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MISSION VIEJO, CALIFORNIA
The door whipped open and disgorged two people into a house.
One staggered in and scoped out the surroundings. The other managed to make it over to a couch and sat down with a thump, having decided that staring straight ahead and sweating was the best course of action for the moment.
“Holy shit.” The first one swayed a little. “Can we… uh, yanno, not do that again for a while?” There was a mute nod from the couch.
An African grey parrot blinked, then bobbed its head from a perch in a corner. “Nice place.”
“You in?”
“’Rushi wanna cracker. Wraaak.”
“You can have mine. Marie don’t have no appetite after that.”
“That was…was. All right. I definitely propose we don’t do that again for the rest of the day.” Larry managed to get the thousand mile stare that had been plastered on his face for all but the first few dozen yards of the trip down to a mile or two of distance. He watched his fingers trembling. “Adrenalin? I don’t like it.”
“Seconded. And now you understand why I don’t eat sometimes. Plays hell with digestion.” Marie started to wander around the house. “Okay, furnished… oo, stereo, backyard, patio, seems to be a good kitchen far’s I can tell, you might wanna look at to be sure, Lau – er, Larry,” her voice echoed from further back, “two bedrooms, attached bathrooms… Yeah, this’ll do. Definitely miles better than my last place before The Thing. Ye gads, knowing the cost of living around here I dowanna know what strings Marc pulled.”
The parrot gave itself a scratch. “Former Boss knows how to pull them, trust me on that.”
“Well, yeah. He’s that kind of awesome.” Marie wandered back in and out to the kitchen again. Larry could hear the sound of a refrigerator door opening. “Cool. Groceries in there already.” Drawers banged. “Oo. silverware. And dishes. Looks like we’re good to go. How you doing?”
He took a moment to respond. “I no longer have nausea. And I no longer think my heart is going to implode. I think being stationary and not moving helps. Now I feel… weak.”
“That’ll do it to ya. The adrenaline dump, I mean.”
“Objectively speaking, this is interesting data. Subjectively speaking, this is information I’d have been just as happy to not know firsthand –”
“Welcome to my world. I live here all the time.”
“– along with how you drive.”
“Excuse me?”
Sirushi cocked her head from one to the other. “Uht oh. Should I get away from ground zero?”
Larry shrugged. “Well, it didn’t help. That, and I have decided if she is going to kill me I might as well get it out of the way so I can spend the rest of the attunement in peace.”
“Ah. Ha. Ha ha ha...Well, to be fair the 405 is almost always insane. Um. And you two seem to have a really weird working relationship for Superiors. Just my personal. From the outside. Er. I mean. You’re not going to remember this, right?” The possessed parrot’s feathers all fluffed out at right angles in nervousness.
“’Working’ is the key word. As long as it’s working.” He gave the Kyriotate another shrug and a half-smile.
Marie gave up debating the ethics of whether she should throttle a temporarily humanized Archangel or not and muttered off after making some highly descriptive strangling motions. “Oh, yeah, well, I’ve heard you want some real excitement, try the damn Orange Crush, not the El Toro Y. And sue me, I got my instruction in a place with non-balls to the wall insane traffic. And I used mass transit when I was in New York.”
“’The Orange Crush’? Should I ask?”
“Um, well, to take from one of my folks who lived in the area, it’s the ungodly nest of humping Balseraphs up in northern Orange County near Disneyland where hope and sanity go to die. If Balseraphs were highways.”
“...It’s a freeway interchange, sir.”
“Yeah, the same way Mad Max: Fury Road is a normal rush hour.”
“…a really chaotic one.”
“Worse than Roman traffic? I’ve seen two thousand years of Roman traffic.”
“Pretty bad.”
“That tells me next to nothing.”
“Way Marie tells me, sir, it’s a qualitative thing. Do you want constant terror, or large amounts of soul-destroying stagnation with sudden really extreme terror?”
Marie opened a hall closet and froze, eyes widening. “Marc. You swine. How did you…”
“What?”
