Good Angel

by A. M. Blaushild

  Any attempt to corral the freshman immediately failed, and the group walked as an ugly blob down the campus. Iofiel had never been this way by foot, but at the very bottom of the hill was a dirt parking lot. A few cars were placed here as to suggest someone might’ve owned a car, but Iofiel had her doubts that even any of the upperclassmen knew how to drive.

  There was a bus pulled there, like something out of her Culture movies, where children were bullied and carted off to school. Huh! It was so rectangular, from every angle! That was the thing about film, you thought you were seeing something, but it was nothing like living it. The engine was running, making the whole thing visibly vibrate, the dark grey exhaust clouding up the air behind it. Iofiel breathed in the smell of it, taking in the subtle hues of tar and grime. Oddly, if it were a food, she wouldn’t have said no to a bite, even if there was something gross about the smell.

  A proper line formed outside of the bus, with the... man-headed professor and the angel on either side, checking over each student for proof that they didn’t look too suspicious. Iofiel and Archie had lingered near the back of the group, but Iofiel was quick to hide her form— it was her halo, not her wings, that still gave the most trouble. She was left a tad glow-ey around the edges.

  Archie must have known this was going to come up on the field trip, but still seemed troubled by the task ahead of him. This wasn’t something taught in Demon Magic— most demons could naturally hide their more demonic side without the aid of magic.

  He clearly had learned something, somewhere. He got rid of his horns first after some furtive rubbing, tapping, and curse words. Iofiel watched patiently by his side. His method for losing his wings seemed to be opening them slightly and then pressing them hard against the skin. After several attempts and no progress, he stopped.

  They weren’t far from the front of the line. “I’ll take care of it,” Iofiel whispered, covering her lips with her hand and trying to be secretive.

  Archie frowned, started to say something, but then gave her a little nod. Without much thought Iofiel gently began to cast the same hiding spell she used for herself, substituting any demon magic she knew when it felt appropriate. After all, demons were the ugly cousins to angels. Their magic was essentially a rougher, ruder bastard child of angelic.

  She failed the first time, but the negative feedback she received— a light zap through her nerves, an electric shiver across her fingertips— was enough for her to guess how to rework it. And then, yes, Archie was another mark more human.

  Iofiel was quite pleased by her work, though the ‘thank you’ Archie muttered was a little bitter. Only when she glanced up did she remember this was another one of those ‘bad things’ she wasn’t supposed to be doing.

  An angel behind her surprised her by speaking in Angelic: “If one is about to fail, let them.”

  Angelic was slippery when out of the bounds of Heaven, so it took Iofiel a little bit: “Sorry about that. Did not mean to.”

  The angel turned their head from one side to the other. “You are different in some way, but I cannot see why this extends into playing favors with demons.”

  Iofiel wanted to laugh it off with ‘I was just trying to be nice’ or even ‘I know, it’s a bad habit, but as long as we’re in truce, he’s my friend’. Angelic wasn’t really a language meant for such complex statements— at least when she was earth-bound— plus she... didn’t want to start anything.

  “So sorry. It will never happen again,” she said, blushing.

  The angel seemed satisfied by this, and with a smirk ran their fingers through their hair, shaking it from a pale cerulean into black.

  Archie nudged Iofiel lightly, and whispered into her ear, “You probably shouldn’t sit with me.”

  He must have been able to guess what the conversation had been about. Iofiel didn’t think it was a good idea to respond.

  They were both stopped at the door of the bus, pulled aside by their respective tutors. Her professor— until she learned for certain her name, Iofiel was just going to nickname her ‘Zoubir’— tutted her for her hair color. “You could have managed a little more realistic hue,” Zoubir stated, easily doing so with a few sweeps.

  Archie was held up longer. She wasn’t supposed to linger, but of course Iofiel did. It was his eye color that was the cause of hassle, but that was an easy enough charm... certainly simpler than his horns or wings.

