Dedicated: MF Priest and Single Mother

by Clara Jenkins

  This was not insubstantial- angels were typically tall beings even when assuming humanoid forms- but in this case, it involved unfolding a little more of her own angelic nature than Ambriel was used to doing in mortality. Her silver robes shined in the night, accentuating the ageless beauty of her form like wearable treasure. Her hair was a collection of red braids, pinned and knotted atop her head like a crown of fire, and they caught what little light there was and held it, trapped in a perfect amber moment upon her, the Queen of Cups, the Gemini Star and the Avatar of Understanding. The Upper realm ascendant.

  She was an angel, and before her they were simply naked demons, slaves to baser instincts that she would not share.

  “I know you, Crowley, architect of lies-within-lies. You are no threat, that seeing you head on might constitute a challenge,” Ambriel said, injecting as much regal Upper inflection into her words as possible. Simultaneously, she tried to tamp down on the strange thoughts and sensations that had pulsed through her very flesh upon first seeing them, knowing that even now the demons would be attempting to probe her thoughts, sensitive to even the mildest hints of temptation. It was in their nature, after all.

  But it was not the gray demon Crowley who responded. Instead, his cohort began to move, prominent muscles rippling as he turned, hefting the human woman bodily along with him. It was a complex motion, and it ended with the crimson demon on his back and the woman in his lap, naked and splayed, her legs straining to spread at either side of him. His member, thick and intimidating, remained inside the wife, his biceps flexing as he lifted her, literally lifted her, up and down his shaft. He did this with an almost bored air, as though using another person as some form of sex toy was just what one did.

  Perhaps for something like the crimson demon, it was. He was simply immense, a mass of red muscle, strength personified. Thick horns, gnarled obsidian spokes, jutted from his forehead and framed a face that would not look out of place staring out from a mountainside. His eyes contained the multiple pupils of a demon of the Earth, perhaps a hint at some insectile ancestry; one central pupil that dilated to look upon the angel before him, ringed by seven smaller ones, black flecks in a red iris. He snorted derisively at Ambriel, and plunged the human woman down further onto his erection.

  “Would you look at this one? Talking like it’s still the dawn of creation!” His voice was a rumbling, volcanic thing, the words slow and deliberate like the grinding of tectonic plates. His breath tickled the wife’s back, and she shivered in response, cooed softly, as though she knew better than to intrude too deeply into what was happening.

  “Easy now, Eo.” The gray demon pulled himself into a sitting position, ran a hand through his jet-black hair so that his own horns, small and just barely protruding from his temples, came into view. “Not all of us come to the human world so much. This could be our Queen of Cups’ first time. Am I right, Mayflower?”

  ‘Why would I tell you that?’ Ambriel shot back, doing her best to avert her gaze from the cumulative nudity in the room before her. She failed, and the blush on her cheeks had to be obvious enough for the demons to see it. Their prodding at the edges of her mental defenses was keenly felt, probing for a means inside, a way to wrap around Ambriel’s soul and squeeze until all that was pure had left it.

  “You don’t need to,” Crowley said, shrugging. He leaned in further, whispering something in the human woman’s ear as he passed that made her shudder and scream, the sound bespeaking naught but pleasure. A lamb to the slaughter. “I can make an educated guess. Seems unlikely that the Upper realm would send one of the twelve that guard the constellations out very often. You’re blushing very hard, which suggests you aren’t used to this even a little. My, my, is Paradise so understaffed that they must send someone of your rank out to negotiate for the soul of but a pair of humans?”

  “Yes,” Ambriel started, without thinking and without taking into account the odds before her. “Paradise sent one high angel to deal with this. And Gehenna sent two dukes of Hell to do the same. Remind me, who is supposed to be lacking in manpower, dear Crowley? Yet another lie, tumbling from your dissembling lips.”

