Chapter Text
Robbe wasn’t religious when he was human.
He’d seen enough of the other side of normality to know beyond certitude that there was something else out there - different worlds, planes of existence, parallel universes if you will - but he’d never signed his name on the dotted line of Organized Religion X’s membership agreement, and he’d never harbored a single regret about it. His mother had made it a POINT, capital P, to remind him as often as she could that it bothered her to no end when he absolutely refused to partake in any bit of the whole ridiculous package: Sunday services, family Bible readings, mission trips (although he’d tagged along to Ecuador with the church once as a preteen just to get out of Europe, see how the sun shone on another part of the world, if it hit different angles than in Antwerp).
“The best people I know, Mum,” he’d said to her patiently, over and over, “don’t cover themselves up with Bible verses and priest robes.”
Meaning the best people he knew were mostly atheist, or agnostic. To his mother, such viewpoints were unacceptable, horrific, hell-sending; to Robbe, they were a respite. He heard enough about miracles and prayer at home, enough to know that virtue didn’t arise from fifty bent-knee Hail Marys or saving oneself for the marriage bed. To him, virtue came from human decency, from saving his extra batch of French fries for the nice homeless guy who hung out near the petrol station round the way from Robbe’s university, from letting his best friend bum class notes when he had to miss biology to take his dad to chemo treatments. The thing about religion to Robbe was: it felt FORCED. Nothing about a genuinely decent deed felt anything but authentic to him, and that was how he learned to judge good versus evil.
He wasn’t sure he really believed in the kind of evil his mother’s Bible talked about, anyway. Wasn’t everything the way it was because of the system by which humans assigned meaning? Time, calendars, age...he didn’t see where the differences split. Good was good because he knew it in his chest as warmth and sun-radiance; bad was bad because it felt the opposite, wrong like total silence in a sunwashed forest or an unease in his gut, but that didn’t mean it was demonic.
But in the end it didn’t make a difference whether Robbe’s character was good or bad, integrity couldn’t protect him; in fact, it killed him He died at the age of twenty-two years old, three months shy of graduating university, pushing a child out of the way of a wild driver who’d careened up onto the sidewalk. He didn’t suppose it mattered to his mother whether he’d died performing an act of selflessness or accidentally injecting the wrong measure of heroin into his veins, because he hadn’t been baptized at her Catholic Church.
*
Except he didn’t die. Not actually.
“I really shouldn’t be doing this.”
Robbe was perplexed, still hazy from the blood loss and shock and slowly fading consciousness, the acceptance of imminent blackness – but above him was only gold. And...a face?
He squinted. The face was too young to be God – at least if He was supposed to look like that typical cliché old-man often seen in artistic renderings – and it seemed human in every visible way, but something about the symmetry, the smoothness of the skin, the shimmer seemed far too perfect for the species that Robbe knew as diverse and unique and flawed. He thought of the only possible explanation for the faultless, glittery humanoid being hovering above him and blurted it aloud.
“Are you a vampire?”
The beautiful face scrunched up once, then exploded into mirth.
“Kid, you really didn’t strike me as the Twilight type.”
“Kid?” Robbe was offended; the guy – or whatever he was – couldn’t have been much older than Robbe himself. “How old are you, then?”
“I lost count at around four hundred and twenty-three, and that was ages ago,” said the being, bored. “Doesn’t matter right now. Drink this, okay? We wait any longer and this process will be a lot worse than it needs to be, and you’ve already been through a load of shit.”
And before Robbe could even get a single coherent thought in his head the being had forced a vial containing a liquid that was both impossibly thick and impossibly gold up to his mouth and shoved it in.
He swallowed without thinking, all of him suddenly afire from the inside, pleasant cinnamon burn like a hot toddy on a glacial January night. When he’d finished the container the man took it from him, stowed it in his jacket pocket, glanced surreptitiously around. It was then that Robbe realized that the world surrounding them had gone absolutely silent, then that he realized that they were delimited by that same strange gilded light he’d noticed when he’d come back to consciousness, then that he realized that he was no longer on any sort of Earth he’d ever known before.
“What the fuck,” he started to say, and then he whited out.
And that was how Robbe Ijzermans – sweet, unproblematic, agnostic Robbe Ijzermans of Antwerp, Belgium, who never had an undesirable word to say about anyone but who had never voluntarily entered a church in his life – became an angel.
*
Purgatory wasn’t at all what Robbe expected it to be.
He was used to it now, having become a frequent flier during the five human years that had passed since he’d gained official angel status (“you’ll stop tracking things strictly in human time eventually,” Jens kept telling him, but Robbe didn’t understand how he’d ever be able to stop), but when he’d first glimpsed the place he hadn’t been able to comprehend how normal it was. In fact, it was so like Earth that he’d refused to believe that every strange thing that had occurred since the car accident wasn’t all some elaborate dream and he was still very much alive, curled up in his wreck of a bed clinging to the last hours of sleep that remained before class.
Jens had found his skepticism adorable, then amusing, then unexpectedly sad.
