I wandered through the estate until I found myself outside of Sam and Grace’s rooms. I wasn’t certain if they were still up, but I didn’t knock. I just stood there, pouting as Sam would say. I knew better than to interrupt with a sound that might wake Grace, if she was asleep.
Sam would know I was there, however. Being so near, and agitated, he would feel me through the door and answer when he was able. Since Grace had started sleeping over, his answering time had lengthened by nearly double. If one of his… prior type… had been over, Sam would have abandoned them immediately to see to us. Not with Grace, however, she got his full attention.
It was not long before the door opened, and Sam slipped out, giving me a nasty look as he did so.
“It’s my wedding night,” he said. “You two can’t stop fighting for one night?”
He assumed that it was Ralph that had me agitated. He hadn’t even let me speak, just made an assumption. Because of that fact, I used a barb of my own.
“I know for a fact that your plan tonight was to play poker and go to bed at a semi-decent hour. You guys aren’t doing the post-wedding traditions until you head out on your honeymoon in four days.”
“And your point is…?”
Sam was angry with me nonetheless. I may have interrupted his attempt at talking Grace into bed, which would have reset everything. Most women were like that, so I assumed Grace was as well.
He could have finished what he was doing, as he had on more than one occasion in the past. It had been his choice to leave the room, which meant that he probably took a swing and missed. I just happened to be in the hallway at the same time as his miss, so he decided to take it out on me.
“The woman I brought to the wedding,” I said “Something’s off with her. I can’t put my finger on it or describe the how, but it’s there.”
“The fact that you brought a woman to my wedding who you actually spent time with, tells me there’s something different about her,” Sam said. “Mike, you’re obsessing over her. That doesn’t mean that she’s special or anything of that sort, it just means that you’re interested.”
I didn’t understand what he meant. I didn’t get involved with humans, nothing about them was intriguing in the least. There had to be something special because I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Even as I stood with Sam, I wondered if Sera was still standing on the side of the road, waiting for a ride. I wanted to go out and invite her back in.
Not for sex, just to spend the night in the estate instead of having to find a ride home.
When Sam didn’t elaborate, I decided to come right out and press the subject.
“Interested?” I asked.
Sam’s eyebrows rose expectantly. When I gave my head a shake, not understanding what he meant, he reached out and patted me on the arm with a smile. I watched the motion in a distant sort of fashion.
“Congratulations, you’re becoming a man.”
“That makes no sense to me. You know that right?”
“You’re thinking with your downstairs brain.”
“Humans don’t have brains downstairs, nor do… oh.”
He meant that I was thinking with my penis, not my head. He was also teasing me, which he knew I didn’t like and it didn’t make me feel any better about the situation.
I’m not crazy.
There was something different about Sera. I wasn’t just obsessing over her. I knew there was something different about her. She was bold and outgoing, constantly catching my attention even with her absence. No other human had ever made me feel like that, or look for them so much.
Just because I spent time with a woman didn’t mean that suddenly I was in love. I had had women as friends in the past. They were great amounts of fun to talk to and deal with.
Just because I was male in form, didn’t mean that I never missed the ability to sit and gossip as we once had in Heaven. I had just learned to ignore those cravings and the need. It helped hone the edge of my temper.
“That’s not it,” I added when I realized that the silence had drawn out long enough to be uncomfortable.
“Well, then, maybe she’s your grace.”
That couldn’t be it because I wanted it too badly. Father had a twisted sort of humour. The more I wanted Sera to be my grace reborn, the less likely she would be. Or every time I wanted it, my grace would trickle away until nothing was left, if it had been there at all.
Grace had shown up as Baal was escaping from Hell, but that had been a simple solution for Sam. My problem was a great deal larger and more numerous. One fight on the top of a building wasn’t going to fix it, and none of us would have forgiveness until we fixed what we broke.
“No. I have to deal with the dark witches before I get my grace back, that’s practically the rule. You had to fix the whole thing you did. My thing isn’t fixed yet.”
“Slow down,” Sam said as the door opened behind him.
Grace slipped out, pulling her housecoat tighter over the silk nightie she wore under it. Her arms wrapped around herself. She looked me up and down, and I had to steel myself to keep from taking a step back, aware that the protective gesture was because she thought I was looking too closely.
She frowned at Sam, then glanced back at me.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“Mike’s just… having a girl problem.”
“She’s not a girl, she’s a woman,” I snapped at Sam.
