Angels to Ashes Read online

  I gestured at the scattered dossiers on the desk. “Is this it? There’s nothing interesting here. It’s the same old shit.”

  He snorted with nasty laughter. “Yeah, Boss, that’s what happens when you do the same old shit for hundreds of years: shit gets old.”

  “Well, yes, but there’s got to be some more interesting prospects out there. I nearly dozed off just looking at these files. Most of them would end up sending themselves to Hell just fine without me.”

  I paused, considering what it was that I actually desired. “I want a case that’s difficult and prestigious, one that will score me some publicity,” I finally said.

  “Uh huh.” His watery gaze was flat and disinterested.

  “Remember that pope in the 1800s? That’s what I’m talking about. I had to work with him one-on-one for months before he finally cracked. I need another one like that! These leads are uninspiring.”

  While a soul was a soul was a soul, their worth was directly related to their fame and the difficulty of the purchase. I’d been on a bit of a dry spell when it came to prestigious souls, and I didn’t want to let myself slide into mediocrity within the Directorate of Pride. The lawyer had been a chilling reminder of that danger.

  Arcturus continued to regard me with irritation, and his perpetual scowl seemed to droop even lower along the edges of his protruding canines. “Oh, well! All you needed to tell me was that you wanted to be inspired! I’m obviously a master of inspiration. Let me get right on that.”

  “And you got lucky on that pope,” he added with a sneer. “The Directorate of Lust gets most of the clergy. Don’t hold your breath for another pope.”

  I sighed; it was always that way with Arcturus. Would it kill him to show some professionalism?

  “You know damn well what I’m saying,” I snapped. “Now get out there and go shake some trees, or some hobos, or whatever it is that you do. Chop-chop.”

  I waved him away.

  Arcturus shook his tiny head and lifted off my desk with comically small wings. He flapped toward the door even more sullenly than he had entered. Being that surly was a talent.

  “Art,” I called as he reached the door.

  He turned.

  “I believe in you,” I mouthed, smiling warmly.

  Arcturus flew through the door, extending a tiny middle finger as he went.

  Chapter Two

  The Empty One

  Walter Grey was a short and slightly plump man in his late fifties. He had a thinning head of salt-and-pepper hair, thin round spectacles, and a kindly face that seemed locked in perpetual contemplation. There was a wise and academic look to him, which was wholly appropriate considering the fact that he was a tenured Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University.

  He had finally achieved his tenure several years ago, after decades of Herculean effort, and philosophy was the love of his life. He was single and never married, finding life pleasantly simple when he didn’t have to worry about taking care of someone else. Walter had plenty to focus on without the complications posed by a relationship.

  While many found that puzzling, he believed himself quite happy and satisfied.

  Walter was agnostic, of course, as he expected of all good philosophers. He had never been able to reconcile himself with the idea of some divine entity watching over everything, meting out judgment and actually giving a shit about pork or stem cells. It all seemed so outrageously anthropomorphic and vain.

  If there really was some sort of intelligence out there that had created the universe, it seemed self-evident that there would be no way for humanity to ever understand It.

  To Walter, the absence of a judging God did not mean, however, that life was without purpose. That was the job of philosophy: to understand how to live a whole and happy life without using the tenets of a book written thousands of years ago. That had often been a struggle to him during periods of difficulty in his life, but it was a struggle that he had endured stoically.

  Did he not bear his scars well?

  Humanity needed to learn how to be kind to one another without the threat of eternal punishment and torment, how to find purpose without a divine being in your corner. Individuals were responsible for their own actions, and the results they achieved. Many people found such concepts troubling, but they were profoundly comforting to Walter. He loved the excitement of the great unknown, and what greater unknown was there than the nature of existence itself?

