by eden Hudson
“Why are you here?” I ask.
“Because I’m not allowed in Heaven anymore and Hell just doesn’t appeal to me.”
“Are you after Shannon?” I ask him.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Shannon and I have a contract,” he says. “She attempted to break the terms.”
I manage to swallow the instinct to bargain, then the one to threaten him. But just barely.
“Shannon sold you her soul?” I say.
“I would expect an apologetics major to know the difference between a literal statement and an idiom,” the fallen angel says. His wings shuffle behind him, opening slightly, then refolding like someone uncrossing their legs, then re-crossing them. “One can’t sell something that doesn’t have quantifiable value. One can, however, go further and further down a road, trading off little pieces of themselves until there’s nothing left. But in my business, that’s more of a fringe benefit.”
“You really like to hear yourself talk, don’t you?” I say.
“Sound familiar?” he says.
“Did you kill Henry and Charlotte?”
“My enforcer handles that sort of thing. But yes, I delegated the job.”
“Because Shannon was trying to break your contract?”
“Charlotte’s time was up,” he says. “Shannon only asked that her sister survive the cancer. Nothing else.”
I feel the bottom drop out of my stomach. Shannon and Charlotte’s mother died from breast cancer—a rare form too fast to treat, but too slow for her to die gracefully. The times Shannon had talked to me about it, all she could say was that it had been awful, that the cancer had eaten away everything she ever loved about her mom.
All those times I’d been around Charlotte and Henry after Shannon and I broke up… They weren’t avoiding talking about how well Shannon’s tour was going, they were avoiding talking about Charlotte’s diagnosis.
Does Henry know you’ve been skipping school?
Screw off, Danny. You broke up with her. That means you don’t get to follow me around and pretend like you give a crap because everyone knows you don’t.
A muscle starts twitching in my cheek. I make myself unclench my jaw.
“You made a deal with a seventeen-year-old who didn’t even know what she was doing?” I ask.
“Let’s be honest,” the fallen angel says. “None of you really know what you’re doing.”
“Why her, then? Why not everybody who tries to bargain?”
“I took a special interest in Shannon,” he says. “You, too, now that you bring it up.”
I can feel myself being led. I need to stop and think about what the right questions are, figure out how to direct this conversation, but he’s not giving me time. All I can do is keep asking, “Why?”
“I invest in the future,” he says. “Would you like to know what happens in your future?”
“I die,” I say, shrugging. “Life’s terminal, big surprise.”
He raises one eyebrow.
“Try to act your age if not your intellect.” Then he leans forward, elbows on the table. “Isn’t it killing you, wondering if you’ll ever be with her? If she’ll ever love you?”
The answer’s not just yes, it’s a screaming yes that makes my throat dry and the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
“No,” I whisper. I swallow and try to say it like I mean it. “No.”
The fallen angel laughs.
“You’re a good kid, Daniel.” He taps his knuckle on the tabletop and stares at me. After a few seconds, he seems to come to a decision. “All right, I’ll tell you. Do you know why you’re going to lose her? Because you’re simple. All you’ve ever wanted from life was to settle down with her and have a whole passel of kids. To live happily ever after. Once you have that, you’ll forget all about being sober and being vigilant and when that happens—” He snaps his fingers and I flinch. “—I’ll be there. Like a roaring lion, Daniel.”
He waits for that to sink in. Then he smiles and stands up.
“Tell your father I send my best. Well, try to tell him, anyway.” Then he gives me a wink as if he gets the joke. “Y’all have a good’n, now, y’hear?”
He turns to go.
“That’s it?” I say.
Without looking back, he waves his hand in dismissal.
What was the point of coming down here? To listen while a fallen angel talked in circles?
When I realize what an idiot I’ve been, I shove away from the table so hard that I trip over my chair. The point was to leave Shannon three floors up, unguarded.
