JEAN-PIERRE

“Are you alright?” Jean-Pierre asked as they strode through the airport together, glancing sideways at Colm. His brother looked like he’d been dragged through a hedge backwards, his hair sticking up in all directions and grey bags showing under his eyes, a shadow of stubble on his cheeks.

“Mm,” grunted Colm, staring forward, and Jean-Pierre sighed, but chose not to further engage on the subject.

The passport inspector was not a mundie, and judging by their face when Jean-Pierre’s passport was placed in their hands, they were a student of history or art or something similar, because they blanched, glanced up at him, and very hurriedly passed it back to him.

Colm was too distracted to mention it, at least, and they caught the train into the city centre before getting the next one out to Oranienburg.

Gunther Klein and his wife, Frances, lived in a heavily forested district some ways out of the centre, so Gunther came to pick them up from the station. He was a square man, pudgy but made up of somewhat severe angles, and he had the dark, curling hair that Jean-Pierre recognised from photos of Heidemarie.

He’d never let himself get too into researching Heidemarie’s family, her various children, her various grandchildren – there was too much risk that Colm would find traces of his surveillance, and even with the practical concerns ignored and set aside, he’d never enjoyed how it made him felt on the occasions he’d looked into it. It was one thing to stalk or spy on someone for his own purposes, and another still to do so in the course of work or politics.

In cases of family, it was always more complex – in cases of Colm’s family, whom Jean-Pierre could look upon but was not to approach or engage with, it was more complex still.

From the driver’s seat, Gunther kept glancing back at Jean-Pierre in the back. Colm was in the front, but he was still feeling the effects of the pills he’d knocked back on the plane to put him to the sleep for the course of the flight.

“You are Gunther,” said Jean-Pierre after some minutes of silence. “Gunther Klein?”

“Yeah,” said Gunther. “You’re the doctor?”

Jean-Pierre glanced at himself in the back mirror, at his dark red waistcoat, the white cloth of his blouse – he was dressed in his Sunday clothes, the best he owned, but he didn’t look like a doctor, he supposed. He leaned forward to look at Colm, and he saw that his brother was dozing, his head tipped forward, his arms crossed loosely across his chest.

“Your wife is mundane?” he asked.

“Frances? Yes. Yes, she is.”

“She knows what your grandfather is?”

“My grandfather?” Gunther repeated, uncomprehending for a moment, and then his lips parted and he glanced at Colm, then put his eyes forward, on the road again. It made Jean-Pierre’s heart pang, made a bitter taste gather on the back of his tongue. “No,” he said. “She thinks Colm is a cousin.”

“I am a cousin too, then,” said Jean-Pierre. “I am his brother.”

“Oh,” said Gunther. “You’re… you’re an angel too.”  He nodded his head, and Jean-Pierre examined him as he turned into another lane, their path taking them further out of the town proper. “We’ve never met other angels, really. Dietmar and Henning, when they were kids, Colm used to take care of them, they met other angels sometimes. After their father died, and Mama remarried, married mine and Angela’s dad, he was, um… Well, my father was a lot more hands-on, he didn’t work as many hours as their dad did, to hear them say it. He was home more, so when Colm was there… And they argued, they argued a lot.”

“That’s very sad,” said Jean-Pierre quietly, and he didn’t bother to keep his tone from being as withering as he felt like making it. Gunther was a shy man, it seemed, because he wilted somewhat in his seat.

“Our father was a mundie,” said Gunther. “He knew what angels were, sort of, but he was an atheist, he didn’t really have patience with it.”

“Patience with what, precisely? A loving relative?”

“You don’t have to argue your case to me,” muttered Gunther, shaking his head. “It’s Angela you’ll be fighting with.”

“Angela,” Jean-Pierre repeated softly. “A funny woman, your mother. Naming her daughter as such while keeping her separate from those very angels who would love her.”

“I chose a mundie wife, too,” said Gunther. “Or— Well. She chose me. It doesn’t matter. But angels are nothing more than stories to her.”

“And your children?”

“They’re mundane themselves, except our eldest, and she lives in Norway now.”

“Her partner is magical, hm?”

“My granddaughter, Hanna. She’s a powerhouse of magic, she, um… She struggles to control it, what power surges in her. She’s only six, and it overwhelms her.”

“Mm. One wonders what might have been different,” said Jean-Pierre cattily, “were she raised among magic from the start.”

Gunther stopped at a traffic light, and the look he gave Jean-Pierre in the mirror was colder and more severe than he might have imagined the man were capable of, being so apparently soft.

“I could believe you’re our uncle,” he said damningly. “I see more of my mother in you than I do in Colm.”

“Perhaps I’ll like her.”

“Perhaps you will,” said Gunther. Conversation dropped off for the rest of the drive.

