“Do angels fall in love, mom?”
“Of course not.” What silly questions children asked sometimes.
“Aw, that’s sad.” She pouted.
Her mother smiled. “Don’t worry about them, sweetie. Angels are okay that way. They’re used to it.”
“But why?” She furrowed her brow.
“You see, honey, angels don’t fall in love because they have to be able to love God with their whole hearts.”
She tilted her head. “So if people here on Earth fall in love, does that mean they can’t love God with their whole hearts either?”
Her mother sighed, and shook her head. “Go to sleep, sweetie.” Her mother turned off the light, and left the room.
But she couldn’t get to sleep.
***
“This movie’s stupid.” Ross was lying back on the couch with his back arched, his arms over his head behind him, his feet too high up in front of him making it look like he was going to fall.
“Then stop watching it.” Ozzie didn’t even look up from his paper. He knew the leopard wouldn’t fall without looking.
“The news are stupid. You’re still reading them.” Ross was repeatedly throwing a ball that bounced on the floor and wall behind him as the movie played in front of him, catching it every time. The goat sometimes wondered if the leopard did it to drive him crazy on some level, but if he was, it didn’t work.
“What movie is it, anyway?” Ozzie pursed his lips and turned another page, unabated.
“Angels in the Outfield.” The goat heard someone hit a ball, and a crowd cheer.
“Sports movie? You hate sports.” The leopard wanted to shrug, but realized his posture didn’t lend itself to it very well, so he settled for trying to get it across in his voice instead.
“It had angels in it. I get curious about how mortals see us demons and angels sometimes.” Curiosity would be the death of that cat someday, Ozzie mused.
“What’s stupid about it?” Not that the goat could keep himself from getting curious about as much either, he had to admit.
“Well, this guy just dies, you know?” Ross gestured with his arms behind himself as he spoke to drive his point home, giving Ozzie a temporary reprieve from the ball. “Then it’s like, ‘poof!’, he’s an angel, just like that!” The leopard scoffed. “That’s some bollocks, isn’t it, though? Do mortals think it really works like that?” He shook his head. “All you have to do is die, and be sort of a nice guy, and you ‘graduate’ to angel status just like that, that’s how we all got to be where we are?” Ross chuckled. “That’s a little insulting, wouldn’t you say?” This time, the goat looked up from his paper.
“You think?” The leopard’s arms and legs flopped back down in front of the couch.
“Well yeah! Our names are written in, like, ancient tomes from thousands of years ago, aren’t they? We’re these forces people had to learn to deal with like wind and rain, aren’t we? And there’s been what, hundreds, maybe thousands of us, at the best of times? I mean, if people just got angeled up or demoned up like it’s a bloody makeover, our ranks would be a lot more swole, wouldn’t they?” Ozzie seemed to turn over what Ross had just said in his mind before answering.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.” The leopard shook his head again.
“I’m bored. Let’s go do something fun.”
***
‘For I testify to every one that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book: If any man shall add to these things, God shall add unto him the plagues written in this book.
And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from these things that are written in this book.’
(Revelations 22:18-19)
***
“Can I ask you something?” He’d looked up at her expectantly when she’d asked.
“Yes?” She’d put her book down on the table in front of her, closing it before going on.
“I’ve noticed people seem to have versions of hell that don’t quite... ‘add up’ somehow.” He’d tilted his head at her.
“How do you mean?” She’d looked down for a second, covering her mouth briefly as she’d looked for the right words to use before looking back up at him.
“There are men in our times who speak as though hell were some kind of kingdom, a place that the devil rules over like a king, where he has complete sway and all the demons and sinners defer to him.” He’d nodded, encouraging her to continue. “But there are other men, you see, who talk about heaven as though it’s a great jail, where the devil, demons and sinners are all being tortured because God ordered them to be, as though hell were owned and operated by God himself, against the devil. How could these both be true?” At first, she had worried he would think that she had been asking him stupid questions. He had soon assured her, however, that as far as they were both concerned, there could be no stupid questions.
“That’s a good question. Hell’s been quite a contested location for a very long time, as a matter of fact. Neither side owns all of it, as it stands. Demon warlords fight among themselves a lot but, put together, they own about a third of it. As far as that part goes, they have run of the place – angels can get into hell more easily than demons can get into heaven, but in demon warlord territory, angels can’t just waltz in. Heaven...” He looked for a way of putting things that she would understand. “I suppose you could say heaven colonized a third of hell, in some ways. Heaven’s gotta have its reputation as the nicest place there is, you know?” A look of dawning understanding appeared on her face.
“So when they need people tortured...” He nodded.
“That’s right. They get demons to do it in hell for them. The rules in hell are a lot more... lax about how mean you can be to people there. So heaven outsources it.” She furrowed her brow in thought.
“What about the last third of hell...?”
***
Sam leaned back in her chair in her smoky office.
Heaven and hell had been at war for such a long time. It hadn’t always been one of those all-out wars that went on with full force from both sides at the same time without cease, of course. In the long run, over a period of millennia, neither side would have been able to sustain as much. There had been large-scale conflicts that had taken noticeably longer than anyone had expected, to be sure, but overall there had been many more skirmishes than that. The insidious part had been that, even when there had been treaties and truces now and then over the passage of time, it had always only reverted to the status of a Cold War at best. In the back of everyone’s minds, the war never went away, hung overhead like a Sword of Damocles.
The bear remembered the last true war between them all too well. Wars between heaven and hell had always hit especially close to home for her, even though she’d fought in wars while she’d been stationed on Earth before. In fact, the last time that heaven had sent Sam to Earth had been from around the start of the 20th century to around halfway through it, during which she’d fought in both World Wars. It was between the two World Wars that she’d taken a job on Earth as a private investigator. The bear had learned to trust as few people as possible at the time yet, somehow, it was during that time that she and Allie had first met. Even with Sam’s guard up as it was, the dove had still found a way around it into her heart somehow.
She blew yet another cloud of cigarette smoke at her office ceiling.
The bear always seemed to finally learn the right lessons just a little too late, she couldn’t help thinking to herself regretfully. Even though she’d learned to trust almost no one, she’d still ended up finding a way to trust the wrong person at the wrong time. Or had it been the right person at the wrong time, or perhaps the wrong person at the right time? Sam just couldn’t be sure anymore. Allie’s feelings for her at the time had been genuine, that much, she still believed. They’d been together for a mere few decades, a blip on heaven’s timescale, but longer in the mortal world. It seemed stupid to the bear retroactively that she could have allowed herself to have gotten so attached to someone in such a short period of time.
As for the dove, she’d already moved on through two separate relationships since then, even though it hadn’t even been a century since they’d met. Sam shook her head. Meanwhile, there she was, still unable to move on all the way from when they’d been together. The bear guessed that it was always supposed to be harder for the person who’d been broken up with than for the person who’d done the breaking up themselves, or that most people seemed to think as much in any case, but still. Maybe it was just more difficult to let go of someone when they’d convinced you that love was something that you could still believe in, even after you’d already convinced yourself that it couldn’t possibly ever be again.
They say love is a battlefield, she thought. All is fair in love and war...
***
Hannah was pensively staring up at a different kind of smoke rising up to her ceiling.
“Did you ever meet God, Allie?” The dove handed her something.
“Not as such, no,” Allie answered the sparrow. “I knew this girl who did though, a long time ago.” Hannah’s eyebrows went up.
“No shit?” The dove breathed in deep, nodding.
“Yeah,” Allie added, breathing out. “Why’d you ask?” she asked the sparrow, wisps still escaping from the top of her beak.
“Just curious.” The Gold Cage looked unfailingly gorgeous around them, as it always did. You could get everything you wanted there. You just couldn’t get out. “I never met Him. I mean, I know the High Council get their orders from Him.” They used to be part of the Low Council, which got to sit in when the High Council met, even to provide advice to the High Council, but the High Council didn’t have to take it. “Rafe never met Him either, though.” They weren’t part of the Low Council anymore, but Rafe still kept them posted on their meetings and still turned to them for advice.
“It was a hell of a thing last time he came here, wasn’t it?” The sparrow blinked.
“God?” The dove chuckled.
“Rafe!” Hannah brought her palm to her forehead.
“Of course, yeah. You’re right, it was.” That was even truer for her than for Allie, if anything.
“Aren’t you happy?” The sparrow flinched.
“I don’t look happy?” The dove smiled understandingly.
“You look preoccupied.” Hannah gave a thoughtful grunt.
“I guess I have been, haven’t I...” Allie moved behind her to rub her shoulders.
“But you are glad he’s coming back, right?” The sparrow nodded.
“Of course, yeah! I’ve missed him so much.” The dove could feel how tense she was. “I’ve just been nervous, that’s all.” Hannah shook her head.
“What about?” The sparrow sighed.
“Nothing, really.” The shoulder rub was helping, that much she was thankful for. “I just keep getting worried something will go wrong, you know?” Allie switched from using her hands to using one of her elbows.
“Like what?” What would she ever do without her, Hannah asked herself?
“What if he comes back and he doesn’t feel the same way he used to about me anymore? It’s been such a long time.” It had been 1200 years.
“Don’t sell yourself short, love,” the dove told her, leaning forward over the sparrow’s shoulder to kiss her cheek, “we may not have been together for as long, but you don’t wear off so quick, I can tell you that.” Hannah hoped she was right. “I’m looking forward to meeting him.” It was going to be an adjustment, having to have him come to the Gold Cage to see her, but it was going to be a lot better than him being incarcerated had been.
“I hope he will come back.” Allie moved back to sit next to her again.
“You don’t think he’s going to?” The sparrow looked down.
“I don’t know. Ezra really hates him. I just keep thinking he’s going to do something to stop him from coming back.” The dove put her hand on Hannah’s shoulder.
“1200 years is a long time. I’m sure he knows he’s made his point by now. It was such a long time ago, wasn’t it?”
“Not too long for you to think Finn still likes me, remember?” The sparrow stuck her tongue out.
“Hah, I guess you’re right,” Allie chuckled. “Ezra still has to keep his promises, though. The rules still apply to him too, don’t they?” Hannah brought her far hand to the dove’s far shoulder, kissing her beak.
“You’re a dear for saying so, Allie...” She sighed. “I just hope you’re right.”
“She went blind, you know.” The sparrow looked at Allie quizzically.
“Who?” She blinked.
“That girl who said she saw God. She said she saw Him, and went blind.” What a story...
“What did she say He looked like?”
“Worth it.”
***
Smoke seeped out of the dragon’s nostrils as she paced back and forth by her hoard holding her wrist behind her lower back as her tail swished behind her restlessly. Sarah still remembered the first time she’d been shown the hoard that she’d been assigned to protect. At the time, its beauty had overwhelmed her. The sparkling sight of so much wealth all gathered together in one place had appealed to her dragon instincts on a primordial level. That had been, what? Certainly centuries ago. Had it, could it have been millennia? It had been most of her life ago by now, that much, she was sure of. With the passage of time, even though the treasure that she guarded had remained unchanged, to her eyes, it had still lost some of its luster.
“What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” Sarah rolled her eyes.
“I don’t have time for this.” A Surinam toad seemed to appear in front of the dragon from thin air, upside-down.
“Come now, that’s hardly a way to talk after some of what we’ve shared, is it?” She stuck out her impossibly long tongue playfully before rapidly drawing it back in her mouth, looking almost like a retracting power cord.
“Look, Belle, I meant that very literally. My shift is almost over. I don’t have time to fool around. Someone will be here soon.” Belle turned around in midair during a descending half-flip to land in front of her in a bestial crouch, her hands on the ground between her feet.
“And what if they are?” She tilted her head, croaking. “You’re not allowed to even talk to demons now?”
“I’m on the job! You’re not even supposed to be in here. I don’t want to get in trouble,” she gestured at the demon emphatically.
“I’m sure I’ve seen angels talk to demons on the job before, when they were bossing us around,” the toad smirked.
“So you’d rather be bossing one of us around, wouldn’t you?” The angel looked back at her slyly.
“Well, you can’t blame a girl for trying,” she winked at the dragon.
“Is this how you got all your employees?” Sarah crossed her arms.
“I meant what I said earlier very literally too, you know. You are too nice to be working in a place like this,” Belle said seriously for once.
“What do you mean by that?” The angel raised an eyebrow at her.
“Oh please,” the demon chuckled, “In all my years, I’ve never seen a dragon look at treasure the way you look at this place. A dragon, guarding treasure that she didn’t gather, that she doesn’t get to do what she wants with, hating it. It’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“I sincerely doubt that,” the dragon scoffed.
“It’s an expression,” the toad harrumphed, “but it’s telling that that’s the part of it you singled out to pick apart, isn’t it?” Belle’s eyes narrowed, piercing.
“Surely you’re smart enough to know appealing to an angel’s selfishness is a fool’s errand,” Sarah told her matter-of-factly.
“I didn’t say you were too selfish to work here, I said you were too nice,” the demon pretended to look at her nails even though, being an amphibian, she had none.
“What’s nice got to do with it?” The angel shrugged.
“You know exactly what nice has to do with it,” the toad assured her.
“Is that right?” Belle nodded.
“Refresh my memory: when’s the last time someone tried to come in here to steal all this?” The dragon chuckled.
“Maybe you’d steal it all if I wasn’t here. Maybe that’s why you’re trying to get me out of here. You certainly don’t seem to have a hard time getting in and out of here without anyone else noticing.” The demon chuckled along with her.
“I guess not! But come on, let’s be honest. A well-placed camera could do your job – and certainly deter me better than you’ve been,” the toad grinned.
“If heaven stationed me here, then that’s where it needs me to be,” Sarah stood her ground unwaveringly. “Heaven doesn’t waste resources.” She frowned at Belle’s outright belly laugh in response to what she’d said.
“Oh I’m sorry,” she said, noticing the irked expression on the angel’s face, “I thought you were trying to be funny.” She heard a low growl in the back of the dragon’s throat.
“What’s so funny, demon?” She knew that Sarah was ticked off at her when she called her ‘demon’ rather than calling her by her name, as she usually did.
“Look at this place, Sarah!” She spread out her arms indicating all the riches piled up around them to drive her point home. “Have you ever seen a bigger waste of resources in your life?”
“I’ve worked here most of my life,” the angel snapped back, “so I’m not a great point of reference for that,” she stuck out her forked tongue.
“Well, I haven’t,” the toad sighed, “and it pains me to see someone I respect throw away her life on something she doesn’t even believe in.” She hopped out of the way when the dragon walked right toward her, falling back into her same pacing pattern from before when Belle had dropped in.
“What do you know about what angels believe in, Belle?” At least she didn’t call her ‘demon’ this time.
“More than you might think,” she answered, hopping insistently around Sarah as she paced to force the reptile to keep paying attention to her.
“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” the angel raised her arm, “you do know where that’s from, don’t you?” She gestured at the demon with understated snark as she asked.
“Taxes are one thing,” the toad granted, crossing her arms behind her head in a way she hoped appeared casual as the dragon’s pacing forced her to go on two legs not on four to keep up with her. She never quite knew what to do with her hands. “Mortals pay taxes so their rulers will spend them on things those mortals need. When’s the last time you saw heaven spend any of this on anything, for anyone?” There was that low growl again, rumbling like a dormant volcano. “Look, I’m not trying to be a jerk...” Belle sounded more gentle than accusing this time. “It’s just that... What are they saving it all for? An emergency? I’ve seen you read about how mortals die from poverty every day, when you think I’m not looking.” This time Sarah cringed.
“Please stop...” she gulped painfully, stopping her pacing as the demon put her hand on her shoulder. “Don’t make this harder. What do you expect me to do, exactly? Just go up and ask heaven, ‘hey, how about all that money we’re not spending on helping the poor, how about we do something with that?’ I’d be easy to replace, you said so yourself. Heaven doesn’t just fire people, Belle. What do you want me to do, steal from them? They’d have me tortured for all eternity, and I...” She grunted in embarrassment. “... I’m sure you’ve got some big demon speech about how I’m naïve and brainwashed for it but I still...” She looked back at the toad to find understanding, not mockery. “... I still can’t just steal from people, regardless. It’s wrong.”
“What if there was a way for you to be able to get all the resources you need to help everyone you want to help without having to steal from anyone to do it?” The angel’s eyes and maw went wide at the thought for a second before she caught herself.
“There’s no such thing.” The demon crossed her arms behind her back, pretending to look away.
“Are you sure about that?” What kind of stunt was she trying to pull, anyway?
“I suppose next you’ll tell me that, if I worked for you, you’d tell me how to do that, wouldn’t you?” Belle clucked her considerable tongue.
“Ah, why must you angels always think us demons are up to some sort of trick? No, you should come work for me because I’m an awesome employer,” she grinned. “I’m great to my employees.” She extended her tongue to eat a fly that escaped from one of the myriad of holes that riddled her hive-like body. “Mostly.” She belched. The fly was one of her employees.
“Even if I was going to otherwise, which I wouldn’t, I could never leave Annie behind. You know that.” The toad spread out her hands cheerfully.
“She could come! She could be a demon too. I mean, you both already look the part,” she smiled. The dragon’s dubious expression hinted at her that that may have come out wrong.
“I... Thank you. I know you meant that as a compliment.” In all such interactions across cultures, there was always a risk of culture shock. “I don’t think I could talk her into that, though. Annie loves her job. If I even tried to bring it up to her, it could already put her at risk. It’s already putting me at risk to have said as much as I did to you now.”
“Well, I’m not gonna tell on you, if that’s what you’re worried about,” the demon assured her heartily. “If – when you come work for me,” she winked, “I want it to be because you want to, not because you have to.”
“I know that,” Sarah replied, starting to pace away from her again, “but if you get caught, you can just go right back where you came from. It’s something that could never affect you the way it could affect me, and...” She came to the end of her pacing pattern, and turned around. “AH...!” Belle was quite gone, the angel whose job it was going to be to take over the dragon’s shift standing to face her just where the toad had been located when Sarah had just walked away from her. “I... I’m sorry, I just got startled,” the dragon blushed and scratched the back of her head nervously, hoping to G... – hoping against hope that her replacement hadn’t heard enough of her previous exchange to get her in trouble.
“It’s okay,” the other angel smiled at her reassuringly, “Don’t worry about it, I get it. It’s a long shift. I talk to myself on the job all the time too.”
***
You could practically hear the music from as far as you could hear the revving of his motorcycle. It was almost as if the revving were just another instrument that was part of the music, or as if the music had been part of what had been driving his motorcycle itself. Underground demons reared their heads, coming up from the ground to see what all the ruckus was about. Flying demons briefly veered off their flight paths, looking down wondering what the source of that sound could be, or where the trail of fire and smoke that his motorcycle was leaving behind it could have been coming from. He tapped on the handles of his motorcycle in time with the rhythm of the music as he drove, unselfconsciously.
The instrumental intro to the song he was listening to, a 90’s punk remix of a 60’s pop song, had just ended, and he started to sing along with the lyrics as he drove, his chains and leather jacket belying his friendly, innocent expression. The phoenix was bobbing his head left and right to the music on his way like the bird he was. Onlookers gasped when shapes of light started appearing around him. Most demons used fire magic to fight, but this fire demon used his to create spectacular pyrotechnic displays. Sculpted out of light, the forms of the distinctive structures that characterized the landscape of the heaven he was returning to briefly appeared around him on his way, his very eagerness at his return to it made manifest for all to see.
The Bayou, the Hive, the Skyscraper, the Treasury, the Library, the Ice Box, the Gold Cage, you could recognize all of them in turn around his trajectory, etched in photons. Of course, over the passage of time, he’d had more than his share of problems with several of these places and the angels who worked in them, but even in spite of himself, he missed them all so dearly, warts and all. He’d been an angel once, a long, long time ago today. He’d spent what had felt like an eternity being a demon in hell now, but in all that time, he’d never forgotten what being an angel, what being in heaven had been like. All he could think about now on his way back was how happy he was that he’d finally be back after all this time.
Out of all demons, he was probably the one who loved heaven the most. Some people did spend an eternity where he had just gotten out of, and he didn’t envy them. Despite his considerable bad luck at having been locked up for so long, he counted himself lucky that he’d been granted the opportunity to ever leave at all. It was the best feeling in the world. He wasn’t sure of what working for heaven as a free bird again would be like, since it had changed so much over the passage of time while he’d been forced to work for it as one of its prisoners, but it didn’t matter. All that mattered to him was that, soon, he would get to see those he loved again.
Even as he took in the hellish landscape around him while driving his flaming motorcycle through it, all that Finn could see was the heaven that it could look like someday, the same way that some could already see the tree in the seed, if heaven did right by it.
***
“Stupid gatekeeping job,” Dawn muttered to herself grudgingly.
“What was that, soldier?” She had thought she was alone.
“Nothing, sir!” You could count the amount of people who had ever caught her off-guard on the fingers of one hand – not all of which had lived to tell the tale. He was on that list.
“Something about your job?” Gabe raised an eyebrow at her as she hastily straightened her back.
“I don’t think so, sir,” the locust shook her head dutifully.
“Good, good,” the seagull smirked at her. “Everything in order over here?” It had been centuries since they had traded jobs.
“Just as you left it, sir.” Even after all this time, he still delighted in tormenting her about it. It wasn’t like she was going anywhere.
“Papers in order?” Dawn stood guard at the very gate between heaven and hell. When demons couldn’t get into heaven from hell, that was her work. Of course, she was going to have her papers in order, and of course, Gabe already knew she did. That wasn’t the point.
“Yes, sir.” The point was that they both knew that, to this day, trading jobs with the seagull had been both the worst thing that had ever happened to her career and the best thing that had ever happened to his. Becoming an angel had seemed like such a good idea to her back when she’d still been a demon and, until then, it’d seemed to her that she’d been right.
“Let’s see ‘em.” The locust repressed a sigh, knowing that it was important for her to hide her dissatisfaction from him, both so that it wouldn’t come across as a sign of disloyalty to heaven on her part and so as not to give him the satisfaction of knowing just how dissatisfied she was. She clung to every scrap of enjoyment she could remove from his job, as he did to her.
“Here you go, sir.” That she would not question the absurdity of having Gabe ask her for her papers when he already knew that she had them was not incidental but deliberate. It was part of the ritual exercise of power that he was making her go through the motions of responding to, as he knew that she was supposed to. It was more about making sure that Dawn recognized his authority than about safety in the immediate, although he would have argued that making sure that those who were subject to his power respected his authority would always be integral to heaven’s safety in the long run. ‘Papers in order?’ used to be her phrase, back when she used to have the job that had been taken from her and given to the seagull.
“I should’ve known it was you when I heard you grumbling to yourself like an old maid.” The locust looked at his face while he confirmed that her papers were in fact in order, idly wondering if his smug bird expression could have looked any more infuriating if he had had teeth to show when he grinned his trademark shit-eating grin. Perhaps Gabe did have teeth a long time ago, before someone had punched them down his throat after he had flashed them that grin one time too many, and that was the reason for which he no longer did. Alas, the answer to this mystery would have to remain lost to history, as the answers to most of the best ones tended to be.
“Very clever, sir.”
***
The pain was somehow still the most distracting part of the job.
It would probably have surprised some people to hear as much, considering everything else about it, but it was still true. His job was a bit of a hodgepodge of a handful of things, things that largely amounted to whatever heaven needed someone to do in hell that day that no one else was around to do at the time. At least half of Levi’s time on the job consisted of filling out forms and paperwork at his assigned workstation. Why heaven had chosen to set up his workstation in the same room in which Cara and Renee both worked was beyond him, but he knew better than to ask why. Heaven had its reasons. Asking questions about heaven’s decisions as to what he should do and why was not part of the whale’s job description.
On some of his workdays, he would be assigned to filing, wandering large labyrinths of filing cabinets like some kind of corporate minotaur. On other days, Levi would be assigned to work as a gopher, flitting from floor to floor, ferrying documents about from one place to another so that everyone would always have the documents that they needed when they needed them without having to leave their posts. His coworkers Cara and Renee envied him his job and, while he hated it himself, he certainly didn’t envy them theirs. The most ostensibly distracting part of the whale’s job were the screams of the people who would get tortured right next to him while he would be on the job. It did make it hard for him to concentrate. At first.
With enough time, you could get used to almost anything.
For years, decades even, Levi would cringe and wince every time. Most of the time, he would only hear it, which was bad enough – it would be going on right there in the room with him, after all. Sometimes, the whale would be unable to avert his eyes fast enough from some of what Cara and Renee had been hired to do to people next to him. For a long time, every time he would hear, every time he would see, he would remember everything he heard, everything he saw, unable to wash it away. A few of the first ones to have made an impression on Levi after he had first started working there, he still remembered. They’d become part of his first impressions about the job itself. Today, he’d forgotten far more than he’d remembered overall.
Now, they all blurred into each other, mortals everywhere, as far as the eye could see.
Over time, the whale’s memories of what life before he had been assigned to work in the starfish and squid’s shared torture chamber had grown even dimmer still. Had he worked for a demon warlord? Had he lived somewhere in the free zone? Levi had vague, half-forgotten glimpses of both, but nothing concrete, so he didn’t have much of a point of reference for comparison. It had felt like a very marked change from his previous existence at the time, this much, he remembered for sure. The whale had been a demon in hell for as long as he could remember. Had he ever been on missions to Earth? If he had, it had been so long ago that he couldn’t remember anymore either. Most of what he knew about Earth, he knew from hearsay.
“What you have to realize about Earth,” Cara addressed him from behind the mortal as she was, “is that people there hate their jobs every bit as much as we do, Levi.” The mortal shuddered, feeling her body moving under his back as her mouth at the intersection of her five limbs opened and closed while she spoke.
“Is that right?” Levi looked up at the starfish from the status report that still looked up at him from his desk accusingly, half-finished.
“Oh, yeah!” Renee concurred, whipping the mortal strapped to Cara as though she were a torture rack as if to punctuate her point. “It’s basically the exact same thing,” the squid went on, picking her teeth while the mortal’s screams died down.
“I didn’t know that.” The whale hadn’t flinched this time. He rarely ever did these days.
“Mortals hate their jobs. They talk about it all the time,” the starfish said as the mortal squirmed.
“They do?” The squid nodded confidently.
“They work in intolerable conditions,” Renee assured Levi.
“They have to ignore suffering right in front of them,” Cara added.
“Really?” The whale scratched the back of his head.
“If you keep telling yourself they have it better, it’ll just make you miserable,” the squid waved off.
“There’s nothing you can do about it anyway, you know?” The mortal strapped to her couldn’t break free from his straps either, struggle as he might.
“I guess not,” Levi shrugged helplessly.
“I guarantee you, out of all the mortals that walked into work this morning, not a single one of them wouldn’t rather not have had to,” Renee asserted, pointing at him.
“Not even one?” the starfish asked.
“That doesn’t seem quite right,” the whale furrowed his brow.
“Not a one!” The squid gestured emphatically to drive her point home, the mortal recoiling as she did because the whip in one of her many hands barely missed him as she did.
“I’ll take her word for it,” Cara told him.
“I still think there are degrees of bad jobs, then, at least here in hell,” Levi proposed cautiously, looking down at his status report that wasn’t going to fill itself out now, was it?
“You really think so?” Renee tilted her head at him.
“What about your old job, Renee?” The squid brought a hand to her forehead.
“That’s right! I did tell you about that, didn’t I – were you around when I did, Levi?” The longer they spent distracted by this conversation, the longer it’d be until he’d get whipped again, the mortal thought.
“I’m not sure,” the whale answered, chewing on the end of his pen.
“Before you worked here, you worked for some sort of demon warlord, right?” Renee nodded.
“Some sort of toad I think. I forget her name.” She had told the starfish all about it just a few centuries ago, the squid was remembering as they talked about it.
“What did you do?” Levi inquired, curious.
“You were her interrogator, weren’t you?” Cara remembered their conversation about it well.
“Yeah, that’s it,” Renee smiled. It seemed like a pleasant memory.
“What was that like? Was it like here?” If he’d been around when they’d first talked about it, he didn’t remember.
“She liked your work, didn’t she? It was how you got heaven’s attention in the first place, wasn’t it?” The squid nodded.
“It was, wasn’t it...” She turned her attention back to the whale. “It was kind of like here, but not quite, though. She used to let me get away with no-touch sessions.”
“No-touch?” He wasn’t sure he’d heard quite right.
“Yeah. I was good at getting into people’s heads. I used to be able to drive them crazy just by talking to them. I’d figure out the things they hated about themselves, about their lives, and I’d just ramble on and on at them about them until they couldn’t take it anymore. It was a thing of beauty almost. Eventually they’d give up and tell me everything she needed to know just to get me to shut up. I was pretty proud of that,” she chuckled to herself.
“As long as she got the info she needed in the end, what did she care, right?” the starfish chipped in.
“It was a good job,” Renee nodded, almost wistfully.
“Better than here?” Levi asked.
“Well, it’s not the same,” the squid admitted, stopping to whip the mortal who was still strapped to Cara and waiting for him to be done screaming before continuing to speak. “I couldn’t very well do no-touch here, could I? Here I’m not trying to get people to admit to anything. Here nothing they say can make a whit of difference. So it’s not quite like an interrogation at all really. Here, we’re doing this to them because we already know what they did, you know?” So much for the conversation serving as a distraction from the torture session, the mortal thought to himself bitterly. He caught himself wishing he’d ran into her at her previous job himself.
“So there are better jobs than this out there, then?” the whale persisted.
“What about you?” Both Renee and Levi were confused about who she meant at first.
“Who, me?” he asked Cara.
“No, you!” She shook her body a few times to snap the mortal out of his stupor.
“You mean me? You’re talking to me?” He felt the starfish shrugging under him.
“Yeah, why not!” It seemed like such an obvious idea to the squid in retrospect that she was almost disappointed not to have thought of it first. “We were talking mortals, you’re a mortal, why not? You’re here right now, aren’t you? We may as well ask you.” He tried to laugh. Something mirthless tripped on its way out of him.
“What’ll you do if I don’t talk? Whip me again, like you weren’t going to anyway?” He idly wished he could have conveyed the full absurdity of the situation to someone who was not already present, to someone who was not already inured to it. They seemed so disconnected from reality that he imagined that a sane person would have found it almost funny, if it hadn’t been quite so horrific.
“Nah, man. Just curious, just making conversation. I’ll whip you when it’s time, same as I always do,” she waved off.
“What did you use to do?” Cara asked him. “When you were still alive, I mean.” He weighed the pros and cons of answering before making his decision. Ultimately, as they’d just been talking about, it wouldn’t make any difference one way or the other, he told himself. What the hell.
“I was an interrogator for federal intelligence.” If they were going to go home that night to spare even a single thought to the poor fuck who they’d been torturing all day, then let them at least remember him for something interesting, he thought.
“No shit!” Levi exclaimed.
“Hey, that makes us sorta colleagues, doesn’t it?” This time the mortal really did laugh at Renee’s remark.
“I guess, yeah! I’d shake your hand but I’m a little tied up.” He spat blood to the side to punctuate his statement.
“Didn’t you like the part about how you got to stop torturing people after you’d finally made them talk?” She raised an eyebrow at him quizzically.
“Kinda... Except, not every time, no.” He wondered just how much of her ability to make people hate their lives by talking to them about it the squid still missed using. “Most of the time, yeah. I mean, even if I ended up killing them, I could at least tell myself, well, they had the information the whole time, didn’t they? They knew, they could’ve told me, they could’ve saved themselves at any time, yet they still chose not to tell me. They knew what they were getting into, right?” Renee nodded. “So it’s their fault for not telling me, isn’t it?”
“Fair enough.”
“Not every time, though?” the starfish asked him.
“No.” He shook his head. “Sometimes, I’d interrogate someone until I... until I couldn’t anymore, then later I’d find out hey, I guess they didn’t know shit after all. Well shit, you know? Not much you can do about it then. It’s your job. At the end of the day, that’s part of the risk you accept when you take it in the first place, I’d tell myself. Sometimes, though...” He was finding himself thinking back on his old life in more detail than he’d meant to in spite of himself. “Sometimes you know, from the start, that they have no fucking idea what you’re talking about, from the get-go. When that happens, and you still have to go through the whole song and dance with them, because what else are you gonna do...” Dammit. “Those were shit gigs, is all.”
“Amen to that!” the squid agreed wholeheartedly before whipping him again. He yelled.
“Fucking Christ...” This time, the whale did wince.
“I’m sorry, did I startle you?” Renee asked Levi thoughtfully. In addition to his other duties, it was also the whale’s job to contribute to the torture effort, in his own way. Heaven would shrink down mortals who had committed the deadly sin of gluttony to the size of plankton, and make him swallow them to force them to try to fight their way out of his body, Fantastic Voyage-style. Inevitably, they would die, and heaven would have them brought back, so that they could start the whole process all over again. The stomach pain that Levi would experience from their movement inside him was so intense that he would get facial tics from it without realizing it. After all this time, it was the last thing left that could still make him flinch.
“No, I’m good.” The whale belched. “I don’t envy you two your jobs, I can tell you that.”
***
There was such harmony in this sound, she thought to herself happily.
It was like liquid peace, freedom and hope themselves, distilled all the way down into just a few notes, into simplicity itself. It would always get to her, no matter how many times she would hear it. Sandra must have heard it from her well over a thousand times by then, and she hoped that she would hear it well over a thousand more. Time and time again, when there would be no pressing crisis for her to deal with, the thrush she loved would go out to sit on her favorite stump, in the middle of a forest clearing near the Birdhouse. She would bring her flute with her, bring it to her beak, and play. Since time immemorial, birds had always won fair hearts through song, and Camille’s flute playing had been no exception.
It was such a short song, but its few notes left and returned as naturally as the leaves fell in the fall to return in the spring, as though they were as part of the same cycle that would always mean that everything would be all right in the end, if you only waited long enough. As cynical as the raven could be at other times, her love’s song always found a way to saunter gaily around her defenses without even trying somehow. The thrush would become so absorbed in her own flute playing, sometimes even closing her eyes as she would play, that for a long time, she wouldn’t even notice the hedgehogs, moles, newts, skunks and rabbits that would gather around her as she played, as though they would be tame for her, though they were but wild.
“That’s such a nice song,” Sandra said after Camille had just stopped playing. It had seemed like far too idyllic a scene to have been taking place in hell itself, yet there they were.
