by Darcy Town
“You’re one of those types huh.”
“Oh yeah, big and fat when I get dumped or fired.”
Andy took off walking; he hooked a finger at her. “Fortunately we cannot get fat, so have a few moments to enjoy that revelation. Then, you should be oh so happy that I know the best pizza place around.”
Whitney looked city. “Here?”
Andy grinned. “Power has been restored; the fridges will be working, same with the ovens. It’s right around the block.”
Whitney trailed him. “So deep dish it is!”
Andy stopped, turned, and sighed. “Whitney?”
“Yeah?” She batted her eyes innocently.
“I am a New Yorker. I do not make deep dish pizzas.” He walked away.
Whitney grinned and followed him. “Didn’t Dahlia tell you?”
“What?”
“I was born in Chicago!”
Andy smiled. “You are eating pizza my way or this friendship ends and you can go have your cat island by yourself.”
Whitney skipped behind him. “Cat Island with deep dish pizza! Represent!”
Andy shook his head. “When I ask myself what our fallen angel posse needs, the first thing to come to mind is not a Chicago-born girl.”
Whitney hit him in the head with a brick. “Oh, that is exactly what this party needs and I am glad I didn’t take my hometown apart.”
“You didn’t?”
Whitney laughed. “No way! I also kept Seattle and Disneyland and maybe a few other places that I liked…”
Andy smiled. “Disneyland?”
She scuffed her feet on the ground. “Helion had never been there. I thought he’d enjoy it.”
He eyed her. “Right.”
She stuck her tongue out at him. “I am going to put my Chicago right in the backdoor to this place; we’re going to get nice and cozy.”
He glared at her. “You are not messing with my New York.”
“Your New York?” Whitney spun in a circle. “I believe this entire place is called Paris now.”
They gazed down the street where the first of the Parisian buildings started. He shrugged. “I’ll build a wall.”
“So will I!” She flapped her wings and blew dust at him.
“First I am going to eat pizza.” Andy turned down a street.
“And I am going to eat it with you!”
“Beer?” He pointed towards an open, empty bar.
She nodded. “There had better be beer.”
***
Dahlia and Lucifer floated along the Amazon River in a small red boat without oars or sails. She rested her head on his chest and traced her fingers along the shifting shadows cast by the tall trees that lined the river. Her wings hung over the side of the boat and trailed in the warm water beside them, attracting a following of exotic fish.
Lucifer stared into the sunlit sky as iridescent dragonflies flew over their heads. He hummed her creation song and his eyes and hair shifted between brown and blue.
Dahlia kissed his collarbone. “You have not asked me any questions about my wings, my escape, none of it. Why?”
He met her gaze and ran his fingers through her hair. “I did not see it of importance at the time. Now we can discuss it if you would like.”
She pinched him. “Are you not curious?”
He shrugged. “Curiosity is your driving force, my beloved, not mine.”
“What is yours?”
“See? You immediately run into questions. Even your statement was a question.”
Dahlia frowned. “Huh. I wonder why that is?” She blushed. “Oh, it just keeps happening.”
Lucifer smiled and his eyes sparkled. “Please, regale me with your planning and cunning. I can only imagine it was brilliant.”
“You are teasing me.” She flicked him in the nose.
“I am not. You truly must have done something brilliant. You fooled Him.”
She propped herself up on her elbows. “That is not that hard.”
“He is omniscient.”
“No He is not, nor is He omnipotent.”
Lucifer perked up. “Do tell.”
She pressed her hands into his chest. “If I do, I want a promise that you will not tear out of here and go straight to Him.”
He grinned. “Why do you think I would do that?”
Dahlia rolled her eyes. “Oh, I do not know, perhaps because you never look before you leap.”
“Fine. I promise you this.”
Dahlia smiled. “He cannot enter my realm now. I locked Him out.”
“How?”
“It is not His, it is mine.”
“But He is the creator.”
