Sinners and Saints

by Jennifer Roberson

  From out of his melted mouth, the perfect teeth now absent within the bloody arch of his palate, came the shouted command. “Know my name . . . know it!”

  “Holy shit,” I murmured.

  “Know that I am Shemyazaz . . . that I am the first among them, the first of the bene ha’elohi . . .” His expression wasn’t angry. It was transcendently ecstatic. “I am Shemyazaz . . . and before we fell we were the Sons of God!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  I didn’t do as the angel suggested. Rather, as he commanded. I did not bend the knee, or, for that matter, bend any part of my body at all. I was too taken aback. I just stood there and stared, like an idiot. The most I could manage was to close my mouth.

  Man, the guy in this version of his body was fugly.

  “Shemyazaz,” Remi murmured, as if in shock. As if he knew what that meant.

  I darted a quick glance at him before looking back at the burned-black angel atop the bar. In a low voice, I said, “What is it? What is he?”

  But Remi couldn’t offer any answer because the Shemyazaz—whatever, whoever that was—began whirling like a Dervish. As he spun, the wreckage of massive wings lofted out sideways, snapped through the air. Ash flew, and soot, and strips of flesh and feathers were shredded from body and wings.

  I ducked and dropped, because I was pretty sure that if a wing made contact with any part of me I’d likely be sliced in two. I pressed one hand against the wood floor to keep myself upright despite my squat, but the displacement of the air buffeted me. I rocked forward onto a knee to steady myself.

  Next to me, Remi, too, was down, pulling himself up off his ass to crouch there, one hand lifted as if to protect the top of his head. We cast one another abbreviated glances of sheer disbelief and no little apprehension before once more locking our eyes on the still-spinning angel as he shed parts of his skin and wings all over the bar. Gloppy fragments flew out onto the dance floor.

  And then he stopped. Just—stopped. With so much skin and muscle missing the bones were clearly visible. And the brilliant blue eyes, even within the wrecked face, remained avidly intense.

  Despite the melted rictus, he managed to stretch the remains of his mouth into a wider grin. He gazed down upon us in barely concealed glee. “You bent the knee!”

  Well. Okay. Yes, I had. Not because he commanded it, but to escape the twin scimitars of his wings. One knee was planted firmly against the dance floor, so yeah. Bent.

  Remi didn’t stay crouched, and his knees didn’t stay bent. He thrust himself back to his feet and faced the angel. “Shemyazaz,” he said. “You fell. You did fall. And you were the first, as you claim; the first among them, the first to call Lucifer your lord, and the first of your people to be flung down into hell for the sin of lying with a human woman. But why are you here?”

  Warily, I rose from my crouch against the dance floor. I wasn’t sure exactly what Remi was intending, but at least he had the ruined angel’s attention. Probably safer than the guy spinning again, shedding yet more flesh and feathers. There wasn’t a whole lot of him left.

  “Morningstar,” the angel said.

  Remi’s eyes were fixed on him. His voice was very quiet. “Why are you here?”

  The brilliant eyes blinked. “I came here.”

  “Why?”

  “To destroy the Morningstar.”

  That caught me off-guard. “You were in hell and all buddy-buddy with Lucifer, but now you’re here to kill him?”

  Shemyazaz lifted wings and arms, spread his legs. Displaying himself. Displaying the travesty. “Because this is what he did to me! I was beautiful, I was beautiful, and he grew jealous, just as he did of the Son, and this is what he did to me!”

  “But—” I shook my head slowly. “You didn’t look like this when you came through that door.”

  He might be an angel, but his voice trembled all the same. I wasn’t certain if it were anger, or tears; fury, or abject desolation. Maybe all of them. “That form, that beautiful boy I was when I came through that door . . . two hours. That’s all I have, to be myself. All the Morningstar left to me. All he left of me.”

  Before I could say anything more he was running the length of the bar again, body shedding gobbets of charred flesh. But he stopped before leaping off this time. Up on his toes he halted, lifted a forefinger in the air, and the jukebox began to play. It was a woman’s voice I heard singing, high and sweet on the chorus, but the angel looked down at us both and raised his voice over hers.

