by Debra Dunbar
He’d give in. Dar always gave in when it came to Asta. Pussy.
“Gabe got back from an EU meeting this afternoon,” Nyalla told me. “He popped in for lunch, then had to go to D.C.”
The Ruling Council had made Gabriel their liaison with the various human leaders, convincing them of the need to comply with the angel’s new world order. It was a job he’d embraced with his usual dogmatic attention to detail.
The angels were in charge, but the humans hadn’t realized that yet. Seems when I’d accidently banished the entire angelic host from Aaru, I’d set up a situation where they’d be more hands-on with the humans. Once the humans realized this, they wouldn’t be happy. But what could they do?
Actually, they could do a lot, they just didn’t realize it yet, and I was plotting a few little things that might help them wiggle free from angelic control. The angels might be breathtakingly powerful by human standards but they were underestimating the humans. And they were also downright idiots when it came to living in corporeal form. I mean, laser eyes aren’t all that scary when your wings get stuck in the revolving door and you’re reduced to sobbing helplessly and begging for passersby to help free you.
That had been one of Rafi’s angels. He’d laughed at the guy, then told him if he did the laser eyeball thing again, he’d be spending the next century with his wings stuck in that revolving door.
“Is he coming back tonight?” I asked Nyalla because Gabe had become a regular overnight visitor in my house. I really hated the angel, but Nyalla loved him so I put up with his griping about my furnishings, and my Lows, and my slovenly habits which only got worse every time he complained. It was a contentious situation, but we both tolerated each other because of Nyalla.
I was painfully aware of her short lifespan. I was sure Gabe was too and that was the reason he was at my house pretty much twenty-four seven when Nyalla was there. I’m not sure who would be more devastated when she aged and died, me or Gabe. The angel checked her every night as she slept, healing the slightest illness, correcting even a hint of a problem. I knew this because I’d taken to doing the same every now and then and I recognized his energy signature on different cells in her body. Between the pair of us, she’d live to be a healthy two or three hundred years old, maybe more if we got meticulous about it. That sort of life expectancy would be a miracle for a human, but a tragedy for an angel.
At four billion years old, Gabe would only have a few hundred years with the love of his life, and then he’d go on to live billions of years alone. I hated the guy, but the heartbreak of that situation made me want to give him a hug.
Hugging Gabe. I’d have to remember to do that the next Ruling Council meeting. He’d totally flip.
A group of Lows wandered in from the guest house and jumped into the pool, splashing and playing with Lux while Snip went inside for drinks. I did a quick head count, because I was never really sure how many of my household were here at any given time. Six in the pool. Probably another dozen in the guest house. That wasn’t too bad. There were times lately when I’d had over three hundred crammed in both houses, the stables, and in tents across my field. With the situation in Hel somewhat stabilized and the protection of my household mark here among the humans, they were beginning to feel more confident, to relax and actually enjoy their lives without the constant fear of death.
Although, from what was going on in the pool, death by drowning was still a distinct possibility. Lux was climbing on their backs, shoving their heads underwater and laughing as they flailed and frantically tried to come up for air.
“Hey,” I shouted to the angel infant. “Don’t murder my household members. I might need them later.”
The angel pouted and rolled off to the side, letting the demon go. My Lows all loved Lux, which seemed really weird given that he was an Angel of Order. Even weirder, he loved them back, treating them like they were a bunch of older siblings. Was this how things had been in Aaru before the war fractured us apart? Did different angels actually enjoy each other’s company, celebrate and honor the differences between them? It seems to have taken a newborn angel to show us that the rift between us was one of our own making—one that could easily be dissolved if only we made the effort.
“Mistress?” Snip stood beside my lounge chair fidgeting, a six-pack of sodas cradled in his fingerless hand. “You had a call on your mirror. I answered it.”
I blinked at him in surprise, because lately no one seemed to use the communication device that connected me to Hel. For a few months my household had lost the Hel-side mirror, then without a steward, I’d not had anyone to convey messages. Snip was now my defacto steward, but he was on this side of the gateways more than he was in Hel lately.
