A plan formed in my head.
I still remembered the target’s address, even though the orders sheet had gone blank. Archimedes! I could find Archie. I could make him shelter us until I could glue Jeff back together. And then I could find out what the hell was going on here.
Jeff had bled so much he was too slippery to carry. At the base of the cemetery wall, a quarter mile away from the gate and its scary female mortals, I laid him down on the grass. Laying my hands on his leg, I concentrated until I felt his wound close and the flow of blood stop. He looked awfully pale, even for a white-on-rice angel. I bit my lip and looked up at the Chicago night sky.
The colored sparks had stopped bursting overhead. Clouds hid the stars. The clouds were faintly orange, as if they reflected hellfire, but I knew it was just streetlights. What had become of the field if their very skies looked like the Regional Office’s?
Don’t die, Jeff. I looked back at his still form. You and I may be the only ones left.
I shook off the mood and tried to remember Archie’s address. It should be very near—like, on the other side of this wall.
Jeff groaned.
I sighed and hoisted him to my shoulder again. Then, with no sinister grace whatsoever, I flew over the cemetery wall.
Keek had hysterics. She told the cop someone was in the cemetery. Of course he shone his flashlight through the bars of the gate. Of course there was nothing to see. She kept trying to convince him that a dark patch twenty feet into the driveway was blood, and he kept telling her to go home and sleep it off.
I tugged at her arm until she came away with me. The cop got in his squad car and rolled on. The woman and her angel had disappeared from the car hood, which was badly smashed in. The other woman and her demon had left the street, although there was an impressive dent in the asphalt where he had fallen.
“Raining men,” I said, bemused.
Keek wouldn’t come inside with me. She was crying so hard, her makeup was all over her face. “He’s out there! He’s bleeding! He’s hurt! I can’t just go to bed! I have to find him! I have to help him! He’s mine! Oh God, Mella, I have to find him!”
I tried to calm her down. “He has Mutt helping him,” I said.
“Mutt?”
“The demon.”
“There’s a comfort!” Keek howled, and laughed wildly. “A demon is taking care of him!”
“I don’t think he’ll hurt him,” I said, but I doubt she heard me. “Come back to the apartment. They’re gone.”
“He’s out there,” she said stubbornly. “I have to look for him.” She looked demented and lost. She still wore her jammies. Clearly she was ready to go on shikari right this minute.
I gave up. Keek lived a risky lifestyle, to say the least. Many was the time she had come home in torn clothes. Tonight, probably even a mugger would take one look at her and seek less crazy prey.
“Be careful, will you?” I said.
Off she went, half-jogging, half-staggering down Ravenswood like a lunatic, looking into windows and cars and watching the sky.
I shuffled back to our apartment in my nightie and Crocs. I had a lot to think about.
Jeff was dead weight on my shoulder. I had to keep stopping on rooftops to shift him. When I thought we were close to our destination, I pulled out my orders sheet in the vain hope that information might have reappeared on it.
Nope.
The angel moaned. On inspiration, I unsnapped his fanny pack and fished out his orders sheet. There was his name, Jioffriel, faintly circled in pencil.
But as I watched, Jeff’s name faded and vanished.
Even the pencil mark disappeared.
Every hair on my back rose up and quivered.
I checked my own orders sheet again.
My own name was gone.
I stared wildly around me at the Chicago night. Comfortingly hellish-orange streetlight showed me low rooftops—houses, two-flat and four-flat apartment buildings, cars parked silent on the narrow streets in front of them, and the railroad tracks running silvery across from my rooftop.
Of the Regional Office’s helo, of the Home Office’s gooney bird, of the rest of the Joint Task Force, the now-helpless fallen demons and angels, and of the mortal women who had seized them, vampirized them, and presumably dragged them into the dark lairs lining the streets, I saw no sign.
