by Gayle Riley
Which left Ambriel with a mission she could no longer complete, and a head filled with thoughts she was not equipped to deal with.
From the perspective of one who dwelt in Paradise and had never left, she supposed it was a simple enough mission: a marriage on the brink, a wife and husband drawing further apart by the day due to words unsaid and intentions misinterpreted… send the angel of clear communication to resolve the situation and heal what could be healed. It made a good deal of sense. But a purely hypothetical solution rarely worked well when run up against the cold light of a flawed reality. Such was the imperfection of humanity.
The trouble was, of course, that the whole reason why Paradise sent its league of angels to intervene in mortal affairs was that the other side, the Lower realm, had chosen to do so first. Demonic phantasms had not the slightest hesitation in Ascending to influence the course of human life, and when given the choice between allowing the leaders of Gehenna untrammeled access to the collective human soul or engaging in a form of spiritual arms race with them. For those who ran Paradise, it was no choice at all.
If only humans weren’t so predisposed to the temptations of the Lower.
Ambriel had arrived too late, that much was plain to see. The demons had gotten there ahead of her, sending two intervening phantasms to the one that Paradise had sent, leaving her both outnumbered and outmaneuvered. How much additional time they had gotten, Ambriel did not know, but it was easy to see just what they had done with that time. The wife of the couple they had been sent to influence lay sprawled out on her bed between the demons, clothes stripped from her body and trailed haphazardly on the floor from the door to the bed itself. The demons were naked too, but their clothes were nowhere to be seen, no doubt magically removed of their bodies before the perverse display going on in front of Ambriel had begun. They lay on either side of the woman, touching her freely, kissing her up and down her body, their attentions focused entirely on the writhing nude form between them.
Ambriel pressed herself to the wall, hiding herself from the three of them. Her eyes could easily pierce the simple plaster and drywall. Nothing human made could hide from the gaze of an angel, and so she could watch openly, a blush rising in her cheeks at what was playing out before her. Never before had she seen so much naked flesh through physical eyes, and never in such lustful repose. An angel’s first time seeing sex was a crucial moment, so said those who had returned from the mortal plane before, this particular sin so tempting purely because of how alien it was. Angels knew of eating in Paradise, and thus could envision greed. They could rest, and thus imagine sloth. The rage of those Above was well known, making wrath a known quantity.
But the Upper realm did not allow sex, and so it was that lust became a mystery.
When Ambriel watched, she did so first with a sense of mounting disappointment at her obvious failure, her mission doomed from the moment she set down to accomplish it. But a single glance would have been enough to establish that, there was no doubt that a woman lying with demons would no longer be amenable to the salvation Ambriel might offer at that particular moment, and yet—she continued to watch
She could not look away. The wife’s breathless moans, the contrast of her pale skin with the darker, crimson shade of the demon atop her, kept dragging Ambriel’s gaze back to them. There was a scent in the air, small and insignificant but so easy to pick up with an angel’s senses, that she knew immediately was the scent of arousal, the heady draft of mortal bodies in ecstasy. The demons themselves were achingly beautiful in a way only the Lower realm could make them, uncanny beings with forms sculpted to perfection from muscle and sinew and the raw mysterious material of that fallen world they hailed from. One worked inside the mortal woman, a large man with red skin stretched taut over a broad back that obscured the smaller human woman beneath him. The other was more slight, thin limbs made of corded muscle the color of pale ash, gray flecked with black. He lay on his side beside the wife, his lips close to her ear and moving constantly, murmuring demonic promises to her, words of pleasure and addiction. The words of a Lower spirit were potent indeed. As angels were creatures of visage and whose power was in their appearance, demons were creatures of language, of promises and lies.
Their power came in slithering whispers, that bent the minds of men and women.