Actually, he tended to spend a lot of time hanging out by the gateway at what used to be the Columbia Mall. I think he liked to hotwire the construction equipment and drive it around. Beatrix hadn’t complained to the any of the Grigori about his constant presence, so I just ignored it.
“Leethu?” I’d been searching for the succubus for a while now, and was beginning to worry that the dude who had been summoning her had her locked up in a salt circle somewhere.
“No, Mistress. Barf is still searching for her. He thinks she may be somewhere in Texas.”
“What’s up then? Did Sinew get lost in the dungeon again? Are they out of beaks?”
“No.” The Low squirmed. “Doriel has requested an audience with you.”
Doriel? I hadn’t heard from her since she’d last left Aaru. “When does she want to see me?”
“Tomorrow.”
Fuck. “I’ve got a Ruling Council meeting tomorrow. Can you call back and ask her to reschedule?”
Snip’s eyes bulged. “You want me to ask the Ancient Doriel to reschedule?”
“You want me to ask a council of archangels to reschedule?” I countered.
“Yes.” Snip gave me a hard stare that was completely out of character for him. “She says it’s important.”
I took my sunglasses off so he could see my epic eye roll. “Then tell her to trot her ass across the gate and meet me here. I’ll let her have a bedroom in the main house and order pizza. With any luck the Ruling Council meeting will be done by suppertime. If it’s so important, she can meet me at my house around six tomorrow night.”
At this point his eyes were nearly out of their sockets. “Mistress, Doriel is an Ancient. It is difficult for her to get across the gateways without being noticed. She is not the sort of demon to risk crossing if she doesn’t have to.”
“Well, she has to.” I eyed Snip. “Distract or bribe Beatrix so she can get across. Or tell Beatrix that it’s really important to your boss that you let this Ancient through the gate, and there’s a big promotion in it for you if you pull this off.”
He perked up. “There is?”
“Promotion to best-steward-ever, that’s what I’m talking about.” I knew Snip could get it done. Beatrix was as sour as a condensed lemon, but she had a sweet spot for this Low. In his own fumbling, adorably awkward way, he’d managed to soften the gate guardian up. If he asked this of her, she’d do it. She’d bitch and moan and probably call me later and complain, but she’d do it.
Snip puffed out his chest and grinned. “I’ll be right back.”
He set the sodas down and vanished back into the house while I closed my eyes and tried to take a nap to the sound of splashing and squeals.
“Lux is shoving Rutter’s head into the pool vacuum,” Nyalla commented.
My eyes shot open as I sat up. Sure enough, my kid had somehow managed to wrestle a demon four times his size over to the robotic vacuum, disconnect the hose, and was attempting to suck up the Low’s face.
“Lux, I swear by all that’s unholy that I will tie your wings to the barn rafters and beat you senseless if you kill one of my Lows. Knock it the fuck off right now.” This kid was going to be the death of me. And quite possibly the death of half my household too.
Lux let go with
an angry screech and a glare that probably should have set me on fire. Rutter yanked the hose off his face, leaving behind a perfectly round red mark that made him look like he’d been given a hickey by an overly amorous squid. In retaliation, he picked up the young angel and tossed him through the air to the other side of the pool. Lux’s anger evaporated, his face creasing in a huge smile as he squealed and revealed his wings. With an agile aerial maneuver, the angel spiraled upward another ten feet, then plunged down into the water, his wings held tight to his back.
I bit back a smile at his antics and turned as I heard the patio door and Snip’s footsteps.
“Mistress, the Ancient Doriel is not pleased with your rejection of her summons, and although she is very intrigued at your offer of hospitality and safe passage across the gates, she says it is urgent that she see you immediately. She says you are to meet her tonight at her home in Hel, just after sunset. She says the meeting will be brief, but what she has to tell you is important, and that she will ensure you are back here in time for your Ruling Council meeting.”
I knew that Snip was repeating Doriel’s words, but he sounded quite stately just now, almost as if he were a real steward and not a Low promoted to the position.
Ugh. All I really wanted to do was hang out here at my house by the pool, then stream some movies while sprawled across the couch in my pajamas. Work sucked.