* * *

COLM

Colm woke up in the car in Gunther and Angela’s yard, groggy and out of it, and it was starting to get dark outside. He was still wearing his coat, and at some point somebody – probably Frances – had put a blanket over his knees as well.

He shivered as he pulled open the door and swung his legs out onto the drive. His case and Jean’s were both already out of the car, and he felt a bit of panic as he thought about how long he’d been asleep – probably two or three hours in the car, at least. After the last flight he’d been a bit overzealous with his pills, he thought, and he’d been a fucking zombie on the trains over, had felt like he was fighting the world just to keep his eyes open.

The lights were on inside, and he stepped into the kitchen, bending to unlace his boots.

“Hi, Colm,” said Marie-Hanna, Gunther and Fran’s youngest. She was chopping up carrots with uncomfortably clumsy movements of the knife, and he itched to take over from her – she’d dropped out of two university courses, and culinary science was her latest try at education. She was always nice enough to Colm, and Colm liked her, but she was the sort of girl who couldn’t pour water out of a boot with instructions written on the heel. “Doctor Delacroix said we should let you sleep.”

“Don’t call him Doctor, Marie-Hanna. He’s my brother.”

“Didn’t you bring him to look at Oma? He is a doctor, right? I cut my hand earlier and he cleaned it up.”

“Sure, yeah, he’s a doctor,” said Colm, “but don’t call him Doctor. Call him Jean.”

“Jean-Pierre, surely?”

Colm rolled his eyes, and he reached past her to swipe a slice of carrot that was way too big, and was right next to a very thin sliver of it. She had a pot of stock brewing in which he saw pieces of raw chicken, and he quickly walked past her so that Marie-Hanna couldn’t get a look at his face.

“Oh, you’re awake,” said Jean-Pierre from where he was sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the fireplace, painstakingly combing through the cat’s hair. Colm didn’t much see the point in fussing over and combing an animal’s hair as if it cared what it looked like, but at the very least she seemed to be enjoying the attention, was radiating a sense of general contentment and purring like an engine. “I tried to wake you, but you didn’t stir, and you’re too heavy for me to carry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” muttered Colm, rubbing at his eye.

“I called over to Angela’s and said you probably wouldn’t be there this afternoon after all,” said Gunther from the dining table, where he was sitting with his laptop open, back to work. He was stressed about it, Colm could feel, had too many deadlines he had to hit, too many emails going through him.

He was nearing sixty, but that still meant there were seven years or so before he reached retirement age, and Colm didn’t know if there was any chance of his being offered early retirement. He was a junior manager, wasn’t exactly a commanding authority figure, and Colm didn’t expect that he’d get a significant promotion in the meantime, not after having already worked twenty years at the same company. 

“She hasn’t cooked off that chicken,” he told Gunther quietly, and Gunther cringed, putting his head in his hands.

“I don’t know what to do with that girl,” he said lowly, and then pushed himself out of his seat to go into the kitchen. Colm heard him speaking with Marie-Hanna, and then heard the sound of trays clattering.

“Frances is upstairs with a migraine,” Jean-Pierre said, but when he looked up at Colm Susi complained and got up, dropping herself back into his lap again and making him laugh. “I’ve given her a painkiller and darkened the room – I taught her a few exercises which helped ease them a bit. She said she won’t see her doctor about them.”

“Her health insurance plan isn’t great,” Colm muttered. “I told you Gunther and Frances didn’t have much say in this thing with Heidemarie – they don’t have much money to spare. Angela and her husband live a very different life.”

“Gunther doesn’t seem to like his mother very much,” said Jean-Pierre, sinking his fingers into the thick mass of Susi’s fur and idly moving his fingers in place, smiling when she looked up at him lovingly. “I expect that’s a contributing factor, too.”

“Probably,” said Colm, although he didn’t like saying it. He felt his fingers twitch with the desire to punch something, to break something – he wished Gunther and Frances lived closer into town instead of the middle of fucking nowhere so that he could go to a gym or a pool and let off some steam. God knew after being cooped up on a fucking aeroplane, knocked out with pills, he needed it.  “I’m gonna go for a jog.”

“How long?”

“I don’t know. Twenty minutes? What time is it?”

“Six-thirty.”

“Oh, fuck,” Colm said, and ran a hand back through his hair.

“The drive is half an hour,” said Jean-Pierre. “I can call a taxi, if you want.”

“No, no,” said Colm. “No, let’s just head over. You ready?”

“Ouais, if you are. I didn’t want to go over without you.” Jean-Pierre looked down at Susi as he rubbed his thumb over the top of her head, drawing a quiet purr out of her. “I assumed you wouldn’t want me there unsupervised.”

