trickled down his forehead and the bridge of his nose until it fell off and into the blackness of the pit below him.
He wasn’t sure if he was sweating just because it was actually hotter than hell in the sun, because he was a little nervous being tied up like a hog, everything from his wrists to his wings secured with a series of small knots that formed a net, completely covering him so that he couldn’t move at all. Or if the hot breath of all the assholes around the pit chanting angelic melodies he couldn’t begin to understand was actually roasting him alive.
It was the third option, definitely.
He wasn’t sure exactly why, but his new friends at Angel Falls were adamant that he free the soul he had unknowingly tethered to himself. So adamant in fact that out of all the choices he’d been given, dangling tied up, naked and horizontal, over a pit that’s bottom couldn’t be seen or estimated by throwing something over the side (which he’d of course tried), and having a boulder that seemed to weigh exactly a thousand pounds tied to him had been the best option. Sure the rock was also tied to metal rings sticking out of the pit, but it certainly didn’t feel like they were taking any of the weight to Demon. It felt like the rock was pulling so hard against the rope tied to his waist that it was going to split him in half.
He looked around at the white robe clad group that circled the edge of the pit and spotted his mother’s face among them, right beside her new old lover. A mix of emotion played across her features. He guessed she looked concerned, but when her eyes caught his she tried to smile and ended up looking more like she was about to cry.
That didn’t make him feel any better. So much for parental support. Her lover’s face on the other hand betrayed no emotion at all. Unsurprising, he’d yet to see any kind of emotion or reaction by the man the entire week he’d been there. Including when he’d been about to chop his head off with his angel sword.
That wasn’t entirely true, he had seemed a little confused by the priest who insisted upon having this elaborate ritual to separate him from Veronica, but all of his mother’s new lover’s ideas had involved sharp knives and potential death, so he’d gone with the cult leader’s suggestions instead.
The white clad ‘church members’ gathered around the edge of the pit, their light but piercing chants harmonizing in a way that seemed to resonate somewhere deep inside Demon. Almost like he remembered it but couldn’t quite place where he’d heard it before.
The pain was building. His whole body was beginning to reject the idea of hanging there for much longer. His legs and arms were cramping, his neck was bent at an odd angle, his head dangling down was the one piece of him unsupported and the strain on his neck was beginning to really hurt. And his back didn’t bear mentioning. The pressure of even partially supporting the boulder was excruciating. If he lived through this his back might never recover.
He had to take his mind off the pain or he was going to start screaming. Who knew how long the Moonies would keep chanting? He forced himself to think of something, anything other than the pain.
He mulled over the previous week spent with his mother and her people. It had been… interesting. Her newly fallen lover had only been a highlight. Another such highlight had been meeting the cult leader who basically called him a sin against nature.
The tall white haired angel had come to his mother’s door the day after Demon arrived. He’d heard about him and wanted to meet this intriguing black winged angel. Things started out pleasant enough, but when the man found out that Demon was half shifter they’d gone downhill rapidly. Ending with his sweet, soft spoken mother, telling the older angel to get out of her house and while she hadn’t used the words ‘go fuck yourself’ that was basically what she’d said.
“I’m probably going to regret that,” she said, leaning against the door, chest heaving with adrenaline.
“I’m sorry, you didn’t have to do that, I’m perfectly capable of telling someone to go fuck themselves, if you hadn’t noticed.”
Greshian took a deep breath and moved away from the door, “I know, but this is my house, and how dare he come here and talk to my son that way? I don’t care who he thinks he is.”
Demon’s brow quirked, “Who is he? Now you know I’m not an expert at angel history, but unless you’ve left out a significant portion of my education, I was unaware that we had a religion.”
Angels, to the best of his understanding, were agnostic. Their belief system went something like ‘The universe is the beginning and end and we’re all just energy moving from one form to another. And everything has its job, when your job is over, you move on to a new job.’
Living on a slightly different, but intertwined, plane than humans, angels didn’t consider themselves to be supernatural beings. They didn’t consider anything to be supernatural. If it occurred in the natural world then it could therefore not be supernatural.
Angels fed on human emotion, good or bad, so somewhere in their history they’d decided they were the caretakers of the less evolved species. The entirety of angel society revolved around their shepherding of what they considered their ‘little brothers’. There were angels that specialized in even the smallest of human minutia. From muses to guardians to special friends for children with emotional issues, if there was a human need, there was an angel who specialized in it.
