And then there were seven.
But seven demons was still too many for a lone angel.
Now there was nothing between Azrael and the night at the edge of town. He could keep running. He could leave the town to the demons.
Instead, he stopped and turned. He threw the knife into the ground and reloaded the gun he still held as fast as he could.
The remaining demons didn’t stop. Three of them charged through the graveyard, smashing skeletons out of their way. The others circled around.
Azrael had time to load just four bullets before they reached him. He pulled the trigger three times, and the three demons in the graveyard fell into the hands of the dead. And then the other demons leaped over the fence and took him to the ground.
One of them bit most of the way through his right arm. Another raked its talons across his face. Blood sprayed into his eyes, blinding him. He felt the other two demons rip through his shirt and bandages to tear off chunks of flesh from the same spot where Beth had fed.
He flailed with his left hand until he caught hold of the knife. He picked it up and rammed it into one of the demons. It fell away with a squeal.
Three.
But then another was tearing his throat open, and his blood watered the graveyard.
Azrael supposed this was as good an ending as any he deserved.
Then there was another unholy shriek as the weight of one of the demons lifted off him. And light shone through the bloody mess of his vision.
Beth.
The other two demons leapt off Azrael, and he wiped at his eyes. He cleared enough of the blood that he could see the world from his right eye again, albeit through a red haze. The left saw nothing at all.
Beth stood in the graveyard, shining with a light he hadn’t seen in... well, he couldn’t actually remember the last time. Her wings burned with fire. She held the demon she’d pulled off Azrael and stabbed it over and over in its stomach with the knife. The scarf was gone from her neck now. As was the bite.
The sight of her made him remember his lost wings, which brought more pain. But he was glad to see that the communion had worked. He hadn’t been sure.
The demon finally stopped crying out and she dropped it to the ground. But there were still two left, and Azrael knew Beth was too young to handle even one on her own, now that surprise had been lost.
“Another angel,” one of the demons roared as they circled her.
“We’ll tear off her wings and make her watch as we eat them,” the other one said.
The townsfolk in the church chanted their prayers even louder, and the skeletons crawled across the ground to help Beth, but Azrael knew there was only one thing that could save them. The bone of a dead and forgotten god.
He couldn’t move his right arm anymore, so he clawed the ground with his left hand until he felt the cool metal of his gun with its lone bullet in the chamber. The demons took no notice of him, so enraptured were they with the new angel. Or maybe they thought him already dead. If so, they were more right than wrong.
But Azrael had enough life in him to sight in on the demon moving behind Beth and pull the trigger.
And he missed as it sprang at her.
The sound of the shot was enough to startle it, though, and it twisted around to face him mid-leap. It collided with Beth back to back instead of digging its claws into her. But the impact sent her stumbling into the other demon’s waiting arms, and it carried her to the ground.
The demon Azrael had shot at came at him, even as he struggled to open the gun one-handed so he could slip another bullet in the cylinder.
“You’re out of time,” the demon spat, as its partner raked Beth with its claws. And then it lunged at him—and was knocked to the side by something that fell out of the night sky. One of the buzzards. It raked the demon’s face with its talons, driving the hellion to a knee, and then it flapped back up into the night.
The demon went after it, then remembered Azrael.
Too late.
The buzzard had given Azrael the time to force a new bullet into the gun. The demon faced him just as Azrael pulled the trigger. The demon’s brains blew out the back of its skull, and it fell to its knees again, this time for good.
Azrael struggled to reload the gun once more. His fingers were slick with blood, and he dropped a couple of bullets to the ground before he managed to slip one into the cylinder. His hand shook as he raised the gun. He hadn’t been in this bad a way since he’d first fallen, all those ages ago.
He didn’t have a clear shot. The remaining demon and Beth rolled around the graveyard, struggling over the knife. He was just as like to hit her as it.
“A virgin angel,” the demon said and laughed as it raked her with its claws. But it stopped laughing when the skeleton with the snakes reached it and grabbed on to its leg. Then the demon looked around, realizing what was happening.
Again, too late.
The other dead converged on it from all directions, grabbing onto it, sinking their fingers and teeth into its flesh, pinning it. The demon struggled and bit skeletons in two, but it couldn’t break free.
Then the preacher and the Indian led the townspeople into the graveyard. The preacher and the Indian still held hands, and Azrael saw blood mingling on their fingers. They really were blood brothers now.
The preacher chanted the Lord’s Prayer, and the Indian chanted words Azrael had never heard before. Most of the townspeople followed the preacher’s example, but the Clamps said their own prayers in a language Azrael had thought long dead, and Jake howled out something only other werewolves were likely to understand.
They joined the dead, piling onto the demon. It screamed as it disappeared under the mass of flesh and bones.
