by Zoe Cannon
“Not anymore.” A brief glance at Danielle showed me the smirk I had been expecting. “He left heaven. He abandoned your war. Give it up—you lost him to us a long time ago.”
I slammed my hands down on the steering wheel, hard enough that the horn blared. “Leave! Both of you!”
They still didn’t look at me. “He may be living among the humans for the moment,” said the angel, “but he never fell. He never joined you. It’s only a matter of time before he comes home.”
“That’s one way to look at it,” said Danielle. “How long have you been waiting? How much more likely is it that it’s only a matter of time before he overcomes that denial of his and joins us?”
My foot hovered over the gas pedal. I didn’t expect the angel to move if I started driving, but I didn’t care. I would drive right through him if I had to, and throw Danielle out of the car as I pulled onto the highway, if that was what it took to get away from them. And I would keep running forever, if that was what it took. I would run faster than they ever could, and hide until they could never find me, and I would…
I would what? Find another nothing job? Move in with a Danielle replacement, someone I saw as the human equivalent of fast food, someone who deserved better? Keep my head down and survive another few centuries, another few millennia?
Well, what other choice did I have? What the angel was offering? What Danielle was offering? No. Maybe I wanted more than a life of bare survival. Maybe I wanted it more than I would ever admit. But it was still the best option I had.
I punched the gas.
The engine died.
Danielle and the angel spoke simultaneously. “You’re not leaving until we’re done here.” Then they returned to glaring at each other.
I smacked the steering wheel again. This time the horn stayed silent. My own words were the only sound in the night. “We are done.”
And still, they didn’t listen. Danielle drew a knife from the waistband of her skinny jeans, where I was sure no weapon had been a moment ago. The blade was wreathed in shadow; looking at it made my my eyes burn and my stomach do a backflip. The angel pulled a weapon of his own out of the air, a sword longer than his arm. It glowed with the same white fire that shone in his eyes.
A sharp ache traveled up my hands and into my wrists. I tore my gaze away from the angel’s weapon to look down, and saw that I was clutching the steering wheel again, harder than before. Hard enough to hurt. I hadn’t noticed myself doing that. I hadn’t noticed anything, for the first few seconds after that blade had come out. For a brief instant, I had been back on the battlefield. The smell of blood in my nose. My fellow angels’ screams in my ears. I could still hear them, if I listened closely.
I forced my hands to let go, and opened my car door. I stepped out into the crisp night air that smelled of gasoline and the fruit smoothies they sold inside the gas station. The angel’s sword added the scent of ozone to the air, and filled the night with the sharp tension of an oncoming storm.
My hands were shaking. Another human reaction. But no matter how long I had hidden behind the human disguise, I wasn’t human. Maybe I wasn’t what the angel thought I was. Or what Danielle saw me as. But I wasn’t what I had pretended to be all this time, either.
The shaking stopped.
“We’re done here.” My voice resonated with the half-forgotten divine power inside me, the power I hadn’t let myself touch in millennia. A passing car slowed, as if the driver had heard and felt a distant shiver. “It’s time for you to go.”
The angel finally looked at me. He favored me with a smile. “You’re finally remembering yourself. Good. Take my hand and come with me.” He started to reach out a hand to me, then paused. He set his jaw as he looked back down Danielle. “After we deal with this filth, that is.”
I didn’t follow his gaze, and I didn’t reach for his hand. “No. I gave you my answer this afternoon. I’ll tell you again, so listen better this time. I am not going back with you. And I’m not fighting in heaven’s wars. Not now. Not ever again.”
Danielle stepped out of the car with a triumphant smile at the angel. “What he means is that he’s coming back with me.”
I would have thought I would feel angry, watching the two of them fight over me like two dogs over a juicy steak. But all I felt was a strange calm. “No,” I said—to her, to both of them. “I won’t be used by either of you. I’m not the thing I was when I fought for heaven’s army. But I’m not what you tried to make of me either.” That last was meant only for Danielle.
