by Aya DeAniege
“In the middle of a hallway?” I snapped.
“No, silly, in the hot tub. Grace is headed that way with whatever alcohol she can carry.”
“I’m not a woman,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter, he was a dick. We can’t, I mean there aren’t… are you going to make me have this debate now, Ralph?”
“Raphael,” I snapped. “All through history, I have been Raphael, but they hear one human refer to vomiting as ralphing, and suddenly I’m Ralph. No. My name is Raphael, and I am an angel of the Lord!”
“Did… did your voice just…?”
“Just what?”
“Just do the arc-angel-fear-my-wrath thing?”
“No.”
“Really? Because it sounded like it did.”
“No, how could it? None of us is proper arc anymore,” I said.
Lilly eyed me suspiciously. She made a face that strongly implied that she didn’t believe me, then made an annoyed, but agreeing sound.
“If you’re Raphael, I want to be Lillith again. Fear my cunt, bitches.”
“All men fear your cunt. They don’t know what to do with a woman who doesn’t spread her legs for any man.”
She smiled at me. “Come on, Raphael. Grace has a lot of alcohol, and none of us has anywhere to be for a few days.”
As Ralph left, I realized that everyone who had been staying the night was present. No one that we wouldn’t want knowing our secrets, but more than Sam would be comfortable having witnessed such a fight.
Ralph and Lilly were friends, sort of, in a confused, greyish mess. By fighting with Ralph, I would be seen as somehow fighting with Lilly, which would cause a problem with Grace. Even if Sam weren’t already going to be upset because guests had seen that little fight, I’d hear it because Grace was upset because Lilly was upset because Ralph was upset.
And I don’t think I should ever get in trouble for something I did twice removed from the one demanding I be punished.
Sam turned at my look toward the hallway. He glanced to the hallway and then over the room.
Several mortals had witnessed the fight as well. A few of them swayed, clearly drunk as could be. All they had seen was a fight between two brothers, and one who crossed a line. They’d think I was strange. They might stop talking to me.
But that was fine with me.
“Go,” Sam said to the guests who were staring openly.
The guests filed out, but for Lilly, who stood stubbornly by Grace’s side. After a moment of silence, Lilly marched up to me and slapped me across the face. My cheek stung a prickling sensation that turned to a burn as she clenched her hands at her sides and glared at me.
“You should be ashamed of yourself. Claiming to represent Heaven and behaving like that? For shame.”
She was gone before I could protest. Grace, behind Sam, just gave her head a slow shake and then left. Leaving Sam, Gabe, and me in the room alone.
“They’re going to drink the alcohol and probably do something foolish. Gabe, would you go keep an eye on them?”
Having someone watch them was hardly necessary. Sam was merely giving Gabe an excuse to leave the room without making it seem like Gabe might be running away.
“I’d rather be there than here,” Gabe growled, slipping his hands into his pockets before he considered me for the briefest of moments. He let out a sighed and gave his head a shake. “Humans give enough conflicting messages about the beliefs of Father without you muddling it up more.”
“Muddling more?” I protested.
But he left without explaining what he meant, which left me with Sam. He thrust his fingers through his thick hair and considered me, fingers still tangled in his hair.
Over the past four years, lines had appeared at the corners of his eyes. He was a little rounder than he had been before. Something about happy men meant that they put on weight, even when they worked out to keep in shape. Sam could still take any of us down, or a demon if one were to be so bold.
But he was rounder, softer than he had been before meeting Grace. The edge to his temper was no longer a burning rage, barely contained by the physical flesh he had chosen to house himself within. The old Sam would have done something terrible to me for that fight. If there hadn’t been witnesses, he would have taken me to the astral plane and ripped into me in a literal sense.
Even if he had softened on all sides, he was still our leader.
“We go over this every century,” Sam said. “This fight of yours has got to stop. Grace is here now. She’s talking about adoption. We can’t have children in the house with you two attacking one another over the smallest thing. Frankly, Mike, you’re, damn it I don’t even know how to say it. You’re fighting. But you’re not fighting him. You’re fighting something else, and I don’t know why or what. It’s something you have to figure out and soon. Before it rips the entire house apart.”
I stared mutely at him for a moment, knowing that he expected me to say something, but not wanting to dig myself a bigger hole. The silence drew out as he stood there expectantly, wanting me to speak up for myself.
“I’m not fighting anything,” I said.
Sam’s eyebrows raised. He slipped his hands into his pockets and considered me carefully before he sighed out.
“Really? Because what you did looked to everyone, myself included, as very homophobic.”
I shook my head and raised my hands away from my sides.
I had done the opposite of homophobic, surely. I had touched him. He was the one who had lashed out at me, not the other way around.
“I kissed him, how am I the homophobe? He’s the one who hit me for it.”
“Why did you kiss him?” Sam asked.
Silence followed the question because I didn’t have an answer for him. It had been an impulsive motion, one that I hadn’t thought about before I did it. In doing it, I had found a feeling, as if that might end the fight. It had ended the fight, but not quite in the way I had hoped.