“Thanks!” the thrush chirped. “They seem to like it, anyway.” She found that the animals that would gather to listen to her play didn’t fight amongst themselves while she’d play. Sure, they’d sometimes jostle for the best location to listen from, hopping over each other excitedly as they’d listen to Camille, but they were the play-fights of peacetime, nothing that would ever truly harm any of them in the long run. It was as though she were extending an unseen shelter to them within the sound, a space of unwritten truce where jungle law held no sway over them.
“Sometimes, when I come here and listen to you play, I feel like one of them myself,” the raven admitted to her, gesturing at the quiet feral animals around them as she spoke.
“I’ll take that as a compliment, I suppose,” the thrush chuckled.
“What do they...” Sandra looked for the right words to say. “What kind of things do they say to you when you talk to them? Do they talk, well, like us, in any way? What’s it like, being able to talk to them the way you can?” She wondered if animals also sometimes struggled to find the right words or not.
“Well, they don’t talk exactly like us, naturally,” Camille smiled. “What you have to understand is that animals are always talking, in their own way, through everything they do. Everything animals do is a form of communication, a behavior you can read as meaning something, if you know how to read the meaning of what they’re doing.” The raven tilted her head at her.
“But that’s something that anyone can do if they have the right kind of training, isn’t it?” The thrush nodded. “How does it affect things in terms of your ability to ‘talk’ to them, as such?” Sandra may not have known everything, but she always asked the right questions. Camille had always liked that about her.
“It means you have to take different things for granted than when you talk to demons like us, for one thing. I mean, you already can’t talk to angels quite the same way you can talk to other demons, right?” The raven chuckled.
“You got that right,” she said understatedly.
“With animals, what that means is... Well, for one thing, they don’t expect you to ask them about things that they’re already conveying physically, through their behavior. They expect that you can read their behavior as clearly as they can read the behavior of other animals, because they’ve been learning how to do that for their whole lives. It doesn’t even occur to them that many of us can’t do that. The first thing they’d wonder about that is how we’ve lived this long without being able to, because it’s such a basic survival skill to them. So if you ask them if they’re scared, for example, when their whole demeanor already conveys ‘fear’ to other animals... they’ll understand what you’re asking, just not why you’re asking it.”
“Oh, I see!” Sandra hadn’t thought of that.
“It’s not that they’ll get offended by it or anything, they’ll just... get thrown off by it? Also, if you want them to trust you, you have to make sure to know how they’ll be reading your behavior. Not all animals react to the same behavior the same way, in fact they’re pretty much all different. All species have their own set of somatic conventions based on their own way of life, so you can’t make inferences based on generalizations. You have to memorize all of them one by one. Behavior that’s welcoming to one species can be threatening to another. If your behavior and what you’re saying to them don’t match, they’ll notice. It’s... uncanny valley for them. If you’re lucky, they’ll ask you about it. If not, they can get into fight or flight mode.”
“Wow...” the raven shook her head. “A lot more goes into it than it looks, doesn’t it?” She looked at them.
“Oh, yes. They do understand a lot more than most people think, though.” They seemed to be following the conversation somehow... Sandra didn’t ask whether they really were or not.
“I don’t know if I could do it. Even if I had your power, I mean. It seems complicated.” The thrush chuckled.
“I think I wouldn’t know what to do with your abilities either, for what it’s worth. People have always seemed a lot more complicated to me than animals. People make me yearn for the simplicity of talking to animals, believe me.” The raven laughed.
“I can sure believe that,” she granted, reaching for something that she felt vibrating in her pocket.
“Trouble in Birdhaven?” Camille inquired.
“Maura and Shaw need our help,” Sandra confirmed as the thrush pocketed her flute hurriedly. Camille grabbed her sword so that she could carry it in her beak as the two birds would fly back to protect their small, unassuming demon hamlet in the free zone.
“Musketeers, AWAY...!”
***
“Ooh, I know what we’ll do!” Ross seemed excited. This time, the goat put down his paper altogether.
“What do you have in mind?” Ozzie loved seeing that twinkle in the leopard’s eye. He smelled adventure in the wind.
“We’ll go way up in the nice part of town, you know the place with all those filthy rich mansions that look way too nice?” The goat nodded.
“Gorgeous part of town.” Ross smirked.
“We’ll sneak into one of the empty mansions and we’ll...” Should he have spoiled it? “Oh, come with me, you’ll love it. You always do,” the leopard winked.
“You still find new ways to surprise me,” Ozzie shook his head while he got ready to go out and follow Ross wherever the wind would take them. When they reached the mansion, the leopard pulled his customary vanishing act to scout ahead and find his way into an empty one in which to let the goat in with him.
“Now, we don’t steal anything,” Ross raised a finger, “not this time.”
“Because that’s what we did last time,” Ozzie acknowledged.
“Exactly. We can’t do the same thing more than once,” the leopard confirmed.
“Patterns are boring,” the goat agreed.
“Help me lift this,” Ross told him, gesturing at a couch.
“What?” Ozzie wasn’t sure he’d heard him right.
“Let’s bring this over here instead,” the leopard indicated an empty corner with his head as both demons lifted it, “see how it looks.” It looked pretty good. “Now, let’s bring this toaster in the... no, not in the bathroom, that’s a bit grisly,” Ross stuck his tongue out.
“Bedroom then?” the goat offered.
“So they can make toast in bed!” Ozzie grinned.
“Now you’re talking.” Little by little, bit by bit, they moved everything in the mansion mysteriously somewhere else, without taking anything, as though a storm had gone through everywhere inside and left everything somewhere else but intact somehow. “Did you know some people get paid to do what we’re doing?” the goat tilted his head.
“Is that right?” It seemed farfetched.
“Interior decorators, they call them. That or ‘design’ or something, I’m not sure, but it’s totally a thing,” the leopard asserted.
“No kidding!” Ozzie learned something new every day. “We’re totes doing this bloke a favor, aren’t we?” Ross nodded.
“We’re teaching him not to take anything for granted, is what.” The goat furrowed his brow.
“Might be a bit spooked, mayhaps?” The leopard pouted dubiously.
“I took care of that.” Somewhere on the mansion’s fridge, Ross had left a sticky note with the words ‘chill, mate!’ and the little Hitchhiker’s Guide face with its tongue sticking out of it next to it under a whimsical fridge magnet.
It was a pun.
“Now let’s see this guy’s face when he sees what his new place looks like,” Ozzie rubbed his hands together. The leopard took a crystal ball out of his pocket and, spinning it on his finger like a basketball, watched it disperse in the air around them as ink dissolving in water might look like. “This is gonna be great!” That would let them scry their target’s reaction.
“It’s good to see you hitting a good creative stride again,” the goat mock-punched him.
“This was a good one-on-one, but next I’d like to do another large scale thing, I just need to think of something we haven’t already done that would be cool to do... Gosh, remember that time we actually did the thing that people talk about where we put LSD in the water supply and watched merriment ensue? That was hilarious as all get out, wasn’t it?”
“Well... Most of it was,” Ozzie shrugged.
***
“Do you think we’ll ever get out of here, Allie?” It wasn’t an easy question for the dove to answer, but she was determined to do her best to come up with whatever she could.
“I don’t know, Hannah. On the one hand, when we met in Purgatory, at first I thought they’d keep us there our whole lives, always making excuses after excuses to keep moving the goalpost further and further. I’d heard of them doing things like that. When they did let us out of it to bring us here, I couldn’t believe they’d only kept us there for such a short time.” Hannah seemed transfixed by a nearby lava lamp, but she hadn’t missed a word of what Allie had just said.
“It still lets them keep us under control enough, though... They just felt pressured to seem ‘nicer’ about it.” The sparrow imagined that the golden light that bathed everything would have seemed soothing, if you’d been there of your own volition, for however long you wished. After decades, it burned her retina.
“That’s true, but still. Anyway, on the other hand, yeah, this. On the other hand, they already kept Finn for 1200 years as it is...” The dove shook and lowered her head, her peace sign pendant shaking around her neck along with it.
“It’s gonna be weird having to have him come here to see me,” it occurred to Hannah. “When he and I first knew each other, we were both out there, doing our thing, you know?” Allie nodded.
“You and I, on the other hand, never knew each other anywhere but caged, did we?” That hadn’t occurred to the sparrow, until the dove had mentioned it just now.
“I guess not... First, it was Purgatory, now the Gold Cage, but... we’ve never been free together, have we?” Hannah felt a lump in her throat. Allie put her arm around her shoulder.
“I’d love you wherever we’d met, you know.” The sparrow smiled back at her, returning the gesture.
“Thanks, hon. Sometimes I wonder what things will be like for us when we get out of here,” Hannah wondered idly, with tiny, wisp-like spheres of light fluttering around the sparrow as she did.
“If they ever do let us out, that is,” the dove sighed, feet dangling. “What if they don’t?”
***
“May I ask you where your ‘R’ section is?”
“We don’t have a section like that,” she told him. “We’re heaven’s library, sir,” she duly apologized. Perhaps he could find the kind of section that he was looking for in one of hell’s libraries...?
“No, I mean your books with titles that start with the letter ‘R’.” She blinked all her eyes.
“Oh, of course! Such as books about you, for example, sir.” Annie always got flustered when members of the Council came to her workplace, even members of the Low Council, let alone members of the High Council like himself.
“Yes, that’s right, like books about me.” Fortunately for her, he seemed to find her awkwardness more endearing than irritating. She would have crossed her fingers, if she’d had any.
“Right this way, Your Grace.” Rafe rolled his eyes behind her as she led the way. Personally, he did not find such formality necessary, but he understood that Annie spoke to him this way to alleviate her own sense of unease. He may as well let her have that if it helped her, the monkey told himself.
“Thank you, dear.” The warmth in his voice eased her mind. “I hope you like working here.” She led Rafe’s way across the white, puffy, cloud-like floor, between the aisles of bookshelves forming a labyrinth that seemed to rise all the way up to the clear blue sky above.
“Oh yes, sir! I love my job, sir,” Annie assured him hastily.
“That’s good to hear,” the monkey smiled. He’d thought of asking ‘Do you like your job?’ but had thought better of it. It sounded like the kind of thing that a superior would ask you before telling you that you were being reassigned or worse. Rafe had specifically wanted to avoid adding to her stress by putting her on the defensive like that. That said, he was genuinely curious about whether the angels who worked under him liked their jobs or not, in no small part because he really did want to be able to make sure that they worked in the best conditions possible. Someone at the High Council had to try to look out for them, after all – and it certainly wasn’t going to be any of the rest of them, the monkey thought to himself bitterly.
“I hope heaven likes the work I’ve been doing, Your Grace,” she fretted.
“You don’t have to call me that, you know,” he waved off. Oh gosh, she thought, he didn’t answer the question, that must mean there’s something wrong, and also he criticized something I did that must mean I did something wrong, oh gosh I should have known better what was I – “I mean, of course we do!” Rafe wondered sometimes if Annie knew that, on a deep-seated level, he felt just as awkward as she did when he talked to her, just as afraid of saying the wrong thing that would accidentally bring her to a bad place. “We love your work, Annie. We couldn’t be happier with it. Keep it up!” The way he could sense her tension just melt away in front of him as she spoke felt so rewarding. He’d said the right thing this time.
“Thank you, sir! That means a lot to me, sir.” She wasn’t lying. By now, she had been working there for so long that she knew the bookshelf maze that was her workplace like the back of her... she didn’t have hands as such, but she knew it very well. Annie’s routine of inventorying it, keeping track of the books that people took out and the books they returned, and leading them through the bookshelves had become second nature to her, the same way that formerly tight clothes loosen and fit better on you after you’ve been wearing them for a long time. She was a creature of habit, and order brought a sense of peace to her. She believed in the value of the knowledge she helped bring to others, in the worth of sharing information.
The truth would set you free, wouldn’t it?
Once she’d brought Rafe to the section that he’d been looking for, she made her way back to the front desk in case other visitors may show up. He went through the section looking for the specific book that he was hoping to take out, idly climbing up and down the bookshelves like the monkey he was, forgetting to use the ladders. Once he’d found it, he retraced the steps that he’d taken following Annie there to find his way all the way back to the front desk as well. The cloud-like surface of the library’s floor did not allow visitors to leave any footsteps, as a surface made of sand might have, for example. Fortunately, Rafe’s spatial memory served him well enough this time.
“Reconciliation magic!” she couldn’t help noticing his book choice at the front desk. “I had no idea the squabbling at the Council had gotten so dire.” Too much, she worried?
“It’s for a friend, I swear,” the monkey laughed.
***
She would go out to walk in the rain in her trench coat, thinking about her life.
It was bittersweet for Sam that she could remember a time when Allie used to admire her. In the forties, the bear remembered that the dove had told her that she looked up to her, because Sam was fighting for something that was worth fighting for. Barely a decade later, the two angels had been recalled to heaven from their mission on Earth. However, while the bear had accepted her orders to return, Allie had disobeyed her orders and continued living on Earth, becoming a prominent activist as part of the American peace protests against the Vietnam War. Heaven hadn’t liked that. Angels were never supposed to become so involved in Earth matters unless heaven ordered them to. They returned from missions when ordered to.
Beyond that, heaven had been afraid of peace activism. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that a lot of the same logic that the dove had used to indict the Vietnam War could have also been used to indict many of heaven’s wars against hell as well. If angels started thinking that they could mess with mortals at will, disobey orders and indict heaven’s wars, there would have been social chaos, heaven had reasoned. To add insult to injury, Allie had started becoming involved with Sally, a demon who had also become a peace activist against the Vietnam War. Angels were not prohibited from dating demons, but it was frowned upon. Sally had become a target for aiding and abetting the dove’s crimes against heaven.
They had sent Sam back to Earth to arrest Allie herself. And Sally had been killed.
***
“Are you guys just standing around bitching about your jobs again?” Arnie had just barged into their torture chamber to admonish them. “Get back to work!” Being their supervisor, it was just what the goose had been assigned to do, he figured.
“Look, man,” the squid raised her finger at him philosophically, “I’ve been doing this job for a while, right?” The angel looked at her with his customary scorn.
“What’s your point?” he asked her.
“When you’ve been working here for as long as I have, you learn a thing or two about how to do it, okay? For example,” Renee went on patiently, “you can’t just whip all the time. It’s not that simple. You can only keep pushing someone suffering through a constant whipping frenzy for so long before they go into shock. When that happens, a dozen lashes, a hundred lashes, it doesn’t make a whit of difference anymore, you get me? They lose all sense of time. The lashes all just sort of blend into each other. When you stop long enough to give them a chance to come down from one, you lull their body into a false sense of security. Each lash can become a new, horrible, unexpected surprise. You have to look at the lashes I’m not whipping.”
“That’s beautiful,” Cara opined. The mortal strapped to her shook his head and groaned.
“You don’t tell me how to do my job,” Arnie pointed back at the squid, “I tell you how to do your job.” The starfish had never liked him. “That’s how it works.” Levi had never liked him all that much either. “Got it?” Not that the goose cared. He wanted to be feared, not liked.
“OW!”
“Yes, sir,” Renee relented resignedly.
“Now why don’t you put all that precious experience of yours to good use and make sure the new guy knows how to do your job,” the angel told the squid.
“She’s not being replaced, is she?” Cara didn’t quite hide the note of panic in her voice as well as she wished she had. Work was work, but it wouldn’t have been the same without Renee.
“No, we’re having a new mortal taken in,” Arnie shook his head, “so we’re going to need a second whipper.” The goose pointed at the whale offhandedly.
“What?” Levi thought he must have misunderstood. “Me?” The angel nodded.
“That’s right, got a problem with that?” The whale was at a loss for words.
“I... uh... N-no, sir. Whatever you say, sir.” In all his years, decades, centuries working there, Levi had never held the whip himself.
“Good, you have until tonight to show him the ropes, fish-breath,” Arnie ordered the squid. Although the whale had become inured to the violence that had been inflicted by others around him after all this time, suddenly being asked to engage in it himself still felt different somehow. “Start now.” Levi looked back down at his status report numbly before bringing his head back up from it, willing himself to snap out of his torpor as much as he could. He stood up from his desk, pushing his chair back under it the same way he always did, unable to shake the sense of unreality that had just been thrown on top of him like a wet blanket. He grabbed the whip that Renee handed him obligingly, still reeling. He looked at the mortal, steeling himself.
“I’m really the only demon who can do it, right?” The goose slapped him in the back of the head.
“What’s the matter with you? Get to work! Even you can’t screw this up, can you?” That did sting a bit.
“Look, man, it’s not like any of us like this, you know?” the starfish offered, trying to help. “We don’t do it because we like it.” She felt sorry for the whale, actually. Cara remembered that it had been hard for her at first too. “It’s just that when angels tell us to do something, we kind of do it, right?” All jobs were unpleasant and difficult when you weren’t used to them yet though, weren’t they? That was just what work was like, she thought. “You just have to push yourself through the first one. Try to focus on that. It gets easier after the first one.” Levi’s hand was shaking around the whip in spite of himself, looking at the mortal looking at him, trying to slow his hyperventilating down to deep breaths when he started hearing it.
The mortal was laughing. Uncontrollably. All four of them seemed duly surprised.
“Now look what you did,” the angel reproached the whale, “he’s having a great time! That’s the opposite of torture, did you know that?” Levi became flustered.
“What... What’s so funny?” the whale asked the mortal, struggling not to let go of the whip.
“You are,” the mortal smirked a bloodied smirk at Levi from his starfish rack. “You work here with these monsters for your whole life. You talk about the weather. You turn a complete blind eye to what they do to me, you do everything they tell you to do, you never question any of it, ever. You collaborate with the whole damn thing. When I was alive, I was an atheist, you didn’t know that about me, did you? I sent people to their deaths, believing they’d never come back. Do you want to know what the definition of irony is, punk? All of you here, every time you hurt someone, you know they’ll heal. Every time you kill them, you know they’ll come right back. None of you have to have half the nerve to do your jobs that I had to have to do my job.”
The angel and three demons were all struck speechless.
“And all you can do about it is whine and bitch and moan about how mean you have to be and how much it sucks to be you! You don’t envy them for their jobs, that’s what you tell them? How about you don’t envy me for being where I am? No, that doesn’t even occur to you. You’re too busy feeling sorry for yourself for that. And now that they actually put the whip in your hand, that you have to do it yourself like these people you’ve been letting get away with it for all this time, now, you think if you take a stand for it, it’ll do what? Make you a better person than them? Save your soul? I’ve got some news for you, buddy: you’re already in hell. Your soul ain’t going nowhere. So yeah... That’s what’s so funny about this. Since you asked.”
He dropped the whip.
***
“Who... are you...?” she rasped. Even though she could already tell that she was dying, she caught herself being genuinely afraid of him as he approached her. She almost hoped that she would die before he could do whatever it was that he had in mind to her. But what could have possibly been even scarier than death itself, in the flesh?
“Don’t worry,” he tried to reassure her, “I’m the Angel of Death.” She could only see his gleaming eyes under his hood. He certainly looked the part. “I’m here to help.” She thought she saw something dark swish behind his back, but her sight was going fast, and she couldn’t be sure. “I’ll help you pass over to the other side. It’s what I do.” She looked at his cloaked figure with a mixture of fear and defiance in her eyes.
“I don’t...” She was shaken by a fit of coughing, struggling to speak through it. “I don’t...” She shook her head in spite of her trembling, wishing she could summon up the moisture in her mouth to spit in his face, but it was gone, all gone. “... believe...” She was all dried out. “... you...” She brought up her arm, creaking in protest like unoiled machinery, to point at him accusingly.
“Come, now,” he clucked his tongue at her disapprovingly. She could swear she could see a cloud of frost start gathering around him. Was he emitting some sort of clicking sound? Or were they simply hallucinations brought on by her senses shutting down? “This won’t hurt a bit...”
***
She heard the phoenix’s music and motorcycle before she even saw him appear on the horizon. She rubbed her eyes at first, not sure of whether or not she should believe that it was really him. However, once he’d parked and stepped off his motorcycle, his birdlike, fiery punk frill was unmistakable.
“Finn, it’s you!” Dawn sounded happy to see him.
“Dawn, hon, it’s been ages!” Finn walked right up to her and hugged her. Although the locust was surprised at first, she didn’t hesitate long to hug him back. She’d forgotten how long it had been since anyone she’d interacted with had been this nice to her, on the job at that. “How have you been? They still have you working here?” Dawn nodded.
“Word gets around even in Carcer, I see.” He had a sympathy wince in commiseration.
“Aw, that’s a shame. I heard they’d transferred you from your old job to this, but that was a while back. You’d think they’d have come to their senses to put you back out there ages ago, wouldn’t you?” She chuckled.
“Oh stop,” the locust waved off, “you’ve been locked up for all this time and you feel sorry for me? I should be the one feeling bad for you!” The phoenix shrugged.
“I guess so. I sort of got you in this mess though, didn’t I?” It had been him who had first suggested to the Council that she could be made from a demon into an angel to work by their side like an equal at the time.
“Ah, you couldn’t have known they’d end up setting me up here, could you? Besides, the job you actually got me at the time was the best one I ever had.” Finn smiled wistfully.
“You miss it, don’t you?” Dawn nodded.
“Oh, yeah! The game, the chase, the thrill of the hunt... You remember what they used to call me, don’t you?” He grinned.
“The Destroyer!” She laughed.
“You do remember! Didn’t that sound badass?” The phoenix giggled.
“I wouldn’t have messed with you, I can tell you that.” The locust sighed.
“Yeah, those were the days...” She shook her head. “Ah, Finn, it just hasn’t been the same since you went away.” His smile showed a hint of pain.
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Finn winked awkwardly, “although there’s been more to it than that, I’m sure...” he trailed off.
“Yeah. The culture feels... different somehow.” Dawn couldn’t quite put her finger on it.
“Well, heaven always had its share of problems,” he acknowledged.
“That’s true. It’s just... I don’t know. It’s hard to explain. Maybe you’re right,” she shrugged.
“One of those things where you had to be there, was it?” the phoenix tilted his head.
“One of those things where sometimes I’m almost glad you weren’t there to see it,” the locust replied smarmily.
“What’s that?” He squinted, pointing at three dots in the sky behind her that were coming toward them as seagull and eagle cries provided them with a partial answer to his question.
“Something old, something new,” Dawn muttered dejectedly as three angels landed.
“Oh, didn’t you use to do her job?” Finn asked Gabe without a trace of malice.
“That’s right.” The seagull and locust both found his question inadvertently amusing yet irritating for their own reasons. “Don’t remind me.” Gabe made a face, adjusting his cop hat on his head as he did. “Worst job I ever had.” Dawn gave the seagull a dirty look. The phoenix seemed slightly dismayed, not having meant to throw salt on the wound.
“Oh my God, Nick, is that you?” The deer turned toward the eagle at his side.
“Who’s Nick?” he tilted his antlered head at Rob.
“His name’s Rudy now,” the eagle told Finn.
“Nick had a bit of an accident,” Gabe made a small circular ‘he’s crazy’ motion at his head as he spoke while indicating the deer with his other hand. “Tragic, really,” the seagull went on in a world-weary tone.
“Didn’t you use to have a trident?” the phoenix asked Rudy, gesturing at the deer’s shovel.
“Rudy has enough pointy things on his head to worry about.” Finn looked Rob up and down.
“And who are you supposed to be?” The phoenix hadn’t meant to sound condescending, but he’d sounded like he’d just asked a kid what his costume was at Halloween.
“Really?” the eagle huffed and puffed, indicating his red, white and blue clothes with a star motif and at his two firearms indignantly.
“Finn’s been away for a while, cut him some slack, Rob,” the locust told him. “He’s not trying to be rude or anything, he just doesn’t know. Rob’s only been around for two or three centuries, Finn. But heaven loves your work, right, Rob?” It seemed a good idea to defuse the tension.
“Sir, yes, sir!” Rob straightened his posture proudly, saluting as he spoke like the soldier that he was.
“What happened to you, man?” Finn and Nick used to know each other, back in the day.
“An anvil fell on his head,” Gabe waved off callously.
“Really?” Rudy turned toward the seagull, surprised. “But Gabe, if an anvil fell on my head, wouldn’t have it hit my antlers?”
“See, isn’t this guy great?” the eagle snickered, pointing at the deer.
“Let’s hear it for this guy,” Gabe chuckled, slapping Rudy’s back as the deer did a bad job of hiding his confused expression, embarrassed that he didn’t get it. The phoenix tried to hold back from glowering at them, but it seemed to him that Rudy’s coworkers weren’t being very nice to him.
“What do you want, Gabe?” Dawn was reaching the end of her daily allotment of tact.
“Glad you asked,” the seagull retorted. “We have new instructions about him, as a matter of fact.” Finn’s heart sank.
“What do you mean, new instructions?” For a moment, he tried to cling to the possibility that it could have meant something else.
“We’re sorry, Comet,” the deer apologized to him meekly, “Santa can’t let you back in the North Pole right now. You might get coal in your stocking for being naughty, we heard.”
“What? Santa?” the phoenix asked, bewildered. What had they done to Nick, he couldn’t help asking himself?
“You can’t be serious!” The locust usually tried to hide the full extent of how much Gabe got to her, but this had still found a way to get around her defenses. “He’s been waiting his whole life after having been told he’d be let back in and now you’re just gonna turn him away?” She was just out of shits to give by that point.
“It’s just a temporary measure, ma’am,” Rob assured Dawn. “We just can’t let him in until we figure out what’s going on, that’s all.” The locust clenched her fist and had a facial twitch as a single, lone frog fell from the sky on top of the eagle’s head, what was left of her self-control having just barely spared Rob from being on the receiving end of a rain of dozens of frogs instead.
“What’s... ‘going on’? What does that even mean?” Finn was becoming worried that she’d get in trouble because of him. He didn’t want that.
“I’m sure it’s just a formality,” the phoenix brought his hand to her arm as he looked at the seagull, trying to help her calm down. “Did something bad happen?” He could see his own reflection in Gabe’s sunglasses, if he looked at them closely enough.
“Trouble with demons right now,” the seagull answered cryptically, “We can’t afford to take risks with any of them right now.”
“I hope it’ll all get worked out, whatever it is, officer,” Finn told Gabe in all sincerity.
“But the whole reason he was coming back was to be made an angel again! He’s only still a demon because he didn’t make it through the door before you got here,” Dawn shook her head disbelievingly.
“Correction,” the seagull raised his finger at her, “it’s because he’s still a demon now that it was our job to make it here before he made it through. And we did it! Justice wins the day.”
“They sent three of you? With Dawn here?” If push had come to shove, the locust would have been more than enough to get the phoenix under control... if heaven still trusted her to be on its side.
“Well, you’re coming with us. These two hold your arms, I lead the way, got it?” Gabe explained.
“Are you taking him back to hell?” Finn tried to show a brave face, but his heart raced.
“We’re just taking him to Limbo. Like I said, this will all get sorted out. Come on, Burning Man.”
The phoenix looked back at Dawn as they took him away to see her helplessly mouthing at him. ‘I’m sorry, man.’ She barely saw him mouth back at her before they forced his head back to make him face forward as he walked.
‘I know, I know...’
***
Mike was reclining in his chair with his feet on his desk holding his phone to his ear, his suit and tie clashing with his casual posture as they were wont to do, when the elevator doors opened on Rafe’s unimpressed expression.
“Hold all my calls, Darlene,” the griffin asked the secretary bird on his phone before putting it back down on his desk as the monkey walked determinedly into his office.
“What’s the meaning of this?” Rafe asked curtly.
“You’ll have to be more specific,” Mike tilted his head.
“You know damn well what I mean.” Did the griffin think him stupid?
“A lot goes on around here, my man,” Mike shrugged.
“Finn was set to come back today. Now I’m being told he’s been turned away at the border and detained in Limbo ‘until we know what’s going on’?” The griffin held up his palms in front of himself.
“Hey, hey, that wasn’t my call to make! I just run this place,” Mike gestured to the Skyscraper around them, “I don’t make the calls.”
“Who did make this call, then?” the monkey raised an accusatory eyebrow at him.
“Ezra did.” Rafe dropped his fist into his open palm in a ‘eureka’ moment.
“I knew it had to have been Ezra,” he said through gritted teeth. “He didn’t even see it fit to call a Council meeting for it?” The griffin’s sunglasses were a mask of imperturbability.
“Ezra doesn’t need to call Council meetings for every little thing, Rafe. Some of us have work to do, you know,” he threw in, looking surreptitiously down at his phone on his desk to make sure it was off so that the monkey couldn’t see his ongoing game of Bejeweled on it.
“That’s not the point! Ezra’s been making more and more calls on his own without calling Council meetings for longer and longer. This is a pattern, Mike! Soon he’s going to be making all the decisions on his own, without even turning to the Council for as much of a rubber stamp anymore! Before long, the Council may as well no longer exist. Now, forgive me for being so blunt, but as a fellow High Councilor, doesn’t that concern you?”
“The point is, I know what it was about. I understand why he did it,” Mike explained. “Frankly, I thought you would too, considering what it is about.” This did little to assuage Rafe’s exasperation.
“What was his excuse this time?” The monkey had often suspected that Ezra made some of his decisions purely out of vindictiveness toward Rafe, although he couldn’t be sure.
“You mean you haven’t heard?” The griffin seemed genuinely surprised.
“I told you Ezra’s been keeping me in the dark,” the monkey reminded him.
“Oh, this is big! You’ll want to pull up a chair and sit down for this one,” Mike said, getting up to offer Rafe a chair to do just that as he spoke.
“What happened?” What could possibly have seemed to justify such an extreme measure?
“One of our demons went on strike.” The griffin’s hands were now resting near the sides of his desk, forming a triangle with his head with his back half-bent as he looked at the monkey through his sunglasses dramatically.
“What do you mean, a strike?” Mike couldn’t possibly have meant a strike strike, could he?
“A strike strike! Like mortals do,” the griffin stuck out his tongue dejectedly.
“Demons can’t go on strike,” Rafe shook his head disbelievingly.
“Apparently, this one can,” Mike made an understated gesture with his head to punctuate his statement.
“But, that means that...” The implications of such a thing were just now hitting him.
“If one demon can go on strike, we have at least two problems on our hands, Rafe. Maybe three. One, if one demon can go on strike, any demon can go on strike. The only thing that gets demons who work for us through the day is being reminded every day, in every way, that they don’t have a choice, so it’s not really their fault. If one demon introduces the element of choice, our whole house of cards comes crumbling down. Now, it’s bad enough if it’s a demon who tortures mortals for reasons I’ll be getting to – but stop and think about what if a demon like Finn chose to go on strike for us. The consequences for all of heaven would be catastrophic. Once we quash this whole strike business, Finn can come right back in, okay?”
“But that’s not fair at all!” The monkey protested. “Even though I understand why the strike is bad for us, Finn has nothing to do with the strike. What does him being a demon have to do with anything? He was an angel before we sent him there and he was going to be made into an angel again right after coming back.” The griffin sat back down on his chair to cross his legs, steeple his fingers and lower his head.
“Don’t you realize how serious this is? Angels are higher up in heaven’s hierarchy than demons are, or did you forget that?” Rafe sighed.
“Of course I didn’t forget,” the monkey rolled his eyes.
“So if a demon can strike, what’s to stop an angel from thinking he can strike, too?” Mike looked back up at him, crossing his arms. “And that’s not even all of it,” the griffin went on, raising a finger to drive his point home, “how long do you think we can have an extra sinner with us who’s not getting tortured before word gets out? I run our PR department, Rafe. Do you realize how important the torture of hell is as a recruiting tool for us? How effective the threat of torturing mortals for all eternity has been at keeping them in line for all this time? Because I can take you through the charts and data analytics if you want, you know. We have those statistics. It’s what we do. Do you have any idea what Sasha will do if mortals stop coming in?”
“I don’t know, but it won’t be pretty,” Rafe agreed grudgingly. “Finn’s been waiting for ages to come back here, though. He would never go on strike, not if his life depended on it, regardless of anything, no matter how many other angels and demons did. Thinking he’d do that betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of his character, and what’s worse, I think Ezra knows that every bit as much as I do. He’s doing this to vex me, Mike.”
“And what makes you such an expert on Finn’s character, Rafe? That you used to sleep with him? That doesn’t tell you anything,” the griffin scoffed.
“Finn did amazing work for us for thousands of years,” the monkey pointed at Mike accusingly, “and this has nothing to do with that! His track record speaks for itself and you damn well know it. Don’t you have the stats for that too?” It seemed like an airtight case to Rafe.
“Finn’s track record is that he already disobeyed heaven once, okay? He’s already on thin ice at it is. He’ll wait until we sort this out on our own if he knows what’s good for him. Remember that, although I’m sure that having him put away for 1200 years felt like a long time to you and Hannah, at the time, Ezra wanted to do a lot worse to him. If he’d had his way, we wouldn’t be here having this conversation right now. Do you really think he’d have let you stop him if you’d been the only one to oppose him?” The monkey winced.
“I know better than that. I know I owe you, Cassie and Sasha a great deal for making a case for him then,” Rafe admitted matter-of-factly. “That kind of sound decision-making on your part is exactly why I’m turning to you for this again today. Will you help me bring common sense back to heaven’s rule now, as you did back then?” His tone had shifted from accusatory to pleading, a tone the griffin liked to hear.
“No, see, the way I see it, I did something for you back then, didn’t I?” The monkey nodded.
“You did.” Where could Mike have been going with this?
“Wouldn’t that make it your turn to do something for me, then?” the griffin pouted dubiously.
“What kind of thing do you need me to do for you?” Mike uncrossed his legs, fingers intertwined, lowering his head to give Rafe a sly look over his sunglasses.
“Oh.” The griffin leaned over to run his hand across the monkey’s head and face.
“I’m sure you can think of something, can’t you...?” Mike trailed off.
***
“What about basketball, anything going on there?” It was a smidgen harder planning a sports-related stunt when you barely knew anything about them, Ross mused.
“Um, let’s see, there’s something coming up with the... whichever team Jabbar is on?” Bugger all, what was the bloody team’s name, anyway?
“Jabbar plays basketball?” That certainly came right out of left field, the leopard thought.
