I opened the book, squinting my eyes to narrow slits in case I got another case of the magical dazzles, but nothing happened. Not, it didn’t hurt me, but nothing. I just opened the book. It didn’t blast me, didn’t turn me into a pillar of salt, didn’t call down a heavenly choir, just fell open to a spot in the middle. I looked at the pages, then back at my incomprehensible friend.
“Is this it?” I asked.
“But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?” He answered my question not just with a question, but with a completely stupid one to boot. I sighed. “This gig was supposed to be easy, you know. A simple FedEx quest, like the first few things in A Bard’s Tale. I get a book, find an angel, put the two of you together, and viola, instant awesome. Instead I have Captain Incomprehensible and some old book of Enochian rituals…” I trailed off as I heard the word coming out of my own mouth.
Enochian? The language of the angels? I looked down at the book again, and sure enough, it was written in the looping characters of holy magic. “This is your book,” I said, looking at Gabe.
He didn’t reply, just looked at me. He kinda looked scared, to be honest.
“You have to take it,” I told him. I pushed the book toward him. He sank back in his chair.
“A woman’s life is in danger,” I said. He shook his head and seemed to shrink in on himself.
“Fuck,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I closed the book, then shoved it into his chest. He put his hands up as the tome touched him, and the second he came into contact with the book, a brilliant yellow-white light shone forth from it like a miniature sun. I jerked back, letting go of the book, and covered my eyes.
Between my fingers and my eyelids, I saw the glow fade. I cracked my eyes open, then opened them wider, and my jaw dropped at the picture in front of me. The little balding crazy man was gone, replaced by a tall, muscular angel with blond curls and seven-foot wings.
“Gabriel?” I asked.
“You were expecting maybe George fucking Burns?” the angel replied, his lip curling up in a sneer as he looked down on me.
“Angels can say fuck?” Yeah, that was the part that surprised me. I mean, Glory swears, but I just assumed it was prolonged exposure to me that did it. Kinda like when you binge-watch Deadwood and every third word you say is “cocksucker” for the next week.
“I can say any goddamn thing I want, I’m an Archangel, you mewling worm.” Gabriel stretched his wings and let out a huge sigh. “Ahhh, that feels good. Do you have any idea how cramped those things get while I’m wrapped in that silly form? Of course you don’t. You don’t know anything. You’re human, why would you?”
I blinked a couple of times to rinse the condescension from my eyes, and said, “I need your help. A woman’s life is in danger. Immediate danger. We’ve gotta go.” I reached out to grab his arm, and he jerked back like I had the plague.
“Don’t touch me, mortal! What makes you think you can lay hands on one of the Host, you repulsive slug.”
“Wow, the Archangel’s kind of a dick. Didn’t see that one coming,” I muttered. I looked up at Gabriel. “Look. I get that you’re a little disoriented from being trapped in a crazy dude for a while, but there’s a badass necromancer sucking the magic out of ghosts somewhere in the city, and he’s got the High Priestess of…oh fuck it, will you just come with me? I need a little divine intervention.”
“No.”
No explanation, no apologetic refusal, just a flat, disinterested “no.” “No?” I repeated.
“Do I stutter? Of course not. I’m perfect. I’m an angel. Listen closely. No,” Gabriel said.
“You’re perfect?” This guy was starting to piss me off.
“Perfect.”
“Flawless in every way?”
“Completely.”
“No way to improve upon your form at all?” Oh yeah, this guy was a total douche.
“None whatsoever.”
“Where’s your dick?” I gave him a nasty grin as he spluttered something about choosing a form and gender being irrelevant and all the things I knew he’d say. All I cared about was that in his bluster he loosened his grip on the book for a second, allowing me to snatch it out of his hands.
The general light in the room dimmed like someone had flipped off a light switch, and Gabriel turned back into a doddering old man, looking from side to side in befuddlement.
I held the book out in front of him. “I need to borrow this for a little while.”
“Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” he replied, shaking his head. No borrowing was apparently a store policy.
“Then you come with me while I steal it.” I grabbed his arm, tucked the book under my arm, the one not near to the masquerading angel, and turned for the door.
He struggled, flailing at me with his arms, raining useless punches onto my arm and shoulders. I held on and kept walking, practically dragging him out of the store. He calmed down when we got out onto the sidewalk, turning this way and that and staring up at the sky with wide eyes.
“How long has it been since you left the shop?” I asked. I knew angels didn’t need to eat or sleep, so if Gabriel was running the interior components, so to speak, he might have been in that shop for years.
He just looked at me, confusion written all over his face. “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in its petty pace from day to day.”
I took his arm and walked with him, heading back to my hotel and our eventual rendezvous with the witches and hopefully not futile rescue attempt. I had no idea what this Barathan was planning, but it’s been my experience that whenever somebody wants to harvest the power of a bunch of dead souls, it’s never good. Like that time a crazy angel wanted to blow up most of Atlanta to tear open the barriers between Heaven and Hell. Yeah, good times.
