by Zoe Cannon
I understood where she was coming from. I could even appreciate that her heart was in the right place, as weary as I was of her efforts to fix me. But there was only so much she could understand, as a human. Humans grew and changed all the time. We, on the other hand, had been created to be constant, unchanging. Each of us had a singular purpose. That purpose varied based on when and why we had been created, but the one thing all of us angels had in common was that none of us ever grew beyond what we had been in the first moment of our creation.
My purpose was to be a soldier. Faceless. Interchangeable. My fellow angels, the ones created for other things, could talk about the triumph of war all they liked. Those of us who fought existed solely to fight and die, whether we wanted to admit it or not. We had to hold onto those illusions of triumph—and once, I had clung to them desperately—because without them, we had nothing else. We were nothing else.
Which, now that I had walked away, made me… nothing. Nothing but a human illusion and a life of flipping burgers. But I was alive, which meant it was still better than the alternative. I had made the choice between having a purpose and staying alive a long time ago, and I had never once regretted my choice.
Except that I still couldn’t get the angel’s visit out of my head.
Maybe that was why the soup didn’t smell as good today, and why Danielle couldn’t make me feel as warm inside as she normally did. Because what had felt like contentment to me never had been. And all it had taken was that one visit to tear through the paper-thin illusion.
“Maybe I should go back.” I didn’t realize I was going to speak until I heard my voice. I certainly didn’t expect to hear myself say those words. But there they were, out in the open. And with my own voice still ringing in my ears, I couldn’t deny that I had said them. Which meant I couldn’t deny that some part of me had thought them.
Danielle, oblivious to the import of what I had just said, shook her head. “No, that’s the opposite of what I’m saying,” she said, in her painfully earnest human voice. “You have so much potential, and so much you could fill your life with, once you let go of everything that’s holding you back. Why would you throw away that opportunity? Why waste your life fighting for a cause you don’t even believe in anymore?”
I stilled. Slowly, on numb legs, I rose from my chair.
“Fighting?” I didn’t take my eyes off her as I echoed the word.
She tried to recover. I watched her cover her mistake with a too-bright smile. I heard the gears whirring in her head as her mouth opened and closed. As she tried to find an excuse for saying something she shouldn’t have known to say. But she didn’t come up with anything, and the silence stretched on too long.
Finally, she shook her head. Her smile turned rueful. “Oops. Tipped my hand too early, I guess.”
When I had found her, I had been looking for someone warm, and open, and inviting. But also someone ordinary. The human equivalent of my Burger Barn job. That wasn’t an insult—far from it. There was a reason people kept going back to Burger Barn. When people craved comfort, when they craved home, they didn’t make reservations at a five-star restaurant. They pulled into the Burger Barn parking lot. That was what I had seen in Danielle.
And I still saw it in her now. She looked exactly the same as she always had. But it was a lie.
It always had been.
I backed away from her. I didn’t realize how close I was getting to the stove until my elbow almost knocked the soup to the floor. I pulled my arm back, and rubbed the spot where my skin had touched the hot metal pot. The hazards of a human body.
But I wasn’t concerned about my physical integrity right now. “What are you?” I asked, my eyes still locked on her.
She gave a shrug and a sigh. “Oh well. I guess it’s not the end of the world. You were getting close to being ready anyway. We were going to end up here before too long, one way or another. I was hoping to choose the moment, but, well, you can’t have everything.”
I repeated my question. “What are you?”
Danielle’s face didn’t change. It would have been easier on me if it had. But her voice did, becoming colder—and older—as she said, “I guess you could call me the loyal opposition.”
But our side had won the war. We had sealed all the demons into hell. “How are you here?”
She laughed. It wasn’t her usual laugh. There was no warmth in it. The sound, so like her and so unlike her at the same time, made goosebumps rise on my human skin.
“Did they tell you we couldn’t leave hell?” She shook her head in amusement. “No. You sealed us out of heaven, but that’s it. That was all your bosses ever cared about, though. Themselves, and their own safety. But we’ve always had access to earth. Humanity is our playground, as long as we don’t get too loud about it and attract attention from above. And we know how to be subtle. Case in point: we’ve been cultivating you for centuries, and you’ve never once suspected.”
I wanted to tell her she was wrong, that no demon could fool me. I couldn’t. When I cast my mind back over my past, I couldn’t see any demons there. “Centuries?” The word came out in choked surprise, revealing more than I wanted to.
She answered with a small smile. “When all the players are immortal, we may as well play the long game. It took some time for my predecessors to get you to where you are now—apathetic, focused only on survival. But now it’s time for the next step—which is where I come in.”
My mind was still back in my past, trying to remember when and who those predecessors might have been. There had been humans in my life, of course. I hadn’t spent the past centuries entirely alone. But their faces all blended together, after a while. I couldn’t say which of them might have been something other than human, not from this distance. And what mattered more was that I hadn’t noticed at the time. I had let them into my life. Let them influence me, if Danielle was telling the truth.
