Natural Born Angel

by Speer, Scott

  Sylvester flipped the switch, and the apartment was flooded with light. A man in a navy blue windbreaker was sitting in the chair facing the door, training Sylvester’s own gun on the detective. Dark circles rimmed his eyes, and he needed a shave.

  “Take a seat,” the man said, motioning with the gun to the couch.

  Sylvester walked to the sofa and sat down, his mind racing.

  “Don’t worry, this is just a precaution. I’m not here to hurt you.” The man’s eyes scanned the apartment nervously.

  “What are you here to do, then?”

  “Talk.”

  “I’m listening.”

  The man walked to the curtains and drew them, but left a crack open so he could see out. He moved his chair closer to the window. “It’s about Jesse DeWinter.”

  Sylvester’s pulse raced, but he kept his demeanour calm. “What about him?”

  “I was his partner in the bombings.” The man looked the detective directly in the eyes as he said it.

  “HDF?” Sylvester said.

  The man laughed. “If you believe that— ”

  “I never said I did,” Sylvester cut him off.

  The intruder nodded in respect. “What I have here is . . . a game changer.” He pulled a thick manila envelope from his coat and placed it on the one free spot on the coffee table. “Phone logs, a CD with recorded calls, photos. Everything I could get.” The man looked at Sylvester with serious, sad eyes. “I put it together after they killed Jesse.”

  “They?” Sylvester’s heart was pounding in his throat.

  “Yes, ‘they’, detective. ‘Them’. Whatever you want to call the murderers,” the man said, looking out of the window. “The Angels.”

  “What do you mean? As revenge for the bombing?”

  The man looked at Sylvester like he was the stupidest person in the world.

  “No. They hired us, detective.”

  The detective’s world became fuzzy for a moment as he realized what the man in front of him was saying.

  “What do you mean? How. . .” Sylvester struggled to make sense of what he was being told.

  “Archangel Charles Churchson came to us with the job. It was to have stayed just between us, for ever. Bomb the offices. Head to Costa Rica on Angel money. That way, Jesse and I could still fund the cause. The cause will take any job. Angels or humans. Our operating expenses are . . . high. But we didn’t know all those workers were going to be there. I don’t know if Churchson did or not. But the whole deal was supposed to be clean. That was until Churchson decided he couldn’t trust us any more. That’s when Jesse tried to find an out. Through you, detective. But he was too late.”

  “But why would Churchson set up a bomb on his own organization?” Sylvester asked.

  “Power. And politics.”

  “Of course. . .” It all made sense. “He could claim the humans were turning against them and they needed to prepare to defend against the ingrates. Charge them more. And keep Angel City for Angels.”

  “And also discredit the mainstream anti-Angel movement,” the man said.

  “The presidential election’s on Tuesday. Senator Linden. You know what this could mean.”

  “It could mean a lot of things,” the man said. “Like I said, game changer. I sent a copy of what’s in this packet to the ten biggest news agencies in the country. All across the country, news editors will be getting to work and discovering this. People will know the truth. I’m sorry I ever became involved now. But it was supposed to be clean. The building was supposed to be empty. Nobody was supposed to get hurt.”

  Sylvester let all of what he had just learned sink in. “Who does this touch in the Angels? How far does the corruption go?”

  “We only dealt with Archangel Churchson, and as far as I know, that’s as far as it goes. I know he has some allies. But he also has many enemies.”

  Sylvester thought of Jackson’s stepfather, struggling to maintain control in the Archangels’ organization.

  After a moment, Sylvester looked at the tired, weary man across from him. He’d obviously been on the run for some time. “Why come to me? I could arrest you.”

  The man smiled. “You forget: I have the gun,” he said. “Plus, Detective Sylvester, I’ve heard that even though you’re police, you’re honourable police. The cause keeps its eye on you. It knows the work you’re doing,” the man said. There it was, Sylvester thought, the cause again. “And I’m leaving, for ever. If anything happens to me . . . I just don’t want it to fade away. Get swept under the rug.” He looked at Sylvester. “Can you promise me that?”

  Sylvester nodded.

  “Thank you,” the man said. He looked out of the window again. “I need to go, detective. It’s time.” He placed Sylvester’s gun on a side table. “I trust you won’t be needing to pick this up until I’ve been gone at least five minutes, let’s say.” He smiled.

  As the man stood up, zipping his windbreaker, he nodded nonchalantly at the global map on the wall. “I see you have the seven now, detective.”

  “Seven?” Sylvester said.

  The man began reciting from memory: “‘And then when the seven burn across the earth, evil will rise upon you from the West.’”

  “The Book of Angels,” Sylvester said. “I know the passage. The controversial final revelations. They’re famous. But their source is also in doubt. Still, many have spoken of a battle between good and evil. What do you mean I have the seven now?”

  “The seven continents, detective,” the main said. He pointed to Brazil in South America. Sylvester had just marked the first incident in the continent twenty minutes before. “We’ve been tracking them as well. It’s only a matter of time now.”

  The man began walking out of the door.

  “You, or your people, sent me the anonymous emails about the attacks. Why?” Sylvester said, his mind running quickly. “Who are your people? What do you want?”