The bitterness that radiated from Jean-Pierre was something that Colm, tired and knowing he was fucking irritable, wanted immediately to jump on, to argue with, except that underneath Jean-Pierre’s bitterness was a wave of uncertainty, of fear. Colm could feel the tension in him, the desire to keep the peace, to make Colm happy, to do his work.

Colm inhaled slowly, squeezing his hands into fists and then loosening them again, shaking out his hands.

Jean-Pierre’s expression didn’t change, and Colm thought about what Aimé had said before, about—

About Jean-Pierre not blocking out Colm’s being able to feel him. About how that dampening enchantment could so easily go both ways, if Jean-Pierre wanted it to, about how Jean-Pierre could block him out. Colm wondered what it would feel like, if it would be like the way Asmodeus was a black hole of feeling, or if it would just feel like relative nothingness, if it would just feel neutral.

“Do you trust me?” he asked.

Jean-Pierre’s eyes widened in slight surprise, his jaw slackening slightly. He was hurt by the question, and Colm felt an answering pang in his own chest as Jean-Pierre gently tipped Susi off his lap and stood to his feet, putting the brush aside.

“You haven’t asked me that question in a good many years, decades, even,” said Jean-Pierre quietly, not without some cold anger in his tone. “I come with you to Berlin, to meet your daughter and to care for her as best I can, and you ask of me—”

“That’s why I’m asking,” said Colm. “I’m tru— I’m trusting you, right? Bringing you here, asking you to have a look at her, but you’re… You came. You’re here. And you let me, uh, let me feel…” He held up one hand, gesturing to his brother. “You.”

“What?”

“You’ve blocked out your empathy,” said Colm. “Made it so you don’t have to feel people’s feelings, feel any of it. But you haven’t turned it the other way, made it so I can’t feel you.”

Jean-Pierre was silent, looking down at him as he pulled down the long sleeves of his too-big jumper, one of Aimé’s. Colm could see paint stains on the sleeves.

“Why would I do that?” Jean-Pierre asked softly. “You expect I would wear a mask before you? Turn my face from you? Keep my life secret from you? I would never.” He bit his lip, stopping himself from going on – a shadow passed over his face, and Colm felt the catch in Jean-Pierre’s gut the same as he did. Why would I do that? he said. Just because you did? went unvoiced.

Colm was not a man unfamiliar with guilt, and now it gnawed in him, gnawed on his insides like a trapped, hungry animal. He didn’t much feel like confession right about now. “Okay,” he softly.

“I’ll fetch my bag and my coat,” said Jean-Pierre, and the conversation ended there.

* * *

JEAN-PIERRE

Heidemarie, in youth, had been a tall woman – now aged and elderly, extremely thin and huddled in her armchair beneath several layered blankets, she seemed extremely small. Her skin, which was a yellowed brown, was so drawn in places and stretched with age that he had no doubt he might easily pass light through it; her face was wrinkled all over, such that the skin there hung from her skull.

Some people wore their age with grace and poise, whether out of stubbornness or simply joy still to be alive – Heidemarie, folded small and bitter in her chair, hunched forward, her gaze fixed on the middle distance, did no such thing. Age enshrouded her, weighed her down, eclipsed the woman that had once been there.

Age and other things, of course.

“Hello, Heidemarie,” said Jean-Pierre in calm, clear tones.

Her gaze flitted up to examine him, and in those eyes Jean-Pierre saw a spark of savage life, a flame seeming to show within their depths. The body might not be willing, but the spirit surely was, and a hungry spirit, too, hungry, predatory. These were eyes, Jean-Pierre had no doubt, that had looked down many a rifle sight – perhaps literally, perhaps not.

“My name is Jean-Pierre Delacroix,” he said. “I am your father’s brother.”

“You are l’ange de la mort,” she said in a voice like a creaking door, deep for a woman. She spoke very slowly, but there was a cutting clarity to the words – her French was Belgian-accented, and Jean-Pierre wondered how much she spoke French with Asmodeus as a little girl, growing up. “Come to kill me too?”

“You are of no political importance, Heidemarie. I’m here to examine you, perhaps tend your arthritis. I understand you haven’t been to the doctor in a little while.”

“The fuck is a doctor going to tell me?” she asked, raising her eyebrows. He noticed that although her face was somewhat expressive she barely moved her body at all, even to turn her head as he took two steps to the left. Her eyes followed him, but her neck remained still. “That I am old? I know I’m fucking old.”

“Ouais, very old,” Jean-Pierre agreed placidly. “But age is no reason for agony.”

“What about sin? Are you in agony?” she retorted, expression hard, and Jean-Pierre let out a low huff of sound.

