“Thanks.”
“I’m sure the others have told you but: this will be nothing good.” He leaned back against the window, the curtains still closed, and turned his head, staring at nothing in particular, certainly not her.
“Yeah. I’ve heard.” Iofiel got up and stretched too. Though he was appropriately grim, Maalik was going to be on her side. Santiago had been wrong— he was someone she could trust. Angels didn’t betray each other, these days. She quickly stepped forward and kissed his cheek, hopefully affectionately. “That one I meant.”
She was starting to realize that Maalik was actually kind of cute, and Iofiel hoped the fact that she was aware of this was not a bonus sin in her already noteworthy collection. He blushed and ruffled his hair, still looking pensive. After a long, strange pause in the half-light of the curtained room, Maalik moved. “I should go. We can talk more later, okay?”
It was still early in the morning, but it didn’t feel like it. When he opened the door to leave, a single piece of paper fluttered down to the carpeted floor, landing inches from Iofiel’s foot. She leaned over and picked it up, Maalik pausing in the doorway.
It was a letter, to be technical, thick and unbendable, with a yellow wax seal on the front and her name on the back.
She clawed at the paper, unable to tear the strong seal, eventually ripping through the corner and the back. Inside was a simple card made of heavy cardstock. It had her name on it, again.
The text inside was in Angelic, and it said: ‘Michael will be seeing you.’ There was no time, or date, or anything else, and whoever had written it had taken extra care in that name, as it was properly flourished, with golden highlights around the black ink of each letter.
Michael would be seeing her.
Oh.
No.
11: The Beast Of Canada
ARCHIE SAT UP, covered in blood. Again. A surprising amount of his life had been centered around puddles of blood, and he was used to the smell and the uncomfortable dampness of his clothes. It took him a few seconds to remember what had happened, though.
He was on the floor of the cafeteria, surrounded by demons with a number of angel onlookers. The other demon— the jerk who’d been harassing Iofiel— was likewise sitting in a bloody puddle.
Damien helped him up, and though his legs shook she escorted him to the nearest chair. His head was buzzing, and as he scanned the colorful crowd, he couldn’t make out Iofiel— hopefully one of her angelic brethren had found her.
“Hey, imp,” Damien said to him. She didn’t seem to be expressing any emotion in particular, but maybe that was just Archie’s head wound thinking. She combed her hair with one hand. “Your nose is broken.”
“Again?” He didn’t want to touch it, but he did have a certain memory of something snapping.
“Aren’t you about a week old? How many times could you have broken one part of your body?”
“Four. My bones are shit and people are dicks.”
Damien frowned and wiped away the blood off his face with a sleeve, leaving a dark red streak across her sweater. The blood kept coming. “You’re pathetic.” She reached into her bag and pulled out a water bottle, handing it over. Archie took a few heavy gulps. “Nice spell, though. Santi’s told me you’ve been struggling to get it right, and that was actually a passable fireball, even if you disrupted it by throwing a punch in there too. Now you need to learn how to cast it without being in a fight.”
Archie groaned. “Even at my lowest, you can’t give me some peace?” With a few loose gestures, he summoned another fireball. He hadn’t been able to grasp it before, in some way afraid of the burning, afraid it would get out of control and hurt someone. But now that he’d done it once, he understood— the fire was his.
Hopefully he wouldn’t have to get in a fistfight in order to master each of his basic spells though. He tapped the fire away, and Damien raised an eyebrow. “It’s going to take a lot more than a page one spell to impress me.”
Archie finished drinking the water bottle, and Damien stood up, offering her arm. “Where’s your dorm? You need to clean yourself up.”
“I need to get healed.” Archie needed her help standing, but he freed himself from her support once he was on his feet. He was starting to come back to his senses. “I’ll be okay.”
“You sure, paper-skin?” Though Damien was gruff and had been rude to him before, he appreciated her concern for him now. She didn’t have to look after him like this. Archie wasn’t used to that, to having people look after him. He scanned the room. Iofiel was off to the side, surrounded by other angels. The crowd had dispersed generally, though a few demons were still eyeing him.
