His Grace

by Aya DeAniege

  “Oh, okay,” I said with a small nod.

  The elevator doors opened onto a flat space. A helicopter sat on the roof, empty and unguarded.

  Sam stepped off, and I followed despite myself.

  The wind whipped at my hair, blinding me for a moment before I managed to get my eyes opened and looked around.

  Around and then below us, the city stretched out for what seemed like forever. All the people going about their lives below us, even in the buildings around us. We were not on the tallest building, but there wasn’t anything directly nearby that was as high as we were.

  I looked up at the sun, directly overhead, then around at the cloudless blue sky.

  “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Sam asked. “Like being in Heaven.”

  “Wouldn’t know, never been,” I said.

  “Neither have I. Well, sort of, a long, long time ago.”

  He turned to me and smiled.

  “You want to go out in a helicopter?” he asked.

  “Do you have a license for that thing?”

  “No, who needs a license though?”

  “Normal people,” I said, then shook my head. “I don’t want to go up in the helicopter.”

  “Just as well, it’s almost noon,” he said. “Probably wouldn’t have had time for sex anyhow.”

  “What’s noon got to do with anything?” I asked.

  “The building, the city, everything was laid out for a specific purpose,” Sam said. “It’s as near to Heaven as one can come on Earth.”

  “It’s kind of underwhelming for being near to Heaven,” I said, looking around with a grimace. “Shouldn’t there be, like, a breathtaking vista at least? Or some really old relic of a building that is really beautiful?”

  “Nearest to Hell as well,” Sam said, walking toward me, his hands back in his pockets.

  He seemed to laugh, looking down at his feet. He scuffed at the grey surface of the roof with the bottom of his shoe. When he looked up again, he was grinning.

  “Funny thing about Hell,” he said, pausing to swallow and look around. “You don’t need permission there.”

  “What?” I asked.

  Colour me confused.

  I had no idea what he was talking about or what was going on. It just didn’t scare me because somehow I felt like the shoe was finally coming down, so to speak. Sam had been charming and nice and charismatic, but he was also utterly crazy.

  I turned and jabbed the button on the elevator, then turned back to him.

  I had dealt with crazy before, I knew better than to keep my back to him for too long, just in case. Some of them got really out of hand, and the roof was a bad place to get that kind of crazy on. One of us could end up falling off the roof and dying.

  My goal, then, was to get myself off the roof, to get into the elevator. It was very possible that Sam would follow me because he was clearly fixated on me.

  If I wouldn’t stay on the roof, he’d follow me all the way down to the lobby to continue, which was fine with me. Once I got him down, I could kick him in the groin and run away, whatever I had to do to escape.

  Because at least down in the lobby, no one was going to fall and splatter across the asphalt below.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” he asked.

  He moved forward as the elevator dinged behind me. I felt the doors open, and I saw him scowl.

  Then he looked over my shoulder, into the elevator, and his eyes went wide.

  Sam brushed past me.

  I just managed to register that it was him, that he was standing in front of me, but also walking past me, when Gabe stepped off the elevator and set a hand on my shoulder. His skin somehow seemed darker than before.

  “Gabe, get out of here,” Sam, the new Sam, shouted over his shoulder.

  “What about you?” Gabe snapped back.

  “Gabriel!” Sam bellowed, turning toward us. “Get her out of here!”

  Gabe grabbed a handful of my shirt and dragged me backward. At the entrance to the elevator, I jerked backward, only to be thrown forward. The doors closed behind me as I struggled to get to my feet, looking up as the two Sams fought.

  Did Gabe just throw me out of the elevator?

  The only explanation I could come up with was that I had somehow been drugged. There could not be two Sams. There was only one of them. I was on some sort of a bad trip. I couldn’t go with Gabe because my mind was all kinds of messed up.

  Maybe I was dreaming.

  The air crackled around us. The hairs on my neck rose as I looked up. The sky suddenly clouded over. Lightning crackled through it. The whole building seemed to move like it was about to topple over. I turned and jabbed the elevator button over and over again as the figures behind me continued to fight.

  In my mind, I was going over the events of the day, trying to figure out when the drugs had entered my system. Wondering how bad this trip was going to get before the drug started wearing off and I’d be back in reality. I also wondered what was going on in the real world. How this all could be happening, and no one was trying to help me.

  Gabe had tried, sort of, but that was all the help my mind gave me, it seemed.

  Everything was moving, like the air itself was thicker and I could see the currents of the breeze. The two Sams fell apart as the building rumbled. One winning over the other. The one still standing laughed and looked over the fallen Sam, to me.

  His eyes flashed.

  “You’ll be mine woman. And I will walk through the gates,” winning Sam said as he stepped over the fallen one. His mouth curled up in a wicked smile. “Now get over here so I can drain your life away.”

  Close your eyes.

  There was another rumble. This time, it wasn’t the ground that seemed to rumble, but the sky. The building began to shake, an earthquake shuddering and roiling as if it were made of liquid.

  I tried to grab hold of the elevator, but the doorway appeared to be entirely flat. I fell as the building rumbled again.

