Behind, Dante jostled and bumped up against Tadeo, then took hold of his shoulder to steady.“What the fuck happened?”Tadeo tensed at the touch, clenched his jaw, but he resisted shoving him away.“Did a bomb drop?”
Tadeo opened his mouth, then simply rolled his shoulder, relieved that the soldier removed his grip almost immediately.“We need to— We should check if there’s any survivors.”
He looked up to the army of angels following them like vultures to the dying.Though they had stayed off the main roads up until now — Tadeo had no doubt that the 199 Watchers had surely already been seen by someone or something, and he’d been anticipating great trouble but nothing at all like this.The angels were quiet, had been for most of the time spent traveling, though they often landed to touch the Earth they no longer recognized, and they had taken Tadeo and Dante’s hours of sleep as an opportunity to run around, to chase each other like animals, to bleed from their wounds.‘They don’t act like Dina,’ Tadeo had long noticed, but Dina seemed calm beside Azazel, the one Tadeo had learned was the beautiful leader of the imprisoned angels.Azazel still kept that pale-eyed, one-winged angel on a chain leash; and Tadeo never missed how this angel — Dina called him Samyaza — followed Dante and him with a twitching gaze.
Unsure what else to do, Tadeo called, “Excuse me!”He ignored Dante’s chuckle.“I want to see if anyone’s trapped beneath the buildings!”Before he could try to look for Dina, and to beg him for a translation, the beautiful angel swept up and away from the cloud of Watchers, swerving to circle above Tadeo — again, like a vulture.He opened his mouth, and Tadeo heard Dina speak in the ancient angel language to the curious faces of the newly-freed ones.Tadeo swallowed, and he took this second to tilt his head and whisper to the soldier, “You can take the horse, if you want.Ride into town.I’ll stay here and look through everything.”
Dante hesitated, then said, “I can’t ride.”
“It’s easy.”
“I’ll stay here.”Dante leaned closer, lowered his voice to a murmur.“I also want to talk to you without… him being here too.”
Tadeo hesitated, then bit on the inside of his lips.‘Dina.’He could sense Dante’s suspicion, and he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t nervous too.But Dina was an angel; Dante on the road had described demons, and they were horned and monstrous, nothing like the angel who’d been guiding him until now.‘And I already met the devil,’ Tadeo thought, ‘so Dina can’t be him.’“Alright, but it’ll be a while before we get back to town.”
Whistling lowly, Dante answered: “Buy me something to eat tonight and I’ll forgive you.”
Fiddling with the leather rein in his fingers, Tadeo shifted a little, not sure what to say, how to really talk to the man casually; he never knew how to talk to men his own age at all.“Fine,” he tried.“Do you like beer?”
Dante snickered.“About as much as I like pussy.”
“So no?”Tadeo blurted, trying to joke and regretting it instantly, ashamed for responding to something so crude, but the soldier behind him laughed, then called him a motherfucker.
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.’