“Of course he does ya dunce, what did you think he did when you said you looked up to the man, anyway?” Sometimes the goat had no idea what went on in Ross’ head.
“Jeet Kune Do Muslim Democrat. You mean to tell me a smart man like him plays a thing like that?” The goat nodded.
“I’m afraid so!” The leopard shook his head.
“No shite?” Ozzie looked at him with an expression that confirmed he wasn’t kidding. “I’ll be gosh-darned. Drat.” Childhood could be so disillusioning. “All right, we’ll give the bloke a break, then” Ross shrugged. “Let’s see, let’s try to think of something else, there’s gotta be something going on that we can mess with somehow, there always is...” Ross snapped his fingers. “I got it, mate! Ooh, I think I got a live one this time, you’ll love this one, I’m sure of it!” he giggled excitedly. “You know the great big thing that’s coming up what they’ve been talking about on the news, that big dish-related thing, you know the one, right?” The goat furrowed his brow.
“What thing?” The leopard heard the newspapers crinkling as Ozzie searched vainly through them for some clue as to what Ross may have been talking about.
“You know, that big kitchen utensil-related thing people won’t shut up about for a while every time it happens? You know the one.” The goat indicated something that he had just found in the paper that he thought could have been about it.
“D’you suppose you might mean this?” The leopard looked thrilled. Yes! This had to be it.
“The Super Bowl, that’s right! That’s the one.” Ross brought his palm to his spotted forehead.
“People sure do talk about it a lot,” Ozzie acknowledged.
“But nobody does anything about it, do they?” the leopard asked with that glint in his eye.
“Ooh, you’re right, I think I’m gonna like this one,” the goat smiled. “What do you have in mind?”
“What’s the first rule of writing, Ozzie?” Ross raised a finger at him expectantly.
“Show don’t tell,” Ozzie answered.
“Exactly,” the leopard flashed a toothy grin at him before dashing off ahead to hurriedly lead the goat’s way. Unbound as they were by several laws of physics and none of the social conventions that applied to mortals, they simply started walking from where they were toward the location of the Super Bowl over the next week or two. The two demons were riding such a wave of excitement on their way that they forgot to sleep or eat altogether for whole days at a time on their way. They reminisced about many of the other stunts that they’d pulled on the way and made plans for other ones that they might pull in the not-so-distant future, if the chance for them to do so ever came up. Finally, they reached and entered the stadium itself.
“♫Take me out to the...♫” Ozzie started singing to himself as they walked in the crowd.
“Izzat for the right sport, d’you think?” The goat shrugged.
“That sounds about right, don’t it? I mean, they’re all ball games, right?” Ross shrugged back.
“I reckon.” There was so much energy flying through the air! The two demons would have loved it, if it had been about something else. Even as it was, with people cheering wildly, hotdog merchants hawking their wares, people waving their hands in the air, all jostling to be nearer to this thing that wasn’t even really anything, they couldn’t help borrowing some of that very same momentum themselves, eager to redirect it. Their nerves electrified, their blood pumping with dark, new energy, restless in its impatience to be unleashed, they saw all these mortals who had come here for a show, for an experience that they’d never forget for the rest of their lives, and the two demons had only one thing on their mind about it all.
Making sure that these mortals’ wish would become more true than they’d ever thought possible.
The stadium lights that shone down on them from above as bright as the lights of heaven itself, the leopard walked just ahead of Ozzie right onto the field itself. Eliciting puzzled glances from some of the mortal sports fans who noticed the two of them there, he lifted his arms up on his sides with his palms up majestically, as if he were walking back after a period of unwarranted exile into a realm that had always been his own. Just as, he couldn’t help but think, the primal spirit of the leopard was a more pure, authentic version of the spirit of energy that mortals had seen fit to tame and defang by turning it into sports, a primeval spirit that belonged to the times of mortals’ origins there to reclaim its rightful place, if only tonight.
“Let’s dance...” Ross snapped his fingers with magic in his voice.
It started with just a single, lone dancer. At first, the other people around the first dancer were weirded out by it, thinking that there must have been something wrong with them. Some people even made fun of them, or worried if they were okay. However, far be it for it to have stayed so easily contained. Soon there were two dancers, then four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, people stood up to start dancing more and more, not the dance of a trained professional either for most of them, but the most simple, spontaneous dance that would naturally come to a person’s limbs to express that they were proud of themselves or having a good time. It was as though they had all just scored a goal, celebrating after their victory.
Soon everyone in the stadium was dancing. The players had stopped playing to dance.
The leopard, briefly distracted by taking in the sense of wonder in the eyes of his partner in crime, his favorite reward of all, finally turned his attention back to the crowd around them, clapped his hands once, and spread his arms out wide over his head, as if he were passionately declaring his love to everyone in the world. Just as the dancing had spread, it started with just one person taking off all their clothes, then a second, then four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and on and on until every last mortal in the stadium was as naked as the day they were born. They went along with what the mortal world would only be equipped to describe as mass hysteria, a riddle for the ages. Ross started getting giddily undressed alongside them.
“Come on, last one in’s a rotten egg,” the leopard winked at the goat at his side.
“You always take me to the nicest places.” There was just no way Ozzie was going to be able to sound detached after something like that, no matter how hard he tried to do so. Once they’d both finished undressing along with every other buck naked dancing mortal in the stadium that night, the two demons danced and danced with the same wild abandon as the mortals around them. High on adrenalin, they only stopped to stand side by side watching the mortals keep going without them when they’d run all out of energy for the time being themselves, the demons’ arms wrapped around each other’s shoulder tenderly as though they were watching a sunset together.
“Look how happy they are...”
***
The target shook violently from the impact of the thrown feather-knife that pierced it.
It wasn’t a ‘real’ tree as such. You could climb it, perch on it, rest in its shade – in a way it was real enough. It hadn’t simply grown there on its own the way a real tree would have, though, far from it. No, the target tree was yet another creation of the Gold Cage around them. She had a lot of anger to work out, and the target tree was providing her with an effective way to work it out. As Hannah flew around it in three dimensions, she threw her feather-knives at the targets that grew on its branches artfully. Feathers she seemed to shed unintentionally in fight drifted down in alternating diagonals in the wind only to end up sticking through targets of their own on their way down, the randomness of their paths of descent a mere optical illusion.
She knew this would happen.
Allie laid on her back with her arms crossed behind her head, staring up at the ceiling. She couldn’t help noticing that even the cobwebs above them were woven in gold, tended by tiny jeweled spiders that caught some of the same tiny, wisp-like spheres that would flutter around them sometimes. What a fitting metaphor for their situation, the dove thought to herself as he looked up at them. A target with a feather-knife stuck through it suddenly landed next to her head like an overripe fruit falling from a tree. Allie stood up and turned around to look at the sparrow landing next to her from her training session. The dove eschewed the use of violence herself, but respected Hannah for her skills, and sympathized with her frustration.
“Got carried away,” the sparrow apologized, picking up the pierced target from the ground.
“It’s okay.” Allie turned around to light some of their favorite incense. Of all the things that they could have in this place, it was one of the few that still legitimately calmed her down. “It’s a rough time.” The dove turned her attention back to Hannah.
“I just can’t believe they did this to him.” The sparrow held her head in her hands, and shook her head. “I mean, I knew they would, I even remember we talked about it, I just still...” Allie wrapped her arm around Hannah’s shoulder.
“Rafe said he’d do everything he can to try to get him out of there, didn’t he?” The sparrow sighed.
“That’s true, he did,” Hannah nodded. “Everything.”
***
“Oh hi!” Annie always seemed so happy to see her. It always cheered her up. “You’re here early.” It clearly wasn’t a reproach. “I’m not done my shift yet but it’s good to see you!” Sarah laughed, her fiery, reptilian appearance ever at unspoken odds with the celestial décor.
“It’s always good to see you, Peepers.” It may have annoyed her to have been called that by someone else, but it was different when the dragon said it somehow.
“I have to stay at the front desk in case visitors show up but we can hang out for a bit until my shift is over if you want,” Annie proposed.
“Actually, I’m...” All her eyes looked at Sarah quizzically. Some angels found it disconcerting.
“Yes, dear?” She was ever so solicitous, the dragon couldn’t help noticing, her eagerness to please masking her nervousness as well as she could muster. Then again, there she was being nervous herself, she was one to talk, Sarah thought.
“I’m here to... Could you help me find a book?” The dragon scratched her head and blushed, almost embarrassed. She didn’t want Annie to mistakenly think that seeing her wasn’t something that would’ve been worth a pleasure visit from Sarah, that it was only something that she would have done with an underlying utilitarian end in mind. She just really did need a book, and it also happened to be Annie’s job to help people find them. The dragon usually picked her up when Sarah’s shift would end first, just as Annie would pick up the dragon at the treasury when Sarah’s shift would end first. The two angels would accompany each other home and talk about how their jobs had gone that day.
“Oh!” Annie did seem surprised, but not displeased. “Of course! I’d be happy to.” She flowed easily into serve-the-visitor mode, without losing her earlier friendliness. After all, if her services could make someone she cared about happy, why wouldn’t she have wanted to provide them to her? “What are you looking for?” The dragon realized she didn’t have a plan for explaining her book choice to her, that Annie, unbeknownst to her, without ever meaning to, had been put in the role of a gatekeeper. Sarah couldn’t take out a book without going through her, then and there, yet it was still better to take it out with her there than with anyone else. Annie would always be likelier to understand and forgive, if push came to shove.
“Could, could you show me the way to the T section, please?” Annie nodded.
“No problem.” She led the dragon’s way through the cloudy bookshelf maze to her destination.
“Thank you!” Sarah chirped. Annie returned to the front desk while Sarah looked around for the book that she wanted to find before finally retracing her steps after having found it back to the front desk herself. The dragon counted herself lucky that there would be no other visitors around at the time, at least.
“Transmutation...? What’s got you curious about that...?” Sarah searched frantically for the right words to use without betraying her nervousness.
“Oh, it came up in other stuff I’ve been reading and hearing about recently, so it got it on my mind a bit, that’s all.” Suddenly Annie was beginning to think back on earlier events during the day under a different light, striving to hide her own growing concern from the dragon.
“Rafe was here earlier today,” Annie name-dropped as she started processing Sarah’s book rental.
“Get out!” The dragon tried to mask her fear with surprise. Was the monkey’s visit connected to Sarah somehow? But the dragon tried to pretend that she was only surprised that Annie would have interacted with a ‘celebrity’ in the angel world in the context of her job.
“Eh, he was just taking out a book. People take out books, right?” She tried to shrug. For the first time in her life, even as someone loyal to heaven who loved her job, Annie looked down at her book rental form on the front desk, and wondered whether she should quietly omit a visitor’s rental from the records or not...
***
“What’s that noise?” Renee asked Levi, bringing several of her hands to her ears.
“What do you mean?” The whale furrowed his brow, seeming not to understand.
“How could you not hear it? It’s got to be the most horrible noise I ever heard in my entire life!” Cara had lived for thousands of years and had spent the vast majority of them torturing people for a living. She considered taking on a shape that would have allowed her to put her hands over her ears, which was impossible in her starfish shape. Unfortunately, she was here to talk to Levi, which she couldn’t have done if she couldn’t hear him – not to mention that she’d always worked hard to hide her shapeshifting ability from angels. Heaven had a way of finding uses for what they knew was at their disposal, and Cara had no intention of giving them a reason to start looking for a way to use that. Things were already bad enough as they were.
“Oh, you mean the crying baby sound,” the whale suddenly realized they meant. “I’ve been hearing it for so long now I can barely register it anymore.”
“What the hell is that?” The squid asked him. She and the starfish didn’t run into a lot of babies, torturing people in hell. Even the renowned effectiveness of torture chambers for heaven’s PR department had its limits.
“It’s the sound of a crying baby,” Levi said matter-of-factly.
“What’s a crying baby doing in Carcer?” Cara moved her whole body in a way the whale had learned over the years to decode as inquisitive.
“It’s coming from the walls themselves,” he gestured at them as he spoke. “Livens up the place, doesn’t it?” Heaven could go to extraordinary lengths to make life unpleasant for people who displeased it.
“When are you coming back to work?” A pained expression appeared on Levi’s face at her question.
“Renee... I’m not.” He’d hoped not to have to tell them at all, that they would have come in already expecting it. There was no good way to break that to them gently.
“Come on, man... You don’t really mean that, do you?” the starfish asked the whale as Renee reached for his hand through the bars.
“They told me to whip someone, Cara,” he reminded them.
“So?” the squid shrugged. “You’ve seen me do that the whole time we’ve known each other!”
“I know,” Levi acknowledged.
“So why is it different if you do it? What difference does it make?” Cara asked him.
“I don’t know,” the whale replied.
“Do you... Do you think we’re bad people, Levi?” He could tell that it wasn’t a rhetorical question. It wasn’t a question he’d wanted to force Renee to ask herself, but there he was.
“Of course not,” Levi tried to reassure her.
“We meant what we said, you know.” He raised an eyebrow at the starfish.
“We hate our jobs,” the squid continued. “Always have, always will. It’s just that it’s... It’s... Well, it’s just not one of the things we can do something about!” None of the words that she could think of seemed quite right to do justice to the situation. “Do you understand that?”
“We miss you, Levi,” Cara said with emotion in her voice. That got so close to convincing him to come back that he felt ashamed of it.
“Work’s not the same without you,” Renee went on.
“The truth is, all of life is hell, okay? All of it is torture. I mean, what else is there, really?” It may have seemed a harsh thing to say, but the starfish’s voice soon softened. “It’s not about trying to find a place where there’s no suffering, because there’s no such thing. It’s about facing that suffering together, with the people you care about... That’s all we really have at the end of the day, in this world, Levi.” The squid looked at her, struck by what she’d just said.
“Will you...” The whale gulped, looking down, holding a bar, struggling to keep going. “Will you come visit me again...?”
“Of course we will, buddy,” Renee mock-punched his shoulder through the bars. “Count on it.” Somehow the single tear that she wiped off her cheek was more painful for Levi to see than any of the horrifying baby screeching that was coming from the walls had been for him to hear.
***
Every time he had to bite the bullet and go see Ezra, he still couldn’t believe just how ridiculously unpleasant the cold was. The monkey grumbled to himself as the snowstorm that raged everywhere around him made it nearly impossible for him to see where he was even going. No matter how much he strove to wrap himself in warm layers to protect himself against the merciless cold, it was never enough. It always found a way to sneak it way in, to pierce its way through Rafe’s fur, into his flesh, and to chill him to the bone. It felt as though the cold were taking a bite right out of him, licking its chops with sadistic relish, cackling to itself in its satisfaction at devouring however little warmth remained in him like a midnight snack.
Monkeys were made for warmer climates.
Finally, he saw, he reached the long, wavy, icy stairway that led up to the Ice Box, crystalline spires protruding from the pit on each side of it meant to add to its majesty as visitors climbed their way up it. Some stairway to heaven, Rafe thought to himself cynically on his strenuous way up it, making sure not to slip and fall to his death as he gingerly placed foot after foot on step after slippery step, one after the other, until he had finally reached the giant ice palace where his celestial rival had elected to reside. Ezra didn’t like to be bothered for insignificant reasons, and his location served as a deterrent to those who would have bothered him for too little for his taste. It usually filtered out the riff-raff pretty well.
Not this time, though, the monkey thought, rapping the ice knocker on the ice door.
“Is the master expecting you?” Rafe held his clothes as close to himself as he could as his teeth clattered on endlessly.
“It’s me, Alfred. Please tell Ezra a High Councilor is here to see him.” The snow owl looked him up and down inquisitively.
“Should I tell him it’s you, sir?” Most of Ezra’s staff had no problem with the monkey as such, but the fact that Ezra didn’t like him was a secret to none of them.
“... Please tell Ezra a High Councilor is here to see him, Alfred.” Alfred chortled.
“Good thinking, sir,” the snow owl nodded sagely.
After a short wait, Alfred finished opening the colossal ice door so that Rafe could come in and turned around to begin leading the monkey’s way through the Ice Box, as he always did. Rafe would always find the ice palace more intimidating than anywhere else in heaven at the very least, maybe even more intimidating than some of the worst places in hell. The snow owl led him between large glass, water-filled cylinders with people floating in them in stasis, and between multiple upright silk cocoons the size of a person. He led the monkey through the bone-chilling ice sculpture room, where a first-time visitor would have assumed that a skilled ice sculptor had carved ice sculptures of Ezra’s enemies, but Rafe knew better than that.
Their models would have been hard to find. The horror on their features was so lifelike...
Finally, Alfred led the monkey through the throne room, on red carpet between two rows of seal guards armed with clubs, Ezra’s own personal retinue of clubbing seals at his beck and call. Ice stalactites hung from the ceiling above them, looking just like the ice stalagmites at the bottom of pits down which Ezra threw his enemies when he found them too ugly to make ice sculptures out of them. With Rudy standing by his side, trusty shovel at the ready, an ice scorpion sat on the ice throne in the back of the ice room. His legs crossed in front of him, his feet rested on the back of an Arctic fox who was down on his hands and knees in front of the throne facing the side of the room like a sentient footrest, emphasizing the Ice King’s dominion.
“I should’ve known it was you. The other three would’ve told me who they were.” Ezra’s tail dangled off the side of his throne menacingly.
“You’d have let the other three in knowing who they were.” Rafe wasn’t in the mood for pleasantries.
“Why does the Monkey King grace us with his presence?” The Arctic fox bent under the scorpion’s feet chuckled at his master’s sarcasm.
“Why did you send him there?” Ezra spread his arms disbelievingly.
“Because he went on strike! What else would you have had us do?” He reached down on the side on his throne to pick up a salt lick to bring to the deer guard’s mouth next to him.
“No, I mean, why did you send Finn to Limbo?” Rudy went to town on the salt lick.
“Not this again,” the scorpion rolled his eyes. “I didn’t sent Finn anywhere. The striker created an unstable situation. We had to do something.” The monkey shook his head.
“We had to do something? You didn’t even call a Council meeting for it,” Rafe pointed out.
“It was an emergency! There was no time,” Ezra shrugged, pulling the salt lick away from Rudy’s mouth to put it back down next to him.
“Come on, I know you don’t like Finn, but the others had a right to know. They listen to you.”
“They didn’t last time,” the scorpion grumbled, remembering the other three softening what Ezra had wanted to happen to Finn 1200 years ago, “and you don’t. I already told you this has nothing to do with me not liking Finn.” The monkey couldn’t help scoffing.
“That’s rich! We both know if it had been anyone else, you wouldn’t have done this. If the strike hadn’t happened, you’d have probably found some other reason to hold him back.” Ezra pointed at him accusingly.
“That is just not true!” Rafe sensed the scorpion was trying to control his frustration and only partially succeeding. The monkey related to this much, at least.
“So if the strike gets resolved, you’ll let him through, is that right?” Maybe it was time to call Ezra’s bluff. At first, Rafe only heard a subtle, low growl in response.
“I will personally go to the gate between heaven and hell and roll out the welcome mat for him myself, Rafe... If the strike gets resolved.” That was going to be interesting to call him on... if it ever came to it.
“The strike is an emergency, Ezra, I’ll grant you this much. What have we done to actually try to put a stop to it so far?”
“We will have to call a Council meeting for that. Our only options so far seem to be, either find a way to force him to go back to work, or find someone else to do it.” The monkey clucked his tongue.
“If we try that but that person refuses, we might end up with a worse problem on our hands.” The scorpion sighed.
“If you have any better ideas, bring them up at the meeting. We’ll all pitch in about them, you’ll see,” he emphasized sardonically. “In the meantime, if you think you can talk him out of his strike yourself, be my guest.” Rafe wrapped his arms around himself, shivering as his teeth clattered on ceaselessly. “Ah, you’re a bit cold, aren’t you?” The monkey looked up at him defiantly. “Look at this place, Rafe,” the scorpion gestured to the ice palace around them. “You may not like the cold but, if this place were warm, it would melt all around us, wouldn’t it?” Rafe nodded, grudgingly granting him the point. “Don’t melt our kingdom to make yourself comfortable, Monkey King...”
It was an effort of will for the monkey to resist writing his name in snow on his way out.
***
“What strikes me the most,” she had started off one day, “when I listen to your stories about heaven and hell and what they’re really like, is how much like us the angels and demons that you describe to me all are. I don’t know, I always imagined them acting more... unearthly than this somehow? Some sort of other way, more alien to mortals than that, if you will. Does this make sense?” He had nodded.
“Very. They work hard to cultivate that impression, I can tell you that. They have a whole department in charge of it. It’s one of the reasons why they don’t like having people like me airing so much of our dirty laundry to someone like you,” he’d smirked.
“You learn something new every day,” she’d smiled back at him.
“My dear, if there’s one thing you learn from spending time with me at all, let it be that, for all pretense to the contrary there may be, angels and demons can be much more like mortals than they may seem.”
***
In the old days, heaven used to send Finn on missions to Earth. The phoenix would be sent down to work undercover among mortals, find a mortal that he could form an emotional connection with, and strive to steer this mortal toward behavior that would be likelier to lead their soul to heaven than to hell. It was a complex infiltration job. It required a complete understanding of and ability to meld into the mortal world, as seamlessly as a chameleon merges with the colors around it. As for a lot of undercover work, one of the challenges for such outreach workers, even and especially the more experienced they became, was to overcome the compulsion to forget who you were, and blend in with the locals for good.
That was what happened to Finn.
The phoenix was dating Hannah and Rafe at the time. When they were in open relationships, it was common for angels who went on missions to develop relationships with mortals on Earth that could last their entire lifetimes. When they’d be done, they’d return to heaven to resume their ongoing relationships. In a thousand-year relationship, fifty years away wasn’t such a long time and, being open, the angels they would leave behind usually didn’t have to be alone while they’d be gone, either. So it was with Finn and the mortal he found. It was when push came to shove, when the phoenix was forced to admit to himself that he had really fallen in love with this mortal, when he put the scorecard aside, that the trouble started.
When Finn’s mortal lover died, he was so heartbroken that he brought them back to life.
***
That time, back then, mortals gathered around them on their own. Those were the days.
Looking up, they could all see the light of the full moon shining down through the branches of the trees in the forest clearing. It was important that they not get caught, hence waiting until nighttime and finding a reclusive spot such as the one they had. Be that as it may, they still had to be able to see what they were doing, on some level. The full moon held a special meaning for the mortals who had joined them that night, like a rallying cry for those who shared what had brought them there. The mortals had all snuck out of their homes late at night after the other mortals who lived with them had gone to bed, hoping that no one would notice that they were gone until they would return after the event would have come to an end.
The mortals entered the clearing slowly with due ceremony, like a procession, each of them having brought a candle from their homes for the occasion. They trembled with apprehension and anticipation alike, fully aware of what the consequences would be if they were found out, yet still willing to risk it all for a once-in-a-lifetime experience that would finally bring a dash of color to their grey little lives. They were ready to become protagonists in the scary stories that they had been told when they had been growing up, to become the people that their elders had warned them about in hushed tones. As they had grown older, it had been the enforced monotony of existence that had become the story that scared them most of all.
Ozzie traced a seal on the ground, Ross set up the candles around it, and the goat lit them. The mortals gave some room to the leopard, waiting in a bestial crouch in front of the seal until Ozzie brought his flute to his mouth, and began to play. Ross started dancing when the music started, slowly at first, until the seal that the goat had traced on the ground caught fire as well. When that happened, the leopard picked up the pace of his dancing as a wicked-looking unicorn appeared in Ozzie’s seal, facing the mortals and the other two demons. Ross’ dancing briefly died down while the unicorn raised both arms palms up on his sides, and the goat threw his flute up in the air, only to have it levitate and continue to play on its own.
At that point, the leopard jumped back into his now frenzied dancing in a hurry, soon joined by all the mortals around them and by Ozzie himself, his hands freed from having to play so that he could join Ross in dance among the other revelers himself. A toothy grin appeared on the unicorn’s face as other, invisible instruments joined in, his mastery over their sound as complete as it had been over the goat’s flute that had gotten him started. They united just as the partiers had, forming a complete melody around it as the mortals surrendered to the sound, their blood pumping in their veins while they gave themselves to the night making them all feel more alive than they’d ever felt in their entire lives.
The moon knew all their secrets, and forgave everything.
The goat was glad that he’d found a way to get in touch with his old friend from hell after all. Having to be on the run hadn’t made it easy, but one look at the expression on the leopard’s face, on the unicorn’s face, on all the mortals’ faces who had joined them that night convinced him it had been all worthwhile. It was as though they had finally found the outlet that they had been looking for all their lives to every repressed desire that their hearts had ever harbored, a way to give life to every feeling and to give shape to every dark imagining that had once laid claim to their restless souls. All the pretense, guilt and strictness from their daily lives fell away, washed clean as they gave free rein to their true, animal hearts in the woods at night.
Soon they gave off so much energy the trees themselves began to dance around them...
***
Hannah’s job had been the same as Finn’s had been a long time ago, long before he’d be locked up for resurrecting a mortal. She would be sent down to Earth to infiltrate mortals, become emotionally close to them, and ‘save’ them to heaven’s cause. Hell sent demons down to Earth to do the exact same thing, it turned out, only they called it ‘corrupting’ mortals. Long after the phoenix’s imprisonment, the sparrow went to Earth on a mission that turned out to be based on a case of mistaken identity. Unbeknownst to heaven, Maude, the ewe who Hannah became involved with, turned out to be a demon, sent down to Earth to corrupt her. But demons couldn’t corrupt angels this way, nor could angels save demons this way either.
When they compared notes it turned out that saving and corrupting were rather similar.
Heaven had not sent the sparrow to Earth to fall in love with some demon girl and hell had not sent the ewe to Earth so that she would waste her charms on some angel bird either. Eventually, their chains yanked them back to their own worlds away from each other. Ezra wanted Hannah sent to Carcer, the other three wanted her to go to Purgatory. It had taken Rafe decades to Twelve Angry Men his way through the other three enough to convince them that, due to the sparrow’s status as a former member of the Low Council, she should be moved from Purgatory to the Gold Cage. With every excess of punishment of the Low Council, the High Council risked invalidating its authority in having selected them, he had argued persuasively.
Maude had not been so lucky. For betraying hell, Thomas had had the ewe put to death.
***
“There’s got to be something we can do to change your mind,” Rafe pleaded with Levi through the bars of Carcer. “Surely regardless of which issue brought you here, there were aspects of your life before that were preferable to this, how could it not be so?” The whale seemed like a reasonable fellow, the monkey told himself. Why would the demon not listen to reason?
“Not preferable enough,” Levi answered.
“What could there possibly have been in what you were being asked to do that could have been any worse than this?” The angel couldn’t even imagine such a thing.
“They asked me to whip someone. Like, not even just once or maybe in a kinky way or something. As torture. As a regular thing.” Rafe should have done a better job of repressing his shudder, it occurred to him. It wasn’t helping his case any.
“And with everything else you’ve already seen and done, that was the final deal-breaker?” The whale rolled his eyes.
“I know, it’s the stupidest thing, isn’t it? Don’t think I haven’t thought about that too.” The demon seemed to be listening – there had to be a way to get through to him, the monkey thought.
“Surely you realize you can’t be the first demon to have wanted things to be different. If it could work, don’t you think another demon would’ve already done it by now?”
“I guess so.” He seemed unconvinced.
“How long have you been working with Cara and Renee, Levi?” He looked up, briefly trying to count on his fingers before eventually giving up.
“For most of my life, sir,” Levi replied.
“Call me Rafe.” The whale’s eyes widened.
“If you say so, sir... Rafe, I mean.” He was a bit flustered.
“Do you get along well with Cara and Renee? Be honest.” The demon stopped, and thought about it.
“To be honest...” Levi felt strangely guilty for confessing to it. “... Yes. I... like them, on some level. Being away from them is... weird.” The angel raised an eyebrow at him quizzically.
“Then why not just go back to work with them?” The whale shook his head.
“I can’t,” the demon could only shrug helplessly in response.
“Do you believe that your co-workers, you were just telling me you liked them just a moment ago remember, are bad people, Levi?” It didn’t come across like an accusation. Rafe was talking to him in a softer tone than Levi had ever heard from an angel talking to him.
“No. Yes. No. I don’t know. That’s not the point, not really.”
“It wouldn’t make you a bad person to do it either, you know,” the monkey tried to reassure him. “It’s not the kind of thing you should feel guilty about.” The whale looked him straight in the eye.
“Well, the best way for me not to have to feel guilty about it is still not to do it, isn’t it?” The angel sighed.
“What you have to realize is that, by avoiding doing harm to just one person in a one-on-one setting, you’re actually doing harm to you, to me, to the other High and Low Councilors... You’re doing harm to Cara and Renee. I’m sure they miss you, just as you miss them. You’re doing harm to a very old demon who suffered very dearly for helping others, if you care. What do you think that you’re accomplishing? Do you think that the system is being improved by what you’re doing? This harm is a loss, and there’s no gain to balance it out. The mortal you refuse to whip won’t be spared anyway. If you won’t do it yourself, someone else will.”
“If heaven could find a replacement for me so easily,” the demon retorted, “a High Councilor wouldn’t be down here taking time off from his busy schedule to come badger a puny underling such as myself to drop my pesky little strike and go back to work now, would he... Rafe?”
***
She had gasped as she had turned around to see him coming into the clearing behind her.
“How did you find me...?” At first, she had mistaken him for another mortal, just as she was, yet looking at him, looking at the way that he was looking at what she had been doing, she somehow got the impression that he was really something... more than that. Something immortal, maybe, if it was lucky and played its cards just right long enough. “You’re...” She had been overcome with emotion. All her life, in her heart of hearts, she had hoped that demons were for real, but another sad, fearful part of her dismissed this hope as mere wishful thinking. To have been actually standing in the presence of such a creature proved an even more electrifying experience than she had ever dared to hope. “You’re him, aren’t you?”
She had gestured at the seal that she had traced and lit candles around on the ground in front of her.
His heart skipped a beat – was she an agent of heaven? Would she betray his secret, if she knew what it was? All he had to go on was that she had wanted to see him, desperately enough to put herself at risk that someone might walk in on her and burn her as a witch, as mortals were wont to do. What manner of demon should have wasted such a display of devotion to the dark forces of chaos by not making the most of it when he had the chance?
“Yes... Yes, I am.” She had looked from him to the seal a few times, seeming to be processing something.
“Yet you didn’t come here because I summoned you, did you?” She had known enough to be able to tell.
“No,” he had shaken his head.
“Did I not trace the seal well enough?” she had asked him.
“No,” he had reassured her, “you traced it perfectly, in fact.” It had been fine work, and a lesser-known seal, at that. He had been duly impressed.
“Did you sense I was here somehow, because I was doing this? Is that why you came here?” She had so many questions for him.
“No,” he had admitted to her, “I just happened to walk in here at this exact moment, if you can believe that.” She had laughed, an enchanting laugh, it turned out.
“I like that. That’s funny,” she had said.
***
“I don’t think I ever had an angel come into my office before,” she looked him up and down gingerly as she spoke. “What does an angel want with the likes of me, I wonder?” Shaw’s finger hovered over her security alarm, ready to call the others to assist her at a second’s notice, if the angel tried anything funny.
“They say you... find things for people, is that right?” The stork nodded.
“That’s right. But what does an angel need hell’s lost and found for? I mean, no offense, but doesn’t heaven give you guys pretty much anything you want?” He chuckled.
“I guess demons would think that, wouldn’t you...” He shook his head.
“Not true?” She tilted her head.
“Most of the time, it’s true,” he admitted, “but sometimes, sometimes even an angel wants something that heaven can’t provide him with.”
“And so,” Shaw gestured with an apparent calmness that belied her underlying alertness, “you turn to the likes of us, for what only we can do for you.” Should she have been milking this for all it was worth, as a genuine power advantage over the angel, she asked herself? Or did it only seem that way, meaning that the stork should have been on her guard about acting as though that were the case, only to be led astray by that belief? At the time, there was no way to be sure.
“Demons can be... uniquely suited for certain things, in spite of everything.” Experience had definitely taught him as much.
“Yes,” she said in a bit of a world-weary tone, “for certain things.” Shaw hoped that he wasn’t coming on to her. He wasn’t her type. “So what is it that this humble demon can be so uniquely suited for that you need from her now, would be my next question to you, sire?” The angel cleared his throat, partly averting his gaze since he seemed to have been having a hard time sustaining her own.
“I’m looking for an artifact called Zepar’s Extractor.” The stork’s eyes widened.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said, hoping she sounded convincing.
“Oh please,” he said, rolling his eyes. “If I wanted to take you in for knowing where it is, I’d have brought at least one other angel with me.” That may have been true... Unless he thought he was powerful enough to take them all down on his own, Shaw reminded herself.
“I don’t know that,” she responded. “The Thieving Magpie is a lost and found. I’m not running a pawn shop.” It was totally a pawn shop. “It wouldn’t be the first time heaven did a raid on an honest business.” The stork wasn’t lying about that.
“What makes you think this is a sting? I don’t scry any drones around, do you?” She grunted thoughtfully.
“Zepar’s Extractor is illegal,” Shaw reminded him dutifully.
“I know that,” the angel acknowledged exasperatedly, “that’s why I came here on my own. I don’t need any of the other angels finding out about this, you understand?” She smirked.
“You angels are such a shady lot, I swear I wouldn’t trust any of you as far as I could throw you,” the stork chuckled, amused by how alike they could be at times.
“So you won’t do it?” His countenance darkened noticeably. If he was powerful enough to pose a threat on his own, should she have been worried about his reaction if she said no? But if he wasn’t, what could he really do to Shaw on his own even if he was a plant, anyway? The angel was deep in demon territory, so she had putative reinforcements nearby, whereas he did not. Of course, it also meant he could have picked on other targets around them, some of who were nowhere nearly as good at defending themselves as the stork was, which she had to take into account as well. Protecting the townsfolk always had to remain their first priority, overriding all others, after all. Perhaps ultimately, helping this fellow would serve that?
“I didn’t say that, but... It is an exceptionally rare item. It’s not easy to get, in fact I’d be taking a considerable risk bringing it to you, wouldn’t I? Now, add that to the fact that you’re asking me to keep my mouth shut about the whole thing, which is already a bit extra under the best circumstances as it is...” She looked at him expectantly.
