Angels on Fire (7 page)

“Art, music, literature—none of these things would exist without the driving force that motivates humans to do more than hunt and gather and reproduce. This is the heritage bequeathed you by the Clockwork. And it is a precious one, indeed. Yet, mankind also has a genius for destruction, inherited from the Machine.

“Animals do not destroy. They kill only out of hunger or self-defense. Man destroys because it pleases Man to do so. Animals do not create. They breed and build, spurred only by the need for food and survival. Man creates because it pleases Man to do so. And that, in the end, is what counts.

“You hold the universe inside you. You’re not all one thing or another, but a combination: good and evil, wise and foolish, innocent and corrupt, hero and coward. In the heart of every sinner is a glimmer of saint—just as in the holy man lies hidden the sinner’s taint. To be absolutely Good or Evil is to be barren—bereft of the drive to create a world beyond one’s self. Humanity is not an inferior copy of the angels—they are but poor shadows of you!

“Your power lies in your diversity. For only through verisimilitude can creativity emerge. Mortals are the only players on the board who have the capacity for surprise. A pawn may turn into a knight, while a king might prove to be worth no more than a rook. Animals are predictable in their actions and reactions to stimuli. Even their panic and aggression can be foreseen, given proper knowledge of the individual species. But humans— while you still possess a strong herd instinct, you are capable of foiling any number of well-laid plans by your simple unpredictability! Humans are creatures of chaos and order, law and misrule. You possess a capacity for duality which Nisroc and Meresin lack.

“Meresin is a corrupter of souls, a sower of discord, a tempter of the weak and base—not because he chooses to be, but because it simply is his Nature to do those things, just as it is in the nature of a bird to fly or a fish to swim. Conversely, Nisroc is compelled to oppose Meresin’s machinations, not because it is motivated by any desire for the Greater Good, but because it is impossible for it
not
to do so. It would be like a duck sinking to the bottom of a lake—anti-nature.

“While you would do well to fear Meresin, you are far from helpless in the face of the supernatural. You see, Meresin is at the greater disadvantage, so he must use all the powers at his disposal. It is Meresin who should cower and quake at the mere thought of crossing swords with you!”

“That’s really nice of you to say, speaking as a human and all,” Lucy replied. “But what does
any
of that have to do with the halo Nisroc was talking about?”

“Hm? Oh, forgive me—I did get sidetracked, didn’t I? Well, as I warned you, there are no simple answers in this situation.”

“So it would seem.”

“The halo Nisroc mentioned is a reference to your aura, Ms. Bender.”

Lucy rolled her eyes. “Angels! Auras! The I-Ching! You’re not going to start talking about chakras next, are you?”

“Only if you insist. Now, allow me to explain: all things possess an aura, invisible to the human eye. The nature of the aura varies from individual to individual, but its strength is determined by the individual’s alignment...”

“I knew it,” Lucy muttered under her breath. “Here come the chakras.”

“Please! Allow me to finish! This alignment shows how greatly influenced the individual is by the Clockwork or the Machine. There are other factors involved—such as emotions and physical illness—that affect the halo, but alignment is the most important.”

Ezrael fell silent for a moment as he studied Lucy, his lips pursed while he looked her up and down. “In your case, your halo shows extremely heavy influence from the Clockwork—you look shocked. Why is that?”

“I guess I’m surprised—I’ve never considered myself particularly religious.”

“Ms. Bender—religion has
nothing
to do with whether one is influenced by the Clockwork or not! The simple fact of being a female ties you to the Clockwork at its most primal level. You are also an artist, which binds you even tighter yet. Thirdly, you bear the genetic mark of those sensitive to the invisible world. Is there insanity in your family?”

Lucy blushed furiously and dropped her gaze to the floor. Ezrael smiled and gave her hand a pat.

“Come now—you need not be ashamed. Was it your mother?”

She lifted her eyes to Ezrael’s and nodded, too shocked to speak.

“Your mother had inner sight, Lucy, but not what was necessary to endure it. Often it lies dormant until a grave emotional or physical shock awakens it, usually far too late in life to do more than damage. But
you
are an artist, which means that your inner sight is constantly active—like an old dog that dozes with an eye half-open.”

“Is that why I can see Joth’s wings and no one else can?”

“In part. But, more importantly, you were at ground-zero when Joth fell to earth. That is why you can see its true nature while others do not. They see only what they
expect
to see. As I said, your kind is gifted, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t fools.”

“You keep saying ‘your kind,’ and ‘you humans,’“ Lucy frowned. “You’re not still an angel—are you?”

Ezrael laughed and shook his head. “No, I haven’t been one in quite some time! I am, however, what is known as a Muse.”

“Muse—? But aren’t they supposed to be women tricked out in sheets?”

