by Sam Cheever
Once he’d ascertained that the room was sufficiently quiet and attentive, the Capcom turned to scan the faces of the other angels sitting at the council table. When he addressed them, his voice was surprisingly deep and invasive, insinuating itself under my skin and probing there. I shivered under the effect.
“We have called this council because we are in crisis. The spirit world is in an uproar of violent activity and we have been charged with the task of discovering why this is happening and figuring out how to stop it. Who will be first to report?”
Several hands along the table went up. The Capcom nodded toward a chubby, red-haired angel to the left of him at the long table. She stood and floated around the table to address the entire council. I watched in amazement as her widely made, clumsy looking body floated across the floor with apparent ease and grace. She stopped in front of the Capcom and bowed slightly, hovering above the floor as if she didn’t have any legs or feet. I made a mental note to find an opportunity to peek under somebody’s robes before they shimmered me out of there. I was starting to think none of them had legs.
The red-haired angel lowered her eyes as she spoke to him, peering through some of the longest, thickest lashes I had ever seen. The room was hushed as she opened her full, peach-colored lips to speak. Her voice came out in a breathless Southern twang. “High Council, I have communicated with our spies on the court of Nerul. They have confirmed our suspicion that he is planning a retaliation for the death of his son. He has Queen Kaline of Dialle’s court in his chambers and is threatening to torture her slowly to death so that her soul cannot seek refuge with her people after she is dead. He is also assembling his forces to attack Dialle’s court within the fortnight.”
The Cap…okay…High Council…nodded without apparent surprise and raised a large, square hand in dismissal. The red-haired angel floated back to her seat. The next angel was a long, stringy-limbed man with thick dark brown hair that fell sharply across his eyes as he floated around to address the council. As I watched him bow meekly to the High Council, I let my mind wander away from the scene in front of me long enough to think about what I’d just heard.
If what the red-haired angel’s spies had told her was true, my handsome devil had lied to me about Nerul’s son. He’d said they had the Prince in their chambers, but he hadn’t claimed to have killed him. I frowned as I realized I’d taken him at his word, despite the fact that he was about as devilish as they come. I would have to be very careful about that. I wondered briefly if that was one of their powers, to make you trust them despite what you knew about them.
The long angel, like the angel before him, spoke with lowered eyes. “High Council, I have spoken with Abrine, the king of the demons and he has denied knowledge of any forthcoming battle between the royal devils. He was very adamant on the point and seemed angry at the suggestion that he would be unaware of such an occurrence.”
His highcouncilness raised one, dark eyebrow and turned to the rest of the council. “I wish to hear from the council elders regarding this new development.”
Myra stood and looked the High Council directly in the eyes, almost glowering at him. “Abrine is obviously lying, High Council. Those of us who were charged with cleaning up the demons’ mess last night have seen the turmoil his people are creating. There can be no other reason for the vigor of their violence.”
A short, muscular angel stood and addressed his-high-and-mightiness from the opposite end of the table. He too looked the High one in the eyes and said, “High Council, I concur with Myra, if the demons don’t know what’s going on specifically, they at least know something is up. King Nerul has made it no secret of what he is planning.”
A murmuring commenced around the table. Several celestial heads bobbed in agreement.
The High Council nodded. “I have to agree. Abrine would have to be a fool to be unaware of Nerul’s plans and the demon king is no fool. So we move forward with the understanding that the demons are involved in Nerul’s plans but are unwilling to admit it for whatever reason.” His soft, brown eyes traveled around the room. “Where do we go from here?”
I felt his eyes land on me and watched the furrow develop between them. I shrank back into the potted palms hoping he would decide I wasn’t important enough to pester. I wasn’t going to be that lucky.
He rose from the chair and hovered there as he glared at me. One by one the entire council turned to face me until I felt the enormous weight of their hostile gaze bearing down on poor little me of the potted palms. I glanced at Myra and she was glaring at me too, as though she had no idea how I’d gotten there. I made a mental note to wring her scrawny neck the next chance I got and stood up to take my medicine. I tried a smile but it was so false it probably just looked like a passing gas attack.
