by Aya DeAniege
Suddenly that tightening was a need.
There was a genuine smile, actual happiness. Finally she was relaxed, and I felt as if that rare picture was an expression of her life. Happiness was fleeting, Grace was rarely at ease in the world. She hadn’t grown up like her peers, she wasn’t able to connect with any of them. Even if they had been in an abusive household, they had some sort of long-term connection, they were linked to other people in the world.
For Grace, we were all just figures passing by, who never noticed her. We would leave her like so many others from her past.
She was a damaged soul that one good body could fix. The idea of being that good body made me bite my bottom lip. An image flashed in my mind, of her moaning under me, red colouring her face as I thrust.
I’m not that kind of guy.
I slipped a hand into my pants, stroking myself firmly. Up and down, the motion was an echo of what I wanted, but it’d do the trick. I caressed my velveteen, yet hard flesh and shuddered out a breath.
When masturbating, I turned into a narcissist. I loved the feel and look of myself, how my body moved. Normally I watched carefully.
Not this time.
Leaning back in the chair, I closed my eyes and continued. Images of her over me flitted through my head. A woman’s voice giggling, poking fun at me. I bit my bottom lip, stiffening as I came.
In that wonderful aftermath, I felt guilty.
Because I’m not that guy. I’m not the guy who masturbates to pictures of a woman he hasn’t met yet. I’m not the one who stalks someone online and finds it arousing. Women are not just sexual playthings to me. That was not their purpose in my life.
That was my purpose in their lives.
Grumbling at myself, I pulled open a drawer and snapped up a tissue. Wiping myself off, I tossed it into the trash bin and then settled everything back to the way it had been before. I looked at the image again and stiffened.
There, in the background, was a pentagram made of plants.
Most people assume that symbols had to be drawn out, but they only needed the focal points. One could make a symbol out of many points. The mind filled the rest in, creating the symbol.
A symbol could be just like constellations in the sky. Written in dots in the cosmos.
Around the plants were strands of ribbon, stones...
I closed my eyes and cleared my mind very carefully. It was a witch’s spell, much like a spider web. The symbols caught the eye and alerted the creator to whoever was viewing the image.
That meant a witch had positioned Grace in just such a way, and taken the image to keep track of Grace, to see who followed her and who was spying on her.
That kind of spell wasn’t easy to do, especially over distance. It was newer magic, experimental even. A version of the spell existed as a type of magical alarm system for crypts, snapping an image of the person who laid eyes on the spell.
Opening my eyes again, I looked at who had posted the image.
Lilly Smith?
Smith was the most common surname in the country. An easy way of hiding oneself was to select that name as their own. Demons on the run liked to claim to be Smith. We had begun to pay more attention to anyone with that surname who was linked to anything. It was a neon flashing sign.
I clicked on Lilly’s name and got a big bundle of nothing. She was not friends with the person whose account I had hacked. Her privacy was set high enough that I couldn’t even see a list of her friends. I only knew of one friend, and that was Grace. I couldn’t very well hack Grace’s account.
If I did, this Lilly probably had something sitting right there on the front page, or on her profile image, to alert her to visits.
I closed down all the windows and considered my desktop. I wondered what I could, or should do, as Mike and Ralph strode into my office. Ralph grinned as Mike frowned.
The two were almost polar opposites of one another. Mike was down-to-earth, country sort of guy. He liked to get his hands dirty and spent a majority of his time tending my lawn and gardens.
I no longer had a say over the flower beds of my property. A fact that he constantly reminded me of when I complained that I wanted more colour and less green. If he had his way, he’d try to grow a whole new Garden of Eden on my land.
Except he’d also slaughter everything on Earth to start over again. I had to be careful not to let him go too far.
Ralph, on the other hand, believed that humanity had simply lost its way. He was always the one to bring up us coming out to the world and guiding them back to God’s good graces.
It was our fault that they had fallen, he argued, we should fix the mess we made.
Which was what we were doing on Earth in the first place. Fixing our mess, but coming out to the humans wasn’t going to change a damned thing. It would only cause confusion and rioting in the streets as the religions began fighting over which one of them truly belonged to God.
“You rang?” Mike asked in his annoyed tone of voice.
“When you fail, you get the hose,” I responded. “It was an agreement we all entered into long ago. If you have a problem with it, flit on back and try to argue the terms of our agreement.”
“The only one who can still time travel is you,” Mike snapped.
When he got irritable, his accent got thicker. That made it harder to understand him, made it even more important to focus on what he was saying. Missing a word wasn’t an option, not only was it disrespectful, but Mike’s temper tended to explode outward.
Whereas Ralph always got cold and still.
I swung my attention back to him.
“And you, little brother?”
Ralph was the youngest of us. While we were not truly related, I had always viewed him as a little brother, an adopted relation that Ralph had accepted without protest.
“I had a cock jammed down my throat when Gabe found me,” he responded in a bland tone of voice.
Which he was only saying to get a rise out of Mike. The two had a complicated history. I had once heard someone say that Ralph wanted to play with Mike’s flaming sword, but Mike was too confused by sex to understand that Ralph didn’t want his actual sword.
