As Raphael pulled to a stop, I opened the car door and swung it shut carefully, closing it as quietly as I could. Raphael did the same, pocketing the keys as he squinted around him. I motioned with my head, and he gave a little nod. We headed off the road immediately.
Dark witches used regular magic more than they did their particular skills. They taught one another about the spells of the dark arts, but they rarely used them. Those arts required a very special ingredient. Either by tapping into the power of Heaven through my feather or by using actual pieces of the feather in their spells. Since I had ripped out my grace, they hadn’t been able to use the first option for their magic.
Real magic could slow an angel down, but it took green magic, the manipulation of plants and the world, to stop us.
There was likely a coven, which meant that they could pull such a thing off, binding us in trees or roots, even opening up a hole in the ground if they were strong enough, and burying us alive.
Not a problem for Raphael, but it was a problem for me. It would take a little time for me to dig my way out of the grave or the roots.
We heard them before we saw them, chanting away in the ridiculous language. They thought it was Enochian, but it wasn’t anywhere near that. Mortals could learn to read Enochian, but they couldn’t pronounce any of the words correctly. Heaven had taught the humans the language long in the past, and generations of teaching it in secret had twisted it into something else entirely.
It never worked as Enochian, that much we knew for certain.
Light blasted upward, like a spotlight almost, but blue in nature. It reached for the heavens and disappeared someplace near the moon.
Apparently the ritual had already begun.
We crested a small hill and came into view.
Sera was tied to some kind of altar on her stomach. Her back was facing the sky, her shirt having been ripped open. She was screaming and struggling as the witches began their ritual. Nothing appeared to be happening to her, but that didn’t mean the wings weren’t starting the process of tearing through her flesh.
The first bit of chanting was angel warding that surrounded Sera, meant to keep us from reaching her. I ended up stuck outside of a glowing white line that only I could see. Angel warding was the kind of magic that we typically destroyed, not allowing the witches to pass that information on but the dark witches always managed it somehow.
Raphael walked over the line and glanced at me, frowning just a little as he did so.
“Angel warding doesn’t stop you?” I asked.
He glanced down at the line, then looked back up at me.
“That’s not angel warding,” he said.
Magic wasn’t meant to harm us at all. We were to walk right through it.
Raphael headed for Sera as I stood there, poking the air with my toe and causing ripple effects of light across the circle.
If it’s not angel warding, what is it?
Sera began screaming as I stood there, looking like a fool. I was little more than a face to look at, at that point. Glancing around, I spotted the witches standing to the side, no warding around them.
There had been a time when dark witches would sell their souls to devils and demons for protection during their rituals. They would protect their sacrifice and then have a new, different layer of protection for themselves in the hopes of slowing me down.
The new generation was a great deal stupider than they had been before. If I couldn’t get through the warding to save Sera, the first place I was going was there.
I hesitated, just a moment, and pulled my blade from the astral plane. The blade began flaring in the presence of dark witches.
Or, more of, flaring in response to bits of myself existing in the real world. The blade was taking on the otherworldly blue that it had once had before I had fallen from grace. Little flames were springing up along the edges of the blade, responding to the feather that the witches must have had with them.
They were using dark magic in the ritual of theirs.
The only kind of magic that could contain a full angel was the magic that used the parts of an angel’s body. Dark witches had succeeded in capturing a lower angel or two with a bit of my feather in the past. It had not ended well for them at all.
They might be my problem to fix, but Heaven wasn’t going to allow one of its own to be captured and stripped for parts by mortals.
The full force of Heaven had come down to rescue the angel. Wiping out most of the dark witches and forcing them to start over again.
I glanced up at the dark sky.
Heaven wasn’t coming to help.
“Wanks,” I said, uncertain if I was talking about Heaven or the witches.
As I walked toward them, the blade hummed in warning. I swung the sword forward and poked ahead of me, like a blind man tapping with his cane. It didn’t look dangerous at all, but it was effective. My blade was capable of cutting through my being.
It removed the magic which would have held me, resulting in an ineffective spell that I could walk through. Stepping over wards, and some snare spell meant to capture me, I drew closer to my targets.
They were so wrapped up with collecting an angel specifically, they hadn’t bothered with regular magic to capture a physical being. Across the spells, I headed straight for the witches. They were almost all involved with the spell involving Sera.
It was obviously more complicated magic than I thought.
They should have just opened a gateway to the astral plane, then reached through and taken what they wanted. Instead, they were bringing the wings into the real world through Sera’s back. It was a longer and more complicated process because the wings had to take on a physical form without the portal to the astral plane.
The witches were creating something out of nothing. Of course, that would take more magic than just opening a portal.
When had witches gotten so stupid?
I was embarrassed for them.
That didn’t stop me from cutting through them. Without all their members, their chanting stopped. It meant Sera was safe.
For the moment.
The witches turned on me. The older ones began weaving spells in the air, their hands in little claws as they chanted. The younger ones physically threw themselves at me. Mobbing me.