And then Beth’s wings burned the air one more time as she raised the knife over her head and stabbed it down. And the pile of bodies went still.
Blood flowed back into Azrael’s eyes, but he didn’t try to wipe it away this time. It was over. He was dying, but the town was safe. He couldn’t help but smile. It had been a long time since he had done something that might someday help redeem his sins.
Then he felt something press against his lips.
“Eat,” Beth said.
Azrael flinched away. He knew what she was trying to feed him, but he couldn’t, not from a new angel like her. Not from one so pure and untainted by the world. He couldn’t bear that taste of Heaven again, that reminder of everything that he had lost and could never get back.
But he couldn’t help himself. He bit into the flesh of her wrist, and blood flowed into his mouth.
“Drink,” she said, and he drank her blood. Her life.
He felt himself heal. He felt the flesh in his stomach and face mend itself, the wound in his throat close back up. Dim smudges of light formed in his dead eye.
And he tasted Heaven itself in her blood. It flowed into him, into all the empty spaces in his soul, filling him with light and song and memories. He wanted it to never stop. He wanted to drown himself in it like he drowned himself in whiskey. He wept because it reminded him of everything he had once been. He wept because he knew this grace would fade too.
He managed to push Beth’s arm away before he took too much from her. Before he took everything from her. It hurt like Hell to stop the flow, but he was used to hurting.
He sat up and wiped the blood from his eyes. He could see enough from the damaged one to get by. He knew the vision would return to it, someday. He’d wear an eyepatch for a few years. It wouldn’t be the first time. It wouldn’t be the last.
Beth kneeled at his side and looked at him with an expression that could only be called motherly. The others gathered around as well. Even the dead crawled over to look at him with their empty eyes.
“Well, I’m certainly glad that trick worked,” Azrael told her.
“You ain’t the only one,” Beth said.
Azrael pushed himself to his feet and looked around. The bodies of the demons were everywhere. Broken
skeletons moved throughout the graveyard, as if looking for more hellspawn. The preacher and the others had stopped praying and now looked at Beth with a mixture of wonder and confusion.
Azrael whistled for his horse, and it came out of the night. It didn’t look concerned about the blood and gore. There were some ways in which a dead horse was just plain better than a live one.
Beth stared at him. “Where do you reckon you’re going?” she asked.
“I told you I was just passing through,” Azrael said. He dusted himself off as best he could, but it was the usual exercise in futility.
“But what if there are more demons?” she asked.
Azrael picked up one of his fallen guns from the ground. He loaded it with more bullets and then handed it to her.
“You know what to do,” he said. He nodded at the skeletons, which were making their way back to their graves. “You can fashion more bullets out of their bones, now that they’ve got the holy blood in them. That’ll make a demon notice it’s been shot.” He walked over to pick up the other gun, then pulled himself up on the horse. “You don’t need me to protect your town,” he said. “You’ve got yourselves.”
Beth looked at the preacher and the Indian and Jake and the others. Azrael didn’t see the Clamps, but he imagined they were somewhere in the shadows.
Beth stepped close to Azrael and offered him his knife back, but he shook his head.
“You’ve earned it,” he said. “And trust me, you’ll make use of it.”
“Who will teach me what I need to know?” she asked.
“Some things are better learned on your own,” Azrael said.
He spurred the horse past her, toward the edge of town. He said a prayer for the first time he could remember—a silent prayer for her, not for him. Because it was no blessing to be an angel.
“You tell God when you see him....” the preacher said as he passed, but seemed at a loss how to finish.
“You tell him yourself,” Azrael said.
“Where will you go?” Beth called after him, but Azrael didn’t say anything else. He didn’t have any answers.
And so the angel Azrael rode out of the town of Burnt Church the way he had come, on a dead horse, with a pair of buzzards following him.
Copyright © 2011 Peter Darbyshire
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Peter Darbyshire is the author of the novels The Warhol Gang and Please, which won Canada’s national ReLit award for best novel. He has published short stories in numerous journals and anthologies, and his last weird western received On Spec’s Best Story of the Year award. He currently lives in Vancouver, Canada, where he is working on a collection of stories about the end of the world. Visit him at www.peterdarbyshire.com.
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COVER ART
“Mushroom Forest,” by Geoff Trebs
Geoff Trebs is a twenty-seven year old artist based out of Orange County, Southern California, who specializes in concept art and character design. His free time is spent working on an unpublished original action comic. Contact him for studio or freelance work at [email protected], and view more of his artwork at dinmoney.deviantart.com.
Beneath Ceaseless Skies
ISSN: 1946-1046
Published by Firkin Press,
a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Literary Organization
Copyright © 2011 Firkin Press
This file is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 U.S. license. You may copy and share the file so long as you retain the attribution to the authors, but you may not sell it and you may not alter it or partition it or transcribe it.
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