“Oh, and the Ancient Doriel says that she will take you up on your offer of hospitality in two days’ time.”
“What?” I squealed. That offer had been in place of me going to meet her in Hel. Damn it all.
“And she will also need to Own a human upon her arrival as the ones she currently has are very dated and inadequate for the occasion.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake. This was the demon equivalent of “I’ve got a closet full of clothes but nothing to wear.” Although if Doriel hadn’t been this side of the gates in a thousand years, she would be at a bit of a disadvantage. Owning a soul wasn’t just a fun hobby for us demons, and it didn’t just give us the genetic pattern to accurately replicate a human appearance, Owning a soul provided us with all the knowledge and experience that the human had during his or her lifetime. Showing up in an age of computers and cars and high-rises when the only thing you knew about was donkeys and carving on rocks would suck. Doriel would catch on quick enough, but the first few days would be horribly embarrassing for an Ancient who enjoyed the sin of pride.
It’s not like I could withdraw my offer, even if she’d either misunderstood it or Snip had mangled it somehow. I was getting an Ancient houseguest in two days, whether I wanted it or not. Might as well get in Doriel’s good graces, so when I needed to ask her for a favor, she’d feel obliged to say yes.
But allowing Doriel to have a human soul…that was a bit of a problem.
“Shit. Is there some terminally ill guy you can drag out of hospice for her? Just borrow a gurney and an ambulance if he’s too far gone to walk to the car.” I’d still need to do a four-nine-five report, but the impact analysis would be a breeze if I only had to factor in a few weeks and not fifty or sixty years.
“Sam!” Nyalla scolded. I winced, but ignored her disapproving stare.
It was harder to ignore Snip’s stare. His eyes were owlishly big, his nose twitching as he eyed me with astonishment. Yeah, I was asking my main-man Low to pimp a dying human’s soul to my Ancient demon guest. We’d all done worse in our lives. This shouldn’t be a problem. So why was he looking at me as if I’d grabbed the last piece of pizza?
“Mistress, Beatrix would be very unhappy with me if I brought a dying human to the gateway and allowed the Ancient Doriel to take his soul.”
I shrugged. “Yeah? So?”
“Mistress, I do not want Beatrix to be unhappy with me. I cannot do this thing for you.”
The poor guy looked miserable. Far be it from me to come between a Low and his main squeeze. “Okay, so the hospice guy is a no. How about you break someone out of prison? Someone on death row? Surely the gate guardian can’t object to that?”
He continued to stare at me, his eyes even bigger.
“Grab a drug dealer off the street? Someone with a really bad FICO score? Come on, Snip! Help me out here!”
“Sam, you can’t do that,” Nyalla informed me. “You’re not supposed to be killing humans.”
“It’s okay as long as their FICO score is total crap,” I told her. “Besides it’s not me that’s killing, it’s Doriel. I’m just instructing Snip to find one and stand him or her up in front of the demon. My hands will be totally clean in this. Snip’s too.”
I felt her glare. “You’re setting it up. And you can’t tell me that the Ruling Council is going to hold you blameless on this.”
Hopefully they wouldn’t find out. Although if Nyalla told Gabe, I was totally screwed. She was normally pretty good about keeping secrets, but who knows what shit she might scream out in the throes of passion?
Snip shook his head. “I am so sorry, Mistress, but if you want to provide the Ancient Doriel with a soul to Own, then you will need to do so yourself.”
And then my angel would be unhappy with me. I think I’d reached my quota of doing things to piss my beloved asshole off these past few months. Offering up a human for a demon to kill and Own was probably not in my best interests right now.
“Doriel is going to have to get her own human,” I told Snip. “When you go pick her up at the gate, make sure she knows it’s got to be all stealthy-like. I don’t want to know anything about it. And if she gets caught, she’s on her own. I’m not filling out a fucking report and listening to a lecture because she doesn’t want to take five damned minutes to learn slang and modern transportation methods.”
Nyalla grumbled something under her breath, but Snip seemed relieved. With a grin he went over to the pool and began handing out the canned drinks to the Lows.
