He wasn’t positive when Verchiel had left, but he was glad to see the Powers’ leader gone, for as bored as he was, imprisoned within the cage, he did not care for the angel’s company in the least. High maintenance that one, he thought, shifting his position in an attempt to get comfortable and accomplishing nothing more than additional waves of excruciating pain. Very temperamental.

The smell of overcooked meat wafted about the inside of the cage and the prisoner was reminded of a feast he had attended in a Serbian village not long before taking up residence in the Crna Reka Monastery. They had been celebrating the birth of a child, and had cooked a pig on a spit over a roaring fire. They had welcomed him to their celebration; a total stranger invited to partake of their happiness. So he did, and for a brief moment was able to forget all that he was, and the horrors for which he was responsible. Moments like that were few and far between in his interminable existence, and he held onto each like the most precious of jewels.

From the corner of his eye he spied movement, a tiny, dark shape scurrying along the wall toward the hanging cage. His friend the mouse had returned. The prisoner leaned back to see outside the cage, and some skin from his neck sloughed off between the bars to sprinkle the floor like black confetti. The air felt cool against his exposed flesh. He was healing, despite the hindering magicks in the metal of the cage.

“Hello,” he croaked, his voice little more than a dry whisper.

The mouse responded with a succession of tiny squeaks.

“I’m fine,” the prisoner answered. He leaned over until he was lying on his side and extended a blackened arm through the bars of the cage. The mouse began to squeak again, and he was touched by the tiny creature’s concern.

“Don’t worry about me,” he told the mouse. “Pain and I have a very unique relationship.”

The animal then sprung from the floor to land on the prisoner’s upturned hand and scrambled up the length of his arm into the cage.

“That’s it,” he cooed, still lying on his side, the mouse squatting before his face, nose, and whiskers twitching curiously.

“I’ll be fine, little one. A bit more time and I’ll be good as new.”

The mouse squeaked once and then again, tilting its head as it studied his condition.

“Yes, it hurts a great deal. But that’s all part of the game. It’s not as if I don’t deserve every teeth-gritting twitch of pain.”

The mouse squeaked, moving closer to his face. It nuzzled affectionately against the burned skin on his nose, gently rubbing it away to expose new flesh, pink and raw.

“No,” the prisoner said. “You just think I’m a good man; you didn’t know me before.”

Memories of times he’d rather have forgotten danced past the theater of his mind, and the prisoner struggled to right himself. His furry companion dug its claws into his shoulder and held on as he braced himself against the bars of the cage.

“What kind of man was I before? Do you really want to know?” he asked with a dry chuckle. The mouse began to clean itself, comfortably perched upon the prisoner’s shoulder.

“That’s a good idea,” he told his friend. “You’re going to feel pretty dirty when I’m done.”

The pain was no worse, and neither was it better, but this was old hat for him. He was a pro when it came to pain. It was always with him, whether his flesh was burned and blackened or he was sleeping peacefully on a woven mat in a Serbian monastery. It was his punishment, and he deserved it.

“You’ve got to promise that once you hear my story, you won’t leave me for some other fallen angel.”

The mouse gave him an encouraging squeak, and the prisoner’s breath rattled in his seared, fluid-filled lungs as he took a deep breath.

“It all started in Heaven,” he began, and the depth of his sorrow streamed from his mouth like blood from a mortal wound.

“So, where are all these citizens you guys keep talking about?” Aaron asked as they walked down the cracked and uneven sidewalk past one lifeless house after another.

“They’re around,” Lorelei answered with a flip of her snow-white locks. “After the business with that Johiel creep, I don’t think they’re too eager to roll out the red carpet for anybody new. I can’t believe he was going to sell us out just to save his own butt.” She shook her head in disgust as she crossed the street at a crosswalk. “Can’t trust anyone these days,” she said with a warning glance over her shoulder.

“How long has it been here?” Camael asked, scrutinizing the neighborhood with eyes more perceptive than a hawk’s.

“What?” the girl asked. “Aerie? I’ve been here six years, and this is the only place I’ve ever known. Although I hear it’s been in lots of different places: on the side of an active volcano, in an abandoned coal mine … one of the old-timers said he lived inside a sunken cruise ship at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Aerie seems to be wherever the citizens are.”

Camael nodded slowly. “That is why it was so difficult to find,” he said, his eyes still taking it all in. “It does not stay in one location.”

Gabriel was sniffing around the weather-beaten front steps of one of the abandoned homes; he sounded like the clicks of a Geiger counter searching for radiation. On a house in front of them, a large piece of plywood had been nailed across the entryway where the front door should have been. Crudely spray-painted on the wood were the words my family died for living here.

“What happened here?” Aaron asked, the message affecting him far more than he would have imagined. It was as if he could feel the grief streaming from each of the painted words as thoughts of his foster parents, their horrible demise, and his own home destroyed by flames flashed through his mind.

Lorelei stopped and looked at the house with him. “During the 1940s and 1950s this property was owned by ChemCord. They were producers of industrial pesticides, acids, organic solvents, and whatnot, and they used to dump their waste here.” She pointed to the street beneath her feet.

“The place stinks, Aaron,” Gabriel said as he relieved himself on the withered, brown remains of a bush in front of the house. “The dirt smells bad-like poison.”

“And that’s helping?” he asked the dog.

“Can’t hurt it,” Gabriel responded haughtily, and continued his exploration.

“He’s right, really,” Lorelei said. “They dumped excess chemicals and by-products in metal drums that they buried all over this property; tons and tons of the stuff.”

They continued to walk, each home taking on new meaning for Aaron. “Then how could they build houses—an entire neighborhood—here?” he asked.

“ChemCord went belly up in 1975 and they began to sell off their assets—including undeveloped land. As far as the guys at ChemCord were concerned, the property was perfectly safe.”

“There is much sadness here,” Camael said from behind them. They turned to see that he was staring at another of the homes. A rusted tricycle lay on its side in front, a kind of marker for the sorrow that emanated from each of the homes. “It has saturated these structures; I can see why Belphegor and the others would be drawn to it.”

“So let me guess,” Aaron began. “They built on the land and people started to get sick.”

Lorelei nodded. “They started construction of Ravenschild Estates in 1978, and the families began to move in during the spring of 1980. Everything was perfect bliss, until the first case of leukemia and then the second, and the third, and then came the birth defects.”

“How many people died?” Aaron asked. The wind blew down the deserted street kicking up dust, and he could have sworn he heard the faint cries of the mournful in the breeze.

“I’m really not sure,” the woman answered. “I know a lot of kids got sick before the state got involved in 1989. They investigated and forced the families to evacuate. They ended up purchasing more than three hundred and fifty homes and financing some of the relocation costs.”