Angels on Fire

by Nancy A. Collins

  The Harrowing began somewhat tenuously. At first all they did was push and poke at the elohim. When it became obvious the angel was incapable of physically defending itself, the group became more aggressive, tearing at its clothes until its hated form was fully revealed.

  An imp with shaggy legs and corkscrew horns fluttered forward and spat on Joth, its fluorescent green saliva striking the angel full in the face. A pig- snouted Machinist with curving boar tusks muscled its way forward and with a squeal of devilish glee, cut loose with a stream of scalding piss that struck the elohim square in the chest. But it wasn’t until an oni the color of boiled shrimp boldly jumped forward and snatched free a handful of feathers that the angel finally flapped its wings in a belated attempt to escape, but by then there were too many hands holding it down.

  A daemon with the head of a three-horned black goat roughly caressed its prodigious member to erection while laughing at the angel’s attempts to free itself. “What’s the matter, elohim?” taunted the goat-headed Machinist. “Is our company not to your taste?” The Machinist’s laughter dissolved into raucous bleating as semen shot from its monstrous penis like water from a fire-hose. Joth coughed and spat as the vile green mess splashed its face.

  The Machinists’ screams of delight grew louder and wilder as they continued to pummel and insult the helpless angel. They struck it with clenched fists, kicked it with hooves and feet, butted it with their heads, pinched it with their talons, yanked on its hair, pulled out its feathers. They spun it around and around and pushed it back and forth as if playing a vicious game of Blind Man’s Bluff. They even knocked it to the ground and dragged it across the floor by its heels. Whichever way Joth attempted to dodge or run, the Machinists and their human attendants blocked its way. Their twisted features filled its vision, their shrieks and brays of laughter stuffed its ears.

  Joth tried to shelter itself with its wings, but it was no use. There were too many of them. It had battled imps while on Repair Patrol, but always in the company of a squadron of fellow elohim. And then the imperative was not to protect itself, but to protect the Clockwork. Confused, frightened and surrounded by an enemy it was unable to escape, Joth cried out for deliverance with a piercing cry like that of an eaglet calling to its parents for help.

  Nybbas clamped its hands over its ears and grimaced. “It’s calling the Host! Silence it! Shut it up before it’s too late!” shrieked the imp.

  One of the warlocks, driven wild by the frenzy, grabbed an empty beer bottle from the bar and smashed it against the foot-rail. Shrieking maniacally, he lunged at Joth, slashing the angel’s throat from ear to ear.

  There was a hideous wail—horrible beyond all comprehension—but it did not come from Joth. “You idiot!” Gaki screamed at the bottle-wielding warlock. “You’ve ruined everything!” The oni opened his mouth wide enough to swallow a basketball and bit the warlock’s head off at the neck, leaving the body to drop onto the floor.

  The pig-snouted daemon shrieked in pain as it staggered past Meresin, its eyes and upper torso smoldering as if doused with vitriol. The sephirah sighed and dropped its half-finished cigarette and ground it out with a swift twist of his heel. Leave it to deathlings to screw things up.

  By the time the cab reached the block where the Seventh Circle was located, Lucy had finally managed to get her shoe on her foot. She’d heard various stories about the Seventh Circle, some of them intriguing, all of them sordid. Rumor had it as a genuine no-holds-barred sex club, where the rich mingled bodily fluids with the famous, and the Beautiful People did ugly things to each other’s persons. Only now it seemed that some of them were neither beautiful not people.

  She leaned forward and tapped on the Plexiglas partition between driver and passenger. John Madonga reached over and shot the divider back. “Yes, Miss?”

  “Look, Mr. Madonga,” Lucy said. “My friend—your, um, tribesman—is in that club. He’s in trouble, and he needs help.”

  Madonga’s eyes grew serious. “Should I call the police, ma’am?”

  “No!” Ezrael interjected. “No—that shouldn’t be necessary. We just need you to wait for us to come back out. Can you do that?”

  John Madonga nodded solemnly. “Of course. We are of one blood, your friend and I.”

  “Good to hear it,” Ezrael said. “We’ll try to get in and out as fast as possible. C’mon, Lucy!”

  Lucy hesitated as she caught sight of the bouncer. “Sweet Jesus!” she whispered. “How are we supposed to get past that?”

  “Leave it to me,” replied the Muse.

