I whistled. “You score that many souls? That’s amazing. The waiting room has been practically empty since, gee, before World War Two.”
“Not souls. Pussy.”
I frowned. “This is sex, right?”
Baz gave me an incredulous look.
“I’m a soldier,” I said.
He hooted.
“Look, I work for the Regional Office. We don’t get benefits.”
“Nice save,” Baz said kindly. “Only you already blew it with ‘this is sex, right?’” He was eyeing me with mingled puzzlement and pity. If he weren’t a demon, I could have killed him in less than a second, with any object in the room, including his own beer bottle. “How did you get recruited?” he said.
“I was fourteen. I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“Uh-huh,” Baz said with palpable amusement. I thought about strangling him with one of his fucking stringy white dreadlocks.
“Okay, I was twelve,” I grumbled.
“Pretty backward twelve. I was looking up girls’ dresses when I was eight.”
“I was into war, not love. My old man and my brothers and my uncles were all soldiers.”
“Uh-huh.”
Eight ways with the beer bottle alone. “The Regional Office recruiter said he’d make me into a soldier.”
Baz shook his head. “Bastard. There’s always a catch.”
“What?” I demanded. “I am a soldier. A good one. I could take you with my ankles tied together.”
If I was sober. Remembering how long it’d been since I drank anything but cat’s pee, I felt another wave of irrational happiness. I sucked down the last of my current beer.
He waved a hand. “Never mind.” He got up, went to one of six fridges for more beers, and passed me one.
“How did you get recruited?” I said.
“I didn’t. I wandered in looking for work, like my roomie Kama.”
“That’s bull,” I said, but I eyed him curiously. “Who’s Kama?”
“Hindu lust god. Six thousand years old. He’s on the Regional Office dole now, like the rest of us.”
My mouth fell open. “Shit. You’re one of them, too. One of the old gods.”
He shrugged. “Everybody’s gotta eat.”
I digested this proof that the Home Office had not, in fact, invented the universe four thousand years ago, as the marketing department always claimed. “Six thousand.” I felt like an idiot.
“You’ve been a company man too long,” Baz said excusingly, as if he could hear my thoughts.
“How about Archie?” I said. I knew Archie. We’d hung out on an island during the Punic Wars for two solid weeks. “That guy can drink.”
“Arch is a little younger than me.”
“So is he a sex demon too? What’s that like anyway?”
Baz stretched. His lounger tipped back but didn’t tip over. “Sex-demoning rocks. I’ve honed my skills to maximum bob. It only takes a couple hours a day, and I get sex out of the deal.”
“So…you try to sign up their souls after sex?”
“Nope. The Regional Office has lowered its expectations. They figure if they get somebody sinning, that’s halfway there. It helps that the Home Office has swung so far right. Sex is bad. Birth is sin. Oh, and smiting’s back, did you hear?”
I grunted. As a soldier I was used to smiting, and I was only so-so impressed with it as a conversion tool. “Tell me more about the sex-demoning. Do you get powers?”
“Most of us have powers left over from our glory days,” he said, referring to back when he was a god, “but we never used to use ’em this way. Now we use our powers to seduce, give pleasure, lead them toward self-actualization, shit like that.”
“Lead who? You mean your victims?”
Baz looked at me funny again and took a long, slow drink of beer. “Professional tip,” he said. “We don’t call them victims.”
“Okay, what do you call them?”
He eyed me. “We call them women.”
I waited.
He explained, “It helps us stay in their headspace.”
I nodded. “Good intel. Think like the prey, catch more prey.”
He sighed. “Right.”
“And you find a lot of these, uh, women to, uh, actualize?”
Baz smiled. “You have no idea how many buttoned-down, buttoned-up women are out there, just dying to be carried away into sin by somebody like me.” Baz gave a contented sigh. “Bless ’em all!”
I digested this.
“How far do you carry them?” My wings felt tired.
“You don’t carry them at all. They carry you. But you do have to convince them that they have no choice.”
I nodded again, more woozily. The beer was catching up with me. “How does that work?”