  On that particular evening, Walter found himself where he often did when he was feeling particularly philosophical: Lewiston Park, on the outskirts of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  Lewiston Park was a small and unremarkable park, crowded with lush trees and a tiny lake. Walter had always loved it there. He felt as though he could actually think in the park, as though he was closer to the universal mysteries he constantly sought. He enjoyed circling the shore of the lake at night while contemplating the questions of existence with nothing but the stars and the insects to keep him company.

  That terrible night was one such night.

  ~

  Existence is pain.

  The Empty One was no stranger to pain. The pain had been present since the beginning of time — a gnawing, writhing invader beneath the skin. A heinous sense of wrongness pervaded the purity of its purpose.

  There was nothing with which to measure the erosion of time except pain, and the march of time was long, indeed. Each shuddering breath of the passing ages reverberated with piercing daggers. Each immortal heartbeat was fraught with unending agony.

  The pain the Empty One experienced now, however, was different. The pain was personal: close, and smothering. It was one with the pain now, and it was a thing of madness. Now, it was an infant wrapped in the accursed skin of creation, the violation of cruel ages, and it wore a cloak of razorblades. Every step it took sent waves of agony skittering through its undying flesh.

  The Empty One would not stop, though. Never.

  The creature looked like a man, but was not. Tears wept from its eyes, but its gaze was placid, and behind it — nothing. No mind hid behind the unassuming visage. The dreams and aspirations of humanity did not move its body, little more than a clay puppet. At its frozen core, it was something else entirely.

  The Empty One was the child of the eternal Void, the emptiness between the stars and at the heart of every molecule. It was a manifestation of nothingness, the messiah of the timeless abyss: the essence of un-creation.

  Existence had to stop. It had endured enough.

  Its birth had been no easy task. It was a marriage of flesh and entropy, the ultimate abomination. Time, however, was not in short supply. Through the relentless agony of the eons, the Void had watched and waited while the outrage of the material squirmed in the depths of its bowels.

  Every dawning day, every child’s laugh, every widow’s scream; each was an icy spear of pain driven into its heart. The Void had finally managed to insert a fragment of its essence into the skein of the material world, wrapping it in a duplicitous façade of flesh and bone. The Empty One was its first, and finest, creation.

  The Void would use its avatar to undo the atrocities of the Prime Mover.

  The Void was not a creator or a weaver, but even the crudest seamstress knew the most magnificent tapestry could be unmade if one but knew where to cut. A snip here and a snip there, a gentle tug, and everything unravels, spilling its guts into the ravenous darkness. The steaming entrails of existence would be a fitting eulogy for the Prime Mover.

  The Void would reclaim its unending dominion. It would kill time. It would usher the return of emptiness.

  ~

  Walter padded slowly through the grass. Scuffed shoes followed a beaten path around the edge of the lake. His hands rested in his pockets and his gaze skimmed the sky. The stars above shone in their celestial splendor, reflected in the placid surface of the small pond. Insects chirped pleasantly in the warm and humid night. Everything was as it should be.

  While Walter
walked the well-worn path, his mind also found one of its familiar roads. For quite some time, Walter had felt the inexplicable sensation there was something that he was forgetting … something important, but he had absolutely no idea what.

  It was actually more like something was missing rather than forgotten, but he did not find that surprising. It was not a new sensation to Walter. Wasn’t life measured by things lacking, its passage tracked by the emptiness of darkened alcoves? The eternally grasping hands of humanity, closing upon nothing? It was vaguely troubling, but it was a feeling to which Walter had become accustomed.

  He submerged it, once more, beneath the surface of his consciousness.

  Walter was lost in reverie when he noticed the insects were silent. He looked down from the stars and realized, with mild surprise, that there was another figure just ahead of him. The figure stood, silent and still, on the nearby shore.

  Walter was generally alone in the park at that time of night. The dark figure looked away from Walter to the distant shore of the lake. Something about the situation made Walter slightly uneasy. He paused.

  “Hello there!” Walter called with a forced cheer, not wanting to startle the man. “Not often I see someone else out here this late,” he continued, chuckling nervously.

