Sons of Angels

by Rachel Green

  “Voices. Angelic voices. Where are the stairs up?”

  “Over there.” Jasfoup pointed. “But it says authorized staff only.”

  Harold raised his eyebrows. “When did that ever stop you? You’re a demon. You should be used to breaking the rules.”

  Jasfoup shuffled his feet. “True, but an angel owns this club.”

  “What makes you think that?” Gillian was already making for the door he’d pointed out, but Jasfoup caught hold of her arm and stopped her. “Ever since I saw the poster of the management behind the bar. See the chap in the hat with the black-in-black eyes?”

  Gillian nodded. “Cool effect. What of it?”

  Jasfoup shook his head. “That’s Midnight, the mortal form of Uriel. He’s a Seraph, the Fire of God.”

  “It’ll be fine.” Harold clapped him on the back and pulled open the door.

  Jasfoup shook his head. “You don’t remember stabbing him in the Garden of Eden, then?”

  * * * *

  Felicia groaned as Jasfoup stopped halfway up the stairs. “Another one you can’t get anywhere near?”

  “I did once and it all but extinguished me. I’d rather not risk it again.”

  Felicia and Harold drew their swords. “Stay here, if you like. We’ll go up without you.”

  “If they’ve hurt my dad...” Harold’s mouth tightened into a grim line

  Gillian grinned at him. “We’ve destroyed two angels this evening. We can make it a hat trick.”

  “I’m glad you have such faith.” Harold smiled and patted her shoulder. “Got any spare?”

  Gillian laughed and pulled Felicia upward, drawing her twin fighting blades.

  Felicia increased her speed. “Last one to the top is a ninny.”

  Jasfoup grimaced. “I can’t help it.”

  “They might need me.” Julie swiveled her hand with the eyeball in it. “Will you be all right on your own down here?”

  Jasfoup looked around. Twenty or thirty men were clustered around a stage watching a pole dancer. “I’ll manage.” He pulled out a tin of business cards and winked.

  Gillian and Felicia raced up the stairs, homing in on the scent of brimstone to the single door at the top of the stairwell.

  Gillian kicked it in without pausing, bursting into the room beyond with her blades raised, though what use they would be against angels, Felicia had no idea. She and Harold followed with their flaming swords.

  Gillian dropped into a fighting crouch, one blade extended in her right hand, and the other in a guard position. Harold adopted a defensive stance with his sword high and Felicia just held hers in front of her, unsure of its proper use.

  “Freeze, arsehole!” Gillian shouted at the back of the black-skinned gentleman she assumed was Midnight.

  “One move and you’re dead.” Harold’s tone was more even. “Discorporated, anyway. I’ve got Raphael’s sword here and I know it can take you out.”

  Midnight held up his hands and turned to face them. As he turned, they were able to see past him. “Dad!” Harold flashed the fallen angel a brief smile. “I knew you were here. I could smell your cologne.” He raised his eyebrows but didn’t waver from his stance, not changing until Midnight had turned fully, when he altered to a front guard, the blade inches from the angel’s neck.

  “You’re making a mistake, boy.” Midnight’s growl was as menacing as a pit bull on amphetamines. “I could take the whole damn lot of you out.”

  “That would not be wise, Uriel.” Louis stepped forward. “It would have precipitated the very thing you’re so keen to prevent. I would have retaliated, had you harmed my son.”

  “My apologies.” Midnight drew back. “I wasn’t thinking clearly.”

  “Clearly.” Louis nodded. “You can let him go, Harold.”

  Harold was surprised. “You trust him? He’s an angel, Father. How can you, of all people, trust an angel?”

  “Because our goals are the same, for once.” Louis walked over and laid a hand on the blade, pushing it gently down. “Neither of us wants this world to end. Let it go.”

  “He’s been killing nephilim.” Harold pointed at Midnight. “By proxy, at least. Azazel’s really unhappy.”

  Midnight chuckled. “He would be, wouldn’t he? They’re his attempt to build an army to storm Heaven.”

  “I hardly think a few hundred nephilim is a serious threat to the choirs of angels.” Harold sheathed his sword. “I think it was more a case of enjoying his children, which, if I recall, was exactly why God started all this in the first place.”