Shannon
Sweat dries on my face and the back of my neck, but I shiver. The angel smiles. The pit of my stomach goes weak and watery. If I didn’t have a catheter in, I think I would have wet myself.
Run, the voice in my head screams.
But I can’t move. My muscles are locked.
“This is your last chance to do it voluntarily, Shannon,” the angel says. “Call the studio. Agree to release Bullet Proof.”
Speaking is so far beyond me now that it feels like I’ll never be able to make a sound again.
She comes closer, perfect hips swinging, heels clicking. Her black wings unfurl and fill the room behind her, and I have a crazy second where I think that would be the music video for “Burn Me Alive” if I finally did agree to release Bullet Proof—the angel of death and destruction gliding through the halls of a psychiatric hospital searching for me.
“If I’m honest,” she says, “I’m still kind of hoping you’ll say no.” The angel leans over the bedrail as if she’s going to kiss me. “Because if you try to grow a spine now, I get to be the one who breaks it.” Her forked tongue darts out and skates across my lips.
Tiffani lunges. The angel grabs her by the throat and throws her to the floor. Before Tiffani even finishes sliding, the angel is holding a flaming sword.
Tiffani rolls onto her side, grabs the lip of the sink, and pulls herself up. Reddish-brown blood oozes from her nose and the room fills with the smell of perms and hot peppers. She looks at me.
For a second, I’m sure she’s going to save me. Tiffani, my bodyguard, my protector. I’m so relieved that I laugh half-hysterically.
Then the angel of death says, “I’ll give you two choices, vampire. Crack open Shannon’s chest and lay her heart at my feet or feel this blade burn its way through your soul as it calls the Gatekeepers of Hell to drag you down to the Pit.”
Danny
I slam open the cafeteria door. Almost plow into a man pushing his very pregnant wife in a wheelchair. I look up and down the hall. The fallen angel’s gone.
The stairs are back past the nurse’s station, across the hall from the elevator. I swing around the corner. Smack into a solid wall of muscle.
Noah. Clare’s right behind him.
“Sword,” I say, holding my hand out.
Noah just stares. “What are you—”
“Give me your sword!”
“We’re not strapped,” Noah says. “This is a hospital, not a—”
But Clare pulls his katana out of its concealed spine sheath and tosses it to me. “Go. We’ll set up a perimeter and catch up.”
I start running again. Thank God one of us doesn’t need a list of reasons with a minimum of five Bible references and ancient Aramaic semantics to study before we act.
Shannon
I’ve never seen Tiffani panic before. It’s awful. She doesn’t look beautiful or even human anymore, she looks like a bird tangled in fishing line.
“Go ahead,” the angel tells Tiffani. “If you love Shannon so much, save her. Start your eternity in Hell off right. Knowing that you died to protect her might even make the pain worth it for a little while.”
The angel takes a step toward Tiffani and lifts that flaming sword.
My hand shoots out automatically, reaching for them as if I can do something. The IV tears free of my vein and droplets of blood spray the white sheets.
Tiffani must smell it. She blinks, snaps out of the paralysis, then turns and grabs the sink. There’s a creak and the screech of metal bending. The whole thing rips away from the wall as Tiffani throws the sink at the angel.
Water gushes. Chunks of porcelain fly everywhere. I throw my arms over my face instinctively.
When I look again, the angel is picking herself up off the floor.
And the door to my room is swinging shut.
Tiffani’s gone.
The angel laughs and I can hear all the souls she’s tortured since the beginning of time wailing and I know the angel has given thousands of people the same choice she gave Tiffani and that the angel has held thousands of still-beating hearts in her hand.
The angel turns to me. Her wings and hair are dripping and there’s a trickle of blood coming from the corner of her mouth.
“That one hurt a little bit,” she says. “But I think a kiss will make it all better. Then we can really have some fun.”
Danny
I take the stairs, two, three, four at a time. As many as I can without tripping. Just as I hit the third floor landing and reach for the door, it bangs open. I jump out of the way. Hide the katana behind my back.