Maybe it was because his pleasure had soaked into me on the astral plane, and I had reacted to it. Soaking in emotion there could affect our decisions in the physical plane. Anyone who said otherwise was telling themselves tales to make themselves feel better.
Never before had I reacted so strongly to an emotion before. Not even while soaked in Sam’s rage.
“You kissed him, Michael,” Sam said pointedly.
As if that explained why I was a homophobe for doing it, I didn’t understand how that worked, so I shrugged and shook my head.
“I know that. I was there.”
“Then you called him a human, little better than a possessed human.”
Again, he spoke as if that explained everything. I didn’t get it. I hadn’t done anything wrong. If Ralph was acting like he was possessed, it wasn’t my fault. I was simply calling it like it was.
“I was there,” I protested.
And I hadn’t done anything wrong.
“So why would you do that?” Sam asked.
Again, I struggled to find an answer.
I didn’t want to admit to him that I had soaked in Raphael’s emotion. I knew better than to do something so stupid. We kept our wings out of humans and held our being out of human emotion. That was the way it was. Emotion didn’t pool like that usually, it took a strong emotion, or a Heavenly Host, to pull it off.
“Michael, damn it. Ralph’s never… you can’t tease him like that. He’s the most fluid of us all. He’s the only one who still sees to men in a personal way. He’s probably a xer or ziddle, or whatever in the hell those people call themselves. You can’t treat him like he’s some flamboyant man.”
And you can’t call him a xer or a ziddle.
My annoyance flared because ‘ziddle’ was clearly derogatory and Sam should have known better. He had always been a little rougher, a bit more stubborn than the rest of us.
But he lectured me on being respectful of Ralph and then talked about him like that.
“He is a flamboya
nt man,” I countered
“He’s not. He’s an angel of the Lord and as such has no gender. He just happens to possess a penis that he likes to use because it’s easier to pleasure himself with that rather than a vagina. With the advent of the vibrator, he might change flesh over to a woman. He’s already broached the subject. Frankly, at this point, if he wants to change, you’ll be changing with him.”
“What? I’m comfortable in my flesh, and I’m not the one who did gay porn for three years, so why am I the one being punished for it?”
“You aren’t being punished for doing gay porn, and neither is he. He saved a lot of humans with what he did. And it’s weird, and I don’t understand how it worked, but it worked, and that’s the point.”
“Then why do I have to change?”
“Because you’re comfortable in your skin. We aren’t males, Michael. We will be returning to Heaven, and there is no room up there for angels who insist on dick measuring contests. We became male because it was easier to move through the mortal world, but sex and gender are human constructs. If I had my way, at this point, you’d be a hermaphrodite of some sort. You’re just lucky we wrote it into the rules that we can’t do that because it might have resulted in one of us being killed in public and we wanted to avoid that whole thing. Otherwise? Yes, I’d do it.”
Grace walked back in with a wicker basket overflowing with bottles of alcohol. It had several bottles of wine, two bottles of vodka, one of scotch, and three that were brands that I didn’t recognize. She dropped the basket at Sam’s feet with a heavy thump, clearly irritated still.
The moment she walked in, her eyes locked with mine, and she didn’t look away, even after dropping the basket at Sam’s feet. She glowered at me, casting Sam one look before she folded her arms and glared back at me again.
“Lilly told me to drop it, but I’m not going to,” Grace snapped, her face turning toward Sam for a moment before she refocused on me.
Sam flinched, almost winced, then slipped his hands back into his pockets and just stared at me. It was a new look, one that he had taken on over the past two years. That look meant that Grace was upset and one of us was going to fix it.
Or else.
He had added a great many expressions to his repertoire since meeting Grace. We had learned what each meant through trial and error, so we knew what the ‘or else’ was with intimate detail.
“What the hell is your problem Michael? Why are you picking on Raphael?”
“Ralph always blows things out of proportion,” I protested.
“Raphael,” Grace snapped. “Also, Lilly is Lillith now, and we’re just to shut up and deal with it. Anyone says otherwise, and I’ll smack them.”
Sam and I shared a look around Grace. Neither of us was certain where that had come from, but it was probably a declaration from Raphael and a snarky response from Lillith. She always just ran with whatever he said like they were old friends and he was the leader of their little group.
“Fair enough,” Sam said with very little resistance.
“Is it true that you boys changed his name to Ralph after centuries of Raphael because someone had compared his name to vomit?” Grace said, turning on Sam.
Whose eyes went just a little wider as he kept his attention on me. That was a new sort of look, one I hadn’t seen on Sam’s face before but I had seen on the faces of several desperate men. He knew he was trouble and was likely hoping that I would take all the blame for it.
Ralph’s nickname wasn’t my fault, but if it would keep me from being skinned alive, I’d take the blame this one time.
“Yes,” I said. “It was a joke. The rest of us had nicknames. He was the only holdout.”
“He’s your baby brother. You don’t do that to your baby brother!”
“We aren’t brothers!” I protested.
A stunned silence followed my words. She just stared at me. He looked surprised that I shouted it at such a loud volume. Even to my ears, my protest sounded desperate in nature.
Sam turned to Grace in that silence, as if judging her reaction.
