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I can’t wake up, Kelsey was thinking. Please, God, don’t let me wake up. Because surely this moment must be a dream. Could a ghost have felt so solid, so warm? She wrapped her arms around him, nuzzling his throat again, breathing in the scent of him, clean and wild and alive, no trace of sickness, no hint of the grave. This was Jake when they had first met, the hero-jester who had swept her off her feet. He picked her up and carried her down the hall, and for one sweet moment of madness, she thought he would take her to bed. But he carried her on to the living room and sat on the couch, holding her on his lap. She wrapped her arms around him, huddled against his chest.
“Kelsey.” He brushed her hair back from her face. “You have to listen.” His lips barely brushed her cheek. “You can’t blame yourself anymore.” She squeezed her eyes shut tight. “I wanted to hide my being sick. I didn’t want to face it.” She reached for his hand, lacing her fingers with his. “Everything I ever said about you hiding…that was bullshit.” He kissed her wrist. “And you were perfect the last night I was here.” She shuddered, letting out a single, hiccupping sob. “You were just so scared.” He drew her closer to him. “I’m so sorry.”
“The letter.” She huddled against his chest, her arms curled close against her breast, still clinging to his hand. “You saw.”
“Of course I saw.” He held her bruising-tight, his voice rough, almost angry. “I am not in Hell.” He touched her chin and made her look at him. “I swear by Christ, Kelsey,” he promised. “I am not in Hell.”
She looked into his eyes. He was Jake, her husband; she would have known him anywhere. She could see their whole life together in his tears. But he was different, too. He had become something else.
“I love you,” she said.
He smiled. “I love you.” He bent and kissed her softly on the mouth, a goodbye kiss. But he didn’t pull away.
She nestled against his chest, determined to stay awake, to ask a thousand questions, to keep him there forever. In less than a minute, she was sound asleep.
The Morning Star
Asher watched the woman sleep, the rise and fall of her breath endlessly fascinating. His adopted form was growing heavy, weighing him down to Earth, and he knew he was lingering too long. Finally, when the gray dawn lit the windows, he made himself get up. He eased her gently from his lap to the couch and covered her with a blanket. Without letting himself stop to think, he leaned close and kissed her softly on the mouth again, the sensation of it making him feel dizzy. She barely stirred, mumbling the name of her dead husband.
Straightening up, he conjured different clothes, drawing matter from the air onto his mortal body. He didn’t want to be recognized by anyone who had known the dead man. He wasn’t the first angel to take the form of a dead mortal to comfort one left behind. In the days before human science had made every unexplained phenomenon into a terror, it had been an almost common practice. Most of the more credible human ghost stories had started with a sympathetic angel.
He pulled the hood of his sweatshirt over his head, drawing it low enough to mask his face as he left the apartment. A window at the end of the hall opened on a rusted fire escape.
The air outside felt brutally cold to his human form, and he let flesh and clothes alike begin to dissolve as he started down the metal stairs. By the time he dropped to the ground, he was naked, the clothes swept away as a vapor on the icy wind. Crouching in the snow, he burst out of the failing mortal body, letting it dissolve as well. His wings opened behind him in a rush of blinding, golden light.
The alley was eerily quiet and seemed deserted. The blizzard had buried the city completely. Rosy light crept over the snow as the sun rose over the dull, gray buildings. He looked down at his hands, and for the first time since his creation, he saw what looked like blood pulsing through the fine blue veins at his wrist. He clenched a fist and felt his nails digging into his palm, a sting of corporeal pain. Without ever knowing what he was, Kelsey had transformed him, just a little, but enough. He would never be able to
completely hold himself apart from mortals again.
“Fucking hell!” A homeless woman was peering at him over a blood-red hospital blanket, huddled under the fire escape on a thin mattress covered in green plastic. The empty bedframe was still standing just outside the door of the building where Kelsey had abandoned it.