  It was Louis’s turn to laugh. “He has a point, Uriel. You have to admit that.”

  “It doesn’t change anything.” Midnight dropped his arms and sat back in his chair. He pointed upward. “He’ll still destroy the world if he’s made aware of them.”

  “Not anymore.” Harold placed his hands on the girls’ arms, encouraging them to put their blades away as well. “The dragon’s dead.” He looked at Louis. “Puriel killed him.”

  Louis nodded. “That’s too bad.”

  “Too bad?” Julie snorted from the doorway. “That was my son.”

  “Jasfoup’s too.” Harold took a seat on the modern leather sofa. “I have a plan. As I see it, there are two problems. One is the coming of the apocalypse, which the death of... George?”

  Julie nodded.

  “...has averted. The second is G-d becoming aware of the nephilim. Is that right?”

  Midnight nodded. “You have my attention, boy. What’s this plan of yours?”

  “According to Genesis, when God marked Cain, he hid from the sight of God. That means that he became nocturnal, doesn’t it?”

  Midnight nodded.

  “He still is.” Louis leaned forward. “Not that he comes out much, these days. He’s a little jaded after seven thousand years.”

  “Then my idea is, the nephilim confine their powers to the hours of darkness.” Harold leaned back. “Unless it’s unavoidable in life-threatening situations. What do you think?” He glanced across at Louis and Midnight, who were looking at each other.

  “It could work.” Midnight scratched his chin. “If they could stick to it. He wouldn’t notice them if they weren’t running about all over the place.”

  “You said you’ve already discussed this with Azazel?” Louis raised his eyebrows. “Is he all right with this idea?”

  “I am.” Azazel walked in through the broken doorway. “It is an elegant solution.” He bowed to Gillian and Felicia. “Good evening, my dears. How pleasant it is to see you again.” He turned to Julie, frowning as she held up her seeing eye. “I hope you’ve recovered from your ordeal of birthing.” He turned back to his peers. “I will have to visit each of the surviving nephilim to explain the procedure, but it might work.”

  “If that’s all sorted, I’ll be off.” Lucifer grinned. “Cheery-bye.”

  Chapter 52

  “Is that the end of it then?” Felicia pressed her key fob to unlock the car doors. “Can we relax yet?” She certainly hoped so. This last week–was it only a week?–was one she never wanted to repeat.

  “I suppose so.” Jasfoup took a last look around the park. “Puriel’s been discorporated, Raphael’s stuck in Hell and Midnight seems happy with Harold’s proposal.”

  “There’s paperwork to sort out.”

  “That’s not our problem.” Jasfoup grinned. “That’s what lawyers are for. We have thousands of them downstairs and it’s about time they earned their keep. How do you feel about keeping your powers under wraps until nightfall?”

  Felicia shrugged. “I can live with it. I’ve only been a werewolf for ten days.”

  “Addictive, though, isn’t it?”

  She laughed. “You could say that. It’ll be hard not to at least use my sense of smell.”

  “Tch.” Jasfoup made a dismissive gesture. “He won’t notice that. It’s the shape-shifting that you need to be wary of in the daylight.”

  “Everything all right?” Har
old caught up with them.

  “Indeed. We were just discussing your plan. How do you feel about not being able to cast spells during the day?”

  “Me?” Harold laughed. “It doesn’t apply to me. I wrote a clause in the proposal. Since Heaven and all its minions know about me anyway, my dad being who he is, they’ll continue to ignore me.”

  “That was clever.” Jasfoup produced a family-sized bucket of popcorn from his jacket pocket. “Making a bargain that curtails everyone’s ability but your own.” He set the bucket on the boot of Felicia’s car and took a packet of butter from the other pocket. “Flamme.” It melted almost immediately in the conjured heat and dribbled over the popcorn. “It’s almost as if you planned the whole thing to make yourself king of the nephilim.”

  “As much as the title is appealing, I think being a king would have far too much politics to be enjoyable. I certainly think we’ve been played, but it wasn’t by me.”