  “What can I say? It’s what I do,” Crowley shrugged again, the gesture speaking not only of a lack of care, but also that it would be impossible for anything you said to make him care. It took a lot of effort, to purposefully do something to communicate a lack of effort, but Crowley contrived to make it happen anyway. Behind him, a pointed tail flicked into view, moving in sinuous, amused ways through the air. He gestured, vaguely, toward Eo and the wife. “But here’s something you can know to be true: you should try this, Ambriel. Your first time out in the human world? Sample its pleasures, my dear.”

  “An angel cannot sin,” Ambriel sniffed, turned her head away even as her eyes glanced back toward the demons. It would not have been smart to put them out of view.

  “Which you take to mean you cannot choose to partake,” Crowley said. “When an equally valid interpretation, absent distinct guidance, would be that anything an angel does would not, in fact, be a sin. You have no mortal nature, Queen of Cups. Nothing in you would tempt you astray, were you to just follow your instincts. What are they telling you?”

  “Not to trust you.”

  “You see?” Crowley spread his hands wide, his tail twitching with satisfaction. “Your instincts are leading you right even now!”

  “Enough of this grotesquerie,” Ambriel shook her head, then inclined it toward the human woman. “Release her. It is not your place to treat her this way.”

  “And as is perfectly typical for a representative of the Upper realm, what she herself wants doesn’t factor in, does it?” For the first time, Crowley’s pleasant facade faltered, and a frown crossed his ashen lips. “You didn’t even think to ask. Why don’t you, Mayflower? Why not, for once, care about your charges, and not just that they do what you approve of?”

  The angel blinked at this. For a moment, she did not know what to say. She knew the woman’s name, her husband’s, what it was that they disagreed on and why, should it be allowed to continue, it would break them apart. Accessing that information was simple. There was nothing she could not know about her if it aided in her divine mission, no conversation starter she could not have. Yet, when put in the position of actually talking to a human, for the first time in her existence, Ambriel faltered.

  Peering into the wife now, Ambriel could only see the demons’ touch upon her, their grip around her soul. What she desired had ceased to be about her husband at all, the life she led outside this one night had vanished as a concern for her, and in its place were Eo and Crowley. Immediacy had overtaken everything else, carnality had subsumed propriety. This particular sin, the one filling her between her legs and turning her into a babbling, red-faced prop for Eo’s victory lap, was all there was in her now, and would be until the demons left her here, alone, tired, wondering what had happened and, more importantly, where she could get more of it.

  That was the thing, about demons. They were, at heart, cosmic permission-givers. What they spoke into your heart, into your very soul, was that it was okay to do the thing you knew were not okay. That there were exceptions to even the sternest of rules, and wherever you happened to be standing, coincidentally, was one of those, exactly.

  What you wanted but could not have, was precisely what they wished you to have.

  “Mmm, she can join us, if she wants,” the human spoke, in a voice that was not human, before Ambriel could collect herself. There was a desperation in the words, and a confused hunger that could never be satisfied that changed the nature of her sound, turned the human voice into something at once hollow and full to bursting with a feeling it should never experience. The wife’s mouth hung open in panting ecstasy, her eyes wide and wild things, and when she looked to Ambriel it was with undisguised want of the purest sort. “I mean, I’ve never done a girl before, but there’s a first time for—oh fuck! —everything.”

  That was the precise moment th
at Ambriel knew she had lost this one.

  Nothing that looked like that woman looked, in that moment, could be reasoned with. You could not appeal to the better nature of a creature consumed by lust. The wife was a lost cause, and no doubt if the husband was not currently in the company of some Succubus or another, he would be Crowley’s very next target. Gender was largely irrelevant to demons. Even if the husband remained untouched, his wife’s infidelity would taint the relationship, mark her soul in a way that Ambriel could not fix, not here, not now. All she had left was to leave, without being waylaid by the demon pair.

  The idea stoked something akin to anger in Ambriel, some distant, prideful cousin to rage that was all an angel, fresh from Paradise, could feel. Wrath might come of it, or perhaps some righteous rebuke, if words were all she could muster. She knew she was frowning.

