She shook her head hard enough that her blond curls bounced the way they had when they were longer, and we were younger. “I will not argue old wounds with you here and now, Zaniel.”
“Good.”
“Whatever wounds we have, Zaniel, I need your help.”
“What help can I possibly be?”
“Have you seen what happened to your friend Ravensong?”
“The lieutenant described it to me, but I haven’t seen it.”
Suriel’s face was serious again. “It is something that should not be.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean that demon flesh can do this, but not mortal human flesh.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“Lieutenant Charleston, can you please show him a picture of the hand?”
Charleston stepped forward, using his smartphone to bring up an image. We took a lot of pictures with our phones because phenomena didn’t always last long enough to wait for forensics to arrive with better cameras. Some of it couldn’t even be captured by technology, but apparently this could.
The first image was Ravensong sitting in a chair with something on the end of her arm. It wasn’t a bad picture, but I think my eyes just didn’t want to make sense of it. The next one had an arm resting on a table with a Halloween glove on it; that’s what I thought, that it couldn’t be real. It was so outsized, compared to the pale wrist that it was attached to, that it looked like something people wore on Halloween with black claws. My pulse started beating a little faster as I looked at those claws, because I remembered them slashing at me, pressing into my stomach while I fought not to let them gut me.
“Are you unwell, Zaniel?”
I swallowed before I answered, because my mouth was dry. “I’m fine.”
“You are sweating, and it is not warm in here,” she said.
I touched my forehead and realized she was right. Staring at the claws that had almost . . . No, I didn’t let myself finish the thought. The monster had tried to kill me; it failed, I lived, I won, it lost, time to get dinner, or lunch, or a drink. That was the way you thought about it in the military and on the job.
Charleston took the phone out of my hand. He was studying my face. I tried to give him my best blank cop face, but I couldn’t fix the sick, cold sweat on my forehead except by wiping it off. I took even, deep breaths and that helped slow my pulse and heart. I was probably pale, and that didn’t have a quick fix.
“I did tell you the hand looks like the demon from the hospital,” Charleston said.
I nodded and let my breath out slow. “You did. I didn’t think it would bother me.”
“I’m sorry, I do not understand,” Suriel said.
“The claws,” I said, swallowed hard, “the claws are the same ones that tried to kill me in the hospital hallway.”
“You’re saying that this hand is an exact match for the demon you all fought at the hospital?” she asked.
“Looks to be,” I said.
“But it shouldn’t be identical,” she said.
“No, it shouldn’t be, and it’s not possible that it’s done that to Ravensong. You’re right, mortal flesh does not do this.”
“It changed the kid in the hospital into its image,” Charleston said.
“No, it changed him into a half-human version of a demon. Real ones don’t look like that except in the movies, and that’s mostly because they’re being played by human beings, so they need the makeup or suit to fit the actor,” I said.
“They can change into what your lieutenant described to me, but only if mortal thought has impacted immortal flesh,” Suriel said.
“But that only happens if many humans think an immortal being should look a certain way; one person can’t permanently change the immortal’s shape.”
“They can if they are the sorcerer that works with the immortal spirit most often,” she said. “Frequency of contact with one mortal can add up over time so that one person’s vision can change the spiritual being, in the same way that hundreds viewing it at once can change its appearance.”
“You mean that one person dealing with the same demon over and over can impact it like being viewed on television did to the Archangel Michael a few years back?” Charleston asked.
“Yes, he was chosen because it was felt that he could withstand so many mortals around the world seeing him physically manifest and be interviewed on television, but even he was unable to withstand so much mortal energy shaping him into their ideal.”
“There were riots in the streets because he ended up being dark-haired and darker-skinned,” Lila said.
“Black or brown hair with darker skin tone is the most common in the world, and most people prefer to see the angelic in their own form. It shouldn’t have been a surprise,” Goliath said.
“Some of the rioting was from the dark-skinned folks like you and me,” Charleston said, “because they thought God should look all shiny and blond like you.” He nodded toward Suriel.
“Not God,” Suriel and I said together. She smiled at me and I couldn’t help smiling back. I motioned for her to continue.
“Not God, but the Archangel Michael, the right hand of God, but he is not God,” she said.
“Either way, people wanted him to look like all those old Renaissance paintings of angels, not like a Hispanic, Middle Eastern stud muffin,” Lila said.
“People always envision angels as beautiful,” Suriel said.
“They are beautiful,” I said, and I had a moment of seeing that golden white light, not the paltry fire of the angel at the first crime scene, but the power of the higher orders. I could almost see her face, the face and body that I had created from the ages of fifteen to nineteen until she became real and could no longer change to another form. That was when she had known something was wrong, and when I had believed her lies as if they were my only truth.
Suriel said, “Yes, but not in the way that the masses think of beauty.”
I did my best to focus on Suriel’s face, her smile, her humanity, and push the ideal beauty of angels out of the front of my head. I wasn’t sure that I would ever be able to get that beauty out of the back of my head. It isn’t just ugliness that has the power to haunt; beauty has its own ghosts.
“No, angels don’t look like we think they will,” I said, finally, but I must have not taken all those memories out of my voice, because she looked at me more closely. Or maybe it was just that Suriel knew; she knew because she had been one of the people I went to for advice. She’d taken me to the masters of the school so they could decide how badly I had fucked up. Suriel had just been in training then, like me. Her with a black badge on her polo shirt, and me with a white one on mine, showing what specialties we’d chosen to study. Later my white badge had been given a gold stripe down it to show that I dealt with the higher orders. Had I stayed at the College my black robes would have been crossed by a white-and-gold sash. I’d been one of only two in our class to be chosen to try to earn the gold sash. The other one had been Jamie, who was now homeless and a diagnosed schizophrenic. The angels had broken Jamie’s mind; they’d only broken my heart, so I’d gotten the better deal. It was why I’d let him crash on my couch when he wasn’t too crazy and I didn’t have Connery. It could have been me instead of him, maybe even should have been me. Jamie didn’t do anything wrong; I’d been the one who had sinned, and yet I was okay, and he was broken.