I had never seen that in the pair of them. I knew there was something between them, something that caused them to fight even though they shouldn’t have. But both were too stubborn to listen to outside advice.
“What kind of hobby have you got?” Mike asked. “Cocks down throats isn’t fun for anyone except the receiver. You need to take up painting or something.”
“I painted for centuries, it’s boring,” Ralph said. “I needed something new to keep my attention and hone my skills. Since someone found me lacking.”
“You failed to expel a demon six times, resulting in the deaths of forty-seven people,” I said. “Though I must admit, you’ve improved since taking on your new hobby, so there’s that.”
“Pornographic imagery of one of us online, and we’re now all right with that? Really?” Mike asked. “He works in gay porn, Sammy.”
“Sam, Mike, I will not tell you again,” I responded quietly.
“It’s pornography!” he protested.
I watched Mike fume for a moment. Then I sighed out and sat forward.
“You do realize that we have sex with humans to excise demons, don’t you?” I asked.
“Yes, but that’s for a good cause,” Mike said.
“He’s still a virgin, recall,” Ralph muttered with a shake of his head. “Saving himself for God, perhaps?”
“Unlike you all, I have not forgotten where we come from, or what we were meant to be,” Mike said sternly. “When we are once more granted access to the gates of Heaven, I will not be denied because I sullied myself with whores, gambling, alcohol, drugs, and now gay pornography!”
Unlike the rest of us, Mike had never found a lover among the humans. He did his duty, he was quite good at that duty and always had been, but he had never been in it for anything besides the action and the f
ix. Even I wasn’t certain how he separated the two of them, but somehow he managed it.
We all denied the past sometimes, it was the only way we could get through the day. That was why I didn’t point out to Mike that he had, by his own belief, sullied himself in the eyes of our Father.
I shrugged at his words because I knew that my shrug would upset him. His annoyance turned to boiling rage quite quickly.
“The woman you two saw to has reappeared on the radar. Gabe saw to her once more, but he doesn’t believe it worked. He brought me her identification. She’s... she’s just too clean. I’m surprised you managed to talk her into sex in the first place. There’s nothing about this woman, not flags or signs. Except for one Lilly Smith.”
“She was with a woman,” Ralph said. “After being with me, she went to see the woman. They left together. She wasn’t dressed for the club, but the other woman was, surrounded by others of her style as well. I followed them out. The one works for a designated driver company.”
“Yes, I know. I’ve requested Grace’s records and was denied by her employer.”
“Denied?” Mike said. “Isn’t that a flag?”
“An oddity, until I saw the image taken by Lilly and placed online, tagging Grace. There’s a spying spell in the background made up of plants. The spell is new, but that method of creating it is old, before civilization, old.”
“The other woman was blonde, blue-eyed,” Mike said.
“Black hair, green-eyed,” Ralph said.
“With the way women at bars act, there’s no guarantee that it’s a sign. I’ve seen several women on different nights, completely different looks. The things they can do with makeup nowadays should be branded witchcraft.”
“Wake up beside another road rash face?” Ralph asked. “Try not to be so vain.”
“Hey, I’m okay with being vain,” I said. “What I’m not okay with is lying.”
“That’s rich, coming from you,” Mike said.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “We need a new plan of action. The demons are latching onto this woman. We need to find out why. If she’s involved with a high-level witch and doesn’t know it.”
“She could be a sacrifice for the witch’s magic,” Mike finished. “That’s against their laws. Call the witches and let them deal with it.”
“We do not let a human be consumed as a sacrifice in a witch’s spell,” I snapped. “Such spells open gates to Hell, allowing yet more demons through. All of our work would be undone.”
“Dinner,” Ralph said. “Let’s be honest with her.”
“Like—Hi, my name is Michael, I am an angel of the Lord, honest?” Mike asked. “The last time we tried that a man died on the cross and yet another religion was founded. One that ended up killing thousands in the name of God. No, no thank you, let’s not be honest.”
“Sam’s the one who pissed him off,” Ralph said.
“You’re going to bring that up, now?” I asked. I growled out, which cut off their protests. After a moment of thought, I sighed out a breath and tried to calm myself. “Dinner, half-honesty. Nothing about our mission or job in this world, understand?”
“And then what?” Mike asked.
“I own Seraph, I had it built and obviously pay attention to what happens inside. My brothers, all three of them, have come home with tales of sleeping with a woman at my club. I want to meet her. I want to see if I can get one of my brothers to settle down with her.”
Mike grimaced.
“Long-term care? Not me, thanks.”
“If that woman looks at you and wants you, your pants had best fucking well drop, Michael,” I snapped. “Do recall, dark witches are on you. You don’t get to argue chastity to get out of cleaning up your mess.”
“What about the witch?” Ralph asked.
“I’m going to extend an invitation which Grace will take to the witch. She will attend, or so help me. They will come to dinner, we will all be polite and someone, please, try again at dinner.”