“I’ll make it.” He’d need new clothes though. An expected expense, and a surprisingly frequent one. When he was younger (younger younger), he had tried flying for the first time and broken an arm, getting about six feet in the air before his thin wings tore and he smashed onto the stone floor. Sand and brimstone had soaked into his lacerated skin, his shoulder dislodged and his arm numb from pain. He cried. Every time he moved his wings, the small holes became larger, stretching slowly, a sensation so unique it stood out beyond the pain.
He walked slowly back to his dorm. A demon (well, imp) covered in blood was not too unusual of a sight, as fights weren’t fully discouraged. It was a good way to see who was bloodthirsty and who had a knack for winning. Plus, the staff rarely mingled with the students— the few professors that there were kept to their offices and classrooms, in their free time often jumping off to Heaven or Hell for whatever purpose.
Once he had gently climbed down to the floor of his room, using his bed for support, Archie cupped his hands under his face and waited until a good amount of blood had amassed. The bleeding had slowed, but it wouldn’t stop without intervention. He waited until his hands were utterly red and gently traced a series of symbols and one shaky circle onto the concrete floor. They were uneven and thin, but would work. With a couple gentle words, Archie waited, knowing it wouldn’t be long. Lucifer knew his voice.
The Beast of The Pit, The Great Adversary, The Glorious One Who Basked Once in the Sun, was there in a jiffy. He laughed when he saw Archie.
When Archie had first tried to fly, and then had lain on the floor in pain and misery, a crumbled mess, Lucifer had laughed too. Called him fragile even as he patched him up, tendrils of golden light healing everything that hurt. He’d been two days old. He’d thought he might be able to fly, as the demons did, over the city and under the fog of souls.
Lucifer reminded him he was not a demon. But neither was he. He was born broken, but the Morningstar had been broken.
He could be something, if he kept going.
Despite his reputation, Lucifer was good— at least, to Archie he was. He’d been spared during his Fall, in circumstances Archie did not know of, and his wings were a glorious yellow-white, his skin impeccably kept. His wardrobe ever neat, if not ordinary. He couldn’t blend with the throngs of lower demons due to his wings and his ruddy red halo, but among the other fallen, nothing about him suggested the truth. He did not seem to be a leader, he just appeared vain, with deep red hair and a strict grooming schedule.
His teeth were straight, white, and flat. “Ah, dear.” He called Archie ‘dear’ like it was his name. It should have been his name, and the way Lucifer rolled his R’s made Archie all the more sure of this. He smeared the blood across Archie’s face until his fingers could find the wound— most of it was internal, but he found a few cuts and held onto them. His long, white fingernails dug his skin apart, pulling and prompting more bloodshed.
He hummed a gentle tune, a high chorus from his days of angelhood. He may not have loved humanity, but he had loved his creator and his brothers, and though the words were unknown to Archie, they surely were divine. His wounds began to heal. With a gentle push, Lucifer fixed his nose. Then he pulled out a piece of cloth from his pocket and dabbed away the blood.
Archie licked his lips. He’d still ne
ed a shower later. “Thank you.” Lucifer did not have a formal title ascribed to him, because he was the devil, and anyone talking to him was generally aware of this. A ‘sir’ was a pointless sign of submission when the person you were speaking to was, in fact, the source of all malevolence in the world. Respect, or fear, was implied.
“Did you stand up for yourself, dear?” Lucifer sat on Archie’s bed, his posture perfect. He folded his wings out of existence, making him look strikingly like an average adult human.
“I knocked him down and left a scar.” Archie wanted to boast, but Lucifer was a hard party to impress. “I punched a fireball into his face.”
“You should have killed him, dear.” His pink eyes were unflinching, unchanging. “Adram tells me you’re having a hard time. Prince Stolas says you sit with an angel when in class. Would you kindly, please, tell me about this?”
“She’s studying demon stuff—”
“That was understood, yes. What is the angel’s name?”