“He just… argh. Well, he must’ve gotten hold of some of my old stuff. I um… Later.” She whumped down onto a recliner. “On that note, brace yourself. I’m liberating my feet.” She started to yank off one steel-toed workboot as Sirushi started mimicing a warning klaxon. Larry just shook his head. Speaking of strange working relationships, on top of everything else he’d gotten more insights into how what passed for the Choice command infrastructure operated in fifteen minutes than he’d ever wanted to have in one go. And Marie’s feet were on the smelly side too. He tried not to let it show as she wiggled around wool sock-encased toes and made a ridiculous roll-eyed and tongue-out face of relief.
“*vwoot vwoot vwoot* Houston, we have a chemical breach on Pods One and Two. I repeat, chemical breach on Pods One and Two. Maybe it’s a dead mouse. Oh, oh, wait, that’s just my boss’s feet. Carry on.”
“Yeah, well, I ran out of the good insoles. Sue me.”
“Can’t, you’re broke.”
Far too many insights into Choice hierarchy, Larry thought. He needed some normalcy. He stood up.
“I’m going to be in the kitchen. See what I can do with whatever is in the refrigerator.”
Marie looked up. “Do you need help?”
“I’ll be fine. I know my way around a kitchen and may as well start inventorying for dinner.”
“Are you sure?”
“You sit. You’ve had a long couple of days leading up to this. I should make myself useful despite my current status.”
“All right. Got it. Give us a shout if you need. My feet will be decontaminated in a couple minutes.”
“Glad to hear it. Otherwise the Vapulans might come by.” Marie’s raspberry and raised middle finger followed him out while Sirushi watched and for her own part got even more insights into Superior dynamics than she knew what to do with.
Especially since Larry was smirking as he left.
When she’d first coordinated them, this was not how the Kyriotate had imagined the weekly meetings between her Boss and the Supreme Commander of the Heavenly Host would develop. She took some time to contemplate the wonder of it all. She was also coordinating the Home Office in Marie’s absence and listening in on a Seraphim Council session in Heaven at the same time on account of being a Kyriotate, but this deserved serious bandwidth. She did so to the background chorus of drawers, cabinets, cutlery, and then chopping sounds from the kitchen while Marie slowly sagged into a doze in the recliner.
The yelp blew them out of thought and nap alike into full flail.
Marie exploded out of her chair with a roll to the floor and Sirushi turned into a feather grenade. The human didn’t even have time to be glad for the self-defense crash course Stone had inflicted on her as a welcome present before she slid into the kitchen on stocking feet behind angel-ridden parrot.
Larry was standing before the sink, frozen. He was holding his right hand and staring at it. He’d shucked his jacket at some point and it hung on the back of a chair, leaving him in a plain white tee shirt. It was a eeriely inert tableau, like one of the frescoes within the Vatican that he so adored.
And then the Exemplar saw the pool of scarlet in his hand dribbling a steady patter onto the floor.
“What the hell!?” She reached him and grabbed him, startling him out of his trance. He blinked at her as she hustled him over to the sink. There was a cutting board with partly chopped tomatoes and garlic next to it; the dropped santoku knife and red splatters on the counter explained what had happened. “Son of a bitch! What the hell did you do?!” The blade had slipped and sliced open his palm. She got a glimpse under the blood and knew exposed bone was something she didn’t want to see. “Fuck! Don’t just stand there, you wanna bleed out?!” This was immediate ER stuff, not to mention that Marie didn’t want to think about that it was probably career-ending if you were a pianist. Or a swordsman.
The only thing he said, a couple seconds later, was an almost wondering, “But… why does it hurt so much?”
Marie didn’t respond; she was too busy closing her eyes and concentrating. Fortunately, the Corporeal Song of Healing could spare them the emergency trip; fortunately, it could also correct the maimed hand. Even more fortunately her variant of Silent Running, the one humans could use, silenced the Disturbance made performing that Song. She opened her eyes again and sighed in relief as she saw severed tendons, blood vessels, and flesh knit back together. Larry was pale and shocky-looking, but whole again.
That, of course, did nothing about the blood already on the floor, the counter, coating Larry’s hand, and flecking his shirt and part of his jeans. She got his hand under the tap and startled as suddenly the faucet pivoted and turned on. “Gah… oh, right, Jean just gave you that, didn’t he.” She watched the blood swirl away into the drain to clear water, and grabbed a roll of paper towels. Larry watched her silently, a blank expression on his face.