“That’s really obvious to everyone,” Grace said with a nod of her head. “You’re the ones insisting on being called brothers and claiming you were all adopted by the same man. You’ve got twisted senses of humours is all I’m going to say on that topic. But if you aren’t brothers, then you need to change your public image. You can’t be kissing a man you claim is your brother. Humans are really understanding of a lot of stuff, but incest is not one of them.”
“We’re only still living here because we’re making our plans to move,” I said. “It’s tough since Sam’s made a name and a face for himself, but he won’t change flesh.”
“This flesh is staying, because this is the flesh that I just fucking married,” Grace snapped, jabbing a finger at Sam, then at me in an accusing manner. “And he’s not changing gender.” She turned to Sam. “I’m sorry, I love you, Sam, but I can’t be sexually involved with a woman and sex in the relationship is important to me.”
Sam made a motion to Grace and then looked at me as if that was somehow the law. As if whatever Grace wanted or said, she got. That was not how we made decisions. Sam might have the final say on a few things or might dole out punishment, but we voted otherwise.
A mortal woman, even if she was grace incarnate, didn’t make our decisions for us.
“Stop picking on Raphael,” Grace snapped at me. “I don’t need to be drinking when I feel sick already. I’m already going to be puking in the morning from the little bit of wine, and now it’s more alcohol because you went and kissed him and didn’t follow it through. Everyone but you knows that you get hard for him, you know that, right?”
“Like you don’t have a choice?” I asked in response.
Grace ignored my comment. Every line of her tense as she turned to Sam. She snatched up the basket, scowled at me and then jabbed a finger right at my face.
“Fix this.”
I opened my mouth to protest but was unable to find my voice as she marched out of the room. I turned to Sam, who was considering me carefully.
He hadn’t even tried to help me out, just allowed her to steamroll right over me and everything I might have to say to defend myself. When I shook my head at him in question, he seemed to shrug at me.
“I think she’s right,” Sam said. “I mean, we all know he likes you, but if you like him and you’re a homophobe, that’d explain why you’re such a dick all the time.”
Suddenly we were back to that topic of conversation. I sighed out through my nose, already tired of the argument.
“I am not a homophobe, nor am I a dick. I support all sexualities of consenting peoples.”
“It doesn’t seem like it. You need to sort that out. Just bang him and get it out of your system.”
“No, Sera, Sera, Sam,” I said. “I’m interested in Sera.”
I didn’t understand how Sam had forgotten about her so quickly. Even through the fight and Grace taking a strip off me, Sera had been there at the back of my mind. Sam acted like it was nothing at all. Like she was just some kind of stripper that I had randomly picked up somewhere.
Like I did that often.
Sam seemed to consider my words. Then he gave a shake of his head.
“I’m sorry, are you saying that you, the self-professed unsullied one, wants to bang a chick?”
“Not bang her,” I said. “She’s…” I struggled. “When you met Grace, how did you know? I mean, how did you know that she was your one? That she was your grace?”
“Do you not remember at all?” Sam asked. “I didn’t know. None of us knew. It took us so long to figure it out that we almost lost her, and even then I didn’t know she was my grace until it all happened and was done with. Remember?”
Barely. Grace wasn’t mine was all that mattered. We had stopped Baal from escaping into the physical plane. A building had exploded. That was all that I remembered. The rest was all just filler, snags of human life that I
couldn’t spend too much time on. Otherwise I would be dragged down into the darkness as I had watched my brothers be dragged throughout the ages.
Just because human souls lived on, didn’t mean that we could sit back and watch them die without it affecting us. We wouldn’t see that human again until we earned our way back into Heaven, and we might never earn that golden ticket.
“Yes, but before you knew, you were into her, you were definitely into her.”
Sam shrugged. “That was just the way it happened. You guys were supposed to do it, but it ended up being me. There wasn’t any flashing neon sign, no way to tell for certain. It just happened.”
“I think Sera is mine. For me. I’ve never…”
“Almost slept with a woman before?” Sam asked.
“Exactly,” I said.
“That’s not true at all. You have a bizarre view of the past ten thousand years. If you want to lie to yourself, then keep on doing that, but you fool no one. You’ve had sex with women before. You just haven’t had an actual emotional connection. The only virgin still among us is Ralph.”
“You two have slept together plenty of times.”
“Sleeping together is different from sex,” Sam said. “Ralph has always been more sensitive than the rest of us. He’s a healer, not a fighter. He’s not built to be away from Heaven for so long. So, sometimes he spends the night with me because he can’t face another night alone. For some damned reason, you think that makes him weak.”
“He needs constant support.”
“Yes, and who did Father create to be the protector of all? Hm? Wasn’t me, that’s not my job. I’m here to lead and make the hard decisions. I’m here as the final line of defence. Gabe’s only job is to herald the apocalypse. Ralph’s job is to heal the world. So. Whose job is to protect everyone?”
I looked away, not wanting to answer. We all knew who the protector was, who the leader of Heaven’s armies was to be if we went to war. Not Samael, he was our leader, but he wasn’t meant to take to a battlefield the same way I was. He could, and he would. We had all been created to protect Heaven but in different ways.
“Whose job is it, Michael?” Sam asked again.