Now I was seriously disturbed. We had all just been erased. We couldn’t even go back, because our offices had forgotten us—personnel file, service record, even disciplinary green sheets—gone. My heart stuttered in my chest. What could wipe the entire Joint Task Force off the computer system? Only the CEO up in the Home Office had that kind of unilateral power.
Or a programmer, said my suspicious nature.
But why would anybody want to erase the records of fifty angels and fifty demons?
Jioffriel moaned again, fainter this time.
Shit, if he croaked on me, I’d be alone out here. Alone with all those vampire women, who had no fear of us.
Thinking of my close call at the cemetery gate, I shivered. That blonde with her billowy white robe, the perfume in her hair, and, when she opened her mouth to breathe my name, her midnight-black teeth.
Why had I told this dope my name in the cemetery? He’d just blurted it right out, and the vampire blonde picked it up, bang.
She was quick.
She might even now be on our trail.
I forced myself to slow down and think.
I had no clothes, no food, and whatever money the Regional Office had put in my fanny pack. I checked. No money. I had a credit card, but the space for a name on that was blank, too, which gave me another shiver.
That left my original plan to force Archie to shelter us. I hoisted the angel to my shoulder and coasted clumsily down to the sidewalk, where I could check the address. Yup. Archie should be right…next…door.
I dragged my wounded angel twenty more feet to a factory building in a long row of factory buildings, and rang the doorbell.
I was crazy with grief. Maybe Mella didn’t care about losing her man, but I did.
It’s raining men!
And just my luck, the man, my man, the one Mother Nature intended for me and me alone, had disappeared in the arms of a demon. Possibly bleeding to death.
I ran down Ravenswood in my pajamas and flip-flops, not knowing why I was certain that my angel and the demon had gone south.
Whenever I thought of turning aside, west or east, I felt a yawning pit of loss and misery open up inside me.
Whenever I turned south again, it was as if a wonderful bell chimed in my belly. The bell sang yes, yes, yes.
I was lucky that cop hadn’t picked me up for being crazy. I felt crazy.
Six or seven blocks down, I stopped hearing the bell when I faced south. I’d come to rely on that inner message so much, I just stood and swayed, numb with the magnitude of my disaster.
“You don’t look right,” said a voice beside me.
I looked around listlessly. My street smarts chugged into first gear.
The neighborhood was deserted in all directions.
Some guy stood there: short, gentle-eyed, concerned. Well-meaning. Harmless, I decided.
“I’ve lost someone,” I said.
Suddenly I heard that bell chime again inside. It wasn’t for this guy. But something about this guy. Or maybe it was just because I was facing south again.
He picked up my hand and frowned at it. “You need to straighten out someplace safe. You’re in no condition to be wandering around out here like this.”
I let him lead me—south. The bell chimed every now and then, quieter but still musical, still ringing through my body like a promise.
The guy held my hand as if I was a lost kid sister.
After a while I felt the bell inside shift. Had I passed by my angel somehow?
I tried to make my would-be protector turn around, but he wouldn’t let go of my hand. By now I was too tired and hysterical and
miserable to fight. He led me to his loft on Ravenswood and put me to bed with a cup of hot chocolate and marshmallows.
I sat on the edge of the bed, crying hopelessly, telling him I don’t know what, while he put my flip-flops on the floor and cleaned my filthy bare feet with a wet washrag and said, “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” as if he thought I was too high to make sense.
Somewhere I heard a doorbell buzz.
Along with it, the bell inside me began to ring louder.
I drank some hot chocolate. I felt a little better.
The bell rang louder and louder, filling me with peace.
Eventually I drank all the hot chocolate and the guy turned out the light and left the room and I turned over on my side and slept, crying a little now and then, holding myself tight, because I thought I could feel my angel close to me.
Chapter Two
AFTER TWO MINUTES the door was answered by a stringy guy in shorts, a dirty singlet, and cowboy boots. His black eyes looked out of a bony white face framed by pale dreadlocks.
“Archimedes in?” I said.