Angel or not, I was in a physical body. I couldn’t slip into the astral plane with so much distraction around me. If I had had my grace, I would have been able to scoot over, taking the women with me. They would die, I would live, and I could just pop back and grab a few more.
Instead, I struggled with six women who were hanging off of me. When I hit one, she was replaced with another.
A wall of blue hit me.
Which I assume was supposed to be magic meant to stop me. The wave rolled over me instead. It didn’t even tickle, just rolled right over me. Not even through me. I didn’t even feel it. It was just a show of light. Pretty light, but still useless.
And to think, I had been worried about confronting them.
Dark witches had once been a thing to be feared. Whenever they got too close to something, I would sweep through and kill all the masters and apprentices I could find. I would burn their spell books and erase anything of them that I could, but they always came back. Like some kind of bug infestation.
They had lost their connections with real magic. They had little more than parlour tricks and a few dark magic spells.
They were nothing more than bitter Wiccans.
But even Wiccans were more effective against us than witches. They at least learned to defend themselves physically and didn’t just rely on their off-brand, watered down magic the few times in history they had caused problems.
“You look like you could use some help,” Raphael called from a distance away.
I growled in response and flung one of the women off of me. I turned and glared at Raphael as he stood there, the smug bastard. His arms were crossed, and he was smiling like it was a good old time.
“Sera?” I snapped.
Raphael shrugged. He made a vague motion as a witch jumped on my back.
He meant that Sera had run off. He likely knew where she was going but wasn’t saying anything in case the witches got the upper hand.
And he was just standing there, letting me handle it because he had already done the hero thing and rescued her. I swung my arm and caught one of the women upside the head.
“Help!” I shouted.
He made a face.
“But I’m just a healer.”
“Raphael!” I bellowed as another witch jumped on my back.
My knees went out from under me. I hit the ground as yet another leaped onto me. They were winning through sheer numbers, and I didn’t like it one bit.
When Sam had gone to save Grace, Heaven had intervened. He had been able to tap into her for a few moments to move the world itself and effect a change. But there was just me, no blinding lights overhead, no saving at the last minute.
Just Raphael standing there smugly, watching me get beat on by a bunch of women.
“Please?”
He sighed heavily like it was an imposition.
“I suppose since you asked politely,” he said as if he had no interest in doing that whatsoever.
I’m going to kill him.
Raphael grabbed the nearest witch and vanished. I continued struggling with the witches that were on me as Raphael popped in and out of the physical plane as if it was no big deal. As I threw the last witch off of me, he reached out, caught her, and tossed her through to the astral plane.
She screamed as she went, echoing across the universe and reverberating with something inside of me.
“I don’t think I like you doing that,” I said.
“I threw her directly into Hell,” Raphael said. “Would you prefer they possibly pollute the astral plane?”
“You took them all to Hell?” I shouted.
“I didn’t go in, just threw them through the gate,” he said, motioning off to the side with a thumb. “You want that one?”
“No, you seem to be enjoying this,” I growled back.
He smiled. “It is pretty fun. Feels good.”
Raphael turned toward the witch off to the side, who was kneeling and dabbling with something on the ground. He just lifted his hand and pop. Her head disappeared.
I miss that.
Humans typically thought we were the type of angels who sat on clouds and strummed on lyres, but that was the Heavenly Choir. The arc angels were built to attack and bring forth Father’s almighty vengeance.
Sometimes a head going pop was funny to us.
I glanced around us, then strolled toward Raphael. He had his phone out and was doing that video chat thing with Gabe, showing him what was on the ground. Gabe took pictures of it, and the call ended as I peered over Raphael’s shoulder.
There were a bunch of symbols and nonsense inside a circle. There were also little bones that were older looking and a bit charred, what I prayed to Father wasn’t virgin’s blood, and in the middle of it, all was a little glowing tube. I reached out and took the tube from its spot, then scuffed my foot around, breaking the circle and destroying as many of the symbols as I could with a smudge of my foot.
“Make sure he doesn’t send that to the witches,” I said as I brought the tube closer to my eyes. “That look like the end of a feather to you?”
“It does,” Raphael said, squinting at the little thing in my hand. “All the trouble they caused and… that was literally one feather? I thought you were joking or, I don’t know, trying not to make it seem like such a big deal.”
“No, one feather. It hurt when they plucked this one. Which reminds me. Where’d she go?”
“That way,” Raphael said with a vague motion. “The wings were beginning to emerge into the real world, but once I broke the circle, they started to slip back inside of her. I told her to run, and she ran.”
“What are we going with?” I asked. “Crazy people? Cultists? Government experimentation, haven’t used that one in a while.”
“How about the truth?” Raphael asked.
We watched each other for a long moment. I wondered if he was serious. He was probably wondering what my reaction would be to the whole thing.
Drawing in a slow, steady breath, I looked around again, then nodded once.