Danielle’s look of disbelief morphed into a sneer. “Then you’re going to keep being nothing? Doing nothing?”
Only a few short hours ago, those words would have pricked at me like tiny needles, reminding me of the old argument she never could let go. Now I couldn’t imagine why I had ever let her words shake me. Amazing, the difference having a purpose could make. “I’m not doing nothing,” I said. “I have a life here.”
She curled her lip. “Doing what? Flipping burgers?”
The angel answered for me, his contempt a mirror of Danielle’s. “Running. Hiding.”
Before I had gotten into the car and driven away from the apartment—for that matter, before I had gotten out of the car only a moment ago—I would have agreed with him. With both of them. Now I knew better. Understanding had come on me in an instant, like a divine revelation. And it had recast my whole world, past and future, in its light.
“I’m doing what anyone does with a life,” I said. “I’m living it. Not just surviving, but living. Burger-flipping and all. Yes, I’ve spent too much time hiding, and been too focused on bare survival. And I intend to remedy that. But my life is not meaningless. Because I’ve lived that life in this world, among these people. And this world means something to me. Humanity means something to me.”
“Of course you value the lower world,” said the angel with a scoff. “With so many humans crawling over its surface, it provides you the illusion that you can hide from us.”
“And gives you a way to hide from yourself,” Danielle added.
I shook my head. How had I been so afraid of them, such a short time ago? Now all I felt for them was pity. “Human life is warm, and comforting, and beautiful. It rivals anything heaven has to offer. If you don’t see it, you haven’t spent enough time among the humans.”
Danielle answered with a sharp laugh. “I think you’re the one who hasn’t seen enough of the humans, if you still think of them as beautiful. Humans are ugly through and through, right down to their twisted little hearts. All it ever takes to bring one of them over to our side is a tiny… little… push.” She flicked her finger in the air.
“I’ve seen the worst humanity has to offer, many times over,” I said. “I’ve seen war, and plague, and suffering. If you think the worst thing I’ve done is flip burgers, you haven’t been watching me as closely as you claim.”
The angel’s eyes flared. His face twisted in outrage. “You were watching him?” he demanded, rounding on Danielle. “He belongs to us!”
Danielle gave him a shrug and a half-smirk. “As soon as he left heaven, he was fair game.”
I had no interest in listening to them squabble over me like I was a favorite toy. I spoke over them, continuing my thought. “But humans survive through it all. And they don’t just survive—they grow, and they triumph. Which is more than I’ve been able to do, in a life many times longer than what any human is given.” I paused for a rueful shake of my head. “I admire them. Maybe I can’t be anything other than what I was made to be—but if it’s possible for me to change, then they are what I aspire to be.” I turned to the angel. “This world is my world, more than yours ever was.” Then to Danielle. “And more than yours could ever be.”
“If you want to protect humanity, do it from heaven,” said the angel, in a tone that made it an order rather than a suggestion. “Fight for us, the way you were made to do.”
But I would never obey another order from heaven again
. I had told myself that for a long time. This was the first time I believed it all the way down to my finely-crafted human bones.
“You talk a lot about fighting for humanity,” I said to the angel, “but when has heaven ever been focused on anything but itself? Winning your wars, celebrating your triumphs. Say what you will about the demons, at least they don’t pretend to care.”
Danielle shook her head at me. “Humans are mayflies. Their lives are too brief for them to become anything more than organic machines running on instincts and base impulses. Their world is a battleground between our two sides, and they are the chess pieces. Would you fight to preserve a pawn carved of stone, lifeless and faceless? The humans may walk and talk and pray, but it doesn’t make them anything more than that.”
“Like I said, at least you admit they mean nothing to you. All the angels in heaven believe the same thing, deep down, but none of them will say it aloud. I’m the only one who has spent enough time here to see past the apathy, and the selfishness, and the relentless demands of war. And now I see this world for what it is: a place worth protecting.”