“Moved out,” said the other. He looked me up and down. I’m sure he didn’t miss my nakedness or my horns and demon wings. “This is an unexpected honor.”
“Save it,” I said. “We may be the only two guys left of the Joint Task Force who know about the Ravenswood Project.”
He blinked. I expected questions about the Ravenswood Project and the task force.
All he said was, “Two guys?”
I stepped back from the door, and he stuck his head out and looked down at the angel, whose white wings sprawled askew and bloody against the brick wall.
“You look familiar,” I said, as the guy’s face came into the hellfire-orange streetlight.
He took off his left cowboy boot and showed me the sole of his foot. The numbers were too small to read, but I understood. This was his eighty-eight digit Infernal Identification Number, tattooed on because mnemonics are for sissies.
He stuck his head inside again and hollered, “Veek!”
A dapper black guy in a crisp, beige linen shirt and slacks came out, sporting a discreet gold loop earring and carrying a briefcase. He looked at me. He looked at Jeff slumped against the wall. He looked at the pale, dreadlocked demon. He put the briefcase inside the door and helped us lug Jeff through the door and up some metal stairs. Then he shook his head at the demon, retrieved his briefcase, and left.
Archie’s demon roommate cleared off a long kitchen table, and I laid Jeff on it.
“Let me,” I said. “I’ve got field training for this.” I hadn’t done first aid in four hundred years, but I figured I remembered enough.
“Let me,” said Archie’s roommate. “I’m twenty-seven hundred years old.”
“After you,” I said, stepping smartly back.
I didn’t see any point in secrecy. If the Home Office and the Regional Office were both after this guy’s roommate, he probably wouldn’t rat me out.
Briefly, I explained what had happened.
“What I can’t figure out,” my host said, swabbing blood off Jeff’s wound, “is why only two of you found Archie.”
“Only one of us,” I admitted. “Doofus here didn’t read his orders till we hit the landing zone because that’s when he was supposed to read them.”
“And he got cut? You have a short temper,” my host added.
“He got cut by razor wire on top of a cemetery wall.”
My host straightened and looked over his shoulder thoughtfully, as if he could see through the kitchen walls to the cemetery a mile away. “Huh.” He went back to swabbing blood. “Can I see those orders?” my host said.
I hauled my fanny pack around to my belly and unzipped. “Here.”
He finished with a butterfly bandage on Jeff’s thigh, washed his hands, and took the orders sheet from me.
“My, my,” he said, “Haven’t seen one of these in a while.” Jeff woke up. My host made him drink something, and we lugged Jeff to a vacant, rather smelly bedroom.
Soon we were back in the kitchen, lying in padded leather recliners, drinking beer.
The beer was incredible. Man, the cat’s pee at the Regional Office had got old.
I said, “In four hundred years of fieldwork, I’ve never seen anything like it.” Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut, but I was too shaken. “Angels and demons lying senseless in the street. Mortals vampirizing them. Female mortals. Deadlier than the male, Kipling said.” I shuddered.
My host leaned across the fat leather arm of his lounger and offered me a hand.
“Welcome to the field. I’m Baz.”
I was stunned that he would tell me his name.
One thing you learn at the Regional Office early: the power of your name is absolute. The whole “Word” thing. No wonder computerization has completely fucked the joint.
If he was giving me his name, I knew I was in unimaginable trouble.
I returned the favor.
“Mutt.” I shook.
Now I could never go back. I’d given my name to a twenty-seven-hundred-year-old demon.
The evening deteriorated from there. We got shitfaced. He kept bringing out the beers, all kinds, new flavors I’d never heard of. It got so I was actually drinking them slowly enough to taste them. We swapped the bull, and I tried to impress him with what a badass special forces field operative I’d been, and he told me about being a sex demon.
“So what happened out there tonight anyway?” I said as the miracle of beer slowly wore off. “Us all getting hit, by what? Our orders getting scrubbed—along with our identities? Got any ideas?”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” he said. “I think my old roomie did something to the computer system at the Regional Office, and somehow it echoed upstairs into the Home Office system. I just can’t figure out how.”