  The man slowly turned. He was dressed simply, of average height and build. Something on his face glistened in the gloom of the park’s lanterns. Tears? The man’s expression was inscrutable, and there was nothing alarming about his appearance, but there was something … off.

  Walter opened his mouth to launch some more nervous banter, but then something happened to the man’s face.

  To Walter’s horror, the face opened, like a kaleidoscopic flower basking in the warmth of a foreign sun. The shards of the unfurling face bent at impossible angles, an affront to the natural order of the world. Its petals were entropy, its pollen motes of the endless abyss, and at the center — there was nothing.

  It was not the nothing in the depths of a dark closet, oh no — its emptiness was the ultimate truth. It was the sinister backdrop of every-day life, and it was aware. Eyes that had never lived peered into Walter’s soul. A mouth that had never laughed, never smiled, opened wide to scream in tormented rage.

  The emptiness was not truly empty, and it howled with an alien cacophony of agony. The Empty One, the first-begotten child of the Void, stepped toward Walter.

  Its maw was the gateway into oblivion.

  Pain. Hatred. Outrage. Tragedy. The bottomless well of eternity, the eons unchained in a blossoming orchid.

  Walter’s heart burst in his chest with a tiny pop. He felt it from far away, and it seemed such a small thing for one of such terrible import. His life fled from the ruined husk of his body as his soul fled his ashes.

  It spiraled down, and down, and down, toward a howling lake of fire.

  Chapter 3

  Kalyndriel

  Kalyndriel, Avenging Angel of the 5th Heavenly Choir, plummeted from the heavens like a radiant meteor. Luminous wings streamed behind her like the like trail of a falling star as she descended, faster and faster, toward the city below. Heavenly attendants sang her passage as she tore the sky with blistering wrath.

  The Angel could have just materialized instantly in Cambridge, but she often felt that taking the scenic route helped her clear her thoughts. It was a suitably apocalyptic entrance for an Avenging Angel, and she had dire business to attend. She must maintain decorum.

  Kalyndriel struck the street with a cataclysmic impact that sent divine shockwaves roiling through the ether like a tsunami. She stood slowly, arching her back and spreading her wings, a vision of Angelic ferocity that would have made Michelangelo weep with fright.

  Beautiful, Angelic severity sculpted her every feature, an amalgam of elegance and merciless judgment. Her graceful frame was tall and lithe, yet undeniably powerful. Blinding platinum hair, vibrating with radiance, cascaded beneath her burning halo. Enormous wings of seething celestial energy framed her stern visage.

  She was clad in enough divine armor, cast in marble and silver, to serve as the heavenly equivalent of a main battle tank.

  Avenging Angels were among the most terrible of the Maker’s children, the enforcers of His divine will. Named for the weapon she wielded, she was widely known as the Lance of Justice. She was a weapon of God, one of His most feared instruments.

  Kalyndriel was on a mission. A vile Demon had violated the Wager, the ancient pact that governed divine interactions in the human world. As long as they followed the Wager, Demons and Angels could travel freely between their domains and Earth, usually with minimal direct conflict.

  The Wager was sacred, and any deviation was met with extreme vindication … often from Kalyndriel and her kin.

  The rules of the Wager were simple: no direct intervention in matters of the soul, and no revealing oneself to the masses of humanity. Demons could tempt and make bargains, Angels could guide and offer strength, but under no circumstance was either Heaven or Hell to directly claim a soul without the human’s consent. The Wager preserved the value of human free will, although there were regrettable instances when a Demon took a soul by force.

  That day, it would seem, was one such tragic occurrence.

  Kalyndriel had heard the disturbance from her perch in Heaven: wrongness, a piercing psychic scream. She had hurled herself toward the source with an eruption of fury. The stain of blasphemy ached in her halo, guiding her toward its source.