“I’ll make it worth your while,” he assured her, handing a considerable sum over to her as he did. “Having an angel on your side will be an asset that you won’t regret investing in, I can guarantee you that.”
“Good.” Shaw pocketed what the angel had handed over. “Pleasure doing business with you.”
***
“Run for your lives!”
Panic cut a swath through the revelers like a storm as they loudly dispersed, abandoning stealth for which the time was past for the element of speed in the hope that, if they separated widely enough and ran fast enough in zig zagging patterns, they may not all be caught. Nets rained from above in mostly vain attempts to catch them before the angels themselves barged in on the scene, eliciting gasps of surprised terror from mortals who had just danced with demons a moment before without skipping a beat. As a deer angel locked horns with their demonic unicorn DJ, a fish angel dressed like a pirate with a cutlass and rope-hook and a crab angel dressed like a knight with a sword and shield made their way to Ozzie and Ross.
“Fuck off, Gil,” the leopard spat at the fish pirate. Gil swung his rope-hook at Ross’ legs but the leopard leapt into a butterfly twist over it. The fish blocked his first leaping claw on its way down but the follow-up one knocked his cutlass out of his hand. Ross swept Gil’s legs out from under him but the fish rolled back just as the leopard brought a claw down where he was. The goat blocked the crab’s sword with one of his horns, bringing his fist down on Kay’s elbow. Stopping a shield swipe with both arms, Ozzie slammed his elbow back into the crab knight’s chest. Grabbing Kay’s head, the goat brought the crab’s face down on his knee before bringing up his other leg into a jump kick, knocking Kay back before Ozzie and Ross made their escape.
“Did Doozy make it?” They were running out of breath but it was an important question.
“I think he did, but I’m not sure. I couldn’t get a clear shot,” the leopard shook his head. “I hope so.”
“What about the mortals?” Ross gulped.
“Most of them did,” the leopard winced. “I don’t like this any more than you do, Ozzie... I don’t know. I just don’t know. Maybe we... Maybe we can’t do this anymore, Ozzie...”
***
“Do you remember those movies we used to watch together sometimes when we lived on Earth?” Hannah was lying face down on the ground with her arms under her face, lost in the fractal splashes of the rainbow fountain. Allie was lying face up next to her, holding a book up over her head to read it by her side.
“What’s got them on your mind, Allie?” The sparrow moved her feet behind her, idly bending and unbending her knees as she spoke.
“Do you remember what we used to say when we’d see damsels in distress in those movies, Hannah?” Hannah’s countenance darkened.
“We used to say they should rescue themselves. Are you... Are you saying we should try to break out of here ourselves, Allie?” The dove paused, thought about it, and nodded her head yes.
“With the way things have been going, I’ve been liking our chances here less and less, for one thing,” Allie started.
“And you don’t like the thought of sitting on our hands while the world goes to hell any more than I do, do you?” the sparrow tilted her head.
“I do not,” the dove shook her head.
“Rafe made me promise to wait until he’d gotten a chance to talk to everyone and see what happens first,” Hannah said, almost embarrassed. “I wouldn’t want to screw up his plans by escaping before he gets a chance to get things resolved without us getting him in trouble for it, you know?” Allie looked down, cooing in thought as she processed Hannah’s concerns.
“I understand. If he can get Finn out of there more diplomatically than that, so much the better for everyone involved. We can still wait and see what happens for now if you want. If we do wait and it still doesn’t work, though, will you consider my plan then?” the dove asked her.
“Has it ever been done? Has anyone ever escaped from the Gold Cage, and lived?” It seemed like a relevant question to the sparrow.
“There is always a first time,” Allie answered unswervingly.
“But where would we go? What would we do? Wouldn’t they catch us eventually, no matter what?” The dove gave her a conspiring look.
“That’s where this book I’ve been reading comes into play, Hannah...”
***
Gabe was leading Rudy on a mission on Earth when heaven called his police walkie-talkie. The two angels were on an investigative mission to track down an evildoer of some sort in a waterpark. The seagull and the deer didn’t go on the kinds of missions that Finn and Hannah did. To them, the carrot would always be weaker than the stick – especially the nightstick.
“Roger, this is Gabe, what’s up, boss?” Gabe looked back at Rudy buying a salt lick at a stand behind him as the seagull talked to their boss on his walkie-talkie with his beak full of French fries. “Stop it, Rudy!” he turned around briefly to shout at the deer behind him, wiping his beak on his sleeve as he did. “No, I mean yes, boss, I’m paying attention, of course,” the seagull was flustered. “Uh-huh,” he nodded, the midday sun reflecting on his sunglasses in a way he hoped looked badass as he threw his container of French fries on the ground behind him. “Of course, yes, sir,” Gabe said obsequiously, sipping his cola. “We’ll get right on it, sir.” His call over, the seagull turned his attention back to Rudy. “Those are terrible for you, you pig!”
Gabe shook his head exasperatedly, dropping his empty cola glass on the ground behind them as they took to the skies.
***
Rafe shook his head to himself as he walked through the Bayou.
It is not that his body was not made for this heat or wetness, he told himself even as he wiped sweat off his brow. He may have been an angel, but he was also still a monkey, after all. Monkeys were made to live in the jungle, and the jungle was nothing if not hot and wet itself. His journey across the boardwalk, which had started under a clear sunny blue sky over a gently rippling lake, had now taken him into dark, dense vegetation, the sun barely reaching the wooden boards under him through the thick canopy of the foliage overhead. The mosquitos that buzzed over the stagnant swamp waters that bubbled under him made Rafe uneasy, but he knew that he could not squash them, that he had to allow them to extract his blood from him.
He knew that this was her toll from him for seeing her, for him to pay her in blood for it.
“Well, well...” she started as she saw the monkey’s telltale silhouette appear in the frame of the door to her cabin on stilts. “Look what the cat dragged in.”
“I need to talk to you about something.” Maybe if he didn’t start out on the wrong foot this time, he would have better luck?
“Is this about Yuri?” She tilted her head as she leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms while putting her feet on her desk.
“It is about Yuri, but it’s also about Finn and about a lot more than that, Cassie. Will you hear me out?” She brought a cigar to her mouth as the bubbling coming from the flasks in the room, mirroring the bubbling of the swamp outside, sent a shiver down Rafe’s spine – he knew what some of those were for. Various charms hung from the ceiling here and there, some of them clearly made from demon bones.
“Sure,” Cassie said offhandedly as she blew a cloud of cigar smoke out. “Why not.”
“First of all, Ezra’s making a mistake by putting Yuri away for refusing to replace Levi.” She raised an eyebrow at him.
“You on a first name basis with this demon, Rafe?” The monkey sighed.
“Yuri’s an angel, like you and me. Yuri’s inventions have always been useful for heaven’s purposes from day one. Putting him away isn’t just a personal loss. It’s a strategic loss, and a waste of heaven’s resources.” Cawing birds and croaking frogs outside her cabin almost seemed to welcome his statement with collective derision.
“Yuri got sloppy,” she reminded Rafe. “He should never have questioned heaven’s use of torture in hell in the first place. What exactly did he think he was doing, can you tell me that?” The smell in the cabin wasn’t for the faint of heart, he couldn’t help noticing.
“Yuri’s on the Low Council, Cassie! It’s his job to make suggestions to the High Council. They’re not all going to be the best. If they were, he’d be on the High Council. They’re going to make mistakes. That’s why they need us there to steer them right in the first place.” Something roared outside the cabin, something that sounded like it came from under the water. Something huge, the monkey shuddered.
“That’s not the point. That peacock’s pride has always been his downfall. When he said that, he sowed a doubt about his loyalty to heaven that’s been hanging over him ever since. It was a generous opportunity that was presented to him to prove his loyalty by replacing the demon until the strike will be over. He should’ve taken it when he still could.” His jaw dropped.
“An opportunity! Yuri’s a gentle soul who’s never hurt a fly. No one could have expected him to agree to that. Ezra set him up.” She emitted a low growl.
“Forgive me for pointing this out, Rafe, but you speak as if this strike was going to go on forever. We can’t let that happen regardless of anything, surely you didn’t forget.” Rafe nodded.
“Of course I remember.” He repressed a twitch when he saw a worm crawling down Cassie’s arm. It would’ve been rude to make a face.
“So this would only have been temporary! That seemed reasonable enough. We lead by example. Did you try to talk to the demon?” The monkey looked nonplussed.
“I did. It was Ezra’s idea. Turns out it just convinced him his strike must be working.” She brought her palm to her forehead.
“Fuck this cunt,” she shook her head dejectedly. “Do you think you can talk Yuri into replacing him until we have things under control, then?” He clucked his tongue.
“I actually have something more serious to talk to you about personally, if you can believe that...” She raised an eyebrow at Rafe.
“What could possibly be more serious than that?” It did beg the question.
“Did you notice a pattern with what’s been happening with the Low Council, Cassie?” Cassie tilted her head at him.
“What do you mean?” The monkey gestured to emphasize his point as he went on.
“Over the past 1200 years, Allie, Dawn, Finn, Hannah and now Yuri have all been replaced by Gabe, Rob, Rudy, Sam and... Who is Ezra thinking of replacing Yuri with, anyway?”
“Arnie, I think,” she shrugged.
“You can’t be serious! Arnie couldn’t find his way out of a paper bag with both hands and a map. His only qualification is that he’s one of Ezra’s cronies.” She uncrossed her legs to lean forward toward him, bringing her hands under her face as she did.
“What are you getting at, Rafe?”
“Ezra has been systematically replacing the Low Council with his people the whole time.” She chortled.
“That’s funny. He said the same thing about you.” Rafe scoffed.
“Of course he would!” He rolled his eyes.
“He said you’d started out by stacking the deck against him, and that he’s the one who’s been correcting that imbalance the whole time.” The monkey sighed.
“This is typical of him, don’t you see? It fits into his pattern.” Cassie seemed unconvinced.
“Even if you’re right... How does that affect me? Why should I care?” He looked at her darkly.
“How long do you think it’ll take until he starts coming after members of the High Council...?”
***
“I hope you’re here for an important reason.” Sarah emitted a low growl. “Almost got caught last time, you know.” Belle’s form seemed to materialize behind her.
“That was a bit of a close call,” the toad admitted. “Trust me, I wouldn’t have come if it wasn’t important,” she said understatedly.
“You don’t seem your usual playful self,” the dragon observed, shielding her face from the blinding glint of heavenly treasure everywhere around them as she turned around to face her hellish guest.
“It’s a serious situation.” The demon’s slit eyes seemed to look into her soul. “You’ll definitely want to be awake for this one,” she raised a suction-cup finger for emphasis.
“I’m all ears,” the angel assured her.
“I need you to talk to Annie about something,” Belle leaned over secretively. Sarah clucked her tongue.
“You know I don’t like to involve her in trouble,” the dragon reminded her.
“This isn’t just some trouble, Sarah,” the toad shook her head. “If you knew what it was about...”
“What do you need me to talk to her about?” Perhaps it would make a difference, depending on what it was?
“Thanks to my... informants...” The demon’s flies buzzed as they flew in and out of holes all over her body to punctuate her words. “... I learned recently that there’s a secret hidden in a decoy book in heaven’s library, a secret so big that some of the higher-ups in heaven would kill or die for it. They seem to believe that, if this secret got out, it could compromise the entire authority of heaven itself.” The angel’s pulse quickened.
“And you want me to help you find out what that is?” Belle extended her tongue to swallow another one of her flies.
“This isn’t just about me, surely you can see that.” She belched. “If there’s something that they don’t want angels to know about, that they think is bad enough for angels that angels wouldn’t stand for it if they knew about it, as an angel who cares about other angels, wouldn’t that be something you’d want to know?” Sarah’s heart was racing outright by this point.
“Even if I believe you, and that’s a big if...” she started gingerly, “... where would she find this secret you speak of, for one thing?” Was the dragon actually considering this? Had her transmutation fantasies turned her all the way into a full-fledged deviant, as she feared they would? There were those who warned others that demons deceived angels with such tricks...
“It’s hidden in a book called How to Actually Be Nice to People,” the toad revealed. “Have you ever checked it out, in all this time?” she tilted her head.
“Are you implying I’m not actually nice to people?” the angel asked her tersely.
“Forget I asked,” the demon waved off.
“Forgive me for asking, but... Why couldn’t you ask Annie directly? Why did you have to come to me, to ask me to tell her for you?” Sarah inquired.
“It would have put her at risk if I’d talked to her,” Belle explained.
“Isn’t it putting me at risk that you’d be talking to me right now?” the dragon pointed out.
“Well, you can’t have everything,” the toad shrugged. “Besides, you’re a scrappy one,” she mock-punched the angel, “you could fend for yourself, if you had to.” A chill went down Sarah’s spine.
“I’d rather not. You’re scaring me, Belle,” the dragon admitted.
“Good.” The demon croaked ominously. “You should be.”
***
So very early on – on some of the earliest days of all – heaven had ordered the angels to vow that they would always serve mortals. And Ozzie had refused. First of all, he had said, mortals were in no way superior to angels. As far as the goat was concerned, if anything, angels should have vowed to work side by side with mortals, or at least not to make mortals’ lives worse. For another thing, he didn’t believe for a second that this was really what heaven had in mind for angels to do. Ozzie believed that heaven had no intention of having angels truly serve mortals, even if that had been a good thing in the first place. He believed that heaven wanted angels to vow this to mortals to distract mortals from how heaven planned to exploit them.
For this, heaven had made the goat into a demon, and had exiled him to Earth.
The angels had not believed for a second that he had been preoccupied with equality between demons and mortals. As far as they were concerned, they had said to him, Ozzie had been the one who had refused to serve mortals because he had believed that angels and demons were inherently superior to mortals. They had accused him of having wanted mortals to serve him. The goat may not have been able to go home again, but if anything, he had been determined to prove them wrong. Separated from Ross for what he had feared would be an eternity, he had taken a mortal woman as a lover. Ozzie had resolved to teach her the secrets of magic, which she had always wanted to learn, so that she could teach them to everyone else.
He would put the power of angels in the hands of mortals if it was the last thing he did.
***
“And then there were none,” Hannah sighed as they sat next to each other hunched over with their arms on their bent knees.
“Now Rafe’s talked to three of the others, and Yuri’s gone.” Allie was still reeling from it.
“I should’ve known better than to wait so long,” the sparrow shook her head.
“They haven’t killed him yet,” the dove reminded her. “We can still get him out, I’m sure of it.” Hannah looked at her quizzically.
“Does this have to do with this plan of yours that you were talking about the other time?” The sparrow tilted her head.
“Exactly,” Allie pointed out. “It’s all in this book.” She showed Hannah a book called Reconciliation Magick. “According to this, there are three demons who have the supernatural ability to literally force people who don’t get along to get along, even if they really don’t want to...” The sparrow raised an eyebrow at her.
“Just how powerful is this ability? What limits does it have?” The dove stared into her soul.
“If what’s in this book is true, with the help of just one of those three demons, we could put an end to the feud between Ezra and Rafe. Maybe even between heaven and hell itself.” Hannah’s jaw dropped.
“So that’s what you think we should do?” It seemed like such a crazy plan. The sparrow couldn’t believe that she was actually considering it, yet evidently, part of her was.
“We’ll disable the guard and sneak out at our next feeding time. Then we’ll fly to hell, and try to find one of those three demons that the book talks about. Unless... you have a better idea...?” Hannah stopped, and thought about it.
“I really don’t.” Allie’s smile was almost chilling.
“Very well, then. I think it’s time...” When someone found the birdcage-chested headless guard who usually brought them birdseed, he was lying on his back on the ground of the Gold Cage with his limbs flailing around. The door to his birdcage-chest was wide open and the canary that used to live perched inside him was flying repeatedly into a paper lantern that hung from the ceiling like a moth flying at a lightbulb. “... to give peace a chance.”
***
With Yuri gone, Arnie volunteered to replace Levi in Cara and Renee’s torture chamber. It was this show of loyalty in such a time of crisis that convinced Cassie, Mike and Sasha to consider Ezra’s recommendation of readmitting the goose from his demon status to his lost angel status and to promote Arnie to replace the peacock, whose loyalty was now in question, at the Low Council.
“All right, you two,” the goose had addressed the squid and starfish as he’d started working on the holdover sinner that the whale had refused to take on, “I’m not gonna be here for much longer, so do you know what that’s gonna mean for you two in the meantime, ya grunts?” Renee shook her head.
“No, sir.” Arnie flashed them a cruel smirk.
“It means I’m gonna have to do everything I can to make the most of the time I have left working with you two chumps. I’m still your supervisor but now, I’m gonna be here all the time. I can actually show you how it’s done for once. Now, you’re never gonna see torture work this good ever again, so you better be gonna pay attention, got that, fuckface?”
“Yes, sir,” Cara said.
“You’re about to see what it looks like when it’s done by someone who likes what he’s doing. You gotta enjoy the process, right?” The squid nodded dutifully.
“Absolutely, sir.” As if they hadn’t already been going to miss Levi as all get out...
***
“You’re being a fool!” They heard screaming coming from another cell. Visits to Carcer were never a pleasant experience. They were just still a lot better than having to live there.
“You don’t mean that,” the peacock quietly replied from his cell.
“With all the chaos that this blasted chain reaction has made heaven descend into recently? I damn well do mean that, Yuri! You’d mean it if you were in my shoes, talking to me.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way, Rafe.” They were already on a first name basis. They had been for a long time. It didn’t make the conversation any easier somehow.
“That’s all you have to say to me?” The monkey looked at him disbelievingly. “That you’re sorry? How could you possibly go and do something you knew would get you into so much trouble? Do you have any idea how hard I’ve been working trying to get this under control?”
“If Ezra wants this guy tortured so bad, he can do it himself,” Yuri said coldly.
“Ezra’s not gonna do that!” The peacock tilted his head.
“And why not?” Rafe spread out his arms for emphasis.
“He’s part of the High Council!” Yuri crossed his arms.
“There shouldn’t even be a High Council and a Low Council, if you ask me,” the peacock said. “There should just be a Council.”
“But we’re not asking you, Yuri,” the monkey told him. “You’re on the Low Council.”
“If an angel can be expected to act as cruelly as a demon, Rafe, nothing heaven’s been telling us makes any sense in the first place.” Rafe rolled his eyes.
“That’s what this is about? You being too good to do an honest demon’s work? There’s no shame in that. They’re not that different from us, you know!” The peacock narrowed his eyes.
“If they’re not that different from us, what makes it okay for us to make them do any of this in the first place?” The monkey shrugged.
“They like it. It’s in their nature.” Yuri didn’t seem entirely convinced.
“You don’t spend much time down here actually listening to these people, do you...?”
***
“Did you ever tell anyone else about Belle?” It had taken Annie quite a bit of time to work up the nerve to ask. They had always told each other everything. They had become extremely comfortable around each other. In a context like this, their discomfort about recent events in their lives stood out like a sore thumb. If they had been more nervous around each other in general, perhaps their reactions to these events would have been easier for each other to ignore but, as it was, they had no such luck.
“Are you still worried about Rafe’s visit?” Sarah asked her.
“I never said I was worried about it, did I sound worried?” Annie was a bit more nervous than Sarah in general – perhaps she could get away with blaming that this time, she hoped?
“I never told anyone else, no,” the dragon shook her head.
“It’s totally your call if you want to, of course!” Annie hastened to add. “If you trust someone, I trust them too. I was just curious.”
“She came to see me again the other day,” it occurred to Sarah.
“She did?” The dragon nodded.
“She wanted me to talk to you about something, actually.” Annie’s heart would have started beating faster, if she’d had one.
“What did she want you to talk to me about?” She did not like some of the possibilities that came to mind.
“She said there’s a secret hidden in a fake book in heaven’s library that could completely change how angels look at heaven forever,” Sarah admitted to her. “She sounded serious.”
“Do you believe her?” She looked at the dragon with all her eyes quizzically.
“I don’t know. I mean, I trust her about some things, you know? Like, I know she’d never sell me out to heaven for talking to her or anything like that. It’s just not part of her personality,” Sarah explained.
“I sense a ‘but’ coming,” Annie called.
“I just mean I still don’t know for sure that, if it was to her advantage, she wouldn’t lie to me about something like this,” the dragon sighed. “I mean, she’s never lied to me before, that I know of, but... If I assume she didn’t and I’m wrong, that’s a big risk to take, you know?” Annie agreed.
“Where did she tell you this fake book was hidden?” she inquired.
“In a book called How to Actually Be Nice to People. Have you ever picked it up at any point by any chance, in all this time?” Sarah wondered.
“Are you implying I’m not actually nice to people?” Annie asked tersely.
“I think I’m starting to understand why no one ever checked out this book,” the dragon muttered to herself matter-of-factly.
***
Heaven had not liked Ozzie’s plan at all.
It had been one thing for heaven to ask angels to claim that they were going to serve mortals. In truth, of course, the goat had been right. While many lower-level angels meant well in earnest, for most of the higher-ups, the de facto superiority of angels over mortals had been incredibly important for them to maintain. Heaven had no intention of letting Ozzie share their secrets with them so freely. They had become so accustomed to their privilege over mortals that, by this point, the idea of equality with them felt like oppression. To be shown up in such a way by a demon, one who they had seen fit to exile at that, was seen by heaven as the goat having added insult to injury, and heaven tolerated neither insult nor injury to itself very well.
So the angels had tracked down Ozzie’s mortal lover, and they had killed her.
The goat had been heartbroken. He had renounced his plan to help mortals for good on the spot, having internalized from what had happened to her that no good deed would ever go unpunished. Since exile had not been enough to get Ozzie under control, he was put on trial by heaven to decide whether he should be imprisoned and tortured for all eternity or simply killed. While he was locked up awaiting his verdict the very next morning, Ross had used his invisibility powers to sneak into Carcer and to free the goat from his cell before heaven could enact their verdict on him. They had escaped together to Earth like two partners in crime on the run from the law, determined to get the best revenge by living well that they could find for themselves.
Ozzie tried to think of things to do that would’ve made her say ‘I like that. That’s funny.’
***
They’d been flying over hell for a couple of hours when they first spotted it below them.
“Look down hon, there it is,” Allie pointed down at it from above as they got near to it.
“Somehow I imagined it’d be bigger,” Hannah admitted.
“Well, it’s no Emerald City,” the dove shrugged, “but you won’t find a more welcoming place in hell for us right now, I can tell you that, Thelma,” she added tongue-in-cheek while the two angels started descending in ever-narrowing concentric circles before touching down in front of the town’s entrance.
“Who goes there?” Maura didn’t unsheathe her sword when she saw the two of them land, but her hand rested on her sword’s handle comfortably, almost casually. She wasn’t gripping it as such, not as though she were desperate for an excuse to pull it out, in fact she was barely even touching it, but you could tell that she would have been able to unsheathe it to defend herself from intruders at a moment’s notice, if the situation had suddenly called for it. It wouldn’t have been the first time.
“She’s Allie. I’m Hannah, sir. Ma’am. Sir.” The crow narrowed her eyes at them.
“What brings you to Birdhaven, Allie?” Maura liked to shift the conversation to whoever hadn’t started talking on their own. It tended to be easier to trip people up if their stories didn’t match when they were unprepared. Allie briefly turned her head to the sparrow, almost as if she wished that she could have asked Hannah what they should say in response then and there, but realizing that she could not do it because it would have appeared too suspicious for her to ask.
“We’re looking for someone, as a matter of fact,” the dove answered gingerly.
“And who might that be?” the crow asked them in an offhand, conversational tone. She had a very different attitude from that of angel guards in heaven, they couldn’t help noticing – but she was paying very close attention.
“We’re looking for a demon named Maura,” the sparrow replied.
“... or Sandra,” Allie completed nervously.
“Never heard of them,” Maura looked up with her finger on her chin as though she were trying to remember something. “Are you sure they’re supposed to live here?” For a moment, Hannah wondered whether the dove’s book had in fact led them astray.
“Well, we –”
“Yes, we’re sure,” Allie accidentally interrupted her. The sparrow gave her a brief look before returning her eyes to the crow.
“Well, I’ll be,” Maura said incredulously. “What do you two want with them, anyway?” The crow tilted her head.
“Well, we...” Hannah briefly stopped talking and looked at the dove to make sure they weren’t about to start talking at the same time again. Allie gave her the go-ahead. “We’re looking for them because we have an important conflict to resolve.” Maura raised an eyebrow at her.
“What do they have to do with that? Are they involved in it, by any chance?” The crow didn’t like the thought of being involved in conflicts that she didn’t even know about. It seemed unsporting.
“No, no!” the dove waved off reassuringly.
“We heard that they’re very experienced mediators, that’s all,” the sparrow euphemized.
“Did you now?” Maura asked dubiously.
“We hoped we could convince them to lend us their conflict resolution skills,” Allie added.
“So you’re having a conflict with someone, aren’t you?” The crow eyed a hidden alarm system near her that she could use to signal the others if she needed to, inconspicuously.
“No, not us,” Hannah clarified, “well, it’s not a conflict between us and someone else we need help resolving, it’s another one, between two other people.” Maura ran her tongue across the inside of her beak.
“We don’t like conflict much here in Birdhaven.” The crow spat on the ground, punctuating her statement.
“Neither do we,” the dove assured her. “That’s why we’re looking for a harmonious resolution to this one to begin with, you know?” Allie scratched the back of her head. Maura wondered if it could have been a ‘tell’ but she couldn’t be sure.
“If it ain’t your conflict, how’d you two even get involved in wanting to stop it in the first place?” The crow tapped the handle of her sword pensively.
“That’s a fair question,” the sparrow granted.
“We’re trying to help a demon named Finn.” Maura’s eyes widened.
“You two know Finn?” They nodded.
“We do,” the dove confirmed. “Well, she knows him better than I do, but yeah.” She indicated Hannah. “In short, yeah.” The sparrow waved nervously in acknowledgment.
“I heard he got locked up.” The crow furrowed her brow.
“He did,” Hannah explained, “but he was supposed to get out, and they sent him back.”
“Aw, that’s too bad,” Maura clucked her tongue. “He always did trust angels too much for his own good, the poor soul,” she lamented.
“How do you know Finn?” Allie couldn’t stop herself from asking.
“I think a better question would be,” the crow corrected her gently, “how do you know Finn, honey?” She gave the dove an understated look.
“Finn and I used to date,” Hannah answered bluntly.
“No shit? I remember hearing he started dating some angel dame after he...” Maura flinched. She moved so fast that they didn’t even see her draw her sword. It was just drawn.
“E... Easy there,” Allie chuckled nervously.
“You two are angels.” The crow would have said that through gritted teeth, if birds had teeth.
“We never said we weren’t angels, ma’am,” the sparrow reminded her.
“I reckon that’s true,” Maura conceded, “but we don’t trust angels much here in Birdhaven, you feel me?” The dove nodded.
“We do.” The crow tilted her head.
“Is that right?” Maura didn’t seem in much of a hurry to re-sheathe that sword of hers quite yet.
“That’s right,” Hannah nodded. “You’ve had some negative experiences with angels, haven’t you?” The crow emitted a low growl.
“Let’s just say last time we trusted angels around here didn’t go so good. Now, it’s only a fool what don’t learn from experience, ain’t that right, birds?” ‘Don’t make any sudden movements,’ the sparrow reminded herself, struggling to slow her racing heart back down to a more manageable rate.
“That makes sense,” Allie admitted.
“We were told a lot of bad things about demons by other angels before we escaped from heaven too,” Hannah related. This time, Maura did lower her sword, if only infinitesimally.
“You escaped from heaven? I thought you two were sent here by heaven?” The crow’s curiosity about these two was starting to get the better of her.
“No, ma’am,” the dove cleared up.
“We want the demons’ reconciliation magic to help us force heaven to let Finn back in.” Ultimately, they might be better served by coming clean outright, the sparrow had decided.
“You two would escape from a place like heaven to help a demon like that?” They nodded. “Then again, can’t blame you, can I... That Finn was something, all right,” Maura reminisced.
“You knew Finn before he went to Carcer?” Allie asked her.
“I knew Finn before he was an angel,” the crow replied, “back when he was a good old-fashioned demon rough and tumble just like the rest of us, no offense to you personally.”
“None taken.” Hannah wasn’t especially proud of being an angel anyway, truth be told.
“I tried to talk him out of becoming an angel, if you must know... He made a good demon, he did. It was a shame to see him go, but you couldn’t talk that fool out of anything – what am I saying, you dated him, you’d know,” Maura chuckled at the sparrow in spite of herself.
“So you never saw him again? After he left, I mean?” The crow looked down at the dove’s question.
“No, he kept coming back now and then, even after that. We already weren’t too crazy about letting angels in back then, but we made an exception for him. He was a friend.” Maura sounded almost melancholy.
“You... miss him, don’t you?” Hannah could certainly relate to that.
“He was a nice guy,” the crow shrugged. “Not a trace of malice on that boy,” she shook her head. “It’s part of why I thought he’d make such a terrible angel. I’m sorry, I keep...” she apologized.
“It’s all right,” Allie waved off, “we sort of get it.”
“Will you help us for Finn’s sake, Maura?” the sparrow entreated her.
“I was wondering when you’d figure out it was me,” Maura smirked.
“We could make it worth your while,” the dove promised.
“I wish I could,” the crow sighed, “but put yourself in my shoes for a second. If you escaped from heaven, if you’re plotting against them somehow, even if it’s with the best intentions in the world, they’re probably already after you, right?” Hannah shuddered.
“... Now that you mention it, there is an alarming probability of that, yes.” It didn’t serve their cause very well but it seemed dishonest to deny.
“Now, I might be willing to put myself at risk for Finn even after all this time, if it were only up to me, but... We’re responsible for this city, understand?” Allie tilted her head.
“Who do you mean by ‘we’?” the dove asked.
“The Musketeers took an oath to defend Birdhaven with all our hearts until death do us part. We’re why Birdhaven developed its reputation as the safest town for demons in the free zone, and we like it that way. Camille helps people with their pets, cattle and pests, Sandra helps people work out disagreements, Shaw helps people find things they’re looking for, and me...” Maura narrowed her eyes at them. “... I can always tell when people are lying,” she lied. “The point is, people here rely on us to keep them safe. Now, if I put myself at risk, I put all of us at risk, and if I let you in with heaven after you, they’ll come here looking for you, won’t they?”
“Who comes here to Birdhaven? To live here, I mean?” the sparrow asked her.
“Some demons come here from the part of hell that’s colonized by heaven. They escape from whatever it is that heaven’s making them do against their will, and they come here. Some demons escape from demon warlords, when they’re sick of being at war with heaven and they just want to find some peace. Some demons used to wander the free zone on their own, but they’re just sick of having to fend for themselves and they want to settle down somewhere where they won’t always have to fight for everything. So we bring our skills to the table, we cooperate, and we have a community going on here. We need this place to live, and we don’t want anyone to mess it up for us. Now, isn’t that a fair thing for us to want, birds?”
“No angels, though?” The crow made a face.
“Angels... tend to have ulterior motives. They get taught they’re better than everybody else and it goes to their heads, so they try to take over.”
“But everyone here is here because they were seeking refuge from somewhere, right?” Maura sighed.
“I’m sorry. Okay, here’s what we’ll do... Now, we Musketeers typically make decisions on our own when we’re out on missions. We trust each other to think fast and we stand by each other when we do, that makes sense, doesn’t it?” The angels nodded. “However, since this here’s a bit of a... unique situation, as we talked about, what I’m going to do is, when my shift is over, and me and the others are all back at the Birdhouse, Im’a mention your snag to mah birds, and we’ll see whether we think it’s a good idea or not then. Now, I should be honest, I don’t think you can talk me into helping you, no... Sandra will probably tell you the same thing I told you but if you want to ask her yourself, be my guest. Come in... for now. Don’t dawdle.”
The crow finally re-sheathed her sword.
“Welcome to Birdhaven,” she chirped.
***
“So, how have things been at work since we last talked?” Levi asked the two demons.
“Oh man, it’s been awful, I gotta say,” Renee lamented. “I shouldn’t be complaining to you locked up in here, though...” The whale shook his head.
“No, it’s okay,” he assured them.
“We have a proposition for you, Levi,” Cara whispered.
“What is it?” Levi brought his ear near the bars so that he could hear them without having them be overheard.
“Cara’s a shapeshifter.” The whale’s jaw dropped.
“Why would you tell me? Heaven can’t find out! They’d have her sent to war. We’d never see her again,” Levi panicked.
“Hear me out, hear me out,” the starfish insisted. “What if you agree to put an end to your strike and come back to work with us, and... I make sure you don’t have to do the actual whipping that made you feel so bad?” Was she really suggesting what he thought she was suggesting?
“You can’t be serious,” the whale gasped.
“No, see, I could turn into you, so when angels and other demons would be around, they’d think you’re whipping that guy, but they’d be wrong. It’d just be me doing it, looking like you. So you could still do your other work like you used to, but...” Levi shook his head.
“No, no, we could never do that. Arnie’s in there all the time now. He’d catch us in an instant. Where would I hide? Sooner or later, someone would see two of ‘me’ together. You’d both end up right in here with me. I could never do that to you. He watches you like a hawk.”
“Funny you should say that,” the squid observed.
“How do you mean?” he asked.
“Arnie’s been slowly turning into a vulture,” Cara informed him. “Like, at first, it was just a couple of vulture features on his goose form, but by now he’s more vulture than goose altogether.” The whale stopped, and thought about it.
“... That sounds like it’d be kind of an improvement on him, honestly.” Renee shrugged.
“You’d think, but he’s been even more of a jerk since he became your scab somehow.” His eyes widened.
“Now that, I can’t imagine,” Levi said wryly.
“Oh, you better believe it,” the starfish assured him. “If you don’t come back soon, it’s only a matter of time before one of us finally snaps and kills him right there.”
“I hope it’ll be you!” he laughed.
***
“Dealing with the demon’s strike is your job,” she admonished him. “While you’ve been struggling to get the simplest thing done, I’ve had to deal with two other entirely separate crises all by myself, did you know that?” She buzzed at him, annoyed.
“I did not,” he answered.