“Iofiel. Beauty of the Divine.” Archie waited a moment as Lucifer comprehended this, no doubt remembering the original Iofiel, from the age before angels died. “I’m going into soul sales.”
“You can do anything you set your heart to, dear.” Lucifer broke his posture a little, crossing his legs and leaning back. “Iofiel— what is she doing?”
“Supporting me, I guess. She’s a little too curious, but she hasn’t been punished for it.”
Lucifer appeared lost in thought, switching his jaw back and forth. “You shouldn’t trust her. My old brothers may have some other plan for her, some roundabout way to keep her in their clutches. There will never be another me, after all.”
“What are you telling me to do, exactly?”
“Oh, anything you want. That’s the miracle of free will, isn’t it, hon? I can’t make you do anything. I can only tell you that Iofiel is going to betray you at some point in your relationship. Either that, or you have to find a way to sink your misshapen claws so deep into her she follows you down to Hell.”
“I don’t know if I want to do anything in particular besides... go to class with her.”
“Your choice, kiddo.” Lucifer stood up, readying his departure with a simple flick of his fingers. “But I can tell you this— Michael is here.” He was gone in an instant.
Archie wished he could have asked that he was supposed to make of that, what he was supposed to do with that information, but he suspected Lucifer’s answer would have been, as always, ‘whatever you’d like’.
With a pleasant, rolled ‘dear’ at the end, of course.
His skin was the blue Iofiel had changed her hair to, a deep and oceanic hue dotted with dapples of gold and shades of other colors, like he had dozed too long in the sunlight and the sunbeams had stuck. His hair was teal and his six eyes were closed in permanent exasperation, his fingers interlocked, dark black nails digging into sapphire skin. He dressed like a nomad, not a soldier, but Michael was Michael— the Archangel, the one who would conquer the beast on Judgement Day.
He sat on the desk in the headmasters’ office, and towered. Amariah sung for him, while Adramelek faced the ground, perhaps remembering an old wound that still marked his body.
Iofiel was trying to regale him with the tale of her utter betrayal, but every few words she struggled to continue. She felt sick in his presence, not afflicted but affected. He really was dreamy, drearily beautiful and utterly swoon worthy, but it felt like if you fell into his arms he’d lead you away to death’s embrace. That the dream he reminded you of was born in a fever, and every ounce of him was not supposed to exist on an earthly plain like this.
And this was true. His Grace, his Greatness— it leaked out of every pore. He was more galaxy than flesh.
He was hard to talk to, and he had to yet to speak a single word.
“So you see, in a way I was doing the divine way, helping those who needed it... I was just made with a flawed sense of empathy.” She swallowed. She’d tried to ask Maalik about him— as if he’d know— but her roommate had refused to speak the second he’d read that name. Rightfully concerned he’d already knew about the two of them. “I would never do anything bad. I’m too g-g-good, too... good to betray Our G-Good...”
She really wished Michael would respond in some way, but he was still. Not breathing, because he didn’t need to. Not responding, because what would be the point? He wasn’t always this blue, this inhuman— the poster in her room had him human-tone, still six-eyed and still with bright teal hair. But he was manageable that way, his golden freckles more like stubborn glitter than ink drops on water.
“How much do I need to say?” she asked, but despite the small room being quite stuffed with beings capable of answering, she felt alone. Like she was confessing her mistakes to the ocean while she was swimming a hundred feet down inside it, very alone, and very far from anything warm. “If I made a mistake, then put me back. I will do whatever you want— I’ll— I can— I could be a soldier, even. Take me off Earth, and I’ll fight tomorrow. I’ll die in that way, so that the next Iofiel can live a better life. But please don’t...”
For the second time in her life, Iofiel was crying.
“I have one rule for you.” Michael spoke, grave and grim but utterly higher than expected. In many ways he sounded like Maalik; if he were a human he would not quite be a man, but not a child either. “One promise, and this may continue. Your affairs are not mine. If you die, none the matter. If you survive, you must stand by this: Take an oath. Swear fidelity to me. Promise you’ll be on my side.”
