A Terrible Fall of Angels

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  “Angels up,” I whispered, and just like that I could feel the warmth of them around me. I could see the shine of them front and back because I’d been born with two Guardian Angels. If I’d looked behind me, I would have seen the two that Suriel had with her, but I looked at Ravensong and saw her angel, but I also saw other spirits around her. The raccoon was at her right side, one minute almost solid like everyone in the room should see it, the next ghostly. It chittered at me, washing its hands in the air the way they did when they dipped them in water. It wanted me to help her, to give them back their hands. There was a tall blond woman at her back. Her hair was in thick braids, and she wore armor, one hand resting on the pommel of her sword. She had a helmet, and the moment I thought Valkyrie, she had wings on the sides of her helmet, and then they vanished to leave it unadorned and ready for battle. I had a moment of hearing/feeling in my mind that she didn’t need feathers on her helmet to have wings. There was a moment when I could have known a name, a Goddess, but it wasn’t my magic, my secret, my power. I was blessed with the ability to see Ravensong’s guardian spirits and I thanked them all for showing themselves to me, for there were other figures standing shadowlike around her. But I didn’t need to see them all; the ones that were most important for this moment would be clearest. I was given the gift of seeing her magic, her guides and guardians; I had learned not to abuse the privilege by pushing for more information than needed, and to trust that I would be shown what I needed to see.

  Her angel was formed of light, not fire like the one at the first crime scene, but light, soft and pale yellow and white, with a brush of white feathered wings around the edges. I could have focused on that trailing edge of wings and the angel would have become more solid, but it wasn’t necessary. When I’d first started working with the angels, I had needed them to look “human” or at least solid, but I’d learned to accept them as they were and rejoice in not needing the surety of fixed form.

  The shining figure bowed a glowing “head” in acknowledgment of the thought. That let me know that I was getting lost in the power; it could be intoxicating, and new angel workers had to be watched for signs of addiction.

  I had to reach through the edge of the angel’s “wing” to touch her arm. The brush of those invisible wings, less solid than the ones at the hospital that had shielded me, pushed a warm, homelike energy through me, as if it was all hearth and home, tea and fresh-baked cookies. It wasn’t what I’d expected from Ravensong’s angel, but I did not judge that breath of power, but just kept reaching toward her arm and let the deeper sense of her Guardian Angel drift to the back of my senses.

  My own angel was present, but did not let their power hamper my vision or tamper with the things I was sensing from everything else. One of the hardest things for an energy worker of any kind to learn was not allowing their own energy to interfere with the interpretation and insight from and of their patients and their patients’ spiritual guides.

  As I moved closer to Ravensong, the large shining figure on her left side turned into a ghostly bear that reached across the front of her body and sniffed her arm as I looked at it. The bear looked at me, as if to say Well, go ahead. The raccoon chittered near her arm where it had started and still “stood” on its hind legs, its hands clutched together like a person wringing their hands with anxiety.

  “It’s all right,” I said to the figure. It looked up at me and made a different sound, more a chirp.

  “I’m not all right yet,” Ravensong said.

  Suriel said, “He wasn’t talking to you.”

  “You see them, too?” I said to her.

  “Yes.”

  Ravensong looked at us and then she looked around her. “Oh,” she said, “do what you need to do, Havoc.”

  “Zaniel,” Suriel said.

  Ravensong nodded. “Zaniel; names have power, and magical names have more.”

  “Precisely,” Suriel said.

  This time I didn’t argue, because they were right; I’d been Corey and then at seven I’d been chosen by the angels and I became Zaniel. I left the angels and went straight into the army, where I was Havoc, and now I was Detective Havelock. Corey, Zaniel, Havoc—different people, different mes. I could see the point in her arm where the corrupting magic started. I didn’t just see the demon’s hand on her arm, but I saw the dark smoke—no, thicker than that, black water swirling not over her skin but under it. The heavier wards in this room were acting with her own magic to stop the corruption from spreading, because that was what it wanted to do. It was like water, meant to flow, to fill the vessel of the body it touched.

  I knew what I had to do. I heard my voice almost from a distance; the magic had almost taken me too far into the vision to be attached that much to the physical world. “Everyone out but Suriel and Ravensong, now.” I didn’t look around to see if Charleston and the other officers obeyed me, not because I assumed they’d just do it, but because I couldn’t divide my attention. The world narrowed down to the black “water” under her skin. I reached toward it, my angels pulsed, and I had a moment of seeing an army of angels connected to my guardian in a shining endless line of holy fire and power. I blinked and I was back in the room seeing the corruption in her skin. Her raccoon laid its paw on my arm and there was another flare of power; the bear laid its great head against my shoulder, the Valkyrie at her back touched me with a shining hand against my forehead, and the power built. Suriel was at my back and her power joined mine, feeding into all of us so that we were a circuit of power and magic. It was a group effort when I let my fingers finally touch her skin.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  I began to strip the darkness off her skin. It swirled in the air, half smoke, half liquid, raising part of itself like the head of a snake searching for its next victim, and in the moment I thought that it was a black cobra rearing up to strike. I blanked my mind, took back the power I had given the energy, and it flowed back to just curling liquid smoke. I kept my mind even, empty, peaceful, and gave no strength to the blackness between my hands, but it was seeking someone else to corrupt. It wasn’t always this active, but clearing the room of anyone but the patient was standard practice for a reason. Some types of dark energy sought new vessels to enter even as you pulled them out of the first, contagious like a flu virus.