“Average goody-good woman, working two jobs, taking care of the kids and maybe her useless husband and her little old sick mother—she’s so loaded down with responsibility, she doesn’t dare take time off for fun. I put a pistol to her head—”
I frowned. “That’s seduction?”
“Metaphorically, dude. You got out from behind that desk just in time, know that?” Baz said. His contempt for me seemed sprightly, no matter how much beer he drank. “Metaphorically, I convince her she has no choice, by impressing the shit out of her with special effects and my sexual awesomeness.”
“Huh,” I said. I wondered what sexual awesomeness entailed.
“And she says to herself—” he affected a high, feminine voice “O well-a-day, I’m being swoggled against my will! Help! Help! I’m being swoggled by a really skilled, determined, hunky guy, oh help!” He chuckled. “But she doesn’t yell very loud.”
I laughed as if I got the joke. Over four centuries of war I’d seen plenty of soldiers mating, of course. What still baffled me was why women would ever agree to it. Which they seldom did, from my observation.
I yawned. “You look familiar, you know that?”
“You too,” he said. “Let’s talk in the morning.”
He led me down the hall to the room where we’d put Jeff to bed. I collapsed next to the angel and passed out before Baz had shut the door.
I woke up in a strange room. I must be in the field! I thrilled to the realization. Finally! I hadn’t been in the field for eight hundred years.
I smelled angel blood, old sweat socks, stale beer, cold pizza, and the sweet, dirty fumes of pot smoke. Also, coffee.
That woke me up. I’d been getting by on hot cat’s pee at my desk in the bowels of the Regional Office for eight hundred years.
Jeff had rolled off the bed. He lay comatose on the floor.
The door opened and Baz came in.
By daylight, and beerless, I recognized him now. “You’re King Ashurbanipal, the Mesopotamian.”
“King, high priest, scholar, war god, feh. Just Baz these days,” he said, and I saw with a thrill that he had two cups of coffee in his hands. “Did we meet then? I thought you’re only twelve hundred years old.”
“You were running a canteen in Damascus in the Second Crusade. Right by the baths.”
Baz stared, frowning, and then he laughed. “It was a whorehouse, but yeah. I take it you never made it upstairs.”
Bastard was mocking my lack of sexual experience again. “I was a soldier,” I grated.
“‘Was.’ You’re learning.”
I glared at him.
“Unfurling new petals of personal development. Have some coffee while we talk about your future.”
Nothing else would have kept me from disemboweling him with a swipe of my talons. Besides the hangover.
“Gimme!”
I slurped coffee—o glorious!—while Baz started to explain the terms of my capture at his hands, if that’s what it was.
“You realize that the Ravenswood Project never existed.”
I nodded. “Wiped off the computer.”
“You realize what that means?”
A groan came from the angel. Jeff
sat up, looking a bit morning after. “Ow.” He put both hands to his head. “Oh, the badness.”
Baz handed him the second cup of coffee.
Jeff sniffed it. “This contains addictive compounds.”
“So did the hash tea you drank last night,” Baz said. “Welcome to humanity. I won’t say mortality. Most of us don’t get that lucky.”
Jeff sat there on the floor in his birthday suit, his white wings still muddy from his dip in the pond last night, looking into the cup with apparent longing and suspicion. “It smells good,” he said cautiously.
“Most addictive compounds do,” Baz said.
“Get off your ass and join the conference,” I suggested. “You don’t want to miss this.”
“Yes, where were we?” Baz said, taking a seat in a broken-down papasan chair.
“We had got to the part where our orders sheets developed severe data attrition and you realized what that means,” I said. I explained to Jeff, “Archie—Archimedes, our target—fiddled the Regional Office computer records, erased the Ravenswood Project, and got us all scrubbed.”
Baz nodded. “That’s how I figure it, too.”
I said, “What worries me is, what was happening to the rest of the task force? What was that shit they were shooting at us from the ground? How did they know we were coming? Angels and demons were dropping like rocks all over the place. I got hit myself, and barely made it to a soft landing.”