  The bouncer scowled at Lucy and Ezrael as they approached the velvet ropes, holding up a webbed hand the size of a catcher’s mitt. “Members only,” Spitter growled.

  “There must be a misunderstanding,” Ezrael smiled up at the bouncer. “We’re here at the invitation of one of your members—a Mr. Meresin.”

  Spitter blinked. “Meresin?”

  “Yes, he assured us he would leave our names at the door. If you check your clipboard, I’m sure you’ll find us there—Ezrael and Lucille Bender—?”

  As the bouncer reached for the guest list, Ezrael motioned for Lucy to slide past while the daemon’s head was turned.

  Spitter turned back around, frowning down at the clipboard.

  “I don’t see your names here—” the hulking daemon looked around, a suspicious look on his face. “Hey—where’d the girl go?” The daemon dropped the clipboard, his throat sacs swelling as he bared its fangs in a fierce growl.

  Ezrael narrowly dodged the stream of venom that arced from the daemon’s mouth. It struck the wall behind the Muse, causing the bricks to smolder. Moving incredibly fast for his size, Spitter caught the front of the Muse’s shirt in his ham-sized hand.

  “You ain’t gettin’ past me, bastard,” he rumbled as he drew Ezrael towards his dripping fangs.

  Suddenly there came the sound of screams and smashing furniture from inside the club as a living wall of flesh, scales, and claws smashed its way through the front door. The stampeding club-goers knocked Spitter to the ground, trampling him underfoot.

  Ezrael pushed past the panicked daemons and witches, trying his best to avoid the bouncer’s fate. He found Lucy just inside the door, pressed against the cigarette machine, her face pale and her body trembling.

  “Are you okay?” Ezrael, asked, giving her a quick visual check. “None of them spat on you, did they?”

  “N-no,” she managed to gasp. “They—they didn’t seem to notice me. Jesus, Ez! Did you see them? They looked like something out of Bosch! And there were so many of them!”

  “Like I said—it’s a popular place. This is one of the few clubs where they don’t have to worry about keeping up appearances. You’re not going to faint on me, are you?”

  Lucy shook her head and pushed a stray lock of hair out of her hair. “M-maybe later. But I’m okay for now.”

  The interior of the Seventh Circle looked like a tornado had touched down on the dance floor. Tables were overturned, chairs toppled, stemware smashed. The club’s trendy torture equipment had been reduced to expensive kindling during the mass exodus. Lucy wrinkled her nose in distaste. The place smelled like a cross between the monkey house at the zoo and a distillery. A human body, minus its head, lay sprawled in a pool of blood near the bar. She grimaced and quickly looked away, but not before noticing that the corpse didn’t have wings. As she scanned the ruins of the club, she caught sight of the angel, cowering with its head tucked under its wing beneath a huge crystal chandelier.

  “Joth!”

  The angel lifted its head from under its wing and looked about uncertainly.

  “Ez! There he is!”

  Lucy started to go the angel’s side, but Ezrael grabbed her arm and jerked her back. “Don’t touch it!”

  “What’s the matter with you? Are you nuts? Let me go!” She tried to yank her arm free of the Muse’s grasp, but his grip tightened further.

  “I said don’t touch it!” Ezrael repeate
d, his voice hard as steel. “Look,” he said, pointing at Joth by way of explanation.

  Most of the angel’s body was glowing greenish-yellow, as if it had been splashed with day-glo paint. Lucy glanced up at the ceiling, but did not see any black-lights suspended from the lighting tracks.

  “Ez—what does this mean?”

  “Nothing good,” he replied. “Neither one of us can physically touch Joth until I can work a cleansing ritual. That will take a little time.”

  “Time you’ll never get, Muse,” said Meresin. The daemon was seated in a booth in the far corner of the bar, smoking a foul-smelling black cigarette and sipping a pink martini.

  “You bastard!” Lucy shrieked. “What did you do to him?”

  “ ‘Him’?” Meresin raised an eyebrow as he finished his drink. “Oh—you mean the elohim? I assure you, Ms. Bender, I did nothing to your precious angel. I didn’t have to. My lesser kin and their, um, companions, were all too eager to welcome Joth to our ranks. Think of it as a fraternity hazing, if you would.”

