“Look what you’ve…” he growled. “You whore-fucking bastard! Now what am I going to…?”
Faith stood up slowly and stretched his wings wide. They were hurting and damaged, but still attached, unlike Dogg’s. He was alive, and also unlike Dogg, Faith was still an archangel of one of the two Heavens. Which one would have to be decided when he got back, but for now the fact that he was an angel was enough.
Faith knew that was more than Dogg had, because every angel in the two Heavens understood what would happen if their wings got cut off. He walked over to the whining, whimpering mutt, Dogg. “And now you can feel what it’s like to be mortal again,” he said. Then he swung his wing as hard as he could, lopping off Dogg’s whimpering head.
As Dogg’s head rolled across the floor and blood pumped from the stump on his body, Faith limped back toward Babette, dragging a badly injured leg as he went.
And now he knew what he had to do to get back.
— CXXVI —
I’M STILL STRAPPED down to this chair. This dream’s getting old, but I… My eye’s still swollen, so I guess—maybe it is real, I don’t know. I’m beat to shit, I know that. Like … “Aah,” I let out a little groan. She said not to do that, but—she was…?
“She’s waking up,” I hear her voice clear enough. That’s me—my voice.
I struggle to get my eyes open this time. It’s like, a bad hang day, or some stupid shit. Groggy… Whole body is… It’s a slow ache now, kinda like … like too many liqs and—who are all these…?
I’m hallucinating again. There’s a big, burly-looking—yep, I’m jacked up on J, because that’s like … an angel or some stupid fairy shit. But I—there was like, a copy of me or something. She was all bitching at me. I was—there she is. Still here, I think.
Then I see them. How many? Six little… What the hell are those things? Like little winged midgets or something. Baby angels. I am so tripping on J!
“You’re not tripping,” my bitchy-self’s voice again. “Well, technically, like, I guess you are fucked up, but you’re not drunk.”
I look closer at the little ones. It’s like, they’re confused, or—shit, I’m confused. “What are those things?”
Sounds like I—she chirps at them, like a bird or something. And they all go running behind me. I can hear them back there, cheeping and chirping like little baby chicks. This is some bad J. I’m gonna kick Brie’s ass. She never gets the good stuff. Total gullible bitch. Have to get her credits back. I guess it’s better than those other hallucinations—that was harsh. I hope he didn’t—
They’re whispering to each other—the big one and—I think I recognize him. No idea, but he’s leaned over and she’s—I’m—“Hey,” I say to her, because I don’t think I’m yelling at him, “that’s just … rude. I’m right here. Anyways, it’s my dream, so untie me, guardian angel fucks.”
They walk over to me and stare down. I know who that fucker is! I seen him on my dad’s Protection—“I know who you are,” I say to him. “Untie me. My dad’s gonna—”
He looks over at … me—angel-me. That’s still spinning my brain. “She doesn’t know,” he says to angel-me. They’re like, ignoring me—totally rude.
“Hello, right here, asshole,” I say to him this time. “Rude.”
He laughs a little, still ignoring me and looking at her. “Your charming vocabulary hasn’t changed much,” he says to her.
And angel-me frowns at him. Then she looks—I look down at me. This is a serious trip. “Do we like, untie her?” she asks. “What if she runs away?”
He’s like, a foot taller than her. “Where’s she gonna go,” he laughs, “Cancun?”
“So not funny,” she says to him. At least my angel-me doesn’t take any shit off assholes, because I’m starting to feel like … like I shouldn’t like this guy.
I close my eyes and my head slumps down—I’m … I feel exhausted. I guess I should be—spinning through all this shit. Where did all that come from? Like flashes of my—oh, shit…
I open my eyes back up, kinda slow, because I’m not sure if I want to know. But angels and little angels and being in—“What … in the fuck … is that?” I say when I see all of it.
I was too busy looking up at them before. The floor’s got like—there’s dead people everywhere!
“I told you little purgies,” angel-me says to the little ones, “she’s gonna freak. Now drag them out of here like I told you.”
But I’m still like … dead bodies! “They’re dead?” I ask.