“I could prove it to you, like for real for real,” he’d said, slanting his body like the absolute carefree model that he was against the doorframe of the curio shop they were passing, “but you don’t want to see what your human body looked like when I found you. Trust me.”
Robbe had peered sideways at him, at once sickened and darkly fascinated, and Jens had arched an eyebrow at him.
“No.”
“I wasn’t going to ask.”
And so, slowly, Jens had verified Robbe’s newly adopted state of being in other ways – doing the rounds in Purgatory, Upper Atmosphere, and Lower Earth (which were, respectively, the equivalent of what humans thought of as “heaven” and “hell”, although it soon became quite obvious that things were a lot more complicated than that). He wasn’t allowed to go back to Antwerp for approximately a century – or until the last living person that might recognize him had passed away – but he was permitted to go to other parts of Earth, places that no one in life had known him. Halos and wings weren’t a thing (“at least not for us – I think some seraphim still keep theirs while they’re in the UA,” said Jens) but Robbe’s back, shoulders, and upper arms were now fully swathed in an intricate golden tattoo, one wing on each side, and when he moved they shone like sunlight on a glass sea. His senses were, suddenly, all overblown, and when Jens had cut his palm with a strange, sharp instrument that looked a bit like a kitchen knife he had felt no pain, bled liquid the exact color of a first-place trophy, and watched in pure astonishment as his skin had healed itself instantaneously.
Now, standing on the rooftop of one of his favorite nightclubs in Greater Purgatory (because yes they had nightclubs in Purgatory, of course they had nightclubs in Purgatory, why the hell wouldn’t they have nightclubs in Purgatory), he looked down at his hand and smiled. He had no scars anymore, no marks but for the tattoos cascading across his back. Being a mid-tier angel wasn’t a bad gig, although he did get a bit bored with perfection every now and then. That was why he spent a great deal of his down time frolicking in the in-between. There were humans here, and creatures that hadn’t existed – at least not visibly – in the human world, as well as rumors of demons – not just rumors, according to Jens, realities, although it was rare that they came here, most of them knew well enough to stay on their side of the sphere – and Robbe could not spend enough time simply lurking in corners and watching his eccentric new cohort pass by. Afterlife wasn’t bad in Purgatory; it was about as challenging as his day-to-day existence had been on Earth, albeit with slightly less scenery and a lot more gray sky.
“You think that,” said Jens, appearing behind Robbe with two frothing, smoking chalices, “but you’d regret it after about five decades. Less, depending on your tolerance.”
“My tolerance,” said Robbe with some irritation, “for you doing that mind-reading bullshit is low.”
Jens flashed his thieflike smirk. The cross dangling from his left earlobe glinted. “I keep you on your toes, Ijzermans.”
“You’re the reason I still have toes, Stoffels. Santé.”
They drank. This was another aspect of afterlife that had stunned Robbe to his middle: there was alcohol.
Furthermore: angels were permitted to drink it.
“Well, yeah,” Jens had said, when Robbe had questioned him. “What kind of existence would be worthwhile without the option to get hammered?”
“But.” Robbe had blinked and blinked and blinked until his head had swiped clean enough to rearrange disheveled thought into lucidity. “You’re an angel.”
“So are you, kid.”
Now Jens licked at the lip of his glass, chasing foam; Robbe watched him with an idle interest, careful to keep his face turned in just a way that Jens couldn’t catch him staring. For a minor deity, Jens was exceptionally vain; he was a Michelangelo masterpiece and he was not ashamed to broadcast the fact that he knew it. Today he was wearing a white oxford half-unbuttoned over dark jeans, gilded ropes dangling down his flawless chest, sleeves pushed up to unveil a suggestion of flashing ink. To look at him was almost painful.
(When Robbe had seen himself in the mirror for the first time after being reborn, he’d been shocked. His imperfections had vanished: the freckles and scars and marks that had crisscrossed his face, the slight off-angle of his nose, the asymmetry of his eyebrows – all gone. He was still himself, certainly, but the novel perfection of his countenance was astonishing.
“Are angels allowed to be vain?”
“Hey, we aren’t perfect,” Jens, preening beside him in the mirror, had said. He’d switched his focus to Robbe’s face, huge hand cupping the back of his neck, the fresh scar lines of Robbe’s tattoo burning. “Nothing about afterlife is at all like they teach you, kid. They don’t have a clue. There’s a lot you don’t know.”)
“Long day?”
“Day.” Robbe withdrew from his own head, snorted. “What’s that?”
“You are preaching,” said Jens calmly, “to the literal choir.” (Indeed, he was part of the Choir of Angels, sang a brassy bass that had ripped gooseflesh all the way down to Robbe’s toes when he’d first heard the sound of Jens’s voice.)
“Touche. Nah, not long. I didn’t do much.” Robbe turned his head, scanned the crowd milling below; one of Medusa’s lesser Gorgon cousins was making her way across the courtyard and as he watched the crush of people parted like a page break for her hunted pathway. None of the other Gorgons except Stheno and Euralye could transform their observers to stone – that trick didn’t exactly work in Purgatory anyway – but no one liked to get too close to a single one of them nevertheless. Gorgon snakes bit the same regardless of the status of their mistress.
