[UA] Random angels

[James Palmer]

A little random something I wrote earlier, trying to get back into the voice 
of Alexsandr from WELTER AND WASTE.  I was toying with some ideas about 
angels being super-evolved demons, the union of a male and female demon 
bound by human magi to a bloodline or concept to keep the Cruel Ones from 
getting them (and that the Cruel Ones themselves might simply be angels 
bound to the concept of 'cosmic order') but I never really got anywhere.  
Enjoy, anyway.


I cannot say exactly when it happened, or where, or, most of all, why, but I 
can testify that yes, it is true that once I met an angel.  You may question 
my truthfulness, my memory, my ability to distinguish a messenger of the 
Almighty from some phantasm conjured up by a stray magician, but 
nevertheless, I tell you this; they exist, and you are a fool to mock them.

This was back in the days when I was a wolf, and when I did not suffer fools 
or innocents gladly.  The woman I had been paid to kill was one or both of 
these; a bright-eyed, light-fingered slip of a Spanish girl, who had, it 
seemed, taken objection when the man I worked for torched her father’s 
business for failing to pay protection money.  She had begun to make trouble 
for my employer.  Somehow, she was constantly turning up as a police witness 
to his operations, which were numerous, illegal, and highly profitable.  He 
sent gunmen after her, and they shot each other by accident.  He tried to 
have her house firebombed, and it hit her neighbors, an Italian family who 
had their own connections in the Outfit, and that came back to him 
three-fold as a consequence.  I had something of a reputation for being able 
to deal with such troublesome cases, and so he called me in.

So.  She was a Fool, and lusty, and single, and it took no great work to 
pick her up in a bar one night, and to return with her to a hotel room.  She 
was drunk, I was pretending to be so, and the sex was brief, hard, and 
sharp.  She bit the scars on my wrist while I was inside her, so that my 
blood was in her mouth.  Afterwards, when she was lying by me, still and 
light in sleep, I picked up a pillow, and moved to hold her down.

My hand moved to her shoulder.  I paused for a moment, thinking how she 
seemed like nothing, like air, as though when her soul was gone from her in 
sleep only the thin ephemera of her body was left.  She murmured something 
under her breath, in the nonsense language of dreams, and I placed the 
pillow over her mouth.

She breathed out, and I felt the pillow disappear beneath my hands, becoming 
nothing but a shower of feathers, rising into the air, borne by her warm 
breath.  They were bright, golden, sharp, making tiny cuts on my hands, like 
paper.  I leapt back.  She was still sleeping, as the feathers became great 
shining wings, surrounding the room, and the stained sheets rose up, 
crumpled, folded, and the angel stood there before me, formed from 
bedclothes and blood and semen.  Beautiful, awful, and, I saw among the 
folds, a richly endowed hermaphrodite.

I was on my knees at that point, the faintly remembered Orthodoxy of my 
childhood clutching at my heart.   It moved one hand towards me, and spoke.

child of dust and bone!  she is not for your taking; go

Well, I went.  As fast as I could, not even scrabbling for my clothes, 
briefly glimpsing it reaching for her sleeping form, I ran naked into the 
night, where I felt for the threads of fate and found them broken and 
frayed, my sense of the world gone, risk meaningless, and ran some more, 
until I could taste the world again and find an unlocked door, and clothing, 
and money.

That is how I met the angel, then.   What its name and purpose were, I do 
not know, nor what happened to the girl.  I killed the man who hired me; 
better a reputation as a cold-blooded killer than a failure.  I have never 
seen one again, and I do not wish to, because with all the things I have 
seen and been and done, I have never been so chilled as by the sound of that 
voice.

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