Angel-me looks behind her at the little ones wrestling with the bodies, and … and chunks of bodies—shit!
The little ones—they look all black and they have little … like wings? They’re dragging everything out the door.
They still aren’t untying me. What the…?
Then angel-me looks at me. “How’s she going to—how can I do that shit?” she asks the big one. And she is pissed—I know my voice.
Then the big angel looks me in the eyes. “Not a question of how,” he says, “she … you have to do it. Otherwise, no one’s going back. And we still gotta find Faith, because he’s fucked too. Right now, no time for this. Tell her and be done with it. I still gotta wipe my own ass over there and deal with your daddy.” Then the big one walks off muttering to himself, “Can’t believe—it’s your lucky day, Frank. Nothing’s easy.”
I’m a bitch, but I’m not stupid. “Am I … dead?” I ask angel-me.
“You wish,” she says.
I frown at her, because that’s like, my own sarcastic voice she’s using … on me. “Tell me what?” I ask her.
By the time angel-me is done whispering my fate to me … I guess … I guess I do wish I was already dead. “Well, what if like, when you untie me, I just jump right out a window or some shit? Or maybe run away? How ’bout that, bitch?”
She smiles at me and I know it’s shitty, because that’s like, what I do when I tell someone something they don’t wanna hear. “Trust me,” she says, “you do not wanna do that. Falling is totally scary … then and probably scarier now. Anyways, you’re not hard enough to handle…” She looks behind her at the big angel, staring into the room with the blown-out glass. “Better to let him do it,” she says.
“He’s throwing me out a window?” I say. Then I look over at him and scrunch my eyebrows. “Fuck him.”
Angel-me turns and looks at him, too. “You sure she’s not remembering this, because like—”
The big angel doesn’t look back. He just keeps staring into that room. I try to lean to see what he’s looking at, but he must hear me or something, because he spreads his wings way out—they’re huge—and I can’t see around them. “She won’t remember,” he says. “Do you remember?”
“This shit?” angel-me says. “None of it.”
“Ipso facto…” I think the big angel mutters.
What the…? I think.
And then angel-me reads my mind? “Yeah,” she says, “don’t think about it too much—it’ll judge up your head. Have a couple of Blonde Bimbos, hit a little J, you’ll cruise right through it. It’s only a year—like that’s … barely a second.”
For some reason, I don’t think she’s talking about the dead bodies. I don’t know how I will forget any of this, though.
Then the little midget-angels start filing and fluttering back into the room … and they’ve got another one with them. How many…? But when I look closer, I definitely know who that one is.
— CXXVII —
WHEN FURY SAW the look of recognition on Mercedes’ face, she spun around and almost fired feathers at him … again.
“Heaven help—whoa-whoa,” Faith shouted. “Easy … easy.” Then he limped into the room. His wings sagged and his body slumped—he’d been in some kind of fight.
Fury turned back to Jump. His wings were still wide, shielding the other two. “We cleansing the garden again?” she said. “Like, every angel with wings, flying around down here.” Then she turned
back to Faith. “What are you doing here … old cocksucker?”
Faith frowned a little. Daughter or not, her vulgarity was—she was a singular force to be reckoned with. “Good to see you, too,” he said. Then he looked around the room. “You’ve been … busy.”
The tearful reunions would have to wait, as would Faith accounting for shooting a fire-feather into Jump’s back. When they started bickering about it, Fury told them both, “Stuff a cock in it because we don’t have time for you bitching at each other! Faith, watch the hall while we clean this shit up.”
Once Jump grumbled past his need for retribution and Faith explained his own return to the garden, Fury sent Faith into the hall to stand guard and they got to work cleaning up her “feather-fuck.” Because that’s what the whole thing was turning into, Jump told her.
When they were done, Fury summoned Faith back into the cell and he looked around. He had missed a few things in their haste to put him back in the hallway. Now he could see why.
Remnants of body parts that the little purgatories had obviously missed were strewn across the floor. Fury and Jump stood angrily on opposite sides of the cell, and Frank—the real one—and a Protection agent that looked like—that’s Jake—Jump? Faith thought.