  Suriel came up to “catch” it as it spilled out. I could see the pale yellow glow of the angelic script and other symbols between her hands as she captured the darkness. She would take it back to the College for study, before it was released to return to Hell. I had to blink to unsee the glowing symbols and concentrate back on the dark energy that I was still cleaning out of the arm. I trusted Suriel to do her part, and she trusted me to do my part. It was as if no time had passed and we were back in the College of Angels curing the corruption of the world together.

  The blackness filled the cage that Suriel had built, but the last bit of dark energy clung to the arm like a root that had to be dug up. I didn’t want to dig into Ravensong’s arm; I wanted to change the arm and take the roots away with it.

  “Why are you hesitating?” Suriel said. “Just strip it off like a glove and let me cage it.”

  I tried, but this wasn’t an illusion or the impermanence of immortal substance; this was mortal flesh and though we drained the negative darkness out of it, the shape of the flesh did not change instantly back to match the pale skin of the rest of the arm.

  “It is no longer immortal substance painted over mortal flesh; it is somehow merged together.”

  “Impossible,” she said.

  “But still true,” I said.

  “If you’ve done all you can, I understand,” Ravensong said.

  I did not look up at her but kept my gaze on the arm and the darkness that was still rooted in it. I had one hand on her arm, which was as it should be, but the other hand rested on the demon part, which should not have been real. At best it should have been a temporary spell, but under no magic that I knew should the monstrous hand have been a
s solid as the arm.

  A small black paw came to rest on my arm. I could feel the weight of it against my arm. It made me turn and look at her spirit animal. The raccoon looked up at me with large, dark brown eyes. Real-life raccoons could give you looks that made you anthropomorphize them and believe they think just like us, but totem animals are both the original animal and a piece of the human they walk beside. Which meant it wasn’t just me projecting human emotions into those inhuman eyes.

  I almost asked out loud, What is it, little fellow? But I didn’t have to speak, I just had to listen.

  Out of the corner of my eye the raccoon had looked solid, but looking directly at it made it less physically substantial, except for the eyes. They were big and dark and lustrous and very alive. It raised a paw and wiggled its clawed fingers and then touched its other hand to it, showing that the hands were the same size, placing fingertip to fingertip so that they mirrored each other.

  “The hand just has to match,” I said softly.

  The phantom face smiled at me as much as the shape of the face allowed. It wasn’t a human smile, but that didn’t make it any less happy.

  I put both my hands on the heavy scaled hand. It still felt wrong, like a jarring when someone in a band doesn’t hit the right note, but this was a tactile jarring; my fingers were feeling something that shouldn’t have been.

  I began to smooth the heavy, mismatched flesh like wet clay, except that I wasn’t just shaping the clay, I was getting rid of excess, and as I whittled down the heavy skin and flesh it turned into more of the dark liquid smoke. Suriel was there to siphon it off into the magical cage.

  I kept working the flesh until it was much smaller, and then finally small enough that it matched the width of the wrist it was attached to, and still I kept working my hands over the skin, smoothing the rough scales down smaller and finer until they were almost as smooth as the skin of the arm. The nails had become smaller to match the rest. I drew my fingers over them to lessen the razor sharpness of them, so she’d be able to touch another person without slicing their skin. The nails were still more claw than human fingernail, but having an extra weapon wasn’t always a bad thing. I remembered Kate and her mourning for the claws she’d had before the magical therapy that made her more human. What was so great about being only human?

  I was almost too far gone in the magic, but part of me that wasn’t Zaniel but still Detective Havelock swam to the surface of all the power. I was able to look up at Ravensong, though I saw her face through the shine of her angel, and then I realized that the Goddess behind her had placed a ghostly shield in front of Ravensong’s head and chest as if the hand were a bomb I was defusing and she was protecting her charge from possible shrapnel. The bear had somehow merged with the shield as if the bear had given its strength to it, or perhaps the bear wasn’t a personal totem, but a part of the Goddess’s power. I didn’t need to know, so I stopped thinking about it and searched for Ravensong’s face through all the layers of power.

  It was like trying to see her through gauze, or misty glass. I found my voice, but it was thicker, so resonant with power that it sounded strange to my ears, like it was my mouth but someone else’s voice. I knew I could have simply thought what I wanted to know and planted it in the woman’s mind, but that was an intrusion, rude at best, and potentially illegal, though I knew that Ravensong wouldn’t worry about it; but it isn’t about whether you will be blamed for something, it’s about is it right, or is it wrong, will it cause harm? I hadn’t used this much power in this many layers in so long; if there was even a small chance that my control was less perfect than it had been, I couldn’t risk telepathy with anyone right now, especially someone who wasn’t initiated into the same mysteries. Ravensong wouldn’t want me helping her conjure at full moon, because I didn’t know how her magic worked; the same worked in reverse here.

