Chapter 28 #2
Soon, the angel Dina fluttered his wings over to Tadeo, and he said, “We will go on ahead to the place where you found me. If we see any humans in need, we’ll try to help them, but a lot of these angels need to be healed first.”
“I understand,” Tadeo said, nodding his head, then moving to get off the horse. “Dante will stay here with me, but hopefully, we’ll meet you in town soon.”
Dina stared, then pulled a smile onto his face, turned it back to the Watchers, and in their language, said: “He wants to investigate this area, but we may go on ahead. I’ll bring you all to where I landed when I came to Earth.
Then, I’ll try to heal all of you. We’ll have to land soon.
We’re too beautiful to be mistaken for humans, and we shouldn’t draw more attention than needed. ”
Azazel hesitated, but not for long. He had a hand over Samyaza’s head as the younger one held onto his waist to stay up in the air as he beat his only green wing left. Then, he gave the order for the Watchers to follow and called back to Dina: “What is it that happened here?”
“The world is very different than what it used to be,” the young angel replied with an odd detachment before he beat his wings and propelled himself forward like a bullet.
Pausing, Azazel waved for the Watchers to go after Dina, but he eyed Tadeo as Samyaza grunted.
Azazel whispered, as he often did, “Be calm.” Lucifer’s child seems more human than angel to me.
” Too human, in fact. After Samyaza made an affirming noise, the two continued onward, behind the other Watchers.
They flew high enough to see dark smoke still creeping up from some buildings, all stout.
This was not a place of many towers, so there hadn’t been much to level, and there especially was not now.
A tall hotel remained with its metal skeleton, but its inside was bare — furniture broken, made half-ash, with not many signs of people within it anymore.
Instead, the humans were scattered in the streets, staring at the darkness of burnt walls and the red blood near every airstrike grave.
Azazel was no stranger to dead humans, but a heaviness nonetheless sunk into his stomach.
In fact, it was because he was no stranger that repulsion sprouted where his heart should be.
How many times can you see the dead until it becomes any easier?
The angel could count each body he caught — two, then three, then six — and, contradictorily, relieve some of the pain.
Turn the killed from lives, with faces and hands, into arithmetic, and you can endure atrocity.
One, two. Dead men at the center of four bewildered adults.
Three corpses laid to finish smoking beneath the sun.
Five buildings still smoking, black as oil, shadowing the Watchers.
The world is very different than what it used to be.
Satan had said, ‘Azazel, you’re wondering why I let you out of your chains while your brothers rot.’
‘You want to know why my child was beautiful, why I was able to create life, not monsters like all the others.’
‘That child of yours — did it speak?’
‘It told me you’ll lose the war against God.’
‘Liar.’
‘You think no one else can do what you can, Satan. You only know how to speak to your groveling demons, the frightened humans, and the angels who dare not sin. But I’m not afraid to lie, and I won’t grovel for you, and there isn’t much you can take from me now.
You know that. You offer me food, water, sunlight because there’s nothing else that you can take. ’
‘Me? You descended to the Earth on your own. You let an ugly man fuck you, abuse you, and it is all your fault.’
‘No, Lucifer.’ A hiss. ‘You worked with God, and you became His pawn. You’ve already lost your war. Do you think you’re still the rebel angel? Or have you realized you’ve just become another hand of His?’
When they landed, it was somewhere far from the most destruction, a quiet neighborhood with many abandoned homes, though there were wandering dogs with their tongues out and their fur matted.
Azazel put one bare foot on cement, for the first time, then the other, and he exhaled shakily.
As the animals jogged over to them, he placed a hand over one of their heads.
He couldn’t remember if he’d ever seen these creatures, if they existed when he’d first been on the surface, the years with his human husband, Eitan. A nice man. He really had been, once.
Samyaza crouched beside him, and Azazel touched the top of his head how one might an animal; like an animal, Samyaza leaned into it.
During all the thousands of years imprisoned, it had been Samyaza that’d been treated the most brutally.
He’d been whipped, burned, tortured by demons, gagged, and took the brunt of responsibility for the flood.