The PAIC—Jake—and Frank were duct-taped to chairs and their mouths were taped shut, too. Mercedes was taped up behind them. Faith limped toward her, dragging his leg a little quicker now. “Untie her!” he shouted. “Why are you—?”
Fury stepped in front of him. “Can’t do it,” she said. “It’ll all get fucked up.”
Faith almost threw his good wing at her to get her out of his way, but technically Fury was his daughter, too. He looked past her, at Mercedes again. The girl was badly beaten and her eyes were swollen, and he could see that some of her hair was ripped out and on the floor at her feet. “God help me,” Faith said. “Who did this?”
Jump frowned. “You’re gonna wanna stop talking like that,” he said to Faith. “Shit’s getting a little too real.”
“Stop saying what?” Faith asked.
“The G-word,” Jump replied. “The mercy shit, too.”
Faith frowned. Jump was a disbelieving blasphemer in life, but after what they had all seen in death? And all this? “Why?” he asked.
“Yeah, why?” Fury asked. She was curious, too. “Rain’s not down here.”
“Not that it would matter,” Jump said. Then he looked up at the nothingness. “But she’s not the one I’m worried about. Something I read…”
— CXXVIII —
THE PAIC AND Frank both flitted their eyes around the room. Taped down to chairs, in the middle of an obvious Judgment overdose, neither of them could speak or move. But who had shot them…?
Images of angels and cherubs and winged warriors, coming to take souls to Heaven, filled their minds. The hallucination was so real that they could even smell smoke and gunpowder and feel the pain and panic in the room.
And when the PAIC looked closely, he could see that the girl angel was this bastard Frank’s other daughter—the twin had turned pissed-off angel from Hell. Gotta make it through the Judgment, he thought. You’re remanded, Jake, wait it out. Did I stick that bastard in the neck?
But that girl angel wasn’t the only pissed-off fairy in the cell with them—the big angel wore a familiar scowl that Jacob Oliver Blake, PAIC, saw every morning when he shaved in the mirror. That big angel … was him.
And when that angel turned his attention back to the two of them in the chairs, Jake got a little nervous. It had been a while since anything had scared him, but a big angel that looked just like him? That did the job.
Jake’s personal guardian angel caught him trying to work on the tape with his fingernails. Then the angel walked over, spread his wings wide, and squatted down in front of him.
The wings were impressively huge, and Jake figured the fairy had to spread them out in order to squat down. That’s what a PAIC was trained to do—catalogue details.
The angel looked at Jake’s hand. “You can stop that shit,” he said. “I’m not killing you.” Then he looked at Frank in the chair next to Jake. “But I can’t let you kill him, either.”
Then Jake struggled against his tape even harder. He had to kill the bastard—he’d come too far to let a hallucination stop him.
“Don’t worry,” the big angel said, “you’ll get to him later.” Then the angel held up the syringe from Jake’s pocket. He smiled. “Right now, he’s just gonna take a nice little trip. You missed his artery anyway.” The angel reached over to Frank’s collar and pulled the man’s shirt down a little, revealing his mesh-armored under-suit. “Little paranoid, don’t ya think?”
Jake struggled some more, but he was taped tight.
The big angel looked right into Frank’s eyes. “That’s the thing about assfucking people, Frank—pretty soon, all you’re doing is looking over your shoulder, clenching up all the time, trying to make sure it doesn’t happen to you.”
“Wait,” Fury said. She walked over behind Jump. His wings blocked her from getting at her father … and the other “loose end” they still had to clean up. She could see now that the guy was Jump. “You’re not even like, letting me do it?”
Jump paused. Then he turned his head behind him and looked into Fury’s eyes. She was still wild with pent-up rage. “You’re gonna cut his head off,” he said. “It’s all over your face. You know I can’t let you do that.”
Then Frank started bouncing up and down in his chair and muffled screams came out from behind the tape over his mouth.
Jump turned back and clucked a little chuckle at him. “Shut … up,” he said slowly. “I should let her. Be doing you a favor.” He shook his head. “You have no idea. Eh, but since I kinda like my life the way it is now … well, I guess Miss Mercedes and I will just have to crack your little eggs in your nest.” And then Jump raised up the syringe.