His-high-and-mightiness raised an arm to point accusingly at me. “You do not belong here.”
I shrugged and wondered if it would do me any good to be diplomatic.
Naahhh.
I looked around and shrugged, raising my hands as if I were helpless to address the problem. “It appears I am here, though….sir.” I thought the sir part was pretty diplomatic.
“What gives you the right to observe the council? You have not been given permission.”
I shrugged again. “I didn’t exactly walk in here myself. I was summoned by someone. Maybe you should yell at somebody else.” I made a very determined effort not to look at Myra, though I was oh-so tempted.
His highcouncilness finally removed his piercing gaze from my poor, pierced face and moved it around the room. “Who is responsible for bringing this mortal here?”
A long silence filled the room. I crossed my arms and tried to look like a victim. It probably didn’t go over. I don’t do victim very well.
Finally Myra stood up and floated, yes floated, around the table to stand in front of him. She bowed slightly, though the stiffness in her shoulders told me it pissed her off to do so. “I brought her here, High Council.”
The stern countenance of his-high-and-mightiness turned upon my angel and he skewered her with eyes that had darkened to the color of pasture dirt under lowered black eyebrows. “By whose command?”
Myra raised her eyes and simply stared at him, elevating her own eyebrows meaningfully.
His Highness’s features raised and expanded with the shock of her unspoken statement. “Why would He want her here?”
Myra turned and looked at me, motioning me forward with her usual disapproving glare. As I joined her in front of the council table she placed a hand on my arm and looked the High Council directly in the eyes. “She has been chosen as our interface with the royals.”
I turned to her and my mouth dropped open in shock. Myra kept her gaze determinedly turned away from me as I stared at her with floppy fish mouth. I knew my angel too well to think she was pulling my leg on this one. If Myra said the Big Guy wanted me to work for them, it was true. And I was in deep, deep, shit, shit, shit.
Chapter Eight
Let Me Out of Here!
And so the damsel’s distress did grow to such uncommon heights,
She wished to sprout soft wings of fire and in this way take flight.
Myra turned away from my flapping, panicky profile and addressed the High Council as if I were not even there. “She has been summoned by Dialle and commissioned to serve as their interface with Nerul’s Court. Since she is one of ours, it seems only logical that she would report her findings to us.”
His cappuccinoness nodded with that same furrow between his dark brows that had moved in when he’d spotted me in the potted palms. “Yes. It does seem that Dialle’s court has given us a gift. Do you think it is possible he does not know of her relationship to us?”
As Myra opened her heavenly lips to respond I finally lost my temper in a big way. “Excuse me!” I turned to include the entire room in the scolding I was about to deliver. “Do any of you see the little person with the long red hair and a pissed off look on her face standi
ng in this very spot?” I paused to convey my frown around the entire room before I set it down on the haughty angel at the center of the long table. “Did it ever occur to any of you that I might have something to say about any of this, since it is my life we’re talking about here?”
His highjerkiness gave me a long, penetrating stare, which left me with the impression that he was considering how best to dismember me and dispose of the body. Then he turned back to Myra as if I hadn’t spoken.
“She will need to be trained for this mission.”
Myra nodded, apparently she hadn’t heard me either. “I have already taken care of that. She will meet with several members of the council over the next couple of days to learn all she needs to learn.”
I looked from one to the other and decided they had lost their frunkin’ minds. “I’m out of here!” I said to no one in particular, which was appropriate because I knew no one was listening anyway. As I turned, I came up against my angel, who put her hand on my forehead before I could pull away. Immediately I heard that whoosh of air that told me I was about to take celestial flight. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.” I wasn’t even going to be allowed the satisfaction of huffing out of there under my own steam, with my ruffled feathers and my disjointed nose. Apparently I was to be “escorted” out.