  “It won’t matter,” he said in time with the music. “It won’t matter anyhow.” His arms dropped, and his wings collapsed into folded shreds, like a tattered paper parasol. “The sun’s light is dim, and the Morningstar says I’ve sinned.”

  I looked at Remi and whispered. “Lyrics, poem, or is he just making shit up?”

  “Paraphrased lyrics,” he answered. “It’s . . .” He paused, looking at the ruined bene ha’elohi, the broken Son of God before us, and he swallowed hard. “The song’s called ‘Angel of the Morning.’”

  “Morningstar,” Shemyazaz said.

  And then he began to weep.

  I’ve seen many things in my life, including a man bleeding out, dying by my hand, but this . . . this? A burned and broken angel crying? Not even in my wildest dreams.

  And then Ganji, the African Orisha, walked out of the dimness from the back of the building. The orbs along the crossbeams, which I’d forgotten in the midst of Shemyazaz’s meltdown—literal meltdown—strobed bright and white. Their merged illumination gleamed off Ganji’s shaven skull. He wore black, as usual, jeans and tight t-shirt, stretched over hard muscle. He paid no attention to Remi or me, just walked onto the dance floor with all of his attention focused on the angel.

  Or what was left of him.

  “Oh, child,” Ganji said, in his resonant, African-accented English. “You are a malak maksur. Come with me, come and see Sayida. She will take you to her breast and dry your tears. She will quiet your fires, smooth your skin, put into order your ruined wings. She cannot return all the hours the Manje has stolen, but she will ease you. And when you are whole again for those two hours, you may visit among the humans in glory and beauty. Sawf najid lak alsalam. We shall find you peace.” Ganji stretched out his right arm toward the angel, upturned palm beckoning. Welcoming.

  Atop the bar, Shemyazaz stilled his weeping. He seemed irresolute, almost shy, which I found incongruous in a being born of heaven, a full-blown angel. His tone was much diminished. “Can she make me whole?”

  Ganji’s voice was kind, though his words were not what Shemyazaz wanted to hear. “Only your God can do that, my malak maksur. You are of His making.”

  The angel said, “I am like Bruno Mars.”

  For a moment I was certain I’d misheard.

  “Locked out of heaven,” Shemyazaz added sadly, and I realized he meant the Bruno Mars song.

  “You are not locked out of Sayida’s heaven,” Ganji said. “She will share it for a while. Come.”

  Shemyazaz squatted, slid down from the bar in a shower of soot, placed one charred hand into Ganji’s. “Then I will go with you.”

  I watched them depart the surreal scene in a highly prosaic fashion: they just walked out the back door. The orbs streaked down from the heavy beams and followed god and angel into a quieter darkness.

  Remi and I stared after them for a long moment. Then we looked at one another. “But what was that Ganji said to Shemyazaz?” I asked. “That malak thing?”

  “Malak maksur,” Remi said.

  “And? What does it mean?”

  “Got no idea.”

  “But you knew what the angel said to you when he was talking to the orbs.” Talking to the orbs. Yeah, that made me sound sane. So very erudite of a former college professor.

  Remi hitched one shoulder in a half-shrug. “Because I know a little Ko
ine Greek. Had to study it for my doctorate, looked a few things up.” He grinned. “When he called me ánthropos ton ageládon? That was the closest you can come to ‘cowboy.’ I am ‘man of the cows.’”

  “Well, at least that sounds a little more elegant.” I stood up. I needed to call Grandaddy, find out what the hell was going on and why he—or whomever—had triggered an alert right when we didn’t need one, though I assumed it had to do with Shemyazaz’s presence in the neighborhood. I fished in a hip pocket and snagged a phone. Nope, wrong one; I wanted the magic phone that ran on neither iOS or Android systems. Pulled that one, discovered the plain black home screen showed a bright red radioactive symbol.

  Frowning, I tapped it. A message appeared on the screen. I promptly looked at Remi. “Check your phone. Hit the red icon, if there is one, and tell me what message you see.”