“Of course not. Do you know why you didn’t know about them, Rafe?” The monkey sighed.
“I could take a wild guess,” he ventured.
“Because I don’t come running to you to make you do my job for me every time I have a problem.”
“I would’ve guessed something along those lines, yeah,” Rafe muttered understatedly.
“Take a look at my drones,” she gestured to them around her. “You don’t see them asking me to step in to do their jobs, do you?” The truth was that no sentient, independent being could have possibly matched the loyalty and devotion to their work of Sasha’s drones. Some might have said that it wasn’t a fair comparison but, to her, in terms of what she expected from the people she worked with, that was exactly what made it the perfect comparison.
“I wanted to ask you something about your drones,” he used her words as a springboard to ask.
“What’s that?” Her antennae drooped weirdly when she tilted her head.
“Do you think we could possibly use one of them to replace the demon who’s on strike?”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” Sasha rolled her faceted eyes. “It’s like you weren’t just listening to me at all,” she shrugged all four arms impatiently. “Get the strike under control. Yuri’s in Carcer. Allie and Hannah have escaped. This whole chain reaction is a disaster, and it’s all your fault. And we’ve barely scratched the surface yet.” She flicked her membranous wings ominously. “If they get their hands on those demons’ magic, they could destroy everything we’ve worked for. Do you know how important our wars with hell are to the prosperity of the Hive? Do you know how much of the Hive goes into producing material and personnel for those wars? Everything we do hinges on it!” She brought her fist down in her open palm for emphasis.
“I know how important the wars are,” Rafe reminded her, “I served as a war medic in a few of them, remember?”
“Oh yeah, that’s right.” Sasha seemed to have forgotten until he’d just reminded her of it. “What possessed you to do a thing like that, I’ll never know.” She clicked her mandibles audibly.
“If you’d seen some of the things I’ve seen,” the monkey explained grimly, “you’d know...”
***
Annie hadn’t been to hell often, if at all.
Ozzie hadn’t been lying to his mortal lover when he had told her that, traditionally, angels could not come and go as they please in and out of demon warlord territory. However, since her conversation with Sarah about Belle, the toad’s claims had been on Annie’s mind a lot. If she heeded them, several things could happen. She could get caught for trying to find it, and get sent to Carcer. She could look for the information to find nothing or something else, to find out that the dragon and she had been lied to after all, then have to deal with the repercussions of that. Or, even in the best case scenario, she could find the information, release it so that all of other angels would find out, and then... what? In any case, nothing would ever be the same.
The angel was a creature of habit. She had never liked change for its own sake at all.
If she ignored the warning that the demon had given them, and it turned out to have been a hoax, there was a chance that nothing bad would happen, that nothing would change after all. She could go back to her life the way it was and pretend that none of it had ever happened. Sarah seemed sure that Belle wouldn’t sell them out regardless of how they took the news, but Annie wondered whether she should have trusted the dragon’s assessment on its own, or met the toad herself to make up her own mind about it. What if the angel ignored the warning that the demon had given them, and something terrible happened to many angels and maybe some demons as a result of it? Could she have lived with herself for having ignored it?
So she had made up her mind. With Sarah at work, Annie went to visit Belle herself.
No one interfered with her trek across the Waste to the Lair. Whether this was the product of chance or a result of some unwritten rule that she was as of yet unaware of was left as a subject for her own speculation, but it worked out in her favor one way or the other, so she wasn’t about to argue with it regardless. She shuddered when she saw a pig’s head on a pike near the Lair’s entrance. As if that wasn’t enough, the entrance appeared like a face carved out of the stone, the way in through its wide open maw as if it were about to swallow visitors on their way in. She wasn’t in Kansas anymore, Annie reminded herself. She had to be prepared to set aside a few cultural differences for the sake of achieving her goal, she tried to tell herself.
“Who goes there?” A dragonfly walked out of the rocky ‘maw’ in front of her.
“I’m...” The insect raised her hand at her, lowering her head in thought for a moment.
“You’re here to see the boss, aren’t you?” She could see the bug’s organs through her translucent skin.
“I am,” the angel confirmed gingerly. How much could the dragonfly tell about her, anyway?
“Come on in, then.” Thunder cracked overhead as they left the windswept Waste behind for the confines of the Lair. Once the insect had led her way in, she turned aside toward a bat next to them, hanging upside-down from a perch in front of an upside-down workstation set up for her to use. “Visitor for the boss, Lucy.” The bat nodded, briefly turning her head to send a directed shriek toward the back of the Lair announcing their arrival before returning to her work without missing a beat. “Follow me,” the bug advised Annie again. When her demon guide had led the angel into the next part of the Lair, Annie saw a workplace unlike any other that she had ever seen before.
In one corner, a mole was working at a computer on the ground with just her torso protruding from the earth, her whole lower body buried in the dirt beneath it. In another, someone whose lower body consisted of eight octopus tentacles worked at a computer held by a skeletal arm coming out of the wall, with just her torso protruding from a pool for her lower body. In a third corner, a snake’s lower body was buried in the sand with the computer that she was working on resting on the sand in front of her torso that was coming out of it. Finally, in the last corner, a salamander’s lower body was sitting in a bubbling pool of lava with the heatproof, super-cooled computer that she was working on resting on an igneous rock in front of her.
“Who’s that, Zara?” the mole turned around to ask, adjusting her glasses on her nose.
“Angel here to see the boss,” Zara explained.
“Ooh, there’s something we don’t see every day,” the octopus-taur observed without looking away from her work. On a wall, the angel noticed a poster with a picture of a smiling spider wearing a six-sleeved shirt that had ‘#1 Mom’ on it with the caption ‘Employee of the Month.’ On the opposite wall was another poster that simply said ‘There’s no place like hell.’
“You ever been to hell before, ssssweetheart?” the snake asked her slyly.
“Don’t scare her off now,” the salamander gently reproached the snake.
“I’m not,” the snake waved off. The door to the wall in front of them seemed to open on its own before the toad’s previously invisible form progressively revealed itself in front of Annie.
“You’re Sarah’s friend, aren’t you?” Belle asked her.
“Uh... Yes. Yes, I am.”
“Welcome,” the toad grinned in a way that she hoped appeared friendly and that was only a little inadvertently creepy. “She speaks well of you.” Belle almost extended her bulbous-fingered hand toward the angel by force of habit before catching herself, realizing that Annie didn’t have any hands to reciprocate with. A hare suddenly appeared in the room in a puff of smoke, carrying a handful of envelopes in her hand.
“Mail’s here!” she shouted, hopping from workstation to workstation to distribute the envelopes to their proper recipients.
“Thanks, Marsha,” the toad told her cheerfully.
“No problem, boss,” the hare waved at her lightheartedly, grabbing a bit of hay out of a hay dispenser that had been set up in the wall for her to use before shoving it in her mouth and disappearing into another puff of smoke, just as easily as she’d teleported in.
“Let’s talk in my office, shall we?” Belle motioned for the bewildered angel to follow her through the door into another room.
“What’s that?” There seemed to be a hammock made out of cobwebs hanging above the ground on the left side of the room. A skeletal arm hung from the ceiling holding a computer facing down over it, perpendicular to the ground so that someone lying in the cobweb hammock could easily use it facing up. Small cobweb ‘enclosures’ covered all eight corners of the room.
“That’s Nancy’s office. Not everyone gets their own office, but once she had the kids, we gave her this one so she could watch her kids in the corners while she worked. Gotta get your work-life balance going, right?” Despite her pride when she would talk to the dragon about it, the toad didn’t even sound like she was bragging this time. She was just stating a fact that sounded like it could be taken for granted.
“Her shift is already done today?” Annie couldn’t help noticing that Nancy’s computer seemed to be off.
“Oh, she has today off.” All of the angel’s eyes widened.
“You mean... She has the whole day off?” Belle looked at her incredulously.
“Whoa, you angels sure need to get some kind of union going, don’t you,” she shook her head. “Can I get you anything?” the toad asked her as they walked into her office. “Tea, ichor?”
“What do demons usually drink?” the angel asked her.
“Oh, coffee, blood of our enemies, stuff like that,” the demon replied offhandedly.
“I’ll just have water.”
“Does it matter if it’s in a mug shaped like half a pig skull?” Belle asked casually, raising an eyebrow.
“Whatever you normally do.” Annie’s reputation for politeness was well-deserved.
“Sorry about the pig head on a pike on the way in, by the way,” the toad apologized as she poured her guest’s water. “It’s just to scare off demons that work for other warlords, not visitors like you,” she explained.
“Oh sure, I get that!” the angel assured her. “We’ve all done that.” She hadn’t, not really, but it seemed like the right thing to say at the time.
“What brings you here today, Annie?”
“Sarah tells me you told her to tell me about some sort of book in heaven’s library?” The demon covered her mouth with her hand, furrowing her brow.
“No, I don’t think so.” Annie didn’t hide her surprise well.
“What? You mean you... didn’t really tell her all that?” Why would Sarah have lied about something like that, though?
“No, I have no idea what you’re talking about, not really.” It was subtle, but the angel noticed that Belle’s good mood seemed to have dropped a bit.
“You are the Belle who comes and talks to Sarah in the treasury, right?” The toad nodded.
“Absolutely,” the demon confirmed.
“But you didn’t tell her anything about a book,” Annie double-checked again to make sure.
“I did not,” Belle shook her head.
“... Huh. How about, how about that, huh?” The toad pursed her lips as some of her flies flew in and out of the holes all over her body, which, the angel understood, served as their home.
“Listen, Annie, it’s been great meeting you. I’d love to see you here again sometime, in fact you’re welcome here anytime, really.” The demon clucked her tongue pensively. “Unfortunately, right now, with Nancy gone from the office there’s a bit more work for everybody else to try to make up for the part she can’t do, and she usually gets a lot done at a time with all those arms of hers, I’m sure you get that, right?” Annie nodded. “Would it be rude if I just... asked you to leave so we can all get back to work for now? We have a meeting coming up and I’d hate to make the others wait for it when they’re so on time all the time, that’s fair, isn’t it?”
“Uh... Yeah, of course!” the angel acknowledged. “Thanks for seeing me.”
“Don’t be a stranger now.” It was certainly the friendliest way in which Annie had ever been rushed out of somewhere.
***
With Annie at work, Sarah decided to make the most of what she’d been reading herself.
She had learned by reading about transmutation in that book that she had rented from Annie’s library that there was supposed to be a demon somewhere in the free zone who had the power to turn lead into gold. If the dragon could get such a power at her disposal herself, she thought, perhaps she could use it to put an end to the guilt that plagued her at the thought of heaven’s hoarding of its resources without having to deal with the guilt of stealing from it either. She could find a third way, a middle way that would cut right through the restrictions of both other approaches. Sarah could give to the poor without even robbing from the rich, simply by creating more wealth from nothing and giving it away to those who needed it the most.
So she flew over the Waste, seeing its canyons, cacti, dust devils, skeletal remains and tumbleweeds unfolding under her as she flew above them. At first, the dragon was glad not to have to deal with such obstacles as someone wingless. However, the sandy wind was making it progressively more difficult for her to fly, so she ended up having to face the last section of her itinerary, a short maze of wooden fences in the sand, on foot like a land creature after all, covering her face from the sandy wind still. When Sarah reached the cave’s entrance in the mountainside, she found it dark, with a puddle of pitch and an unlit torch. So she grabbed the torch, dipped it in the pitch puddle and breathed fire on it to light it herself on her way in.
The dragon followed mine cart tracks into the mine, hearing the repetitive dripping of water into puddles in the distance somewhere as she went. Fortunately for her, her torch made it possible for her to read the directions on the map that the transmutation book had provided her with, otherwise she would have gotten far more lost in the cave maze inside than she could have in the wood fence maze outside. Eventually, Sarah’s path finally led her to the location inside the mine that she had been looking for. A literal cowgirl greeted her on her way into the larger open cavern space, wearing a cowboy hat and vest, leather boots with metal stars and some ripped up jeans, chewing her cud like gum with her arms crossed, tapping her hoof.
“Long way to come for an angel to see me, ain’t it?” The dragon’s eyes widened.
“You can tell I’m an angel?” Privately, she’d hoped that Belle’s assessment of how demonic she may have looked might have at least helped her pass for a demon for a little bit before someone figured out she was an angel, but she turned out to have been wrong, it looked like.
“I can always tell,” the cow grinned.
“Are you Gen?” Sarah asked.
“That’s me all right,” Gen gave her the thumbs up. “Now why would an angel like you come such a long way as this to meet a demon like old Gen here?” The dragon could have sworn she saw some of the gold pebbles on the ground around them tremble.
“I heard you have the power to turn lead into gold.” The cow raised an eyebrow at her.
“So are you here because heaven sent you here to turn me in for criminal demonology or whatever you dopes are calling it these days?” Sarah heard a loud creaking sound in the distance.
“No, not at all,” the dragon shook her head, raising her palm in a gesture of appeasement.
“Ah, then it’s self-interest that brought you here.” Gen smirked at her like someone who experiences as a personal victory anything that appears to serve as evidence that everyone has their price and that money makes the world go round. “Thought you’d throw in a bit of extra sauce on top to supplement heaven’s cheap, meager pittance, didn’t you?” The gold pebbles seemed to stop shaking. “That, at least, I can understand.” Sarah wondered how the cow’s hat had gotten that bullet hole in it, and what must have happened to whoever had been responsible for it. It was probably best for her not to think about it too much, she tried to tell herself.
“I have all the gold I need for myself.” Gen gave the dragon a dubious expression.
“Then what is it what brings you here, sweetie pie?” The cow idly tapped her fingers on the lasso at her waist.
“I want to create gold so I can give it to the poor.” Gen’s eyes widened.
“My, you sure got some... mighty fine lofty ideals there for an angel, don’t ya? Just poor angels, or poor mortals and demons too?” What an interesting question that was.
“I hadn’t thought about it, but yeah. Everyone. Why not, right?” Sarah shrugged, as if she hoped to downplay the radical implications of what she had in mind.
“Now, just because you’d give something away for free, don’t mean you should expect something for nothing from me yourself now, should it?” The cow wagged her finger at her.
“I understand that, of course,” the dragon acknowledged.
“Do you now?” Gen looked down her ringed nose at her. “Then let me ask you this: since I can literally create my own gold, what could you possibly have to offer me that I can’t already get for myself, angel girl?” Sarah stopped, and thought about it.
“I can talk them into making you an angel again. You could live in heaven again. Wouldn’t you like that?” The cow seemed to consider her proposal for a bit.
“That’s a tempting offer, no, it is, it really is,” she told the dragon. “There’s just one problem with it though,” Gen clucked her tongue.
“What is it?” Sarah asked her.
“See, the thing is...” The dragon suddenly felt the cow’s lasso tightening around her. “I’m already an angel, sweetie pie,” she flashed a cruel grin, “and my name ain’t Gen, it’s Hazel.”
“You tricked me!” Sarah couldn’t believe it.
“I can’t believe you fell for it, dummy! Then again, you would if you’d come up with a plan like that. Just giving money away to the poor? What in tarnation is that? What do you think money is, exactly? Do you think it just came into the world fully formed, and people were like ‘Ooh, shit, that’s a lot of money!’? No! If it hadn’t been gold, it would’ve been something else. We just tried to come up with something that was rare enough that only a few people could have a lot of it to set them apart as people who deserved to be treated better than everybody else. You can’t be rich if everyone else isn’t poor, ya dope. Money’s not just about pulling yourself up, it’s always, inevitably, about pushing other people down. It’s the point.”
“So even if I did figure out how to make gold at will...” The dragon felt like she’d been punched in the stomach.
“They’d just have to decide that it makes gold worthless. Don’t you get it?” Hazel was exasperated. “You can’t slap an engineering solution on a people problem. And shame on you for betraying your fellow angels like me by being willing to give some away to mortals and demons while you’re at it, you traitor! Biting the hand that feeds you like that, you oughta be ashamed of yourself, I swear. We angels here in the heaven-controlled portion of hell advancing into the free zone to take control of more and more of it for heaven are settlers, worm. We take this worthless pile of shit, this literal hell, and, by imposing heaven’s rule on it and putting its inhabitants to good use, we do turn shit into gold, do you get that, honey?”
“I don’t think so,” Sarah sniped through gritted teeth.
“Don’t matter a whit to me,” the cow spat on the ground next to her. “You’re coming with me.”
“Actually...” The dragon snapped the lasso around her by contracting her muscles like a strongman. “I don’t think so either.” Hazel’s cud fell from her dropped jaw when Sarah broke free of her lasso but quickly started chasing after her, knowing the cave maze like the back of her hand.
“Come back here this instant, you’re under arrest in the name of the law!” The light from the dragon’s torch reflected off the cow’s sheriff star, briefly blinding Sarah. Raising her arm that wasn’t holding her torch to shield her eyes from the light, the dragon shrieked when she felt Hazel’s descending pickaxe dig into her arm on its way down toward her head. Just as the cow’s sadistic expression sent a chill down Sarah’s spine, as if the pain and blood dripping down her arm weren’t already bad enough, the dragon steeled herself nonetheless, and breathed a plume of fire toward Hazel. The cow screamed, throwing herself on the wet ground, rolling around desperately struggling to put herself out. “Fuck! Bitch! Fucking bitch! AHHH...!”
Finally reaching the mine’s exit, Sarah strove to bite the bullet through the extraordinary pain that she was experiencing. Spreading her wings, she forced herself to fly through the sandy wind despite how difficult and risky it was because it seemed to her like the emergency that she was in justified such measured regardless. That had gone a lot more badly than the dragon had hoped that it would in almost every possible way. The only way it could have been worse would have been if she’d actually gotten caught. It still didn’t change the fact that Sarah was now a fugitive, on the run from the law. She didn’t have a backup plan for if her plan didn’t work, she realized too late. The first thing the dragon would have to do was find a healer to fix her arm.
She wondered if she’d ever see Annie again.
***
Maura was walking down a beaten earth path by a giant cornfield. Now finished with her guard duty for the day, she had gone out to meet Shaw, who was out on patrol while The Thieving Magpie was closed, so that the crow could accompany the stork back to the Birdhouse from it. Knowing that both strange angels on the run that she’d met were probably still in Birdhaven, maybe even on their way to the Birdhouse itself, Maura thought it might have been better for Shaw to head back from patrol with some backup rather than on her own. The stork knew how to defend herself, to be sure, but better safe than sorry, she’d reasoned. As long as they’d be back before Sandra left for her patrol, they could wait for Camille to return from hers.
“Fancy meeting you here.” The stranger who was coming down the road toward her wore a canvas cloak and a straw hat. “Nice day to be out, isn’t it?” The stranger spread out her scaly, green arms to her sides. “It’s bright and sunny out today.” From the snout protruding from under her straw hat, the crow guessed that she must have been a crocodile. “Clear, blue skies...” Maura definitely did not recognize her, though, not by a long shot. She wasn’t quite sure what to make of that, truth be told. “Birds are singing...” A shiver went down the crow’s spine when she noticed that worms seemed to be crawling all over the crocodile’s skin, even in and out of holes in her scaly flesh, as though she had been a corpse freshly out of the grave.
“Well, you’ll sing for me, anyway,” she cackled creepily, throwing off her hat and cloak.
“Cassie...!”
Her assailant’s eyes rolled back in the back of her head as she threw her head back while smoke escaped from her gaping, toothy grin. “Didn’t you hear, demon bird? The early bird...” Maura precipitously drew her sword when the ground started shaking beneath their feet and, soon, giant earthworms over a foot thick started erupting from the ground around them. “... Gets the worm!” Cassie laughed uproariously at her own bad joke as the giant worms started moving right toward the crow, trying to wrap themselves around her to trap her completely. Maura leapt over a worm’s low move at her and, borrowing her momentum from the jump, spread her wings to take to the skies.
Soon the crow was twisting, spinning and flipping through the skies everywhere around the writing mass of giant worms everywhere around her, chopping them to pieces as they tried to wrap themselves around her only to see them keep regenerating from the stumps that she would cut them down to time after time. They were keeping her way too far from the crocodile for Maura to have been able to reach her with her sword from where she was. So as she dodged and evaded the giant worms’ attacks with more and more acrobatic flight maneuvers, she started spitting fireballs down toward Cassie from the sky, without letting up with her hacking and slashing as she did, at that. The crocodile barely back-flipped away from a fireball.
“Ooh, someone’s seen North by Northwest, hasn’t she?” She looked up snidely. “Maybe I should take a walk in your shoes...” Cassie spoke ominously as the smoke coming out of her maw and the wriggling of the worms all over her body both intensified to a fevered pitch...
***
Ozzie and Ross’ Super Bowl stunt had gone so well that it had really put them in the mood to try to do another big group thing, maybe even one where the participants would show up intentionally this time. While it was written off as an unexplainable case of mass hysteria just as they’d assumed that it would be, people would seem to get a guilty pleasure out of giggling at it when they’d first find out about it. With the world in the shape it was in, it would easily be the cheeriest piece of news that they would seem to have heard that day, and that was something that they could both believe in. They had shied away from group things after the raid at the sacred grove with Doozy that time but that had been centuries ago by then.
Surely, it had been long enough that heaven would have had better things to do by then than to send angels to track them down again if they did try again, after all this time? So the leopard started talking to the goat excitedly about wanting to put on the biggest, best rave ever. It would be the most fun party that they would ever throw, they had decided. They would take every possible precaution so that they could be ready for anything to make sure that nothing would go wrong this time. They found a way to spread word of their plan to as many would-be partygoers as possible, who contacted more, who contacted yet more still, and so exponentially it went. They found performers, a venue, lights, sound systems, rigs, booze.
It would be a celebration of life. It would be the greatest show on Earth.
***
“I can’t believe they brought you right back here after all,” Rafe lamented dejectedly.
“Well,” Finn reached for his hand through the bars with compassion in his eyes, “there was a pretty good chance they were never going to let me out of here in the first place, wasn’t there?” The monkey reached back for the phoenix’s hand through the bars, downcast.
“I know, but to come so close, to have come so far, only to have you snatched away again, after all this time,” Rafe shook his head. “It just seems so unfair. To you, not just to us, you know?” Finn nodded.
“I know...” He gulped. “I admit I really wish I could’ve gone to see Hannah in the Gold Cage, just one more time, before being taken back here to Carcer at least. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to see you here.” The phoenix wished he could’ve hugged his lover through the bars outright. “I was happy to see you here every time you came to see me. It’s just that...”
“No, I get it,” the monkey nodded. “It’s been even longer since you’ve been able to see her, since she was locked up too and couldn’t come here to see you herself...” Rafe sighed. “It was so stupid that they locked her and Allie up over such nonsense. God, it was stupid that they locked you up here over this nonsense,” he frowned.
“Rafe... I know it’s not going to be easy for you to hear this, and believe me, it’s not easy for me to say it either, but... Do you remember the last time heaven made a decision that you really, really agreed with?” The monkey shuddered.
“You were right, that wasn’t easy for me to hear.” Finn winced.
“I’m sorry,” the phoenix looked down, almost meeting Rafe’s eyes halfway.
“Do you know what the last thing they asked me to do was, Finn?” Finn shook his head.
“No, but I’m almost afraid to find out.” The monkey found that he couldn’t meet the phoenix’s eyes head on.
“They want me to catch her and Allie.” Finn’s eyes widened.
“What!” His beak hung open like a barn door.
“Well, the way they put it was...” It was no self-respecting polyamorous man’s dream to arrest his boyfriend’s girlfriend, but that was one of the many things that heaven didn’t care about. “They said if I can’t have her taken in my way first, they’re going to have to have her taken in their way... Dead or alive. So I...” He started crying as the phoenix attempted to wrap his arms around Rafe through the bars after all. “... So if I don’t want them to get to her first and kill her, I...” His boyfriend patted him on the back, trying to hold back his own tears at the thought of what heaven was putting both of his lovers through because of him. “I have to catch her first, you understand? I just have to, one way or the other, no matter what the cost...”
***
The Birdhouse turned out to be a quaint little abode up on a small hill just a short walk into Birdhaven. Almost everything in town seemed a bit diminutive somehow, permeated by an all-around ‘less is more’ aesthetic, whether through choice, necessity, or some admixture of both. Allie and Hannah took the beaten earth path through town and, once they had reached it, followed it up into a brief curve leading them back up to the Musketeers’ humble headquarters. The sparrow stepped up to the door and, politely, knocked a few times, hoping that Sandra would be there and would let them in to listen to their plea for help. Perhaps she would even accept where Maura had not! Who knew? It was worth a shot.
“Come in.” A slow, tentative push on the door revealed the raven at her writing desk, her feet up on it with her legs crossed, leaning back in her chair while polishing her sword. “What do you birds want?” she asked them calmly, fully aware of where they both were and of what they were doing without looking up from her work.
“Well, we talk...” Before the dove had gotten a chance to finish her sentence (or even really start it for that matter), Sandra had already brought her feet back down under the desk and leaned her sword back down against the desk with an understated flourish, now resting her cheek on her fist with her elbow on the desk while sustaining their gaze. She was fast.
“We talked to Maura on our way in,” Hannah said.
“She told us we could find you here,” Allie mentioned.
“I see,” the raven told them. “What can I do for you she couldn’t?” She tilted her head.
“We were told you have the power to make people get along, even when they normally wouldn’t,” the sparrow explained.
“You two got some sort of marital problems to work out?” Sandra inquired.
“Oh! You can tell we’re...” For some reason it hadn’t occurred to the dove that the raven would have been able to tell that Hannah and Allie were in a relationship.
“No, no, of course not!” the sparrow waved off. “We’re doing great.” She turned her head to the dove. “I mean, we are, aren’t we?”
“Great!” Allie nodded. “Couldn’t be better.” Sandra gave them a look.
“Good thing you girls are sure. Lemme ask you this: now, you just told me you already talked to Maura, didn’t you?” she asked them.
“We did,” Hannah confirmed.
“Oh!” the raven brought her hand to her forehead. “Where are my manners? Would you two like some tea?” The angels couldn’t tell if she was deliberately shifting the conversation to throw them off or if that had been what she’d have been going to do anyway. Was being in hell making them unduly paranoid?
“Yes/No,” the dove and sparrow answered at the same time. Allie turned her head to Hannah.
“I’m thirsty,” the sparrow shrugged. “We flew a lot.” The dove turned her head back too Sandra.
“Nothing wrong with that,” Allie smiled.
“Of course not,” the raven agreed. “Long flight, you said?” She got up from her chair to go pour some water into a kettle.
“It was,” Hannah replied.
“Where are you two hailing from?” Sandra asked offhandedly, starting to put the kettle on to boil.
“Well, we’re...” The sparrow quickly turned her head toward the dove, remembering how negatively the crow had reacted to them being angels before. Allie, annoyed, gestured at Hannah in response, trying to imply ‘Well we can’t very well lie about it! We’ll have to tell her eventually’ without actually saying it out loud, because it would have made them look like they had something to hide, which they were trying to avoid. The sparrow relented, grumbling, and, holding her wrist behind her lower back, answered the raven’s question while Sandra was taking teacups out of the cupboard next to her.
“We’re angels, ma’am,” Hannah lowered her head in shame. It was only thanks to the raven’s considerable training with her reflexes that she didn’t drop the teacups in shock outright.
“Well, that explains why Maura didn’t already help you on her own out there first, doesn’t it,” Sandra observed coolly, putting their teacups down safely after all.
“You could say that,” the dove acknowledged.
“If she’d asked us to leave, we’d have left without bothering you at all,” the sparrow assured her.
“Is that right?” The raven took two small metal filters out of the cupboard to place them in the teacups.
“Yes, absolutely,” Allie insisted.
“A flight that long and, if neither of us feels like helping, even if it’s for no particular reason, the two of you would just turn right up around, and never bother us again, really?” Sandra got the tea container out of the cupboard, opening it.
“We’re not here to twist anyone’s arm into anything, no,” Hannah shook her head.
“Yet you have no problem asking me to twist two other people’s arms for you, do you,” the raven said, getting a spoon out of a drawer, in a light tone that clashed with her accusing words.
“Well, it’s not quite like that,” the dove protested.
“It’s different,” the sparrow added.
“Of course it’s different. It’s always different,” Sandra philosophized, taking two spoonfuls of tealeaves out of the container to put them in the metal filters.
“We’re trying to stop a conflict between heaven and hell,” Allie revealed.
“I see.” The raven closed the tea container, putting it back up in the cupboard where it belonged.
“We want to save demon and angel lives.” Hannah hoped to be convincing. It did have the merit of being true.
“What makes two angels like you care about demons like that?” Sandra asked them as the water came to a boil.
“Well, we...” It should have been easier to tell a demon than another angel, the dove chastised herself.
“We’ve both... loved demons before,” the sparrow forced out while the raven poured boiling water into their mugs through their filters.
“Had... demons we loved, we mean,” Allie tried to clarify.
“Ooh, this is getting more interesting already,” Sandra opined as she brought the teacups to the table. “Careful – hot,” she warned them. “I’m sorry, which one of you was the one who wanted tea again?” They gave her a blank stare.
“... I don’t remember,” Hannah admitted.
“Me either,” the dove blushed. The raven laughed.
“It was you” she pointed at the sparrow, “wasn’t it?” Hannah gasped, then nodded as she brought the extra teacup near her, embarrassed. “Wait for it to steep,” Sandra reminded the sparrow, raising her finger toward Hannah as the raven’s feet took her back to the cupboard again.
“Smells nice,” the sparrow remarked.
“Thanks,” Sandra chirped, opening the cupboard to take a small plate out of it.
“It does.” Allie couldn’t help sniffing it in as well.
“You sure you don’t want some?” the raven offered again, bringing the small plate to the table with her.
“I’m sure,” the dove waved off.
“Nothing wrong with that.” Hannah brought her beak to her steaming teacup to blow on it.
“So, about those demons you two both loved...” Sandra brought back up. “Are you two still seeing them, or is it just you two now?” The angels lowered their heads.
“They... They’re dead,” Allie gulped.
“Do you take honey?” The sparrow’s eyes widened.
“I’m sorry, what?” Had the raven really just asked Hannah this after the angels had just said that?
“Some people like their tea with honey,” the raven shrugged. “I don’t. I find it too sweet, but you might not, for all I know.” It took a second for Hannah to regain her composure.
“No, I... I’m not going to, I don’t think. Thanks, though.” The sparrow usually did like her tea with honey, but she was too thrown by the demon’s timing to ask for some.
“What happened to them?” The dove blinked.
“Who?”
“The demons you loved. How did they die?” Was Sandra messing with them? Was this simply attributable to culture shock between angels and demons? Or was the raven counting on the fact that neither of the angels would be able to tell?
“Heaven had them killed.” Hannah couldn’t help avoiding the demon’s gaze.
“Anything to do with the two of you, or for separate reasons?” It was always worth it to take every possibility into account, Sandra figured.
“It... It did have something to do with us,” Allie confessed.
“It hurts to admit, but you sure can’t accuse us of not being honest,” the sparrow winced.
“Well, then...” the raven said understatedly, “I guess getting along with you two didn’t work out so well for them, did it?”
“Hey, that’s...!” The dove struggled to restrain her knee-jerk indignation.
“No, it’s... It’s true. You’re right,” Hannah sighed.
“These must be done,” Sandra said quietly, removing the tealeaf filters from the teacups to put them on the small plate she had brought.
“Hannah, you... blame yourself for what happened?” The raven got up to bring the tealeaf filter plate back to the counter.
“Of course, don’t you?” The demon came back to the table to sit with them.
“I blame heaven for what happened,” Allie answered. “I blame Ezra for being such an asshole. I blame the Council. I blame...” The dove hesitated, but the sparrow tilted her head at her inquisitively. “I blame Rafe, okay?” Sandra brought her steaming teacup near her beak to blow on it.
“Oh! That’s... interesting.” Hannah tried not to make a face.
“You don’t?” This time it was Allie’s turn to be surprised.
“Why would you blame Rafe, of all people?” the sparrow asked her while the raven finally sipped her tea.
“He lets them get away with murder,” the dove told her.
“Come on, if it wasn’t for Rafe, we wouldn’t even be here right now,” Hannah reminded her.
“So it was his idea for you two to come here?” the demon asked, putting down her teacup. Had heaven really sent them here after all?
“No, no,” Allie waved off.
“It was her idea,” the sparrow indicated the dove.
“My idea?” Allie seemed a little offended.
“Well yeah, wasn’t it, though?” At first Hannah wasn’t sure that she understood why.
“I got the book because you kept talking about how the feud between Rafe and Ezra was going to stop Finn from coming back! I did it for you, and now that two out of three demons have said no, suddenly it was my idea?” The dove seemed outraged.
“I haven’t said no yet,” Sandra reminded them.
“Oh, so you weren’t already a peace activist between heaven and hell before we met, were you?” the sparrow snapped back.
“Those are completely different things!” Allie couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“Well,” the raven called back to their earlier conversation, “good thing you two don’t have any marital problems, innit?” The angels’ eyes widened. “Why don’t you take a few deep breaths, dear,” the demon said, putting her hand on the dove’s arm. Allie usually disliked being touched by strangers, yet somehow Sandra’s touch still proved appeasing to her. The dove briefly wondered why that would be the case, but she didn’t think about it too much. “Drink your tea, hon,” the raven advised Hannah dotingly. “I find it always calms me down, doesn’t it?” The sparrow brought the teacup to her beak. It really did calm her down. That’s what it usually did, wasn’t it?
“I, I’m sorry,” Hannah apologized.
“I don’t know what came over me,” the dove shook her head.
“Angels often mean well, even we demons know that, if you can believe that. It’s just that sometimes the road to hell is paved with good intentions, so to speak, you feel me, birds?”
“I know,” Allie nodded.
“I’d be a demon if I could, if it means anything.” The dove turned to the sparrow in shock.
“Really? You would?” Hannah nodded.
“Well yeah! Wouldn’t you?” Allie had never thought about it.
“I’m sure a lot of angels would be demons for a day if they could,” the demon smirked. “I’m sure the fantasy of being a demon and feeling like the badass rebel that picturing it makes you feel like must be a lot more fun than the day-to-day grind of surviving in this hell that you angels can only imagine. But being a demon ain’t all fun and games, and it ain’t something you just walk right into. It’s flattering that you’d like demons enough to want to be one, sure, but we demons have to fight every day to survive in ways you know nothing about. You may not believe this because of what other angels say about us, but we’re proud to be demons. It’s a badge of honor and a source of identity. We don’t give it away for free. It comes with a price.”
