Total pages in book: 59
Estimated words: 55109 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 276(@200wpm)___ 220(@250wpm)___ 184(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 55109 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 276(@200wpm)___ 220(@250wpm)___ 184(@300wpm)
BONK!
“Banish me from my old kitchen, would you.” She scowls at the now insensate human angel collapsed in a pile of limbs and feathers on the floor. “Took me far too long to argue my way back up out of Hades. And for what!?”
Cosmos and Bryn move like one man, grabbing the woman. “Get her into the cells,” Bryn says.
They bundle her up and take her downstairs. Anita has told me once or twice that there are prison cells down there. I’ve never seen them, but I imagine this lady is about to become very intimately familiar with them. How the mighty and angelic are fallen.
Over the next few minutes, things settle down. Nina and Anita come back indoors. Bryn scowls at the hole in his wall while simultaneously making a long-distance call to Norway, which apparently has a bad connection and requires him to explain loudly and repeatedly that they were held at gun point by the female head of Fleisch.
“Are you okay?” Cosmos grips me by the arms and looks into my eyes with a worried expression. He’s right to be concerned. I don’t know if I am okay. There are images in my head joining the ones he put there, but this time they're not his fault. They’re mine.
“I. Uhm. Think so?” I don’t want to think about it, so I change the subject. “What now? What happens to the lady?”
“Katya. She’s above our pay grade,” Cosmos says. “Even Bryn doesn’t have the experience. We’re going to have to call someone else in to handle her.”
“Who handles rogue angels?”
“Don’t worry about that. Worry about who handles you.” He embraces me tightly, holding me like a precious thing
“You were so good,” he says. “Such a good girl.”
“I want to train more. I need to have more control over this. I don’t want to accidentally decapitate someone. Again. There’s a real mess out there in the rain. There’s a smashed up van full of cut up dead people.”
“Don’t worry,” he says. “We’ll call Crichton back from Hell to deal with it.”
“You summoned me, sir?”
Crichton’s suit seems a little singed, but aside from that he is none the worse for wear. His expression is as mild as ever, though perhaps there is a certain tension around his brow that suggests he is not happy to have been forced into an impromptu journey to the depths of existential pain.
“There’s a van full of dead people on the road out of here,” I tell him. “I don’t know if I killed them, or if I just… rearranged them after they were dead, but it’s messy.”
“Very good, young lady. All will be taken care of.”
“What would we do without him,” I sigh as he exits the room, straightening his collar. “He’s the backbone of this place.”
“In more ways than one,” Cosmos agrees. He’s still holding me tightly. I think he was afraid to lose me. I was afraid to lose me. Fleisch was never supposed to come here. We were supposed to be safe. But isn’t that just the story of my life. Places that were meant to be safe turn out to be perilous. “Don’t worry. It’s going to be okay.”
I don’t know if that is true. In fact, I am pretty sure it is not true at all. But I pretend to believe because that’s the comforting thing to pretend to believe.
Later that night, when all Direview is asleep, I tiptoe down a great deal of stairs to find the dungeon. I am curious about what happened today.
“Hello,” I whisper to the angel lady with a headache. “I just came to say sorry about cutting a hole in your hand.”
“Hello,” she replies. “It’s okay.”
“I feel like you’ve made a huge mistake in coming here.”
“A slight miscalculation,” she replies.
“Right, but also, kind of a big fucking…”
“Yes, okay. I didn’t plan on you being able to wield angelic fire. That’s an incredible blessing.”
“So I’ve been told. I also didn’t mean to kill your men. I did, uhm, do that? But I didn’t mean to. I just thought you should know that because there’s been a lot of intentional killing lately, and I feel like accidental killing is, well…”
“Yes,” she says.
She’s very pretty, very poised. Without her wings extended, she looks like she’s taken a wrong turn from the business lounge and ended up in a prison cell.
“So you came here just to try to stop the violence, is that it?”
“Fleisch and the Brotherhood have more in common than almost any other two organizations in the world. But I couldn’t come here without being prepared to leverage something.”
“Probably not people’s wives, though? That’s not a good idea.”
“I didn’t count on there being real affection there,” she admits. She’s being very open. I find her an engaging personality. Also, she has fucking wings, and whether I’d admit it or not, I think wings are fucking cool and I kind of want some of my own. My curiosity has always been my biggest strength. It might also be my biggest weakness.