They had killed him, slowly. One day, Samyaza had become unable to say anything beyond slurred mumbles, and one day, he’d begun to growl and bite, and they had put a muzzle on him.
The demons had enjoyed torturing all the Watchers, but when they reduced them into creatures like animals, it was not how humans return to their animalistic urges in moments of great fear.
Angels had been born from stars, from light — not the Earth; their growls were not instinctive, nor natural.
The way that God had made humans from mutilated animals, the demons had made animals out of mutilated angels.
‘Sometimes I wonder, Satan, if you want to tear me open and take my organs for yourself. Is that what you want? Do it. Give me another reason for revenge. Hurt me more, and it will absolve me for everything that I will one day do to you.’ He stared fondly down at Samyaza.
‘My dear healer. My dear Samyaza. Maybe we’ll have our revenge. Soon.’
Dina was up ahead, and Azazel stared at his face, trying to recall his memories of him again, every instance that the young angel had held his hands, bowed his head. Constantly, he would cry. And, now, Dina was parting his lips, but the one who spoke next was someone else entirely.
Baraqiel — hair trimmed close to his head, his skin paler in certain places as if from kisses by painted lips, and his eyes tired; his build was also tall with little visible injuries.
He had Kokabiel in his arms, limp like a murdered bride.
“Kokabiel has had visions for all of our imprisonment; I think he should be the first to be healed.” But he didn’t say it softly, kindly.
He wasn’t particularly fond of the angel of the stars anymore — Azazel thought — though that didn’t stop Baraqiel from spending all his captivity staring at Kokabiel, pressed to his side.
Once, Baraqiel had confessed to Samyaza that he had a habit of checking for darkness in Heaven, of lighting candles to fill it.
‘But then I met him,’ Baraqiel had said, softly.
‘Kokabiel.’ Samyaza had told him that he shouldn’t be so close to another, his face twisting in the disgust he’d trained himself to feel over the affection of two angels.
‘Now I look for him,’ Baraqiel had said.
‘Now I’m always looking for him. Maybe he’s my light.
’ Samyaza had said: ‘Or maybe he’s your darkness.
’ A corner to keep lighting candles in, to keep scratching at the compulsion.
Slow, he settled Kokabiel down on the sidewalk, right as Dina stepped up to him.
Folding his wings into himself, Dina swallowed, then reached for a bottle of water that he’d been carrying for the humans, and he spared a second to glance around them, noting the lack of humans here.
‘Heal him,’ Apsinthos said, ‘but be wary of what he speaks of. I don’t know what he’ll do.
’ That was strange; Dina wasn’t sure that he’d ever heard Apsinthos confess to not knowing something.
But he followed orders, poured some of the water to pool coldly onto his left palm.
He was no great healer, briefly taught by Raphael one day that he’d visited Uriel’s home, but Dina’s hands were careful.
Soon, he’d threaded Kokabiel new tissues, tendons, and teeth.
Creeping along, skin pulled itself over new bone — brown, freckled.
Like the space between stars, dark irises pooled at the center of eyes born blinking.
It was a slow process, but not so much that the Watchers didn’t all turn and lean in to watch it happen like they’d never seen a miracle.
Baraqiel stood right beside Kokabiel, and he, like all the others, anticipated that crazed smile that he’d found so dually comforted and terrified by once.
Except — Kokabiel’s reborn angelic face was empty, eyes hollow, lips only slightly parted.
“Kokabiel, are you with us?” Azazel spoke, and he felt Samyaza press against his back, face hovering by his left shoulder.
“Speak,” Danel urged; and the angel of the stars fluttered his eyes, but the gaze in them remained unfocused. “Tell us everything that you’ve been hearing. All this time we were chained, you knew what was happening on Earth, right?”
Kokabiel, suddenly, almost violently, jerked his head in the direction of Baraqiel, and his first word was, “Bara.” His voice was soft, and the fallen angel of light visibly tensed, eyes widening. “You kicked me. On the beach.”
Before there could be any further exchange however, a certain deep, stern voice called, “Dina?” The sharpness of the call made the youngest angel’s heart stutter then stop, but he didn’t dare move even when he heard all the Watchers do so around him.
“What is this?” Uriel demanded next. “What have you done?”