Was she? Had the humans in my life—the ones who hadn’t been human at all—played some role in bringing me to where I was now? I didn’t think so. I wouldn’t deny that it had been a long time since I had looked beyond survival. But only because of what Danielle had said a moment ago—that I couldn’t go back to heaven, but also couldn’t let go of my old life or my old self enough to become something new. That had all been inevitable, not a product of influence.
But she had also said she and her fellow demons knew how to be subtle.
I dropped the subject before the spiral of memory and doubt could suck me in too deeply. “Whatever you want,” I said instead, “you’re not going to get it.”
She shook her head at me. “Do you still see us as the enemy? You left heaven behind millennia ago. If you still held any allegiance to them, you would have done whatever they asked you to do today.” She tapped her chin. “Let me guess—they’ve noticed our armies gathering. They want you to come back and fight for them again. And if we’re your enemy, if we’re not even worth listening to, then that’s exactly what you should do. So tell me—are you going back? Or will you listen?”
“I’m not one of them,” I said. “Not anymore.” My own voice hardened to match hers. “But that doesn’t mean I’m one of you. I’ve spent thousands of years among the humans. I love humanity too much to work to corrupt them alongside your kind. Because that’s what you’re going to offer me, right? A job doing hell’s work?”
The words made me jerk to stillness when I heard them. I hadn’t known what I was going to say until I said it. And those words had been far from what I had expected. But the strength of the emotion in my voice, and the way my volume kept steadily rising, surprised me more.
We had fought the war over humanity. Well, in reality, it had mostly been about power. But on paper, at least, it had been about the humans. Our side had believed our purpose was to protect humanity—not that any of the angels actually spent much time doing that. Why would anyone want to soil their wings in the muck of the human world, when they could have been enjoying paradis
e instead? The other side held that humans were useless cruel things, whose only value was as toys for their brief amusement—and to corrupt and break just for the pleasure of taking something away from heaven.
But I hadn’t fought for humanity. Why would the humans have mattered to me, when I had never had much occasion to even think about them? I had been created to fight, not to protect. No, I had fought because I was told to fight. Because back then, I had always done what I was told.
And yet here I was, proclaiming my love for humanity as if I meant it.
“We would never ask you to do anything but free the humans to indulge their darker natures,” said Danielle. “Their true natures. You’ve had thousands of years to get to know them—you must know by now that they’ve never wanted the light your side offered them.”
But I had never seen the humans that way. Maybe briefly, when they had turned against me. But even then, examples of the better side of humanity had never been in short supply. Wasn’t that what I had sought in Danielle in the first place? The comfort of her humanity? Humanity was warmth. Humanity was simple pleasures. Humanity was love.
But that had all been a lie.
“I’m not interested.” Even if I didn’t understand why I had rejected her offer so vehemently, I knew I didn’t have to think about my decision. Whatever my motives, I had no desire to throw my lot in with hell. I didn’t fight for heaven anymore, and never would again, but that didn’t make heaven my enemy.
Except that in heaven’s eyes, it probably did.
“What do you think you’ve been fighting for all this time,” she said softly, “if not for the same thing we believe in? Freedom from the dominance of heaven, for us and for the humans?”
“I haven’t been fighting. I’ve only been surviving. Isn’t that what you said?”
“Every day you stay alive, you’re fighting for something,” said Danielle. “Unless you want to lie down and stare at the ceiling all day until you waste away and die.” Her smile twisted into an expression that, for a second, made her look nothing like my warm, soft Danielle. “And you’ve put a lot of effort into fighting for the ability to be a selfish coward.”
The words didn’t even hit as hard as they should have. How could I be offended when she had done nothing but speak the truth? That was exactly what I was. I had come to terms with that the day I had left heaven.
“And the more you live among humans, the worse it gets for you,” Danielle continued. “Yes, a lot of that is because we pushed you in that direction. But it wouldn’t have been possible for us to push you if you had resisted. How much of a difference is there, really, between what you’ve already been fighting for—selfishness, laziness, a life lived outside heaven’s constraints—and giving a few little nudges of your own, to steer the humans away from the values that you yourself reject?”
I tightened my hands into fists. “I said no.”
“You haven’t even let me tell you what you would get out of the deal. Wouldn’t you like to have a home again? A family? A place to belong? And if that isn’t enough, think about this—we’re offering you a real purpose. Something to believe in. Something more than living to hide another day. Haven’t you missed that?”
I clamped down on the spark of yearning her words ignited, crushed it ruthlessly in a mental hand until it guttered and died. Just like I did every time I found myself wishing for something more. I couldn’t let myself miss what I had left behind. Not when the cost of getting it back was so high.
“We would never ask you to fight,” said Danielle. “Some are suited for fighting, while some work for our cause in other ways. We don’t care if you were created as a disposable soldier. We care about you.”
Unlike heaven, she didn’t say. She didn’t need to.