As she watched, the gray demon’s head turned toward her, his expression idle and relaxed, and as his eyes settled upon her through the wall that separated them, Ambriel became sharply aware of a tingling that had begun at the crux of her legs, the join between them and her hips. The sensation intensified at the demon’s gaze, the clarity with which the creature apprehended her startling enough that Ambriel actually took a step back, her thighs clenching automatically, defensively. A smile crossed the creature in the other room’s ashen mouth, and he sat up a little.
“There’s no need to hide,” he said, in a voice like quicksilver and velvet. “We both know it’s not working. We’ve been aware of each other from the moment we began sharing this plane, so you might as well just step out and address us head on, Mayflower.”
Ambriel felt the tension ratchet up in her body at being called that name, that one specific name, and the demon smiled even wider, showing teeth that were pointed now. She was the Gemini Angel, guardian of the month of May, but to be identified as such by that thing in the other room, to have one of her true names spoken by a creature of the Lower planes, rankled in such a specific, undignified way that Ambriel nearly left entirely. But her angelic pride would allow no such thing, and with no point left in concealment, she strode out from behind the wall and into the open doorway, where she stood to her full height.
This was not insubstantial-angels were typically tall beings even when assuming humanoid forms-but in this case, it involved unfolding a little more of her own angelic nature than Ambriel was used to doing in mortality. Her silver robes shined in the night, accentuating the ageless beauty of her form like wearable treasure. Her hair was a collection of red braids, pinned and knotted atop her head like a crown of fire, and they caught what little light there was and held it, trapped in a perfect amber moment upon her, the Queen of Cups, the Gemini Star and the Avatar of Understanding. The Upper realm ascendant.
She was an angel, and before her they were simply naked demons, slaves to baser instincts that she would not share.
“I know you, Crowley, architect of lies-within-lies. You are no threat, that seeing you head on might constitute a challenge,” Ambriel said, injecting as much regal Upper inflection into her words as possible. Simultaneously, she tried to tamp down on the strange thoughts and sensations that had pulsed through her very flesh upon first seeing them, knowing that even now the demons would be attempting to probe her thoughts, sensitive to even the mildest hints of temptation. It was in their nature, after all.
But it was not the gray demon Crowley who responded. Instead, his cohort began to move, prominent muscles rippling as he turned, hefting the human woman bodily along with him. It was a complex motion, and it ended with the crimson demon on his back and the woman in his lap, naked and splayed, her legs straining to spread at either side of him. His member, thick and intimidating, remained inside the wife, his biceps flexing as he lifted her, literally lifted her, up and down his shaft. He did this with an almost bored air, as though using another person as some form of sex toy was just what one did.
Perhaps for something like the crimson demon, it was. He was simply immense, a mass of red muscle, strength personified. Thick horns, gnarled obsidian spokes, jutted from his forehead and framed a face that would not look out of place staring out from a mountainside. His eyes contained the multiple pupils of a demon of the Earth, perhaps a hint at some insectile ancestry; one central pupil that dilated to look upon the angel before him, ringed by seven smaller ones, black flecks in a red iris. He snorted derisively at Ambriel, and plunged the human woman down further onto his erection.
“Would you look at this one? Talking like it’s st
ill the dawn of creation!” His voice was a rumbling, volcanic thing, the words slow and deliberate like the grinding of tectonic plates. His breath tickled the wife’s back, and she shivered in response, cooed softly, as though she knew better than to intrude too deeply into what was happening.
“Easy now, Eo.” The gray demon pulled himself into a sitting position, ran a hand through his jet-black hair so that his own horns, small and just barely protruding from his temples, came into view. “Not all of us come to the human world so much. This could be our Queen of Cups’ first time. Am I right, Mayflower?”
‘Why would I tell you that?’ Ambriel shot back, doing her best to avert her gaze from the cumulative nudity in the room before her. She failed, and the blush on her cheeks had to be obvious enough for the demons to see it. Their prodding at the edges of her mental defenses was keenly felt, probing for a means inside, a way to wrap around Ambriel’s soul and squeeze until all that was pure had left it.
