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The mortal he had mistaken for a demon gaped at him, eyes bulging, blood pouring from his mouth. Asher heard the real demons behind him start to laugh as the mortal staggered. He withdrew the sword, and the man clutched his stomach, his eyes glazing over as he started to fall. Asher dropped the sword and grabbed him, reaching out with his angel’s senses, finding the damage, struggling to put it right. But it was too late. The heart was split apart, and he had no demon’s blood to sustain him while the angel’s power did its work. With a final retching cough, the man slumped dead to the ground. Asher had used his holy sword to kill a mortal.
The limbless demon was giggling too much to speak, but the head lying in the gutter at Asher’s feet had stopped laughing. “Oopsy,” he said, grinning up at Asher. “Welcome to the family.”
Asher didn’t feel himself making a choice, didn’t think at all. Rage like a blinding white light exploded out of him, burning away every thought. Kicking away the sword he was no longer worthy to carry, he extended his bare, bloody hands and roared the word of destruction he was forbidden to speak in this realm, the word of power saved for battle on the fields of Heaven itself. The demon’s head erupted in a gush of burning, stinking blood. His body was still lying face down on the sidewalk, and it began to collapse, imploding, disappearing in moments like a crumpled wad of paper in a furnace.
The limbless one began to scream, writhing on the pavement like a worm. “You can’t!” he sniveled as Asher moved toward him. He tried to wriggle away, his severed limbs flopping and twitching just out of reach. “Absolute destruction is forbidden!” Asher whispered the words through lips drawn back over his teeth, and the demon howled in agony. A massive, steaming crack opened up in the ground, swallowing the severed limbs as they melted into flaming sludge. The demon’s torso was melting, too, slowly, up from the hips. “It is forbidden!” he screamed again in the ancient language just as his head was consumed.
Humans were starting to come out into the street to see what had happened. Asher looked down at the blood on his hands. He could change his form to any shape he could imagine, look like anyone or no one, disappear from mortal sight completely. But nothing in his power could wash away this blood. He could still feel Kelsey calling out to him, needing him, a silent scream of terror. He let his bloody hands fall to his sides as a man from the jazz club on the corner reached him, staring at him in pity and horror. Meeting the man’s eyes, he extended his blackened wings, his shadow swallowing the mortal up, blocking the light of the streetlamp. The man crossed himself as the angel turned and took off into the air.
The Waiting Room
When Jake had finally died, Kelsey had missed it. His mother and sister had gone home to sleep. But she had been there watching him carefully, listening to every painful, shuddering breath, feeling his hand she was holding twitch ever so slightly once or twice an hour. But when the moment had come, her attention had been elsewhere; she had been lost in her own thoughts. The alarms on his monitors had been turned off for more than a day by then. He had been past all sense of crisis for the nursing staff. Heaven or Hell only knew how long she had sat there holding the hand of a corpse, half-dozing, not knowing he was gone.
When she had finally realized, she had stayed absolutely still for several minutes, staring at his empty face. His eyes and mouth had been open. After a few minutes, more quickly than she would have thought possible, his hand had gone cold and hard, the fingers still laced with hers. He had died alone.
When the nurse had finally come in and found them, she hadn’t said a word. She had walked back out of the room and come back two minutes later with another nurse. Kelsey had known it was almost exactly two minutes; she had been watching the clock. This second nurse had come to her, speaking softly and distinctly, words Kelsey hadn’t understood. She had gently and carefully lifted Kelsey and Jake’s joined hands as she was speaking, untangling Kelsey’s living fingers from Jake’s dead ones. Taking Kelsey by the shoulders, she had lifted her bodily from her chair and turned her toward the door. She had kept on asking, “Is there anybody I can call?” Kelsey couldn’t remember now if she had ever answered. They had walked down the hall together, the nurse supporting her like she might have been a patient….to the same small waiting room the demon nurse was leading her to now.
Lucas Black was sitting on the tattered love seat, flipping through a crumpled magazine. His left ankle was propped on his right knee, exposing his droopy, brown sock, and he was slurping mostly air through a straw from a white Styrofoam cup. “Hiya Kelsey,” he said, looking up. “Thanks for coming down.”
Kelsey glanced back at the thing that was pretending to be a nurse. The demon smiled, exposing just a few too many teeth. Had she always been a demon, even when Jake had been making her a sandwich every night? Kelsey didn’t think so; this was something else, something that had taken that poor woman’s shape. “I didn’t really think I had a choice.” She didn’t smile back, just stared into the creature’s eyes. After a moment, it looked away, crossing its arm over its stomach as if it suddenly hurt.
“Thanks very much, nurse,” Black said. “I think I can take it from here.” Head down, hunched over, the demon nodded, scuttling out. Black smiled at Kelsey. “Of course you had a choice.” He dropped his magazine on the battered coffee table with a slap. “That’s the great and awful thing about people like you, Kelsey—or people in general. You always have a choice.”