“Y-Your side...?” Like she hadn’t already known the end was coming, like others hadn’t alluded it might be due, Iofiel felt truly heartsick at the concept, her blood pulsing through her veins with— well, blood did not have emotions, did not respond to hers, but suddenly she was more aware of how her heart was beating. The world, which she was too young to have known well, would be over. Soon. But in the terms of angels, this could still be a hundred years yet. “Of course.” She placed a few fingers against her throat. “Until the end, and into the beyond, I will be on your side. No matter what, I am pledged to you.”
Michael did not stir.
“Not like I’m ever going to be a threat, you know?” Not even a joke, it was in poor timing, capped off with an awkward laugh. Michael’s stony gaze suggested a worrying possibility that fate had other plans.
He really was beautiful, in every sort of way. Her quick dive into sin with Maalik seemed to help her realize this, how lovely he was, how bioluminescent and impossible. But he frowned deeply, with very real bags under his eyes, and a deep, red cut stretching up from under his tunic. His brother’s sin had been pride, so he had embraced humility.
He stood up and walked over to her, the formless shapes of his clothes finally falling into a somewhat passable robe of muddy green and brown, his pink and grey wings merely an impression upon the air behind him. He gently touched her face, closing her eyes, and in a strike of heat he was gone entirely.
Back to Heaven. Iofiel hoped, sincerely, that she’d never see him again in any other place but above her bedpost.
That night she’d return again to Maalik pretending to sleep, and consider taking the poster of the Archangel down. But instead she reached into her bag and with a thick black marker wrote:
“Always on his side.”
And again, in Angelic, she wrote mantra:
“Always on his side.”
And then one more time, in shaky Infernal. Because it was time she started embracing that, too.
12: Dayfly
IOFIEL’S FIRST WEEK had seemed like an eternity, but the next two had passed in mere moments. After Michael had spoken to her on Sunday, she’d alternated between crying and sleeping, but by Monday the twenty-sixth she was set. Ready. Determined.
Surprisingly, classes were going well. She and Archie had met up again three days after the fight for another study session with Santiago, and it had gone well. He was on the path,
though slow, to grasping basic magic, and Maalik had been helping Iofiel with hers when he had time, so she at least could do a fair facsimile of a fireball.
Meanwhile in Rituals she was surprised to find herself thriving. It wasn’t a hard class, maybe, or perhaps there was some talent latent inside her for taking life. She tried never to dwell on the darker strokes of her classwork, but rather relished in what she was capable of— not much, but something.
The only difficulty of the last week had been that, well, everything was awkward. Maalik didn’t trust sitting too close to her when dining or even in their dorms, and when he taught her spells he refused to touch her hands in order to better her casting. Besides this, they were stilted. Michael showing up would have done that regardless of whether they had kissed, but they had, and that was clearly a Pretty Bad Thing.
Archie was equally off, somehow. He’d grinned a little when Iofiel had first complimented him for fighting back, and seemed at least happy with how class was going, but he sometimes sent her strange looks when he thought she wasn’t paying attention, small twitches in his facial expression showing something like fear.
There was a certain stiffness to the study group that hadn’t changed. Today, Santiago was supposed to be reinforcing a very simple levitation spell, but the mood of the room was oddly lethargic. Damien, who had been invited back last time on the condition she try not to say anything too rude, was sleeping under the table in a position like she’d fallen off a building, her arms and legs at wild, uncomfortable, angles. Archie had the spell down already, and was twirling a wad of paper above his fingertips, one hand supporting his head, bored of watching Iofiel fail.
Iofiel was, yes, failing. Levitation was a physical sort of magic, and something angels didn’t tend to succeed at— Maalik hadn’t even learned any spells of the sort, and though he was capable of pulling it off once he’d got instructions from a textbook, it was clearly too advanced for Iofiel. So another F on this week’s log, then.
Good Angel (Good Angel Duology Book 1) Page 13