“You don’t need to,” Crowley said, shrugging. He leaned in further, whispering something in the human woman’s ear as he passed that made her shudder and scream, the sound bespeaking naught but pleasure. A lamb to the slaughter. “I can make an educated guess. Seems unlikely that the Upper realm would send one of the twelve that guard the constellations out very often. You’re blushing very hard, which suggests you aren’t used to this even a little. My, my, is Paradise so understaffed that they must send someone of your rank out to negotiate for the soul of but a pair of humans?”
“Yes,” Ambriel started, without thinking and without taking into account the odds before her. “Paradise sent one high angel to deal with this. And Gehenna sent two dukes of Hell to do the same. Remind me, who is supposed to be lacking in manpower, dear Crowley? Yet another lie, tumbling from your dissembling lips.”
“What can I say? It’s what I do,” Crowley shrugged again, the gesture speaking not only of a lack of care, but also that it would be impossible for anything you said to make him care. It took a lot of effort, to purposefully do something to communicate a lack of effort, but Crowley contrived to make it happen anyway. Behind him, a pointed tail flicked into view, moving in sinuous, amused ways through the air. He gestured, vaguely, toward Eo and the wife. “But here’s something you can know to be true: you should try this, Ambriel. Your first time out in the human world? Sample its pleasures, my dear.”
“An angel cannot sin,” Ambriel sniffed, turned her head away even as her eyes glanced back toward the demons. It would not have been smart to put them out of view.
“Which you take to mean you cannot choose to partake,” Crowley said. “When an equally valid interpretation, absent distinct guidance, would be that anything an angel does would not, in fact, be a sin. You have no mortal nature, Queen of Cups. Nothing in you would tempt you astray, were you to just follow your instincts. What are they telling you?”
“Not to trust you.”
“You see?” Crowley spread his hands wide, his tail twitching with satisfaction. “Your instincts are leading you right even now!”
“Enough of this grotesquerie,” Ambriel shook her head, then inclined it toward the human woman. “Release her. It is not your place to treat her this way.”
“And as is perfectly typical for a representative of the Upper realm, what she herself wants doesn’t factor in, does it?” For the first time, Crowley’s pleasant facade faltered, and a frown crossed his ashen lips. “You didn’t even think to ask. Why don’t you, Mayflower? Why not, for once, care about your charges, and not just that they do what you approve of?”
The angel blinked at this. For a moment, she did not know what to say. She knew the woman’s name, her husband’s, what it was that they disagreed on and why, should it be allowed to continue, it would break them apart. Accessing that information was simple. There was nothing she could not know about her if it aided in her divine mission, no conversation starter she could not have. Yet, when put in the position of actually talking to a human, for the first time in her existence, Ambriel faltered.
Peering into the wife now, Ambriel could only see the demons’ touch upon her, their grip around her soul. What she desired had ceased to be about her husband at all, the life she led outside this one night had vanished as a concern for her, and in its place were Eo and Crowley. Immediacy had overtaken everything else, carnality had subsumed propriety. This particular sin, the one filling her between her legs and turning her into a babbling, red-faced prop for Eo’s victory lap, was all there was in her now, and would be until the demons left her here, alone, tired, wondering what had happened and, more importantly, where she could get more of it.
That was the thing, about demons. They were, at heart, cosmic permission-givers. What they spoke into your heart, into your very soul, was that it was okay to do the thing you knew were not okay. That there were exceptions to even the sternest of rules, and wherever you happened to be standing, coincidentally, was one of those, exactly.
What you wanted but could not have, was precisely what they wished you to have.
“Mmm, she can join us, if she wants,” the human spoke, in a voice that was not human, before Ambriel could collect herself. There was a desperation in the words, and a confused hunger that could never be satisfied that changed the nature of her sound, turned the human voice into something at once hollow and full to bursting with a feeling it should never experience. The wife’s mouth hung open in panting ecstasy, her eyes wide and wild things, and when she looked to Ambriel it was with undisguised want of the purest sort. “I mean, I’ve never done a girl before, but there’s a first time for—oh fuck! —everything.”
