by Danae Ayusso
“Bottoms up,” I mumbled and broke the seal along the top of the vial and a little wisp of black smoke danced into the air. Once it cleared, I held my breath and threw my head back, emptying the glass vial’s contents down my throat while desperately trying to avoid my tongue.
My body started shaking the moment the disgusting liquid entered my system, and it quickly absorbed into the soft tissue lining my throat, lungs and heart before it could reach my stomach. The liquid quickly broke down into smaller particles that ripped through my system, attaching themselves to my blood platelets for faster delivery. Violently my body convulsed—that wasn’t entirely normal—and it heated up as if I were on fire. Images flashed in my mind as if I were experiencing them firsthand: a father leading the congregation; a man and woman holding hands in the park; Coney Island; a man weeding at the base of the statue of liberty.
Thousands, tens of thousands of images flooded my mind and I couldn’t make sense of them. Either someone was looking for a promotion and compiled way too much information, or something was wrong. Tears flooded my eyes and the force of the convulsions ripping through my body knocked me backwards off of the bench. I choked and gasped, desperately trying to draw breath but it felt as if I was being choked—that wasn’t normal in the least. Then my view of the trees above me was eclipsed by a darkened shadow that blocked out my view of everything.
Going down the rabbit hole was an understatement.
If it was someone trying to mug me, I was so kicking some ass and pumping someone full of lead. You don’t mess with a demon and her Prada bag.
As quick as the darkness appeared, it seemingly disappeared again. And by the time I was finished convulsing, it was completely dark out, the Cloisters was closed, I had stained the back of my blouse and pants, and snapped one of my high heels off. Upper Management was so going to pay my dry cleaning bill and buy me some new shoes. This was Dolce and Gabbana with Badgley Mischka!
Goddamn it. I hate my job.
I pulled my cell phone out and called dispatch.
“Handle?” a nasal voice asked after the line picked up on the first ring.
“Zion,” I growled, eying my broken shoe. “Delta, Echo, Mike, Oscar, November, Whiskey, Oscar, Mike, Alpha, November.”
The loud typing of her clawed fingers on the keyboard made me long to reach through the phone and strangle her. “What is the problem, Agent?”
“Well, for starters you fuckers owe me a pair of new shoes and some dry cleaning.”
I didn’t need to see her face to know that she was smirking—dispatch was full of wannabe repo men. “You know that Upper Management and Central Hub are not responsible for any damaged, lost, misplaced, or destroyed personal items. You are considered a sub-contractor under the terms of your agreement. Is there anything else?”
Your head on a platter, you snobby bitch! Ugh, I hate these people!
“Something is wrong,” I mumbled after I pulled my blouse up and looked at my side. “I downloaded and it... I don’t know what it did, but my batch is only reading six repos. I was told that there was a top priority in this batch, but I’m not seeing or sensing it.”
That was putting it mildly. It felt as if someone threw my head in a blender and hit purée.
“Hold,” she said; she didn’t sound too happy about having to work.
I pulled my broken shoe off then dusted myself off.
“Agent,” she scoffed, “there is a high priority in your batch, but it has not been authorized as of yet. Collect the others in your batch, and by then the formalities will be downloaded to you. Do you understand?”
Before I could answer, she hung up.
“Bitch,” I hissed at the phone before tossing it in my purse.
This just turned into one of the worst night of my surface life. And to think that offering Volac the opportunity to grab my tits wasn’t the worst thing that could have happen that day.
“Yeah, not even close.”
How in the hell did I get an unassigned repo?
That was suicide and a clerical err waiting to happen. I had never had one like that before, but I had heard of them happening before. Usually it meant that the paperwork was held up in Contract Confirmation or a pending arrangement was being brokered. It wasn’t that bad and usually they were like any other repo, however this one was a high priority repo so that wasn’t making sense in the least.
For obvious reasons that wasn’t giving me a warm fuzzy feeling inside.