  Remi did. His brows shot up and he blinked, then looked at me. “‘Danger, Will Robinson?’”

  I confirmed mine said the same. “The ring tone is from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and now this?”

  Remi shrugged. “Well, one of the explanations for Revelations is that the writers purposely framed everything in imagery specifically designed to grab the audience’s attention, to impress upon them the seriousness of the End of Days.”

  Non sequitur time. I frowned at him. “Yeah. And?”

  “Maybe using pop culture references is the kind of language that gets our attention, and impresses upon us the seriousness of the End of Days.”

  I stared at him. “That’s what you’re going with?”

  Remi’s smile was as slow as his drawl. “Makes sense, don’t it? We’re fanboys. Unless whoever sent it just happens to be a pop culture fan screwing with us.”

  For an arrested moment I considered whether celestial beings had personal preferences in music, movies, cars, booze, you name it. I mean, the Bible certainly didn’t suggest that as far as I could remember, but you never know.

  Then I shrugged it away. “Well, I’ll ask Grandaddy about that, too.” I pulled up the only contacts I had: Grandaddy, Remi, Ganji, and Lily—the Irish Goddess of Battles herself—and tapped his name. Waited a while. Whether he wouldn’t, or simply couldn’t, Grandaddy did not pick up. “Dammit.” I stuffed the phone back into my other hip pocket. Carrying two phones was going to get old fast. “I really would like some answers. I mean someone sent that Amber/Weather/Burned-Up-Angel Alert. Makes sense it would be Grandaddy.”

  Remi tilted his head in doubt, lips pursed. “Not so sure about that. He took off with that Ripper letter . . . might could be hip-deep in investigatin’ that.”

  “Then let’s go ask the magic computer.” I headed for the staircase. “That is, if it chooses to talk to us.” The device seemed to be shy, or coy, or downright pissy. And very dictatorial. Possibly, it viewed my questions about this as frivolous, just as it had when we were instructed not to use our magic credit cards for ‘frivolous expenditures.’

  Like, you know, fighting demons, screwing with the devil, saving the world. No accounting for what might be viewed as frivolous in the midst of such minor inconveniences.

  Remi followed, but for once he wasn’t singing. I was the one who had to forcibly stomp on the impulse to surrender to the Bruno Mars ‘Locked Out of Heaven’ earworm.

  But at least it wasn’t country.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Upstairs in the common room I plopped myself down in the task chair before the computer. It did not remotely surprise me that I found no indication of the manufacturer on any part of the CPU. Plain old black tower, plain black monitor, plain gray soundbar. Plus a perfectly ordinary power button on the tower, and I depressed it.

  I heard Remi’s step in the doorway behind me. He’d always been the one on the computer before. I watched it boot up. “Normal browser?”

  “Other than when it was showing us unsolicited messages all on its own, yup.” He came in all the way, pulled out one of the chairs at the table and abruptly made an inarticulate sound of utter disgust.

  I swiveled around to look at him, wondering what triggered the expression. Burned angel glop on a boot? Found him still standing, staring at the styrofoam container resting on the table.

  Oh. Oh. Blechh.

  In the midst of everything to do with a well-cooked angel, we’d forgotten about the ordinary and innocent human who had involuntarily surrendered a kidney. I hoped it had been post mortem. Ugh.

  Remi just looked disturbed. “What are we supposed to do with this thing?”

  My stomach gave a little squirm as I grimaced. I was pretty sure I’d never request boxed restaurant leftovers again. “Hell if I know.” I sucked in a breath, blew it out noisily. “I mean, we don’t even know if it’s human.”

  “Pretty sure it is.”

  “It might be a sheep’s kidney, or something.”

  “This is a demon we’re dealing with,” Remi said. “Why would he—it—send us a sheep’s kidney when it can probably drop a shitload of gen-u-wine dismembered bodies on us?”

  “Send it to the cops, then.”

  “That’s best,” Remi agreed. “But I guess we send it anonymously . . . do you really want to drive over to the closest police station and deliver a human body part?”