I opened my palms, and released my grip on the disguise I had crafted so lovingly. The skin of my back burst open without pain. A second later, the fabric of my shirt tore. And my wings burst free.
I looked down at myself. Sharp, jagged lines of light, like miniature lightning trails, zigzagged down my skin. They glowed white, first faintly, then with blinding brightness. My human disguise popped open like an overfull balloon, then vanished on the sudden wind that surrounded me.
The pavement was no longer cast in the dim yellow glow of the gas station’s flickering bulb. Now it shone with the full light of day. But the light wasn’t coming from the sun, which was still safely tucked beneath the horizon. It was coming from me. When I looked down at myself again, there were no human clothes, and no human skin. My body was still shaped the same—two arms, two legs—but in place of flesh and bone, I rippled with the same white fire that shone in the angel’s eyes.
I had forgotten what it felt like to inhabit my real form. The strength that coursed through me. The heat in my core, like I was carrying around my own individual sun. But better than any of that was the indefinable sense of rightness. I had been so desperate to get away, so grateful for my human form, that I had forgotten what it was like not to live with the constant crawling knowledge that I was living in a body that didn’t belong to me.
Why had I been so afraid that the angel would strip my human form away? I should have let him do it. I should have done it myself, hundreds of years ago. But I had been a coward. I had let myself forget.
No more.
The feathers of my wings brushed against the metal canopy built over the gas pump. I gave the wings an experimental flap. Sparks of light drifted down like snow, and winked out of existence before they hit the ground.
“Leave,” I ordered the angel and Danielle again. This time, my voice split the air like a crack of thunder.
Danielle stumbled back. She smoothed her hair and visibly tried to wipe the awe from her face, and the fear. “What you plan on doing, fighting a war for humanity on your own? One angel—and a cowardly one at that—against the armies of heaven and hell alike?”
I shook my head. “I don’t need to do that. Offering the humans protection in smaller ways—from both hell’s manipulations and heaven’s selfish neglect—will be enough.” I paused, meeting her eyes and the angel’s in turn. “For now.”
The angel cleared his throat. “And if we decide to stop you?” He didn’t sound like he was in the mood for giving orders anymore.
“First,” I said, “you’d need to ask yourself why you wanted to stop me from protecting humanity, when that’s supposedly the reason you and all heaven’s armies are fighting the war in the first place. And second…” I held his gaze, and didn’t let him look away. “If you do, you’ll find out just how good I’ve gotten at hiding, and at surviving.”
He recovered enough to give me a derisive laugh. “That’s what you’re threatening me with? That you’ll run again? Go back into hiding?”
“The thing about hiding is, if you can’t find me, you can’t stop me.” My smile came easily. As it spread over my no-longer-human face, my heart lightened that much more. “I meant it when I said I would never fight again. But that doesn’t mean I intend to surrender.”
With that, I reached for the divine power I hadn’t touched in millennia. The power that lay inside me, in the nuclear core of that miniature center. I expected to have to dig for it, to beat my mental hands against the walls of my being, as I struggled to remember the knack to something I hadn’t done in so long. But liquid fire flooded out and through my limbs with barely a thought. And unlike when I had last reached for my power, in that horrible final battle, the sensation of heat in my limbs didn’t bring bone-shaking fear along with it.
No, I realized—that wasn’t quite right. The fear was still there. It was there when I looked at Danielle, and when I looked at the angel. It was there no matter how confidently I spoke, no matter how easily I smiled. It was just that it didn’t matter anymore.
It turned out fear wasn’t relevant once I was fighting for something that actually mattered to me.
“Leave!” I thundered for the last time. The fire I had called up spread out from my limbs like a full-body halo. Tongues of white flame reached for the angel and Danielle, and tore at their human disguises. False flesh crumpled at the edges like burning paper.
