Earth Angel Read online

  Book Description

  Raphael was meant for better things.

  He is an archangel, after all. It was he who cast out Qayna, the first murderess, and inscribed on her flesh the name of her brother Abil that embodied her deathless curse. It was he who formed the Sons of Light, and it was he who was set to watch over Azazel in the well of his imprisonment in Dudael.

  And now, a failed rebel, Raphael wanders the heavy earth alone. The Sons of Light find him, though, and offer him another chance. Raphael is to Bear the Word again, to call the first prophet in centuries.

  Can Raphael find the appointed prophet? Can he reach him, across apocalypse-torn America? And when he does find his man, imprisoned by the Fallen Kokhabel, can Raphael and the new prophet both survive?

  D.J. Butler

  Digital Edition – 2016

  WordFire Press

  wordfirepress.com

  ISBN: 978-1-61475-393-3

  Copyright © Copyright © 2012 D.J. Butler

  Originally published by D.J. Butler 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Cover design by Janet McDonald

  Art Director Kevin J. Anderson

  Cover artwork images by Carter Reid

  Book Design by RuneWright, LLC

  www.RuneWright.com

  Kevin J. Anderson & Rebecca Moesta, Publishers

  Published by

  WordFire Press, an imprint of

  WordFire, Inc.

  PO Box 1840

  Monument, CO 80132

  Contents

  Book Description

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  About the Author

  If You Liked …

  Other WordFire Press Titles by D.J. Butler

  Chapter One

  “It was the Chinese, I heard.” The oldest of the three men picked through the garbage strewn on the asphalt around the dumpster, picking up abandoned syringes to eye them in the predawn light and sniffing discarded packages that had once held food. Finding a Ho-Ho wrapper with something in it worth harvesting, he turned slightly away from his companions and licked it clean with a withered tongue, careful not to let any crumbs fall on the cuffs of his jacket. He wore a tweedy sport coat with corduroy patches on the elbows, and his hair clearly hadn’t seen a comb in weeks. “Heard it on the TV.”

  “TV from where? Chicago?” The heaviest of the three stood inside the dumpster, cracked and mismatched gumboots protecting his legs almost up to the knees. He shook a cracked plastic radio and listened to the rattle it made as if that would give him news. “You can’t trust those bastards. You can’t trust any of them. Besides, what would the Chinese be doing turning off our power? If it was the Chinese that wanted to get us, we’d have run out of cheap plastic toys and knockoff iPhones. Or maybe they’d have bombed us, I don’t know, or gene-engineered a disease, but none of that ain’t what happened. Shit just fell apart. I bet it was the government.”

  “You always think it’s the government.” The third man was rail-thin, stooped, and bald as an egg. He paddled through the sodden layer of refuse in the bottom of the dumpster with hands like spoons, stopping to examine avidly a treasure: a single, slightly cracked egg. “And it wasn’t just the power.”

  A loud crash down the street sent all three men into huddled crouches, sheltering behind and inside the heavy, rusting iron dumpster. Curled red and orange leaves rustled, drifting into an ever deeper pile against the underside of a flipped pickup truck in the center of the intersection.

  “Yeah?” The heavy man peeked over the edge of the receptacle. “Well, if you always think it’s day, you’re right half the time.”

  “Or you could just look at the sky.” The old man cackled.

  None of the three was a very good vessel; their hearts were full of fear, and the wrong kind. They weren’t open to Heaven, and Raphael badly needed to find someone who was. And besides, they were scum. Even without society’s collapse, these men would probably have been homeless drifters, the losers of life. This was how far Adam’s children had fallen.

  But despite the weight of the world crushing him, the Bearer of the Word couldn’t pull himself away.

  “It isn’t just the lights, is it?” asked the thin man. “No mail, either. Disability check’s gone, of course. Jack at the hardware store used to let me sweep up for him for a few bucks, but he pulled out two weeks ago and disappeared. Said kids kept stealing his stuff and the wholesalers had nothing to send to replace it. No one in Springfield was answering his calls and no one in Washington either; couldn’t get a cop around to give him the time of day. Said money wasn’t worth anything anymore anyway.”

  “See?” The heavy man was satisfied. “Government.”

  “That’s idiotic,” snorted the oldest. “The government doesn’t do away with itself. It can’t. Not in the nature of governments to do so. Never been a government I heard of yet that didn’t make itself bigger.”

  “Yeah? What happened then, genius? You tell me.”

  The old man shrugged and sniffed a square of waxed paper that had once been wrapped around a stick of butter. “I dunno,” he admitted, in between licking the paper around a greenish spot that might have been growing mold. “Everyone just went crazy. The country couldn’t handle it—wasn’t really built to handle it, I guess.”

  “Where’d Jack go?” the heavy man asked. “Chicago?”

  “The Bull is strong.” The thin man shook his head. “I dunno, mighta been St. Louis. I hear they got electricity there, off the river or something.”