“When we walked in,” the dove asked Sandra, “you said something about something you could do for us that Maura couldn’t do. What did you mean by that?” The raven stretched and yawned lazily before replying, using the few seconds it took her to think about how best to answer.
“See, Maura and I can both make people get along. But I can make people fight. Maybe Maura trusted you, maybe she didn’t. I don’t know. I can’t tell. What I can tell you is, someone would have to be more powerful than me on their own to be able to get the best of me, because the moment two or more people come at me at once, I can always turn them against each other.” The sparrow’s jaw dropped.
“So were you... Is that why we’ve been fighting so much since we got here?” Here they were, asking someone to help them magically manipulate other people’s moods, yet they felt vaguely ripped off at the thought of someone else having done just that to them then and there.
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” the demon retorted, tongue-in-beak. She got up from her chair suddenly, seeming to have just remembered something. “Something’s wrong,” Sandra said, her eyes no longer on the angels but staring off somewhere else in the unseen distance. “Maura should’ve been back by now.” She checked something that she took out of her pocket. “Maura’s been kidnapped!” the raven gasped. “You kept me here while she was kidnapped,” she spat at the two angels unceremoniously. “You stupid idiots,” she shouted at them, sheathing her sword. “A pox upon you,” the demon shouted back over her shoulder as she rushed out the door. “A pox upon your kind forever!” She flew off before they could answer.
They could hear her cawing, echoing in the distance, like the sower of discord that she was...
***
It was a quiet day at the library.
No one had shown up all day. Annie’s assessment was, at that time, that it was likely that no one would show up for the rest of the day either. She still had no idea of why Belle would have denied having given Sarah the information about heaven’s library that she had, but she would have no way of asking the dragon about it until her shift would be over. Under other circumstances, that wouldn’t have been such a big deal. She’d always been the patient type. But she and Sarah kept up with what went on in heaven and in hell, as much as they could. The most recent series of events in their personal lives seemed to complicate matters in ways that Annie wasn’t sure that she’d know how to deal with when they would come up.
She didn’t know how long she still had before that would happen. If there would ever be a time for her to verify these claims, it would be right now. It was such an uncharacteristic, impolite thing to do in some ways, that part of her rankled against it even as she tried to steel herself to do it. Then again, if harm did come to other angels because of Annie’s inaction, that wouldn’t have been very polite of her to them either, now, would it? The toad had at least been right about as much as that, regardless of anything else. So she pretended to wander idly in the cloudy maze of bookshelves for simple lack of anything better to do, all the while stealthily making her way from the front desk to the location of How to Actually Be Nice to People.
Oh God. She couldn’t believe what she found. It was everything she feared, and more.
“All right, lady, you’re coming with me.” Annie’s heart would have leapt in her chest, if she’d had a heart. Or a chest.
“I... Hello, officer, I didn’t see you there!” she chuckled nervously. “What seems to be the problem, sir?” Maybe if she was really polite, Rudy would go easy on her, she prayed to herself?
“Now, now, lady, don’t make a scene,” he said disapprovingly, trying to figure out a way to cuff her in spite of the fact that she didn’t have any hands for him to cuff.
“Oh, I’m not! I mean, I’m sorry, officer,” she apologized, flustered.
“Come on, I’m taking you in now,” the deer insisted. Annie was having the worst panic attack of her life but she was so scared and had internalized so much guilt over the course of her life that she just followed his orders unfailingly. Who knew what Rudy might do if she disobeyed?
“Is it true you once turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt, sir?” she asked him in morbid curiosity as he dragged her out of the library, remembering a rumor she’d heard about him a long time ago.
“Oh, yes,” he smiled innocently. “I totally did.” It struck her how ill-suited to his job the deer seemed.
“What was she like?” Annie couldn’t help asking him.
“Oh, she was great. Why, you want some?” Rudy offered her the salt lick that he was carrying.
***
Healers in hell turned out to be in short supply.
Sarah learned that there was supposed to have been a healer named Helen who lived in the remains of a shipwreck on a beach somewhere. She was supposed to have lived there on her own, singing to herself to pass the time, for a very long time. Helen was a powerful healer, and demons came to see her for her services from far and wide. She made her living from her healing, and she’d developed a reputation for it. So the dragon, following the directions that she’d found, flew all the way across the Waste until she had reached the shore on the other side of it. She was sure that she’d found the right shipwreck when, nearing it, she heard singing emanating from it.
When Sarah looked inside, there was no one there.
She found a treasure chest filled with medical supplies, medical charts on parchments hanging from the corroded wood of what used to be the hull, seashells, an anchor, bottles and lamps – but no Helen. Where could the demon have gone? Her things looked scattered, almost as if she’d had to leave in a hurry. The dragon found a gramophone, explaining the singing that she’d still been hearing when she’d approached the beached shipwreck. However, while this did solve one mystery, it presented her with another more difficult one to solve still. Who had taken Helen away, and why? For what reason had they left a gramophone behind with a recording of her singing voice playing on it to create the illusion that she was still there?
It also didn’t do anything to heal her arm which, at the time, was a more immediate problem.
***
The party was on.
As gloriously repetitive beats pumped out of the sound systems around them, Ozzie and Ross saw lizards and birds with frills shaped into punk hairdos shaking their heads around to the music, whipping their flashy frills around into a frenzy. They saw dancers wearing anarchist ‘A’ shirts, dancers wearing hippy clothes, dancers wearing glowing outfits that nicely complemented the glowsticks that they were also waving around as they danced, illuminating the night around them like swarms of excited fireflies. They saw dancers who were literally fireflies illuminating themselves to bring their own multicolored lights to the show around them. People cheered, and hurrahed, and applauded, and whistled, and whooped, and trilled.
This, this was what magic really was, they thought to themselves.
Under the decorations that the goat and leopard had hung up everywhere around the venue, they saw partygoers who had dyed their fur and skin all sorts of unnatural colors – green badgers, blue raccoons, red rats, yellow rhinos, purple wasps, pink elephants, turquoise bats... They saw people defy the laws of nature in the name of beauty, refuse the cards that they had been dealt to write their own story. They saw their multicolored light show bathing their fellow revelers in wonder. They saw ravers dancing on top of cars and vans whereas others stumbled and crawled on the ground, all united in laughing at the same shared cosmic joke that, for the space of one evening, felt like it was just a little bit less at their expense than usual.
Every other night belonged to the world and its madness, but tonight, tonight was all theirs.
***
“What happened to our deal?” Rafe was unimpressed.
“What ‘deal,’ what are you talking about?” Mike looked back at him uncomprehendingly.
“Finn!” The griffin blinked at him.
“What about him?” Mike asked the monkey.
“You promised you’d help me get him out of Limbo, don’t you remember?” The griffin furrowed his brow as if he was really, really trying to remember having told Rafe that.
“Is that right?” Mike tilted his head.
“Yes! You said you’d done something for me last time, and if I wanted you to do something for me again, I’d have to do something else for you first, didn’t you?” That, the griffin did seem to remember.
“Oh yeah! That’s right. So, did you come up with what you’d do for me yet?” he asked Rafe.
“What do you mean, have I come up with it yet? Didn’t we... Well, you know!” The monkey gestured incredulously.
“Oh, that?” Mike scratched his head. “I... I thought you did that because you liked me.” Rafe’s eyes widened.
“Because I liked you? When we were just talking about me needing to do something for you so you’d do something for me back, and you started hitting on me, and...” The monkey couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“Did I ever say I’d help you get him out if you did that?” The griffin asked him coolly.
“I thought it was implied!” Mike clucked his tongue at him.
“Never assume anything. How is that more something you did for me than something I did for you? I mean, you may not like like me but, we both had a good time, didn’t we?” The griffin looked at his nails.
“You need a more ergonomic desk,” Rafe stuck out his tongue.
“I’ll tell Darlene,” Mike said slyly.
“This isn’t a joke, Mike. Have you been paying any attention at all to what’s been going on?” the monkey asked him.
“It’s my job to pay attention, Rafe,” the griffin reminded him.
“Then maybe, just maybe, you’ve noticed how fast everything’s been spiraling out of control ever since Finn got turned back at the gate?” Rafe was done mincing words.
“Relax, my man,” Mike smirked, “I’m just fucking with you.” He brought up a suitcase to slam it on his desk in front of the monkey.
“What’s this?” Rafe asked him.
“Read ‘em and weep,” the griffin answered, opening the suitcase for the monkey to look inside.
“These are...” Rafe gasped as he sifted through it. This was just what he’d been hoping for.
“That’s right,” Mike smirked proudly. “With this, you can get that Levi fellow out of jail once and for all. It wasn’t easy to get, lemme tell you! With his secret weakness right at your fingertips, though, you’ll be a lot likelier to be able to talk him out of this stupid strike business, wouldn’t you say?” The monkey leaned across the griffin’s desk to kiss him right on the beak.
“Mike, this is amazing! If I get him back to work, Ezra won’t have any more excuse to keep Finn locked up anymore. Without Finn locked up, Hannah and Allie won’t have to be on the lam looking for a way to get him out either. This... You may have just saved all of our asses, Mike!” In all their years, Mike had never seen Rafe so effusive.
“Yeah, well,” the griffin looked at him over his sunglasses, “maybe next time you won’t wait until you need a favor from me to come here and try out my new desk, will you?” he winked.
***
Shaw would get Maura back out of the Hive, or die trying, she vowed.
She looked it up and down, stopping for a second to catch her breath after having flown all the way there from Birdhaven. It was certainly an imposing sight if she’d ever seen one, the stork thought, a chill going down her spine as she took in its full size. Angels lived in terrifying places, she shook her head to herself, missing the humbler sights of the hamlet that she called home. The Hive was so big, so bright, sprawling and exposed. There were rumors in Birdhaven that the Hive was where angels performed some of the creepiest punishments on demons who had displeased them that they had ever devised. Shaw had never been sure of just how many of those rumors had been designed to keep children in line, but she was sure about to find out.
She had gotten so near to it, nearer to it than anyone she’d ever known had gotten and lived to tell the tale, she could see drones up in the air around it flying in their trademark figure 8 patterns, indicating what they’d found, drones scuttling all over the Hive’s surface, drones flying in and out of its hexagonal windows. The Hive was said to always be buzzing with relentless activity from morning to night, with nary ever a reprieve for any of the drones who worked in it. Under ordinary circumstances, the stork would have waited for the least active period of any location that she would have made plans to sneak into but, in a place like the Hive, this strategy was no longer possible. She’d have to come up with an alternative solution.
The ideal would have been for Shaw to have her other two Musketeers by her side to help her get the crow back out of there. Unfortunately, a demon warlord had already kidnapped Sandra on her way to rescue Maura earlier and, since every second that they allowed to tick by without rescuing both of them was now a matter of life and death, Camille had already stormed off to go rescue the raven from it all by herself. There were flaws to each plan, but they’d had to come up with them under an amount of pressure in terms of time that they rarely had to face. At least, by striking simultaneously, they made it less likely that, after the first incursion, the unharmed location would solidify its defenses, expecting their arrival.
Entering the Hive was a shock to her, even after all the rumors she’d heard about it.
There were drones everywhere, literally everywhere, working ceaselessly around the stork as though their lives depended on it. The truth, of course, was that any of them would have laid down their lives for the Hive without even thinking about it. They couldn’t think about it, not even as much as a feral drone on Earth may have been able to for all we know. They’d been designed that way, intelligently, Sasha would have said, no doubt. The only time ‘off’ that drones ever got was when they died, which many of them never would, and which those that did would always be brought back from by heaven so that they could go right back to work in the Hive just as they had before, tirelessly. Drones had never revolted. This was their life.
Shaw’s default fallback plan when she couldn’t have any of the other Musketeers by her side was usually to find an alternate route in that was not the main entrance. That way, she could sneak her way in past as many of the enemy’s defenses as possible unnoticed until she would be so far in that she could strike at the heart of the beast before making her escape. Unfortunately, there had been no time for the stork to do recon on the Hive, so she did not know of any less frequented way in. The holes in its crust that she kept seeing drones flying in and out of all over it never seemed to remain unoccupied for long. Everything in the Hive was there so that it could serve a specific purpose, and it served it faithfully, constantly.
Shaw walked right in through the front door.
The oppressiveness of the atmosphere hit her like a bad smell the second she walked in, although the smell itself wasn’t too bad as such – honey and wax, overwhelmingly. As tempting as it may have been to charge in with guns blazing shouting ‘Geronimo!’ at the top of her lungs, the stork thought she may have better chances if she tried something else first. None of the drones had turned their heads toward her as she’d come through the door or acknowledged her presence in any other way, as though she weren’t even there. They were all much too preoccupied by continuing to perform their work so that they could meet their productivity quotas on time for them to waste any of their attention on insignificant details such as this.
Could Shaw perhaps trick them, pretending to be some sort of demon envoy so that she could ask to speak to Sasha directly, having them lead her right into the core of their kingdom unsuspectingly, only to make her move once it would be too late for them to regret their mistake? She put her hand on the shoulder of one of the drones to get her attention. The drone’s attention did not waver, did not deviate from her work one single iota. “Hey.” The drone shoved the stork away just a bit, not violently but firmly, like a persistent distraction that she needed to carefully put aside so that it would become easier for her to focus on her work again. “HEY!” Still, none of the drones even looked at her. So much for fear of being noticed.
A shiver went down Shaw’s spine. What had been done to them to make them like this?
It had become clear to her by then that performing their work as fast as possible was the only thing that had been on any of their minds. The stork noticed that many of them simply stayed in the same location without ever moving from where they were, performing the same handful of repetitive movements over and over that only took each of them a few seconds to do each time before starting over again. Those of them that did move often seemed to walk back and forth between the same two locations repeatedly as well, ferrying this or that here or there unvaryingly. Among the vats, pipes, hexagons, wax cylinders, cocoons and conveyor belts, all of them were as cogs as part of some larger machinery that none of them fully understood.
When she looked into a drone’s eye, she didn’t see a soul staring back. Shaw shuddered.
The fact that none of the drones were paying attention to her invasion seemed like an anomaly to her at first. However, the more the stork thought about it, the more she understood why they had not been made to deviate from the set of instructions that they had been given even under circumstances such as these. The more she understood, the more disturbing she found it. The cold, bare truth was, Sasha wouldn’t have given a damn if Shaw had killed a thousand of her drones on her way in. They were all replaceable to her. They would remember being killed after having been brought back, an unpleasant experience if there ever was one, but Sasha didn’t care. As long as the Hive functioned, none of the drones mattered to her.
The stork had gone in fearing the drones. Now, she felt overcome with pity for them.
How could anyone treat their own so callously, Shaw asked herself, appalled?
She caught herself being glad that none of the drones attacked her for reasons that went beyond her own sense of self-preservation. The stork had fought a lot of battles against other individuals, angels and demons alike, but for some reason she was beginning to find the thought of having to fight back against the drones a little unsettling. It was as if the drones could have been killed while fighting her without even fully understanding what was happening to them, denied the intellectual means to be able to tell what fighting or dying for anything even meant. Shaw’s eyes lingered above the drones, almost expecting to see strings pulled over them to make them move like so many puppets, but shook her head to snap out of her reverie.
Her immediate concern had to be to come up with a new strategy that would help her get to the central chamber, knowing what she knew now. So the stork swept the first room with her eyes, taking in every pattern of every drone around her, regular like clockwork as it always was. She had figured out by then that the only reason for which the drones may attack her, aside from if she had attacked Sasha herself she had to assume, would have to be if she did anything to interrupt the workflow. Therefore, Shaw carefully calculated her movements as she went through the room to avoid all of the drones’ work patterns successively, never interfering with any of what any of them did so that they all continued to ignore her completely.
Rather than a full-scale assault, her invasion became a kind of moving obstacle course. This was where all of the weapons that heaven used in its wars against hell were made. If the stork could have thrown a wrench in their plans and made it out with the crow in tow, she certainly would have. She knew that, if she could have somehow taken down the entire thing in one fell swoop, she would have been saving the lives of countless demons that those weapons would later be used to kill. Shaw couldn’t help but ponder the morality of what it would have meant to take down the drones along with the Hive. Drones were, in a sense, innocent, though they didn’t have much of a life. ‘Fortunately,’ her limited powers made this dilemma academic.
The further and further the stork got in, the more difficult avoiding the drones’ patterns as part of their assembly-line factory work became. Drones walked on the floor, but they also flew and walked on the walls and ceilings as easily as if they had been floors of their own, making the moving maze that they created fully three-dimensional for her to have to figure out how to navigate through. No smart person would have deliberately ticked them off this far in, that was for certain, not with so many drones between them and the way back out by then. Shaw was relieved to find the central chamber at first, knowing that Maura would no longer be far, but her relief was short-lived when she saw who stood between her and the Musketeer.
Sasha.
“Well, well...” Her faceted eyes stared right through her from her glistening throne. “Come to admire my drones, have you?” The angel tilted her head.
“Why did you take Maura?” The stork hadn’t taken her sword out of its sheath, even though her hand was hovering near it. Talk first. Always talk first, when you can.
“So you’re here to get her back, aren’t you?” she chuckled.
“We demons make deals, surely you’ve heard,” Shaw pursed her beak. “There must be something I can do for you that’s worthwhile to you, or something I can get for you that you do not have. An angel once told me that even you guys can’t always get everything you want, that demons can get certain things for you that you can’t get otherwise. I’m good at finding things for people. It’s what I do.” Sasha looked down her nose at her.
“So... You thought you’d waltz into my Hive, all the way into my throne room, and just ask me to give her back to you?” Where Ezra would’ve had his servants snicker, her drones simply worked on. This angel wasted nothing on special effects. Her contempt was evident enough.
“Not give,” the stork reminded her patiently, “trade. I’m a tradesperson, remember? Just one honest businessperson trying to make a deal with another honest businessperson. That way everyone goes home with something they want. That’s certainly...” She paused, looking for a word that she thought Sasha would have liked. “... efficient enough, wouldn’t you say?”
“Haha, well said!” She seemed amused by Shaw’s proposition. Did this mean that the stork had a chance after all, she asked herself? Or was it her proposition being a laughingstock that made it so amusing? The angel raised her finger as if she was about to say one thing, then brought one of her four hands to her mouth, stopped, thought about it, and asked what Shaw could only assume must have been something other than what she’d had in mind just a moment before.
“Actually, I do have something I’d like to get from you, now that you mention it.” That was certainly an unexpected but pleasant surprise, the stork thought.
“What can I do for you...” Shaw hesitated, then shrugged. “... Your Grace?” Sasha smirked.
“You said an angel once told you we can’t get everything ourselves and must get some things from demons, didn’t you?” The stork nodded.
“Is that not so?” she tilted her head.
“Oh, it is, it is, that’s not the problem,” the angel waved off. “The angel who said this to you...” Shaw raised an eyebrow at her. “Who was it?”
“This information... This is what you want, isn’t it?” Sasha nodded. “So, if I tell you this, you give me Maura in exchange, is that it?” The angel grinned.
“That’s right.” The stork took stock of her situation. What she’d had in mind was that she would first leave, get something for Sasha, then meet her or one of her drones in a neutral location for an exchange. If Shaw gave away her information then and there first though, objectively, there was very little that she could do to make sure that the angel would hold up her end of the bargain, wasn’t there? The two of them weren’t exactly in a neutral location by any stretch of the imagination, to say the least. Yet if she let this opportunity go now, who was she to say that it would still be available for her later on, when she would have more leverage?
“... Let’s see Maura first,” the stork settled on as a sort of makeshift, halfway measure.
“Very well.” Sasha snapped her fingers. “BRING THE GIRL.” Her voice resonated around her like an echo, without her having even needed to shout. This time, all the drones around them turned their head toward the angel. So it was possible to get their attention after all, the demon thought. “Look who’s here to see you, demon...” At first, the angel’s cruel grin only filled Shaw with unspoken, nameless dread. It was when ‘Maura’ came out of hiding to step into the royal chamber by Sasha’s side that the stork’s apprehension was finally given definite, terrible form.
“M... MAURA...!” The angel may not have been going to find out who had requested the demon’s services after all, but the stricken look of horror on her face at her fellow Musketeer’s fate was reward for her enough.
“Sorry, bird...” Superficially, the person who came out to see her did look just like the crow but, on another level, she really wasn’t. ‘Maura’ was now covered in earthworms, worms that moved in and out of holes all over the crow’s body at all times, worms that Shaw could see wriggling everywhere under her skin. “You’re in Cassie’s house now.” That was when the stork understood why she’d simply found a crocodile’s limp body lying on the ground in a heap by a cornfield on her way there. Cassie had never been that crocodile. The angel had simply found a crocodile who had a body that she wanted for herself, so she had taken it, only to discard it when another, better body for her came along: Maura’s. “Maura doesn’t live here anymore...”
Cassie was the worms. She had always been the worms.
“Why don’t you see out our guest, dear?” Cassie’s grin seemed to wide to fit on her face, her eyes rolled back into the back of her head.
“With pleasure, Sasha!” What fun these wings were – she’d have to make sure to have wings in her next form too, she took a mental note of it. If making it into the royal chamber had been a challenge of split-second timing and precision footwork for the demon, making it back out the other end of it while flying at top speed because Cassie was flying after her cackling madly as she went proved exponentially more difficult still. Not only did Cassie borrow Maura’s abilities to spit fireballs at Shaw but giant worms started bursting out of the walls trying to wrap themselves around the stork. Accidentally slamming into drones as the demon flew made them turn against her too, forcing her to fight back after all until she, somehow, made it out alive.
Only to be captured by another angel right after having escaped from the Hive after all.
***
“Gabe?” He could see Levi rub his eyes blearily through the bars.
“Uh... Hi.” The whale had never seen Gabe seem nervous before. The seagull was the kind of person who usually made other people nervous.
“You’re the last person I expected to have come here to see me, I gotta say.” Back when he had still been working with Cara and Renee, the angel had dropped in to ‘check’ on them sometimes. It had been Arnie’s job to supervise them as such, but Gabe would show up to ‘make sure everything was going well,’ which usually meant tormenting them for no good reason because he was bored and he could get away with it.
“Uh, yeah. I bet,” the seagull chuckled awkwardly.
“Come to gloat that your ‘white whale’ finally got what was coming to him?” That had been one of the angel’s recurring ‘terms of endearment’ for the demon. It was the first time that Gabe ever talked to him when, if Levi really stopped and thought about it, the seagull had no more power over him at all. All of the whale’s incentives for behaving were already gone so, paradoxically, in a way, he held more power in their interactions than before. What was the angel going to do, send him in extra-jail, when he was already in jail?
“I deserve that.” The demon raised an eyebrow at him.
“Beg your pardon?” He wasn’t sure he’d heard Gabe right. It didn’t sound like something he’d say.
“I’m... I’m here to apologize.” Levi had never heard the seagull apologize to anyone for anything, not if he didn’t work for them, in any case.
“What’s wrong? Did you hit your head? Did someone tell you to come here? Is this a prank?” Surely there must have been some explanation.
“No, this isn’t easy for me, okay?” The whale looked at him with a dubious expression.
“Is this a way to try to get me to give up the strike?” The angel’s reaction told him that he must have hit the nail on the head.
“Look, Levi, I... I shouldn’t have said all those things I said.” The demon furrowed his brow.
“What things?” His questions were clearly making Gabe uncomfortable. He sort of liked it that way.
“Those things about you not being a man, I mean.” Levi looked like he was trying to remember what the seagull could possibly have meant.
“Hmm, no, doesn’t ring a bell.” The angel blinked disbelievingly.
“Well yeah, when I’d say you were, like, a girly man, or I’d call all three of you ‘ladies,’ or when I’d say you must have...” The whale narrowed his eyes at Gabe as he spoke in a way that made the seagull more and more inescapably aware that of course the demon had known exactly what he’d meant and what kind of an idiot had the angel been to think he could possibly have forgotten a thing like that.
“Oh yeah. That’s right,” the whale answered sardonically.
“You, uh, you remembered, didn’t you.” The demon chuckled mirthlessly. “But yeah. You’re a man. Of course you’re a man. That was the wrong thing for me to say at the time.”
“You know, even if all I get out of this whole strike business at the end of it is that I heard you say that...” Gabe seemed to have been awaiting the rest of his sentence with some measure of trepidation. “... That almost makes it all worthwhile.” The seagull’s eyes widened.
“So you’ll come back to work?”
“No.”
***
“Do you... do you think most of that was ‘us,’ Hannah?” Allie asked her as they flew over the Waste.
“I don’t know, Allie... I hope not. I can’t tell.” Their encounter with Sandra had left a bad taste in their mouth.
“Do... Do you think we’re doing the right thing? This whole thing, I mean?” The sparrow winced.
“I don’t know. I hope so.” Hannah tried to sound encouraging, even though she was trying to convince herself as much as the dove.
“Do you blame me for things going wrong back there?” At this, the sparrow turned her head to her outright.
“No, of course not! Don’t think that,” Hannah reassured her.
“Are you sure?” Allie felt guilty for asking again, chastising herself for being a whiner about it.
“Of course I’m sure, dear.” The sparrow tried to encode forgiveness for having needed to ask again as well in her words, without actually spelling it out.
“If you say so...” They flew again in silence for a moment. “We’re running low on options,” the dove lamented.
“But we’re not out of options yet,” Hannah reminded her.
“Two down, one to go,” Allie sighed.
“Yeah, well... Third time’s the charm, right?” The dove nodded.
“Let’s hope you’re right about that...”
The third demon who was supposed to have the power to make people get along lived far away from Birdhaven, all by themselves. Whereas Maura and Sandra had chosen to try to protect themselves from having people try to abuse their powers by integrating themselves as part of a community, Val had chosen to protect themselves from people who would take advantage of them because of their ability by isolating themselves instead. What this meant for them was that they had to do a longer trip from the raven to Val than they’d had to make from the crow to Sandra, for sure. The Waste was different here. Soon, the pyramid that they saw indicated that they’d reached their destination. They descended in concentric circles to land.
“Hello?” the sparrow called out as they both walked in through the entrance into the pyramid’s corridor to see whether the demon was really there or not.
“Anyone home?” Allie asked.
Torches lit their way along the sides of the pyramid corridor, illuminating hieroglyphics illustrating scenes of battles between demons and angels over the centuries. Val seemed keenly aware of what their power to make people get along was up against, of the context in which it existed as a thing. Hannah asked herself how, with a power like the one that she had read about, none of the three demons had stepped in during all these great wars to try to put a stop to them. Could it be that they had, but that something had gone wrong? Could it be that they had chosen not to for reasons she could not yet understand? Finally they walked into the main chamber where the sarcophagus stood, surrounded by canopy jars. The dove walked up to it.
She knocked on it.
“Hi, are you here?” Allie tried to sound friendly despite the weirdness of the situation. They heard something move inside of the sarcophagus. Clearly, someone was, although which mood they were in and whether that was going to translate into wanting to help them or not was something that they both regretfully realized was completely up in the air and not up to either of them by this point. They stepped back to allow the demon to push the sarcophagus door open so that what appeared to be a mummified dromedary wearing an ankh around their neck could wearily step out of it to stand up and face the two angels with an expression that looked like it belonged to another age altogether. The dromedary stretched and yawned.
“Are... Are you Val?” It would have been stupid for them to have come all this way only to have met with the wrong demon, Hannah thought.
“Come, sit, sit,” Val gestured for the two angels to step back and sit cross-legged on the sandy floor in front of the dromedary, who then sat down cross-legged facing them between the birds and their sarcophagus. The mummy didn’t know what the angels’ visit was about, but it never helped to be uncouth, after all.
“I, uh, I hope we’re not disturbing you,” the sparrow scratched the back of her head hesitantly.
“I came a long way to live here all by myself away from everyone, child. If you came all this way to find me here, I hope you made your peace with disturbing me from the start,” the demon smiled.
“I... I’m sorry,” the dove apologized to them.
“Tell me, birds – are you here to fight? Or are you here to talk?” the mummy asked them.
“Talk,” Hannah answered.
“Just to talk,” Allie nodded.
“Then you are welcome here. Just make sure you stand by your word...” Val trailed off. “I do have a strict no fighting policy, and I do enforce it.” It occurred to the sparrow that the dromedary was one of the few people there were who could say that, and mean it. “Aside from that, make yourselves at home.” The demon gestured at their surroundings. “So... What brings you two angels so far away from heaven as this?” The dove was surprised. Maura and Sandra had had no idea that the two of them had been angels until Hannah and Allie had told them as much themselves, yet the mummy seemed to have been able to tell that they were just by looking at them.
“We wanted to ask for your help,” the sparrow said.
“Not tell!” the dove hastened to add.
“Just ask,” Hannah reiterated.
“If you’re willing to,” Allie added.
“We mean,” the sparrow completed nervously as Val turned their head to look at each angel who spoke to them in turn. What an agitated pair the two of them made.
“I can’t promise I’ll be able to, but I can always hear you out,” the dromedary granted.
“Thank you!” the dove chirped.
“We’re grateful to you for that,” Hannah smiled.
“What can I help you two with?” the demon asked them amiably.
“We were wondering if you could help us put an end to a conflict between angels and demons. Something that could cause heaven and hell to descend into war all over again,” Allie explained, remembering the hieroglyphic depictions from earlier in the pyramid. The mummy’s countenance darkened.
“That bodes most ill... I’m no big fan of conflict. You may have gathered as much.” The angels nodded.
“Does that mean you’ll help us?” the sparrow asked with all the hope she had left in her voice.
“Well...” Val winced. “I do wish I could help you... I’m just not sure I can.” The angels’ hearts sank. “It’s not that I don’t want to, you see.” That much, they both believed. The dromedary’s expression seemed genuinely regretful. “It’s just that I have a very, very long history with people trying to borrow my powers to solve their problems, and...” The demon sighed. “You’d be surprised by how much conflict the ability to make people get along can act as a lightning rod for, by how many people are willing to fight each other to the death over who controls it. People often want other people to get along, when it’s convenient for them, but when it comes to conflicts in which they’d have to make concessions themselves...”
“So that’s it?” the dove tilted her head.
“That’s the reason you can’t help us,” Hannah gulped painfully.
“I’m sorry, birds,” the mummy apologized. “You may not believe this, but over time, based on my own experience, I’ve come to believe that, of all the magic in heaven and in hell, ‘mood-altering’ magic such as my own is... the least trustworthy. The most dangerous.” The angels did seem surprised.
“More dangerous than invisibility, telepathy, teleportation, elemental magic or shapeshifting?” Allie asked them incredulously.
“The most dangerous of all,” Val repeated darkly.
***
“Hold still.”
If only she wasn’t on the outs with heaven, she could’ve asked Rafe to heal her, she thought. Of course, if Sarah hadn’t been on the outs with heaven, she wouldn’t have needed healing in the first place, it stood to reason. Helen’s absence had forced the dragon to take her wounded arm to Weir, the only other demon healer that she had been able to find. He didn’t come quite as highly recommended as she did but he was supposed to have been competent and trustworthy enough for someone in a bind such as hers to turn to. Sarah cringed while he disinfected her wound. ‘Fortunately’ for her, Hazel’s pickaxe had not left any piece of metal in her arm. The demon disinfected it thoroughly, bandaged it up for her, and gave her painkillers.
“How in the world did such a thing happen to you anyway?” he wondered out loud.
“Long story,” the dragon strove not to rub her itchy wound, wincing at the pain of it still.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Weir told her. “You can tell me about it at least until another patient shows up, if you feel like it. I don’t have any appointments for the day.”
“Eh, pissed off the wrong people, is what,” Sarah stuck her tongue out.
“Isn’t that always the way,” he clucked his tongue. “We don’t see that many dragons in these parts,” the demon commented.
“I wonder why that is.” He shrugged.
“Who knows? In any case, whoever the people you pissed off were, it’s a good thing they didn’t get your head or chest. That was a nasty turn.” She nodded, grimacing as she did.
“It sure was. I mean, even though it hurts like hell – no offense, mind you.” Weir chuckled.
“None taken,” he assured the dragon.
“Even though it hurts like hell, and I certainly don’t feel lucky about that, on another level, I know I’m lucky to have even made it out alive,” she shook her head.
“It looks like it was a bad scrape, but you look like a bad scrapper,” the demon observed.
“Yeah... I guess I found that out after all. I was hoping I’d never have to,” Sarah regretted.
“Oh, you didn’t have to fight for a long time?” He raised an eyebrow at her.
“I didn’t realize how good I had it, I don’t think,” she shrugged.
“You don’t seem so sure,” Weir noticed.
“Well, it’s not that... Not really,” the dragon pondered. “Maybe it’s more like... I never liked fighting, but I got into a situation where I had to confront the fact that not fighting had consequences too? Does that make sense?” He wasn’t sure whether that was supposed to be a rhetorical question or not. “I should’ve found a better way around it somehow,” she sighed. “I don’t know. I shouldn’t be rambling at you about all of this, probably,” Sarah apologized.
“I don’t mind,” the demon smiled. “It’s all good.”
“If I’d been smarter about things, I wouldn’t be here making you have to do this, I can tell you that,” she said.
“Well,” he shrugged, “not that I’m especially glad you got hurt, but if I didn’t get any clients, I wouldn’t be able to make my living from this. At the very least you don’t need to apologize to me about it.” The dragon stretched her weary muscles, only to flinch and clutch at her wound as she inevitably felt pain shooting through her arm because of it.
“That’s gonna take some getting used to,” she chuckled grimly.
“You’ll have gotten used to it by the time it’ll be gone, I’m sure,” Weir encouraged her.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.” Sarah knew well enough not to take too much for granted by now. “I gotta say, I’m lucky to have found you here too. There aren’t a lot of demon healers in the area, maybe even fewer than there are dragons, I’d say,” she remarked.
“I gotta say, I’d hate to see the other guy.” He gave her an understated look.
“Yeah... I hated it too.” The dragon seemed downcast. She clearly wasn’t too happy about what she’d had to do.