14
I got Gabe back to my hotel without much incident, just a slight panic attack on his part when he had to cross the street. I couldn’t tell if it came from being trapped as a human for too long or being stuck in a bookstore with no human contact, but it certainly seemed like my amnesiac angel wasn’t just prone to speaking in iambic pentameter, but was also a little agoraphobic.
I closed the door to my hotel room and threw the deadbolt, then sealed it with a binding spell again. I was pretty sure it couldn’t stop Gabriel in all his Archangelic glory, but I was willing to bet it would give Crazy Gabe a few seconds’ pause at least.
“Have a seat, Gabe,” I said as I walked toward the small bathroom. “I gotta visit the euphemism real quick.” I tossed the book on the bed and turned the corner. I had just enough time to get unzipped when I realized exactly what I’d done. I put everything away and spun around, returning to the bedroom just in time to see Gabriel standing there holding the book. And looking pissed.
“I bet you’re wondering what you’re doing here,” I said with a sheepish grin. I didn’t really know exactly where on the power scale Archangels landed, but I was willing to bet two things. One, I was about to find out. Two, that it was pretty high.
“I know why I’m here, mortal,” Gabriel replied. “You have some stupid quest that you cannot fulfill yourself, and you are here to beseech me for my aid.”
Not technically wrong, I thought. Still no need to be a dick about it. “That’s partly right. Well, I guess it’s completely right, I just have more than one thing I, we, the world, needs your help with.”
“No.”
“No, what?” I asked.
“No, I will not assist you in whatever idiotic endeavor you think is so important. I assure you, it is not. The world will still be here long after you have shuffled off your minuscule and ineffectual mortal coil, the cities will still thrive, civilizations will still be born and die, and the Father will still sit on the High Throne of Heaven.”
“Yeah, that’s exactly the problem,” I said, folding my arms over my chest. This guy was an asshole, but I needed him to be our asshole, at least until we found God and put Him back on that throne.
&n
bsp; “What is the problem?”
“God. He’s AWOL.”
“What? I do not understand your stupid human words.”
“Do you understand ‘dick’?” I asked, grabbing mine through my jeans. “Because you’re being a dick. God is on vacation, missing in action, quit, evacuated the premises. He’s not sitting on the High Throne of Goddamn Anywhere, and that’s why I’m in this fucking hotel talking to a fucking prick of an angel!”
“The Father is…missing?” he asked, and a lot of the asshole seemed to run out of him with that realization. The golden light that had rolled off him in waves vanished, he seemed to shrink a little within himself until he was barely taller than me, and his wings folded back into his shoulders.
“I don’t know if He’s missing, or if He’s just on vacation,” I said. “But according to very good sources, He’s not in Heaven and hasn’t been for a very long time.”
“Balls,” he said, then sat down on the bed. “He meant it?” I don’t think he was talking to me but decided it might be important anyway.
“What do you mean, He meant it?” I pulled a chair out from under the table and sat with my back pressed against the door. I usually won’t do that, but everybody who wanted to kill me in Charleston was going to use magic, not bullets, so I didn’t have to worry about anybody going all Wild Bill Hickok on me. I was a little concerned about Gabriel trying to bolt, so I thought by putting myself in front of the door, I’d at least slow him down a little if he decided to leave.
Gabriel opened his book and flipped through pages, running his finger down the page like he was looking for the right passage. He must have found it because his finger stopped moving and he looked up at me. “He told us if we didn’t take care of the humans that He’d leave it all in our hands and we could see how we really enjoyed being in charge. I think He was pissed off at Azrael for something again.”
I was having a little trouble wrapping my head around the concept of God Almighty getting pissed off at one of his angels, and I’m sure it showed on my face because Gabriel laughed.
“You humans,” he said, slapping his knee. Yeah, really. He slapped his knee. I suppose it’s worth mentioning that he was dressed this time. In basically normal clothes, if size extra-extra-tall. He wore black slacks, a white button-down shirt, and loafers. Basic banker wear, only without the tie. “You mortals are always so baffled whenever you find one of us behaving in what you consider to be ‘human’ ways. Haven’t you ever considered that perhaps you are behaving like angels?”
I thought about it for a second, then shook my head. “Nope, never considered it. Of course, for the first century I was on this planet, I’d never encountered an angel!”
“That you know of,” he corrected. I got the sinking feeling that correcting was something this well-read douche of an angel did a lot.
“I’ll grant you that,” I said. There were plenty of times that I’d encountered a supernatural or divine creature that masked its identity from me. Most notably one asshole demonspawn that hid himself under my nose and murdered a couple of people I cared about.
“Well, we have all the same failings that you have, except for the physical ones, of course. But we are subject to sloth, anger, petty jealousy—all the emotions you feel, we felt them first.”
“Especially that jealousy part,” I said with a wry look.
“Yes, Lucifer and his followers were jealous of the attention Father lavished upon you mortals. As were we all, if we’re to be honest with ourselves. That didn’t stop just because we pitched a few rabble-rousers into The Pits. Father never liked that and told us if we didn’t start acting like the older brothers He wanted us to be, that He’d give up the throne and leave us to deal with your messes all on our own.”