“Okay,” I said. “But you go first because I feel like she’s going to try to club one of us with a rock. Oh, and the whole bleeding.”
“Bleeding?”
“There’s literal… Raphael!”
He looked down and paled in the light of the moon. Immediately he headed off in a sprint, headed for the other side of the field. As he ran, he called our Sera’s name. I did the same. We searched for a good ten minutes before Raphael came to a complete standstill.
He turned and headed off in another direction. All of a sudden his back was stiff, and he was marching instead sprinting. I followed after him, having seen that walk before. He knew where she was.
As he pulled to a stop, I reached for my phone. I turned on the flashlight in the phone and lit up the area in front of me. Raphael knelt at Sera’s side.
She had dropped to the ground. She was face down, fingers working on the earth as if trying to drag herself away. Raphael settled a hand on her shoulder and began talking to her in Enochian. That always seemed to calm people down.
Sera’s back was ripped open. Two parallel lines down either side of her spine. Torn and bloody, but I swore I saw a feather in there twitch as she whimpered. Blood coated her back, covering the marks of the ink that had woven the wings into her soul.
Raphael made a hissing sound at me. I backed up but kept my light somewhere near Sera’s feet.
He did his work on her. Which was to say, Raphael knit back the flesh and fixed all the damage caused by the witches as they tried to pull the wings into existence. His kind of healing wasn’t just physical. It would have reached into Sera’s soul and begun removing the ink that had attempted to stitch Raphael’s wings into my grace.
When he was done, he knelt back and sighed.
“Okay, I’m not a hundred percent,” he said, sounding strange.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
He turned to the side and vomited. There wasn’t much more than stomach acid coming up. When he did that, we always looked away because he insisted it was the polite thing to do.
I stiffened, looked up and then down and around.
Darkness surrounded us. Moon overhead, of course, I knew that already, but something wasn’t right. Something we had missed.
Something big.
“It was day when we left the estate,” I said before it had fully dawned on me.
Raphael wiped at his lips, spitting to the side and wiping again before he turned back toward me. He seemed to struggle, a finger motioned around, and he frowned.
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“Sam was yelling at us this morning about the fight last night,” I said. “How did it become night while we drove and we didn’t realize?”
“City limits,” Raphael said. “I think it happened at city limits.”
“What the fuck?” I asked. “Can you time travel?”
“I can, but not with you in the vehicle,” Raphael said slowly, the words drawn out as he seemed to grasp what I had been trying to say. “That’s… if Heaven interfered why couldn’t we have arrived early? Saved all this trouble?”
“The dark magic?” I asked. “If it were angel warding, it would have stopped me but not you, but we were in the vehicle together, so time just got all wavy?”
Raphael was quiet a moment.
“I do recall a Heavenly Host who got stuck on a boat with a human and time changed pace when the angel tried to leave but was being held captive. I think. Or was that a story?”
“Which means we barely made it in time.”
“Or Heaven did intercede,” Raphael muttered. “Could you be useful and pick her up?”
“I can’t carry you both. The last time you puked after healing was when Samael was dragged back from Hell. You passed out for a decade.”
“I can make it to the car,” Raphael said. “And if I pass out for a decade, I fully expect some oral when I wake up.”
“Get her for a decade, give you a little oral, I can agree to that,” I said.
I knelt and pulled Sera’s limp form off the ground. It was as I was adjusting her weight that I looked down and saw Raphael staring up at me with his mouth hanging open.
“Are you going to pass out on the field?” I asked as I began walking away, taking Sera with me.
Behind me, I heard him coming, but I also heard the uncertain footfall. At the car, I stopped and turned, watching Raphael stand in the field, hands on his hips, glaring at me.
“Well,” I said. “Come on! You have the keys, you ninny.”
“I’m not a ninny,” he called from where he stood.
“Then why are you over there?”
He mumbled something at his feet. That was his childishness coming out, something that Samael thought was endearing but always came out at the wrong time.
“Get over here,” I said sternly.
Raphael grumbled something and came toward me. The car’s headlights flashed, indicating that the doors had unlocked. He reached around me and opened the back door for me. I slipped Sera into the back seat, laying her down.
We both looked Sera, then at one another.
He took the door gently from me and closed it quietly. Peering into the back seat, he frowned.
“Are you wondering what I’m wondering?”
“If it’s fun to wake up as you get thrown off a back seat of a car because someone stopped too quickly?” I asked.
“Yeah, that’s about it,” he said.
Then he turned back to the field. He frowned again. The quiet of the night encroached on us. Balance returning to the world slowly but surely. It would be at least a week until the physical plane recovered from what the witches had tried to do, and they hadn’t even begun to succeed.
But at least it would recover.
“Michael.”
“Yes, Raphael?”
“Humans don’t like it when you kill a bunch of humans and then act like it’s no big deal,” he said.
“But it’s not a—shit.”
“Call Lillith?” he asked.
“You do it. I don’t need her trying to slap me through the phone.”