If I had been a different person, I would have answered with words of defiance, a speech fierce enough and eloquent enough to close her mouth and make the whisper of temptation leave my heart. Or, if I had been different in another way, I would have smiled, and taken her hand, and asked her where to begin.
But I was who I had always been. So I did what I did best. I turned and ran.
I fled the apartment, pausing only long enough to grab my car keys. She didn’t stop me. She didn’t even try. She just watched me go, arms folded in front of her chest, sadness—or was that pity?—in her eyes.
I started the car with shaking hands. Another human reaction. For someone who had never cared about humanity, I had spent as much time as one of them as I had in my true form. No, I realized as I thought back—more time. By at least three centuries.
That thought was almost enough to make me forget the threat and stop where I was. I had spent longer on earth that I had in heaven. When had that day come? Why had I not thought about it until now?
Probably because it would have made me think too hard about how exactly I had spent all those long centuries.
As I left the driveway, I looked back at the apartment. Danielle was standing at the window, watching me go. I turned my attention back to the road and stomped on the accelerator, making a squirrel scurry out of the way. I didn’t look back again.
* * *
I drove without seeing the streets in front of me. I would have said it was a miracle that I didn’t get into an accident, but that wasn’t a word I used lightly. I found myself in the tangled streets of downtown, with no memory of how I had gotten there. A few minutes later, I was driving through a neatly laid-out suburb, where all the houses looked the same and all the streets had children’s names. A few minutes after that, I was on the highway. At least it felt like it had only been a few minutes, but the signs told me I was two hours away from where I had started.
On the highway, I relaxed a little as my foot punched the accelerator. With no traffic to speak of, and a speed limit that everyone took as a gentle suggestion, I could almost drive fast enough to feel like I was outrunning heaven and hell both. An illusion, of course. If they wanted to find me, they would find me. But that illusion was enough to keep my awareness from fleeing again.
Which was a mixed blessing. Every time I had to slow down—for a cop, a slow truck in front of me, a patch of late-night road work—my mind started to whisper: What are you running from? Heaven couldn’t drag me back. Hell couldn’t force me to work for them. There was nothing they could do to me, aside from stripping away my human form, and I could recover from that. So why had I panicked? Why had I run?
Then I would pass the truck or emerge from the construction zone, slam my foot down on the accelerator again, and let those thoughts disappear in the soft rumble of the engine and the blur of the world passing by around me.
Sometime around the fifth hour, when the sun had long since set and the few cars sharing the highway with me were nothing more than white and red lights in the darkness, my gas light flicked on. The thought of stopping, even for a moment, made my heart speed up—another human reaction. Maybe that was why that strange burst of intense feeling on humanity’s behalf had come over me, back in the apartment. Maybe I had spent so long in one of their bodies, living like them, reacting like them, that I had started to identify with them.
That was part of what I was trying not to think about. I let the thought pass through my mind like water and drain away.
But stopping for gas would mean thinking. If slowing down was enough to start my mind whispering, I shuddered to think of what a total stop would do. It would also mean giving Danielle a chance to catch up—assuming she had come after me in the first place.
Which was a paranoid assumption, I told myself as I got off at the next exit that promised a gas station. The demons were playing the long game. I knew better to think they were done with me for good, but Danielle hadn’t seemed in any hurry to chase me.
But when I pulled into the first gas station I saw, and drove up to the pump, someone opened the passenger door—the one that had been locked—as soon as I came to a stop. The smell of her, warm and human, wafted through the car as she slid int
o the seat. I didn’t have to look at her to know it was Danielle. But I looked anyway—at her soft body, her warm smile—and immediately wished I hadn’t.
“I told you,” I said, clutching the steering wheel, “I’m not interested.”
“If you really weren’t interested, you would have just said no. No one runs unless they have something to run from. In my experience, that always means either a temptation or a threat. And you and I both know I’m no threat to you.”
My fingers tightened on the steering wheel until they turned white. Before I could think of what to say, before I could figure out how to get her out of my car, a new voice rang out. A familiar voice. “Get away from him, demon.” It rolled through the parking lot like a peal of thunder.
I knew what I was going to see before I looked up. The angel from the Burger Barn was standing in front of the car, illuminated by the headlights.
I cringed back from him, and regretted the reaction right away. I knew how it made me look. Knew, too, that Danielle had seen. I didn’t look at her, but I could imagine all too well the smirk she was wearing now. But that was the problem with being so used to my human body—I couldn’t stop its instinctive reactions. And those human instincts told me I had to get away from the angel.
A temptation, or a threat? I already knew he wasn’t any threat to me.
“Leave,” I said quietly, addressing the angel and Danielle without looking at either one. “I don’t plan on going with either of you, and you both know it. All you’re doing is wasting time and attracting attention. Leave.”
I was proud of myself for controlling my human body enough to keep my voice from shaking. But neither of them so much as looked at me. I wasn’t even sure they had heard. They were busy staring at each other without blinking.
“He belongs to us, demon.” White fire flared from the angel’s eyes.