I landed in my office without Myra. My hand still hovered above the door panel where it had been when I’d been shimmered away in the first place. With a scream of frustration I opened the door and slammed it shut about five times. Then, realizing that slamming the door was seriously juvenile behavior, I slammed it about five more times and then forced myself to calm down so I could use my brain. What I decided was that I wasn’t going to feel better until I kicked some serious butt.
I stalked across my office and grabbed my purse and coat, checking to make sure my demon laser was in my purse. I also strapped a very large silver knife to my thigh. I wasn’t taking any chances that this little demon jerk would get away from me.
Glancing at my watch, I left the office, descended to the parking floor and stepped into the Viper. I mashed the buttons on my poor Viper’s directional information unit mercilessly until I’d programmed in the location of the spot where my new client had told me there was a nasty little demon that needed to be taught some manners. The way I was feeling at that moment, I was just the totally pissed off, small but mean, half angel half devil critter to teach him those manners. And teach him I would do. Sitting back with a sigh, I tried to calm down enough that I could breathe. It only took a few minutes to get there. Then I turned to gaze out at the other traffic roaring by me in the sky.
Since traffic had taken to the air, about ten years previous, the skies had become increasingly congested. Where, at first, most people didn’t have the guts or the desire to take to the sky in a flying car, over the last couple of years more and more of Earth’s creatures had found out what an exhilarating experience it was to ride with the winged things above the stale, overused air of domestic habitation below.
When I had first taken to the sky, right after the world government passed the Right to Fly law of 2079, the sky had been wide open and free. Now it was so filled with flying vehicles and floating advertisement blimps that I had to put my repelling shields up just to travel a couple of miles to the corner store.
I flicked a passing Air Bus the winged salute as it roared by so close that its shield thudded into the Viper’s shield and blew us sideways to skim against a colorless, little air booger on the other side. The driver of the sad little booger cringed away from the window and looked at me with a pale, pinched face and huge, terrified eyes. She looked about sixteen. Must be new to the air. By gross contrast, the driver of the bus grinned manically at me, wagging his tongue suggestively while I gifted him with my best repertoire of swear words, which he couldn’t hear but which made me feel infinitely better for having delivered them.
Oh for the early days of flight, when it had pretty much just been me and a few confused looking birds up there.
The Viper touched down in a part of Angel City that had lost the war between modernization and decay when the wrong element had moved in several years ago. Because of its innate goodness, with its scores of small, tidy family homes, neatly mown and tended postage stamp yards and churches on every corner, Ashland in the northern section of the city had been a perfect target for demonic inhabitance. Nothing draws a demon in like goodness. There is no sweeter thrill to a demon than destroying that which is good.
I realized with a start that the nightclub I was about to enter was Demonica, the heart and soul of Demondom, a truly trendy nightclub, a really dangerous place to visit and the demon king’s main source of questionable income. I hadn’t recognized the address when my client had given it to me.
King Abrine was even known to be around the place on most nights. Rumor was he liked to scope out the clientele for future pleasure, or pain, or both, depending on what the involved parties were into on any particular night.
I scowled at the gnarly-faced demon at the door and flashed him my business card when he asked me to cough up a truly evil cover charge. He screwed up his purplish-black face and curled an overly wide mouth at me when he saw the name of my company, a trickle of drool rolled down his leathery chin. “You here to vanquish one of my people, Phelps?”
I smiled back with what I hoped was a much prettier smile than he had offered me, with his chipped, gray teeth and scabby lips. I covered the business card with my Strange Crimes badge, which was only sort of official but which usually had the intended effect. “You know the law, drool boy, I’m here on official business and you gotta let me in, minus that ridiculous cover charge.”
“They ain’t nothin’ on that badge about waivin’ no cover charge, bitch girl.”
I just shrugged and stood my ground, smiling benignly at him.