“No one to save?”
“No. I think Raphael wanted to give me a break after that nuclear crisis I averted in the Ukraine the other day.”
“Lucifer.” Jens swallowed, hissed through his teeth. “You’d think that lot would have learned their lesson after Chernobyl.”
“Humans are stupid,” said Robbe, shrugging. “I can say that with confidence. I’m not too far removed from them yet.”
“Yeah, well. I am far removed, and I agree with you. They’re like puppies or something.” Jens grinned, chucked under Robbe’s chin. “Sweet but dumb. Like you saving that kid’s life.”
“Fuck off.” Swearing was permitted, too, although Robbe’s favorite human curses (goddamn, Jesus fuck) were Not Allowed on the tongues of angels. They could misuse demonic titles as much as they wanted, however, and with Jens it was all or nothing: he liked to call upon the Prince of Darkness himself to lend a bit of flavor to his vernacular.
“Don’t think I will,” said Jens lightly. “Nothing interesting to report?”
“No. Some unusual mercreature activity off the coast of Norway, but nothing of importance in the land of the blissfully ignorant.” He meant those humans who remained unaware of the various other planes of existence. “And you?”
“Mercreature activity?” Jens groaned, puffed out a hot, displeased breath so it blustered through his tousled fringe. “I hope it’s not one of mine.”
Robbe grinned. “Dunno. I’ll do some research for you when I’m out there next. Should be about five to seven business days, if the wind catches me right.”
“If it’s really that big, I’ll be finding out soon enough,” said Jens. “That brother and sister duo, the one I was telling you about – ”
“Oh, you mean the mermaid who’s always pulling an Ariel?”
“The one who always tries to get as close to land as possible without getting harpooned, yeah.” Jens was halfway through his drink already; Robbe could feel the stress curling off him in clouds. “She’s been stirring it up again lately. If she goes ashore, the brother will go after her, and to be honest I sense more trouble from him than from her.”
Of all the active cases Jens had running right now, this was Robbe’s favorite: he had always been stunned by the sea, how unknowable it was, black hole of the Earth. “Doesn’t he spend all his time hanging out with sharks and whales?”
“Yeah,” said Jens, musing. “But there’s something on land that’s going to draw him in, and it’s gonna get complicated.”
“Something?” Robbe arched his dark eyebrows. “Or someone?”
“Can’t see that far yet,” said Jens. He meant into the future. “It gets cloudy under the sea for me.”
“You don’t need to see,” said Robbe decisively, “if it’s going to get complicated for a mercreature on land, it is definitely a someone.”
“Probably,” said Jens. He leaned over the railing by which they were standing, narrowed his eyes at the Gorgon cousin, still visible striking her hurried, widened track towards Lesser Purgatory. “Where the fuck is Eurydice going?”
“How can you even tell which Gorgon that is from here?”
“My spirit animal is a hawk,” said Jens cheekily.
“But they all look the same.”
“Nah. Their snakes are different colors and species,” said Jens. “Eurydice has these kind of coral-pink pit vipers. Very cool.”
Robbe tilted his head, twisted his mouth in concession. “That’s fair. Wanna follow her?”
Jens cut his eyes sly to the side, knowing. “Robbe.”
“What?” Robbe adopted his most virtuous visage: huge glimmering eyes, pious bow of a mouth, all innocence. “Don’t even act like you’re not interested in the business of Gorgons. You can tell them apart, for fuck’s sake.”
“Alright, I won’t,” said Jens, “if you stop acting like you give a shit what she’s up to and admit that you just want to see Lesser Purgatory.”
Lesser Purgatory was the renowned haven of demons, the place from whence the devil’s legions were forbidden to leave when they visited the midway point between Earth and hell. Robbe had spent his entire afterlife chasing hints of what it might be like there; angels were allowed to venture into the LP, but from what little he had managed to wheedle from Jens they usually only went when it was absolutely necessary. It had taken an obnoxious amount of hounding to get Jens to admit that yes I’ve been there, Izjermans, hot damn, it’s really not worth all this obsessing about but he had seen the shadow of untruth slash Jens’s eyes and knew that there was a depth to the tale that the elder angel was concealing. Since then he had made it his mission to learn as much about the LP as he could, even going so far as to slink cloaked by his Shield down to the entrance, but he’d been alone and young and he hadn’t been brave enough to pass over the border. He wasn’t sure if the Shield was enough to obscure him from the things that lurked in the LP, but he wasn’t stupid enough to risk going without an accomplice. Jens would have known what he’d done the second he looked into Robbe’s eyes, anyway, and he hadn’t felt like dealing with the repercussions of Jens’s well-meaning blusters.
“Yeah, okay,” said Robbe, dropping the mask. “I want to see it. But isn’t now the perfect time? Drinking Hour, no one’s paying attention, my Elder with me?”
Jens arched his spine, closed his eyes, sighed. Emptied his goblet and slammed it on the railing.
“Technically, I’m supposed to take you to see it anyway.”
“What?” Robbe couldn’t decide whether to lend more of his emotion to disbelief or annoyance. “You’re supposed to show me the LP?”
