We called Lillith while standing outside the car because we wanted to know how to approach the topic of what had happened. Of course, then Lillith asked what happened. I explained it to her and the different spells and bits that I recalled the witches saying, then how they all disappeared.
She just told us to treat it like we had killed a bunch of angels. The notion made me uncomfortable, but I do believe that was the point of telling us that.
Michael, on the other hand, just shrugged.
He had killed angels before, and I think it bothered him more than he let on. Execution was also a part of his duty in Heaven at the beginning of time, however. The Heavenly Host expected that of him, so he never talked about it or how uncomfortable the notion made him feel.
After the call, we drove very, very carefully. Every time I had to apply the brakes, I was afraid Sera would fall off the seat and end up wedged between it and the front seats. Or wake up to her nose breaking because she went face first into the front seats.
At the estate, we stopped. I looked at the time and sighed.
“What?” Michael asked.
“It’s now two in the morning,” I said. “We’ve lost an entire day, basically.”
“Does that mean the spell is still active?” he asked.
We shared a look. I motioned with my chin, and Michael pulled out his phone. He looked through the call log, for the one we had placed to Lillith.
“Forty-five minutes ago,” he said. “No, dark witches have this weird thing with midnight. It just took time there to clean up, and to drive back.”
“Thank goodness,” I said. “Can you imagine losing days every time we try to leave the city?”
He glanced back at Sera.
“How do we decide who gets to carry her in?” he asked, then looked at me.
“This time, it’s you. If I pick up any weight, I will be sick. Next time is me because that’s two lifts for you.”
“And then?” he asked, lowering his voice with another glance to the back.
“Michael, the and then is really up to all three of us, not us alone, and not her alone. Relationships with humans are about compromise and talking it out. You can’t just join together and then separate and just know it all.”
He was quiet a moment, then he nodded. He at least understood that the way angels came together in Heaven wasn’t how humans came together. Angels shared memories and thoughts and feelings during pleasure. Humans did not.
“I don’t know how to talk to humans.”
“You also don’t know how to communicate without the meshing in Heaven,” I said. “You never compromise.”
“Says the guy that Sam has described as ‘the only one more stubborn than Michael,’” he countered.
“Just get out of the car,” I said.
I climbed out and closed the door without being quiet about it. I was hoping that the sound of it would wake Sera up.
Michael opened the back door and leaned in, setting a hand on her. He gave her a little shake, which was relatively gentle for Michael. He usually shook a body so hard that they ended up falling off whatever they had been sleeping on.
Through the window, I watched Sera stir, a frown creasing her brow as she shifted in the backseat. I walked around the car as Michael shook her again, then pulled her up. He helped her out of the car.
Sera was looking around, confusion plain on her features as her head moved this way and that, trying to piece together what she remembered, and where she was. What I had don’t to her hadn’t affected her memory at all, but the trauma of what the witches had tried to do could cause all sorts of lasting damage.
Michael kept a firm grip on Sera’s hand as she stiffened. He kept that grip because we had saved more than one person in the past, only to have them bolt when they woke in an unfamiliar place and hurt themselves by running headlong into something they didn’t see was there.
“We didn’t drug you,” I said carefully.
“I take Judo,” she said. “If I thought you did, you’d be on the ground begging for your mommy. What happened?”
“What do you remember?” Michael asked.
“Weird Wiccan bitches,” Sera said. “They showed up at my door. And a field. They monologued a bunch. Are you two actually angels? Like real angels? I thought you were joking.”
“Yes,” I said.
“As in archangels,” Sera said slowly. Like she could believe we were angels, but being arcs would cross a line or something.
“Yes,” I said. “And it’s arc, not arch. We are not doorways into buildings, or other planes of existence, though we can pop between them when we have our graces.”
“Michael the sword-bearing lunatic who smites people, and Raphael the… the androgynous healer…”
“We’re all androgynous,” Michael said. “We have no gender in Heaven but took gender on Earth. Being male, I mean, I think we can all agree that through most of history, being male was a lot easier for humans than being female. So, we took on male bodies.”