  Another crash, and the three men ducked again. Down the street, a pack of teenagers jeered as one of them heaved a brick through a car window. It wasn’t a theft in process; the rest of the car’s windows were already gone. Mere vandalism. The exhausted wildness of drunks just before the dawn. Exultation in the spirit of destruction.

  “Might make sense to follow him,” the heavy man said thoughtfully. “I gotta tell you, I’m hungry enough to eat just about anything. I can already tell you what cat tastes like. And dog. No telling what might be next.”

  They don’t know what they do, Raphael thought. Despite their fear, none of the men prayed. He turned and drifted through the air along the street.

  It wasn’t his fault. It wasn’t his fault that the streets of this smallish Illinois town were thick with the weeping sores of damnation, invisible to the mortals among whom they oozed. Damned souls, released but not freed or healed by Jacob bar Azazel, Hell’s new, upstart Lucifer, tortured each other in Raphael’s plain sight. There had always been, he knew, a certain amount of … overflow leakage. Occasional damned souls had always been able to be found upon the surface of the Earth by those who had the gift, or the curse, of sight. In recent years, in Dudael, he thought he had detected a small increase in their numbers. The approach of the Liminal Year, maybe.
br />   But now they were everywhere.

  And with them came suffering and rage.

  It wasn’t his fault. He had let Jacob take his father’s hoof from its warded enclosure in New Mexico, yes, but this hadn’t been his plan. Somehow—Raphael was unsure exactly how—Jacob bar Azazel had used that piece of his father’s person to raze and harrow Hell. Now, even remembering the ponderous, dusty ache of millennia he had passed alone in the desert, Raphael almost wished he had remained faithful and stopped the rock and rollers from taking the hoof. Or turned a deaf ear to the Legate’s wheedling. Still, this destruction was not what he had intended.

  What had he intended? Now he wasn’t sure. He liked to tell himself that he had wanted to turn the hoof back over to Heaven. He was a night watchman who wanted to let burglars in so he could catch them red-handed. Part of him doubted, but he ignored that part. Raphael had been tired of his long vigil, sitting for thousands of years on top of what amounted to little more than a fingernail clipping. A dangerous one, yes, but still a menial task.

  He was destined, he knew, for better. Once, he had done better and greater things. Hadn’t it been he who had brought judgment to the first murderer, Qayna, exiling her from humankind forever? Hadn’t he also enforced the Writ against Azazel and his effronterous City of the Free? Raphael had been a great one, a trusted messenger of Heaven, and then he had been exiled every bit as much as Azazel, the grotesque leader astray of the hearts of multitudes.

  And then an opportunity had fallen into Raphael’s lap to take that bit of personal hygiene detritus and turn it into … at least a bargaining chip. Maybe more. Maybe even a weapon, or a tool with which to open the Stairway and return to Heaven.

  Failure. He’d been defeated by a drunk, profane, trigger-happy band of bad musicians. Not defeated, he told himself. Delayed. They had forced him to make common cause with the Legate of Heaven, the sorcerer Pilate. Pilate, who had turned around and abandoned him in the rubble and riot of Hell as it fell to pieces around both their ears, leaving Raphael to fend for himself.

  He considered letting the Veil drop, revealing himself to the rioting youths and soothing them with the Whisper of Eden. If there was anyone trying to sleep in this blasted burg, that might afford them a little more quiet, or at least it would allow the men exploring the dumpster’s contents to do so in peace. But Raphael was tired and needed rest, and any peace he gave anyone would soon fade, and they didn’t really deserve it anyway, so he passed them and continued up the street.

  Around him, he thought, he should feel prayers. In early morning and late at night, on holy days, at prescribed times, these were the moments when the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve turned themselves towards Heaven, opening themselves up, at least a little bit, to powers they could not see. In Dudael he had gone years at a time without feeling a prayer, but then, he had gone years without hearing a human voice other than those of his own vessels. Here, among this desperate people, he expected to feel prayers in the dim light from all sides around him, through the walls. Instead, he detected nothing.

  No, not nothing … there, not on this street but not far, he felt the gentle, vulnerable tremor that meant a heart had opened itself. At least one of these ungrateful wretches still remembered Heaven and turned to it.

  He moved through backyards, drifting above sagging chain-link fences and hard-packed dirt where once there had been grass. Three houses in a row had burned to the ground completely, unrescued by either a Fire Department or any helpful neighbors. Feral cats still picked at the bones of someone who had died of a broken neck on the concrete pad behind one of the houses, having fallen out of the upper-story windows. A whip-thin basset hound whimpered and stared with liquid eyes, making Raphael wonder if it saw the blood-soaked orgy of tooth and nail before him, the damned torturing the damned.

  Raphael saw the damned—at least, as long as he remained unveiled in flesh. Whether they saw him or not he couldn’t say; they paid him no attention, scratching flesh from each other’s bellies and drinking each other’s blood. Though they looked like a crowd, Raphael moved among them easily. This was the geometry of the spirit: as a Bearer of the Word, he was a mere point. As a spirit only, or in the words of ancient Egypt that were still passed down among wizards like the Legate, a ba, one of the damned was also a mere point. The damned appeared to have substance and to be blocking the path, but with only one point and nothing draped over it, they were infinitely small. Raphael passed through them like one impossibly small gnat through a cloud of impossibly small gnats. Their eyes rolled back in their heads, they shuddered in the pleasure of their pain, and they ignored the angel in their midst.