  There were sometimes humans of such great potential Hell would risk violating the Wager to claim them, a human of such nobility they must be reaped, but that was uncommon. More commonly, it was the result of a Demon degenerating into a mindless beast unable to control itself. Kaly was not certain which situation she faced.

  Burning in the midst of the crowded streets of Cambridge, the Avenging Angel stalked toward the source of the scream. Her face was a picture of calm composure, a painting of serenity, but there was no mercy or compassion etched within those lines. Hesitation was a trait of lesser beings.

  A shimmering lance of intense radiance appeared in her right hand, held within a grip that had throttled the life from countless unclean spirits. It was an extension of herself: a deadly manifestation of her Angelic will. It was her soul.

  Most Angels and Demons could tolerate each other’s’ presence on Earth peaceably, but when a warrior caste such as Kalyndriel materialized, it was the divine equivalent of a gauntlet being thrown. Demons from the Directorate of War, her infernal counterpart, would soon arrive. They would seek to end her.

  Kaly did not have much time to find the violator. She must move quickly.

  Within seconds, Kalyndriel scanned her surroundings. The violation had taken place in a nearby office building, ramshackle and clearly condemned. Not the likely home for a future holy man, which made it probable that she was dealing with a feral Demon.

  That should be quick work.

  She streamed toward the entrance of the building, as fluid as liquid mercury. The Angel flowed through pedestrians blind to her blessed passage. Mortals were unable to see her motion in their midst, but all felt shame within their hearts as her radiant light touched their flawed forms. The frailty within them, their mortal birthright, shrank before her blinding glory.

  Kalyndriel passed through the broken door with no resistance, finding herself within a ruined foyer. Trash littered the cracked floor, graffiti covered the walls, and the foul stench of ruin permeated the air. It was a den of filth.

  The violation had occurred close by, but she could not sense a Demon nearby. That was strange: Demons and Angels could invariably feel each other’s presence when in close proximity. She was assessing her surroundings when another wave of mental agony ripped through her mind, staggering her.

  Blast, another one, she cursed. The scream had come from above; it must be on the second floor.

  She mounted the ruined staircase in a blur. She reached the first landing when a third, and then a fourth so
ul, was torn from an unwilling human. This was a massacre!

  Kaly vaulted the summit of stairs and entered a large, open room that once served as a cubicle farm. Her wings flexed, hissing with searing white plasma, and her Angelic blood roiled with a need for justice. She would not tolerate such desecration! Her burning gaze lit upon the shape of a Demon at the far end of the room. Shattered corpses of the homeless laid strewn about its cloven hooves.

  The hulking Demon turned slowly to her.

  Well, then. That’s unexpected, she thought.

  The Demon was enormous, more than ten feet tall and nearly as wide. It was solid, rippling muscle scarred with infernal tattoos and brands, its skin glowing a dusky red with the heat of Hell. Its disproportionately large torso gave it the hunched posture of a gorilla. Coal-black eyes filled with madness glared at her above an under-slung mouth protruding with vicious tusks.

  Kaly took a calm breath. The creature was no garden-variety Demon; it was a Ravager of the Directorate of War. They were the shock-troopers of the infernal army, seldom seen on Earth except during cataclysmic divine battles. The presence of a Ravager on the material plane was often enough to mobilize a full Angelic host. They never operated alone, and she had never heard of one going feral. They were fierce and brutal, but also famously disciplined.

  The afternoon had just become unexpectedly serious.

  The Ravager snorted as steam poured from its nostrils, its eyes rolling madly within their bleeding sockets. The beast lumbered slowly toward her, its apparent lethargy belying deadly speed. Enormous fists, each finger ending in a terrible claw, clenched and unclenched.

  The brute stopped suddenly, and its cavernous maw split wide in a demented smile. Teeth as long as forearms gleamed wickedly in the dim light. The Ravager reached slowly for a massive maul lying beside the crumpled body of an unfortunate human. The crude cudgel was the size of a street sign, covered in spikes and chains: the weapon of a Demonic berserker.