A talkative demon strikes up an unlikely and forbidden friendship with a blind angel, who is unaware of what their dear friend really is.
He visited her daily. She sat in the park, on a bench, her eyes long since scooped out and removed. The law she held tight to her chest still bore fruit, but she had long since lost the ability to see right from wrong.
She couldn’t see the sin he clutched against his heart, binding it’s way into his thoughts and mind.
Not even the pigeons bothered her, scared they might intrude upon her domain, and she would pluck their heart out and replace it with a contractual obligation to serve her.
“Hey,” He said. He took a seat next to her.
She didn’t reply for a moment. “It’s you again, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” He leaned back, pressed a hand against his horns. They needed trimming again; he’d pay for his apartment in horn shaving this time, work wasn’t really panning out. Ennui was more powerful than refined lust in this day and age. “How’s work?”
She laughed and it was bells in the wind, like the old church bells he had flocked to when he was bats and scars instead of bone and horn. He missed it. “Slow, as always. Not too many people are willing to tangle with angels, not anymore.”
“You’re still Kill-No-Angels?” He laughed. “You’ll never change.”
“I am unable to change,” The angel clarified. He could see where her eyes had been before they’d been plucked out for corporate foresight. “How is your job at the coffee shop?”
He leaned back. Tugged his hand through his hair again, wishing it was something other than rusted wire red. It made him stand out, even in his mortal condition, protected from the heavenly light streaming from the Loft overhead, where the virtues watched humanity languished and rotted in their heaven built on earth.
The demons were just there to catch an easy meal.
“It’s not hard work,” He lied. Focusing on coffee when he could be getting easy meals… it was distracting.
But he was a professional. He had been, at least.
“Keeps me occupied.”
“You always sound so sad,” Kill-No-Angels said. “Have you thought about taking on a heavenly duty?”
“The Loft stared into my soul,” He said, playfully. “And it saw I was unworthy.”
She didn’t reply for a moment. “It was Dilligence, wasn’t it, who saw you?”
“You see right through me, even now,” He said. What was he doing here, talking to a heavenly soldier? Her skin like silicone still bore the heavenly words of power that gleamed when the light from the twin suns struck it. He was tempting death.
He hadn’t seen death in a long time. She used to haunt the edges of his visions, flickering, telling him he had barely escaped it.
“Tell me this time, what your name is?” Kill-No-Angels asked.
“Des-” Desire cut himself off. “Desmond. I’m Desmond.”
“Closer,” The angel whispered. She turned, her blank sockets filled with nothing but the light of law, and peered at him. Did she see something?
Could she see the moment he’d defected, when Lucifer had been struck down after the slaughter of the Virtues? When Babel had fallen again, a corporate tower that had shattered the economy?
Did she see his depression, his lack of purpose. The snatches of sin he stole from teenagers in coffee shops making eyes at each other like disgusting mirror images?
“You’re good,” The angel pronounced.
Desmond wished he bore that clarity. “Work still slow?”
She smiled, showing off too many pointed teeth. A proper number of them, like the proper number of arms she still bore. “Not as slow as you think, Desmond.”
He swallowed, then reached into his bag and pulled out the bird seed.
“You’ll get more company if you bring something with you,” Desmond said.
They fed pigeons in the park. The slaughterer of contracts, and a lowly demon who dearly wished the world wasn’t dying.
The pigeons didn’t care.