Baz stole me a clean pair of jeans and a tan linen shirt from Veek, the black roommate, and I borrowed a pair of Baz’s ancient cowboy boots.
Jeff turned out to be a huge mirror slut. He spent the rest of the afternoon showering, buffing, and trying on everything Archie and Lido had abandoned in their closets. He seemed on the point of tears. Every time Baz or I said anything, he got snarly again.
The sun was setting when we walked into the bar called Cheaters. Baz took us to the bar and got us drinks. Then he gave us his final advice for the evening.
“Don’t talk. Listen.” He reminded me of a sergeant looking over a pair of dumb recruits. “If somebody seems interested in you, call me over. I’ll close the deal—handle the money angle.”
“Should I act available?” I said.
“Just be yourself,” he said firmly. “You—” he pointed at Jeff “—especially, keep your mouth shut. Yourself is a bit much right now.”
We got our drinks and turned on our bar stools to face the crowd.
There did seem to be a lot of women in the bar. They all seemed to be with men already. The men were uniformly big and husky. Was this the competition, then?
I looked closer at the guy nearest to me.
“Scorazterax?” I said. “Holy shit.”
He turned to me slowly, a puzzled look on his face. Big guy, ruddy-colored like me, his head shaved, his ears just a little pointed, and in his eyes a faint spark. “Mutt?”
“Score, you ugly fuck, what are you doing here?” I was so happy to see him, I thumped his back and slopped beer onto my own shirt.
“Mutt, hey, you were on that helo, I remember.” Score slapped my back. “Let me introduce you to Nancy.”
Then I saw he was with a chubby little woman with short red hair. She smiled at me in a way that gave me a chill. I realized that, last time I saw her, she’d been biting the throat out of some demon fallen on the sidewalk.
This demon.
I looked from her to Score. “Did you—is she the one who—”
“He fell out of the sky right in front of my house,” Nancy said.
“We’re in love,” Score said, putting his arm around her. “Where’s yours?”
I blinked and looked everywhere but at them. “Uh—” Suddenly my focus sharpened on the couples swaying and cuddling on the karaoke floor. Some of the men were blonder than others, but they all had Score’s bulky grace and musculature. They were all dressed like mortals—I couldn’t tell which were angels and which were demons—so I counted heads. Almost eighty of us.
Every single guy had a woman with him.
“Is the whole task force here?” I muttered.
“Pretty much,” Score said. “We’ve been scrubbed, you know. We’re off the grid. We don’t exist.”
I nodded soberly. “I know.”
“And you can’t get into the army here without a ton of paperwork.”
Nancy snuggled closer to him and looked at him as if she owned him. “You are not going off to the Middle East. I’m getting you a job at my company. Landscaping,” she said, turning to me. “Do you have a job yet?”
“And that’s your total reaction,” I said, stupefied. “Hello, I love you, get me a lawn mower.”
“Don’t forget, ‘and how about a beer?’” Score said, lifting his. “Man, that cat’s pee got old.”
I conceded his point. We clinked bottles.
“So what kind of work will you go after?” Score said.
I suddenly remembered my mission tonight. “Uh, that’s still under discussion—”
“Threesomes are more,” Baz said, coming up to us. He looked from Nancy to Score. “Shit.” He scanned the room exactly as I had done thirty seconds ago. “Are all of you here?”
Score lifted his knee, took off his flip-flop, and showed Baz the IIDN tattooed on the sole of his foot.
Baz pulled his foot out of his cowboy boot and showed his.
I kept my shoes on. Something about all this bothered the scheiss out of me.
“How can you just accept this?” I groused. “Don’t you care that you’ve been scrubbed? Does it bother you to be owned by this person? That she can kill you with a word?” I could hear my voice rising. “Does anybody give a shit that there are no rules any more?”
When it had happened to me, I thought I was the only guy in the world who had ever been captured by a woman and forced to lie on her bed, naked and sweating, awaiting death. I’d felt huge. Terrified maybe, but in a way, I’d been important. The moment had mattered.