The pretty young lady standing behind me in line frowned and glared at me before tossing her heavy, brunette hair and turning to the demon to give him a flirtatious smile. The creature that grinned back at her probably looked like Prince Charming or his brother Fred Charming to her. Demons never let humans see their true likeness. If they did they’d never get any of them to come around, which would be ruinously bad for business.
I grinned at her and then turned back to the gnarly-faced badass sitting on the tall stool beside the door. Before we could exchange any more knife-edged repartee, the buzzer on the wall beside him sounded and he turned away from me to punch something into the televisual on the wall.
The unit was screened on three sides and, although I leaned forward and squinted really hard, I couldn’t see the face on the screen. Whoever it was, though, drooly boy reluctantly let me pass. Though the look on his face told me that he’d rather have ripped me into bite sized-pieces and had me with tartar sauce.
“You can go in,” he said in his wobbly, razorlike demon voice, “but you better behave or you’ll be dealin’ with me.”
I pretended to quiver in my tall, leather boots and turned away from him. As I opened the door, however, I closed my eyes briefly and said a silent prayer. It always unnerves me a little to walk into evil’s abode. And, fiery though I may be, I have a deep dislike of being outnumbered.
And outnumbered I was. Entering the pitch black of the front entranceway, I thought immediately of those haunted houses and spook walks I used to love as a child. The feeling of complete blackness was meant to terrify and titillate and for me, it definitely did more of the former than it did of the latter. I prefer my demon well lighted and easily squashed.
As I adjusted to the complete darkness, my eyes began to pick up the auras of what must have been minor demons if they couldn’t mask themselves from me. Either that or they weren’t worried enough about big, bad, ole’ me to hide. The auras lined the long hallway, about one every six feet or so, on both sides and although they shimmered with some sort of latent energy, they didn’t make a move toward me.
I watched them closely as I moved throu
gh them into what passed for a lighted room in the place. Although the hallway was open to the main room, the demons had somehow deadened the noise of the main floor in the entranceway, leaving it silent as a tomb and certainly as dark as one.
However, as soon as I walked through the wide archway that separated the two spaces, the sound of the place crashed into me, nearly taking my breath away with its force. From all around, the crush of hot, sweaty bodies pressed into me and although Abrine had obviously taken great pains to perfume the air and filter out the raunchy smell of hundreds of gyrating bodies packed into a space that was entirely too small to accommodate their existence, I could smell a faint undercoat of demon beneath the perfumed air. It was that rotting earth, mold and decaying flesh kind of smell that demons gave off and that they could never fully mask from non-humans. It clung to every table, stool and wall in the place and caused my nose to close off in self-defense.
I tried to block it out of my sensory pool and turned toward the bar, where I hoped to get the information I needed. I was momentarily disappointed to see the roiling mass of human and demon flesh between me and the bar, but then I mentally rolled up my sleeves and went to work chiseling a path through the clinging, gyrating wall of flesh.
It only took me a couple of minutes to push, shove, threaten and wriggle my way through them all. The last obstacle between me and the bar was a particularly revolting couple, where he was of the extremely good-looking human type and she was of a particularly disgusting demon type, with purple, warty-looking skin and green Brillo pad hair that moved even when she wasn’t moving. I determinedly averted my gaze from the moving hair as I passed by. I’d been killed by curiosity once too often on that front.
Some demons, known as supra-demons, serve as hosts for other, smaller demons that resemble something from the reptile or maggot family, depending on their size. Of all the demons, I’ve found these to be the foulest, in more than just the obvious way. As I took a tall, surprisingly empty stool at the gleaming bar, I glanced one more time at maggot head, I couldn’t seem to help myself. She turned bulging brown eyes to me and winked as a slimy, white wormy-looking thing crawled down the side of her face. I pinched my lips together in revulsion and turned away. The last thought I gave her was to wonder what the human was seeing as he looked at her. Little did he know that the Miss America he thought he was sidling up to was a complete illusion and he was really rubbing up against something that was too repulsive even for his sad, human imagination to conjure up.