There were no gods that instructed them in how to behave or what to do. There was no figure that had given them some heavenly task. They were just creatures that needed humans to live, so they’d molded their society around them. It was almost parasitic when you thought about it.
They didn’t have an origin story, they had scientists who had posited that somewhere along the line angels had evolved from humans as just another level of species diversification. A way the universe handled making sure something human remained if anything happened to one branch of the family tree. The same reason they believed humans had also branched off into other categories as well, such as shifters and the fae. It was all nice and scientific, completely barren of the woo-woo the shifters believed in. The thing that made him an abomination in their eyes.
Or it had been.
His mother shook her head, “He showed up a few years ago, with a devoted group of followers behind him. And you know we don’t turn away angels here. We’re already outcast enough without turning people away who just want to find a home.”
“Well, maybe you all could make an exception with religious cults?”
His mother laughed, “Maybe we should have thought of that before. I doubt it’d work now, he’s converted too many of the angels who were here already.”
“What’s he’s selling them? Angels already live ridiculously long lives, I know he can’t be trying to sell them eternal life?”
“No, just life back home, what he’s started calling ‘Heaven’”
“I thought once you left you couldn’t go back?”
His mother shrugged, “That’s what I’ve always been told but he says if there’s a way out, then there’s a way in, which makes sense. But he’s teaching that we were all in error, or sinful, to leave there to live here with the ‘dirty’ humans, and that we must atone sufficiently before our souls are clean enough to return.”
“What the fuck?”
“Yeah, he’s teaching that humans are less than us, but I believe he’s consumed a little too much of their dogma.”
“Sounds like it,” Demon agreed, “And what’s with the cross? Surely he hasn’t provided a savior figure for us as well.”
His mother shrugged, “He believes that Jesus was an angel who came to this plane to teach people of a better way to live. He says he was the only angel who had successfully returned to the angelic plane.”
Demon had mused over the new theological leanings of his mother’s people. As far as religions went, trying to live your life like Jesus wasn’t a bad core ideal, it was all the other beliefs and dogma that surrounded it that seemed to prevent the successful application of that ideal. Be kind and loving to everyone, but also know that gays, adulterous, idolaters and many others who don’t live like you do should be stoned to death. Also, feed the poor if you have time between stonings.
He hoped, for his own sake, the crazy priest was at least not just making things up with this whole spirit removal ceremony. Cause if they’d tied him up and hung him over a never ending abyss just for shits and giggles, he was going to be pissed.
The Jonestown crew were still chanting and nothing was happening except his body felt like it was breaking, so he continued to let his mind ramble.
Nothing much else exciting had happened. Obviously there had been a town hall about his Veronica problem because the priest had sent a note to his mother apologizing for his earlier behavior and offering his services as spirit remover extraordinaire. His mother’s new lover must have spilled the beans about it, or either the priest had sensed the spirit in the small amount of time he’d been around Demon. Either way, here he was tied up over a pit.
He looked around the pit, at the white robed chanters. He’d met a few of them over the week and most of them had seemed normal.
His eyes lingered on one woman in particular. When he’d met her he’d felt that weird buzzing that he’d felt between him and Sidney, but he hadn’t had a chance to ask his mother about it. If he made it through this ceremony he’d have to remember to mention it. It was strange that he’d gone his whole life without feeling it and now he’d felt it twice in less than a month.
The woman he was eyeing didn’t seem to notice him. Her eyes were upturned and she seemed to be completely absorbed in her chanting. She was attractive of course, almost all angels were, but nothing about her seemed extremely special. He didn’t look at her and feel that same yearning that he did when he looked at Sidney. It was a mystery. Maybe he just wanted what his brother had.
Demon was sure some psychologist could have a field day with him. Especially considering this wasn’t the first time he’d felt drawn to a woman who was already taken by his brother.
He shook his head and the beads of sweat flew off in a spray. If anyone had been close enough to him they’d have been drenched.
He had to forget about Sidney, forget about Three Rivers and forget he even had a brother. He had to find a place of his own. People of his own.
But if this past week had proven anything, it was that this was not his place, and these were not his people. Despite the fact that he had wings, he was definitely no angel.
And despite the longs talks with his mother where she tried to convince him to give Red and his father another chance, the bottom line was he didn’t belong with the Dogs either.