  “Duke, I—” Archie’s voice went high pitched when he was distressed, and only that part of his conversation had leapt into hearable decibels. Duke (the Duke?) had perfected a snake-like hiss.

  Quickly, Iofiel was tapped on the shoulder and prompted to move. She found a place on the bus near the back, next to another angel. The next person to get on the bus was the angel who’d been rude to her. Following that was a demon she did not know.

  As the bus drove away, she caught sight of a small figure walking up the great hill, back to campus.

  Iofiel would have loved to lean against the window and watch the world go by, but she had an aisle seat and suddenly felt very vulnerable. Switching out of her classes, plus hanging out with Maalik, meant that her only angel acquaintances were all from higher years. And when she was in any of her classes she either kept to herself or sat with Archie. She really didn’t know who anyone around her was.

  Rather than a simple left/right split, the angels had taken the back of the bus, with a little bit of a mess in the middle where they’d failed to estimate their numbers. She was sitting next to a lanky angel in a white hijab who was painting her nails with silver glitter, while across the aisle was the formerly-aqua-haired angel she’d managed to offend.

  The angels were a well-behaved bunch, and it seemed to Iofiel she was the only one upset by the lack of conversation. The demons, a couple rows up, were occupied with chatter. Duke was leaning against the front seat, speaking to someone out of sight. Sometimes there’d be laughter, worse than most laughs, perhaps shriller in an effort to upset the angels.

  The angel next to her accidentally got nail polish on her finger and cursed under her breath. She turned mostly away from Iofiel and subtly licked the glitter off her skin, using a finger to remove the last of it before finishing the nail perfectly.

  She held her fingers in the light, turning her hand a little to let the sparkles catch the light. Iofiel watched. Witnessing her lick glitter made the other angel far less intimidating. Maybe she wouldn’t have to spend this trip alone after all? “That’s such a pretty color!” Iofiel said, putting on her friendliest smile.

  The other angel was obviously alarmed she was talking to her. The bus went over a sharp bump and a bit of polish spilled from the bottle, this time landing on her pants leg. She twitched a little, looked away from Iofiel, and rubbed it thin until the only mark was a slight off hue.

  “Well, my name’s...” Iofiel couldn’t help but giggle. Was it wrong to assume she had enough renown that this angel knew her, or was it a sad fact? “What’s your name?”

  She scratched her cheek with her unpainted hand. “I’m not going to tell you.” At least she had the poise to seem apologetic about this.

  The bus shook again. Past her, out the window, Iofiel caught a glimpse of suburbia. The streets were dark grey, colored by the lack of sunlight above. Cars of every dull hue ran beside them. It was odd to think there were humans in each of them, and each human then was not just human but a person: a life, an ambition, a soul and all that. There were a few other school busses on the road, full of kids simultaneously both younger and older than them. They were on a through way, passing through and over little houses and tall red apartment complexes, heading towards the city proper.

  A way into the next swathe of silence, Duke came through the aisles with a large box in his arms passing out caps. They were bright red with white text reading ‘Wolfcrest University’. Iofiel wasn’t alone in giving the name— and the garish cap— a disapproving glance.

  “So we don’t lose you,” Duke said a ways before her.<
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  This didn’t really make sense until they piled off the bus in a parking lot in the center of town, and Iofiel realized that without horns, wings, and odd colored hair, she didn’t really recognize most of her classmates. Except, oddly enough, Salem— he was standing with some other demons a way off, but that white scar nearly shone in the light.

  Probably best to not talk to him, though. She was sure none of her classmates wanted anything to do with her. There was something solid about this knowledge, like she couldn’t even begin to imagine what life she should’ve had, where the other angels might’ve been her friends.

  It was a windy day in whatever city they were in— she really did not know— and she clutched her new baseball cap to her head while the group gathered around their instructors. She smelled asphalt and more gasoline, dust on the wind and a chorus of car alarms somewhere, stories below.

