. Doing it.As a consequence, congressstill sounded sexual to her every time she heard it—which, living in Washington, D.C., was often.)

In the Book of Elazael, unlike in the patriarchal Book of Enoch, or Genesis for that matter, the angel wasn’t the giverof seed, but the receiver. The angel was mother, was womb, and, credit nature or nurture, her offspring weren’t monstrous.

At least not physiologically.

The Book of Elazael wasn’t written down until the late eighteenth century—by a freed slave named Seminole Gaines who married into the matrilineal clan and became its most charismatic evangelist, growing the church, at its height, to number nearly eight hundred worshippers, many of whom were also freed slaves. Of the angel Elazael herself, he wrote that she was “ebon-dark, and the quicks of her eyes white as starfire,” though, living eight hundred years after she did, he was hardly an unimpeachable source. Beyond that obviously massive heresy—a black mother angel; no, even better: a fallenblack mother angel—the book was actually pretty orthodox, derivative enough that it could almost have been the result of an epic session of magnetic poetry, Bible edition.

You know, if magnetic poetry had existed in the late eighteenth century. Or refrigerator doors.

In any case, what Eliza wanted to know about her heritage would not be found in the Book of Elazael. At least, not that edition. The real book of Elazael was within her.

She… contained it. Not in her blood, though only those of the blood had it. It was, in fact, encoded on the thread of her life, that tether hooking soul to body that would be found on no anatomy chart ever drawn in this world. She didn’t know that, even as she fell headlong into it, in the backseat of a car on a long, straight road.

Right into the heart of the madness that had claimed each and every “prophet” to come before her.

48

HUNGRY

There were no french fries to be had at Tamnougalt, and, in what Zuzana considered a blatant breach of hospitality laws, there was no chocolate, either—except in liquid form, that is, and hot chocolate just wasn’t going to cut it right now. But if she was back to her old self enough to crave these things, she was notback to her old self enough to complain about them.

And I never will be again, she thought morosely, sitting in the shade on the rooftop terrace of this new kasbah. Well, not new, obviously. New to her. It was strange to see people ambling around in their cool leather slippers, at home in this place that reminded her so much of “monster castle.” Just add a few homey flourishes, like Berber drums and some big woven cushions laid out on dusty rugs, fat candlesticks bearing years of wax drippings. Oh, and electricity and ru