Grace’s gaze shifted between us several times before she frowned at Sam and shook her head. She looked puzzled, more than anything. When Sam didn’t immediately speak up, Grace gave her head another shake.
“So?” she demanded.
In the extended silence, Sam and I shared a look. Mine was likely arrogant and a little presumptuous. His was that half-annoyed look that he had taken to making behind Grace’s back. It was the exasperated sort of look that he gave when he knew he’d give in, but he also didn’t like having to give in.
“Well, the whole,” Sam made a motion around us, then struggled for a moment and sighed. “I told him that maybe she was like you are, except for him. He said that he had to fix his problem first, like I fixed mine.”
“Therapist,” Grace said.
“What?” I asked.
They must have been having a conversation in the room. Sometimes Grace would bring up that conversation as they were in another room, when it came back to her, or if she thought it related to what they had been arguing about. I had no idea how a therapist might be connected to our grace being reborn.
“Tomorrow, we’ll set it up for when we get back,” Sam said to Grace before he focused on me. “Look, Mike, I was long off fixing my problem with Grace was born. It’s not so simple as to whether it’s fixed or not. And hot stripper does seem the type of woman the Heavenly Host would choose for you because of how much of a prude you are.”
“I am not a prude,” I said. “Having standards is not the same as being a prude.”
And I enjoyed sex, just not with humans. Half of Heaven viewed them as little more than animals, the other half as some sort of chosen child of Father who had to be taken care of. In neither view could I feel comfortable bedding a human to do more than save them.
“If you want to see if something is up with your date, why not just go to that other place?” Grace asked, then gave her hand a little wave. “The… the astral plane, I think Lilly called it. Is that a thing?”
“It is a thing,” Sam said while keeping focused on me. “Have you checked her out on the astral plane? Because those wings on her back are a little too detailed. If you ask me, it’s suspicious that the Heavenly Host are slinking about down here and not telling anyone else who they are.”
Toby.
Sam meant Toby. If the man hadn’t come right out and told us that he was Heavenly Host, we might not have realized for years to come. We hadn’t told Grace that because we didn’t want her to think that she had been driven toward Sam. She knew she was special, but I wasn’t certain if she had been told just how special and I didn’t want to be the one who made Sam that kind of pissed off.
Like Dark Ages inquisitor, that kind of pissed off.
Grace was right, however. Slipping into the astral plane should have been my first thought when I saw a human acting strangely. If a demon had possessed her, even if it was hiding, I’d be able to tell by seeing it on that plane. If anything was going on with Sera, that was the place to watch it unfold.
I felt like a fool for not doing it sooner.
“No, I haven’t,” I said. “But you’re right. We should check her out just in case. I’ll swing on through, see if I can find her.”
“She’s with Ralph,” Sam said with a jab of his thumb toward Toby’s guest room. “Toby checked in with Grace to let her know that your date was in there with them. He seemed to think it was important that we all were aware of her comings and goings.”
Sam wouldn’t come out and say it, but I knew he meant that he had found it suspicious. There were only two others who could have checked on Sera without being found out. One of them was with Sera.
The other was Gabe, who was probably four bottles of wine in and might have been starting an orgy with the hot supermodel type dates of the rich men of the city. Just their dates, not the men.
Sam wasn’t about to interrupt Gabe’s night to check on Sera and couldn’t do it himself. That really only left me, the person who had come asking questions that Sam couldn’t answer.
“So, go do that,” Sam said.
“I’m having trouble sleeping anyhow, how about we all go down for a nice hot chocolate?” Grace asked.
“Warm milk would be better,” Sam countered. “The sugar in hot chocolate would have you up for hours.”
Grace made a sound that might have been annoyance, and led the way to the kitchen. I followed in a numb fashion, already trickling away from my physical form. I was barely aware of finding a seat before I slipped away entirely and floated through the estate.
There was a lot of turmoil over the estate and soaking into the walls, but there was always that cloud of emotion when a wedding took place. I just wasn’t used to seeing that kind of emotion swirling around my home.
All the single women attending the wedding, feeling like they’d die old maids because they were twenty, twenty-five, thirty, even thirty-five or forty and not married yet. That was a lot of stress for a piece of land to try to filter out.
Not to mention the couples who fought because she was reminded that she was of a certain age and not yet married. The arguments that would result.
Weddings had once been a time of celebration. Now it seemed they were nothing more than shaming women who weren’t pumping out children or tied to a man. The world had stopped telling women they were nothing without a man and had instead started their passive-aggressive manipulation to force women to link themselves to one man. Telling them their biological clock was ticking, oh and by the way—in order to marry in a true celebration and not some sham that would never last—one had to fork over tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars for the ceremony because they mentioned the word ‘wedding’ to the event planners.