Slowly I limped halfway down the block before I got pissed and decided barefooted was better than breaking my other heel.
“Wait, how did I get in Edom?” I mumbled, looking around. “I was in Eden when I started down the rabbit hole but this sure in the Hell isn’t Eden.”
I had never accidently shifted spectrums before so that was concerning. But not nearly as concerning as what was going on. Not that I actually knew what was going on, but that little voice in the back of my head was telling me that I was in trouble and that I picked the wrong year to quit drinking.
Before I stepped out of the shadows, I shifted over into Eden—I lived in the human spectrum, it was less nerve-racking and I was less likely to be on the receiving end of some pissed off loved one of a repoed soul’s wrath. It had happened before. Not to me, but to a couple repo men I knew; it’s another lovely perk of the job.
A few blocks from Mother Cabrini Convent on Fort Washington Avenue, my side started to heat up—the first sign that an intended repo was in the vicinity—and my head started to swim with images: candles, weeping statues with blood streaking down their smooth marble cheeks, stained glass, swinging rosaries, black habits, incense, white collared-black shirts, weeping families, coffins, bibles...
I shook my head, trying to clear the ungodly jumble of crap flooding it.
When my vision cleared, I looked up at the small cathedral and groaned. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
I could honestly say in my more than six-hundred years of repoing souls, that I had never repoed a human priest in church before. It was a first and would prove to be interesting, not that I was completely sure it was legal. If he ran, I was just going to shoot him in the back of the head and leave it at that. I wasn’t not in the mood for runners.
Slowly I took the steps to the large, uninviting, wood and steel riveted doors, and held my breath as I wrapped my hand around the iron handle and pulled it open.
“Please don’t rebound me. Please don’t rebound me,” I chanted over and over under my breath. Holy places of man were off limits to demons unless it was a demon based dark religion. It stemmed from those possessed priests forcing people to drink the Kool Aid fiasco—believe it or not, that type of shit happened more often than one would think; it just wasn’t always Kool Aid.
I waved my hand inside the threshold, making sure that I wasn’t going to be rebounded or incinerated—nothing sucked more than a one way ticket back to Hell—and thankfully nothing happened.
“Okay, now what?” I whispered to myself, trying to figure out how to do this exactly.
“Can I help you with something, my child?”
I jumped, startled, and spun around to face the young man smiling at me. The faint white glow around him told me all I needed to know; this soul was about to be repoed.
“Father O’Malley?” I reluctantly asked then cringed.
“Aye, is there something I can help ye with?”
Before I could say anything, someone pulled me back from of the entrance and slammed me against the wall.
“Never mind her, Father,” a deep, raspy voice growled. “She is just confused.”
“Very well. All are welcomed for evening mass,” Father O’Malley said then nodded in passing and headed inside the church.
Suddenly the doors slammed shut on their own.
“What in the...” I started to ask, reaching for the doors when I was slammed against the wall again.
The man, correction, angel, lowered his face to mine and growled
under his breath. “What do you think you are doing here?” he demanded.
Disgusting angels.
I tried to shove him back off of me but he was unmoving stone of shirtless muscle, black canvas pants, and bare feet.
Why does this seem familiar to me?
“I’m here to confess some sins and maybe get lucky in the confessional,” I venomously informed him.
“I will not ask again,” he said in a voice so low and menacing that I shivered in fear—or I was turned on, sometimes it was hard to tell the two apart.
“My job, asshole,” I shot back. “Get off of me before I go medieval on your ass.”
That wasn’t something I said every day.
His large black and gold eyes burned into mine as if he’s trying to read my mind or something.
Stupid angel, he should know better than to try to read a demon. Men, ha!
“I said let go of me,” I snarled.
In a blur of movement, an angelic dagger was pressed against my throat, forcing me up on my tippy toes, and his free hand jerked my blouse up.