The woman stood up, staring wide-eyed as she came toward him, muttering nonsense under her breath. Then slowly her expression twisted into a leer. “Hey, pretty,” she said, her voice dropping to a snarling growl. “Don’t you want to kiss me next?” She let the blanket drop to run a hand up through her own greasy hair, pushing off her knitted hat. She smiled at him, her eyes half-lidded. “You want to fuck me, don’t you?” She was missing a tooth in front, and the smell of her breath was appalling. “I bet an angel does it nice.”
He caught her gently by the wrist. “Begone from this woman, demon,” he said, barely raising his voice. “In the name of Christ, I cast you out.”
“OOOooooooo,” she purred, and he felt a shudder up his spine. The demon inside of her had changed her voice. Now she sounded just like Kelsey. “You don’t really mean it.”
He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her hard. “I said begone!”
Her body contorted, writhing in his grasp as the demon wriggled free and fell, wet and black into the snow. She was a succubus, and she had obviously been feeding from the mortal for quite some time. Her scaly body was fat and sleek, lush with evil.
“Come on, Asher,” she purred, rising to her knees before him. He let the now-unconscious mortal fall gently to her mattress and put himself between her and the demon. “Play with me.” Her forked tail swished over the snow as she crawled toward him, reaching for his bare leg. Her face as she looked up at him shifted into a fire-blackened mockery of Kelsey’s. “If you’re going to have a girlfriend now, you’re going to need the practice.”
He caught her by the hair with his left hand just as she reached him, snatching her up like a cat. He held her at arm’s length as she spat and hissed in fury, trying to attack. He drew his flaming sword seemingly from thin air into the physical world and swung it once, slicing her neatly in two.
The bottom half dropped to the ground, writhing as the burning trunk poured black, acidic blood into the snow, the tail flailing in impotent fury, virtually helpless. But the top half was still coming after him, screaming in pain as she lunged, her claws swiping his shoulder, surprising him by opening his angelic flesh to the bone. Still holding her by the hair, he drove her back toward the wall. Her neck stretched long, and her jaw unhinged as she snapped at him with venom-dripping fangs, slicing into his wrist. He raised the sword again, and she screamed for her master in the low speech of their plane, her yellow eyes wide and rolling with fear. He drove the sword through her throat, burying the blade in the brick wall behind her, making sparks fly. Her scream was cut off in a nasty gurgle as she struggled, tearing at the sword with her claws, moaning in frustration as it burned her flesh. Her bottom half was writhing closer, churning up the snow, leaving a steaming black trail of demon blood.
He took a step back from her, breathing hard as if he needed the air. He looked down at his wrist and saw he was still bleeding red blood like a mortal. The bites were beginning to knit themselves closed, but slowly. And it hurt.
“Temper, temper, Asher,” a voice spoke from behind him. The succubus began to struggle more frantically, reaching out, her gurgle an obvious plea. Asher turned and saw Lucifer coming toward them disguised as a human. He was slighter of build than usual with long, soft-looking black hair and a jagged, purple scar across his face to mar his once-angelic beauty. “Don’t you think this might be an overreaction?”
Asher yanked his sword from the creature’s throat and let her fall into the snow. He stepped back, feeling sick as she dragged herself forward to lick her master’s boots. “She defied me,” he muttered. He gathered his own accustomed human guise around him, the long, black coat enfolding him as his wings disappeared into his back.
“Defied you?” The Fallen One glanced up at him from watching his creature and grinned. “You couldn’t cast her out?” The demon’s lower half had almost reached her top, and Lucifer kicked it across the alley. “Fetch!” Weeping in frustration, she began to drag herself after it.
“I cast her out,” Asher said. He looked down at his wrist again. The bites had healed, but there was the thinnest white trace of a scar. He reached under his shirt and felt a slick, tender ridge on his shoulder left from the demon’s claws.
“Let me see your eyes.” Lucifer stepped in front of him, his gleeful anticipation warming the icy air between them. Asher glowered down at him, and he beamed. “Well, fuck me swinging,” he said. “Blue…by Hell’s own gates, they’re blue.” In his human guise, Asher’s eyes had always been a dull, burnished silver, their true, angelic glow completely masked. If they were blue, his true nature was wearing its way through the mask. Jake’s eyes had been blue, he thought.