  The plan was to wander for a while, giving both parties a good chance to observe humans going about their lives. The disguise as some sort of school group would let them blend more easily than a wild mob of young adults. After a while, they’d split, either party off to a part of the city more suited to their domain.

  It was only a day trip, though Iofiel was quite excited about it. She would have been more excited to share it with someone, in all actuality. Guardianship would have suited her quite poorly, all that time incorporeal, sometimes observing something so tremendously Good but never having someone to gush with about it. Just logging, recording, and gently pushing in a struggle that still could prove futile.

  Maybe she’d have succeeded anyway. Amriel had not been lying when they had noted her ideal for the role. But whether or not it would have drained her, killed her drive decades later, had not been considered.

  She fell in line, hoping to walk with the nail polish angel, only to end up near the back. She wasn’t last, but close to it, with two other demons set on ignoring her. As she’d do to them.

  It was a nice day out. Iofiel had brought a pocket notebook and her favorite colored pen, and as everyone got organized she took a few slow notes about her surroundings. A chance to examine a car up close should have thrilled her, but she studied a nearby truck with apathy. She was going to love it here. If she told herself that, she knew she’d eventually feel it, but she still wished Archie could have come. Even with their mutual, awkward avoidance of public displays of friendship, any time chatting to him would be better than monologuing to herself.

  Zoubir was standing at the front of the group with a clipboard, checking they’d all made it. Duke, meanwhile, made his way to the back of the group. He leaned against a metal half wall that ran around the parking lot, and it was only with a shiver that Iofiel realized he was looking at her.

  “We’ve been wondering which side you ought to take,” he said. Something about the way he moved his mouth made Iofiel sure he spent more time as a jaguar than a man. “Will you stay with your kind, or follow your studies?”

  “I guess it depends if I think it’ll be more fun to go to a prison or a zoo.”

  “We’re going to have so much fun at the zoo. I do hope you’ll tag along.”

  Honestly, the temptation to view animals was playing strong in Iofiel’s mind. Especially since they’d be real animals, acting wild as opposed to the domestic prototypes that roamed Eden. “I think I’m going to stay with the group that’s less likely to get me beaten up.”

  “And which one is that...?” Duke had the fakest laugh she’d ever heard, though she suspected it must have been genuine. “Oh, poor child! The title which you’ve been thrust into really should have gone to someone with a bit more sass.”

  “I’m plenty rude,” Iofiel snapped. “Sorry.”

  Duke’s laugh managed to top itself, turning from a bold ‘a ha ha ha’ to a sort of confident ‘wheesnaw’. “No, I must apologize. Staff at the University are forbidden to be involved in matters such as yours, so I have the privilege of being an outsider. So while I can’t advise you, I certainly can laugh at the direction your life is taking.”

  “This is very rude for a professor.”

  “Demon professor, Iofiel. Archdemon at that.” Duke laughed another spectacular laugh, and then gave a signal to his angelic cohort, who in turn flashed a thumbs up.

  “Alright, children.” —Iofiel did not feel this was an appropriate word for them— “Stay in your lines, and don’t wander off. We’ll be stopping periodically, and it’s important we stay together.”

  Right before they left, after looking around for humans, Zoubir reminded them not to discuss Hell, magic, demons, that whole thing. They’d heard all this before they left, and when the trip was first announced, and a few demons groaned.

  “As if we’re idiots,” someone complained.

  They still stuck out, as maybe this grey city wasn’t known for attracting big groups. Humans were looking, but ‘adolescent immortals’ was surely not the first thing that came to mind. They strolled down main street, Zoubir giving a thorough tour of noted historical buildings of little importance while leaving plenty of time for the class to get a good look at a city in motion.

  They stopped to eat at a booth in a park, and spread out across the grass for a good forty-five minutes. A couple demons wandered off, while the angels generally stuck with the group. One climbed a tree near the group and was sitting with the crows, softly cawing, before Zoubir waved at him to come back down.