“I think she means the mythos that humans have built around angels,” I said. “We’re usually pictured as male, but I’ve been pushing a bit because I don’t want to be viewed as a man.”
“Is God a man?”
“No,” I said. “We call him Father because it’s descendant of a word that once meant creator.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Sera said.
“It is,” Michael said. “It’s just that humans don’t recall the language because it was never written down. Mother and father both descend from the word, but for some reason, humans always thought it creepy when we used Mother, so we settled on Father.”
“That movie back in the early century did not help us any on the Mother front,” I said.
Sera stared blankly for a second. She turned to me slowly and stiffly. There was a definite up and down motion as she seemed to take me in.
“When I asked you if you were fourteen and you said ‘billion’ you weren’t joking, were you?”
“No, no I was not.”
“But according to Christians, the world has only existed for like three thousand years.”
“Father’s more of a…” I struggled for a moment.
“That one where he creates the place and then lets it evolve,” Michael said. “He made humans, don’t get me wrong, but the human that you are, and the human he made are two different things. He created the things which would become human, giving them the spark of creation, entrusting your world with the ability to grow, adapt, and evolve.”
“What?” Sera demanded.
“The Garden of Eden was technically a puddle with primordial ooze along the equator during the stage of the world’s life when it was bombarded by asteroids to create the more complex molecules that your people would later use for food and everything else,” I said.
Sera made a face and stared at me. She seemed to be struggling with the concept, so I turned to Michael for help.
“The first man and woman were one-celled organisms,” Michael said. “But that story was told from our perspective, not theirs. So, Adam and Eve, legs, penis, boobs.”
“And the fruit?” Sera asked.
“Baal’s cock,” I said. “Or the equivalent thereof. Eve ended up birthing a demon before she began to birth the sons of Adam.”
“And Lillith?” Sera asked.
“Oh, Lillith is an odd one,” I said with a little nod.
“Father thinks she had too much free will, but she never sinned, so she doesn’t age,” Michael said. “She does, however, evolve as humans do so, you know, the two legs, two arms, such on. She just doesn’t age, and I swear she gets the best parts.”
“Well, I mean, she never sinned,” I said. “So, she wouldn’t get bad parts. She’s technically living just as Father commanded, except when she refused to breed with Adam she was removed from the Garden of Eden.”
“I’m sorry, Lillith is real? I thought, I mean… crazy man. Hot, but crazy.”
“You met her,” Michael and I said at the same time.
“Lilly?” Sera all but shouted. “Lilly, the androgynous asexual is Lillith, the mother of all demons and the whore?”
“She’s not androgynous just because she’s what humans would call a tomboy,” Michael said.
I think that may have been the first time I heard Michael come to Lillith’s defence. It was also very much true. Lillith had sometimes worn the clothing of a man for the same reason we wore the flesh of a man, but culture was not something she cared for when it came to gender roles.
“Humans made her a whore,” I said. “Apparently being a whore was the only way to explain the fact that she refused to sleep with Adam? It was weird. But while we could make suggestions, we couldn’t rewrite the stories that humans tell each other.”
“Didn’t she sleep with Lucifer?”
“Samael, but not sleep, sleep,” I said. “We were having some trouble with the human form, and, I mean, she’s asexual. The closest to sex she’s had was when—”
And then I stopped speaking. The closest to sex Lillith had come was when Michael sexually assaulted her at the command of Father. Father thought Lillith just needed a little push, that the female of the species didn’t become sexually active until they experienced sex.
Saying that out loud, however, would have thrown Michael under a bus and we might have just sorted things out. I didn’t want to start the fight again so soon.
“I’m not happy to say that I followed orders,” Michael said, throwing himself under that bus. “But at the time we didn’t know what disobedience was. Sam did, he tried explaining it to us, but I didn’t understand until later. We weren’t made with free will. We had to learn it individually.”