“What in the hell are you doing?” I demanded and he shushed me. “And at a church nonetheless!” I continued, simply to piss him off even more. “And they have the audacity to call me a demon. That’s hypocritical and complete bullshit.”
The angel’s eyes flickered down to my exposed midsection and his head titled to the side. Carefully he read each name, and as his eyes passed over them, the tattooing heated up and burned slightly.
That wasn’t normal in the least.
The blade disappeared and he stepped back. “You are on a job,” he whispered.
“No shit, that’s what I just said!” I flipped my hair over my shoulder, and held my head high as I adjusted my blouse; that one was going in the garbage since there was no saving it now that it had angel germs on it. “Aren’t you a little old to be an altar boy?” I smirked.
He slammed me into the wall again—goddamn it, where can I get speed like that?—and got in my face. “You are standing on the steps of a house of the Lord, of the Heavenly Father, of my father, so you will watch your tongue or I will assist you with that task. Do you understand or is that beyond your limited cognize?”
Asshole.
“If you weren’t such a dickweed, I would suggest something to keep your tongue preoccupied with,” I said. “But I get the feeling that you only take and never give.” I smirked when his head tilted to the side as he obviously fought to keep from striking me. “What’s wrong, winged pig, cat got your tongue? Or are you thinking about the other kitty that it wants to play with it?” I curled my tongue at him and cocked an eyebrow.
His top lip snarled, pulling upward, revealing his perfect white teeth—they were nearly as nice as mine—and the amber in his eyes flared to burning gold, consuming the black completely. They burned with such intensity that it made me want to run, but I held my ground.
“You cannot enter,” he informed me in that same annoying level tone then disappeared.
I’ll admit, that wasn’t the smartest thing I had done all day, it even surpassed offering Volac to feel me up at the holiday party, but there was something about the annoying angel that made me want to push his buttons, to see how damn far I could push him before he pushed, or hit, back. In addition to having to deal with an annoying angel and an open contract lingering in limbo with my batch that could cost me my soul, now I had to repo a human soul...a Catholic priest at that, in the middle of church, in Eden with a pissed off angel bible thumping ass-clown breathing down my neck. Not to mention, I ruined my outfit and broke the heel off of one of my favorite shoes.
This has officially been one of the worst days I’ve had in centuries.
I really should have stayed in bed.
I looked from the church to the sidewalk below and back again.
No. I’m not going to let some stupid angel tell me what I can and can’t do. No man tells me what to do anymore. I am woman, hear me roar...seriously, no more pie on an empty stomach.
I wrapped my hands around both iron handles and pulled the large wooden doors open like a bitch on a mission, because let’s face it, I was on a mission and I was a bitch, then stormed into the chapel as if I owned the place.
Thankfully my body didn’t go flying across the world from being rebounded, and I looked around for the contact. The place wasn’t large and it was easy to find him, but for some reason I was suddenly apprehensive about repoing this particular contract. The chapel was made up of ten rows of dark wood pews which split the room in half, a stone walkway marked the nave and lead to the bema where the altar was in the back, illuminated by the wall of stained glass behind it. A couple dozen nuns took up the first three rows on the left, a handful of patrons—human and seraphim—were scattered along the pews on the right. My appointment was slowly walking up to the podium in the center of the bema. I stayed back in the narthex, trying to stay under the angels’ radars—I suddenly didn’t have the urge to singlehandedly start a goddamn war over something as frivolous as a human soul or my perfect repo record—and entertained myself.
“Let us pray,” Father O’Malley started right away and I snarled—I hated prayers. “Deus meus, cum sis omnipotens, infinite misericors et fidelis, spero Te mihi daturum, ob merita Iesu Christi, vitam aeternam et gratias necessarias ad eam consequendam, quam Tu promisisti iis qui bona opera facient, quemadmodum, Te adiuvante, facere constituo.” He sighed then looked up to where I was standing, “Amen.”