Now it turned out ninety-nine other guys had been going through it. Probably some hours before it had happened to me.
For some reason this made me feel less, I dunno, less heroic.
Once again, the joke was on me.
I’d sold my soul to become a soldier and wound up behind a desk for eight hundred years.
I’d wanted to be a man, and instead I felt like a gawky, gullible teenager.
I had no friends, besides these slack-ass sex demons and a defrocked angel with a Brillo pad.
I had no job, no identity, no past, no future.
The only thing I had to look forward to was Mella touching me again—kissing me—wiping my soul as clean as a baby’s ass and about as useful.
The sick part was, I wanted that.
On some level, I wanted to just turn myself over to her and let her make me into whatever kind of man she could…love.
And at the same time I was righteously pissed off.
“But don’t you see, you’ll be living in sin!” I said to the angel who had flown beside me in Home Office aircraft. If it took this long to persuade them, I had a long evening ahead of me. The bar was crammed with former members of the task force. To a man, they refused the call of truth.
“Jioffriel, you need to get laid,” he advised me, and went to the bar.
“I’ve been laid!” I shouted after him. “It’s wrong!” I appealed to the demon who’d been playing foosball with him. “Don’t you see? This is your chance to get your soul cleaned up! If you’d just stop fornicating—”
“Fuck off, angel,” the demon said. He put his arm around the woman beside him and turned away to put a quarter in the karaoke machine.
“The rules are different now,” another angel told me. “We’re operating under the rules of love, now.”
“What?” I squeaked. “Thithomiel, there’s only one set of rules. Good versus evil.”
“Nope,” he said, swapping his full drink for his lady companion’s empty one and kissing her on the nose. “There’s always been love, too.”
“Good and evil trumps love,” I said. “Love’s just a lot of messy emotions.”
“Nope,” he said again. This time he looked at me as if he felt sorry for me. “First there was love. Then you got the messy emotions.”
“That’s wrong,” I said, less certainly.
“Messy emotions generated two sides. And poof, you got good versus evil. Because everybody thinks they’re on the side of right.”
His companion said to me, “I bet you think you’re right, and your girl is wrong.”
I frowned. “Of course I’m right.”
She stuck her tongue onto the straw in her drink, grinned, and wrapped her lips around the straw. Then she snuggled up to Thithomiel.
He seemed to forget I existed.
I had had enough. Clearly, no one was going to buy my body in here tonight, and worse, they all thought I was wrong and Keek was entitled to be angry with me.
There was no fresh air outside the bar’s front door. Smokers loitered everywhere. I walked to the corner to get away from them.
I spent the next hour talking to guys from the task force, avoiding Baz, and wondering if Mella ever came into this bar.
If she did, I could tell her what I thought of her. I wasn’t sure I could admit what I thought of myself, for selling myself so cheaply to her.
Every other guy in there, demons like me or Jeff’s angel buddies, had come
with some woman. One look at their faces told me they were goners.
And they didn’t care. They’d all lost honor and rank and a position in our respective armies. Home Office and Regional Office. Heaven and Hell. The most feared magical beings this side of our divisional CEOs.
All that, thrown away.
I would have accused them of drugging themselves with love to numb away the loss, only I was full of the same drug, and it didn’t feel like loss. It felt like hell, frankly. It was chaos and madness mixed with joy. It was complete annihilation of who I’d thought I was.
I wound up standing at the bar with Score again. His Nancy was in the bathroom. I tried to explain my frame of mind.
In the middle of my rant, Score put his arm over my shoulder and clonked his head against mine. “Bro. You’ve got to understand something. You’re a horse’s ass, always have been. You’ve been a fish out of water your entire fucking life, which is longer than mine by a few years—”
“By thirteen hundred years,” I snapped.
“—And that whole time you’ve been miserable. More than anything else, this makes you lousy company. Me, I always kind of liked the Regional Office. But everybody likes me. I fit in even before I was recruited.”