“I’m sorry, you sexually assaulted someone?” Sera asked.
“Yes,” Michael said. “I’ve apologized since, every time I see her. She almost always responds with magic. The first time she blew my head off. Another time she turned me into a woman. More recently it was explosive diarrhea. What I did was wrong. I know that. I knew doing it that it was wrong.”
“God told you to… “ Sera trailed off.
“He also told us to turn women into pillars of salt,” I said. “And the whole bit with plagues, though not necessarily in Egypt, but we still did similar things.”
“Drowning almost all of humanity,” Michael said.
“Michael once started massacring a village because they prayed to a bull god instead of Father and He was having an off day.”
“God is bipolar?” Sera asked.
“I wouldn’t say bipolar,” Michael said. “The God represented in the Old Testament is the one we’re more familiar with.”
“But… then… so… Christianity is the right religion?”
“You’re talking to two arc angels living on Earth who have no problem having sex outside of marriage,” I said.
“One of whom was a gay pornography star,” he added. “We aren’t fallen angels. We’re just not living in Heaven. He wouldn’t be denied entrance over that. Does that sound like any of the standing religions?”
“It’s just that the Old Testament may have been us talking to humans,” I said.
“Then why aren’t we burning in fire now?” Sera asked. “Didn’t he smite people over sodomy?”
“Says a bible written by prudes,” I said. “It also suggests that Lillith is a whore, bride of Satan and mother of demons. That book picks and chooses.”
“Raphael,” Michael said.
“She’s not Christian, I’m allowed to rip it if she’s not Christian,” I said. “I also have a problem with every other religious book. They have good points and good lessons but don’t quote a two-thousand-year-old book as the reason why a woman has no right to her own body, or why you should murder someone. Fer fucks sakes, humans for all Father has given them are fucking stupid.”
“He’s considering becoming a woman,” Michael said ever so quietly to Sera.
“Hence the rage about the book?” she asked.
“He probably would have been more comfortable as one all this time,” Michael said.
“I’m allowed to be upset about the shit done in my Father’s name,” I snapped.
“Yet perfectly willing to praise those who follow their religion and use that as an excuse for doing good,” Michael said. “It’s not about whether a big, invisible man is shaking a finger at you to make you be good. You should be good for the sake of being good, for not being a moron, not causing pain in the world. If you praise the good ones, you’re feeding into the problem, not solving it.”
“Wait, wait,” Sera said, raising her hands. “Just, wait.”
She turned to Michael, looked him up and down, then turned to me and did the same.
“You morons have been fighting since the beginning of time, and you’re calling humans, who live a blink of an eye to you, idiots for being scared and making mistakes in less than a century?”
“Yeah,” Michael said with a shrug.
“Yes, so?” I asked.
Sera was silent a long time. Her mouth was open just a little, eyes focused on the door of the estate. There was something about her expression that I had seen before, but I couldn’t pinpoint where. Her eyes almost closed, her head twisted to the side.
That’s pissed off woman.
My mind did a stumble back, trying to figure out what we had said or done wrong. I stumbled for a moment, then I saw it and took a real step back, away from Sera as she snapped her head toward me.
“But, in the middle of the fighting, it was just him and I fighting,” I said. “It was kind of like it was always meant to be and then just happened. It’s not like. I mean. Michael, help.”
“She’s mad because we’ve been fighting so long?” he asked. “Sure, but Samael kept telling us to repress it instead of talking it out. Right, that’s a thing, right?”
“You two both have brains,” Sera said. “Why didn’t you use them? You, Michael, you didn’t learn anything from just following the orders of those above you?”
“Samael threatened to throw us into Hell for fighting,” he protested.
Sera spun on me.
“It’s an actual problem,” I said. “Samael, being who he is, and linked to Hell like he is, can throw us into the depths of Hell. We’d have to claw our way out, which I’m sure we could do, but it’s not just a place like Earth. Hell is Hell for all. It warps around the visitor to create a Hell for them.”