  Close your eyes.

  I closed my eyes, covering my head with my hands as something slammed into the building. The concussion of the strike hit me in a wave of that thicker air, roiling around me and tugging at my hair and clothing.

  Close your eyes!

  It was no longer my voice shouting at me. It was Sam’s howling above the sound of the wind and the rumble of the building. Over the sound of shifting metal and concrete, as the building struggled to stay upright in the middle of the earthquake.

  The next wave that hit me felt much more like a dream than reality. It picked me up and threw me while not feeling like it was real. Like being thrown in a dream, I opened my eyes and looked straight ahead, screaming as I did.

  The building was rushing past me.

  The last blast had thrown me from the rooftop, and I was falling headlong toward the asphalt below. I screamed again as something flashed on the top of the building, screamed all the way down.

  And then I hit the sidewalk.

  I was headed to the building to find Grace, when Gabe all but stepped into the road. The car squealed to a stop, and Gabe walked around the car calmly and slipped in beside me. I glared at him as he gave the driver an order to keep going.

  “Are you mad? He could have hit you,” I snapped.

  “More important news,” Gabe said. “The landing pad activated about ten minutes ago.”

  I swore and pulled out my phone, texting Grace yet again, asking where she was. I looked up at Gabe, who had his phone out and was furiously typing along. He glared at his phone, then looked up at me.

  “Ralph can’t get your gun back,” he said.

  Because the driver had the partition down and was human. We didn’t want to give anything away or out ourselves to humans. It wasn’t a rule, but it helped keep things from going too crazy. I glanced up front, then looked to Gabe.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “It’s stuck in customs,” Gabe said with a little smile.

  He was ple
ased with himself for coming up with that excuse off the top of his head.

  “Did they explain to the customs agents what it was for?” I asked.

  “Protecting your home from invaders is not an appropriate answer,” Gabe said. Then he frowned again. “Did your phone just giggle?”

  “Shut up,” I snapped, pulling out my phone.

  “S.O.S.”

  From Grace. I stared at my phone, wondering what she meant. We had never used such terminology, and we hadn’t been seeing each other long enough to have that sort of a relationship. I didn’t mind her reaching out to me for help, but I didn’t know what might be the problem.

  Then a picture downloaded.

  Grace was in what appeared to be an elevator, given the door and the number above the door. I could see just the edge of her chin, as she looked up, taking the picture without the knowledge of others in the elevator.

  Except… The elevator was empty.

  I looked over at Gabe and showed him the picture. He frowned at it, then took the phone from my hands and zoomed in on something. He zoomed back out and shifted toward me, motioning to a part of the elevator door.

  “Lighting above should cause a glossy look here. There, we should see a partial reflection of whoever is standing behind her, which I assume is what she was trying to take a picture of.”

  I frowned at the screen, then went still as a chill washed over me.

  “She’s in the building.”

  “Well, yes, you said she was.”

  “No, Gabe, she’s in the building, and the landing pad has been activated,” I sighed and pulled up my conversation with him and typed in: “Humans can’t see demons, neither can human tech.”

  Gabe swore and pulled out his phone, flickering through several things.

  “All right, we’re not far off, driver, can you go faster? We think someone drugged our friend and we need to rescue her before something bad happens.”

  “Yes, sir,” the driver said.

  I could feel the car shifting, moving down the road just a little bit faster. We weren’t immune to local law enforcement, but we were generous enough to local authorities and charities that we might have been able to talk our way out of being arrested and into a ticket. Possibly even gotten an escort to the building depending on how the next few minutes of texting went with Grace.

  “Take a picture and send it to her,” Gabe said. “That way she feels like we’re coming. Ask her if she’s eaten any mushrooms or something. Maybe she’s hallucinating.”

  If she wasn’t hallucinating and there was a demon there, we could use that excuse later on. Claim that she had been drugged.

  The other option was admitting to Grace that I wasn’t just crazy and religious, and that Baal had actually climbed his way out of Hell to claim her soul. While we had discussed that before, I had gotten the feeling that she hadn’t been receptive to the idea. It questioned her world view too much.

  I pulled the phone away from me and shifted to the front facing camera. I took a picture, making certain that I caught Gabe in the background giving me his annoyed look. He didn’t like having his picture taken for any reason whatsoever. A great way to figure out where security cameras were, was to have Gabe lead the way. He would instinctively shift away from cameras.

  The image went off, sent to Grace.

  We had a little back and forth as the car pulled up to the building. Just outside the building, the car stopped, and we got out. I turned to the driver and considered for a moment. Then I sighed out.

  “I want you to go pick Ralph up. He’s across town at his studio.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I nodded, and the driver headed out immediately. The move would get him as far from the possible destruction as I could without warning him. We walked into the building and looked around.

  “Fire alarm?” I asked.

  “Not until we’re on the roof. It’ll shut down the elevator,” Gabe said, headed for the elevator immediately.

  We both looked up, then around. We went to another elevator, and he pushed the button. We had moved because the first elevator didn’t reach the roof. It was a subtle sign, but it exists for those who knew where to look. Stepping onto the elevator, I sighed out and looked at Gabe.