“We all have to do things we’re not proud of sometimes,” the demon excused, “don’t we? I may be more of a healer than a fighter, but, I’ve done things I wasn’t proud of too... I’ll probably do things I won’t be proud of again. But we do what we can to survive. We all do. It’s hell, you know?”
“But how do you go on? How do you deal with being this new person who did this thing you now have to live with?” Sarah looked at him meaningfully.
“You just do your best and keep putting one foot in front of the other, hon,” Weir advised her. “You’re bound to get somewhere, if only you walk long enough.” It seemed like sound advice enough, from where the dragon was sitting, anyway.
“What did you have to do?” He seemed taken a bit off-guard by her question, even though he tried to hide it.
“I... Well, I used to be an angel, if you must know.” Sarah privately wondered if, now that she had been cast out of heaven, she would ever end up a demon like him as well. Wouldn’t Belle have found that amusing. Annie would’ve been horrified, probably. How dearly she missed her...
“What happened? Why did you get kicked out?” The dragon almost wished that she could have revealed to Weir that she’d been expelled from heaven too. It was clearly something they had in common. But, she wasn’t sure of how much a demon would trust her, knowing that she was still technically an angel at the time. Maybe it’d be wise for Sarah to keep that to herself for the time being.
“I healed a demon who got hurt during a war against heaven... Heaven didn’t like that. They told me that, if I healed a demon just because they were hurt, and that they went on to hurt an angel, it made me as bad of a person as if I’d hurt that angel myself. So I got kicked out of heaven and I had to become a demon healer to fend for myself. It’s still what I do to this day. It’s all I can do.” She stopped, and thought about what he’d said.
“I still think you did the right thing,” the dragon decided. “Healing people is, on a very basic level, a good thing, right? You helped someone who needed it. Today, I’m sure the demons you know would be grateful to know you started thinking of them as people even before you were forced to by having to live here, even though you were being encouraged not to, just because you could, you know?” The demon started shaking.
“Please go.” Her jaw dropped.
“I’m sorry, what?” Sarah wasn’t sure she’d heard him right.
“I can’t do this. Please go, right now!” She didn’t understand.
“But why?” They’d been having such a nice conversation.
“They’ll be here any second! They locked up Annie! You gotta run!” Weir couldn’t possibly have meant what the dragon thought he meant, could he?
“What do you mean? What did you do?” Suddenly their earlier conversation about doing what you gotta do had gained a new resonance for her already.
“I saw a Wanted poster of you out in the Waste. The angel higher-ups told me they’d let me back into heaven if I kept you here until they got here. They told me I’d be an angel again, Sarah! But I thought I could do this to you but I can’t. You’re just like me. Run, Sarah!” The angel turned her head at him angrily as she ran away from him before taking flight to escape.
“You’re wrong!” For a split-second, she wondered how far she’d go to become an angel and see Annie again, after having spent centuries alone in the Waste. “I’m nothing like you!” Far, but in the end, maybe just not far enough. “I wouldn’t have betrayed me...!”
***
It had started so well.
They were several hours into the rave when the first cop cars came. In the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, when they came to crash the rave that had been put on by Ross and Ozzie, the first animals started running for their lives in the night. The sound of musical instruments was replaced by the blaring of police sirens, the fog of fog machines by the smoke of smoke grenades, the multicolored lights of their light show by the blinding light of flashlights and searchlights, and the cheering of the crowd by shouting from a police megaphone. The two demons’ collective ritual of worship to their one true god, Fun, was defiled, desecrated, and trampled underfoot by those who did not believe.
Fun was a serious crime.
It didn’t take long for the leopard and goat to notice that the cops that were busy crashing this specific party in particular were Rudy and Gabe, angel cops with a reputation for taking down demon criminals in heaven, in hell and on Earth alike. They’d brought a whole squadron of Sasha’s drones with them, also complete with full police arsenal and regalia, all moving as one while the once united mass of revelers dissolved into chaos and panic. The two demons tried to fight back against the deer and seagull, but when Rudy threw salt all over Ross, the leopard collapsed to the ground writhing. Ozzie tried to get him back, but he the fleeing crowd trampled and dragged him away while the angel cops dragged his partner in crime away.
For him, the night that they took Ross away from him became the night that Fun died.
***
When Camille had first learned that someone had kidnapped Sandra, her first assumption had been that angels had to have kidnapped the raven, probably for the same reason for which they had kidnapped Maura for all she knew. She had been surprised to learn that a demon warlord had really kidnapped Sandra, but she did not have the luxury of wasting time asking herself what the reason for it could be. What the thrush had to do was to follow the raven’s tracks, scent and occasional detached feather all the way to the fortress of the demon warlord who had taken her, to fly all the way across the Waste beyond the free zone to where the forces of order who favored a darker aesthetic than heaven’s authorities did dwelled.
She shuddered when she realized that her journey had taken her to Thomas’ fortress. The Wolf Lord was Belle’s main rival. As the most militarily powerful demon warlord in hell, he had been a thorn in the side of the Lady of the Flies for longer than most demons remembered. Even Sarah had heard horror stories about him from the toad when his actions had become an unusually bad source of concern now and then over the passage of time. The crow, the raven and Shaw had all faced Thomas’ seemingly infinite supply of mindlessly obedient pig soldiers, Legion, in the streets of Birdhaven when the Wolf Lord had tried to expand his empire to include the hamlet, but Camille had never faced them personally herself.
Based on the descriptions of them that she’d heard, she wondered what they would be like.
Her first plan was to try to see how far she could get into the fortress without having Legion notice her, so that she could delay the inevitable fighting that would erupt if or when the pig warriors would realize that she had broken into the fortress for as long as possible. The thrush may have been fully confident in her sword-fighting ability, but she was no fool: the less she fought, the less likely she would be to be defeated before she would have the chance to rescue Sandra. They did outnumber her infinity to one, at that. In a fight, Camille would have to force them to have to get to her through a bottleneck to prevent them from getting her in a pincer strike, to make them have to face her one by one but, even then, she’d eventually tire.
They would not.
Thomas’ fortress was surrounded by a high, slightly askew black metal fence with spikes and jagged edges protruding from it peppered here and there all over it like so many bells and whistles. The sky above her was all orange light reflecting on grey clouds overhead, and the thick stench of sulfur filled the nostrils on her beak with a uniquely demonic aroma. The thrush even heard the occasional cracking of thunder rumbling along in the distance like a growling underground beast. She counted herself lucky to be able simply to fly right over the black metal fence – she would not have wanted to figure out a way across it as a wingless creature, which looked like it could have proven remarkably unpleasant to the least fortunate among them.
Camille slowly descended from the grey, crackling skies to land on the other side of the fence and walk a few steps inward toward the fortress, out of a barrier of smoke around the inside of the fence that initially obscured her vision. When Legion saw her, they did not immediately come at her, as she feared that they might have. The thrush hoped that, if she found a way to make it all the way to the wolf in one piece, she could have pretended to offer to give herself up in exchange for the raven’s release, only to find a way to escape after he would have let out Sandra. What she saw in Thomas’ courtyard and once she walked inside his fortress convinced her all negative stereotypes angels had about demons were based on him.
Camille saw the Wolf Lord’s pig soldiers – who, it turned out, dressed like Roman legionnaires – whipping mortals, demons and angels alike strapped to torture racks on display for all to see. She saw skeletons impaled on pikes set up as warnings to anyone who would challenge his dominion over hell. The thrush saw benches that had been built with spikes coming out of them to punish those foolish enough to sit on them – a truly vile contraption that only a mind of pure evil could conjure up, she couldn’t help but think. She saw bubbling pools of lava, poison and acid, prisoners in black cages too small for them to stand, structures built from skulls and bones, red-hot pokers, thumbscrews, cauldrons, pitchforks, and iron maidens.
Camille saw Legion engaged in activities too inelegant to describe in this book.
When she finally reached Thomas’ throne room still, somehow, unharmed after her journey through his gauntlet of horrors, the Wolf Lord stood up to face her with a toothy smirk on his maw.
“What little songbird thinks she can take on the big bad wolf, I wonder?” His voice carried with demonic echo, reverberating through the room as all of the pig warriors around the two demons duly turned their attention toward them.
“Legion doesn’t seem to have stopped me for some reason,” the thrush noted, more curious than bragging.
“They’re a dumb lot, no doubt.” Thomas grabbed something on a bone stand next to him to bring it to his mouth and start idly chewing on it, which, she realized with some measure of dismay, could only have been one of the pig soldiers’ arms. It looked like the Wolf Lord’s employee compensation program could have used a bit of work. “A bunch of obedient mindless animals, working on instinct alone... I could send dozens, hundreds to their deaths all day, and I do! It’s great, really.” He laughed. They did not understand anyway. What did they care? “They understand almost nothing, but they do understand enough to follow orders, I can tell you that, Musketeer. You can see the heads of the enemies they killed for me hanging up on my walls.”
“They’re very festive,” Camille complimented him.
“I thought as much,” Thomas concurred. “Are you here to fight? Please tell me you’re here to fight.” He seemed giddy at the thought of it.
“I’m here to offer you a deal,” she corrected the Wolf Lord. “Many of us demons like to make deals, as I’m sure you know,” the thrush reminded him.
“What could you possibly have to offer me that I don’t already have, birdling?” Thomas scoffed. “To build my vultures a new nest? They can build one of their own, I’ll have you know.”
“What would you say if I told you that, if you let Sandra go, I’d be willing to let you keep me captive instead? A bird for a bird, that’s not a bad deal, is it?” He chortled.
“I just did.” Her jaw dropped. “I had no interest in her for myself, you see, but heaven... Heaven’s kept my dear lover Las in Carcer for far too long for my liking, and I do get so very... itchy, you understand?” The Wolf Lord licked his lips.
“What did you do?” Camille shook her head.
“I offered heaven Sandra in exchange for his release, and heaven... Heaven was all too happy to comply, you’ll be glad to hear. Apparently, whatever mischief my beloved serial killing sex fiend committed paled in comparison to how much heaven needed to get their claws on your precious Musketeer. I don’t know what she did, but it had to have been pretty good to get her this much attention. I’m almost jealous, I have to say. Fortunately for me...” He pointed at her while all of Legion around them came closer to her to surround her, aiming all of their spears at her and putting chains around her wrists to bring her away. “... I have a brand new pet bird to amuse myself with. And I do intend to amuse myself with you, birdling... Count on it.”
“Well, don’t that just beat all,” the thrush grumbled to herself as the pig warriors dragged her to the very same cell that the captured raven had occupied before her.
“Sorry, Mario, but your princess is in another castle!” Thomas cackled uproariously.
The cell was cold and bare, safe for a handful of black feathers that she recognized all too well.
“So... What do you guys like to do for fun around here, anyway?” Camille asked Legion. One of the pig soldiers grunted at her in response. He almost sounded... friendly toward the thrush somehow? “Do you guys like your job?” Was there any way that these creatures could understand her, just as the beasts of the forest would understand her when she would play the flute for them and speak to them in their midst? “I hope he’s nice to you.” Camille had not gone into the Wolf Lord’s fortress with that impression in mind. However, if there was any chance of it, could she really take the risk of letting such an opportunity slip between her fingers, if there was any way that it could help her escape from his cell? “You seem like some nice pigs...”
Legion let her reach through the bars to pet them on the head. So the thrush talked to them, on and on into the night, the first being who had ever treated the pigs like full living things in their own right. She spoke to them about her life as a Musketeer in Birdhaven, she asked them how long they’d been working for Thomas, what their day-to-day life consisted of, what had been some of their best and worst moments over the past few centuries. Camille asked them what they missed the most, what they wanted the most, how they functioned as a collective hive mind with preconscious cognition... She told them how the angels lived, how the demons in the free zone lived, just how much it contrasted with what they took for granted.
With sunrise, the pigs had freed her from her cell. The Wolf Lord had been overthrown.
***
“So you’re back.” Levi seemed to greet Rafe’s return with relative equanimity.
“Yes.”
“What makes you believe that anything will be different this time?” the whale asked.
“I did a little bit of research about just what your job entailed,” the monkey explained to him, “or, at least, someone did a bit of research for me, and shared it with me, which amounts to the same thing.”
“What did you learn?” The demon raised an eyebrow at him.
“I have the power to do something for you that will definitely catch your attention, I can promise you that.” The angel had never seemed so sure of anything in his life.
“We’ll have to see. My attention’s been getting hard to catch these days. I don’t know why,” Levi said offhandedly.
“I can free you from Jonas, Levi.” The whale’s jaw dropped. That had caught his attention after all it turned out.
“You mean the...” The demon had that facial twitch again.
“Yes. The little man that they put in your gut, the one that makes you feel like he’s ripping a hole through your guts every day, because a lot of the time, that’s exactly what he’s doing. The one that used to make every day of your life a living hell long before the very idea of you whipping any mortal had been even a glint in any angel’s eye. Jonas, who makes you hate your life even now, with your strike wreaking havoc all over heaven and hell, with your ability to seemingly ignore everything that hurts about being in Carcer... The last thing about your old job that could still make you flinch. Even. After. All. These. Years... So tell me, Levi... Are you ready to end the strike and go back to work quite yet...?” It wasn’t an easy question to answer.
“... Can I think about it?” Levi had to know.
“Think quickly. The offer won’t stay on the table forever,” Rafe warned the demon.
***
“Do you know about Maura and Sandra?” Val nodded.
“I do. What about them?” Hannah thought that she might have had something there.
“So you know about how they live, about how they help all the citizens of Birdhaven with their powers every day, right?” The dromedary understood what she was trying to imply.
“Maura and Sandra have existed as part of that community for a very long time,” the demon reminded her. “Over the centuries, the citizens of Birdhaven have come to expect them to use their powers to regulate their disputes, and even to rely on them to do it. They’ve all become integrated as part of the same socio-magical ecosystem, you see... They have reached a point at which, if the two of them were to be suddenly removed, the community depends on them so much for their abilities that there would be social chaos. Conversely, by asking me to intervene in matters between heaven and hell such as those you were discussing, you’re asking me to introduce a foreign element... Why didn’t you ask Maura or Sandra? I’m curious.”
“We did ask them.” Allie sighed. “They said no. We got in very serious trouble with heaven escaping from the Gold Cage to come here to hell to find someone, anyone, willing to help us put an end to the feud between heaven and hell and, well, it was our only ticket back by this point, if you must know.” She tried not to sound bitter but not as hard as she could have, truth be told. She was bitter, after all. Since she could do nothing about it, was it not fair for her to give herself the right to sound the part, if only at least a little? “So I’m not trying to tell you that you have to do what we ask, really, I’m not. It’s just... What exactly do you think we should do? Because if you do have any, any suggestions for us whatsoever... Well, I sure am listening.”
“You could stay here, if you wish.” The mummy spread out their arms to the pyramid around them.
“Are you serious?” The sparrow had expected no such offer to be extended to them.
“Yes, I think I am. If you have nowhere else to go, then... You may as well stay here. I don’t know if you’ll be happy here, but...” Val shrugged. “I don’t know. You seem to believe in peace and to care about all the right things. You don’t seem to be an outright threat. I’m sure I could find worse company to keep, even if I only tried for a short time.” The dove gasped.
“That’s... I don’t know if we can ask you that. It seems like so much to ask.” The dromedary smiled at them.
“Well, you don’t have to decide right away. You can start by spending just one night, see how you like it. What do you say?” the dromedary offered. Before the angels could answer, Sam and Rob burst into the room, hot on the renegade angels’ trail.
“Freeze, police!”
The demon snatched the bear’s sword out of her hand with one of their extendable mummy bandages to toss it aside. While the eagle was temporarily distracted by Val’s disarm, Hannah slammed into him shoulder first, breaking his shooting stance. The dromedary’s extendable bandages fared less well against Sam’s claws, which could rip through just about anything. Just as Rob had finally managed to aim his gun at the sparrow again, he screamed and dropped it altogether. Hannah had just thrown one of her feather-knives through the eagle’s hand. The bear got out her magnifying glass, holding it over the weakened demon’s body. Allie knew that Sam had the power to set fire to the mummy with it but she... she just couldn’t fight.
“Stop it, Sam! Stop it! I give up! I surrender, Sam, just stop it...!” She raised her hands.
“Allie, no!” The sparrow jumped at the bear while trying to dissuade the dove but Sam just backhanded Hannah away from her.
“Take me. Just leave them... Leave them alone. Val never asked us to come here and disturb them. They weren’t even going to help us, Sam! And Hannah...” Allie gave the sparrow a sad look while addressing the bear, remembering their earlier conversation. “... Hannah never asked me to drag her on any of this thing in the first place. This whole escape thing, the plans, the demons, the magic, it was all me, Sam. She just went along with it. It wasn’t her fault. If you want the person who’s responsible for this, the only person who really represents the threat you were sent here to do something about, you want me, Sam... Not them.” Rob had transferred his gun to his remaining good hand, and lowered it at the dove while she spoke.
“Rob, don’t!” the bear roared at him. Before any of them could see whether the eagle would have followed Sam’s demand or not, Hannah had already thrown another feather-knife at him. She had targeted his gun this time, dismantling it as her feather-knife flew right through it.
“You’ll stop throwing these at me if you know what’s good for you,” the eagle growled at the sparrow. Hannah had already readied another feather-knife to throw at him, undeterred.
“I mean it, Hannah!” The sparrow had never heard Allie sound so serious about anything. Hannah, grumbling, reluctantly put her feather-knife away as the dove allowed the bear to cuff her.
“Take the demon too, just in case.” Sam indicated Val to Rob with her head as she spoke.
“What! But you promised you wouldn’t...” The sparrow readied her feather-knife to throw again but the bear aimed her magnifying glass at it, rendering it searing hot to the touch forcing Hannah to yelp and drop it on the pyramid floor.
“I promised no such thing,” Sam snapped back at her. The sparrow tried to shoulder-slam the bear the same way that she had shoulder-slammed the eagle before her. Unfortunately for Hannah, Sam’s body didn’t move an inch. She proved a lot harder to topple than Rob had been. The bear grabbed the sparrow’s whole body to lift her up, holding the bird over her head intending to bring Hannah’s back down on Sam’s knee from up there to break it.
“Sam don’t you dare kill my girlfriend again like some tacky jealous ex!” The bear growled at Allie’s invective. The dove could tell that she’d just struck a nerve. But, would it be enough?
“All right, then,” Sam said grudgingly. For lack of a better option, the bear threw the sparrow’s body down on the floor in front of her, Hannah grunting as she hit the ground at top speed. “Don’t come back.” Sam spat down on the sparrow. “We’d make you regret it.” The bear kicked Hannah away from her, Allie barely seeing the sparrow rolling awkwardly on the ground away from them as the eagle and Sam dragged the dove and the wounded dromedary back with them to take them to Carcer. Hannah struggled against the pain and encroaching unconsciousness to strive to get up, to follow them still no matter what, but it was no use. Her body had just been too damaged to cooperate with her mind’s noblest intentions by that point.
So unconsciousness claimed the sparrow after all. When she woke up, she was all alone.
***
As Sarah flew from Weir’s practice toward Carcer, she noticed a fast-flying swarm of flies start following her. The fly swarm quickly raced past her to end up in front of her, amassing in sufficient numbers to force her to slow down and take stock of them. The flies were flying around in erratic, elaborate patterns in front of the dragon, almost as if they were deliberately trying to get her attention about something. “Oh, not now, Belle!” There had always been an element of playful mock-reluctance to their back-and-forth, but Sarah had never sounded as genuinely annoyed by it as she did then. Yet the flies persisted in swarming in front of her still, as if to insist that no, this really was important enough to warrant her attention after all.
So the dragon followed them, against her better judgment, all the way to the Birdhouse.
Ozzie was finally back in hell after all this time. He and Ross had avoided coming back to it for centuries, for the same reasons for which they had avoided going back to heaven. They had been no more interested in becoming slaves to some demon warlord than in getting incarcerated by angels all over again. Yet now, with the leopard gone, the goat’s priorities had changed. What did it matter to him that he was free, if his favorite partner in crime was no longer with him so that they could enjoy their shared hijinks together like two demons, as they always had? So he had returned to the free zone to plan his incursion into Carcer from it, wondering if his old flute-playing buddy from eons ago was still up to her old tricks or not.
Of course, her thing used to be music that made animals dance, not trees as his was.
Reeling from her defeat against Sam but determined not to let it get the best of her for good, Hannah, her body finally healed enough from the bear’s punishment to be able to fly again, had flown all the way back across the Waste to Birdhaven herself. She felt guilty about the damage that she and Allie had inadvertently caused to the small demonic community in their quest to achieve their own goals. The sparrow wanted to find out whether Shaw and Camille had succeeded in rescuing Maura and Sandra from their captors after all. She wanted to know whether there was anything she could do to help Birdhaven as penance for her actions before she would go off to risk her freedom and her life by trying to break the dove out of jail.
Hannah met Sarah, Ozzie and Camille, all reaching the Birdhouse at the same time.
Slowly, with time, all four of them cautiously exchanged their stories with each other and, realizing that they all shared the same goal by then, the two demons and the two angels teamed up as four people wronged by heaven’s rule who were all determined to break someone they cared about out of Carcer. Would they not have been much likelier to succeed in this risky endeavor if they attempted it together, rather than on their own? With a wider set of skills at their disposal, they would have better chances of finding ways around the obstacles that had been designed to keep would-be jailbreakers like themselves out of it, and better chances to defeat the guards that would certainly stand in the way of their rescue attempt.
The two birds teamed up to carry the goat, the only one who couldn’t fly.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this, but now that I’m the only one of us left who’s still free for now... The three of you are my Musketeers now,” the thrush told them meaningfully.
“Well, then...” Ozzie replied, “... All for one, and one for all, right mates?” Hannah nodded.
“Right.” The goat used one of the sparrow’s feather-knives to pick the lock of the entrance to Carcer.
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here...” Sarah muttered ominously as the gate creaked open. The next obstacle that they ran into was a thick wall of ice cutting the first room in half. The dragon melted it down for the rest of them with her fire breath.
“Ezra’s work, no doubt,” Hannah grumbled as they walked through the puddle that was left of it. In the room after it, they ran into one of hell’s trademark three-headed guard dogs interposing itself between them and the door.
“You’re a good dog,” Camille assured him, giving him three dog biscuits and petting all three of his heads lovingly as the other three jailbreakers walked past. Next, they walked into a room cut in half by a force field that would have electrocuted them had they tried to walk through it. The sparrow, noticing the generator for it on the other side of it, threw one of her feather-knives through it into the generator, rendering it useless and turning off the force field so that they could all pass.
“The Gold Cage sucked, but the target-tree sure was one of the best things about it.” The next room saw their path blocked by a thick wall of intertwined vines. Ozzie pulled out his flute and, as he played, the vines gently separated and slithered out of their way like so many charmed snakes.
“Party on, buds,” he raised his thumb back at the vines on their way out of the room.
“Oh my God, Dawn, they put you here...?” Hannah knew that, for all intents and purposes, it would have made a lot more sense for her to have reacted to the fact that it looked like the four of them were going to have to fight their way past her old Low Council buddy. It was a much more pressing, strategic concern, after all, even she could see that clear as day. Be that as it may, on some level, the sparrow still couldn’t help being reminded of how disappointed the locust had been to have been reassigned from having been known as The Destroyer to her boring gatekeeping role at the gate between heaven and hell. She could only imagine how much Dawn would have hated being moved from the gate to Carcer still.
“It’s a living,” the locust shrugged.
The goat jumped at her, hoping to grab her in a bear hug so that the others could get by her. Dawn’s roar at him was so loud that he was knocked back so hard that his back slammed into the wall at full force. She stretched, yawning. “You guys really want to do this?” The locust scratched the back of her head. Hannah threw one of her feather-knives at her but Dawn just slapped it out of the way with her free hand without stopping scratching the back of her head with the hand she’d been using to do so. “Guess so, huh,” she stuck out her tongue. As the thrush unsheathed her sword, the locust seemed to pull extendable, wire-like hairs out of the back of her head, swinging them around in front of her into Camille’s legs, making her trip.
“Another day, another dollar.” Dawn shook her head as she turned her whole body to iron, bored by the plume of flames that Sarah engulfed her in. “Day in, day out,” the locust rambled on to herself. She yanked her wire-like hair up from the ground in front of her in a cloud of dust and debris, slapping Ozzie right back into the wall through his second attack. “It’s always the same shit.” Dawn wrapped her wire-like hair around the sparrow’s arm tightly, forcing her to drop the second feather-knife that she was about to throw at her. “Day after day.” The thrush, flying at the locust with her sword drawn, fell flat on the ground face-down as a shower of blood came down from the ceiling right on top of her, nailing her to the floor.
“It’d be one thing if I just had to do this now and then, you know?” The dragon interrupted her flight toward the locust precipitously, flapping her wings to pull back out of range of the scorpion tail that Dawn seemed to have temporarily grown to swing at her before retracting it back into her just as easily. “But no,” the locust sighed, effortlessly willing the feather-knife in Hannah’s remaining free hand to rust until it disintegrated altogether. “I mean, not to be a dick about it, but...” Dawn didn’t even seem to need to think about what she was doing, fighting on auto-pilot. “... Variety’s the spice of life, right?” She flicked a speck of dust at Camille’s sword that knocked it right out of her hand like a bullet would. “Don’t you think so?”
“Uh... Yeah!” Sarah stammered.
“In fact,” the locust yawned again, “if it’s all right with you guys, I’m gonna take a break and lie down for a bit.” She stretched tiredly. “If anyone asks, you got me with your amazing power to put people to sleep, okay?”
“We... Does any of us have a power like that?” the goat asked the others, uncertain.
“Sure you do,” Dawn assured them as she laid down on her side. “One of you there in the back or something,” she waved off through another yawn without even looking at them.
***
Coming to a four-way fork in the road, they separated, and went their own way.
Ozzie walked into the cell in which they kept Ross. Rudy stood before him, guarding it. “Don’t be such a Grinch, Frosty.” The deer looked sad. “Christmas is for everyone, don’t you know?”
“I remember you...” the goat muttered, recognizing the angel who had taken the leopard away from him that night.
“Don’t get me wrong,” Rudy assured him, “I’m not angry, just... disappointed.” Ozzie scoffed at him.
“You have no idea of how disappointed you’re gonna get.” The goat narrowed his eyes at him.
“Ozzie, look out, he’s got some...!” Ross tried to warn Ozzie from his cell behind the deer, but it was too late. Rudy had already thrown a whole bunch of salt from that salt lick that he carried everywhere with him on top of the goat, who was now shrieking and writhing on the ground in agony from it. There was a reason for which salt lines on the ground were used to keep demons out of certain areas. Physical contact with salt was at least as bad for demons as it was for snails, possibly even worse. A demon, even a powerful demon, if submerged in salt altogether, even only for a short amount of time, risked utter annihilation. Watching Ozzie in such pain from it made the leopard sick to his stomach. Then Ross suddenly had an idea.
“There’s no Santa, Rudy!”
“WHAT...?!” The deer had never seemed so shocked in his life.
“I’m sorry, Rudy. There’s no Santa Claus,” the leopard went on.
“But, but...” Rudy turned his attention back toward Ross across the bars, forgetting all about the goat entirely. “Gabe told me there was a Santa Claus!” The leopard put his hands on the deer’s shoulders through the bars in front of him, explaining patiently.
“Listen to me, Rudy: Gabe... tells you lies... because he thinks that’s funny.” Rudy seemed outright catatonic.
“But, but... How do I know you’re not the one who’s lying to me right now, then?” the deer asked Ross pleadingly.
“You don’t. You can’t. You have to learn how to find out the truth about things for yourself, Rudy.” The angel became unable to speak or move for seconds... minutes... it would probably be for hours. Ozzie stumbled up to his feet and, running his hand in front of Rudy’s face a few times, received absolutely no reaction from the deer for having done so, as though he had not even been there. The goat even checked from up close to make sure that the angel was still breathing, but he was – he was still alive. Would Rudy still be there in days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, millennia? Who knew? Angels could live unaided for a very long time. It didn’t seem like something that the demons needed to worry about right then.
So Ozzie grabbed the key from the deer’s belt, and unlocked the leopard’s cell for him.
***
Shaw and Sandra’s cell was guarded by Gil and Kay, the fish pirate and crab knight who had gone after Ozzie, Ross and Doozy with the mortal revelers in that forest clearing all those centuries ago.
“Halt!”
“Stay where you are!” Gil turned to Kay.
“I already said ‘halt,’ you don’t have to tell her ‘stay where you are’ on top of it, that’s redundant.” Camille’s eyes went from one to the other as they spoke, following the one who was speaking.
“I know you already said ‘halt,’ you don’t have to get into a whole thing about it.” The fish seemed annoyed.
“You don’t have to tell me I’m getting into a whole thing about it,” he scolded the crab.
“Well, you are,” Kay retorted.
“I’m not getting into a whole thing about it, you’re the one who’s being dismissive,” Gil reproached him.
“I am not being dismissive you’re just being dramatic.” The fish frowned.
“That’s the definition of being dismissive, Kay!”
“Oh will you shut up? How long have we been working together, anyway?” The crab was exasperated.
“Long enough for me to be able to tell when you’re being dismissive, I can tell you that!” Gil spat at him.
“Fucking Christ, if you could keep your mind on the job just one time, I swear!” Kay shook his head.
“I do so keep my eyes on the job!” the fish protested.
“If you kept your eyes on the job, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” The crab stuck out his tongue.
“That is so typical of you! You always try to make me feel like I’m redundant and you could do the whole thing yourself!” Gil accused him.
“I do not!”
“You do too!”
“No I don’t!”
So things kept escalating between the two of them until they came to blows, ignoring the thrush completely until they had knocked each other out right in front of all three demons.
“I thought you’d never get here,” the raven told Camille as the thrush picked up the keys to the cell from their belts.
“I’m sorry, I had to talk to Legion for a while,” Camille apologized to both Musketeers.
“You got through to Legion? When I tried to set them against each other it seemed to go right over their heads.” Sandra seemed impressed. The stork whistled appreciatively.
“You just have to know how to talk to them right,” the thrush explained, unlocking their cell. “They’re really very nice, once you get to know them...”
***
Hannah found Allie and Val locked together in the same cell, guarded by Sam.
“I already warned you once, traitor,” the bear said through gritted teeth. “Don’t expect leniency a second time,” she shook her head, then roared, lowering her center of gravity into a terrifying fighting stance as she did.
“And don’t expect any from me,” the sparrow snapped back, eight feather-knives already ready for her to throw placed between all of both of her crossed hands’ fingers. She brought her hands to her hips, then over and behind her head, ready to lower both of her arms in front of herself abruptly so that she could throw all eight feather-knives toward Sam at once.
“WAIT...!” Both fighters sighed, disappointed that the dove would have temporarily contained the rage that they wanted to unleash toward each other yet again.
“What is it this time?” the bear growled.
“Do you remember when you fought in the war?”
“I’ve fought in countless wars, Allie.” Sam’s eyes narrowed.
“I mean the Second World War, back when we were still on Earth.” The bear nodded.
“Of course I do. You don’t forget something like that. You’d know that, if you’d ever fought in a war yourself. You...” A low rumbling in the back of her throat. “You used to look up to me back then, you’d say.” Allie nodded.
“I did. You fought against authoritarianism, totalitarianism, discrimination and oppression back then. How could I not have looked up to that?” the dove asked.
“I don’t know why you can’t still look up to what I do now, okay? I mean, what changed?” Sam really didn’t seem to understand.
“Fighting isn’t just fighting, Sam! At the end of the day, it does make a difference what you’re fighting for, doesn’t it?” the dove said emphatically.
“I fight for heaven. Always have, always will. For heaven’s sake! People literally say for heaven’s sake, Allie, what more reason do you need for it than that?” Hannah noticed that the dromedary in the cell with Allie didn’t seem to be doing so well.
“Doesn’t it bother you at all that heaven is now making you fight for so many of the exact same things you fought against back then?” The bear pointed at Allie accusingly.
“How dare you say that?” The dove gestured at her insistently.
“Look at what you’re doing right now!” Allie was too preoccupied by her confrontation with Sam to notice the state in which the demon next to her was. “Why fight for something, if to do it you have to fight against the very people you’re supposed to be protecting?” the dove asked pointedly.
“Because it’s all I have...!” Under other circumstances, it would’ve been difficult to get the bear to admit that. “I’m a warrior. I’ve always been a warrior, Allie...” These were anything but ordinary circumstances, though. “It is all I know how to do,” she admitted. “So if there’s no war going on, what the hell am I supposed to be...?” Allie looked at Sam with something that the sparrow decoded as... Compassion? Pity? She wasn’t sure.
“Even a lifelong warrior can still pick her own battles,” the dove told her. “They can pick the people they fight for, and they can pick the people they fight against.” Hannah saw the mummy sitting on the ground in the corner of the cell holding their knees.
“So that’s what you tell yourself you did, isn’t it?” the bear shot back snidely. “You left me for a demon and traitor! To fight alongside them, against me.” It occurred to the sparrow that Val seemed as though they had been through some very unpleasant situations in which other people had fought around them. “What did they have that I didn’t have? Tell me, Allie – what was it that made them so much better than me that they were worth disobeying heaven for, and that I wasn’t worth obeying it for?” Allie was exasperated.
“Don’t you get it? We’ve all been open and poly the whole time. I never left you for them. I left you because you abandoned the values that drew me to you in the first place.” Hannah noticed the dromedary start rocking back and forth. “I wouldn’t have had to break up with you to be with them, or to break up with them to be with you either. It’s not a competition. You always think everything’s a competition.” ‘Please just stop fighting, please just stop fighting, please just stop fighting,’ was all that the demon could think to themselves, on loop, over and over... “You never had to be better than them. You just had to be better than you.”
“Then...” Sam’s expression changed. She seemed hopeful, all of a sudden. “... Does this mean that, if I did become whatever your version of ‘better than me’ happens to be... You’d take me back, Allie? If I embodied those values that you believed in again, and if you didn’t have to leave Hannah for me... Does this mean that we could be together again, my lovebird?” A shiver went down the sparrow’s spine and a tear trailed down the bear’s face.
