Banished

by Billie Sue Mosiman

  They were almost to the spot. She and Henry had come from a different direction so she knew she wouldn't happen up on the midget. They were to the north of where Nick waited along the shoreline. They topped a hill, and below them stood her least favorite angel. Her lips raised in a snarl at how he was displaying himself, just as if he thought he was one of the golden ones, one of the righteous, when in reality he was no more than the outraged, the same as she.

  A series of memories inundated her. Nisroc rising up for the first time in the dead man's body, so happy, so grateful to be earth-locked.

  Nisroc on the ship sailing out of England for the New World, his spirits high, almost giddy with expectancy.

  Nisroc guiding her through the backwater rush and flush of New York City, lifting her and her petticoats across mud bogs to land her safely on wooden walkways.

  Nisroc in Charlotte, stand-offish, less a companion than a nuisance in her house. She had him fed, clothed, she provided for his every need. She gave him a beautiful home, warmth, and comfort.

  Then...Nisroc after he had met his Mary. Nisroc the Betrayer. Nisroc the Fool, in love and moving farther and farther from Angelique, relegating her to the stormy past while he believed he had arrived on the unblemished shores of another world where angels could mingle with man without repercussion, where angels could break all the bonds with heaven in order to tie themselves to the Earth.

  “Well? I guess that's the one,” Henry said at her side.

  Angelique stood mesmerized by her thoughts of her past with Nick and her future, which looked so bleak, without him. There was nothing to be done for it. He had to go. He had to.

  She began to gather her powers. She called them from deep and beyond space, into the universe she called, as her black wings unfurled to blot out the sunlight...

  #

  Nick heard her brazen call to the netherworld, but he also heard Jody's call at his back. Confused, pulled as if by tethers to each arm raised in the sky, he turned toward his friend's voice.

  “She's over there!”

  It was Jody all right, standing high on the ridge, his hands cupped around his mouth to sound the warning. Next to him stood a male child even shorter than Jody, his face wiped clean of every single emotion save fear for his life. He looked to be a butterfly caught in the amber light from the sky, unmoving, frozen, even his mind shut down to barely a spark of thought since thought had brought him to this terrible place where fear might peel him like a boiled egg, where fear might gouge out his innards and leave him a sprawling mess on the ridge.

  “Jody, no,” Nick whispered in sadness.

  Jody did not call again, but Nick read all this thoughts just as if they were his own. Nick had, for this day, given up all that made him human save heart, and relied on his angel inheritance. He could read the human mind even more easily than ever before.

  Jody was thinking I couldn't help it. I tried and I couldn't leave you. I'm tied to you some way I can't explain but I know God is there and as long as I know that I know it doesn't matter what I do as long as I do right. This is right. I'm with you, Nick. I got this.

  Had he the time Nick would have probed his friend's mind to find out about the boy and what he was doing here in the middle of what might be a cataclysm. But he didn't have time. He didn't have time to...

  #

  ...save them.

  Angelique knew what her partner angel was thinking and sent a blast of wind so strong that even a hurricane couldn't match it toward the small people standing on the ridge to her right.

  Jody and Kurt were blown over and backwards as if they'd been bowling pins. They vanished from sight over the ridge top and she pushed harder, tumbling them down the ridge to the bottom. Then she turned her wrath toward Nick, having no more time or thought for his little friends.

  She rose from the ground, a black and white figure, a white child's dress, the massive black wings. She was wild-eyed. She lost all grace given her by the child's body she'd stolen for herself and, like Nick, she was wholly dependent on her angel self. It was not a beautiful angel, but a startling one. One that blazed so fiercely she might as well have been an imploding star.

  SHE.

  SHE WAS THE QUEEN OF ALL THE FALLEN.

  She felt this in her bones and flesh, in her blood, in the roots of her hair, in the expansion of her wings, and in her deepest soul.

  Nick, too, has risen into the sky, no longer fretting about human observers or reporters from The Post. He knew his little friends, so terribly bashed about and now lying scraped and half-broken at the bottom of the ridge, would not die, not yet, not just yet.

  His sole intent and concentration was on surviving one more hour--one more minute!--within the burning hell of Angelique's furnace. He knew instinctively she had not come to forgive him, or to beg him to return to her. She had only come to destroy the one thing she hated most of all—another angel who had tasted completely of the earth, even the degradation and meanness and pettiness and still found it God's greatest achievement.