Dahlia shook her head. “Not of Hell.”
“But of Heaven?”
“Yes.” She hesitated. “Yes that is correct.”
He caught her reaction. “You hesitate.”
She frowned. “I do not have the full story there, only theories. But I do know for sure that He cannot enter my realm, just as I now cannot enter His.”
“You cannot?”
“Not even if I tried my hardest. So keep that in mind if you run in there with guns blazing. I have no access in.”
Lucifer nodded. “Can you lock Him out of this place?”
Dahlia shook her head. “Not that I know of, but I have been relearning things it seems hourly. I did not know that only God or one of us could restore our third set of wings. That information came from Raphael.”
He looked thoughtful. “Then you had to go to Him to get your wings back.”
She nodded. “Yes and that is why Raphael and I switched places. She took the risks and got our wings back and I hid in Heaven to step in and save her. I would have gone without the trickery, but she refused to let me do it myself. She said she owed it to me.” Dahlia shook her head. “At the time I could not believe that we could switch appearances and fool Him, but I trusted her and we did. Now I know that He can be fooled.”
“How did you do that?” Lucifer searched her features. “He looked into her mind, saw her fully, and yet still was tricked into thinking her you. I thought she was you.”
“Raphael is the keeper of my original memories and the more devious aspects of myself. She gave all of that back to me on the ice for safekeeping.” Dahlia made a face. “You are right in that He would have seen it if she had kept it while they joined, there is no doubt in my mind of that. So I held on to it for her, disguised as her. With our disguises in place, I went to Heaven, but no one questioned me. They ignore her regularly and so did He.”
“Allowing you to slip into Heaven unnoticed.”
“I would not have believed we could be so brazen until I experienced it. They lack suspicion, they only respect power. And she had worked this entire time on seeming powerless, weak, and spineless.” She sighed. “Her act allowed her to stay hidden in plain sight, all of this time. I do not believe He ever questioned her creation or appearance.”
Lucifer nodded slowly. “I did not question it either.”
She jabbed his chest with her finger. “You did not question anything. In certain respects you and He are alike.”
He made a face. “This is true. But would He not have seen the plan in her thoughts?”
Dahlia smirked. “He had His healer remove the memories. And that I did, I peeled back what she already had. He would find no tampering besides what He had ordered me to do. So with her memory wiped in Heaven, she was reduced to me, the Ladriam-self I had allowed Him to see in Hell.”
Lucifer’s brows furrowed. “How could she be reduced to you? You are you.”
“And so is she. Our memories and experiences up until that split where she became my second are the same. He thought He had Ladriam, but He just had the carbon copy.” Dahlia smiled. “You were right when you said I was paranoid, but even I did not know how much so until her and I reconnected on the ice.”
“Oh?”
“Raphael is the Archangel of Dichotomy. The guardian angel of the paranoid
mind, the conspiracy theorists, and the clinically insane and I made her that way.” Dahlia kissed him. “I created my second at the creation and our meeting. I made her probably in much the same way you created yours.”
“Yes. A mostly similar copy, a sibling.”
She nodded. “You and I each created someone who could take our place and step in to fill our shoes, someone who would have our original memories, ideas, and core.”
He nodded. “He asked me to make one, and so I did, Michael.”
“And you never wondered why He had you create your own backup?”
He shook his head. “No.”
Dahlia did not seem surprised. “Though Michael and Raphael are similar I created her with a different purpose than simply my backup. I made her with the fear that all the knowledge I was gaining and all the questions I was asking were going to lead me into trouble that could possibly kill or wound me. But I wanted that experience and information so badly, Lucifer. Leaving Hell seemed to be the only way to get it.
“I felt and I sensed and those things both attracted and repelled Him. He wanted it, but He wanted to control it. What He did not realize was that I sensed that desire as well. Though as Eve bit from the tree of knowledge—”
“That is all fake you know.”