  “I can’t understand, Havoc,” she said.

  “He’s speaking in the language of the spheres,” Suriel said.

  I tried to remember how to speak in a language that she would understand, embarrassed that I’d lost so much so quickly to the power. I threw my willpower into speaking English to Ravensong and still holding on to all the power I needed to finish this. It was like holding on to a string that was being pulled out of my hands while I was looking in the wrong direction.

  “You okay with claws—little ones?” I managed to say out loud.

  “Can you make them human fingernails?” she asked.

  Which meant she wasn’t okay with it, but I’d taken my attention away from it too long, the power was unraveling. The small paw touched my hands this time and I could feel every texture of the raccoon’s hand, rough and smooth, the tiny prick of the claws at the end of the dexterous fingers, and that was my answer. This was her totem, a piece of her spirit; there was nothing wrong with delicate claws at the end of clever fingers.

  I had a moment of cradling the small hand between my larger ones. It was a pretty hand, a feminine hand, but it was still covered in red scales like a snake and had black fingernails that ended in points that made her raccoon chitter excitedly.

  The power flowed away from me, all the many pieces of spirit sliding back to where they normally existed. I had a moment of wanting to see spirit all the time, all the totems and guardians and Deities that surrounded us until the world was made glorious and haunted by it. I knew there was even a chance I might keep that double and triple vision, but I also knew that it would drive me mad, because that was part of what happened to Jamie. It hadn’t even been a choice for him; the angels had awakened his deeper vision and then he hadn’t been able to shut it off. The College had seen his inability to control his psychic gifts as a failure. He wasn’t strong enough to be an Angel Speaker, so they’d expelled him as if he’d flunked a final or failed to turn in his last research paper. Jamie had excelled at any paper test or essay, but you could fail all of those in the College of Angels if you were gifted enough in other areas. If you could survive the power, stay sane and functional, they would find a place for you, but madness that failed to be useful? That was unforgivable. Angels are about order, and any angel that preferred chaos was cast out. If Heaven would cast out the angels themselves, how could they do less to a human being who had proven too frail a vessel?

  Thinking about Jamie shut down the flow of power. I clanged my shields into place as fast as I could. I wanted out of the room, away from Ravensong’s thanks and Suriel’s questions of “Zaniel, what is wrong?”

  I could still see the glow of her cage and the swirl of darkness trapped inside. The cage floated by her shoulder like a well-trained dog. The flare of angel wings glittered around us all, filling the room with white-yellow light and I could not bear it.

  I went to the door, pounded on it. “I need out!” I knew they were watching on the cameras. I knew they heard me, saw me. A small hand touched my leg and I looked down to see the raccoon with too much knowledge in its dark eyes. I needed out, not because I wanted to see it, all of it. I wanted to wrap myself in the glow of angelic power like a blanket that I’d missed, like I was a child and needed my comfort object, but it wasn’t that. It wasn’t a comfort; it was an addiction. The brush of one angel’s wing is much like another’s and there was one set of wings that I had loved, been in love with their owner, and been loved in turn, but though an angel may love humanity, they are not allowed to be in love with one person. They are not allowed to put the well-being of one human being above all others. Angels are meant to serve God and humanity and creation, not necessarily in that order. Once, I had had the sole attention of an angel of one of the highest orders aimed at just me. She had loved me above all others, and I had felt the same, and that had been when everything went to hell.

  I pounded on the door again, but the white-yellow light of all the angels was filling the room until I couldn’t breathe; no, that was a lie, until I wanted to breathe them in, wrap them around me like I had with the energy at the hospital, but this was more, so muc
h more, and it was offered, it was there. They wanted me back. I was an Angel Speaker and there were so few of us.

  I pressed my palms against the door and yelled to be let out, to be away from the temptation. The raccoon chattered at me and I realized as I looked into its eyes that it helped ground me, helped chase back some of the glowing energy.

  I whispered, “Thank you.”

  Then Suriel touched my bare arm and her angel echoed her so that the power whispered over my skin like a sea of kisses that I could swim in, or sink in, or . . . I screamed and slammed my hands against the door. I had to get out!

  The white-yellow light filled my vision and there was nothing but the light, and in the light were strands of gold and silver and copper and colors that humans have no words for; symbols and angelic script and scripts that humans are not meant to read trailed around the threads of the universe like music made visible. For one shining moment I heard the music of the spheres and I knew if I reached out far enough I could travel those shining lines on a river of words and sound that had driven Jamie out of his mind, but that I had loved.

  I let myself relax into the beauty of it, and then I heard a voice down those shining strings. A female voice said, “Zaniel, is that you?”

  I pushed myself out of that glorious view, arms flailing wildly as if I could touch music and sound, as if there was anything solid enough to push against in that place. I fell backward, landing on my ass on the floor, hard enough to jar up my spine and into my head so that I felt stunned as if I’d fallen much farther than just from my feet to the floor.