by Aya DeAniege
Turning my face to the sky, I began speaking the words of submission. That mantra we were taught before we knew how to speak, or the name of our Father. I spoke it as we had always been taught, and I submitted for the first time since Father had sent Michael to end Lilly’s life for refusing to carry a virgin birth. Refused to give birth to His first-born human, refused to become the mother of all humans.
If only He’d answer my call.
If he didn’t, Baal would consume Grace and enter Heaven. He would destroy everything that was good about the multiverse, even kill Father if he could get close enough. And once Baal had my weapon, he’d get close enough.
The whole building heaved as something fell from the sky. It struck the building as my brand began to burn. I reached up and gripped at my chest, nails digging into the flesh around the brand, as if that would stop the burning agony of the brimstone in my skin.
I screamed out as the wave of the impact whipped through me, tearing at my clothing.
Close your eyes!
The herald’s voice changed to that of Grace. Howling above the cacophony of voices as if she knew what was going on. I took in a long, deep breath and felt the thrum of a Heavenly weapon. I lowered my face. Hand still gripped against my brand, I dared to open my eyes.
There, on the rooftop, was not my weapon. It was a small, sliver of a thing used by those who cut the threads of fate. Not enough to kill much more than a rat. Its edge was ever sharp, however.
Close your eyes.
There was a little whisper just in my ear, almost begging me to understand.
I reached out and grabbed the blade. It might have been all they could get past the guardians of the gate, and I wasn’t about to lose the opportunity. No angel could return to Heaven without a grace and wings. But they had to belong to the angel entering Heaven.
Any angel who returned to Heaven with the possessions of another angel was killed immediately.
Maybe that was their plan.
Gripping the blade tightly in my hand, its cold calm clearing my mind of all the humanity.
I turned on Baal and lunged.
With the blade before me, I slammed it into his back, between his ribs as Grace seemed to flash before my eyes. Her surprise was evident even with her eyes closed. Her hands reached out as if trying to grip something.
Grace fell over the edge of the building.
Baal ripped out the blade and threw it away from himself as he turned on me.
It occurred to me that Grace was gone. With her went the last human witness. The combination of Heaven and Hell above the building would obscure the view to outside observers. I tossed off my jacket and let loose my wings. Baal laughed at me and tossed off his jacket, loosing his wings.
“You can’t fly to Heaven with half a set, Samael!” Baal shouted at me.
“Neither can you.”
I ran at him, striking him in the chest with my shoulder. My weight sent him tumbling back. We stumbled over that edge as something seemed to explode.
The world came to another standstill as we fell. He was surprised, but not moving. I was reaching for his neck with both hands as if wringing it might help me somehow.
Beneath his shirt, his brand was shining brightly. Under mine, it still burned like hellfire itself.
Where’s your heart?
I had ripped it out. After the incident with Michael, I ripped out my own heart so that I didn’t have to feel the pain of leaving Lillith. The only way she could be safe was if I left and she went into hiding. But I couldn’t bear the thought of loosing her, and I had ripped out a part of me.
An angel’s heart didn’t look like that of a human. It manifested as much more than a pile of muscle. They take on the form of the angel they belong to, live and breathe. Their only goal is ever to get closer to the Host they had been ripped from.
Mine had named himself Baal.
Baal had started a war, because he felt too strongly because he didn’t have the logic to back him. And when he invited me over, I had joined him, because I hadn’t the heart to care for the world or anything that didn’t cause a feeling inside of me.
For so long, the only thing that made me feel anything at all were the screams of my victims.
Michael and Raphael had worked together to break out of Heaven and save me from myself, separating Baal and I. He had gone to Hell, I had struggled to recover.
You can’t love someone without a heart.
Father wasn’t always right, though. He had turned me away during council, and I had removed myself of his presence. Ripping out my grace prevented me from returning, kept Him from making me return.
My hands touched Baal. I had the opportunity then, as I moved forward, to end him. To destroy that part of me entirely, but looking into his eyes, I knew that wouldn’t solve anything.
It might remove him from the world, but it wouldn’t fix anything except the small problem at hand.
I am not an executioner, I am a mercy!
My words from millennia before came back to me as I reached past Baal.
They had once said something about miracles. Something along the lines of, “only by the grace of an arc angel,” which I had always thought a funny saying. We had been apart from our graces for so long, that we were unfamiliar with them. And if the heart of an angel turned into a creature like Baal, and the grace of an angel turned into a woman like Grace… What were we, really?
I pulled Baal toward me and hugged him tightly, holding him against me as time seemed to explode. It moved in a forward motion, then snapped backward. Like a spring flicked or stretched too far, I sprang back and forth over that line of past and present.
I had crossed that line so many times that I had lost count. When I had last been whole, I had gone back in time, trying to change the outcome between Lilly and I. The past had been changed so much that I could no longer recall which was the current timeline.
The universe which Earth resided in tried to right all the things, to slam me back into the past where I had been before, to when I had been whole last.