“Thanks for rubbing that in.”
“No problem. Don’t interrupt. I didn’t have a plan for my life, but it didn’t bother me, ’cuz somebody else always did.”
“So what,” I rasped. “Loser.”
“Loser back atcha,” he said calmly. He shook my shoulder and clonked heads with me again. “What I’m saying is, this woman, she wants you. She wants you, bro. You know you want her.”
“I was hit with a love spell. I had no choice.”
I could feel the pull of love even as I said this, a yawning whirlpool of body hunger and thrills and overwhelming tenderness and impending weepies that scared the crap out of me.
Score shook his head. “Everybody has an excuse why it’s not their fault they’re in love.” He winked.
I knew what that wink meant. He referred to the biggest clichés in the Regional Office—I didn’t know what I was doing! Somebody tempted me! It’s not my fault! We all expect to have to account for ourselves, sooner or later.
The pisser is, nobody ever actually asks.
He said, “Who cares why you’re in love? You’re here. You like it.”
I growled in my throat.
“You love it,” Score insisted, pushing me away so he could look me in the eye. “It beats the Regional Office. You have no plan. Who knows? If you ever get a plan of your own, maybe this woman will, like, be on your side. Ever consider that possibility?”
I hadn’t. I chewed my lip, trying to stay mad. “My number-one concern so far has been to keep her from killing me.”
He shook my shoulder, gripping it hard. “A thousand things could kill you. Who cares? You want to live forever?”
I thought about that.
I didn’t.
That was a bit of a shocker, right there.
I pulled free of his grip and wandered out to the street, where people were standing around, smoking and talking. It was full dark now. Only Jeff stood under the corner streetlight. I ignored him and leaned against the post, thinking.
I spotted them first. “There they are, Keek! Hey, guys!” I waved.
Jeff turned first. The mix of emotions on his face as he saw us could have made a whole comic strip. I glanced at Keek. She’d gone stony.
Mutt was looking superhot. He’d gotten some decent clothes from somewhere. The tailored linen shirt set off his strange, dark coloring, and the jeans snuggled up to his haunches.
He didn’t smile when I came up to him.
“Marshall Field already delivered the bed! You’re amazing! We went by the sex demon lair and that Indian lust-god guy said you had come here. What—what’s the matter?”
Mutt glowered, silent.
Oh, damn. Did I have to be in charge all the time?
“I thought you were coming back to my place,” I faltered, not feeling in charge.
“We’re working,” Jeff said curtly.
“Already?” I said.
“At what?” Keek lifted her chin. “Something honest, I hope.”
I rolled my eyes. “Still sulking. Do you believe this guy?”
“Yes,” Mutt said. “I do.”
I felt like I’d been slapped. “What is your problem?”
He jerked his head, and I looked behind him at the bar, people hanging out in front, the sounds of karaoke from inside.
“We came here to sell our bodies,” Jeff said.
“What?” Keek said. “So that’s why the leather pants?”
My mouth fell open. “But you’re out here, not inside. Wait a minute, we? You’re both—”
Mutt nodded. His lips were pressed shut.
“What’s the matter? No women in there?” I said.
Mutt looked over my head. “It’s full of women. They’re all taken.” His gaze came down to mine. “They’re here with their angels and demons.”
“They’ve given up on right and wrong,” Jeff spat. “Now love rules them.”
Keek said, sounding confused and pissed off, “So that means you’re going to be a whore now?”
Mutt’s black eyes bored into me. “They’ve all surrendered.”
I was speechless.
“We’re all subject to a powerful spell,” Mutt said.
I took a step closer to him. “I can see you’re upset. What’s this about a spell?”
Mutt paused, and I thought he softened. “We got hit by love-spell sparks. That’s why we fell out of the sky.”
Oh, ick! Suddenly I faced up to what I’d been avoiding thinking about since the moment I saw him.