“Yeah, yeah, calm down,” said Jens. “All Elders have to take their Fledglings to see it within the first ten human years of their new existence. It’s a rite of passage, of sorts, so you know what’s out there.”
“And you were just not gonna tell me about this?”
“I was going to tell you eventually,” said Jens. “But I knew you wouldn’t shut up about it if I gave you a timeline, so I thought it would be a nice surprise for a rough day.”
“So you’ve been more than once.”
Jens licked his lower lip, regarded Robbe stoically; his eyes were glinting, amused. “Uh huh.”
“You lying asshole, you would barely even admit to me that you’d seen it.”
Jens raised his hands. “Ignorance is bliss, sweet pea.”
“Don’t fucking call me that,” said Robbe. He closed his eyes, breathed hard twice through his nose, settled. “That’s it, then. You’re taking me. Right now.”
He finished his drink, smacked it down besides Jens’s own. Then, before the older angel could object, Robbe grabbed his wrists, Shielded them both, and Warped.
They landed smoothly on an empty corner of the grey slate sidewalk below, out of range of anyone who might accidentally have been impacted by their sudden arrival. When Robbe had first learned to Warp he’d been messy and unpredictable, prone to teleporting directly on top of another being or in a puddle of mud or somewhere else equally inconvenient, but he’d improved vastly with practice and Jens hadn’t had to correct him in almost a year. Now Robbe basked at the automatic pride in Jens’s face before it faded into aggravation.
“Ijzermans. I swear to Lucifer.”
“Maybe he’ll be there. You can swear to his face,” said Robbe, grinning.
“Shut the fuck up,” said Jens, but he smirked, too. “You realize this is a terrible time to go to the LP. Drinking Hour is a lot rowdier over there.”
Robbe found his eyes, hazy green and impassive, and searched them.
“And that’s a…bad thing.”
Jens flashed a grim grin. “You ever see a bar brawl on Earth?”
“Yeah. Once or twice.”
“Okay, so it’s like that,” said Jens, “but a hundred percent worse, because demons.”
Robbe sighed, gestured vaguely around them; within eyesight he caught a troll, a fae, at least two centaurs, all milling about like there was nothing more natural in the world, because here it was natural. “Jens, it’s not like shit doesn’t happen in Greater Purgatory, either. Demons might not hang out here, but nothing in GP is inherently good. I mean, are angels even good, by Earth standards?”
“Fair point,” said Jens, and when their eyes locked again heat seared. “All right, little one. I’ll take you. But you do what I say and you don’t take down the Shield unless I tell you otherwise. Okay?”
“O captain, my captain,” said Robbe solemnly, straight-faced pulling from one of Jens’s favorite human films. Jens rolled his glittering eyes.
“Come on, then. You insufferable brat.”
“You love me,” said Robbe, preening, cheeky, and Jens made a sort of pshaw noise in the back of his throat before he spun around and led Robbe into the shadows.
*
“Medusa won’t come,” said Senne, leaning back in his seat as he licked blood from his thumb, slow. “She never shows up to these things.”
“She’s coming.” Britt was drip-dark against the red splash of the wall, dead-eyed. “Trust me.”
“Trust you?” Senne’s grin was a blade-white slash. “Fuck off, harpy. Your word means less to me than dirt.”
“Fine, don’t trust me then,” said Britt, without venom. “Trust Thanatos. He’s the one who told me. Sander was there, weren’t you?”
In the back of the booth shielded by low low light, blank and sneering at the eyes, observing, Sander leaned lazily forward to rest his elbows on the table and sighed.
“I was. But Senne’s right, she’s not coming unless she comes. The word of a demon is tripe.”
“Sander, you’re a demon.”
“I am.” Sander stirred one finger in his drink, dark liquid clinging to his porcelain skin. “And that’s how I can be so sure. Know thyself, Britt.”
It was funny, he thought, how confident he could sound preaching about self-knowledge when in reality he didn’t know shit about who he was.
Once upon a time, Sander had been a sweet tawny-haired human boy, a bit daydreamy in school but endlessly skilled with art and words and language. When he’d been barely eighteen, his mother had passed away in a car accident, leaving his father to crumple into a useless, heartbroken shell and Sander to take the force of the blow. He’d lost pieces of himself every day until, two and a half years later, shattered and empty and by all accounts bereft of options, he had started seeking superficial solace in the power of his physicality. He knew enough by then to be cognizant of how others craved his body, the hot brush of his skin against theirs, the spike of flame that flared when he rested his gaze upon them. It was the one thing he felt sure of when everything else was draining away like the tide back to sea: others found him to be an ethereal kind of gorgeous, and beauty equated to status. His face granted him passage to VIP rooms at clubs he wasn’t technically old enough to enter; his sexuality allowed him the luxury of pretending - only if for a night - that fraught lust was just as fulfilling and meaningful as love. He learned how to do precisely what he needed to do in order to fulfill a plethora of desires and kinks and he soon discovered that the more tricks he added to his cache the greater his reach became. Individuals with heavier and heavier social clout were becoming everyday conquests to him; eventually, devoid of challenge, he stopped regarding them as conquests at all.