  She envied him his love. She hated his compassion. She despised his empathy. And she longed for his conscience. For she knew, just as he did, even at this moment before their clash, that he was greater in so many ways than she would ever be. He was the grandest angel she might have ever known and all she wanted to do was extinguish his flame, send him back to the purgatory of the stars where he could never love or empathize or care again.

  Nick flew forward, his wings beating rhythmically, lifting him easily into her space.

  From Angelique nothing so pedestrian as beating wings was good enough for her rage. She looked like a black, monstrous hummingbird, her wings blurred they worked so fast and hard. Coming together brought more force from her than it did from him and they crashed into one another like trucks colliding at full speed.

  Together they fell toward the water, her hands talons on his shoulders to hold him fast. He was shouting into her small furious face. “We don't have to do this! Angelique, stop, we don't have to do it!”

  If the coming together of angels in flight created a sonic boom, their rapid descent into the water created a tsunami. The ruffled waters parted and sucked them down into the deeps. Water closed over their heads cold and final.

  It was then that Nick's hands found her neck. He was still shouting to her, but now wordlessly, straight into her wicked little mind. Stop it, stop it now before it's too late, stop it, Angelique, let it go, let me go, let us go!!!

  He squeezed, tightening his grip, and her small neck was like a soft ball between his fingers. He felt her hands clawing at his face, but it didn't matter. He must make her listen. He must make her understand. He kept telling her the truth and how it would free her if only she would listen to him.

  Let it go! You don't need me and you don't need to punish me! Only God punishes and it's not in your realm, Angelique, are you listening, in God's sweet name, are you listening to me?

  But then he knew she wouldn't. He had to do it, he had to stop her or she would stop him. God grant him the strength, he prayed, and squeezed down on her neck even as they drifted deeper and deeper into the water, the murk darkening, the light blotted out from above, the world nothing but a ball of swirling waters before God sent the light out of the darkness.

  She struggled no longer. He couldn't even see her face in the dark underworld of Poseidon.

  He let her go, afraid.

  She began to drift up now, rather than down, buoyed by her wings. He struggled against the water to follow, reaching out for the surface, for the sun, for the sky. He folded his wings close to his side and aimed for the vault of heaven above.

  #

  Angelique bobbed on the water, her face turned into the sky. She drifted with the current toward the sea.

  Nick lay on his back watching her go, tears wetting the already wet skin of his face, making new tracks.

  He turned onto his belly and swam toward shore. He had to see about his friends and felt they needed his help badly.<
br />
  He saw a creature on the hill from where Angelique had descended and he stopped treading water to stare. It was a hunch-backed thing, hoary and unholy, creeping over the hill away from him. He saw the thing's back, leather-skinned, covered with pustules and sores, weeping like bloody Jesus in the now lowering sun.

  The beast disappeared over the hill as if winking out and Nick resumed making his way to shore, to his friends.

  #

  Nick was just a man again, a bedraggled, dripping wet man with deep scratches on his face and a look of terror in his eyes. He turned Jody over and called his name. The small man opened his eyes slowly, wincing as he did. “Think I might have broke a leg,” he said.

  “You'll be all right now.”

  “The boy?”

  Nick lay Jody back down where he'd been holding his shoulders in his lap and rushed over to the kid. The boy had blood coming out of his nose and his arms were scraped up as if he'd been dragged over the ground by a team of horses. Nick lifted him into his arms, looking down into his face. He saw he was breathing. He carried him over to Jody and said, “He's alive. Who is this?”

  “A kid from the hotel who followed me here. I couldn't stop the little pipsqueak,” Jody said and then he began to laugh, laughing like a maniac, laughing and crying, holding his broken leg.

  Nick picked them up, one small person in each arm, cradling them like his sons, and went down the ridge slowly, careful not to stumble and fall.

  “Is she gone?” Jody asked. He shivered even speaking of her.

  “Yes. She's gone.” Nick said it with such great sadness that the small man didn't know what to say back to him.

  Clouds obscured the sky, and rays from the sun spun out from the sides like spikes from a halo.

  “I know just the doctor you need to take us to,” Jody said.

  “Gotcha.”

  “His office smells like cat pee, I want to warn you beforehand. But he sews a mean stitch.”

  “Right.”