“No, no, no,” Fury raised her voice behind him. “I didn’t like, fly all the way down here, dragging these little purgie bitches, so you could deliver him judgment. That’s bullshit! That’s not what you said.”
Jump paused the needle in front of Frank’s face, letting him get a good look at his company’s “wonder” drug, dripping out of the tip—that was his agreement with Fury. He looked at her while he hovered the needle behind him. “Hmm…” he said, “maybe … but you have to promise not to cut his head off. That shit in the church—I could barely handle all that blood, spraying and spewing out of his neck like that. You are one sick—you might be meaner than me.”
Fury looked into Frank’s eyes. They were wide as her wings. Then she looked at Jump. He could hardly stop from cracking a smile. “What if like…? Ooh, I know,” she said, “I’ll cut off his cock. That—that’s fair.” She would like to do that very thing, but after she and Jump’s little chat, the stakes were now beyond her need for revenge against her father.
Jump frowned at her. Fury was enjoying torturing the man. But that was their deal, so he shrugged a little and moved the needle closer to Frank’s neck. “I don’t know,” he said, “how’s he gonna piss? And he’ll get all infected. Messy, too. You ever cut a cock off? They bleed like a stuck pig—messy … very messy.”
And sweat rolled down Frank’s forehead and nose and he started hyperventilating, sucking in the salty liquid through his nostrils, and then he choked and tried to cough behind the tape.
Fury frowned and pouted her face a little. “Balls?” she said. “At least let me take his balls. That’s like, totally fair.”
Faith could see that Jump and Fury were simply torturing the two of them, wasting valuable time. He could feel the sands of eternity galloping at them—somehow he knew there wasn’t much time left.
The torture didn’t bother him as much as he thought it should. Frank was a filthy dog, in life and after. And Faith wondered.
What was Dogg doing—where was his soul? Faith hadn’t heard a soul-security gathering angel since he let Life resurrect
him. And from the looks of the bodies piling up in the hall, not to mention the ones he and the father had left in the other interrogation wing, there was a huge backup of waiting souls to take back to Purgatory.
But Faith had sent Father Benito looking for Mercedes. When he stopped to think about it, he was nowhere to be found.
Distracted by Jump and Fury’s little game, Faith hadn’t checked the edges of the cell. “Excuse me,” Faith said to them both, “but when you two are done with him, can you tell me what the hell is going on? And where am—where is Father Benito?”
— CXXIX —
RESURRECTION, RAIN THOUGHT. She knew the tide of redemption could go out as quickly as it came in. If Fury wasn’t careful, it would sweep her out to sea with it—a little bird, lost in an ocean of her own self-denial. If Rain’s friend harmed a hair on her own father’s body, she could never be redeemed. She would simply repeat her trial, and her judgment in Heaven would be the same.
Salvation continued to watch the fall with Rain. Seeing Jump and Fury toy with Fury’s father, she felt a darkness in him that she hadn’t known before. He enjoyed watching the man squirm in fear. Yet, the man was an evil animal. Salvation had overheard Fury and Jump speak about it. And then there was Vegas.
Fury had alluded to it the whole time she and Salvation cleansed Sin City. Watching older men parade through casinos with young hookers barely out of high school, Salvation hadn’t really understood Fury’s contempt and joy as she killed them. Now, watching Fury delight in torturing her father, it seemed more obvious.
Rain looked into the fall. “Mother?” she said.
“Oh my—Rain, don’t listen,” Salvation said. She stopped watching and looked at her daughter. “That’s just—does she always talk like that?”
Rain giggled a little. “Not always,” she said, “sometimes it’s worse. But … it’s kinda cute too, don’t you think? She just shouts about nothing, and it is—she likes to hear herself talk. I think it keeps the memories out of her mind—calms her down. I just … I just want her to get back here.”
Salvation rolled her eyes. “Just like your father,” she said. “Heaven and Hell have mercy. I have to deal with two of them now? I can’t handle one.” She looked into Rain’s eyes. “Are you sure about how long this takes?”
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