I allowed myself that bitter thought because all that emotion was swirling around my home, soaking into my walls. Killing my flowers.
I stilled my thoughts, to keep from alerting Ralph to my presence as I approached the guest area.
I slipped into Toby’s room through a side wall, ignoring the door which had warding over it to prevent us from sneaking up on one another.
From there, I looked around the room, checking the obvious locations for dirty, dirty wedding sex with a groomsman, before I turned to the bed.
And I struggled to comprehend what I was seeing.
A set of wings filled the room. Angel wings, not the little piddly things that the Heavenly Host were given when they tended things on Earth, but full on angel wings. They filled the space of the room and slipped in and out of the ceiling, out the walls, even outside the estate itself.
They’re glorious.
And they couldn’t have belonged to Toby, who had a smaller pair, well trimmed and always under control.
Thank goodness, the guests were all gone, or we risked one of them having a religious epiphany by walking through the feathers or altering the fate of the world by accidentally snapping off one of those threads of fate.
There was a lot of fate wrapped up in those wings, growing long and floating toward me, trying to taste the air. Fate was like that around angels, and humans who were capable of changing the world in spectacular ways. Those threads had to be carefully tended, to avoid inadvertently changing the plan in ways that Heaven was not prepared to deal with.
We all clipped our threads of fate and packaged them up as nicely as we could given the fact that we were not the ones meant to be handling them. Then Ralph took the threads in a gold-encased box to the specified drop off point where someone from Heaven retrieved them to use them in the tapestry of time.
It was a process that had happened long before humans and would continue after we started fresh and new.
Some fallen angels would rip out their threads of fate with their graces. Ripping them out was a painful ordeal, and the only place for the threads to be used then were in the bowels of Hell. Yanking it out, unlike plucking hairs on the human body, meant that the thread never grew back again.
I had been told at some point, the fallen angels had stopped plucking their threads, preferring to grow them, because Hell had its own tapestry which somehow controlled the balance of the world.
But only Sam would know for certain.
What I did know was that a set of wings like that was not common and shouldn’t have been on Earth. If they were on Earth, they should have been kept close, like my wings and those of the other three. Always held tight against our bodies, practically flat. It reduced the possibility of a human walking through our wings to absolute zero, because no human could get close enough to find our wings.
Dark witches knew how to snag that kind of power, if they knew the wings were there, and if they got control of that many threads of fate… they could begin weaving their own tapestry. One which completely rewrote everything humans knew about their lives.
And maybe cause a ripple that affected angels?
What if Grace wasn’t there because Father had sent her? What if the dark witches had begun that tapestry, and in doing so had made Grace appear?
Because they needed a special ingredient, perhaps?
But where did they get the wings?
Angel wings could not be grown, or borrowed. If Raphael had allowed his wings to do that, grow out like that, then the rest of us would have noticed. It would have been impossible to hide that much growth. Even if Toby had been growing out his wings, which was impossible given his close connection with the Heavenly Host.
The thought of that made me reassess the room.
The only people in the room were on the bed, caught up in the midst of the wings. I moved around the reaching feathers, not wanting to alert the owner of them that I was there. I had to edge around the feathers, pressed up against the wall as I went.
They were sitting at the head of the bed. Sera was on top, straddling Ralph and moving with that same fluid grace that she had shown on stage. She was flush with emotion and pleasure, a practical open book. No demons there, not even a parasite to feed off of her extra energy. Just wholly and entirely Sera.
Under her, Ralph was flushed red.
I don’t think I had ever witnessed any of the others in the middle of carnal relations. I had seen them participating in sex to free a human of possession, but never in the middle of sex for the sake of sex. I avoided everything to do with the act.
We were there to save the humans, not partake in their flesh as if we were nothing more than demons.
I wasn’t prepared for how Ralph’s pleasure was different from a human’s. It was a feeling that spread through the astral plane, pooling about my feet and creeping up my length. It soaked into my very being. A pang of sympathetic emotion flared through me. A craving that I had buried down deep and kept hidden away since the last time we had walked the planes of Heaven.
The feel of it made me nostalgic.
In Heaven, I had had my romps. I had enjoyed sexual pleasure. I had enjoyed it a great deal, with a variety of partners. Even participating with a few imps, as much as they annoyed me out of the bedroom, so to speak.