  Kurt woke to find himself being carried down the hillside by the big blond stranger with wings, but now he saw no wings at all. His arms hurt and his head. His nose and his hip. He began to moan and cry.

  Looking up at his guardian angel through his tears he said, “I your friend.”

  Jody laughed. Nick smiled. “You're going to be okay, little buddy. I'm taking you to a doctor.”

  Nick thought the world was right again even if clouds curdled and drowned the sun, even if there was rain or wind, sleet or snow, good times or bad. Because the world was all there was, Nick realized, holding hard to the charges in his arms. Heaven was for God. The outer reaches where he had wandered for so much time was for the Fallen.

  And this place, this little blue planet, this spinning ball of mankind was really all there was.

  #

  Angelique floated like a small patch of debris toward the open sea. She retched horribly, feeling her very stomach coming up through her throat. Water spewed forth like a foaming fountain. She blinked hard at the blue sky.

  She had been gone a while. Gone into the dark. She had railed against it. Cursed it. Fought it with every fiber of her being and every tendril of her strength. She had forgotten how cold it was and how empty. She had been in the world so long that this place where she was heading was alien and disturbing enough to rattle her wits. She could hardly think.

  She was choking. She was drowning. Then she flew back over the scales of time, over the hump-back of the sun, through the silvery clouds of Jupiter, past the dry valleys of Mars, and she saw Earth rimmed by white cloud and thronged with lands and oceans.

  She came back. Back to the little girl's body. Back to herself in the world. She had gone only a little way into oblivion, but her way back had been a tremendous journey. She felt a thrill of relief to be in the world again, inside a warm, living body, feeling the sun burning in her eyes, the water caressing her body.

  She gulped air so that her lungs expanded into life. Her throat hurt and she still had the sensation of oxygen deprivation and then of drowning. She moved her mighty wings under the water to propel her to the far shore. Ripples moved in concentric circles away from her. Whitecaps and little wavelets broke over her face and she shook her head and laughed.

  She saw on the far shore a tiny figure standing hunched over, waiting to help her out of the dark drink. She thought his skin was leather and she imagined his eyes would be the corrupt green of a stagnant pond and oh so knowing.

  When finally she reached him, he waded into the water and took her hand, lifting her free. He carried her to the land over his shoulder. She folded her great wings and let them return to her body. He lay her down, standing over her with his oafish look and his lips dripping slime.

  “Will you go after him?” he asked.

  Angelique hesitated. True hatred that had driven her for so long and the very real need to punish Nisroc seemed to fade even as she consulted those feelings and thoughts. Finally she answered, “No.”

  “You won't go after him?”

  “No. Leave him be.” That was what Nick kept telling her even as he took her life. And so she would let him be. Because, really, was he worth it now that she knew he had as much strength and will to survive as she? If she lost one battle and nearly lost her earthly place, what might happen if she fought again? She had felt during the engagement that Nisroc was filled with a great power unlike her own...and superior. She would never have imagined it, but for the moment she knew she was beaten.

  For was he really worth it at all?

  “Maybe not,” the monster said, reading her mind.

  She stood, straightening her sad little wet, torn, white dress. She had lost her shoes. She had lost the red ribbon from her hair.

  But she had not lost anything she couldn't replace.

  “Shall we go then?” He was Henry again, tall, imposing stick man with the legion of lost children somewhere deep, deep, deep inside him.

  Angelique followed him up the rough hill until they stood side by side facing the city. It was bathed in orange melon light, the spires, the rooftops, the steeples beckoning.

  What a glorious day to be alive! She thought, looking out across the city knowing it was just one and all the other cities, global-wide, could be conquered if she wanted to conquer them.

  What a magical and glorious day!

  She followed Henry down the hill, his shadow long and hers short, sometimes her own shadow lost in his. He was her new mate, the one she could depend upon, and what couldn't she accomplish with this demon at her side? Who needed an angel?

  SHE was the angel. She was the Queen of all angels.

  THE END

  If you enjoyed this novel, please leave a review on the site where you purchased it. Look for Book Two of the Fallen Angels in the future. Nisroc and Angelique will move into the future from 1931 to the years of the 1990s. The third novel will cover their time on earth from the 1990s into the future. Eventually there will be a trilogy of novels involving my angelic creatures. Thank you for reading!

  Billie Sue Mosiman

  http://www.billiesuemosiman.weebly.com