With money and influence, of course, came access. It wasn’t long before he realized how much easier it was to forget that his life was a facade when there was some sort of drug flowing perpetually through his system; consequently, by the age of twenty-two, he was doing cocaine almost daily, smoking powerful weed from the moment he opened his eyes until the second he closed them. His father never questioned the inexplicable influx of money; he’d stopped working long ago and had been reduced to a husk of a human curled in his rocking chair, zombie-eyed and radiating misery, left alone to wither. He didn’t speak more than was necessary, ate when Sander put food in front of him, slept as often as he could. For all the world it was though he had nothing left to live for, despite the relentless effort Sander had put in in to bring him back to Earth, show him that he still had a son who loved and cared for him, that he was needed. That he didn’t have to give up.
Strange, though, how giving up could present itself in so many different ways. Sander and his father were both experts at numbing themselves; the difference might have been starkly visible within their methodologies, but their divergent means led to the same end. Forgetting.
Cocaine made him a machine; weed stroked his nerve endings numb, and he couldn’t recall how to feel until he found heroin and it gave him that power back with interest. All the meaningless sex he’d had over the past few years had stripped his capacity to assign emotion to physicality and no one had shown him any kind of genuine love since his mother had died and it was exactly what he’d thought he needed to get back on his feet. He could enjoy himself again, let his body take over and his mind appreciate the overwhelming pleasure that sex could bring, and for a while it seemed as though things might actually make an upturn. He started saving money for art school, started cooking more than eggs and boxed macaroni and cheese for his father, started watching the sunset again. His life seemed to be stabilizing at last.
Until the high stopped coming so easily, and he had to hunt to find product strong enough to get him back to the apexes he’d once attained so effortlessly. When Senne had found him he’d been face-up on the bathroom floor, having injected himself with such a strong dose that it was a miracle (even demons believed in those) his heart hadn’t stopped beating on the spot.
Sander had known he was dying. Senne was a black blur above his head, his heartbeat slowed to a faint, infrequent purr, veins thick as tar. He was twenty-three years old.
“Sander,” Senne had said, and then there was nothing.
When he’d awoken he’d been convinced of his own death. All around him was black, blacker than any kind of night he’d ever experienced in his life; he imagined this kind of impenetrable coal to be akin to the darkness that enveloped the bowels of the Parisian Catacombs when every tourist’s flashlight had disappeared for the day. But,
“You’re not dead.”
Senne had been sharp and shocking before him, tall, impassive.
“Why the fuck not,” Sander had spat, and it had stunned him how much he’d hoped otherwise.
“Because,” said Senne, and he’d reached out to glide a hand through Sander’s hair, “your human life was fucking terrible, and I thought you were due for something a lot better. Come look at yourself, little one.”
And through the darkness they were moving, the air gallivanting trickily around them; Sander wound his fingers through it and found it pressing back. When Senne pulled him in front of a mirror – one that appeared in front of them as suddenly as a strike of lightning – it didn’t surprise him to learn that he was naked.
“My eyes,” he said, croaky as he raised his fingers to his face; his pupils had turned a ferocious color of red and from them dripped a slow stream of scarlet liquid that evaporated before it could flow below his cheekbones. Blood.
“Yes.” Senne had been calm, static beside him. Sander had known him briefly in life; he’d been a regular at the strip club, although never one of Sander’s own personal clients. Now that he thought about it, he’d never actually seen Senne with any of his coworkers – he’d just sort of been there, lurking, background noise.
“Senne, what are you?”
“Not just me,” Senne had said, amusement cresting around his mouth, in his eyes. They were a different color than what Sander remembered; he’d been certain they were brown, but the hue reflected there now was an undeniable, aggressive sort of violet.
Sander looked at him in the mirror.
“What am I.” He thought he knew; it wasn’t a question.
“We,” said Senne, “are demons. Gratissimum.”
*
At first, Sander had been resentful of his newfound eternity; now, he was constantly overcome with gratitude for Senne, for what he had done (“you saved me,” as his blood-tears turned to water, and Senne had kissed the top of his head and held him for hours, until he’d stopped shaking). As much as his human life had been a dumpster fire, his afterlife was a neverending adventure, and he was at risk for none of the things that had ravaged his prior existence: addiction, disease, crippling mental illness. He was clear of mind and pure of body and there was not a single substance available to him in any of the worlds he could inhabit that would destroy him. He was invincible.
All of that was fantastic, tremendous, and he was happy – happier than he could remember ever being as a mortal, even when his mother had been alive and his father had been more than a soul-phantom. But immortality couldn’t change the fact that he didn’t know himself.
Senne looked at him now and Sander could read in his elder’s face that he understood what a line he had just fed to Britt; they smirked imperceptibly at each other before Senne said:
“I don’t really give a shit if she comes or not. There have been more interesting things known to show up on Fight Night than the higher Gorgons.”
Sander’s head turned for that; when unimpressed, stoic Senne expressed genuine interest in something, that something never failed to be worthwhile. “Such as?”