“No sodas in the pool!” I shouted. What the fuck had become of me? Rules? Suddenly there were rules at my house and I was enforcing them? It was bad enough that I was a sort-of angel now, I really didn’t want to be edging any closer to Order than necessary.
“I’m the only one allowed to drink sodas in the pool,” I amended. There. That was better. Rules for everyone else, just not for me. I lay back on my lounge chair and closed my eyes, enjoying the warm sun and thinking of how I was going to eat pizza and drink beer in my pool later this afternoon.
I felt him before I saw him. My eyes opened, my head swiveled, and I watched a tall, freakishly buff angel with copper curls round the corner of my house, Boomer at his heels as he headed toward the pool. I revealed my wings in a flash, snapping them out with a force that nearly knocked Nyalla from her lounge chair.
“Hey! Watch those things, Sam!”
I shifted so I wasn’t crowding her with the giant feathered appendages. We’d had a lot of fun yesterday evening, and I hadn’t expected to see him again so early today. Was this a booty call? I hoped this was a booty call. Gregory loved my wings, so making them visible increased my chances of getting some. I shifted the appendages to draw his attention to them feeling the air against the sensitive feathers.
Sure enough, his eyes immediately drifted toward the wings. I lifted them so the breeze stirred the feathers and felt the change in his blazingly hot energy signature. Yeah, baby. Come get some of this.
“Wanna fuck?” I called out once he was reasonably close. His spirit-self reached out to mine, warm and breathtakingly seductive as it caressed me. Then suddenly it was gone.
“Is our offspring drowning?”
Damn it. “Snip! Don’t let the kid die!”
“I’m on it, Mistress!”
I sat up to see the Low with a pool skimmer, hauling Lux out of the water. The infant angel flopped on the deck like a dead manatee, then began coughing and spitting up the clear liquid.
“See? He’s fine. It’s all good.” I reached out with my spirit-self to rub against Gregory’s, letting him know that I was still ready t
o go.
“He’s alive!” Snip threw his hands up in the air like he was an NFL referee signaling a successful field goal. “We got to him in time! Not like this morning with the chipper shredder, or lunchtime with the hot dog.”
I glared at Snip, silently willing him to lose all ability to speak.
“Cockroach, what happed to our Lux this morning with the chipper shredder? And this afternoon with an overheated canine?”
I winced at his stern tone, knowing I was probably not going to get any sex, angel or physical, in the next twenty-four hours. Or possibly in the next week.
“Hot dog. It’s a food. Nyalla did the Hymen maneuver or something like that and it popped right out. Shot ten feet across the floor, and he started breathing again. It was his own damned fault. Kid needs to learn to chew if he’s going to indulge in the sensation of consuming food.”
The weight of my angel’s stare was intense. “He should not be eating. He’s an Angel of Order.”
“Yeah, well he’s more like an Angel of Chaos sometimes.” Actually there were times when Lux was alarmingly like me. I’d not made the kid, I’d simply agreed to house him. Why he was copying my personality traits, I didn’t know. Was this a nature or nurture thing? Were Angels of Order more like Angels of Chaos back before the war and the stagnation up in Aaru? Was Lux actually closer to what a true angel of his sort should be? Or was he just a freak of nature?
I hoped freak of nature. That would be a whole lot more interesting.
Gregory sighed and eyed the little angel, who was still flopping around on the ground like a suffocating fish. He was faking it. And my beloved knew this very well.
“Lux, stop being so dramatic. You haven’t died. And even if you had, you’ve proven yourself quite adept at recovering from mortal injury and forming a new, viable corporeal form.”
Lux ignored him and kept flopping. He did that a lot—ignoring us, that is, not flopping on the ground.
“Lux!” Gregory’s voice thundered, and his energy surged white hot. Nyalla gasped. Snip cringed. The Lows who were still in the pool squealed and dove under the water. Lux stopped flopping and glared at his adoptive sire. Then in a flash he was in Gregory’s arms, all nakedly adorable, cooing, with little wings wiggling like a bird’s from his back. The archangel softened, instantly under the spell of the younger one. He snuggled the baby close, an expression on his face that twisted something deep inside me.