“—wearing a laurel wreath and carrying a lyre? Hardly. While some of us are female, not all of us fit such a strictly classical definition. And before you ask, while I am not a human, I assure you I am mortal. While killing me is exceptionally difficult, as my enemies have discovered over the centuries, and I age very, very slowly, I am capable of dying. I surrendered my immortality a long, long time ago, under circumstances very similar to Joth’s.”

“What? I don’t understand—?”

“As I said earlier, it is not unheard of for angels to fall from their world to this. And, as I said, Nisroc is usually quick to retrieve them, for the longer an elohim is away from the Host, the more unstable it becomes. But should something interfere with the initial retrieval—then the sojourner has only two more chances to return to the Host.”

“What if next time Joth tells them he wants to return?”

“It will have to undergo purification in the Fire of Righteousness, in order to burn away all the impurities it has acquired from Creation. The Fire is fierce and terrible, and Joth would have to dwell in its heart for a year or more before being allowed near the Clockwork.”

“What if Joth
didn’t
return?”

“Then it will turn into a daemon.”

Lucy gasped audibly, glancing first in Joth’s general direction, then back to Ezrael. “Wait a minute—I thought you said you
weren’t
on Meresin’s side!”

“Don’t worry, I’m not!” he chuckled. “The transformation from angel into daemon is not Joth’s only possible fate. It will only become a daemon if its refusal to return is
not
of its own choosing. If Joth decides to remain on earth of its own free will—then the fires of Creation shall burn away its divinity and it will be as other mortals.

“It will be as if Joth was born into the world a full-grown human, knowing hunger and want and cold for the first time—but also discovering joy and warmth and love. What happens after that is up to Joth. Not all former angels are Muses, though most of us are—since we can be as unpredictable as any human, now that we have free will. However, most of us find ourselves drawn to the Blessed; those humans who possess within them the divine spark—creative types, such as artists, builders, inventors and the like.

“I, personally, have a predilection for the visual arts, although I know a fellow Muse who leans more towards playwrights. By using my magick in subtle ways, I encourage to greatness talent that might otherwise find itself thwarted or consumed. In this way I still serve the Clockwork. But now the service is of my own choosing.”

“So—Joth will become mortal if he—”

“It!
Joth is an
it,
not a
he.
Besides, there’s no guarantee, should Joth choose to remain on earth, that it would become male.”

“Okay, whatever. As I was saying—Joth will become normal if
it
chooses to remain on Earth of
its
own free will. Right?”

“Right.”

“But you said angels don’t
have
free will.”

“Yes,” Ezrael sighed, sipping his tea. “Bit of a Catch-22, that.”

Chapter Eight

Lucy glanced out the window and saw the sun going down. “Oh, Jesus!” she moaned as she slapped her forehead. “I can’t
believe
I forgot to call in sick!”

Ezrael grunted as he ferried their empty cups to the sink. “Where do you work?”

“A brokerage firm on Wall Street. I’m a clerk-typist. It sucks, but it pays the bills.”

“I’d say you had other things besides work on your mind today.”

“Yeah,” Lucy sighed. “I really thought the sky was the limit this morning. Now I feel like I’m looking up at it from the bottom of a dry well.” Lucy shook her head in disgust. “That’s what I get for having great expectations!”

“You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself,” Ezrael smiled. “After all, you’re only human.”

“Which puts me in the minority around here,” she said, resting her chin on her fist. “So what do I do now?”

“We prepare ourselves.”

Lucy turned to fix Ezrael with a quizzical stare, cocking one eyebrow. “What do you mean
‘we,’
white man?” she asked.

Ezrael laughed as he squeezed her shoulder. “I am here to
help,
Lucy, whether you choose to believe it or not.” The older man fished an antique pocket watch out of the breast pocket of his Hawaiian shirt and frowned at it. “You are right about one thing, however—time
is
slipping away. If I am to be ready for what lies ahead, I must make a few errands before it gets too late.” He snapped the watch shut and returned it to his pocket. “I will try to be as quick about my business as I can. You stay here and keep watch over Joth. Do you have a spare key?”

“Look in the cookie jar,” Lucy said, pointing at a large ceramic bear set atop the refrigerator. “Uh—don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I don’t appreciate what you’re doing, Mr. Ezrael—”

“Call me Ez,” he said, plucking the spare key from where it was taped inside the bear’s head, pocketing it as easily as a magician would a coin. “And I’m doing this because I owe it to Joth—and to the memory of someone I cared for a long time ago.”

The former angel motioned for her to follow him. “I need you to make sure the door is locked behind me when I leave. And while I’m gone, allow absolutely
no one
entry! Meresin is far from the
only
Machinist in New York City—any one of which would most gladly surrender a horn or a hoof to make Joth one of their number.”