  I thought of my dad—former Marine, current cop—and how he might react to a couple of strangers walking in with a kidney from a woman whose body had already been found. Or from a body they hadn’t yet found. “Yeah, that would be a ‘no.’ Hell, I’ll ask the computer about that, too.” I swiveled back. “Maybe . . . I don’t know, stick it in the freezer for now? I mean, we need to preserve it for DNA. We can get a cooler pack for mailing.”

  “This in our freezer is downright disgusting,” Remi declared, but I heard the squeak of a styrofoam box catching against slick wood as he picked it up and thumped away in his boots. He came back a few minutes later and sat down at the table. “I found some of those kitchen trash bags and wrapped it up in one, stuffed it in the back of the freezer. Don’t pull it out by mistake. I ain’t eating it for dinner.”

  Oh, God. I really didn’t want to think about the kidney any more. I wanted to think about why a burned-to-cinders angel had sought us out to do pirouettes on top of a bar, sic orbs on us, and play country music on the jukebox. “Did you do anything special to bring up the magic screen?”

  “Nope. Did its own thing. All the other times I went through three different browsers to see if I could get into the deep web—deepest of the deep, I reckon—and I never could.”

  I stared at the screen, considered things. Finally shrugged. “Ask, and ye shall find.” I began checking out browsers just as Remi had.

  “Seek.”

  “Seek what?” Chrome was Chrome, as far as I could tell.

  “‘Seek, and ye shall find.’”

  I was distracted, inputting letters. “Yeah. That.”

  “The actual verse is Matthew 7:7: ‘Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.’ And then 7:8: ‘For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.’”

  I’d moved on from Chrome to Edge. “Remi?”

  “Huh.”

  “I’m not much interested in Bible verses at the moment.”

  He was silent as I got nowhere with Edge. But as I moved on to Firefox he found something to say. Or to repeat, at any rate. “You’re not much interested in Bible verses?”

  “Not really, no. I’m too busy trying to find my way into whatever this iAngel deep/dark web thing is.”

  “You’re not interested in Bible verses even though this iAngel web thing is, I reckon, actually run by angels, and coming from angels.”

  I thought that over as I stared at the perfectly ordinary browser screen that offered absolutely no answers, and chewed crookedly at my bottom lip.
“Hey, Remi?”

  “Huh.”

  “Go out, close the door, then knock on it.”

  “Come again?”

  I spun my chair to face him. “Go out, close the door. Then knock on it, come back in.”

  His expression suggested he was weighing my sanity.

  “Hey, you were the one who said it: ‘Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.’ Maybe we have to do it in physical code, or something.”

  He seemed no more convinced of my sanity but did as told. Stepped out, shut the door, then knocked, opened the door, and stepped back through. “That float your boat?”

  I turned my chair back to the computer. “‘Ask, and it shall be given you; seek and ye shall find,’” I muttered, and worked my way through every browser window asking what I felt was a perfectly straightforward question.

  Remi came up to look over my shoulder. “You’re asking who Shemyazaz is?”

  “It might be good to know details about who he is.”

  “I know who he is. Shemyazaz, Samyaza, Sahjaza—there’s a whole host of versions of his name. He was—or is, I reckon, seein’ as how he’s here among us—a Grigori. The first. Bene ha’elohi, the Sons of God, just as he said. He was first among them, and the first to fall, of the Grigori.”

  “Yeah?”

  “And the first to share forbidden knowledge when he was meant only to watch, and he had the unmitigated gall to be the first of the Grigori to lie with a human woman.”

  “The horror,” I murmured, trying for Brando’s tone. “Any other firsts? Seeking and finding, here.”

  “He was also the first to sire a child, said child being, therefore, the first Nephilim. That’s what got a whole passel of Grigori thrown down into the pit with ol’ Scratch. And Shemyazaz told us what he’s here for.”

  “To kill the devil?” I shook my head. “He’s here like all the demons are: to sow utter chaos, complete with eviscerating humans the way Jack the Ripper did, and prepare the way for Lucifer’s return. What Shemyazaz told us is probably what he thought we wanted to hear, for God knows whatever reason. He may be an angel, but he didn’t exactly strike me as particularly well-balanced.”