My disgust of participating with humans wasn’t even because they were dirty animals, or that I wanted to raze the world to the ground and start over again. It was just…
That, that on the bed.
Raphael debasing himself as if he were a common demon. He was using her for sex. There was nothing that he could offer her in response. Humans needed other humans to continue being healthy humans. They needed each other. They needed to build connections in their world.
Our interacting with humans cut off those connections, left them stranded in the middle of their lives, usually at the time when they would have been forging the longest and best connections that they would need to live for as long as possible.
And there he was, thrusting into her and moaning like he was a human and had a right to enjoy the bodily pleasures that our Father gifted on the tiny little mortals.
There was a sound, and I realized that they were not alone.
That’s right. It’s not their room.
Toby was under Ralph, dragging Ralph down every time he moved upward. The Heavenly Host seemed caught up in the moment, utterly oblivious to my standing there, watching them.
Ralph ignoring me, I could see. We had all learned to ignore the shadows out the corners of our eyes, of whatever was going on in the astral plane. We had to, to keep going. Toby was still new. He seemed distracted continuously, eyes darting across the room as he watched what appeared to be motes of dust, dancing on sunbeams.
Toby sat with his back against the wall, Ralph in Toby’s lap, impaled by him and facing Sera, who straddled him.
Sera was facing the wall, Toby and Ralph’s backs were to the wall.
Angel wings weren’t exactly like a human imagined them to be. The wings did not come out of our backs, that wasn’t where wings belonged, especially when one had multiple sets of wings. Still, by looking at the wings, we were able to tell which body they were coming from because we knew how they should sit, and where they were bound to flow to if they were coming from a specific body.
The astral plane was also not like the physical plane. We called them wings and feathers and strands of fate, but they weren’t really like all those things. They were these things on the astral plane that we had come to call the things we used to fly with, and the bits that made them up.
Though, apparently, when our wings, or feathers, were pulled into the physical realm, they took on the physical form with which they shared their names. A wing became a wing, a feather a feather.
On the astral plane, they appeared made of light, all the same colour of light, in different thicknesses and textures, but all seemingly the same. I could still tell the threads of fate from the rest, but if a human looked at them, perhaps not.
A dark witch, for instance, might not manage any of that. She would grab whatever she saw and rip. Once she pulled it into the physical plane, then she’d see what she had. But we knew. Like a human knew if it was morning or night based on a feeling and the sun.
My not realizing who owned the wings was because of everything to do with the astral plane. All I knew for certain was that they were angel wings, real and old as could be. Not new, not belonging to a baby angel, but having existed for a long time, possibly since the beginning of all time. Many of us had a particular kind of colour to it, I guess a human might say. I knew and recognized my wings. I knew who was approaching me of the other three as well, because of how long we had been together.
Hundreds of angels had been there at the beginning with us and Father. So the age helped narrow down the owner of the wings, but the colour was opalescent. Of that number, a dozen or so might have allowed their wings to grow out to such an extreme.
None of which explained how those wings had ended up on Sera’s back.
The wings are attached to her.
Not just her flesh, but it had been inked into her very soul. I could see the droplets of ink shuddering back and forth as they wound their way through the ripped and bloody edges of the wings, working the anchor points deeper into Sera’s soul.
I let out a curse.
Which was the wrong thing to do when there were two angels in the room, I knew it the moment I made the sound. Toby’s startled surprise rippled outward, catching the edge of me as I gathered myself up to move.
I thrust myself away from the room, but I felt Ralph’s anger as I fled. I only hoped that he didn’t realize it was me who had been in the room. If he thought it was one of the others, he might not explode quite so much. He might even give me enough time to explain.
… that… we had to burn her with Hellfire?
What did we even do in that instance?
I hit my body and was out of the chair with a gasp. My coming to must have startled Grace, because I heard a squeak. Then I heard the disgruntled sound of Sam stirring from an almost sleep.
“Wings!” I shouted as I went.
The physical world seemed to burn me with the light and sound and heat of it all. There were too many things for my being to feel. I was overwhelmed and unable to do much more than process sound.
“Yes, nice tattoos,” Grace called.
“If he were talking about tattoos—” I heard Sam said as I fled the room.
I made it to the front doors without being trampled by Ralph looking for whoever had been in the room, so I knew I had something going for me. When I spotted Toby, standing by the drive, I counted my lucky stars.
He turned as I ran toward him.
“How long have you been here?” I asked as I skidded to a stop.