She was a hard speaker, yes, and direct, too, cruel – as he stood before her he could feel the weight of her calculating gaze, feel the sums she was doing in her head as she did them, the examinations and analysis she was making of him. He had worked across from many people like her – surgeons, nurses, other medical staff – in a thousand operating rooms, his many decades alive.

He smiled.

“No,” he told her. “And if I am not in agony for all my sins, there is no reason you should be, hm?”

She narrowed her eyes,

“I will tell you what I am going to do, Heidemarie.”

“Mrs Wauters,” she corrected him.

“Heidemarie,” he maintained. “I am going to examine you physically, take your heart rate, your blood pressure, look at the mobility you currently have in your joints. I’m going to ask you some questions about your appetite, your general sense of health, wellness, a little bit about your digestion, the pain you feel, how easy or difficult it feels for you to move. I will be reviewing your medical records from the beginning once I have them from your general practitioner, and I will also be reviewing your medications – tomorrow, it’s my intention to take some blood for some tests, perhaps other samples will also be necessary.”

“I’m not your fucking guinea pig,” said Heidemarie.

“No,” Jean-Pierre agreed. “You are an old woman, you have little power over your own body, your autonomy. You cannot even move your head comfortably from side to side – you are in no position to refuse my medical attention.”

For the barest moment he saw the glint of fear in her eyes, underneath the anger, underneath the pain, underneath the blistering heat of her personality. He took no particular pleasure in provoking it – seeing it, recognising it, sparked in him a sense of distant, quiet grief.

“But I am not a shitty GP who sees a hundred patients a week and just wants you to go home and die quietly that you not require paperwork or prescriptions from me, Heidemarie,” he said quietly. “You are my niece – you are Colm’s beloved daughter. Even were you not, the situation you are in now would anger me.”

“I’m not interested in having you fucking touching me,” said Heidemarie. “It’s good of my father to bring his faggot brother to examine me,” her voice was venomous, “but I don’t want your murderous fucking hands on me.”

“Would you like some morphine?” Jean-Pierre asked.

She blinked, staring at him. She had been working herself for a real rant, it seemed to Jean-Pierre, and he had derailed the train of thought before it could really get going. “What?”

“Morphine,” Jean-Pierre repeated. “You are a very old woman and you are in a lot of pain, you have seen a lot of doctors, they annoy you, yes. I have killed many, many people – almost as many, no doubt, as I have saved on the operating table. But for all the assassinations and murders I have committed, my dear niece, I am quite superior to your Hausarzt, because I do not care about the American opioid addiction, or about modern pain management strategies. I’m not going to give you a herbal tea or some Ibuprofen. I’m going to give you the fucking good stuff, as they say, immediately. We can talk about alternate strategies once I know exactly what is wrong.”

“You think I need morphine?”

“I think you would like morphine.”

“You’re trying to fucking kill me.”

“I don’t need morphine to kill you. I don’t need anything to kill you – time is not on your side, young lady. Would you not like the morphine? I thought that you would.”

Heidemarie didn’t say anything for a moment, but she eyed the bottle Jean-Pierre had withdrawn from one of his pockets, her gaze fixed on it.

“That’s not the sort of gift a man normally brings for a niece or nephew,” she said finally.

“I’ll bring you toffees next time,” said Jean-Pierre, and Heidemarie’s laugh was cold and had a steel hardness to it that Jean-Pierre actually rather liked.

“You have to examine me before you give it to me?”

“I’ll be as quick as I can.”

“You gonna hook me on that shit?”

“If it turns out you’re in the sort of pain that requires regular morphine, I would prescribe it to you,” Jean-Pierre said honestly. “It’s my guess that what will serve you better is a combination of targeted medication, some physical therapy, and some exercises – even were you a mundie, and I restrained by mundane medical resources but not by time or money, I would think I would be able to give you some significant relief. But I have some potions, some magical therapies, all of which should aid you here. If I can get you mobile and reduce your pain significantly, and you still want morphine, I can give it to you. But I don’t think you’ll want it.”

“This is a treat,” said Heidemarie softly, and her eyes were narrowed as she looked him up and down, as though sizing him up anew.

“It doesn’t have to be morphine,” said Jean-Pierre. “I’ve got ketamine, naturally, I don’t know if you’ve tried that before. A few other opiates, uh… If you’d prefer a hallucinogen to a painkiller, I can get you some LSD.”

“I can’t have both?”

“Not right now,” said Jean-Pierre measuredly. “But you can have one now, and the other later.”

“The morphine will be fine,” said Heidemarie. She had an authoritative voice, a natural command in her tone.

“And I may examine you now?”

“Get a fucking move on, l’ange de la mort. I haven’t got all fucking day.”

“Merci,” said Jean-Pierre pleasantly, and pulled his stethoscope out of his bag.