“I think he’s on the roof.”
“Why is he up there?”
“I think he’s feeling cooped up, but is too afraid to go out.”
“You don’t think it’s dangerous, him on the roof by himself?”
“He’s a smart boy. He understands gravity.”
“I wonder.”
I go through the door in the back of the closet and climb the stairs to the roof. Vincent is crouched on the edge like a black-clad pigeon.
“If you’re thinking about jumping, we’re not high enough. You’d just break your legs and ruin the pants I loaned you.”
He glances over his shoulder, shielding his eyes with his hand. When he sees who it is, he turns back to the street.
I walk over and sit down beside him.
“What are you doing up here?”
“Just looking at the city. All the lives. They used to form a floating web of sound and heat that I could follow to any individual. It was like a symphony in a furnace. Now . . .” he says, and shrugs. “Everything seems so much more fragile since I’ve had this body.”
“Yeah, we break easy, but we fix ourselves too.”
“Not all of you.”
“You mean suicides? Yeah. That whole thing sucks. It doesn’t seem right for anyone to get pushed that far.”
Vincent half turns to me.
“When you were imprisoned in Hell, did you consider it?”
“Why bother? I was already in the belly of the beast. What were they going to do? Send me to Super Hell?”
That makes him smile. He takes out his bottle of pills, taps out a couple, and dry-swallows them.
“You’re getting good at that. You’re not turning into a pill head, are you?”
“Being human never stops hurting.”
“You learn to roll with it. And seriously, don’t get hooked on those things. It’s hard getting off.”
He nods, but I don’t think he’s listening. We sit together, neither of us talking.
A couple of minutes later, I say, “You ever have any second thoughts about your job?”
“No. Do you?”
“Sometimes. We’re both sort of in the same game. Death.”
“You can choose to change.”
“That’s easy to say. My father, the archangel Uriel, called me a warrior, a natural-born killer. He said that’s what I was good at, what I was made for, so I should get on with it.”
“I wonder if all the nephilim were killers like you. Maybe that’s why they were so hated.”
“You don’t know?”