  His being a point didn’t mean he couldn’t interact physically with the world. It crushed him constantly, and it could also touch him, and, with the right weapons, even wound him. And he could touch physical things in return, though even small objects seemed to him to be massive. There was a paradox here and, frankly, understanding it was a little beneath him. Heaven had its engineers; he was a prince.

  Maybe it had something to do with the weight of the world.

  A Kwik-Pak store on Wise street. Blood on the shards of glass still clinging to the window frame. Burning damned upon the cracked and buckled sidewalk in front of it. But the prayer came from within. Far away, gunshots.

  Screams.

  Dear God, Raphael felt. Dear God, help me.

  It wasn’t a cry of terror. He went in.

  Rats scurried across garbage-strewn tiles, sniffing at Twinkies boxes and Snickers wrappers and whimpering in frustrated anger. A short, mummified body lay stuffed into the corner under the hot dog broiler and the sink; no one had ever come to take away the corpse of the clerk who had died defending his store, though his gun and his pants had both been valuable enough for someone to steal. His shirt, crusted brown and full of neat round bullet holes, looters had so far left untouched.

  Dear God, help me to do your will. Help me to find it today. Help me to survive, and to forward the cause of Heaven.

  Raphael hesitated. In this ruin that had once been small-town Illinois, he was about to take away the one ray of hope he had encountered, depriving this person of will and the ability to do good.

  But Raphael was so tired. The rough matter of Earth banged against him without a shielding body, bruising and draining him. He dared not return to Heaven or to the Queendom, and he didn’t have the power to go anywhere else. Besides, what better purpose could this person serve than to be his vessel?

  Dear God, make of me your vessel.

  The praying man’s words almost sounded like an invitation, and Raphael cast aside his doubts.

  He found the man in the back of the shop. He huddled on his knees in what had once been an awkward nook created by the fact that the Kwik-Pak’s freezer didn’t quite reach the corner of the building. A collapsed stack of shelves and a tattered tarp shielded the praying man from view, but Raphael rose above the rubble and looked down at the man in his secret closet of prayer.

  The praying man knelt on a scrap of army surplus wool blanket. He was young, maybe eighteen, with yellow hair and a face shaped like a fox’s and a long-sleeved flannel shirt. He clutched his hands around a Gideon bible that had been torn in half. He twitched nervously as he prayed, and Raphael wondered if he were ill. Being inside any body was a limiting and unpleasant experience, made palatable only by the fact that, in Raphael’s current situation, the alternative was worse. Being inside a sick body, or a wounded or dying one, was that much worse.

  But the young man’s soul was open. He was praying out loud, and now Raphael was close enough to hear the words and not just feel them.

  “Dear God, keep me from harm if it’s your will, but in any case let me be a sword in your hand, a shield for the suffering, a net to collect those who hunger for righteousness.”

  Raphael dropped the Veil.

  “Child,” he said.

  The young man opened his eyes and gasped.

  “Fear not,” Raphae
l told him. The open warmth of the youth’s spiritual being drew him like a candle drawing a moth.

  “I … I’m not afraid.” The blond man managed an unsteady smile. “Are you a messenger?”

  Raphael drifted closer, nodding. “I come with good tidings. I am here to make of you a vessel.”

  The young man said nothing, but opened his arms and closed his eyes. As was only right and proper.

  Raphael embraced him. There was no act of will merging his substance into the vessel’s body because Raphael had no will that was distinct from any other part of him. Raphael was a point, a ba only, or something like a ba. Being a point, he slid with ease and comfort inside the constellation of things that made up a living man. He entered through the man’s name without being able to see it, but contact with the binding force of the five parts flooded Raphael with images of rocky hills and hickory trees, football games and math classes, magnolias in bloom and rain crashing on planted fields. Raphael nestled among the man’s name, his body, his ka, and his ba, sliding about until the shadow that those parts cast became Raphael’s shadow too, and he was a sixth point in the web of different objects that made up this man.

  The scratching, thumping hardness of the world gentled as the flesh and bone of the man’s body enveloped him, armored him, warmed him. He felt the now-shared heart set a rhythm for the world to which Raphael could dance within the interfolded parts of the vessel. Weariness fell away from his own limbs as he felt the young man’s hungry, wiry, determined strength take its place.

  Suddenly, he had lungs. He sucked in deep breaths and realized that the air was cold. Dizziness washed over his head in a wave, and Raphael fell forward onto his hands and knees. The relief he felt from the sensation of being squeezed and battered by the physical world almost hid the sudden pain in his hands as he scraped several knuckles in the cement floor and jammed one finger.

  “Ouch,” he murmured, but lay against the cool stone and let the pain simply be, reveling in the sensation of the chilled floor through the body’s hot blood.