“So you’re telling me that the past few thousand years of human history have all sucked because you pissed off Dad and He pulled the metaphysical car over?” Suddenly every bit of bitching I’d ever done about the universe feeling like a ship without anyone at the wheel seemed more real than ever. Definitely one of those days that I hate being right.
“I suppose that’s right. I wasn’t in Heaven when He left, obviously. But if He’s gone, and He’s been gone for a long time, then that’s the only logical answer.”
“Where were you? Why weren’t you in Heaven? Isn’t that kinda your job, to write down all the shit that happens?” My research had referred to Gabriel as the Herald of Heaven, the Word of God, so I assumed he was kinda like a scribe.
“Not exactly,” he said. He gestured to the book. “This is the repository of all the knowledge in the world, yes. I am the Keeper of the Word, yes. But I don’t write the book. The book writes the book.”
“That sounds very Zen.”
“I think it’s more Tao than Zen, but it’s an easy mistake to make.” Now that he was in teacher mode and not intimidating angel mode, he was a lot less of a prick. I was starting to have hope that he’d help us save the priestess and kick the shit out of a necromancer.
Gabriel went on. “Everything that happens in God’s Kingdom is recorded in the book. Like I said, I don’t write it. I can, however, access all of it.”
“All of it?” I asked.
“All of it,” he confirmed. “All I have to do is think about an event, open the book, and every piece of information ever gathered on Earth, in Heaven, or even in Hell, will be right there at my fingertips.”
“Seems like a good book.”
“It is one of the most powerful magical items ever created, as are all the Implements. Simply being near the book has completely worn through the mind of the poor human body I created to mask myself. Now he remembers nothing, save Shakespeare. He keeps that to read to me at night.”
“I don’t understand how he reads to you. He is you.”
“It’s complicated,” the angel said. “Our host forms exist both with and apart from our divine selves at the same time.”
“Yep, sounds complicated,” I agreed. “So now what? You’re an angel again, at least as long as you hang onto that book, and you know we need to get all your brother angels back together and doing your angelic duty so we can find God, literally, and get Him back to work.”
“Why?” he asked.
“What do you mean, why?”
“You don’t strike me as the altruistic type. So why do you want us to do all this?”
He had me there. I thought the world was running along pretty well without very much divine intervention. But it wasn’t about me. “I have a friend…”
“Surprising in and of itself,” Gabriel interjected.
“Go fuck yourself. Oh wait, you can’t. No dick. Never mind,” I shot back. “As I was saying, I have a friend. Her name is Glory. She’s more like my guardian angel than just a friend. She lost her wings helping me, and apparently only God can restore her wings.”
“That is true; only Father can restore lost divinity. Wait, did you say Glory?”
“Yeah, apparently my guardian angel is a Buffy fan.”
“You’re the Reaper?” He looked like he was trying very hard not to laugh. I was getting really tired of that nickname.
“I swear, I didn’t come up with it,” I said. “What the fuck are you laughing at?”
“Nothing, I’m sorry, it’s just…well, I thought you’d be bigger.”
“Oh, come the fuck on!” I said. “We’re gonna start quoting Roadhouse now? I’m fucking six-three!”
“Well, yes, but you’re terribly thin. Not very intimidating at all, to be frank. Given your reputation, I honestly expected someone…well, a little more frightening.”
“I don’t have to be scary,” I said. “I just have to get shit done.”
“Well, I will grant you that was fairly intimidating. That line, that was quite good. Still…I guess I just expected the Reaper to be…more, somehow.”
“I thought you’d been trapped in the body of a nutbar bookseller for eons. How have you even heard of me?”
“Humans,”
he sniffed. “Still thinking of time as a straight line. Even if it were, it doesn’t matter. I have the book. I read it. Don’t let this go to your head, but you were foretold. You have important work to do, Mr. Harker.”
“More important than restoring God to the Throne of Heaven? Because that’s the current project, and it’s pretty important to me.”
“Fair point,” he conceded. “You do realize that it will take all of us to find Father, right?”
“Yeah, all seven Archangels combining their power to locate God. I guess it’s like some kind of mystical GPS, or cell phone signal, or something.”
“Well, that’s essentially true. Except there aren’t seven Archangels.”
“Sure there are. I got all their names written down somewhere. Even did the research and found out that the one with the Transformer name is really Raguel, not Metatron.”
“There are eight.”
I pulled out my phone and called up my notes. “Michael, Gabriel, Raguel, Raphael, Uriel, Azrael, Sealtiel. Seven.”
“There are eight.”
“I just named all seven.”
“There were eight.”
“Angels don’t die. Well, okay, they can, but it takes Michael’s sword or something…you’ve gotta be fucking kidding me.”
“Nope. He’s number eight.”
“He totally doesn’t count.”
“I don’t think you get to make that call, Reaper.”
“Don’t call me that. How the fuck does he still count? Wasn’t he fired?”
“Still counts.”
“Goddammit!”
“In a lot of places, that would be considered blasphemy. I’m not the judging type, so I’ll let it slide.”
“Fucking hell.”
“Exactly.”
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