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“Of course you wouldn’t,” Raziel scoffed. “Because the dog couldn’t answer. Don’t be ridiculous.”
Good old Raziel and his inability to grasp anything beyond the literal. And this was where they always butted heads, brain against brawn. I squeezed the bridge of my nose.
“You guys. Please. Focus.” I ruffled my hair in frustration and gestured around our apartment. Well, my apartment, really. My name was on the damn lease. “Florian? I’ll make this quick. Rent is due. This is how stuff works in the human world. We need to pay up, or we’re out on the street soon.”
Florian sipped on his coffee, eyes somewhat vacant, like he wasn’t fully grasping my meaning.
I bent in closer, holding my hands up and speaking slowly to deliver the gravity of my words. “That means that you don’t get to sleep on the couch anymore.”
He gasped. The surface of his coffee rippled as his hand shook just the slightest. “Then where would I live?”
I slapped myself on the forehead. “Yes. Exactly. But also, where would I live? Come on, man. We’re supposed to be in this together. I don’t know why Belphegor wants you to live with me so badly, but we’re stuck with each other. I need your help.”
He set his mug down and twiddled his thumbs. “Belphegor said it was so I would learn to be more responsible.”
Raziel folded his arms and huffed. “That would be a start.”
Florian frowned. “Hey. You don’t get to talk to me like that. You don’t even live here.”
That was true. Raziel came and went as he liked. He was the first angel I ever met – the first nice one, at least, who didn’t attempt to murder me on sight. It was good to have his guidance around, like a sort of guardian angel with an unfortunate addiction to designer clothes. How he could afford them was anyone’s guess. But for all his intelligence and knowledge, when it came to human affairs, Raziel, the wise and all-knowing, the angel of mysteries, was functionally useless.
“Okay. Let’s not start another argument here. Florian? I need you to come up with a list of things you can potentially do for work. That’s your assignment for the day. Also to get dressed. Just write down anything that comes to mind. You’re strong. Maybe you can do some work over at the warehouses.”
He twiddled his thumbs some more. “Maybe.” His forehead
was wrinkled like bark, his eyes distant, like he was deep in thought. That was a good sign, then. At least he was thinking. “I’ll come up with something,” he said, his eyes filled with ferocity and determination when they darted to meet mine. “Promise.”
I gave him a smile. Florian was just as useless as Raziel was when it came to these things, but it was hard to begrudge him for his general – well, niceness. The jolly, not-so-green giant, all six feet and six inches of solid tree trunk in the shape of a man. Which was a strange way to describe Florian, perhaps, because he was just as flexible as any ordinary person despite the toughness of his skin.
“Well, I wish you both the best of luck,” Raziel said. “I’m off.”
I rubbed the bottom of my chin. “To help with the cash situation?”
He sniffed. “I told you, I can’t just interfere with matters like this. You’re on your own.”
“You’re probably good with a harp, aren’t you?” I said, half seriously. “And maybe trumpets. Could you find a gig somewhere? Maybe busk over in Central Square, or Silk Road?”
Raziel sniffed even harder, pointing his nose up at the ceiling. “That is prejudiced and you know it, Mason Albrecht. I thought you’d know better than that. Angels are good for more than just – ” He rotated his hand at the wrist, grasping for words in his frustration. “Just playing string instruments and frolicking among the clouds, if that’s what you think I’m up to in my spare time.”
I stared at him blankly. “So you really can rock out with a harp? I was right. Admit it.”
Raziel stomped his foot, huffed, then transformed into a pillar of light that disappeared through the ceiling. I sighed, then chuckled. Hey, I was still allowed to have some fun, wasn’t I? I left Florian to his rumbling, creaking thoughts and his terrible cup of coffee and headed to my bedroom, or the little alcove with the rickety door that passed for a bedroom. Then I shut said rickety door, because I needed time to myself to think.
I peeled off my shirt, just then realizing how I was still sweaty and probably a little bloody from the scuffle with the demons. I sighed as cool air rushed over my skin, my tattoos faintly glowing as I did. Though calling them tattoos is pretty inaccurate, really. Generally, a person asks to be tattooed. A person picks the stuff that goes on his skin.
My grimy full-length mirror showed me the eerie collection of swirls and runes and glyphs that marked my body, from my stomach all the way up to my shoulders. At times they just sat there in their odd, pale shade of yellow. Sometimes, especially when I was excited or agitated, they glowed gold. And when they did, my skin would get hot in all the places the sigils occupied. Never enough to hurt, mind you. They never did burn as badly as the first day they showed up on my body, scarring me forever, that first day that the angels visited.
I know now that the glyphs came to me shortly after my father died. I never knew him. It explained why my mom could never give me a straight answer about our family. She never really knew him, either. It was a one-night thing. That was all she told me, when I was old enough to understand. And that just happened to be the same year she died, when I was almost seventeen. Time had passed, but I still thought about her. I always would.
It was a strange way of passing on his power, but Samyaza, king of the fallen, had his own assortment of glyphs, or so I was told. And that was how it worked with us fallen and nephilim. The sigils were meant to seal away our divine abilities, a punishment from heaven itself for our taint on all of existence, for the sins of our fathers.
My eighteenth birthday was the day I awakened to all things supernatural. When the glyphs appeared, they appeared with golden fire. I thought I was dying, the way the sigils felt like they were being seared into my skin. It was like being branded by intricate invisible irons, like a suit of white-hot armor was pressing forcibly into my body, leaving its imprints there.
A small squad of angels came that same day to kill me for the abomination I was, my soul suddenly a huge, flashing signal on the map due to my awakening. I cut off one of their arms in self-defense, using a sword that miraculously appeared in my hands. That was when I discovered my command of the Vestments.
Raziel explained how. Not the why of it, exactly, only enough to inform me that I had some kind of bizarre mystical access to the armories of heaven. That sword I used to kill the three demons, that was borrowed from the Vestments. I could call on different things depending on the situation, all of them armaments used by the celestial host in battle. Generally I preferred the sword, and most times a kite shield when I wasn’t feeling like cutting people open. Never together, though. I’d worn myself out trying to retrieve more than one thing at a time from the Vestments, hence the dependence on the good old improvised garbage lid.
And yet, for all of the battle-readiness the Vestments afforded me, none of it exactly translated into a marketable skill. Was I really going to hire myself out as a killer, or a mystical mercenary? Like I needed even more heat on me. I sighed, watching my glyphs shift as my chest rose and fell. Okay, so maybe I was flexing a little, too. Daily exercise never hurt anybody. I tilted my head, wondering if my little joke with Florian had any merit.