I shuddered, remembering the metallic crunch of winged bodies hitting car hoods, the ululation of wailing car alarms.
Baz nodded. He seemed to be falling over himself laughing inside, but nothing showed in his expression. Bastard. “That may have been my ex-roomie again. Reckless fucker was setting off fireworks dipped in love potions last night—something to do with his girlfriend. When he could have hit one of us! He’s gone now.”
I shrugged. It wasn’t as if I wanted to catch Archie and get back on the Regional Office’s payroll.
I was too hung over to be subtle. “So what’s the price to get out of here with our skins?”
Jeff’s eyes widened. I think he was only beginning to realize the trouble we were in, the doofus. He stared into his coffee mug with horror.
“Okay, here’s the deal,” Baz said, and I was suddenly listening very carefully. “We have a quiet little household here. Four of us share the expenses—and the chores when I can arm wrestle ’em into doing any. I cook. The guys take turns shopping. What we need most right now is somebody who can play drums and who will clean the skylights over the MJ plants. A motorcycle mechanic would be awesome, but I’m guessing you two aren’t.”
“We’re awesome,” I said smoothly.
“We’re very awesome,” Jeff echoed.
“I used to fix tanks,” I said. “I bet I can learn to fix a motorcycle.”
“Excellent. As for cash, if you want to share the monthly bonus from the Regional Office, you learn sex-demoning and pool your scores with ours.”
This gave me a chill, thinking of those predatory women last night.
“You’ll teach us?” Jeff said. He didn’t look thrilled either.
“Sure.”
Jeff and I exchanged glances. “Okay,” I said warily.
“Great.” Baz slapped his knees and stood up. “You share a room, unless and until we lose another roomie. If you want more coffee, it’s in the kitchen.”
“I think I’ll stay here, thank you,” the angel said. He looked pretty fragile.
I wondered if I could get my paws on any of that hash tea. “Think I’ll get up.”
“You should eat,” Baz told Jeff. “You lost a lot of blood.”
But as soon as I left the bed, Jeff crawled up onto it and curled up with his arms around his head, his wings hiding his face from the light coming in the window. Being a fallen angel was new for him.
I hoped his head was killing him.
I tottered behind Baz to the kitchen.
Someone shouted at me.
“You!”
Sitting at the table was the gothed-up woman who had nearly got Jeff through the iron gate last night. The one who’d been screaming, the blood! the blood! Her hair was an unhealthy hot-pink-purple. Her goth paint was smeared even worse now. In daylight in the kitchen, I could now see that her face was pierced everywhere—eyebrows, ears, nose, lip. Fucking scary.
I would have leaped back, but my hangover wasn’t up to it.
Besides, I’d have spilled my first coffee in eight hundred years.
“Oh, hi,” I said weakly. I wondered if I should, like, ask Baz for some pants.
Baz didn’t seem to think so.
She looked hungrily at me. I edged around to keep the kitchen table between us.
“Where is he? That other guy?” she demanded.
“Here I am, at your cervix.” A new guy came in, short, slightly dusky under the eyes, with aristocratic features and the chunky-yet-lithe body of a wrestler. He had a gym bag in his hand. “Listen, sugar, I gotta hit the gym,” he said brightly to the goth girl. “You coming?”
She ignored him. “The white guy. With the wings,” she clarified, not taking her eyes off me.
The new guy shook his head sorrowfully at her. “Still methed up, eh?” He turned to Baz. “Picked her up on Ravenswood outside Cheaters at two a.m., crying and raving about a naked angel.” To the goth girl he said, “Honey, have some coffee. Eat something. Sure you don’t want to hit the gym with me?” He wiggled the gym bag as if it were a box of fresh doughnuts.
She shrugged him away without looking at him.
Baz spoke. “Mutt, this is the guy I mentioned last night. Kama, meet your new roommate, Mutt.” He turned away and started messing with bowls and eggs and things.
I shook hands with Kama. “Wait a minute. Kamadeva? As in Kama-Sutra Kama?”