“Oh Sam...!” The dove threw her arms around Sam’s neck. “Of course it does...!” On one level, Allie had been right. Under most circumstances, Hannah would have had no more of a problem with the dove having another girlfriend than Allie had had about the sparrow having loved Finn either. But it wasn’t as simple as that.
“Oh, Allie...” As the bear threw her arms around the dove’s torso, the sparrow noticed Val taking deep breath after deep breath sitting in their corner, slowly calming down from the panic attack that they were clearly having about the fight before. “You don’t know how long I’ve waited to hear that.”
Hannah’s problem was more about what it would have meant for Sam and Allie to get back together under these circumstances at all, even if the sparrow and the dove had not been together themselves in the first place. There were reasons why they’d broken up, after all, reflections of their personality incompatibility. To see them erased so easily simply because the poor dromedary had willed it so proved... unsettling to her. However, Allie had always been supportive of Hannah’s relationship with the phoenix, just as the sparrow had always been supportive of Finn’s relationship with Rafe. This put Hannah in a situation in which she could not say anything about the ‘shortcut’ that wouldn’t have made her seem a jealous hypocrite.
“I...” After the dove and the bear had stopped nuzzling each other lovingly, Sam simply walked up to the sparrow’s cell, and used the key she had on her belt to unlock the door to it herself.
“You’re free to go,” the bear told Hannah before kissing Allie. The thing is, the sparrow couldn’t really blame Sam, or the dove either. Both of them were acting on feelings over which they had no control. Hannah couldn’t very well blame the demon either. The mummy hadn’t even wanted to have been in this situation in the first place, for the exact reason that they didn’t want to have this very thing happened. It was the sparrow and Allie who had tracked Val down in the middle of nowhere against their will, despite their best efforts to isolate themselves. Hannah admitted to herself that she may not have known the bear and the dove’s relationship dynamic after all. Was there any chance this had been their ‘real’ behavior at play?
“Did you...?” she started to ask the dromedary.
“I don’t know, okay?” The demon’s voice broke. “Don’t ask me, please, I don’t... I don’t know.”
***
“All right, you, you’re coming with me.”
“What, you mean me?” Surely Arnie must have been joking, Cara thought.
“Of course I mean you, you idiot,” the vulture admonished her.
“Wait, you mean her?” Renee thought she had to have heard wrong, clung to it, hoped against hope.
“That’s what I just said ya mook, innit?” The angel had been on full-on power trip mode with the demons for what felt like an eternity now, but even they had never thought that things would go this far.
“You can’t take her with you, her shift isn’t even over yet,” the squid protested.
“We don’t give a shit about her shift, fuckface,” Arnie spat at her. “Been holding out on us, Twinkle, haven’t you?” ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star,’ Cara was a starfish – the vulture wasn’t all that clever with nicknames.
“What do you mean by that?” Cara tried not to let her panic show, but it wasn’t working very well.
“You’re a shapeshifter! You never said.” Renee felt a cold bead of sweat going down her back.
“Well... You never asked,” the starfish weakly tried to deflect.
“Are you kidding? No job in here is more redundant than yours! You’re being replaced with just a regular torture rack. It’s enough for Renee to whip mortals on a fucking piece of wood like everybody else when there’s a work shortage.”
“Where are you taking her?” the squid asked as the angel started dragging Cara away.
“Cara’s power means she can be an infiltrator operative. She’s going to war, and hey, I guess you might never see her again,” Arnie chuckled. “I told you you’d learn a thing or two about torture from me, fuckface,” the vulture smirked cruelly.
“No.” The angel blinked.
“What?” Had he heard that right?
“No.” Arnie raised a finger at him.
“Do you want to know what happens to insubordinates, fish-breath? Because keep testing me, and you’re gonna find out.” But Renee didn’t relent.
“You’re not taking her.” The squid screamed as the vulture whipped Renee himself to show her who’s boss. So the starfish extruded her stomach out of her mouth, wrapped it around the angel, and pulled it back into her to eat him whole.
“I guess Levi was right about one thing. Everyone’s got a breaking point,” she told the squid.
“I guess he was right to hope you’d be the one who’d snap and kill him first,” Renee answered understatedly. “Now how do we get out of here?” Cara assumed Arnie’s shape.
“Oh my God,” the squid’s jaw dropped. “You look... quite fetching like this,” she admitted.
“I look like Arnie!” the ‘vulture’ laughed.
“It sure looks a lot better on you than it did on him, I can tell you that,” she complimented her.
“Shut up, demon,” Cara winked at her. They stopped by the whale’s cell on their way out.
“Holy crap, where are you taking her, Arnie?” The ‘vulture’ had smiled at him.
“It’s me,” Cara said in her starfish voice despite her vulture form.
“So you two are making a run for it?” Renee raised a finger at Levi.
“We three are making a run for it,” she corrected him.
“How are you going to get me out of here?” the whale asked them. The ‘vulture’ belched, the keys to Levi’s cell that had been on Arnie’s belt coming out of her beak to fall into her hand so that she could use them to unlock the door to the whale’s cell.
“... Oh.” Levi flinched.
***
Sarah found Gabe guarding Annie’s cell with its keys at his belt.
“Well, well...” He was tapping his foot, arms crossed, shackles spinning on his finger. “Look who’s been evading the long arm of the law too long...” He emitted that trademark mocking seagull cry.
“The law’s made for people, chief...” She descended into a fighting stance. “... People aren’t made for the law,” the dragon finished.
“The law may be harsh...” He followed suit. “... But it’s still the law.” She roared.
Gabe drew his Taser to aim it at Sarah but she kicked it out of his hand. She dodged the his first punch then countered his second before he dodged her first, got hit by her second but countered her third, which hurt. That was her bad arm. The seagull tried to yank the dragon’s arm into an arm lock but she wrapped her tail around his ankle, pulling it up as she kicked him away. She parried his kick, he parried her first backhand then ducked under her second before she uppercutted him off the ground. Gabe backflipped in the air into a charging swoop that Sarah dodged, then he drew his nightstick to come at her but she avoided, grabbed and threw him, disarming him. As he rolled up into a dramatic kneel, he drew his gun and aimed it at her.
“All right, honey... Playtime’s over,” the seagull told the dragon, whose hands went up.
“Don’t you want to know the truth for yourself, chief?” They both turned their heads toward Annie, neither of them having expected her to address him so suddenly from her cell.
“What do you mean, ‘the truth’? There’s only one truth, I’ll have you know.” Annie sounded as though she was clucking her tongue, even though she technically didn’t have one.
“They don’t even tell you why she’s here, why you’re even guarding her in the first place?” She rolled her many eyes. “That’s so typical of them. Of course they wouldn’t care whether you’d know or not. Of course you wouldn’t care whether you knew or not either.” Annie shook from side to side.
“What difference does it make?” Gabe frowned. “All organizations compartmentalize information. Heaven tells me everything I need to know.” She gave him a dubious look.
“Are you sure about that? Because if you did know why they locked me up, I’m not so sure that you’d be saying that.” Annie sounded uncharacteristically confident about that.
“Why did they lock you up, then, if it’s so important?” The seagull was making sure not to take his eyes off Sarah, so that his aim at her wouldn’t be compromised. He’d be damned if he let the two of them distract him from his task – and that wasn’t a figure of speech.
“Tell me, chief – have you ever read a book called How to Actually Be Nice to People?” Gabe looked back at her indignantly.
“Are you implying I’m not actually nice to people?” He seemed outraged by the question.
“They really should’ve picked a different name for that book,” the dragon muttered.
“Forget I asked,” Annie waved aside. “The point is, heaven locked me up because I knew too much.”
“Well, they don’t lock people up for knowing too little,” the seagull responded understatedly.
“I learned that, in that book,” she went on patiently, “there were secrets that heaven didn’t want any of the angels working for it to know, secrets heaven believed that, if most angels knew about them, most angels would refuse to work for heaven anymore, heaven feared.” He scoffed.
“I don’t believe that for a second.” Gabe still hoped that Sarah would try to pull some sort of heroics against him, giving him an excuse to shoot her.
“What if I told you that, now that I do know those secrets, as an angel, I do no longer want to work for heaven, myself?” He shook his head.
“Heaven doesn’t want you working for it. That’s why they locked you up,” the seagull replied.
“So you could go on working for heaven, knowing they think you’d stop working for them if you knew the full story, without ever wondering what it could be, without ever caring that you’re being taken advantage of, for the rest of your life – probably forever...?” He stopped, and thought about Annie’s question for a moment.
“... Yes, I think I’d be fine with that,” Gabe shrugged.
So he shot her.
“Goddammit!” Sarah swore through her teeth, struggling to keep standing up while holding what had still been her good arm just a moment before.
“Any more brilliant plans?” the cop snarked at them.
That was when Ozzie, Camille, Sandra, Shaw, Allie, Hannah, Val, Sam, Cara, Levi and Renee walked in.
“You sure that’s a good idea, chief?” Allie asked the seagull as they surrounded him.
“... Yes, I do. I have a gun. None of you do. Angel to angel, I like those odds,” he replied.
“Izzat right now?” Gabe yelped as his gun seemed to leap out of his hands of its own accord. “That seems so reductive,” Ross shook his head as he aimed the seagull’s gun back at him while reappearing next to him.
“I’ll get you for this, Peepers!” Gabe snarled at Annie while raising his hands over his head.
“Dude, don’t call a dame that,” the goat stuck out his tongue disapprovingly. “Have some class.”
“I think I’d like to hear those secrets you were talking about just a moment ago,” Hannah said to Annie.
“All right then, strap yourself in,” Annie told them all as the squid tied up the seagull’s hands behind his back with her whip. “You’re in for a bumpy ride...”
***
“First of all, it turns out that, when Ezra says he gets his orders from God, he’s not really getting his orders from anyone. He’s just saying that. If there’s a God, Ezra doesn’t really have a direct line to him at all. But even that’s just scratching the surface. Do you know why heaven didn’t want you to give the secrets of magic to mortals, Ozzie? Why they killed her for it?”
“Because heaven wanted to maintain their superiority over mortals,” the goat replied.
“Yes, but it goes much deeper than that. Do you know why heaven is so desperate to keep you two lovebirds from making peace between heaven and hell?” Annie gestured at Allie.
“For the same reason as the other thing, I’m assuming, I’m just not sure what yet.” The dove had that much right, Annie granted.
“Do you know why Sasha’s drones and Legion are so similar, to each other and among themselves, why they’re so mindlessly obedient to heaven or hell without question, and can only be reached by Camille’s ability?”
“I think I might have a guess, but... Let’s way and see if I’m right,” Camille opined.
“You do not,” Sandra mock-punched the thrush’s arm.
“Why do you think that heaven was so vindictive about your attempt to share with mortals freely without even stealing, Sarah?”
“It seems to all come back to the superiority, just as earlier, but why?” the dragon wondered.
“Do you know why you have to put up with Jonas, Levi?” Annie asked him.
“I always assumed it was just because angels are assholes. Uh, no offense, ladies,” the whale apologized.
“There’s an element of that,” she admitted. “But it’s part of a wider picture. Do you know why heaven is so desperate to stop Finn from escaping from Carcer, Hannah? Why it was so important to heaven that he not resurrect mortals on his own on Earth?”
“Angels are superior assholes etcetera, get to the point...! I’m sorry. It’s been a rough day,” the sparrow explained.
“It all leads back to the same thing, everyone... Mortals are angels. Mortals are demons. Angels are mortals. Demons are mortals. They have been the whole time.”
“Just like in that fucking movie, you’re kidding?” Ozzie mock-punched the leopard’s arm.
“I shit you not,” Annie assured him, as unladylike of her as that may have been.
“What do you mean by that?” Cara asked her.
“The only thing that separates mortals from angels, demons, Legion and drones is that angels and demons have access to Finn’s ability to bring other people back to life. Angels and demons have mastered magic to a point at which they become ‘something else’ than mortals, but mortals... evolved into angels and demons, in a sense. And heaven doesn’t care much for people teaching about that evolution. It reveals that angels are fallible, that they’re just people, not these unquestionable forces of nature. Mortals who die never having questioned heaven or hell, who live for their whole lives without magic, become drones or Legion for heaven or hell.”
“So when Hannah and Finn would go to Earth to save mortals...” Allie trailed off darkly.
“The lucky ones became angels.” Camille and Shaw shuddered. To spend one’s whole life working hard and being ‘good’ because you’ve been promised a reward for it, only to end up continuing to work as a drone for all eternity, with nothing more to hope for... “Maude used to ‘recruit’ mortals so they’d become Legion or, if they were lucky, demons, similarly. Also without knowing. Finn used to bring back everyone all the time, just because he could. Finn loved everyone. But heaven locked up him to be able to have complete control over who lives and dies. If angels and demons die, but only angels get brought back...”
“Ezra’s committing genocide,” Hannah gasped. “He has been, for 1200 years...”
“That’s also how they bring back the mortals that die in the torture chambers that heaven owns in hell, isn’t it?” Renee figured out. “So they can die over and over while being tortured, but never stay dead?” Annie nodded.
“That’s their deterrent to make sure that mortals don’t become demons or Legion, yes... When heaven gets their hands on the mortals who would beforehand, but they can’t be made into drones or angels, heaven makes an example of them to draw more mortals to itself. You were one such mortal, Levi...” His jaw dropped. Heaven had tampered with Levi’s memories.
“You mean I’m a mortal? I always thought I was a demon!” His two coworkers had always thought the same thing. They’d had no idea that, for all this time, they’d been torturing a mortal in front of another mortal – or that they’d let a mortal into their hearts either...
“Heaven loves ‘ironic punishments,’ Levi. Jonas is real, and heaven is punishing him for his sin of gluttony by making you swallow him, but... Jonas is also your punishment for something you did on Earth.”
“I remember now...” the whale said grimly. “I had to get an abortion.” They turned to him, some of them needing a moment to understand before figuring it out.
“Oh shit,” the dove gasped, “did you get...?” Levi gave her a look.
“Oh, because it was ‘just’ an accident, I should’ve kept it?” Allie shook her head.
“I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry. The dysphoria would’ve been horrible,” the dove winced.
“So as an ‘ironic punishment’ for it, they forced you to ‘carry life you didn’t want inside you,’ so that the pain from it would always torment you.” All angels present cringed.
“Having life in you that doesn’t belong in you is a... horrific fate,” Shaw shuddered, remembering what Cassie did to Maura. “No one should ever have to endure this, Levi.”
“What does heaven care if mortals get abortions?” Sam asked Annie.
“It gives them one less mortal to turn into a drone in their war against hell. Why do you think heaven doesn’t care if we angels are queer, poly, trans, or generally don’t have kids?”
“More angels are competition... More mortals are cattle,” the goat understood.
“There’s still something I don’t understand,” Sarah asked Annie, “What happened to Helen? Why did she disappear? How does she fit into all of this?”
“Helen was Mike’s lover a long time ago, if you can believe that. He always had a thing for demons, even though he didn’t respect them much.” The raven exchanged a meaningful glance with the sparrow. This was part of what Sandra had been wary of, in terms of angels thinking of demons as existing to provide angels with exciting, temporary vacations. “When he accidentally got her pregnant, she wanted to keep it, but he ordered her to get rid of it.”
“That was why he asked me for Zepar’s Extractor,” the stork put together. “So he locked her up, then captured me on my way out of the Hive to keep us quiet, so we wouldn’t ruin his precious reputation.”
“Exactly. A child of a demon and angel risked exposing the similarity between the two.”
“So I was tortured in hell for getting an abortion by someone who ordered someone else to get one...?” Levi said through gritted teeth. “By nothing but a self-serving hypocrite...?”
“I told you it’d be a bumpy ride,” Annie said understatedly. They still had to free Finn...
***
They walked into the room that had Finn’s cell in it to find Las standing in front of it. Rob was lying on the ground next to the dog, the eagle’s neck broken, the key to the phoenix’s cell still on his belt. Heaven had freed Thomas’ boyfriend to get Sandra from him, and there he was.
“Ah, fresh meat!” The demonic canine’s eyes glowed and he bared his slobbery fangs, completely unfazed to see so many of them enter.
“Look out, he’s...!” But Finn’s warning was too late.
Las killed Ozzie, Cara, Camille, Hannah, Levi, Sarah, Ross, Shaw, Gabe, Annie, Val, Sam, Renee and Sandra in seven seconds. He turned, finally, toward Allie, blood dripping from his maw as he looked at her hand extended toward him from his predatory crouch as though it had been some sort of dog toy for him to chew on.
“Bad dog,” the dove said, upturning her palm as Las raised an eyebrow at her quizzically. With that, she started clenching her fingers, his whole body tensing up, unable to move as the dog realized that his feet were no longer touching the ground beneath him. “No biscuit.”
Allie’s eyes became shrouded in flames as she clenched her fingers tighter and tighter, Las yelping more and more plaintively as he became smaller and smaller in the air in front of her, until her open hand had become a fist and the dog could no longer have been detected by a microscope. The dove, her eyes returning to normal, grabbed the key from Rob’s belt and used it to unlock Finn’s cell, who brought Ozzie, Cara, Camille, Hannah, Levi, Sarah, Ross, Shaw, Gabe, Annie, Val, Sam, Renee, Sandra and even Rob back to life. The sparrow hugged Finn dearly. He was free! “What did... What did you do to Las?” the eagle asked Allie.
“Do you know when people say about someone they hate that this person belongs in a ‘special place in hell’?” They nodded. “Well, he wishes he was somewhere that good.” They shivered at the ember that they could still see burning in her eye...
***
They found Yuri and Helen’s cells on their way out, freeing both of them as they escaped themselves. Helen told them that Mike still had Zepar’s Extractor up in his Skyscraper and that, if they recovered it, they could also use it to free Maura from Cassie. Shaw, Sandra and Camille, desperate to get their fourth Musketeer back, hatched a plan to do just that. Ozzie and Ross offered to help. Cara and Renee wanted to help, angry at Mike for what he’d done to Levi. Sarah’s arms were still busted, unfortunately, but she offered to at least be their lookout for their heist. Val just wanted to return to their pyramid in the Waste by that point, too shaken by recent events to help. Annie gave them information about the layout that proved invaluable.
The stork used her long beak to pick the front door lock. The starfish assumed the griffin’s shape, giving Darlene her best performance evaluation ever. Renee and Levi teamed up to knock down a door whose lock couldn’t be picked. The thrush took a splinter out of Mike’s guard lion’s paw, making it purr as she petted it while the others went by. The raven hid to the side, starting a fight between two of the security guards only to take the key to the door they were guarding from their belts after they knocked each other out. The goat seduced the griffin in his office while the leopard became invisible to sneak past Mike’s camera security system, bringing back Zepar’s Extractor with him while Hannah and Allie flew Ozzie out the window.
“So... What was he like anyway?” Ross couldn’t help asking the goat.
“Eh, I’ve had worse, I guess,” Ozzie shrugged. “I wouldn’t do it again,” he added.
With Zepar’s Extractor in hand, Shaw went off and tracked down Cassie, who was still ‘borrowing’ Maura’s shape for her own use, to find her sitting under a tree in an apple orchard with a half-eaten apple in her hand. The stork landed up in the apple tree’s branches over the angel’s head, unnoticed, then dropped down upside-down in front of her, slicing the apple in half with her sword as Cassie ducked under her slash before landing on her feet. The angel rolled out of the way of the sword’s arc down and did a kip up over Shaw’s low slash before the stork finally used Zepar’s Extractor on her. Cassie shrieked and shrieked as she was ripped out of the crow, Sasha flying toward her in a panic as Shaw escaped with Maura’s limp body.
Finn brought back Sally for Allie, Maude for Hannah, Ozzie’s witch girlfriend, and his mortal. From then on, he decided, he was going to bring back everyone he wanted, all the time.
***
“Oh my God, you’re alive!” Ozzie couldn’t believe his eyes.
“I’m happy to see you again too! It’s been such a long time.” She ran at him, throwing her arms around him as he threw her arms around her. “Of course, it’s been a lot longer for you than it’s been for me, I gather...” He would always owe Finn for this. She turned her head to his befuddled partner in crime. “You must be Ross...” The goat had lived with her on Earth for only the space of a single lifetime, after his own escape from hell but before the leopard had been able to follow him there. “He used to talk about you all the time, you know?” Ross tilted his head.
“All good things, I hope?” She smiled.
“He spoke about you glowingly, Ross. He missed you a lot. I wish I could have seen his face when he got you back.” The leopard smiled back at her.
“He’s told me quite a bit about you too, now that you mention it... I’m glad I did get to see his face when he got you back,” he answered her, turning to look at Ozzie as he did. “We’ve never had a mortal work with us before, have we, Ozzie?”
“Not straight up, no,” the goat shook his head.
“Having a mortal’s perspective might help make us... funnier, don’t you think so, love?” Ross asked him.
“I think you’re right,” Ozzie nodded.
“See, the first thing you have to realize about mortals,” she started as the goat walked between them, his arms around their shoulders with their arms around his own, “is they’ve been taught immortality would be boring. That’s part of how they justify mortality to themselves,” she explained.
“Oh my God, Ozzie, we’ve got to help these people,” the leopard gasped. “Think how bored they’d have to be to think something like that right now.” She laughed.
“I’m sure we’ll think of something, Ross, we always do, don’t we?” Ross nodded.
“Tell me, ma’am,” the leopard asked her, “do you like... crimes?” She grinned at them like the witch she was.
“Fun is a crime,” she answered cheerfully.
“I told you she was awesome,” Ozzie told him as they walked off together into the sunset.
***
“Do you know the story of Baldur, Finn?” Ezra had found Finn alone in the High Council conference room, lying on his back with his arms crossed behind his head, looking at the ceiling.
“Hi, Ezra.” The phoenix’s mind seemed to be elsewhere.
“Baldur, you see, was invincible to everything but mistletoe,” the ice scorpion went on as he slowly walked around the conference table. “So the gods would play at throwing sticks and stones at him, they’d hit him with every weapon they had. It was a game to them.” Finn turned his head toward Ezra without getting up from the table. “Until that one time someone finally threw a weapon made out of mistletoe at him. That time, Finn, that time... Baldur didn’t shrug it off.” The phoenix looked back up at the ceiling, unsure of how to interpret the ice scorpion’s story.
“Don’t you think it’s weird how we call them ‘mortals,’ Ezra?” Finn was just lying there having a conversation with him, not seeming to care that Ezra would have been responsible for having kept him locked up for all this time. “I mean, there they are, perfectly alive one minute just like us, and then–” He snapped his finger. “– dead, just like that, like they were never even alive in the first place. It’s the oddest thing, and yet... We call them ‘mortals.’ We define them, completely, by this one fact, by this one design flaw about them that we don’t suffer from. Don’t you think that’s weird, Ezra?” The ice scorpion didn’t answer. “Gosh, it’s been such a long time since I’ve been here,” the phoenix shook his head. “I remember when we used to –”
Ezra killed him.
***
“Oh God, FINN...!” Rafe didn’t have time to recover from his shock after walking into the conference room before he stumbled forward after Ezra had just hit him on the back of the head.
“It was YOU...!” The ice scorpion spat at the monkey. “YOU gave that book to Allie that caused this whole thing. YOU let this strike go on and on until it was too late to fix it. YOU gave Belle that tip she gave Sarah that gave us all away! And now, you think you can just drag your shitty boyfriend out of jail, and have him make a mockery of everything that I, the Angel of Death, work for every day of my life? I DON’T THINK SO...!”
“Ezra, what have you done...?” He rolled out of the scythe arc’s range to his feet. “You’ve doomed us all...” Rafe dodged the scythe as acrobatically as he could, but he was hurt.
“No, Rafe...” Ezra raised his scythe above his head over the cornered monkey. “You did.” Before the ice scorpion could bring his scythe down on the monkey, a feather-knife flew across the room from the door, pinning the scythe to the wall.
“You killed him.” Hannah saw an ice sculpture of Finn, lounging on the conference table.
“That’s right, honey,” Ezra turned to her clicking, frost gathering around him. “Now I’m going to kill you... Neil.” The sparrow suddenly stopped moving. “That’s right, Neil,” the ice scorpion started slowly walking toward her. “Did you know that, as annoyingly independent as angels and demons are compared to drones and Legion, you can get complete control of an angel or a demon if you call them by their True Name, Neil?” Ezra was near Hannah by then and, when he raised his hand to choke her, he could see the panic in her eyes as she seemed to struggle against an invisible hold preventing her from defending herself from him. “OW...!” The ice scorpion crumpled forward, pushed away from her by the force of her kick to his crotch.
“Did you know someone’s deadname is no longer their True Name, asshole?” Without waiting for an answer, the sparrow started spinning in front of him, dissolving into a cloud of dandelion spores that lodged themselves in the floor, wall and ceiling everywhere around them. Finally, an enormous carnivorous plant emerged from the ground in front of Ezra and, bending forward over the ice scorpion to snap its vegetal maw shut around him, arched its stem back to swallow him right up like a great big popsicle. With this, the giant carnivorous plant retracted itself back into the Earth, the dandelion spores returned from the walls, floor and ceiling to where Hannah had been standing and reassembled into her, just as she was.
“The King is dead,” she said somberly. “Long live the King.”
***
“As unimpressed as we are with you right now, Rafe, yes, what Ezra did was even worse than that. Keeping Finn locked up was one thing – we could still use him. With Ezra and Finn both dead, we can’t even get new drones now! Ugh, what was he thinking?” Sasha was exasperated.
“Well,” he told her, “I guess you’re going to have to be a lot more careful about not getting them killed now, aren’t you?” She grumbled. “I like the new look, by the way,” Rafe added.
“Oh, you mean these?” Sasha gestured at the worms that now came and went in and out of holes all over her body. “Yes, we... we like it too, to be honest,” she admitted, almost embarrassed. “Cassie’s, well we’ve... We’ve never been one before, at least not like this. Cassie’s always... existed in unwilling targets before. She never experienced what it’s like to exist as someone who wanted her in them. We... can live with this.” Sasha looked down.
“There are still angels who want to work with us now, you know,” the monkey said. “Even having found out everything that’s going on, on some level, enough of them mean well deep down that they still believe that heaven can be salvaged somehow, that it can be turned into what they were taught it should be.”
“And, of course,” she reminded him, “there are those who still do because they don’t mind any of what we did, who will stand by any abuse of force, provided they benefit from it.” Rafe sighed, nodding. “But what would we even have them do? With demons and angels going around telling mortals what we did, who among them would still come to us?”
“Have you ever thought we might want mortals to learn the truth, to learn magic, to become angels and demons like us, rather than drones and Legion?” Sasha looked at him disbelievingly.
“Did you see how fast this whole mess got out of control with even just a few angels and demons involved, Rafe? Can you imagine how much worse it would be if we were dealing with millions, billions of angels and demons, all with their own interests, powers, and agendas? It’s hard enough to keep track as it is, isn’t it?” She buzzed, annoyed.
“On the other hand,” the monkey started, “have you ever noticed that, as rare as some of our abilities are, there are at least a few of us who can do some of the same things as it is?” Sasha nodded.
“What’s your point?” She tilted her head.
“How many mortals do you think would have to learn enough magic to become angels and demons until one of them evolved with the Finn’s power? Or with Ezra’s?” Sasha stopped, and thought about what he’d said.
“We... suppose that could be... good, possibly? If we could get control of them somehow,” she added.
“All right then, why don’t you consider this,” Rafe went on, less warmly. “You heard about what happened to Legion, didn’t you?” A shiver went down her spine.
“You’re bluffing,” Sasha hoped.
“Try me.” She growled.
“So... What happens to the Council now?” she asked him.
“That’s right, with Ezra dead and with... the two of you counting as one now, we do have two gaps in the High Council to fill, don’t we...” The monkey sighed.
“We need five angels on the High Council and five angels on the Low Council. That’s how it’s always worked.” The more things changed around them, the more she clung to familiar things.
“Mike is still around, at least.” With the dirt that Rafe now had on Mike, he was sure that it was going to be easier than before to get the griffin to go along with him about a lot of things...
“What about Rob?” Sasha suggested.
“Rob quit,” the monkey answered matter-of-factly. “We’ll have to find someone to replace him, too.”
“We guess we have no choice but to take Yuri back now, do we?” She stuck her tongue out. “What about Sam?” He blinked.
“What about her?” Rafe asked her.
“She’s got a fairly solid record, in general. Very loyal. Never questioned orders. Why don’t we put her on the High Council?” He tried to keep pokerface but, knowing that Allie now had a direct line to the bear’s ear, he saw this as a win for ‘his’ side that she was unaware of.
“... Yes, I think that could work,” the monkey agreed. “We need to find someone to replace her on the Low Council then, though,” he noted.
“Rudy’s still working for us, right?”
“Rudy became Yuri’s apprentice. He says he wants to learn how to make toys for children in real life now.” Sasha rolled her eyes. “That said... Yes. He does still work for us.”
“Well, beggars can’t be choosers we suppose. At least he knows how we run things” she tried to tell herself. “We can’t promote him to the High Council though. He’s still too out of it.”
“That much, we agree about,” Rafe acquiesced.
“Why don’t we promote Arnie?” Pokerface. He almost did a spit-take, but pokerface, he scolded himself. “We mean, we were going to give him a spot on the Low Council, weren’t we?”
“That’s true,” he acknowledged.
“And, he’s always been loyal, and never questioned heaven’s orders, did he?” The monkey shook his head.
“That he did not.” Oh man. Cara at the High Council, posing as Arnie. It was too perfect. “We just need to come up with someone to replace the spot he’d have had at the Low Council.”
“So that leave us with what, now?” she asked him.
“Two empty slots at the Low Council,” Rafe reminded her.
“Okay, let’s see... Allie gave herself up willingly when Sam went to capture her, didn’t she?” He nodded. “And she killed Las, a powerful demon who had just killed a whole bunch of angels, without ever killing a single angel herself?” The monkey concurred again. “Well then, congratulate her, she’s getting a promotion,” Sasha shrugged. “What about you, any ideas?”
“How about Dawn?”
“You think she’d still take her old job back?” she asked.
“She misses it a lot, I hear,” Rafe replied.
***
“So... What’s it like living with Maude here in Birdhaven?”
“It’s not bad,” Hannah answered Rafe. “Cara, Levi and Renee all moved here to become a poly triad of rogue bakers. The townsfolk really took to them.”
“What about Annie and Sarah?” He remembered Annie well.
“They both work for Belle now. They love their jobs, they tell me.” The monkey smiled.
“Good. Annie will get the reputation of being the most polite demon in hell in no time, I’m sure.” The sparrow nodded.
“Camille’s acting as a go-between between Belle and Legion now... Those pigs seems to have become a lot easier to deal with now that they seized the means of production, so to speak,” she noted. “Belle even took the pig head pike down in front of the Lair.” Rafe’s eyes widened.
“That, I did not expect,” he admitted. “Are you still seeing Allie?” Hannah sighed.
“Technically, yeah... Things are just really different with her still living in heaven with Sam while I’m living here with Maude instead... Allie comes here to visit Sally and me now and then, so she’s still with us, it’s just... different. I don’t know. The big jailbreak made everything weird, you know?”
“You telling me,” the monkey nodded understatedly.
“No shit,” she acknowledged. “I wonder if things will ever be the way they were again...” He gave her a pained look.
“Well, I... suppose if we’d wanted them to stay just the same, we wouldn’t have worked quite so hard at making them change so much, would we?” The sparrow looked at him, bittersweet.
“How are things back in heaven with the Council?” she asked.
“Oh... Better, in some ways. I mean, it’s a lot easier to get a lot of the right things done, I can’t complain about that, right?” Hannah looked at Rafe expectantly.
“But...?”
“Oh, Hannah...” He sighed. “I miss Finn... I miss him so much.” She hugged the monkey.
“I miss him too... It doesn’t seem to be getting any easier,” the sparrow shook her head. “Do you... Do you blame Allie and I for what happened? Do you think that, if she and I hadn’t escaped from the Gold Cage, Finn would still be alive today?” He shook his head.
“No, of course not. It was Ezra’s fault Finn died. I can’t blame Levi for that, or Yuri... I can’t blame any of them for what happened but myself.” She looked into Rafe’s eyes sadly.
“Don’t blame yourself, Rafe...” Hannah remembered having defended him from Allie when the two of them had first been talking to Sandra. “You did everything you could.” He scoffed.
“Everything I could! That was what I always told myself, wasn’t it? Oh, I wanted Finn back so I told Levi to stop his strike, didn’t I? I wanted Yuri to replace Levi, so I told him to stop too, didn’t I? Oh, I did everything but tell the rest of the High Council that they could get bent with torture altogether, that it was barbaric, that heaven had no business conducting such ghastly nonsense in the first place, oh no! No, I made every possible accommodation to their unreasonable demands I could. I bent around their inflexibility like a contortionist, and what else would they do but take advantage each time I did? I was their good pet liberal...! I always worked within the system but I never questioned it, the way a radical would. The way you did.”
“Oh, Rafe...” The sparrow hugged the monkey again. They both felt like crying.
“Do you... Do you think there’s a God, Hannah?” She gave him a quizzical look. “Beyond and above everything we’ve been taught, I mean, not the God that Ezra would tell us about, but some God, somewhere, somehow, who made mortals, heaven, hell, angels, demons, drones, Legion, and who... who wanted what’s good for us on some level, even during everything we’ve been through? Who, in His own way maybe, even wanted us to figure all of this out, who was pleased that we freed heaven from Ezra, that we fought for equality, for justice, just the way we always hoped we could, simply... on another level than all this...?” Hannah could tell what a rough time Rafe was having. It didn’t seem like the right time to admit to him she no longer did.
“I don’t know, Rafe...” The sparrow shook her head. “I just don’t know.” She stopped, and thought about what he’d said a bit longer. “Hey, Rafe?” The monkey turned his head toward her.
“What?”
“If there’s a chance that a mortal will evolve someday into a demon or an angel with the power to bring people back again, just like Finn could...” He encouraged her to continue. “... Well, would you be willing to work with me toward a future like that, right now? If, if someone like this eventually exists, will you help me convince them to bring him back so we can be with him again, just like old times...?” Rafe stopped, and thought about her question before answering.
“... Yes, Hannah,” he replied. “Yes, I think I can do that,” he smiled.