Lucy followed Ezrael to the front door, trying her best not to let the fear rising within her show in her eyes. Muggers and serial killers were nothing compared to the Unknown—the fear of which, countless eons ago, had given form and reason to such half-glimpsed things as Joth and Meresin in the first place. As she moved to close the door, Ez grabbed the door jam and thrust his face back in one last time.

“Remember—allow
no one
entrance until I return!”

“I understand. Just hurry back, okay?”

Lucy quickly locked the door and shot the deadbolt into place. She hurried through the apartment, turning on all the lights, banishing the shadows back to their corners. She hadn’t realized how late it was until she turned on the lights in the living room, causing the walls to leap out like guests at a surprise party.

Once all the lights were on and the doors and windows shut tight, Lucy sank down onto the red velour sofa, chin propped atop her fist, and stared at her peculiar house guest. Joth remained motionless, hunkered on the living-room floor like a living gargoyle, eyes fixed on some unknown point. Lucy was glad Ezrael was gone. She needed time to marshal her thoughts and try to digest all she had been told. Up until now, things had been moving way too fast for her to do anything but react.

Assuming everything Ezrael told her was
true
and she
wasn’t
tied to a bed in Bellevue talking to the ceiling-tiles, she had no other choice
but
to trust him. It had been a long time since she had to do that. After all, Manhattan was hardly a city that encouraged its citizens to put their faith in absolute strangers. Everyone here was out for themselves, as Nevin had amply proven.

Thinking of Nevin made her wince and rub the back of her head. Now that all the lights were on, it was impossible to ignore how bare the walls looked. She sighed and bit her lower lip. There was a down-side to catching her breath—up until now she hadn’t had time for feeling used.

What she was experiencing, however, was more anger aimed at herself, not at Nevin. She was mad at herself for being so damned stupid—again. The signs had been there for her to see, but she had—as usual—chosen to ignore them. She used to think she was unlucky in love, but now she was beginning to wonder if she wasn’t just out-and-out masochistic.

The lump in her throat had grown so large and heavy it was strangling her. She grabbed a short, tight gasp of air around it, blinking rapidly in a desperate attempt to keep the tears from spilling, unbidden, down her cheeks. So much of her time, self and money had been tied up in those photographs. Losing them was like having a pet taken from her. Now all she had left was one picture—the hand-tinted print of the irises lying atop her mother’s casket. And the only reason Nevin hadn’t taken
tha
t as well was because the frame was damaged. She had been upset when Joth broke the frame earlier—but now she was glad it happened. She didn’t know how she would have handled Nevin absconding with that piece. She glanced over at where the print rested in its ruined frame, propped against the wall.

“Oh, Mama,” she sighed, shaking her head. “What
would,
you make of all this, huh?” The tears came then. She had not cried at her mother’s funeral. Nor had she cried in the three years since. Now, she finally let her grief come forth. “Mama,” she whispered, her throat so tight she could barely squeeze the words out. “I’m so
sorry.
I’m so very,
very
sorry.”

Lucy had spent most of her life trying not to think about Mama; first out of shame, then out of guilt, but mostly out of fear. The fear that if she thought too much about Mama, she would end up like her.

Mama had her first breakdown at Daddy’s funeral. Lucy had only been six and a half when the tractor rolled on her father, but she remembered how Mama went into hysterics at the cemetery—insisting she could see Daddy watching the mourners from a distance. She worked herself into such a state Doc Moody had to give her a shot just to get her into the car. When the doctor stopped giving her shots, Mama moved on to more freely available medication prescribed by men with last names like Beam, Dickel, and Walker.

Mama was in and out of the state hospital in Benton on a regular basis after that. By the time Lucy was eight he was living more or less full-time with her grandparents. After five years of electro-shock therapy and heavy medication, the doctors let Mama come home. While Mama’s delusions were under control, the alcoholism certainly wasn’t, so Lucy continued to live under her grandparents’ roof.

During junior high, Lucy had been forced to suffer the shame and embarrassment of being the daughter of the town’s crazy drunk. Doc Moody had tried to explain to her that what was wrong with Mama was beyond his—or anyone’s—ability to fix, but Lucy was convinced her mother’s behavior was deliberate.

When Pappy died during Lucy’s sophomore year in high school, Mama’s craziness came back in spades, landing her in Benton for another protracted stay. She was still in a padded room when Lucy graduated. By the time Mama was finally released, she was off at college. Mam-Maw pretty much looked after her after that, and for a while it seemed like Mama might have finally put her demons behind her.