“Maybe you should try,” Mike snarled. “It’s been a long time since you did your duty, you probably don’t remember how.”
“My part cannot be undone by throwing some demons out of mortals,” I growled. “While you entertain the masses, I will continue on my mission and do what I need to do to fix this.”
“If witches are on me, why do I have to service the sluts?” Mike asked.
I lowered my head and pinched the bridge of my nose as Ralph shouted a protest. The two of them began bickering back and forth about the mission, of what we were doing with our time on the mortal plane. As they continued to argue, I stood.
“Stop,” I said quietly.
They stopped. Both of them turned to me, their hands at their sides, waiting for me to give them a command.
“The women you fuck in my club are rarely sluts. They may harbour dark secrets, they may hold the mind of a demon, may be a puppet for evil forces on Earth, but they are rarely sluts. They sleep with you because you are an angel of the Lord and they are drawn to you like moths to a flame. They would do anything you ask of them, including sleep with you, or sleep with a man who is possessed. But they are rarely sluts. What they do to you, you have them do to you. Don’t you ever call them a slut.”
“I am a virgin.”
“Oh please, you’ve had sex more times than Ralph. Get off your high horse, Michael. We are all tainted, none of us will ever see Heaven as long as our mistakes continue to walk this Earth. Now is not the time for your petty, bitter whining.”
“It’s never the time!” Mike shouted back.
“No! It is never the time,” I responded. “Heaven will not accept bitter. It will not allow you back in if you behave in a petty manner. I’m tired of having this conversation with you every couple of centuries. Cut it out. End of story.”
“We never agreed that you’d be the boss of us.”
“No, it just happened. So, here I am, being the leader,” I snapped as I picked up my phone and hit a button. “Mary, get me my driving service, I have a need for them to pick something up for me.”
I woke up the next morning in Lilly’s apartment to my alarm on my phone screaming at me. Groggily, I found the phone and shut it off. Scrunching my eyes against the sun filtering in through the sheer curtains covering the windows of the apartment, I sat up slowly and turned my attention to the kitchen area.
There Lilly was with headphones on, dancing and bee-bopping around the kitchen area with an egg flipper in her hand. She was dressed in pyjamas, as in a t-shirt and pyjama bottoms, but her hair was already up and ready to go. It would take her seconds to get the rest of her appearance ready to leave the apartment.
With a grimace, I looked down and smoothed out the wrinkles in my button up shirt. I supposed I had to go clothes shopping the next time I had some money, find something that didn’t make it look like I was trying to be a girl from the country.
But they were comfortable, and new clothing was always thin and expensive... and fragile. I had thought about asking Lilly for help there. Not to buy the clothing for me, but to help me find the right outfits to wear.
I just didn’t think she’d be able to list a single clothing store I could afford, let alone find on a map.
“Good morning, sunshine!” Lilly called from the kitchen area.
She knew that I was not a happy person in the morning, but she still beamed and waved. Thankfully, she did not expect me to smile and wave back. That was for crazy people and those who got up early enough to have breakfast almost ready by the time you woke up.
“Coffee and newspaper there,” she said, motioning with the egg flipper before she transferred the music from her phone to the in-house speakers.
It wasn’t loudly obnoxious, just loud enough to hear really. She continued to dance, and I went for the coffee pot and poured myself a cup. Then I grabbed the newspaper and sat at the kitchen table and drank some coffee and read the newspaper. More importantly, I stayed the hell out of Lilly’s kitchen.
She didn’t appreciate visitors trying to help. In fact, my first breakfast there, I had been smacked on the hand with that flipper before I got the message.
So I sat and relaxed, reading about some war in a country across the world, that we weren’t even participating in. A new war, or perhaps a civil uprising.
Truth be told, the only time I read the newspaper was at Lilly’s. I was always behind. I didn’t know what half the terms were, or why acronyms were suddenly appearing in the newspaper.
“What’s a—?” I got out.
“Terrorist group, not newly formed, just getting more attention,” Lilly said, setting a plate on the table with toast laden on top of it. “You’re going to eat a full meal today, not a piece of toast and then run.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said a little sarcastically.
I went back to reading the paper. She went off to finish breakfast. A few minutes later she tapped me on the shoulder, and I moved the newspaper out of the way as she set a two-egg omelette in front of me.
I grimaced at the sight of it.
“Don’t worry, sour cream is coming, and there are cheese and egg yolks in there. It’s not like mine,” she said as she walked away.
Where does she get the energy?
I folded the newspaper and set it to the side as Lilly returned with a little bowl of sour cream for me, and her plate. Except her plate had an omelette made with egg whites, kale, mushrooms, and some weird thing that might have been beans.
We ate in silence as the music played in the background. At the end of the meal, I sipped some of my coffee and Lilly cleared the plates and placed them into the dishwasher she had installed beside the sink.
“Okay, maybe I should let you get the dishes next time,” she said. “You look super uncomfortable, and it’s hard to mess up dishes going into the dishwasher.”
“That is true,” I said with a little head nod as I sipped my coffee. “Are we done with the forced ritual?”