  The city walk resumed, through an inside marketplace and under skyscrapers. They wandered a mall in wide rings, and ducked into a coffee shop only long enough to inhale the foreign air of roasted beans. Duke weaved throughout them, stopping with angel and demon alike to point something out in a low whisper. The sense of despair that hung around a man waiting for the bus, or how easily a human’s mood could change due to a simple smell or the sighting of a dog.

  It was during one of Duke’s excursions towards the front of the group that Iofiel, walking at the very end of the group, happened to notice something. They were in an urban area mostly filled with shops, and coming up was a store specializing in the occult, according to the sign (a pentagram, a crystal, the words ‘occult goods’, and the fact the place was called ‘The Black Crescent’).

  Currently, the group was on its way to a plaza, where they’d officially split into two. They’d been that way earlier, and Iofiel was pretty sure she remembered where it was. And if worse came to worst, she could fly home, confident she hadn’t had to make any tricky morality choices.

  An occult shop had to have information on Morningstar. Plus, as much as humans interested her, walking around the city in a large group didn’t seem the ideal way to learn more about them.

  She slowed her walk, and as the group passed by the door, she slipped inside The Black Crescent. A bell chimed as she entered, and a girl at the counter looked up.

  “Hey!” She was cheery, with bright orange and yellow hair and a distinctive lack of a witchy air beyond a large, silly looking pointed hat. Heaven didn’t have an official stance on witches— the vast majority of humans were completely bogus in their attempts to control magic, and those that did were too weak to be a threat. It was only worrying when demons got involved.

  “I need books about the devil,” Iofiel said with a quick glance behind her. Duke would notice soon that she’d gone missing.

  “I think we have a few of those,” the girl slid off her stool. She was a lot shorter like this, barely over five feet. “I love your hair by the way!”

  “O-oh, thanks.” Iofiel instinctively checked if it had changed back to it’s original hue, but it was still at the deep brown Zoubir had changed it to. The girl led Iofiel through the small bookshop, towards the back. It was a stuffy, low-ceiling place with a garish orange and red carpet. In the very back was a slightly open space, with a few armchairs and a low burning fire.

  “Can I ask what you’re doing, by the way?” The girl was pulling several books off the back shelf with a learned sense, only taking quick glances at each sp
ine before deciding if it went in her stack. “I don’t really mess with demons.”

  “You shouldn’t!” Iofiel said without thinking.

  “Yeah?” The girl had a slight smile at Iofiel’s outburst. “I’m not exactly like, hardcore Wicca. Just kinda practice on the side when I’m having a bad day.” She handed the stack of books to Iofiel. “Here’s somewhere to start. Is there anything specific about Lucifer you’re trying to find out? Most of our books on the subject are more generally demonology.”

  “His summoning sigil.”

  “Were you just not warning me about the dangers of summoning demons?” She laughed. “Hey, watch out for yourself. If you’re having that hard of a life, pray to an angel. Michael’s supposed to be good for those types of things, right?”

  Iofiel was flat-faced, thumbing the gloss on the cover of the first book.

  “I don’t really believe in angels and demons myself, honestly. Definitely not demons.” The shopkeeper wandered back towards the front of the shop, a bell on the end of her hat jingling as she did so. “Obviously, no offense. We get all types here, and I’m one of those weird ones.”

  In the back were two large armchairs, and Iofiel settled down. It didn’t take long to leaf through each book in search of sigils: most lacked pictures, and she knew enough about rituals at this point to quickly determine if a book was at all accurate. Most were plainly false, while others were sprinkled with real symbols of power. Generally, when it came to the pages dedicated to summoning demons, Morningstar wasn’t included in the mix.

  She was slowly compiling a list of possible symbols— it wouldn’t be impossible to set up a full circle and then switch the primary symbol out until it worked— but didn’t feel too sure about any of them.