That was the precise moment that Ambriel knew she had lost this one.
Nothing that looked like that woman looked, in that moment, could be reasoned with. You could not appeal to the better nature of a creature consumed by lust. The wife was a lost cause, and no doubt if the husband was not currently in the company of some Succubus or another, he would be Crowley’s very next target. Gender was largely irrelevant to demons. Even if the husband remained untouched, his wife’s infidelity would taint the relationship, mark her soul in a way that Ambriel could not fix, not here, not now. All she had left was to leave, without being waylaid by the demon pair.
The idea stoked something akin to anger in Ambriel, some distant, prideful cousin to rage that was all an angel, fresh from Paradise, could feel. Wrath might come of it, or perhaps some righteous rebuke, if words were all she could muster. She knew she was frowning.
“I know when I have been outplayed,” she said, and turned to leave. “Try not to cause too much damage, at least.”
“Alternately, and here’s a hot take for you.” Suddenly, and with no motion within the intervening space, Crowley was in front of her, blocking her exit. “You could stay and give the human what she desires. Isn’t that what you’re for?”
“No,” Ambriel shook her head, and shouldered past the demon. “I am not. I will leave that tawdry work to you and your brute, Crowley.”
“What was it you called her before? Mayflower, Crowley?” Snorting a rough breath through his nose, Eo laid the woman to one side and stood, rising up and up and up off of the bed, seven feet of naked muscle easily. Big hands clenched into thick fists. “I think I’m done with that. Got a better name for her. Mayfly.”
What happened next only took a few seconds, and to fully understand it, it must be rendered in minute progression, one small action after the next. Eo raised his hand, lights sparking about his wrist, and behind Ambriel, window glass began to crack, as though under sudden, great strain. Sensing the application of aggressive magics, Ambriel released her physical form and became light herself, a curving trail of azure sparks leaving afterimages in the air, the preferred traveling form of the discerning Upper agent. Her new, luminous form flowed away from the attacking demon, danced through the windows and the walls into open air moments before the spell detonated and reduced a large portion of that same wall to chunks of free-floating pla
ster and brick. Ambriel’s light curved its way across the street and alighted on the far roof as Ambriel embodied once more, graceful feet landing with nary a stumble on the tiles beyond.
Ahead of her could be seen the light of demonic travel; angular, sizzling lines of orange cutting through the air, turning at random, harsh angles as they made their way to the roof just one further along, far enough away to not be attacked as they shifted form, but close enough to head Ambriel off. There were two such lights, the larger traveling ahead of the smaller, and so it was that Eo landed first, Crowley both in hot pursuit and, eventually, with a steadying hand on his partner. Both were still naked, even in this public space, but it mattered little. Below them, human life continued as though nothing had happened above.
For the denizens of the Lower and Upper realm both, being seen was always a matter of choice.
“Eo, we didn’t come here for this,” Crowley said, crisp and commanding. “Not that I don’t enjoy watching you break things apart, but… oh, whatever. We did what we came here for anyway. You may want to leave now, angel. There’s no profit in lingering.”
“On this, we agree,” Ambriel frowned, already turning over how she would report this back to Paradise. Without another word, she shifted back to light form and Ascended, not in any spatial direction, but in a spiritual one, back to the realm she called home.
Left behind and more than a little frustrated by this fact, Eo growled formlessly, a chittering snarl that seemed to be wrought by vocal organs that humans did not possess. He rounded on Crowley, bare skin shining in the moonlight, and for a moment looked as though he was gearing up to strike the other demon, before thinking better of it. Crowley had leveled a long, steady look at the big creature, and once he had settled down, the ashen demon returned his attention to the destroyed wall they had just left through. In the hole Eo had made, Crowley could see the naked wife, panting from her bed and looking longingly out at them, imploring them to return. But there was no fun in it now, the addition of the Queen of Cups had made mortal fare seem common and disposable by comparison.