“Lucifer, shut up.” She punched him in the arm. “I decided to roll the dice and take a chance, a risk. Gain knowledge and experience and run the roulette to see what He had in store for me. But I am not a fool. I carbon copied myself and gave Raphael all of the things I could not keep or wanted kept separate. I sent her to Heaven when He unlocked His realm. She was to remain there to keep an eye on things, on me.”
“Raphael was never one of mine then.”
“Nope, but she did a damn good job of blending in did she not? It is not due to your lack that you did not see her as different. I had but one second to give power to and no Archangels to gift with wards. So I was able to give her many skills instead of separating them out among Archangels and their siblings.” Dahlia grinned. “I made her to be a savant of the mind, an unparalleled illusionist, and not coincidentally a masterful healer. She had everyone fooled even me after we reconnected once.”
“When you met Raphael on the planet.”
“I recognized her as mine and remembered. Happiness for us, but also an immediate liability.” Dahlia nodded. “So even those memories were taken away by her then. I could not keep them. Through my thoughts she could be found and then neither the original nor the copy would have been safe.”
“You knew you would be damaged in Heaven?”
Dahlia nodded. “I had considered it as a possibility before I left Hell. I did not know how that would come to pass, but I figured it could happen and if it could happen, I should plan for it. As soon as we became two, that kind of mind, the mind that looks and plans for all possibilities went to Raphael.”
“Why even allow yourself a chance to be hurt?”
“He thought me an innocent, Lucifer. He thought I did not know the truth and He sought to take advantage of that. If I had come out of Hell as I truly was, He would have noticed immediately. If I had shown Him all of myself, He would have seen me intelligent and aware and cut off my access to His realm. Therefore, I made myself an innocent. I left the devious bits out in Raphael, trusting her to take care of me if it came to that.”
“But she did not! The prison—”
Dahlia put her fingers to his lips. “She had not the time or resources to save me from that. She bided her time and acted when she predicted that her chance of success would be the highest. She could not afford to let emotions rule her actions, as she saw your—”
“Attempt fail horribly.” Lucifer looked away.
“I like that you act with your heart.” Dahlia sighed. “And perhaps if she had known about the prison beforehand or had a chance to speak with you without Him seeing…” She shook her head. “But that is a useless thought exercise. What is done is in the past. And regardless of the pain, joining our realms was the best decision I ever made.”
“But—”
Dahlia kissed Lucifer. “I met you and you are the best thing in existence.” She kissed his neck. “I experienced the height of pleasure, love, and joy and from that all that I have ever experienced since has been worth it ten thousand times over. In Hell I thought only of myself, but when I met you, everything changed and I was more than just myself.”
Lucifer pulled her on top of him. She straddled him and smiled as the boat rocked. “I love you infinitely and forever.”
Lucifer eyed her hungrily. “And I you.”
Dahlia winked playfully. “We cannot do this here.”
Lucifer stood and picked her up. “Then we go back into space.” He looked above and paused.
Dahlia followed his gaze and saw nothing. “What?”
“I am trying to think ahead.” Lucifer frowned and opened his mouth, then closed it. He looked at her. “What kind of deal did you make to get out of Heaven? Why is He not destroying this place? Why do no angels wait to pounce upon us outside the shield?”
“The answer to those questions is one in the same. I know His name.”
“So?”
Dahlia kissed Lucifer’s cheeks. “With it, you can make Him vulnerable.”
Lucifer’s eyes blazed. “Tell me!”
Dahlia pulled her head back. “He will know.”
“I do not care.”
“I do! He is leaving this planet alone because of the threat of telling you.”
Lucifer frowned. “We leave Him alone and He leaves us alone.”
“That was the deal I made.”
“He will not follow through you know. He will renege and come for us.”
“I expect so. I suspect He is plotting something even now, but if I tell you His name now, He will know instantly. I want to find out what His doomsday plot will be and then foul it up.”
“Why wait until it is apparent?”