  “You’ll know us when the time is right,” the man said, walking through the door. “Goodbye. I have to leave if I want to live to see tomorrow night.”

  “Wait— ”

  But the man was already out of the door. His footsteps echoed down the hallway.

  Sylvester’s head swirled with the revelations, implications and even more questions the mysterious man’s unexpected visit had brought.

  He couldn’t even begin to imagine what was going to happen when the public found out that an Archangel had set up the bombing to stir anti-human sentiment in the Angel community. And Sylvester had thought the bombing had had something to do with the demon attacks. How wrong he had been.

  It turned out that the Dark Angels might be coming for something much, much worse.

  Sylvester went to his bookshelf. Next to the King James Bible, he had the Apocrypha, which included the Gospels of Judas and Tom. Next to the Apocrypha, he had The Book of Angels. It had surfaced in the Middle East in the 1930s and got an incredible amount of attention by a public hungry for everything Angel.

  Most of it just told biblical stories from the viewpoint of the Angels. Except for the ending sections, which were all new. They were also the bloodiest and the most famous sections, with plenty of demons and carnage. The Angels had put a lot of effort into proving that the later apocalyptic sections in The Book of Angels were not ancient, just the work of some crackpot in the nineteenth century. “Scary bedtime stories,” as Mark had called them. But there were still many people who believed they were prophecy.

  The detective flipped through the yellowed pages and found the passage the man had begun quoting.

  “And then when the seven burn across the earth, evil will rise upon you from the West. The Darkness will come from a pit in the Great Ocean, out of which no light has ever been seen, straight from the depths of the other world. Death will surely find a home with you, and mercy shall be driven out b
y the hordes of doom. And you will beg for the end.”

  Sylvester felt a coldness creep along his spine. He slowly closed the book, and then sat down at his kitchen table.

  He reached over for his landline telephone, but then paused. Fumbling in his pocket, he pulled out his old mobile phone, a Nokia. Scrolling through the numbers he found it: MARK GODSPEED.

  Mark answered on the fourth ring.

  “Yes, I know what time it is, Mark,” Detective Sylvester said. “I have some news about Archangel Churchson. But you’re going to need to help me.”

  CHAPTER 27

  The day after receiving her Protections, Maddy had to go to the NAS media offices, which were only a few blocks away from the regular NAS headquarters in Beverly Hills, to get fitted with her Angelcam. Although the Angelcam had only been around for a little over two years – and a lot of those two years had been spent in trial and error with prototypes – it was now one of the most popular additions to Guardians ever. Now that they were HD, being able to watch a save first-hand through footage from the tiny camera was almost too good to be true for Angel fanatics. Saves were becoming more and more watched around the world, and every new save on SaveTube was getting millions more hits than the one before. Angel analysts expected Maddy’s first save to be the most-watched save of all time. The question on everybody’s lips was, when would it happen?

  At the media office, Maddy showed up with a piece of jewellery, as they requested: her mother’s necklace. “Sorry, it’s a little crazy down here,” the technician said, pounding a flurry of keystrokes as he finished calibrating her ’cam. He turned to her. “But let’s get to work.”

  The Angelcam was the world’s most advanced camera, a trade secret owned by the Angels. It would make a fortune if the technology was released to the public, but the Angels were content to keep it to themselves right now and reap the profits from the footage of their hottest Guardians making saves around Angel City and the world.

  After her necklace was fitted with it, Maddy looked at herself in the mirror. You’d never know she had a camera on her. It was almost microscopic. She looked at the monitor next to the technician, and it was showing amazingly clear, crisp and steady live footage, even though she was shaking back and forth. The technology was amazing. Looking at herself in the mirror, she then looked into the LCD monitor, training the camera into it. On the TV it looked as if there were a thousand Maddys extending for ever. She smiled, her white teeth extending into infinity on the screen.

  “Guardian, you are ready for your close-up,” the Angel technician said, smiling.

  The technician’s intern, a pimply college student majoring in Angel Studies, suddenly burst into the room, his face in a panic.

  “What is it?” the Angel technician asked, looking annoyed at the intern.

  “It’s, uh, uh— ”

  The technician pushed past the intern to where a group of Angels and interns were standing in a group, watching something.

  Maddy followed her Angelcam technician out of the door and found everyone glued to the large TV mounted on the wall of the waiting room. Most seemed to be standing, mouths open, in shock.

  On the screen was file footage of Archangel Charles Churchson, in a black tuxedo and bowtie, attending an Angel charity event earlier that year. Maddy recognized Churchson as the goateed Archangel she’d called a jerk during her meeting at the NAS. The one who had been against her becoming Guardian.

  Bold script on the screen read: ARCHANGEL IMPLICATED IN BOMBING THAT KILLED NINETY-TWO INNOCENTS.

  The voice of the anchor back in the studio was announcing: “NAS officials have denied they had any clue of Churchson’s plot, and promise to do everything to help authorities bring him to justice. But Angel observers wonder if the damage done is already too late to fix.”

  “What’s going on?” Maddy asked the intern.

  “Archangel Churchson was the one behind the bombing; he was trying to frame the HDF and make Linden look bad,” the intern reported breathlessly.