  Felicia sniffed. Jasfoup’s butter had a pink smell that sparked with the blue of salt but it still couldn't counter the stink of sulfur and brimstone. The whole park felt imbued with the stuff. She looked at Harold, who had snaffled a handful of popcorn and was feeding it into his mouth one fluffy kernel at a time. “How do you mean?”

  “Well...” He popped the last of his handful in and reached for another. “The angels attack us because they can’t attack the demons, and the demons give us a helpful shove because they can’t attack the angels. Both sides hope we take care of the problem for them and neither seems to care if we survive the process. It’s like playing a video game, only we’re the expendable avatars and we don’t respawn.”

  “You do, technically.” Jasfoup cupped his hand to catch the last few spoonfuls of butter. “The problem is, you respawn in one camp or the other. As nephilim, you respawn in Hell. Mortals stand a good chance of bulking out the Heavenly host, theoretically.”

  “Theoretically?”

  Jasfoup held his dry hand up while he licked the butter off the other with a long black tongue. “We all know no one goes to Heaven.”

  Julie coughed. “I think I did a little, just for a moment there.”

  “Naughty.” He wagged a finger at her.

  “Still...” Felicia frowned. Overlaying the sulfur was another scent, reminiscent of a hospital’s antiseptic wipes. “Harold’s right. We’re just pawns, aren’t we? Foot soldiers in the endless war between the two sides.”

  “If it’s a war, it’s more like a cold one.” Jasfoup liked his lips. “One with hot butter. You should try some.”

  “No thanks. The skin gets caught between my teeth.”

  “No skin on these kernels. I brought them specially to watch the big fight. Shame on you, for it being so quick I didn’t have time to enjoy the show.” Jasfoup took a handful and ate them all at once.

  “That’s just it, isn’t it?” Harold turned toward the demon. “It’s all a show to you people. Mortals and nephilim, fighting for their lives and it’s all just points on a giant swingometer to you. The Dalai Lama tours China? A few points to the right. Gillian and Felicia take out an angel? Minor swing to the left. It’s all one big game.”

  “Don’t tar me with that brush.” Jasfoup huffed and batted Harold’s hand from the bucket. “We didn’t start this, did we? This was all Uriel, Puriel and the renegades of Heaven. Nothing of our doing at all.”

  Harold snickered. “Sounds like Camberwick Green.”

  “Or an uninspired rock band.” Julie grinned and reached for corn. “What? I listen to music. I'm not deaf.”

  “You might not have started it this time.” Gillian dropped from the sycamore tree above. “But you can’t deny that your side has instigated other events. You told me yourself it was your lot whispering in Joan d’Arc’s ear, egging her on to attack the English, then discarding her when she lost credibility.”

  Jasfoup shook his head, tiny pieces of popcorn flying from his jowls. “That’s not true. We used her as a rallying point for the Puritans. How were we to know they’d put her to death?”

  “My point made, I think.”

  Felicia sniffed, certain she could detect antiseptic. She held up a hand. “Can you smell that?”

  “What?”

  “A sort of dentisty smell.” She was put in mind of amalgam fillings and root canal agony. “There it is again.”

  “Probably the toilets.” Gillian returned to the conversation. “I wish we could be independent. You know, neither light nor dark but something in between.”

  “Impossible.” Jasfoup used a claw to pick at his teeth. “You are what you are. Nephilim. The scion of angels, despised by G– Those upstairs and doomed to be the foot soldiers of Hell.”

  “Not me.”

  “Except Harold,” the demon amended. “Harold will be a sergeant, thanks to his connections.”

  “It all seems to smack of a depressing finality.” Gillian sighed. “We should start killing off both sides to establish a true neutrality.”

  “And how would you get to Heaven, eh? Wrap yourself in stamps and climb into a postbox?” Jasfoup balled up the bucket and tossed it in a perfect parabolic arc toward the nearest waste bit. It landed six inches away, and he grinned. “Perfect.” He turned back to Gillian. “Do yourself a favor and get with the program. I heard you owe Azazel a biggie.”

  “So?”

  “So there’s no call for you to be spouting revolutionist philosophies when you’ve just got yourself in debt to the government.”

  Harold slapped Gillian on the back. “Perhaps that’s exactly the best time.”