And for a moment, I was there.
Standing in Eden.
Lillith sat on a rock by the lake, singing as she brushed her hair with her fingers. Adam stood off in the bushes, clearly masturbating as he watched his would-be mate. It was that moment when I should have told her to obey the will of God. Told her to do what Adam wanted, to get behind that bush with him.
But she wasn’t like that.
She smiled as I approached and was not shy. In her presence, I felt nothing but comfort and joy. I watched her smile up at me, and those same words came out of my mouth.
“I can’t see you anymore.”
That same confusion set over her features before the heartbreak came over her. She looked over at Adam, still furiously masturbating behind the bush, then to me. I saw the burning hatred of only a moment, before the resigned disgust set in.
She hadn’t ever wanted that life.
Father had put something in the wrong place, or did it as a test, I don’t know, but still, I thought it wrong of him to subject a woman of a species that was supposed to have complete free will to rape and breeding by a man who couldn’t stop touching his dick long enough even to ask her name.
“I’ll get you out.”
I was slammed back into the present and the ground, my wings arching up above me for the briefest of moments before I got them away and gasped in a breath.
Gabe strolled casually out of the building.
“Time is all swishy.”
“Damage,” I gasped out as I sat up and hit the ground with my hand.
The ground rumbled in response to my anger. A clap of thunder broke the skies. Staring at my hand, I struggled to comprehend.
“Grace…” Gabe said.
I looked up at him. He was staring off at something. Turning, I looked to where he was.
Grace was…
Well…
What humans do when they fall twenty-five stories.
I was up and running to her side before I knew what I was doing. Hitting the asphalt with my knees, the thunder called out again.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “No, no. That wasn’t a part of it!”
“Humans die,” Gabe said. “At least you can go see her, now that you have your grace back.”
“No,” I shouted at him.
A crack opened up in the ground by his feet, causing him to skitter backward as his hands rose to help balance himself. He looked at the crack, then up to me. A finger jabbed at me, and he made a judgemental face.
Arc angel power in the middle of a crowded city may not have been the best idea, but I didn’t care.
“She’s grace incarnate,” I said to him. “When she dies, she just dies. Damn it. This wasn’t supposed to happen!”
“Loo—”
Gabe froze mid-word, mouth open and hand out as if he was going to jab his finger at me again. I frowned up at him, not understanding why he had paused.
The others could no longer control time, or walk among it, but it was impossible for me to accidentally pause time. Which meant that I couldn’t have done that.
The Host appeared beside Gabe with a flutter of wings. He made a little face at me as if disappointed in my reaction to the events of the day.
“You don’t want your grace back?” the Host asked. “I mean, you can go to Heaven again, be an arc angel. You’re practically the big guy.”
“She’s dead. I didn’t want her dead. I thought I made that clear.”
“And I made it clear that in order for you to have your grace back, Grace had to die.”
“Then take my grace back, make her alive again.”
“She’s going to die one day, you get that, right? It’s not like Lillith. Where you can just let her out of the Garden, and she’ll never age because she’s never sinned. Humans live and die because of the choices your brothers, and you, made. If I give her life back to her, she will age and die, there will be no more resurrections.”
“Do it, just let her live her life.”
“At the end of her life, she ceases to exist, just like before. Why put yourself through that pain?”
“It’s not me I’m concerned about. It’s her. She deserves a chance to exist. She’s not a blow-up doll that you happened to animate. She was a person with a mind and heart of her own.”
“You really want this don’t you?” the Host asked with a sigh and a shake of his head. “And you don’t even want it for you, no. You’ve got this quaint notion that, what, that you saving this girl will save the world?”
“Just do it.”
“There are troubling times coming. He wants you back in Heaven.”
“He can have me back in seventy years.”
“I’m sorry. What? What was that?” the Host asked, placing a hand to his ear. “Did Samael just swear to kneel at the feet of God and do His bidding? Over the life of, of some girl? Now I’ve heard it all.”
“It’s what He wants, isn’t it?”
“No. He wants his warriors back. Not down here bawling their eyes out and,” the Host hesitated and motioned over my shoulder. I turned to look at Mike and Ralph, paused as they ran toward the building, “being those two morons. I mean, look at them. Can’t agree on anything, but both are holier than thou art. Well, maybe not anymore, since you’re whole again. Both sets of wings too, nice touch. What happened to Baal though?”
“He’s gone.”
“How? I have to make a report, you know. How did you get rid of Baal, that, uh, that was a nice light show you had up there, but that was a lower angel’s letter opener at best. There’s no way you could have killed him with that. Who smuggled it out for you?”
“Smuggled what out?”
“Your weapon.”
“I didn’t kill him like that,” I said. “I took him back into myself.”
The Host winced and hissed out.
“Ouch, that is going to hurt. A lot. But, I suppose it was his life long dream. Baal and Lucifer reunited once more. Samael, whole. With his grace, able to fight, now why would I break up a winning combination like that?”