“Lots of things, Driesen,” said Senne on a drawl, but he was smiling. “In this particular case, though, I’m talking about angels.”
Angels.
Both Britt and Sander sat up; Britt was just a harpy, so she was allowed to go roaming Greater Purgatory as often as she pleased – as long as she kept the trickery and drama to a minimum – and she’d seen an angel or two in her time, but she’d never gotten close enough to speak to one, and she was just as fascinated as the demon population about those golden unknowable beings.
“Angels?” Sander was skeptical. “At Exitium?”
“Mm.” Senne dipped a finger in his goblet of blood, sucked it clean. Even for a supernatural being, he had eccentric habits, habits that had led Sander to surmise that demon was not quite an explanation for everything that he was – and he’d been right. Senne was one-quarter vampire on his father’s side, and he had a strong craving for blood, although he tried not to hunt hapless human prey if he could help it. Once, when they’d been in the Arctic trying to round up a group of murderous draugr who’d been luring polar bears to their untimely deaths, Senne, bereft of blood for three days straight, had almost gone mad for need.
“Drain a polar bear, for Christ’s sake,” Sander had yelled in vexation, after the sixth time Senne had snapped at him in an hour.
His Elder had looked at him as though he’d never seen a creature so stupid.
“I can’t fucking do that, Driesen, what kind of monster do you think I am? We’re here to rescue them, not contribute to population loss. Jesus.”
Sander had rolled his eyes so hard blood had splashed into his dark eyebrows.
“First of all, you’re not a monster, you’re a fucking demon. Second of all, if you take one big drink from an animal that size, it won’t even faze them. You might have a rogue vamp polar bear running around, but sometimes you have to risk it for the biscuit, you know what I’m saying?”
Senne had examined him with such intensity that Sander had felt pinned to the ground; when he’d realized what Senne was looking at his stomach had twisted strangely.
“Sander.”
“Yeah.”
Slowly, Senne had moved closer; they were in an alcove of one of the polar bear caverns staking out the draugr leader, a notorious night-hunter. Cold couldn’t affect demons but it was still unpleasant to be hit with nonstop torrents of sleet and snow, so they’d taken shelter while they waited for it to appear.
“You have,” said Senne, and his voice was trembling, “blood.”
“Yeah,” said Sander hoarsely, aware for the first time in months of the liquid seeping steadily from his eyes. “I do.”
Abruptly it was impossibly warm in the space between them; Senne blinked and shook his head and shoved back, feral expression dissipating just slightly.
“Fuck. I’m sorry. That’s – I shouldn’t ask you for that.”
“No,” said Sander, and he reached out and pulled Senne in by the front of his shirt. “It’s fine. Drink. If it makes you stop being a fuckhead, I’m here for it.”
Many demons had all black or all red or all white eyes; others had vampiric wolf teeth; yet others had webbed fingers or retractable claws or forked tongues. From what both he and Senne had deduced, Sander was the only one of his kind whose external Trait was to constantly cry blood. He suspected it was because his Maker was part vampire.
Now Sander watched Senne licking blood from his fingers, thinking of winged golden beings and tiny space-less caves and the gentle hunger with which Senne had held Sander’s head as he’d lapped the blood from his face, and waited for his Elder to elaborate. But before he could, Britt spoke up again.
“An angel at Fight Night,” she said haughtily, “is something that I won’t believe until I see it.”
“Suit yourself,” said Senne, amused. “But you might not know what you’re looking at even if you do see one. They can blend in very well, you know.”
*
“This is insane,” said Robbe, for at least the fourth time in half an hour.
“Robbe, shut up,” hissed Jens, clamping one of his gigantic hands around Robbe’s wrist as they ducked past a group of weres skulking in the middle of the alleyway. “Your Shield isn’t a damn cone of silence, you know.”
“I know, I know, I’m sorry,” said Robbe, but he was grinning as he turned his head to gawk after the weres. “I’ve never actually seen one of them in real life before.”
“Yeah, well, you’re not missing anything,” said Jens under his breath. “It’s weird that they’re here right now. Weres normally don’t come out for a half-moon.”
Rarely were days in Purgatory sunny for longer than ten minutes at a time, but each night the sky cleared for the moody moon and its surrounding speckled stars. Robbe never ceased to be grateful for the view; in life he had been a star-chaser, often climbing to the roof of his flatshare to watch the galaxies above him gleam, and he wasn’t sure he would have been able to get behind an afterlife without constellations.
“It’s Drinking Night,” he said, dismissive, his focus switching gears for every new oddity in sight. They’d only been in the LP for ten minutes and he’d already seen a night-dragon and two banshees; however, Eurydice, to Jens’s great disappointment, was nowhere to be found. “Everyone comes out for that.”
“I guess,” said Jens. His voice was mistrustful. “Have you seen enough yet?"
“Are you kidding?” Robbe’s giddiness was in blatant disparity with Jens’s wary gloom. “We haven’t even made it to the city center!”