Sonuvabitch, he knows why I’m here.
I swear to the Dark Mother, if he runs I’m going to unload both Precious and Persuader into his ass and not think twice about it! I’m not in the mood to run, and I’m really not in the mood for games tonight.
“And it is those sins that we must face,” Father O’Malley continued, turning his attention to the gathered congregation. “If we want our heavenly father’s forgiveness, we must first forgive ourselves and then, and only then, will then heavenly father forgive us as well, and his sentiment of forgiveness will flood our hearts and lessen the burden on our souls.”
Um…so he’s not running?
I’m confused, I mentally whined. It wasn’t often that someone was so accepting of dying, especially a human.
Huh, I must be more terrifying than I thought. Cool!
While Father O’Soon-to-be-dead rambled on about forgiveness—I was rather confident that he did something really bad—and how everything happened for a reason and whatever else Catholics rambled about, I entertained myself in the back of the narthex. I stepped over to the freestanding font filled with holy water and smirked as I stuck my finger in the center of the smooth surface. The moment my finger pierced the water, it started to bubble and smoke rose into the air.
“That is a sin.”
I looked up then batted my lashes at the irritable barefooted angel that suddenly appeared across from the font. “No, what’s a sin is this,” I said and the bubbling water turned to blood and started violently splashing from the font, covering the floor in the thick, crimson substance.
“Stop desecrating my father’s home,” he said in that menacing, level tone of his.
“Blow me,” I said loudly, causing everyone to turn and look at us. “If your daddy has a problem with it then he’d stop me.”
The angel glared at me.
And of course that was an open invitation to continue.
“Oh yeah, that’s right,” I mused. “You’re daddy doesn’t live here anymore. Tell me, how many eons has it been since daddy-dearest graced the earth, or the heavens for that matter?”
He continued to glare.
“What are you going to do about it, winged pig?” Now I’m just being a total bitch, but in all fairness, I had a really shitty day. “Kick my ass in a spectrum filled with witnesses that would take it as a divine sign from their precious god or the first sign of the apocalypse? The last time something like that happened it took Upper Management on both sides to fix it. The angels just do
n’t know when to shut the fuck up and accept that their deadbeat dad is never coming home. Come to grips with it, everyone else has,” I venomously informed him.
We stood glaring at each other, neither conceding nor backing down. The entire font was empty, and blood covered the floor of the narthex. The candles in the votives had extinguished one by one—that trick my master taught me after one too many bottles of wine—and the entire floor of the church was veiled a thick blanket of rolling fog. Even the air had taken on a burnt toast smell...that could have been because I felt as if I was having a stroke, but I wasn’t going to rule out the angel was somehow doing it. And the fact that I thought, for a passing moment, that the irate, bossy, prick angel was kind of hot for a holier than holy winged pig; lean muscle, tan, shaved head with a soft sprouting of black hair, large burning black and gold eyes, defined features, long arms and hands, slender fingers that looked as if they knew how to reach all the right spots…
Yes, I was having a stroke; there was no other explanation.
“Is there a problem?” Father O’Malley whispered.
I didn’t take my eyes off of the seething angel.
“You know why I’m here?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said but the angel wasn’t surprised.
“Have you done what you needed to do, or do you have some unfinished business that you need to see to?” I asked then turned to the priest.
Father O’Malley appeared as confused as the angel looking at me with his head tilted to the side, eyes no longer burning with rage. “Yes, for the most part,” he said.
“If I let you finish your sermon and say your goodbyes, are you going to run?” I asked with a heavy sigh for resignation. The blood disappeared from the floor, the font was suddenly filled with holy water again, the candles in the votives were burning low, and the fog separated and retreated to the walls of the chapel, disappearing in the stone. Obviously I was losing my edge in my old age. A century ago I would have never asked that or even offered it. No, I wouldn’t even have entertained the asinine notion in my head! Either I was losing my edge or I was broken.