“Once played, He will have nothing left. We will have the advantage; I will have no reason then not to share the name.”
“Then we strike?”
“Then you strike.”
“Just me?”
“Unless He is pulled out of Heaven I will not be able to aid you in battle, it will be entirely yours to win or lose.”
Lucifer smiled. “I like the sound of that.”
Dahlia nipped at his neck. “Men, the same absolutely everywhere.”
Lucifer grinned and launched them both into the air.
***
Gabriel closed his eyes. He blocked out the light and sound of Heaven. His nostrils filled with the scent of grass, green things to match his eyes. Gabriel remembered flying with Uriel as they searched for their brothers. They had stopped in a field to explore on their own.
He remembered space. He remembered Earth.
Gabriel had dropped to the ground and buried his hands in warm soil. Sunlight saturated the ground, but this was better than light, greater. The sensation was alive, the mixing between Dahlia and Lucifer.
In Heaven, Gabriel craved. The feeling was a curious thing, but he desired it. This thing called life. He never desired anything more before that moment.
In his vision, he had looked up through the blue to the burning sun, not a cloud in the sky. The world had hummed to him. The breeze had rustled leaves and played a melody he had never heard before. The warm earth sang to him and Gabriel had fallen in love.
His eyes snapped open.
***
Lucifer and Dahlia’s Archangels gathered on the plains as the sun grew close to setting. They sat near the ashes of Belial’s pyre. Whitney and Andy stared at the spot sadly. They reeked of garlic and tomato sauce. Neither smiled nor spoke to the others.
Paimon, Bean, Jegudiel, and Furcas sat off to the left. Paimon and Furcas leaned on each other and dangled toys in front of Bean’s face. She sat on Jegudiel’s lap and chewed on diamond spheres that Furcas had made for her. Jegudiel smiled, happy that she
no longer made him her favorite chew toy.
Apple and Berith sat together with interlaced fingers. Raphael sat on Selaphiel’s shoulders.
Dahlia and Lucifer turned towards their Archangels. Dahlia looked at Lucifer. Lucifer looked at her. “You explain.”
Dahlia shrugged. “We are waiting for an attack.”
Berith perked up. “What kind, an invasion?”
Dahlia shook her head. “We do not know.”
Apple looked back towards Eden. “Should we warn the city?”
Lucifer frowned. “Not yet.”
“Why not?”
Lucifer wrapped his arm around Dahlia. “We do not know when the attack will occur or how. There is no reason to start a panic.”
Dahlia nodded. “We just know that one will eventually. We would like to institute patrols of two, just above the surface of the shield, to watch for any activity.”
Lucifer looked at the Archangels. “No one is to engage alone, if there is any activity you will report back immediately, and—”
Helion slammed into Lucifer, throwing him off his feet. He plowed into the ground. He held his head. “Sorry.”
Whitney jumped up. “Helion!”
Helion held up his hand and backed away. “No one touches me yet, nothing personal.” He rubbed his temples.
Dahlia looked him over. “Where were you, Helion?”
Lucifer caught her gaze. “Dahlia, he no longer has the black spots.”
Helion waved them away. “We went to where we needed to go. I need a promise from everyone here.” They nodded. Helion faced them, both of his eyes were blue. “You must honor my, our, wishes. I, we, made a choice and we are sticking to it. Anyone interferes and there will be consequences.” He glared at Andy. “Not all of you might agree with us, but that is your problem, not ours.”
Paimon whispered to Furcas, “Why is he talking about himself as plural?”
Furcas shrugged. “Maybe he finally went over the edge.”
Helion shook his head and hit his forehead. Everyone eyed him. Whitney took a step forward. “Helion?”
Helion backed up. “Sorry, this is not easy.”
Dahlia frowned. “What are you doing?”
Helion grabbed his shoulder and wrenched, dislocating it. He muttered and stared at his hands. “Just get out already. Don’t be scared You are being a baby.”