  Without taking his eyes off Meresin, Ezrael whispered in Lucy’s ear. “I need you to go over to the bar and find a bottle of white rum.”

  “You want me to fix you a drink?” she asked, baffled.

  “Just do it, okay?” Ezrael let go of Lucy’s arm and moved slowly in the direction of the daemon, all the while keeping Joth between them. “Looks like things got a little out of hand,” he said to Meresin, pointing to a wide stretch of the black floor that was now bleached white. “Somebody got a little too rough during the Harrowing, am I right?”

  “You could say someone lost their head,” Meresin smirked, flicking a half-smoked cigarette in the direction of the corpse sprawled near the bar. “They panicked when the elohim called for the Host. You know what witches and warlocks are like, Ezrael. They think its all black sabbats, orgies and icy semen. Morons! The material we have to work with nowadays is so shockingly shoddy! I never thought I’d see the day I longed for alchemists and corrupt priests! You have no idea how trying it is to work with quasi-literate headbangers, bad poets and politicians.”

  “My heart bleeds, sephirah,” Ezrael replied frostily. “But if you think you’re going to claim this sojourner as your own, you’re sadly mistaken.”

  “Oh, am I, then?” Meresin slid out of the booth with the grace of a panther. “Those are bold words indeed, Muse, considering your batting average. You’ve lost the last two of your kinsmen to the Machine. You’re getting old, Ezrael—best to stick to your white magick and hanging out at East Village coffeehouses.

  “Face it—the elohim is ours! Why don’t you and the lovely Ms. Bender simply leave while you still can? I’ll guarantee you safe passage. Come the dawn, it will be as if none of this ever happened—at least as far as the fair Lucille is concerned. Or Joth, for that matter.”

  Ezrael shook his head. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Meresin.”

  “No more talk, then,” agreed the daemon. Meresin snapped his left wrist, as if shooing away a bothersome fly, sending a tongue of black flame arching towards the Muse.

  Ezrael lifted his hands, palms outward, and a disc of blue aether appeared in mid-air, shielding him from his opponent’s fiery whip. Tendrils the color of sky wrapped themselves about the daemon’s upper body like fingers of ivy. Meresin growled throatily and flexed his muscles, causing the aetheric restraints to shatter.

  Lucy didn’t know how long Ezrael could keep Meresin busy, but something told her it wouldn’t be for long. Careful to avoid slipping in the pool of blood from the headless corpse, she made her way behind the bar, hurriedly scanning the display of liquor bottles for white rum. But as she reached for a bottle of Bacardi, a blue-gray hand with long, black nails closed about her wrist.

  “What do we have here, Nybbas?” Gaki growled, the eye in his forehead looking in the direction of its partner while the others were fixed on Lucy.

  Lucy gasped and tried to wrench herself free of the oni’s grasp, but its grip was unbreakable.

  “Looks like we got us a gatecrasher,” the imp chittered from its perch atop the bar, its pinions opening and closing like a butterfly drying its wings.

  “You know what we do with gatecrashers?” Gaki grinned, exposing a double-row of razor-sharp teeth.

  As the oni’s mouth moved closer, Lucy found herself too frightened to scream or move or even close her eyes. She wondered if this was how the mice pet shops used to feed the boa constrictor felt. Just as Gaki began to unhinge his fearsome jaws, a wind from nowhere began to blow. The imp Nybbas threw back his head, sniffing the air with alarm. Its nervous chittering turning into frantic ultrasonic pips. The oni’s third eye blinked then rolled toward the ceiling.

  “Damned sephirah—I told him this would happen!” Gaki snarled as it roughly tossed his captive aside.

  Lucy watched in amazement from where she lay sprawled on the floor as Gaki rolled himself up like a window shade, becoming a blue-gray ball of foxfire that shot through the ceiling of the club. The oni was quickly followed by its business partner, who took to the air like one of the winged monkeys from The Wizard of Oz-

  As she got back onto her feet, she saw reflected in the mirror behind the bar the reason for the daemons’ sudden departure: a portal identical to the one the seraph Nisroc had opened in her living room was now in the middle of the Seventh Circle’s dance floor.

  Meresin shrieked like an angry cat, his face knotted in consternation. “No fair summoning the seraph! No fair!”

  “I didn’t summon it, daemon,” Ezrael shouted over the howl of the rising wind. “It’s answering Joth’s call!”