“Do it,” I snapped.
“Mm, no,” the Host said with a shake of his head. “See, there be conditions to this barter of ours.”
How am I going to pay for this?
“Then name them and make her whole.”
“Your brothers cannot know. You were loaned your grace, that’s all you can tell them. They still have to go through their own trials.”
“Trials?” I asked. “This was another of His tests?”
“Well, not really. This was more of His way of cleaning house. If Baal isn’t down below, he can’t lead the demon army into Heaven. He put your grace into this girl shape to draw him out and put you here to make the two of you fight. Hard to run from dear ol’Dad when He’s got His mind set on something, but you knew that, didn’t you?
“And your brothers? Well, they also fucked up pretty big. They need to fix their problems, and you’re going to make them fix those problems. Even if it means you have to kill one of them to get the others on board.”
“I’m not an executioner.”
“I’m a mercy,” the Host whined out. Then he sighed and rolled his eyes. “You’re a baby, is what you are. Killing one of them would be a mercy compared to having them still walking the earthly plane. But you don’t get to know what’s happening until He knows what’s going on and who is working with Him. Deal?”
“That’s it?” I asked.
“Ezekiel wanted me to toss in something about sodomy, but I don’t think I’d like to deliver that condition to you because one day you will be free of this contract and you probably would kill me slowly and tenderly. Do we have a deal?
“Yes, of course. Just bring her back.”
“Your wish is my command.”
“But when this is through, I’m going to break your legs for being cocky.”
“That’s if I live through this and the trouble that’s coming, I’m sure.”
I dragged my eyes open and stared up at the ceiling in a fog. White spotted panels separated by bars of off-white.
Blinking several more times, I tried to focus on the ceiling.
I had no idea where I was, or what had happened. Before blacking out, I had hit the sidewalk. I even remember the pain of falling that far, that fast. The feeling of my body breaking a moment before my head hit the ground and everything went black.
Reaching up, I wiped at my eyes with one hand. The other hand twitched against the thin blankets. There was something on the tip of my finger.
I wiped more furiously, but it just seemed to spread the fog around.
Everything down my back hurt like a giant bruise. My head was tender, throbbing something awful even. I reached up and set a hand on my head, wondering what had happened. Where I was, and what had happened to Sam.
My stomach swirled, clenching down as I clenched my jaw. There was that acidic taste at the back of my throat, which made me feel as if I were about to be sick.
Given the pain in my back, I didn’t think I wanted to go through the experience of vomiting right then. It would have been even more painful than normal, if I threw up. Instead, I swallowed and closed my eyes, willing the spinning to stop.
Outside the room, I heard a sound. It repeated twice before I recognized what it was.
“Paging Doctor Grey to the waiting room. Paging Doctor Grey to the waiting room, thank you.”
I was in a hospital. That there gave me cause to relax but only for a moment.
How am I going to pay for this?
Medical coverage, lost time at multiple jobs that didn’t have some payout for injured workers. Not to mention the time it would take me to get back in school. Both after getting out of the hospital and after getting back on my feet enough to start paying off my bills.
I could feel the surge of my heart beating faster, thundering in my chest. I dragged in a breath through clenched teeth
as my hand moved to my chest.
The thought of paying going into debt because I was in the hospital sent a wave of panic through me as I turned one way and the other.
I didn’t have the energy to sit up, just groan when I saw that I was in a private room. There were monitors hooked up to me. Only some of which I knew the function of. I struggled to look down at the bed, over my body and legs.
Certain, that somewhere on that bed, there was a call button, I tried to get my damned eyes to open and focus enough to read and see what I was looking for.
There was a button.
I squinted at it and blinked several times. There were several buttons on the railing of the bed. All collected together and set up to be almost at my finger tips. There were two buttons on there that were different colours than the rest, and they had a little cross symbol on them.
I pressed the button and prayed that it wouldn’t call in a code blue or something. If it did call a code blue, at least someone would come to see me, I’d have that going for me.
Then I dropped my hand back to the bedspread, utterly exhausted just from the attempt to push the button. Laying, waiting for a nurse, I slipped in and out of consciousness.
I think I might have passed out again, but I dimly recall a nurse arriving and greeting me with a smiling face before she seemed to melt to the side and talk slowly.
My second time fully alert, I sort of gasped awake. I felt like I had slept several days, but I couldn’t put my finger on how I knew that.
When I awoke, Lilly was sitting there.
I remember that I could hear her while I slept. She was reading the bible to me, and I don’t know why. That was not my first choice of book. It’d probably be closer to my last, and she knew that. It was possible that she was trying to aggravate me into a wakeful state.
Lilly was that sort of friend.
Her voice was level and steady, reading as if she were intimately familiar with the book. She knew what she would encounter during reading, and where to hesitate to breathe.
The moment I was awake, she had a hand on my chest, pushing me gently back to the bed.
“Easy, Honey, back down. Your body’s still healing, but you are one determined bunny.”