Sirushi bobbed her head from her perch on the back of a chair. “Eheh. Not the way I’d planned to first use it.”
“Had to do it sometime. Damn. We have any peroxide around here?” She grabbed some paper towels and dampened them, then got down to her knees to mop up the mess on the floor. Larry mutely watched . “And um… we’re going to have to do something about your clothes before the blood sets…” She paused and looked up. “Are you okay?”
“It turned in my hand.” His voice was almost monotone.
“Larry? Laurence?” Her eyes widened.
“It turned in my hand.” he repeated.
Something about the helpless expression on his face, combined with that voice… that was not the fiercely competent, driven and dedicated Archangel she knew. That wasn’t Laurence, Malakite Archangel of the Sword, one of the most dangerous warriors the Heavenly Host had ever produced. It sure as hell wasn’t the Lord Commander of the same Host.
That was a lost little boy. It was unbelievable. It was incomprehensible. It was wrong.
It scared the Hell out of her.
<Shit, shit, shit! Sirushi, what is going on with him?!> she bleated over the Song of Ethereal Tongues. <Did the attunement break him or- >
<No, Boss.> Sirushi hunched her wings, one eye cocked to see them. <I think it’s… His Word.>
<He’s not feeling his Word right now! He’s not in contact with it. What does that have to do with this?> She guided the unresisting Larry to a chair and had him sit in it, chewing on her lip frenetically as she did so.
<Marie? I mean, I’m not Worded, but... The Word of Choice is part of you now. The same way the Word of the Sword is part of him normally. And it’s a knife, but it’s still close enough. How would it feel if your own concept was not only unreachable but turned around and attacked you? This… I mean, it’s not something angels deal with, not like this. Not even with Word-shift.>
Marie thought through it, and shuddered as she watched him slowly come back around to reality. He was shivering as he did so, but bit by bit, the betrayed look slowly left his eyes, leaving hollowness in its wake.
He cleared his throat after a few minutes.
“Now that I think about it, staying here for the first day was a good call on your part.” It was thready, but a vein of irony was creeping back into his voice.
Marie let out a long breath she had been holding. “Yeah. Are… are you gonna be okay?” She squeezed his hand.
He nodded. “I… I think I will be. I’m grateful that this didn’t happen in a combat situation, though.” He managed to twitch a smile..
“Normally would have never happened.” <Wait. Sirushi? Now I’m paranoid. Drop a line to Jean. Ask him if the main part of Laurence felt anything just now.>
<On it.> There was a pause. <Nothing, he said. Though he wants us to keep an eye on stuff down here. Data, after all.>
<Feh, data for him but scary shit for us.>
“Unexpected consequences, you said.” Larry rubbed his hands on his pants, then realizing the blood flecking the denim. “Well, you were right. Do we have any–?”
Marie winced. “Doesn’t mean I’m gonna be smug about it or go ‘I told ya so’. You scared the shit out of me there.” She offered him a damp washcloth and some peroxide. He accepted and set to work on his clothing while she slowly resumed cleaning up the mess on the counter and floor. She glared at the offending santoku knife before carefully cleaning it off.
“I forgot my reflexes and fine control aren’t what they are, normally. Or I haven’t adjusted to my new state completely yet. Or both. Even before considering… well.” He rubbed at a spot harder. “I should have been more careful.” He sighed. “I hadn’t expected…” He trailed off. “I know combat, I know pain, I know vessel death, and it… It hurt.” That stunned, wondering tone surfaced again for a second.
Marie could find no response that didn’t sound pat or snarky, and finished silently cleaning up the counter and stowing the vegetables she could in the refrigerator. “Hindsight’s twenty-twenty, we say down here,” she said at last.
“So much for my bright idea to make some marinara sauce right away. I think I’ve got the worst out.” He slowly got up and began to rinse out the washcloth. It was considerably pinker than it had been before.
“Heh. Just means we’ll have to do another essential part of American human experience instead for tonight.”
“What’s that?”
Marie gave a half-hearted grin and pulled out her phone.
“Ordering out for a pizza.”