Lesser Purgatory was both exactly what he had expected and nothing at all like the intricate labyrinth his imagination had spun for him. The darkness everywhere was on-brand, as were the run-down, shoddy storefronts surrounding them on both sides, and the humans dwelling here were grimmer by far than the ones who carried out fairly normal existences in Greater Purgatory. If Robbe had tried to pick one word to describe them, it would have been sooty; their skin was grey and ashen, their eyes and hair and teeth dulled to muted shadows of the luster they had held in life, and none of them looked as though they had smiled in decades. Most of them, Robbe thought with a shiver, probably hadn’t.
“They look awful,” he whispered to Jens as they danced their meticulous way through the crowd.
“Of course they do,” said Jens. “Lesser Purgatory is a hovel.”
Robbe watched a child as filthy as a chimney-sweep walking past them with her eyes down, gray shawl swathed tightly around her head, and found his chest warming with sympathy. “Can they leave?”
“When they do their penance,” said Jens, grim. “Then they’ll either be made into angels or demons or reincarnated to another universe, depending.”
“On what?”
“Lots of things,” said Jens. “I’ll tell you about it when we’re not supposed to be fucking quiet.”
“You’re incredibly foul-mouthed for a high-tier angel,” said Robbe, but he was messing, and when Jens jabbed him pointedly in the ribs it was without venom.
“Can it, Fledgling.”
Robbe was about to open his mouth to respond – because he never let Jens get the last word if he could help it – when they rounded a corner smack into the wretched grandeur of the city center, and he was momentarily stripped of the power of speech.
Everything was rendered in different shades of what could only be described as bleak, grays and blacks and whites, as heavily morose as the city’s uniform inhabitants. Buildings seemed sharper here, turrets that ended in rough, angled points, windows like frowning eyes, fence posts that thrust aggressively skyward. From the rooftops, grimacing stone gargoyles observed wordlessly; Robbe had heard tales that they were the works of the Gorgons themselves and he wouldn’t have been surprised to find that it was more than a rumor. One of the High Demons, Raksha, who was immune to the Gorgons’ ability to turn prey to stone, was responsible for the architectural upkeep of Lesser Purgatory’s city center. She was enjoying quite a scandalous affair with Medusa and was known to incorporate elements of her favorites into her work; it was alleged that when she finished with a lover she killed them and immortalized parts of their bodies within the designs of her buildings.
Robbe wasn’t quite so positive about the truth behind that one. At any rate Medusa wouldn’t allow that to happen to her.
Despite the titanic relief of the open sky the air seemed dimmer, thicker, difficult to keep comfortably in one’s lungs. The faces around them were rent with resigned misery: slit eyes, slash-mouths, loud in their silent warnings to stay away. No one seemed to want to attract any more attention than was necessary and Robbe was suddenly glad for the shield; without it, he and Jens, gold and glittering, would have drawn eyes for miles.
As it stood the most noticeable thing about the city center by far was the fountain positioned directly in the middle of the square. A gigantic granite statue of Tantalus, morbid-beautiful in its careful, clever attention to detail, stood beside a stone apple tree amidst a massive basin of water. One arm extended upward towards the lowest branch of the tree and around him black water flowed steadily from multiple faucets into the pool of water at his feet. True to mythology, both the branch and the water seemed close enough to touch, but Tantalus was damned to deprivation for eternity, within sight and smell and feel of both food and water but denied access to both. The expression of helpless longing on his face was wrenching; Robbe could not yank his gaze away.
“This is dismal,” he hissed under his breath, delighted.
“Don’t sound so excited, Ijzermans, hell,” said Jens. “You’re an angel. Act like it.”
Robbe ignored him. “I’ve only been an angel for five years, Jens, come on. Even you have to admit this is dope.”
Jens regarded him with one feathered eyebrow arched so high it blended with the fall of his thick dark fringe. “Your enthusiasm is endearing. It is interesting, kid, I’ll give you that, but the way it feels here, you know? The collective misery is contagious after a while.”
Robbe could see his point, but he was high on novelty and the gloom couldn’t touch him. “Not tonight, Jens. Not tonight.”
And indeed, the further they pressed into the square, the more the atmosphere seemed to change: the silence had swelled into a low roaring chatter, not of an unpleasant tone. Most beings seemed to be headed towards a knobby, narrow little street directly parallel to the main road, and as Jens squinted after them his face transformed abruptly from fixed concentration to understanding.
“Oh, shit.”
“What?” Robbe was immediately on alert.
“I think I know why the weres were out.”
“Why?”
“Because,” said Jens, and Robbe was astonished to find that he was beaming, “it’s fucking Fight Night.”
*
Fight Night, among fledgling angels, was something of a legend.
Everyone had something to say about it; no one ever managed to get any of the facts straight. Some said it was like an underground boxing league between creatures of similar size and mettle; others said it was more of a fight-to-the-death, gladiator situation; yet others said it wasn’t a real thing and anyone who believed in it was a dolt. Robbe had chosen to endure on the side of the skeptics just to remain sane because in truth he was wild to know about it.
“I thought that was just a myth.”
“It’s certainly not,” said Jens, looking affronted. Musingly, almost to himself, he added, “that explains where Eurydice was going.”