  “What?” Maddy gasped.

  “Protests in major cities around the globe have already erupted, demanding justice and a full inquiry into the Angels and their hierarchy. Presidential candidate Teddy Linden has announced a press conference one hour from now. Still no official word from Gabriel and the True Immortals at this time. Stay with us as we follow this shocking scandal and the outrage around the world!

  “In other news, a group of doomsday activists shut down Metro lines this morning as they claimed. . .”

  “Oh. My. God,” Maddy’s technician whispered to no one in particular.

  Phones across the offices began ringing incessantly. For a moment, no one seemed able to move to go answer them. They all stood stock-still, remaining in disbelief.

  *

  The shockwaves from the utterly astonishing revelation that Archangel Charles Churchson had been behind the mysterious deadly bombing of the Angel offices quickly spread out from Angel City and across the world. The idea that an Angel himself – especially an Archangel – could be behind something so odious was deeply troubling to even those who had been consistent defenders of Angelkind and their rights. And the anti-Angel groups found their claims about the corruption of the supposedly perfect Immortals vindicated.

  Bizarrely, A! and ANN and some of the other Angel fan networks kept running normal Angel coverage, including specials on Maddy, while most of the regular news stations were running non-stop coverage of the Churchson scandal, interviewing family members of the victims, running profiles on Churchson, and cutting together exposés on other high-ranking Angel figures. The Angel networks were pretending like nothing was happening, even though the presidential election was mere days away. Poll numbers showed the public flocking to support Senator Linden, the Immortals Bill, and the Senator’s proposed Global Angel Commission, known as GAC. Maddy didn’t know how it was all going to end up. The Council of True Immortals had promised swift retaliation if humans trespassed on the rights of Angels. Everyone was on edge. But, in the wake of this devastating scandal, Mark had told her the “show must go on”.

  And so it did: Maddy soon got her second wave of Protections, bringing her up to her final number. Like the first batch, they all were very well-to-do and had a sense of entitlement clinging to them. But this time she tried to not let it bother her as much. Because, as Jackson had said, sometimes change took time. Soon, she assured herself, she’d be able to start advocating for some changes, but after she got really settled.

  Maddy also didn’t want to kid herself: with the shocking revelation of Archangel Churchson’s corruption and violence, she was secretly hopeful there would have to be some kind of reform on the way. People were demanding it.

  Jacks had been very busy recently, and he wouldn’t say much about what he’d been doing. But she thought it had to do with his treatments, which seemed to have increased in frequency.

  Then Election Day came. Maddy went over to the Godspeeds’ house that evening to watch the results. Jackson, his mom and his sister were there. Mark was at the NAS offices, preparing to start manoeuvring around whatever might happen politically.

  A strange pall had hung over Angel City that day, a morning mist that lingered far into midday, lending the afternoon a grey cast. People seemed to walk or drive around with their heads down. The beautiful Immortals were what Angel City knew. What it thrived on. What it felt pride in. And now a large part of the rest of the country might vote against them?

  The public revelation of Archangel Churchson’s crimes had been catastrophic for the pro-Angel political cause in the final days before the election. Everyone who had been infuriated by the threats of violence from the Council, everyone who had been calling the Angels “fallen”, all those who had pointed to the existence of someone like Maddy as a sign that Angels had been hiding things – they all felt a victory that day.

  “We cannot let
one bad apple ruin an entire system that thrives on goodness and the principle of service to mankind,” Mark had said in a press conference. But for many humans across the country, that was not good enough.

  At 7:43 p.m., hours before anyone would have predicted, the news networks were already able to call the winner of the election. They cut quickly to footage of the acceptance speech: the man on the screen had a shock of lustrous politician hair, with only a bit of grey starting to show through. His smile was meant to inspire confidence. Confidence in yourself that you’d made the right decision by voting for him.

  It was Senator Linden, now president-elect Linden.

  “My fellow Americans, I wanted to speak directly to you, the men and women of this great country of ours, the United States of America, the greatest country this world has ever seen. As one of our earliest citizens said, we are indeed a light upon the hill.”

  The president-elect cleared his throat and continued:

  “I want to thank you for the confidence you’ve put in me. I will do my best to serve you and this country as your next president. Now, I don’t think it will surprise you to hear me say that I’m proud to be an American. But it might surprise you when I look westward to Angel City and see something as un-American as the institution of the National Angel Services on our own shores. Well, I want to do something about it. The Angels don’t want you to hear about this. They’ve got their fancy cars and fancy homes and fancy lives to think about. I know many of you have followed these so-called Immortals your whole lives. They’ve thrilled you, moved you. You might even remember important events in your life around Commissionings, or a particularly memorable save. There is nothing wrong with that. We are all human Americans, allowed to spend our time and liberty however we see fit. The Constitution guarantees this. However, when the Constitution was framed, the Angel question was not on the table. As you know, I’ve been spearheading the special committee on Capitol Hill over the past nine months that has been investigating Angel affairs. And what I’ve discovered would shock – yes, shock – you. Much of it I can’t disclose right now, but, when the time comes, it shall be made public.