“I hate to pull the example out, but Hitler,” Sera said.
“Samael’s not Hitler,” Michael said.
“He’s right. He’s not. Samael is concerned with getting us all back to Heaven. And more recently with his wife, who is miraculously pregnant.”
“Aren’t Nephilim bad?” Sera asked.
“Those don’t exist,” I said. “We could have sex until the end of time. You couldn’t get pregnant. Angel plus human can’t interbreed because we aren’t close enough genetically.”
“Genetically?”
“Okay, fine, we can’t reproduce because technically speaking we don’t have genetics,” I said with a shrug. “Can’t have a baby if you don’t have the genetics to pass on.”
“Okay, but this isn’t going to work if you two are constantly fighting,” Sera said with a motion between us.
“We know,” Michael said. “Uh, Father is a little odd with uh, he…”
“Has a twisted sense of humour,” I said for Michael.
“What’s that mean?” Sera asked.
“It’s been made clear to us that if we continue to fight, we lose you,” Michael said. “And if we lose you, we, uh, we’ll be grounded on Earth while Samael and Gabriel are allowed to return to Heaven.”
“Why can’t you go back to Heaven now?” Sera asked.
“I ripped out my grace,” Michael said with a little face. “Idiot over here ripped off a pair of wings.”
“It, uh, seems the witches stole my wings and inked them into your soul,” I said, slipping my hands into my pockets.
I was guessing that Michael didn’t want to tell Sera that she was his grace. That would bring up a whole bunch of other questions, and we were probably already overwhelming her with the angel of the Lord bit. Sera turned to me, then jabbed a finger over her shoulder, to her back.
“Yes, those are wonderfully detailed, but also are representations of what follows you along on the astral plane. And, yes, if you recall when we rescued you, those are what the witches were doing to your back. Trying to bring them into the real world to pluck the feathers off them to fuel their dark magic.”
“How would they even know how to do that?” Sera asked.
“This moron over here,” I said with a motion to Michael. “He slept with one almost three thousand years ago—which was the last time he had sex, by the way—and she plucked a feather, which they’ve been using all this time to fuel their magic. With just a feather they caused a lot of destruction. No idea how they got the wings out of Heaven.”
“But, why me?” Sera asked.
“We don’t know,” I said.
“That’s not true,” Michael said. “Awkward conversation here, but, Sera, you’re—I mean, your body houses—my grace. The only reason they could attach the wings to you was that you have the grace of an angel inside of you. Our wings can’t just connect to any human for the same reason human and angel don’t make a baby.”
“But grace and human makes me?” Sera asked.
“You are a miracle by the grace of Father,” I said. “What you are is something that has existed once before, perhaps once more for Gabe.”
Sera was quiet a moment. She frowned at me. When she turned to Michael, I cast him a desperate look over her shoulder. As she turned back, I forced my expression to one of calm.
“So… you’re telling me that you two were made for me.”
Technically it was the other way around. I opened my mouth to say as much, but Michael spoke over me.
“Yes, I guess that is the way to look at it.”
“Okay, well, I’m not going to put up with you two fighting. Or witches popping in to rip my wings off my back. I want them to stay where they are.”
I shook my head at her. “No, you can’t keep the actual wings. The magic ink they used means that the wings are being pulled into the grace every time you orgasm. We have to unlink the two. If the wings fully meld with the grace, a new angel will be made. In theory. The trouble is that Michael and I would lose grace and wings respectively. And I can’t promise that you as you would be the new angel. The being would probably explode out of your soul, splattering you across the universe.”
“I don’t want to splatter across the universe, but you still can’t fight.”
“I won’t fight with him if he doesn’t fight with me,” I said.
“Michael?” Sera asked.
“We will still bicker about some things, that is simply how people work. But I promise to try to compromise on what we disagree on.”
“Good. On the orgasm thing, how quickly is that happening?”
“From a human perspective, very slowly,” I said. “Why?”
“Apparently, a crazy night out in a field turns me on.”