“That’s awesome.” She made herself look him in the eye. “I’ll just go.”
He got up fast, but he didn’t stop smiling. “That would be really, really stupid.”
“Why? Would you arrest me?” He wasn’t scary, she thought, not like the ones who had grabbed her on the street, the other demons. Because that was what they had been, surely, and that was what he was. As soon as she had seen the fake nurse, she had known. In the deepest, most primal part of her brain, she had known it as soon as she’d seen him the first time in the alley. He was pure evil. But he wasn’t horrifying, really—except for the scar, he was actually kind of handsome. He didn’t smell bad the way the nurse had. Truth be told, he smelled kind of good, like a coal fire or gasoline or the freshly oiled barrel of a gun. But standing this close to him made her flesh crawl. “What for?” she said. “Murdering the woman who just walked me down the hall?”
She saw a flash of anger in his flat black eyes, a tiny tongue of blue flame sparking in their depths. But his grin widened, twisting the corner of his scar. “Oops,” he said, taking a step closer. “So you figured that one out.” She stood her ground, meeting his gaze.
?
?What are you?” she said. “Not a cop.” He shook his head, still smiling, bemused. “Not a human.”
“I can be anything you want.” His beard grew longer, and his features thickened until he looked like the Irish priest. “Are you sure then you’ve nothing you want to confess, dear heart?” He laughed, making her stomach turn. Then he was changing again, his coarse black hair growing longer and finer as the beard and mustache disappeared, and his lips ripened to a familiar curve under the ghastly scar. Within seconds, Asher seemed to be standing in his place, Asher in an ugly suit and trench coat with flat black eyes and jet-black hair and the stomach-churning scar. He opened his arms and turned around, modeling his new form, and she saw the gun in its holster still under his arm. “That was cute of you, casting Asher out,” he said, facing her again. “Where is he, anyway?”
He’s an angel, she thought. He’s really an angel; he really wanted to save me, and I sent him away. Her fear was like a clammy sweat breaking out on her skin, a phantom snake twisting in her gut. “I don’t know where he is,” she said, fighting down the tremor in her voice. “But if you try to hurt me, I bet you he’ll show up.”
“Oh, I know he will.” His smile faded, but the flames burned brighter in his eyes. “Kelsey, baby, I am counting on it.”
Before she could answer, he kissed her, taking her completely by surprise. His mouth was cold, but his hands felt burning hot as he grabbed her shoulders, even through Jake’s heavy coat. She pushed against him, and his tongue pushed deep inside her mouth, icy cold and much too long, slithering against her palette. He pulled her closer, crazy strong, and a weird, narcotic weakness overwhelmed her, sapping her hope and will away.
She bit down hard on his tongue, tasting something hot and bitter in her mouth before he let her go. She stumbled back and almost fell, scrambling to keep her balance. “Stop it!”
He was laughing, wiping his mouth. “Aww, come on, Kelsey,” he said. “Don’t be mad.” His smell and the sound of his voice were making her drunk, dragging her toward him like an undertow. His voice was changing again; the words were stretched out to a drawl so familiar, her scalp began to tingle. The change was happening faster this time, his face rippling like he was under rushing water, his body shifting, thickening. She stopped breathing, feeling sick. “Goddamn, Kelsey,” he said in Jake’s sweet Southern drawl, caressing her cheek with Jake’s hand. “I swear I could just eat you up.”
“Just leave me alone,” she said, her voice coming out in a breathless rasp as she stared into his face, her husband’s face with the devil’s cold, black eyes. “Get away from me.”
“He told you Jake was safe in Heaven, didn’t he?” He grinned, the sexy, crooked grin that had always made her toes curl up on her husband’s face twisted by the scar into a nasty leer. “That nothing was your fault.” Blue flame flickered in his eyes. “That must have been a relief.” She put her hands over her ears to shut him out, but his voice went on inside her head. “What a crock of shit.” She shut her eyes tight. He was a better mimic than Asher had been. Listening to him, she couldn’t stop herself remembering how formal Jake’s ghost had sounded and how she had thought at the time it was strange. Now she knew he had sounded like Asher.
“You and I both know where Jake is now.” He was so close now she could feel his icy breath brushing her ear. “And your mama, too.” A hand that felt so familiar she wanted to cry caressed her hair. “But they were both fucked before you got to them; you couldn’t have saved them. But Asher?” He snickered. “Asher’s fall is gonna be all about you.”
“You’re lying.” She looked at his face then away again, focusing on a candy wrapper on the floor, trying not to hear him. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh honey,” he said, laughing. “I know all there is to know about falling from grace over a woman.” His fingertips traced the shape of her jaw. “The Great and Powerful Oz made you all so pretty and so needy….and my brother loves you so much.”
“Shut up.”