Then Mam-Maw passed away, and suddenly Mama was on her own for the first time in her life. She sold her parents’ house to Cousin Beth and bought herself a trailer on the edge of town, where she pretty much lived the life of an alcoholic recluse for two years. Then one night Lucy got a call from Mama, just after midnight, rambling on about how she could hear ‘them’ walking around outside the trailer—meaning Mam-Maw, Pappy and Daddy. She pleaded with Lucy to come back to Seven Devils, to look after her. Lucy told her no and to go sleep it off. Sometime after Lucy hung up on her, Mama took a double handful of pills and washed them down with a pint of Old Crow. And now, if what Ezrael told her wasn’t utter bullshit, it seems Mama wasn’t crazy after all. At least, not at first, anyway.

Poor Mama—one moment she was just another rural Arkansan housewife who enjoyed making peach cobbler, crocheting socks and listening to Loretta Lynn, the next she was seeing beyond the veil into the Great Beyond. She simply wasn’t prepared for it. Lucy liked to think she’d stretched her consciousness far beyond the narrow limits of what was considered possible in Choctaw County, but even she was having trouble absorbing what was happening to her. She could just imagine how having the doors of perception thrown wide must have shattered Iris Bender’s grip on reality—and Mama never claimed to see anything as
outré
as angels or giant floating eyeballs, just dead relatives.

Still, what Ez told her explained a lot—such as Mam-Maw’s side of the family’s reputation for witchy ways. Lucy always had the feeling that Mam-Maw knew a lot more about what was plaguing her daughter than she let on. Lucy could remember several occasions where her grandmother stopped whatever she was doing to stare off into space, or appeared startled by something Lucy could neither see nor hear.

Her grandmother had been a no-nonsense woman whose creative energy manifested itself in hand-made quilts and elaborately embroidered hankies and pillow-cases. What memories Lucy possessed of her mother before the illness were dim—she remembered Mama had a fondness for puzzles and crosswords, but nothing genuinely creative. In fact, one of the few things she’d brought back with her when she went to Seven Devils for Mama’s funeral was her mother’s collection of jigsaws puzzles, which she kept stashed in the hall closet. They were one of the few things that reminded her of Mama from happier days.

Perhaps whatever it was that enabled members of her family to see into the Protoverse, or whatever Ez called it, was apparently augmented by creativity. That made sense, in a way—maybe it was the creative side of the brain that kept Mankind from permanently freaking whenever it glimpsed the Unknown peeking in through the kitchen window.

Still, buffer zone or not, Lucy was starting to wonder if her neurons might be deep-fried to a crackly crunch. She now knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what numberless mystics, philosophers, and saints had died trying to discover—that, yes, Virginia, there
is
an Afterlife, a God, and a Devil---and all because she was unlucky enough to trip over an angel and drag it back to her apartment like it was an old lamp someone had set out on the curb with the garbage. However, none of this inside info was providing her with much in the way of warm-and-fuzzy religious awakening. The only thing worse than discovering that There Is No God is discovering There
Is
A God—but that It doesn’t know or care that you exist. Frankly, she preferred it when the Universe was a cold, cruel place devoid of reason and where all life was motivated only by the need to create more of itself.

She wept until she fell asleep, wearied from the emotional stress that had accompanied the events of the last twenty-four hours. The last thing she saw before her heavy eyelids closed was Joth squatting on the living room floor, as silent as a stone.

The next thing Lucy knew she was being roughly shaken. She struck out blindly, catching Ezrael in the gut. The former angel groaned and dropped the gym bag he was carrying.

“Watch where you’re punching!” he snapped. “It’s just me!”

Lucy knuckled her eyes and looked around, feeling slightly dazed. “Sorry—I thought you were my ex-boyfriend.”

“Never mind that!” Ezrael replied. “Where’s Joth?”

“What do you mean—?” she said stifling a yawn. “He, I mean it is right over there.” Lucy pointed where the angel had been squatting. Except that it wasn’t there. “Where—? Where did he go?” She jumped to her feet, looking around frantically. “Joth?
Joth
—?” She hurried down the hall and looked in the bedroom and the bath, but Joth wasn’t to be found in either one.

“You didn’t open the door, did you?” Ezrael asked. “I
told
you not to open the door!”

Lucy opened the hall closet and peered inside. “I didn’t! I swear!”

“Then where is Joth?”

“I don’t know! Maybe he went back to heaven or whatever the hell it is he’s from?”

“I
seriously
doubt you would have been able to sleep through a portal being opened,” Ez commented dryly.

“So where
is
he?”

The former angel peered into the kitchen then quickly motioned for Lucy to join him.

“I think I may have an answer.” Ez pointed to the open window facing the air shaft. “Wasn’t that closed earlier?” He plucked a pin feather from the window sill and held it up between thumb and forefinger. “That’s what I was afraid of—it looks like our friend has decided to go sight-seeing.”