I mean, it doesn’t rain men just because I’m lonely and man-hungry and desperate.
“Someone cast a spell on you to make you love me,” I said.
“We all got hit,” he said.
“That’s why you love me. Why you do what I say.” I felt sick.
Keek was right. We got them cheap.
“There’s a rule in the Regional Office,” Mutt said. “It’s called the Box Rule. If two persons are in a sufficiently small box, it doesn’t matter who is master and who is slave.”
“Mutt, you’re not my slave.”
At my elbow, Keek growled, “Explain how love makes you a whore.”
“I—” Jeff faltered. “I want to sin until I am worthy of you.”
“You want to what?” Keek was going up the pole. “How long do you think that will take? Since I’m such a major whore?”
“You’re a slut,” Jeff corrected Keek. “You don’t sell your body. You give it away.”
“I am a slave,” Mutt said. “Your slave, the slave of love. We’re all your slaves.” He gestured backward again, toward the bar that was full, so he claimed, of angels and demons. “But you are no less trapped.”
I heard an oof! and turned to see Jeff stagger, clutching his stomach.
“You son of a bitch!” Keek sobbed. She hauled off and socked him on the jaw.
Jeff went down.
Keek stomped away.
Trapped. Mutt felt trapped. He’d lain on my bed and let me make love to him, and fear had made him hold on for dear life and ruin my mattress, and he’d got me a nice new mattress. And then he went out to sell his body?
“Why are you here, again?” I so didn’t want to know the answer.
“I have to pay for the bed. Baz is pimping us until we learn the ropes.” He ducked his head, looking as embarrassed as a hawk can, with hawk pride and hawk ferocity. “I thought I might learn to serve you better.” His voice dropped. “Because I suck.”
Jeff was hauling himself to his feet, looking after Keek with tears in his eyes, feeling his jaw.
I said to Jeff, “Shouldn’t you go after her?”
He gave me a look and then turned and went back into the bar.
“Look,” I said to Mutt, reaching for
him. He flinched. I remembered his fear of touching. I pulled my hand back. “Keek and I talked this morning and I realized I—my experience has been pretty lousy so far—I don’t mean with you! Not with you!”
“Not just with me,” he corrected.
I threw my hands up. “Will you listen? I had some bad experiences—at first—with men. A long time ago. And I kind of closed off. I shut down to protect myself. Honestly, most men I’ve dated have lived down to that low standard.” I reached out a hand, hearing myself pleading. “You’re—you’re different. You act almost like I own you or something.”
He acted exactly like I owned him, and I loved it, and I had felt entitled to own him, and now I felt so horribly guilty about it that, as I looked into his solemn eyes, tears were pouring down my face and I barely felt them.
He began to speak, and I stopped him.
“I don’t deserve to own you, Mutt. Nobody should be owned. You’re right about the trapped thing. I feel horrible about that.”
We looked at each other, and we swallowed at the same time. My throat was full of razor blades.
I licked tears off my lips. “I’m setting you free, Mutt. I’m sure you’ll be a good person, even if you were a demon for over a thousand years.” I tried to swallow again and choked. “I just can’t bring myself to let you feel like you have to do what I say…because you, like, have to or something…”
I could see the strange maroon color shifting across his face, his shoulders bulking up, his hands making fists. Mutt, going demony.
Which meant he was scared.
I shook my head. I couldn’t do anything right. No matter what I said, he would feel like my slave, and I was only stressing him out worse by going all emo on him.
I put my hand on his chest. My lips trembled so hard I could barely speak. “You understand me? You’re free.”
The little red horns emerged from his forehead. With a tearing sound, his shirt ripped away from his back, and his bat wings rose behind him.
His heart slammed under my fingers.
I stammered, “Mutt, I—I’m so sorry.”
I pushed.
Then I turned and ran.
I waited for my heart to stop pounding and my wings to retract. Then I went back into the bar.
It's Raining Angels and Demons Page 9