“I can,” I said. “It’s like this. If the project—what was it called?”
“Ravenswood Project,” Baz said.
“Right, if the Ravenswood Project originates at the Regional Office, then that’s where the core files are kept. All Home Office files refer back to it, to avoid duplication that can therefore branch off and corrupt centralized data integrity. And, of course, same for a project that originates Upstairs. Either office can access it and even add data, but there’s only one file. So if Archie fiddled the file somehow, it would affect documents in both offices.” When he looked at me blankly, I explained. “In the nineties we had a big consolidation move, when the Home Office moved to the right.”
“You mean the two systems are connected now?” Baz said incredulously. “Seven sacred piglets. Bet that was a job and a half.”
“It was,” I said. “Everybody got roped in on that one, just like with the first computerization push in the eighties. It pretty well sealed my fate. I’d been hoping to be reassigned to the field before that, but now I’m too valuable in CIS. Doomed to a fucking desk job for eternity.”
Then I remembered that I’d been struck off Hell’s rolls and become a nonperson. Undemon. Whatever. I cheered up and drank more beer.
“Shit. I was retired by then,” Baz said. “Glad I missed that.”
“Yeah, tell me how you managed ‘retirement’ again?”
He explained that he too had worked the big move to digital in the eighties and saw an opportunity to install a “back door” that would allow him to erase his core file with one keystroke. “Which of course I used.”
I blinked in awe. “I never heard of that.”
“Why would you?” He passed me another cold one. “Have you tried this? It’s kind of hoppy for my taste, but some people like it.” I took the beer, and he leaned back in his lounger. “So you were special forces before they nailed you to the perch?”
I yawned. “Yup. Worked the Crusades right from the beginning up through the fifth. Followed Pisarro and Cortez into the New World in the late fourteen nineties. Got in on the start of the Thirty Years War.”
“What happene
d?”
I made a face. “I got ambitious. Everybody was excited by the possibilities inherent in the growth of world currency—gold then, fuck knows what they like now—and the Spanish and English were building empires that made the Romans look like olde worlde craftsmen, and I thought, this is where I make my mark. I came up with an accounting system that capitalized on a pyramidal military structure I stole from the Chinese, one that deprivileged the tangled mess of feudal private armies mortals had been using since the dawnatime. And—” My eyes glazed over, remembering days of glory.
Baz finished for me. “And they said, ‘Good, great, you’re a genius, now you’re in charge of all that,’ and you’ve been stuck behind a desk ever since.”
I sighed. “Those days, it was quill pens. Digitizing seemed like such a good idea.”
“Ambition,” Baz grunted. “We don’t do that here.”
“Yeah? What do you do? I assume somebody under this roof is on the grid.”
“Good question.” He paused, frowning. “I was, until the Regional Office digitized. Archie was, until tonight, or possibly a day or two ago—he’s getting married,” Baz added distastefully.
“Bummer,” I said, to be polite. I had no idea what that entailed.
He ignored that. “Kama has a file and an IIDN, but his rating is so low, he only gets paid quarterly, if then. Veek has a ghost account. The Regional Office pretends they have jurisdiction over his group by claiming they’re a heresy that forked away during the African diaspora. Really, the Yoruban pantheon is older than Christianity by a good ways. Totally independent.”
“They still only pay field operatives thirty pieces of silver?” I said.
“Yeah. Silver rates are up again, but the pieces get smaller every year.”
I frowned. “How do you eat, for fuck’s sake? It’s been a while, but I remember the field being expensive.”
“We manage,” Baz said complacently. “We pool our scores every month, and pick one of us by lot to claim them. To the Regional Office, that one guy looks like a rock star who just sucks at paperwork, and he gets a nice bonus. Much more cost effective than each of us logging our scores separately.”
It's Raining Angels and Demons Page 2