The voices around the pit seemed to be rising, dragging him away from his internal misfit sulking. He raised his head and saw through the strands of soaking wet hair that the priest had thrown his hands in the air and was vigorously yelling at the sky.
This didn’t seem to be doing anything. He was about to yell at them to call it quits, it had been a good effort but he was really getting tired of hanging around when he felt a sudden shift in the air.
Gooseflesh prickled over his entire body as a breeze circled him. The previously brutal sun disappeared as dark clouds rolled in.
Demon shivered, his drenched skin making the rapid temperature drop all that more noticeable. This seemed a little melodramatic.
The wind picked up, howling along the walls of the pit, creating a cyclone that threatened to pull him from his perch. He was suddenly glad of all the intricately tied knots.
He began to believe the wind would never stop, but would continue until it formed a tornado that could take him to Oz. At least there he could apply to be one of the Wicked Witches flying monkeys. Being a flying monkey didn’t sound that awful actually, he bet it even came with health insurance.
The pit below him, which was already dark, had gone pitch black. It looked like an inky substance lay at the bottom at as the wind picked up speed the blackness seemed to come closer and closer, until Demon was almost scared it was going to flow over him and swallow him up.
But as it rose the center became more and more clear. It was Veronica, laying peacefully, her spectral form at rest atop the depthless darkness.
She rose until she was right below the boulder they had tied to Demon’s middle. If she opened her eyes she’d be staring directly into his.
“Spirit hear our call, AWAKEN” the priest bellowed from the edge.
Veronica didn’t stir. “Hear our voices, restless one, spirit of the deep, AWAKEN!”
He listened to the priest command her to open her eyes in every different way he could. From cajoling, demanding, to screaming and cursing. And finally Demon could take no more.
“Hey, yo, Veronica! Wake up bitch!” he screamed.
Her eyes opened and took in their surroundings.
“What the fuck Demon?” she asked, confused.
Two angels had flown into the pit with him, hovering between him and Veronica, one held a knife out to the rope connecting the boulder to him.
“Looks like I’ve got to cut you loose,” Demon said watching the angels and wondering what they were waiting for.
“What?” Her eyes flew wide, taking in the scene. The pit, the angels surrounding it, Demon trussed, the boulder connected to him. He saw it as she must see it, and imagined her terror, and not for the first time he felt a little pang of sorrow for her. She’d been given a bad deal.
“No,” she cried, “I’ve got to stay until I see that Frederick gets what he deserves. I haven’t even been bothering you.”
Demon wished there were something he could do for her, “Sorry kid, not my choice.”
“NO!” she screamed as the first angel with the knife cut the rope and released the rune covered boulder, it caught Veronica in the middle and drug her down so quickly it was almost too fast for his eyes to follow. She screamed as she went, who knows how far down, and Demon felt like his soul was falling with her. He listened until he couldn’t hear her anymore.
It was a shame. She was an annoying bitch, but even annoying bitches deserve to get revenge on the asshole that killed them.
He mentally sighed, oh well, nothing he could do about it. Might as well not dwell.
He looked around waiting for the angels hovering in the pit to drag him out so he could get on with his day, but they didn’t seem to be in too much of a hurry to let him out.
“And now, oh Great Father, we offer you this vile creature, in hopes that his death will cleanse the sin from the soul of our sister Greshian, and rid the world of this abomination.” He heard his mother scream and looked over to see two angels in white holding her as she struggled to get free.
The angel that cut the rope holding the boulder to him flew closer.
“Would it be possible for me to convince you to ignore Jim Jones over there and let me go?”
The stoney faced angel didn’t reply. Instead he cut one of the ropes that suspended Demon in midair. Oh well it had been worth a shot.
The other angel held him in place, presumably so he wouldn’t hit the wall of the pit as knife boy cut him loose.
Demon struggled against the ropes, but it was no use, he couldn’t move so much as a feather.
The cultist that surrounded the pit were chanting, “abomination” and his mother was screaming and crying and trying to break free from the two that were holding her, to no avail.
Demon watched as one by one, each of his ropes were cut, until the only thing holding him up was the emotionless angel. And then without warning, he wasn’t holding him anymore and Demon was falling.
It was odd, his life should have been flashing before his eyes, but all he could think of in that moment, was that he was getting real tired of the fucking word, ‘abomination.’