It’s Tiffani. Her nose is bleeding. Her clothes are drenched. Her eyes are wide and terrified. She shoves past like she doesn’t see me.
I rip the door open. Turn down the hall. Dodge a nurse carrying a tray full of shiny instruments.
“Hey, no running,” the nurse yells. “How many times do I have to…”
I don’t slow down. I follow Tiffani’s wet shoeprints. My lungs are burning. Every heartbeat sounds like too late, too late, too late.
Please, God, don’t let me be too late.
Shannon
The angel’s lips are so hot it feels like I’m kissing a stadium spotlight that’s been left running for a week. Scorching droplets of water fall from her hair onto my face. With her so close, the room has turned into a sauna. Her forked tongue slips into my mouth. She tastes the way fresh asphalt smells. As her tongue pushes to the back of my throat and up into my nasal cavity, stinging sparks shoot off from its tips.
Her flaming sword has disappeared. She doesn’t need it anymore. I’m not struggling. Some part of my brain has finally figured out that this is what I deserve. Shannon Colter, the pathetic bitch who destroyed not only the lives of everyone who ever loved her, but also the lives of everyone who ever listened to Bullet Proof, the first rock and roll album in the history of the world that was actually demonically inspired.
Instead of my life flashing before my eyes, the stats run through my mind. Four suicides—two of them focus group listeners; one a ‘zine writer named Jack; and one a double-murder-suicide by a mixing tech who killed her boyfriend, their three-year-old daughter, then herself. The perfectly normal V&R exec, Kyle, who raped his secretary. Almost definitely Mena’s breakdown last year. God knows how many other mental health problems festering in psyches somewhere, waiting for a trigger.
I should never have agreed to be the conduit for that music. Duh.
I should never have made the deal. Equally duh.
A handsome man with black holes for eyes finds you crying in a hospital stairwell and tells you he can save your sister’s life, you just have to do a little something for him first? How fucking stupid does a person have to be to say yes to that shit?
The doctors said they caught it early. Stage two. Maybe Charlotte would’ve gone into remission with treatment alone. Maybe she would’ve made it. Maybe if I had just believed and prayed and been the good little God-fearing country girl I was supposed to be, Charlotte would’ve gotten better and Dad would still be alive and Danny and I would be together. Maybe all of this is God’s way of getting back at me for not believing in Him when I had the chance.
There’s a boom at the edge of my vortex of self-pity.
The angel breaks the kiss. When her tongue jerks out of my throat, it feels like someone’s trying to suck my lungs flat and pull my eyeballs out through my nose. I choke and gasp for air.
“Nice of you to join the party, preacher,” the angel says.
“Not him,” I whisper to God or Jesus Christ or whoever’s listening. “Please not Danny.”
But it is. He’s standing there in the frothing water, holding a fucking samurai sword like he’s ready to go all Teenage Mutant Ninja Preacher on the angel of death.
Danny
Usually, I’ve got a feeling of perfect clarity during battles. Time slows down and I can see everything that’s happening. Even things I shouldn’t be able to see, for some reason, when I’m in the middle of a fight, I can imagine or sense them or something.
But this time I feel disoriented. And it’s not the busted pipe in the wall gushing water, either, it’s the fallen angel. She’s completely different from the one who distracted me in the cafeteria. Sure, her blood-red dress is sticking to her like another layer of skin, but something about her wings opened to their full span and shedding water is terrifying. The only thing I can compare it to is that time I saw a cottonmouth spring up out of the creek and bite our bull on the throat.
“Nice sword,” the fallen angel says. “But mine’s bigger.”
Then she reaches to her side and pulls a sword out of thin air. It’s got more than a foot and at least ten pounds on Clare’s katana. And it’s on fire. Real fire. When she swings it through the spray from the wall, the water hisses and evaporates.
I’m going to die.