I watched for a moment, just long enough to be sure neither of them had an unexpected attack up their sleeve. Then I turned away and let the flames envelop them, or the places where they had been. I didn’t look to see whether they left before the fire ripped away their disguises entirely. It didn’t matter. Either way, when I looked back a moment later, the flames were gone and so were they.
But someone else was watching, standing at the circle of the light my body emitted. A man wearing a striped gas station uniform, with thick glasses perched on his nose and a name tag pinned to his shirt. His uniform was green and yellow. The same colors as the Burger Barn. I gave him, and myself, a wistful smile.
That part of my life was over. I had a harder job ahead of me now.
The human took off his glasses and rubbed them on his shirt. He put them back on and squinted at me. His mouth was hanging open, his eyes wide with fear. But as I watched, the fear faded, and wonder stole over his face. My fire reflected back at me from his eyes, giving them a borrowed glow.
I gave him a single nod, standing tall and proud. Then I extended my wings again. And for the first time in far too long, I flew.
Pure Wicked Heart
The first thing Marik noticed when he stepped into the apartment was the smell of blood. Angel blood smelled different from human, and even more different from his own, which he had been told had the odor of gasoline and tobacco smoke. Angel blood, though, was almost pleasant—or it would have been, if he hadn’t known what it was, and what it meant that his nose had caught the scent of it now. It smelled like sun-warmed wood, with a mild, sweet bite like an expensive champagne. It mingled in the air with the smell of the blueberry pancakes he had cooked earlier that morning, before he had popped out to the store and left Sacha behind on the couch with a full belly, a smile on his face, and cartoons on the TV.
The couch was empty now.
The screams hit Marik’s ears a second later. If he hadn’t already known the voice was Sachael’s, he might not have recognized it. Over the past five centuries, he had heard the angel’s voice raised in passionate arguments, or husky and low in an intimate whisper… and yes, he had heard his screams, although of a very different sort. But never this raw pain.
He dropped the grocery bags. The eggs crunched as they hit, and yellow leaked out onto the carpet. That will take forever to clean up, some distant, detached part of Marik’s mind thought, as another scream ripped through the apartment.
He wanted to fall to his knees with the
force of the sound. He didn’t. He was already shifting to his true form—claws elongating, horns erupting from the top of his head, knees bending backward with a snap—as he ran toward it.
He knew what he would find before he burst into the kitchen. Hunched over something on the floor—something Marik couldn’t look at too closely—was a mirror of the form he wore now. The demon had green, chitinous skin. Twin horns twisted and curled out from his head. His long rat’s tail lashed excitedly behind him. As Marik watched, the demon raised bloodstained claws, then swept them down toward the screaming tangle of limbs and feathers on the floor.
Marik had always expected the forces of Hell to try to bring him home eventually. He had even planned out a speech in his head—or rather, several speeches, depending on how large a force they sent after him and how equipped he felt to deal with it head-on. He had practiced them in front of an indulgent Sacha, who had never seen the need but had listened to him nonetheless. Everything from a defiant pronouncement that he had chosen his own path just like their original fallen-angel ancestors millennia ago, to a groveling apology and a promise to return just as soon as he took care of a few last things. He had wasted so much mental energy on wondering if the latter speech would be enough to buy him time to escape.
All those scenarios had ended with him and Sacha flying off into the sunset. Because as much time as he had spent planning, it had never occurred to him that they might find Sacha first.
But Marik’s footsteps must have caught the demon’s attention, because the demon stopped mid-strike. He turned to face Marik as he rose to his feet, his red eyes wary. Marik knew that look—he had worn it many times before, in his time serving Hell. It was the look of someone trying to figure out whether the face in front of him belonged to a friend or an enemy.
As hard as it was for Marik to swallow down his rage, he did his best. Instead of the roar that threatened to erupt from his chest, he met the demon’s gaze with a relieved smile. “Are you here to bring me home?”