  “No!” Meresin yelled. “I’m not ready!”

  As Nisroc stepped out of the portal and onto the dancefloor, the black paint coating the walls of the club began to bubble and swell, the chandelier shook like the bells on a sleigh, and the heavy tapestries draping the ceiling began to smolder.

  The seraph stood and regarded its surroundings with obvious distaste, the ophan Preil bobbing in its master’s wake, its solitary pupil expanding and contracting as it recorded the scene before them.

  “What have we here?” the seraph growled, wrinkling its muzzle in revulsion at the sight of Meresin.

  The sephirah gnashed its teeth, its mortal guise melting away like soft wax, revealing the Machinist underneath the suit. He pointed a trembling talon at Ezrael.”You may have won this round, Muse! But not by the strength of your own hand!” With an angry roar, the daemon wrapped its huge bat-like wings about its body like a cape and disappeared in a puff of brimstone.

  “Ez—is this the frying pan or the fire?” Lucy asked as she handed him the bottle of white rum.

  “Depends on how you look at it,” he replied.

  The seraph sniffed the air. “Where is the elohim called Joth? Its cry for deliverance was what drew me to this stinking hell-pit.”

  Preil shot forward like a pinball, coming to a sudden halt over where Joth lay huddled on the dance floor. “I have located the sojourner, Lord Nisroc,” the ophan announced. “However, it is heavily contaminated.”

  “I’ll take care of that, if you don’t mind,” Ezrael said, shooing it away like a bothersome horsefly.

  The Muse opened the bottle of white rum and handed it back to Lucy, then fished a small unmarked packet from his pants pocket and emptied a colorless powder into the liquor. Muttering in an unintelligible language, Ezrael took the bottle and shook it vigorously, placing a thumb over the open neck. He then took a mouthful of the clear liquor and shot it out in a fine spray over Joth, moving clockwise as he spat. Within seconds of the rum striking the angel’s body, the fluorescent green splotches began to fade. Ezrael turned to Lucy as he wiped the rum dripping from his lips and chin with the back of his hand.

  “It’s okay—you can touch Joth now.”

  Lucy smiled with relief and knelt beside the dazed angel. “Joth? Joth, are you okay? It’s me.”

  Joth lifted its head from under its wing. “Lucy? Meresi
n said you would be here, but you weren’t.”

  “He was lying to you,” she said, smoothing Joth’s hair out of its face. “But now I am here. I’ve come to take you back home.”

  “No, deathling,” growled Nisroc, stepping forward. “That is what I have come to do. The elohim called out for Deliverance, and the Host has answered.”

  “And we got here first, Nisroc,” Ezrael said sharply.

  The seraph turned to fix Ezrael with a withering glance, its brass claws fingering its mane of liquid fire. “Do I know you, wizard?”

  “I am Ezrael, late of the elohim, once and future servant of the Clockwork.”

  “You are out of your league, Muse,” Nisroc warned the former angel. “The elohim cried for Deliverance, and its cry was heard. If one of the Sephiroth flees at the sight of me, what chance have you and your magics?”

  “You want to try me and find out?” Ezrael replied, squaring his shoulders. “I’m no longer a worker drone without will or thought of my own, Nisroc. I stood against the Horde to protect Joth, and I’ll stand against the Host just as readily.”

  “Apostate!” shrieked Preil, wrapping its tentacles about Ezrael’s neck and upper torso, stinging him like a jellyfish. Ezrael cried out in pain, clawing at the ophan, but was unable to wrench free of its grip.

  “Let go of him, you—you—eyeball!” Lucy shouted angrily. She looked around for a weapon and spotted one of the cricket bats used for ‘disciplining’ certain members of the Seventh Circle’s clientele. She swung at Preil and connected solidly, sending the ophan flying end-over-end across the room until it smashed into the mirror behind the bar.

  Before she could check to see if Ezrael was okay, Lucy found herself wrapped in a blanket of flame. The fire was all over her, licking at her arms, her legs, and her hair. She swatted at it as if she beset by a swarm of bees, but it was no use. The flames were so cold—colder than ice—yet she burned—burned without end or relief. She could see Joth through the curtain of flame, its brow furrowed in confusion, as it watched her burn. The look on the angel’s face was exactly the same as when it stood by and watched Nevin beat her.