  “I know when I have been outplayed,” she said, and turned to leave. “Try not to cause too much damage, at least.”

  “Alternately, and here’s a hot take for you.” Suddenly, and with no motion within the intervening space, Crowley was in front of her, blocking her exit. “You could stay and give the human what she desires. Isn’t that what you’re for?”

  “No,” Ambriel shook her head, and shouldered past the demon. “I am not. I will leave that tawdry work to you and your brute, Crowley.”

  “What was it you called her before? Mayflower, Crowley?” Snorting a rough breath through his nose, Eo laid the woman to one side and stood, rising up and up and up off of the bed, seven feet of naked muscle easily. Big hands clenched into thick fists. “I think I’m done with that. Got a better name for her. Mayfly.”

  What happened next only took a few seconds, and to fully understand it, it must be rendered in minute progression, one small action after the next. Eo raised his hand, lights sparking about his wrist, and behind Ambriel, window glass began to crack, as though under sudden, great strain. Sensing the application of aggressive magics, Ambriel released her physical form and became light herself, a curving trail of azure sparks leaving afterimages in the air, the preferred traveling form of the discerning Upper agent. Her new, luminous form flowed away from the attacking demon, danced through the windows and the walls into open air moments before the spell detonated and reduced a large portion of that same wall to chunks of free-floating plaster and brick. Ambriel’s light curved its way across the street and alighted on the far roof as Ambriel embodied once more, graceful feet landing with nary a stumble on the tiles beyond.

  Ahead of her could be seen the light of demonic travel; angular, sizzling lines of orange cutting through the air, turning at random, harsh angles as they made their way to the roof just one further along, far enough away to not be attacked as they shifted form, but close enough to head Ambriel off. There were two such lights, the larger traveling ahead of the smaller, and so it was that Eo landed first, Crowley both in hot pursuit and, eventually, with a steadying hand on his partner. Both were still naked, even in this public space, but it mattered little. Below them, human life continued as though nothing had happened above.

  For the denizens of the Lower and Upper realm both, being seen was always a matter of choice.

  “Eo, we didn’t come here for this,” Crowley said, crisp and commanding. “Not that I don’t enjoy watching you break things apart, but… oh, whatever. We did what we came here for anyway. You may want to leave now, angel. There’s no profit in lingering.”

  “On this, we agree,” Ambriel frowned, already turning over how she would report this back to Paradise. Without another word, she shifted back to light form and Ascended, not in any spatial direction, but in a spiritual one, back to the realm she called home.

  Left behind and more than a little frustrated by this fact, Eo growled formlessly, a chittering snarl that seemed to be wrought by vocal organs that humans did not possess. He rounded on Crowley, bare skin shining in the moonlight, and for a moment looked as though he was gearing up to strike the other demon, before thinking better of it. Crowley had leveled a long, steady look at the big creature, and once he had settled down, the ashen demon returned his attention to the destroyed wall they had just left through. In the hole Eo had made, Crowley could see the naked wife, panting from her bed and looking longingly out at them, imploring them to return. But there was no fun in it now, the addition of the Queen of Cups had made mortal fare seem common and disposable by comparison.

  Sighing, Crowley raised a hand. From beneath the scaly partitions of his horns, light could be seen, red light. Infernal light. Looking at the wife, he spoke a word, one of the words that had wrought creation, the true name of Sleep. On her bed, naked and glistening in sweat, filled with demon seed, the wife was helpless to disobey, and she collapsed into a loose-limbed slumber. Crowley spoke again, a spell of recalling and repairing, that whispered to the shattered masonry that had once been the wall of the wife’s home, reminded it of what it had once been, and what it must be again. In a whirl, the stone and plaster and dust picked itself up and placed itself, seamlessly, back into position. It looked as though nothing had happened at all.

  “I’ll never understand why you bother doing that,” Eo shook his head, as though he were witnessing something foolish. “No human is worth the effort you expend on these spells of yours.”