Over the fallen angel’s shoulder, in the V between her wing and her neck, I see Shannon kneeling in the hospital bed. Her hands are folded as if she’s praying and they’re clasped so tightly that her tattoos almost glow against the bloodless skin of her arms.
A feeling of calm spreads through me. If I have to die for anything, it’s going to be for Shannon. Nothing else is worth it.
I lunge at the fallen angel, kicking up water. Swing the katana. The angel swats it down with her bare hand. I try to redirect the momentum, change the direction of the blade to slice through her thigh instead.
The angel sidesteps. She chops down with her flaming sword. Slams the katana to the floor. Water boils. The katana’s blade digs into the soft vinyl tile and the concrete underneath.
The sting from the impact rings up my arms. I try to wrench the katana free, but my hands are numb and wet. I can’t grip the hilt.
The angel punches me in the jaw. My back hits the wall so hard that I can actually feel my lungs deflate. I slide to the floor. Clutch my chest and try to breathe.
I wonder how long the angel is going to drag this out before she kills me. I wonder if that argument about whether or not I really can see demons is the only thing my parents are going to remember about me. I wonder whether Noah and Clare will be able to convince them that I got killed by a fallen angel or if Mom will think the guys were just feeding my paranoia by playing along and throw them out. I wonder how long it’s been since I last took a breath.
A current rolls up to my face and water flows into my ear canal. The angel’s standing by my shoulder. She looks at her sword, then down at me and smiles.
“Ready to go to Hell, preacher?” she says.
Finally, air rushes back into my lungs. Somehow, between the coughing and wheezing, I manage to grit out, “You got no power over me.”
“Is that so?” she says.
The fallen angel kicks me in the groin and the whole world disappears in the pain. I curl into a ball. I’m going to throw up.
She kicks me again, this time in the teeth. I try not to whimper, but I can’t help it.
“Sure feels like I’ve got some power, doesn’t it?” she says.
“Just physical.” Talking takes everything I’ve got left and I’m spitting blood with every word. “Temporary. Can’t send me to Hell and you know it.”
“Arrogant little piss-ant,” the fallen angel growls. She pushes me onto my back with the toe of her shoe and rests the point of her flaming sword at the
base of my throat. I feel my skin blistering. My breath hisses in and out between clenched teeth.
I dig my fingernails into my palms and try to brace myself. “I’ll tell God you said hi.”
Shannon
Time slows to a crawl as the angel lifts the flaming sword, one hand on the hilt and the other halfway down the blade, like she’s rearing back to kill a snake with a shovel. Except it’s Danny’s throat she’s about to hack into, his blood that will pour into the water flooding the room, and his dying scream that I’ll hear in my nightmares for the rest of my pathetic, hopefully short life.
That toxic blackness churns inside my chest, trying to fight its way out. Not Danny. Not because of me. Please, God, I’ll take the blame for every other soul I helped destroy—I’ll rot in Hell for all eternity—just don’t let this happen to Danny. He loves You. He dedicated his life to You. You can’t let this happen.
But there’s no flash of heavenly white light. No miraculous last-second rescue.
The angel’s wings flare. The muscles in her shoulders and arms flex as she changes direction and drives the sword down. Danny squeezes his eyes shut and turns his head.
I trip out of bed, scramble-splash across the floor on my hands and knees. Drop onto Danny’s chest.
Searing metal strokes my spine, but the sword doesn’t break the skin.
“You’re not getting out of our deal that easily, Shannon,” the angel says.
She kicks me off of Danny and puts a foot on my chest. I try to squirm away, but I can’t.
When Danny starts to push up, the angel smacks him down with the butt of her sword. His head bounces off the floor with a sick thud.
“Danny!”
He turns toward my voice, but his eyes are unfocused and confused. He groans.
The angel digs her heel into my breast.
“Don’t worry about him, Shannon. If he dies, he’s free. You? You’re never going to be free.” She sits on my chest and pins my arms to my sides with her legs. “You’re trapped.”