“Five minutes,” Toby said. “Was that you in the room? He’s super pissed, but I can’t tell you motherfuckers apart.”
“What’s with the swearing? You are part of the Heavenly Host, talk with some manners, for crying out loud.”
“I have manners, but I just want to remind you the same way I reminded him when he pretended to finish and decided to take her home,” Toby said. “Grace still thinks I’m human, so if you kill me, or hurt my flesh in some manner, she will know and want to know what happened, and then I’ll just tell Ralph what you did, and he’ll damage your flesh, and let’s face it,” Toby paused to shrug, “at that point I’m just laughing my ass off.”
“You pathetic meat sack,” I snapped, grabbing Toby by the front of his shirt and dragging him close. “I am an angel of the Lord, the greatest warrior of all the Heavens, and you will fear my flaming sword!”
The host made a sound as if he didn’t believe me.
For facing the wrath of an arc angel, Toby certainly was calm. Even self-assured as he made another sound that might have been a laugh.
Cocky, arrogant little piss.
“Still with the flaming sword, really Michael?” Toby asked with a shake of his head and an eye-roll. “Go out in this day and age and tell people you have a flaming sword and you’ll never need to worry about someone trying to bed you because they’ll assume you have a venereal disease.”
“Where did he take her?” I demanded.
“He took her home,” Toby said. “You people are so wound up that he didn’t notice the wings, he just saw you running away after you talked. Why did you have to talk? I was so close to coming. That would have been fabulous. And before you yell at me for that too, shut up about it. I was having my way with Raphael and man… is that well worth the effort of telling him that I’m interested and just ignoring him for two years so that he doesn’t think I’m creepy or something. That ignoring him thing really works. No wonder he’s chasing after you like a puppy after a treat.”
I shook him like a ragdoll. I did it because I could, and I knew he wouldn’t die. He’d hurt in the morning, but he’d live. I threw him at my feet and spat to the side in disgust.
The host laughed. It wasn’t even desperate. He sounded like he was amused.
“Ah, there’s that old Michael charm,” he said as he wiped his bottom lip. “Hm, not bleeding.”
“Fuck you, host.”
“I’d love to, but only if you were tied up. After so long, you’ve probably got so much pent up sexual energy that you’d end up fucking someone to death. That doesn’t sound pleasant, despite the death by sex.”
“Is your only function as fuel to a fire?” I demanded.
“No, my function is a messenger and guardian style,” Toby said, staying firmly on the ground. “I’ve still got more juice in my hand than you do in your whole body.”
“Why does she have wings inside of her and on her back?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but you need to find out and fix it.”
“No, really? How? How do we get rid of a set of angel wings that are bound into the soul of a human? How do you do that? How do you even make that possible?”
“Dark witches, is probably where I’d start. So this is your mess to clean up.”
“She has wings, Toby!”
“I’m quite aware of that,” he said calmly.
Far too calmly. Like he had known that there had been wings on Earth before anyone else had. Like he had prepared for that moment.
It wasn’t beyond the Heavenly Host to know about the future. Or to even see the future and shift into the past to alter it. Toby wasn’t supposed to do that around us because it could shorten the lives of humans and Sam wanted to keep that as far away from Grace as possible.
I wanted to beat it out of him, but as I reached down to drag him back up and make him tell me, Grace appeared at the front door. She was watching us as Toby got up and smoothed out his clothing.
“He was just helping me up,” Toby called to her.
“What are you doing here, Toby?” Grace called out. “I thought we gave you a room in the estate.”
“Right, uh, see, I had sex with Ralph,” Toby said. “Quite a mind-altering experience. I got a little lost. Room’s in there? Yeah, I’ll head in there and take a cold shower, then go to bed.”
Toby headed back into the estate as I looked over him, to Grace. She moved to the side as Toby passed her, keeping her eyes on me as I stood there, only then fully realizing what Sam had meant all those months ago when he had sat us down to explain it.
She was his grace incarnate.
And I had inadvertently sparked the rage that had once been described as loyal, but chaotically good.
Grace had decided Toby was hers, and I had seen that sort of claim before. I had witnessed the destruction that Sam had wrought when someone had turned on him.
“Don’t you do that again,” Grace said to me before she turned and headed back into the estate, closing the door behind her.
Warning received.
It would be my only warning. If I crossed the line with Toby again, she would rain hellfire down on me.
I could only hope that Grace, not having access to Sam’s knowledge and experience, wasn’t capable of bringing hellfire down from the skies in a literal fashion.