  “You sure about this?” I asked as the doors closed.

  “About them being on the roof? Yes. It’s a mid-point. The buildings around were built to keep from existing too close. They should accommodate the wingspan of an arc, but not you.”

  I scratched my face just below my right eye, following the line of my eye socket. As I lowered my hand, I turned to Gabe.

  “I’m not over compensating for something,” I said.

  “Your dick is none of my concern,” Gabe said.

  We stood in silence for a moment, then Gabe turned to me again.

  “Actually, no. Your dick is my concern. Because your dick, you realize, is technically the cause of all this?”

  “Gabe.”

  He reached out and set his hand on my chest, over my brand. We met eyes, and I sighed, looking away as I pushed his hand off of me.

  “If not for that, there’d be no Baal.”

  “Don’t remind me,” I said. “I know what I did.”

  “Now is the opportunity to fix it.”

  “Not without my weapon,” I snapped.

  The elevator doors dinged. A moment later they opened, and there was an inward spill of darkness and putrification. It was oozing off the building’s rooftop, altering the very flow of the world. I slammed past Grace, shouting at Gabe as I did.

  Then I realized that he would only follow my orders to the letter. I turned and added the demand that he take Grace with him. Then I turned on Baal.

  “Brother Samael!” Baal crowed out in Enochian.

  “Baal, we had a deal!” I shouted back at him.

  “Deal’s changed, Samael. I’m here for the princess.”

  Close your eyes.

  “I can’t let this happen, Baal.”

  “Come now, we could work together again. Baal and Lucifer, reunited at last. Start a dark age that spans to the end of the world. Rip down the walls of Heaven.”

  “No,” I said.

  Close your eyes.

  Except that wasn’t my voice, not the one I usually heard.

  The voice was that of a woman, higher in pitch than any woman in my life at that moment. It called out as if from down a long cavern.

  The world around us was shifting and changing.

  Heaven and Hell spilling into the air and fighting over one another in an attempt to claim the space. It wasn’t just a landing pad, but neutral ground between the planes of existence. Everything was trying to pull into the space, filling the void created when Baal had stepped out of Hell.

  Hell tried to turn the area into thickness, to give its demons something to swim through instead of being stuck to the ground. Its atmosphere was very much like water. That thickness to the air, allowed those who knew how to fly, to escape easily and dive quickly.

  Heaven seemed to light up the air, trying to lighten the load and cleanse the air of everything Hell and Earth alike. The conflicted realms made everything appear to be fluid. The roof under my feet moved, expressing a desire to shift in anticipation.

  Because somewhere in the future, I was moving. Heaven still responded to me as it had all those years ago, eager to follow through on everything I wished of it.

  Baal launched himself on me. My warning had been that shifting in the world, but I had been gone so long that I hadn’t taken it as the warning that it had been.

  His fist contacted with my face. I went down, in agony.

  We weren’t used to using our fists. Our kind of war was one of silk and cock, not fists and feet. While we had kept ourselves toned and ready to go, Michael was the only one who had had any practical battlefield experience in the previous four hundred years. The rest of us stayed out of it because we didn’t need to fight and didn’t much like it.

 
Baal’s fists rained down on me faster than I could recover.

  I hit the roof top with a little groan. I wasn’t Baal’s main target, however. He wasn’t aiming to kill me, as I had been aiming with him. And he hadn’t taken centuries off.

  He had been preparing for that moment, as I should have been instead of chasing skirts.

  But then, he had always been the fighter of us.

  “You’ll be mine woman. And I will walk through the gates,” Baal said as he stepped over me. “Now get over here so I can drain your life away.”

  Close your eyes.

  It could be several minutes before I could recover again. The healing time, that close to a part of Heaven, would be halved. Even as I thought that my body was righting itself, healing what had been broken and bruised by Baal’s fists.

  I groaned and forced my way off the roof top as the sky overhead began to open up. I could hear the chorus of angels rising in song.

  The gates of Heaven were opening.

  Close your eyes.

  The voice was more eager now. It almost sounded familiar. I tried to recall when I heard it last and realized what that was. A herald of Heaven calling out the approach of an arc angel. All those who were followers of God, or a part of the Host, could hear the voice.

  Halfway to standing, I dropped to my knees and lowered my head. I closed my eyes, hands on my legs in that moment that hesitated and seemed to last forever. I was lost, nothing seemed to be working out for me.

  Without my grace, I couldn’t use my powers.

  “Dear Father, who art in Heaven,” I said quietly, my eyes still closed as the whole world seemed to come to a standstill.

  It had been thousands of years since I prayed last, giving up on ever finding salvation.

  We had brought this on ourselves, and He had told us to fix it. Until we did fix it, we were cut off from all that He was. We couldn’t even feel our prayer be heard. Like humans, we prayed, and nothing happened.

  And we had lost our way.

  “Hallowed be thy name.”

  But there was Heaven, just a hundred feet above me, ripping a hole in the existence of humanity. The ground beneath the building was shaking as Hell tried to reach upward, tried to penetrate the sky itself.