  His chuckle was cut short as Jasfoup burst into flames and vanished. A flaming sword emerged from his stomach. Blood dribbled from his mouth as his lungs were punctured, the sword traveling upward through his body and dividing him almost in two.

  Felicia shrieked and backed toward the car as his body split open like a banana and slumped to the ground. Behind him stood the man in black, Uriel, his humanoid form a silhouette in the air through which the infinite recesses of space gleamed, blacker than pitch with the rare glimpse of light as a galaxy flared and died.

  “Not all of us ignore you, Mr. Waterman.” Uriel’s eyes flicked upward toward Felicia and he lunged faster than she could move, her barest motion merely deflecting the sword from her chest to her side. The fire cauterized the flesh, preventing her healing the damage as she fell back against the trunk and collapsed. The protruding rear bumper dug painfully into her spine as she waited for the killing blow.

  It didn’t come. Uriel reacted to the shriek of rage from behind by twisting and spinning the sword in an arc so fast that it sang as it cut into Gillian’s torso. She dropped back, writhing on the ground next to the bifurcated torso of her lover.

  * * * *

  Julie stared at the angel, not needing the sight fetiche to see this creature of legend, the great Uriel, Hammer of God.

  “You, I save until last. If you were not the Black Madonna, I could have cured your blindness as Raphael did for Tobit.”

  “Black Madonna?” Julie laughed, feeling the pull of the land of the dead at the back of her consciousness and preparing to draw upon it. “Mine was no virgin birth.”

  “Precisely.” Uriel relaxed. “You gave birth to an abomination I was pleased to see destroyed. You have become a powerful mage in the years since you were awakened. I had hoped you would use those powers for good.”

  “What are you talking about? My grandmother awakened my sight.” She opened a thread to her well of magic.

  “Under my instruction. I gave you the ability to see demons and bind them, as I did with Asmodeus and Raphael did Azazel, but you threw my gift away.”

  “I’ll give him your regards.” She was pleased to note the spirits of her friends were not visible, which meant they were, so far at least, still alive.

  “Now you consort with demons instead of binding them.” Uriel frowned. “I sought to make the nephilim a source of joy unto God, and instead I find every one of them a dark
minion of Lucifer.”

  “Them’s the breaks.” Julie edged backward as an old man in a tweed jacket and Wellingtons appeared. He shimmered in and out of focus, his outline like white chalk on a blackboard. She remembered him from St. Pity’s, though he’d been confined to a bed then, a machine inflating his lungs every other second. She struggled to remember his name. “You kill them indiscriminately and often for no purpose. Some were not even awakened when you slaughtered them. Some were children. What chance did my mother have when she took an angel into her home? He destroyed her.”

  “She was a breeder, a begetter of devils. She had no right to life under God’s covenant. As He commanded Moses to destroy the villages of nephilim, so I have continued the work.”

  “What if you had found a thousand good nephilim? Would a thousand have stayed your hand?” Another figure appeared. This one a young woman with a bloody slash from her shoulder to her groin. Julie kept her gaze upon the angel.

  “A thousand good nephilim would have saved the world,” Uriel agreed. “But it was not the case.”

  “What if there were a hundred short of that thousand? Would you have slaughtered them all for the sake of a hundred?”

  “No.” Uriel laughed. “You try to blind me with allusion and false logic, just as Lot did at Sodom. I will not play such games with you to the point where I will admit my actions were unjust.”

  “But they were.” Another spirit appeared and another. “You had no right to destroy the nephilim. They were not the giants of old who fed on human flesh for sport.”

  “Are they not?” Uriel glanced at the figures writhing on the floor. “Look at your compatriots. One a vampire and one a werewolf. Both feed on human prey. Both steal the life not theirs to take.”

  “And Harold?” More ghosts were arriving, heeding her subvocal call for aid. Some she recognized from the hospital, those she had listened to and occasionally helped “He never harmed anyone in his life.”

  “He traffics with demons. ‘Though shalt not suffer a witch to live.’”

  “It’s clear which bible you read.” Julie opened the path of the dead. “That was King James’s amendment. The original text said poisoner.”