  “In her mind, what happened tonight was that two handsome human men tempted her, and she cheated on her husband,” Crowley replied patiently, still concentrating on the magic as he placed the last few pieces of stone and glass back into the house. “If she wakes up to find us gone—which she will—and her home destroyed, then what lesson will she take from this? She tried infidelity, walked on her dark side, and it got her a momentary spasm of pleasure and a wrecked wall. Which her husband will no doubt see the next day, and she will, no doubt, be unable to satisfactorily explain. Cue large, blow-up fight. That’s the kind of thing that has people getting introspective and changing their ways, my friend. Better it be something she can easily keep hidden, where the knowledge will take root, and the guilt of it will rot. Give her time to think, not an angry husband in the morning.”

  “If you say so,” Eo grunted. “And you let the angel escape. We could have taken her head as a trophy, Crowley! The Queen of Cups!”

  “We could have done that, yes,” Crowley nodded, ritual decapitation being as second nature to demons as, indeed, the temptation of souls. “But I have better things in mind for her. She’s seen us, what we did in there… I suspect we’ll be seeing her again very soon.”

  Shaking excess magic from his hand, like one working a kink from a muscle, Crowley turned to look up at the moon, something one could not readily see from the Lower realm. He made it a point to take in what he could of the human realm’s pleasures whenever he came here.

  “Yes,” he said solemnly, pale light washing over his features. “I don’t think I will have to do much chasing to get that one.”

  Chapter 2

  For a water angel like Ambriel, Paradise offered one place in particular to truly center the mind: The Astral Ocean.

  In the eastern reaches of Paradise, further than the halls of the departed, beyond the outer gates of the populated zone, there lies an immense stretch of water, in a place where it is always night. The surface of this boundless lake sits in perfect stillness, a mirror of the stars above, and it is here that Ambriel ventured in search of peace, notions of Crowley and what she had seen in the mortal realm dancing in her mind. She set out across the Astral Ocean, footsteps sending out ripples over the featureless surface of the water as she walked upon it. Once she had walked far enough that she could see neither the opposite shore nor the one she had set off from, Ambriel lowered herself into a seated position, hovering just an inch above the water, legs crossed.

  She closed her eyes, and set her mind to finding inner peace, the place beyond temptation.

  Concentric ripples expanded outward from her as she breathed out, and returned to her as she breathed in. Keeping the pace steady meant a perfec
t, circular pattern washed constantly across the surface of the ocean, disrupting the stars above for a moment, before returning to place. Ambriel loosened the constraints of her form somewhat, allowed her wings to emerge, three pairs in all. The lower and upper pairs, extending from her lower back and her shoulder blades respectively, stretched out, so used to curling inward and covering her body that the new position was a relief, a delightful pleasure. Her middle wings, the flight wings that grew from her waist, bent forward, wrapped around her torso, the eye-tipped feathers just barely brushing the water at their tips.

  She parted her lips and spoke, just two words, whispered to the water. A smile touched the angel’s lips, for they were old words, spoken to the first of the humans the angelic class had appeared before, words that had been needed. A greeting, and a portent.

  “Fear not,” she said, allowing the sentiment to fill her.

  Fear not, for there was nothing to fear. Righteousness was on her side.

  Ambriel stayed atop the ocean for some time, perhaps longer than any human had lived, perhaps a span of seconds; time did not necessarily function in Paradise the way it did on Earth. She sat in silence, close to motionless, only the rhythmic pulsing of her breathing across the ocean even suggesting that she was still alive out there. For a time, that was all. She focused. Below the surface were trillions of water molecules, each drifting in an endless, aimless dance of physics, just as beautiful in their creation and design as any other form of the Creation. Ambriel could sense every one of them, the constant motion, the churn, the flow of it almost hypnotic, and a part of herself dripped down through her wings and into the Astral Ocean, flitting down through the atomic bonds that held it all in place, her mind a dancing quantum impulse writhing amid the microscopic storm. She was One, part of All, just as the All was a part of her One.