“To you, maybe,” said Robbe, pouting. Sometimes this low-handed tactic worked wonders on Jens’s willingness to share and tonight seemed to be one of those nights because he said:
“Do you want me to explain or do you want to see it for yourself?”
Ten minutes later, having successfully trailed the crowd surge, they were shoving their way through the door of a dingy sort of nightclub, neon sign overhead reading EXITIUM, smaller sign beneath proclaiming in words so unremarkable it was easy to miss them: FIGHT NIGHT TODAY. Robbe was still smirking at the irony of this when Jens pulled him in close and hissed under his breath.
“Keep your guard up. Make sure you’re reinforcing the Shield at all times. I’ll help you as much as I can, but you need to remember that there are things in the LP that can sense us, even if they can’t see us.”
“Noted,” said Robbe, but his brain was fully occupied with the possibilities of what he might see that night, and the urgency in Jens’s tone didn’t translate. As they dodged creatures and humans alike to make their way into the center of the building Robbe’s senses went into defcon five: the air throbbed with a bass so low it sawed pleasantly within his golden bloodstream, chatter so mixed and strange he could not pick up a single word in a single language, sights so unusual he kept blinking to confirm reality. To his left was a sphinx chatting with a gryphon, to his right a group of shadow-fae, directly in front of him a lone wendigo. He had never seen so many harpies in his afterlife and he was about to say as much to Jens when he looked up and saw the makeshift arena, positioned in the back left of the room.
“That’s where the fighting happens?”
“Yeah,” said Jens, with a great deal of satisfaction. “And tonight it’s Gorgons.”
*
Nestled privately in the very back of the club, blocked from excess noise and aggravation and distraction, Sander felt the air shift.
The alteration was minimal - similar to the way atmospheric pressure adapts a slight moist heaviness in those hesitant slow moments before a storm - but it was definite, and his hackles reared instantly. Senne saw the change on his face and set his glass on the tabletop; by now he was wholly in tune with his Fledgling’s intricacies and he knew when Sander was Sensing.
“Driesen,” he said, “what?”
“I don’t know,” said Sander, flexing his fist against the strike of chill that thrashed down his spine, automatic. “Something powerful.”
“Good or bad?” Britt was distracted, searching the crowd; her bruja friend was supposed to be joining them but it was getting closer to First Blood and neither hide nor hair had been seen of her yet. If any of the Higher species were participating in Fight Night, they wouldn’t be featured in the arena until much later, but the early rounds were always good and bloody when the draw contained Gorgons and Furies.
“Depends on your parameters,” said Sander, and he grinned. Senne relaxed; if he could smile, they weren’t in immediate danger.
“Tell me when you see it.”
“I don’t know if I CAN see it,” said Sander abruptly, and he didn’t understand why but he was certain that whatever it was that had caused the air to rearrange itself would not be easily visible.
Senne’s eyebrows bridged marginally.
“Now that is unusual.”
“I know,” said Sander, restless. He swallowed the last mouthful of his drink, rose to his feet with a metallic clang. Something was always clinking on his body; he never went anywhere without excess adornment. “I’m going to get more alcohol before this shit gets started.”
“Get me a refill,” said Senne, scrutinizing him.
“Ram or elk, Dracula?”
“Ram.”
“Cheers,” said Sander, before he turned to maneuver his way through the melee to the bar. When he was out of eyesight of the table he allowed his guard to relax slightly; he’d excused himself because he was unsettled and he didn’t like showing vulnerability, especially not in front of Senne. But the fact remained that Sander’s most powerful gifts were to Sense and See, and when the former was not bolstered by the latter, he could only assume that whatever was concealing itself wielded the kind of power on a level that he had not yet dealt with.
He pressed up to the bar, hailed the sullen pixie standing behind it, ordered something strong for himself and stronger for Senne (because, according to him, blood was much more satisfying when it was spiked with alcohol). Leaned against the countertop and wrecked the cuticle of his thumb with his teeth until black blood emerged over the surface of his skin; when he pulled his hand away the pierce-wound disappeared smoothly. He was halfway back to the table with two heavy mugs in hand, focused on balancing them both so no liquid spilled over the edge, when he looked automatically over to his left and stopped flat.
The air in Exitium was always smoke-thick and sooty, reduced, like a living version of a grainy vintage photograph. Never before had Sander seen color appear within the place aside from gray and red and sepia tones; it had been curated to reflect the dismal nature of Lesser Purgatory, and it did its job effectively.
That was why it was so disquieting to see the empty space directly to the left of one of the dim overhead lights glimmering with luminescent gold.
Sander bit at the ring hooked through his lower lip, brow scrunched as he stared at the abnormal patch of glittery air. For all intents and purposes the area seemed quite devoid of occupancy, but the longer Sander stood watching it, the more apparent it became that the crowd was – whether consciously or not– avoiding that little place. He scrutinized the faces of the beings that came closest to it, did a quick survey of the area to see if anyone else seemed to notice the gold patch, but no one even glanced in that direction. Whatever it was, it was clear that only he could see it.
Whatever it was, he knew, was the thing that had caused the air to change.