“That’s me,” Kama simpered. “Heyyyy! Aren’t you—huh—did we meet in Strasburg during a blackout in nineteen forty-three? Bunch of factory girls, right? And you had the hash?”
“Try a stag night in Florence in thirteen seventy-six during the War of the Eight Saints. Your short-term memory sucks.” I shook his hand again, feeling better. “But yes, that was my hash.”
Kama’s happy-go-lucky face made this whole experience feel a lot less creepy. I remembered that bathhouse hash party with fondness.
“Did you say new roommate?” said the goth girl to Baz, breaking her stare at me for the first time.
“Uh,” I said cautiously, sending Baz a warning look.
“Yeah, we found him on the doorstep last night,” Baz said, his focus on a waffle iron.
“Alone? Or was there somebody with him?” she said hungrily.
I poked Baz and redoubled the warning look.
Baz took the hint. “Nope, all alone.”
This might have worked, if Jeff hadn’t chosen that moment to come yawning into the kitchen in the nude, his wings hanging slack from his shoulders.
The goth girl gave a shriek, leaped up from her chair and knocked it over, and hurled herself at Jeff.
I was on the other side of the table, and happy to be so.
Jeff tried to back through a refrigerator.
She crouched in front of him, her pale, pierced, mascara-blotted face turned up to his, her mouth open and smeared with red.
Jeff looked around wildly.
Our eyes met. I was paralyzed.
“Don’t be afraid,” the girl breathed.
Jeff turned a panicked look back to her. His eyes narrowed. “Is that paint on your face?”
“What’s your name?” she whispered.
I was tempted to warn Jeff not to tell her. Mortals could do terrible things to a demon if they got hold of your name. Probably an angel was not much better protected.
Jeff seemed to relax a little. He reached out and touched her under the eye with one finger.
She swiped at her eye and looked at her hand. “Ah, hell. Guess Kama and I made a mess of my makeup.”
“You s
houldn’t say ‘hell,’” Jeff said.
She squinted back him.
“I’ve heard about painted women,” he offered, as if trying to seem less like a tourist on planet Earth. “What are you called—harlowes? Hackers?” He extended a finger cautiously and touched the ring in her nose. “Does that hurt?”
The goth girl blinked. “I’m Keek,” she said, starting to frown.
Smooth one, Jeff. Don’t piss her off.
Jeff seemed to sense that he’d put a foot wrong. “I guess I’m a mess, too.” He frowned down at his naked body and half stretched a wing. He looked back at Keek. “Are you a sex demon, too?”
“No. Are you an angel?”
“Yes,” Jeff said, while I signaled wildly behind her back.
Keek reached out carefully and took Jeff by the hand. “Let’s go find the shower.”
“My name’s Jioffriel,” the idiot said as they walked out of the kitchen together. “You can call me Jeff.”
I rolled my eyes.
When they had gone, Baz turned back to the waffle iron. “Look out for love. You dodged a bullet last night. Your buddy looks like he’s bought it after all. You still have a chance.” He toasted me gravely with his coffee mug. “Don’t fuck it up.”
Jioffriel was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Every part of his body was perfect, and I mean every part. He was also really, really dirty. There were still smears of blood on him.
“What happened to you?”
“When?” He was looking at me as if I was sunrise, which was nice, considering that goth makeup does not cry well.
His hand, which I was holding carefully, got very hot.
So did most of me.
“Last night? You fainted in the cemetery. You were—” I choked at the terrible memory. “You were bleeding. A lot.”
I looked at his thigh, or at least near his thigh. Oh boy.
After a short struggle to refocus, I realized I couldn’t see his wound.
“Hey. You’re not hurt any more.”
Jioffriel looked down. “Mutt and the demon Baz healed it.” He seemed to be having trouble talking.
“Demon,” I repeated, but I was looking Jioffriel in the face now. He seemed dazed. “Poor baby. You need to take a shower and drink about three pints of cold water over the next twelve hours and get some bed rest.”
It's Raining Angels and Demons Page 3