Time was, divine power flowed in my veins instead of blood, and wrapped around my bones in place of muscle. I didn’t just have magic; I was magic, down to the cellular level. Having power didn’t make me powerful, not when I didn’t have a say in how I used it. Still, I didn’t realize how much I took it for granted. Not until I burned it all away in one desperate attack, and found myself here in this fragile human body that got tired and hungry and sick. A body that would die someday.
If I ever wanted to have any kind of power again besides the kind that came with a gun anyone could buy off the street… if I wanted to have a fighting chance at helping the next person who came to my door with more-than-human problems… I was going to have to get that power the hard way, just like any other human. I was going to have to learn it from the ground up.
It wasn’t going well.
“Try again,” Margot ordered from behind me.
She had the voice of a drill sergeant and a face that said, Have another cookie, dear. She was a full head shorter than me, with crepe-paper skin and a tight cap of white curls, and looked like a brisk wind could blow her away. But meet her eyes long enough and you’d see no wind would dare try.
She had propped up a cardboard target against her antique divan, right under a picture of the Virgin Mary that was fully half my height. She used to have a dedicated room for this sort of thing back when she used to take students, or so she had told me once, but she had torn out the soundproofing and turned it into a sewing room twenty years ago. I was her only student these days. She took me on as a special favor after I saved her from a problem her magic couldn’t get her out of.
So far it wasn’t paying off for either of us. Probably why she wasn’t too worried about the furniture.
I shook my head at the untouched target and lowered my extended hand. “This isn’t going to work.”
Margot crossed her arms. “You’re the one who insisted on an emergency lesson today instead of waiting for our usual appointment. You’re the one who wanted this badly enough to drag your behind here at five in the morning, when you normally don’t roll out of bed until noon. Try again.”
I couldn’t argue with that voice. Especially at five in the morning.
I picked up the rosary she had lent me. In theory, it was supposed to work as a focus to tap me into humanity’s collective supply of faith. Faith was humanity’s only access to the power that used to be as much a part of me as my own wings. And the rosary was full of faith—I could tell by how her fingers had worn the beads to a shine.
The problem was, none of that faith was mine.
My scars writhed across my palms. Margot had been working with angelic power long enough that its residue clung to her all the time, like a whiff of faded perfume. Touching her rosary only made it worse. Margot must have noticed my scars as soon as I had taken off my gloves for our first lesson months ago, but if she had ever wondered about them, she hadn’t asked.
I closed my eyes and pictured the three angelic glyphs that spelled out the formula she had been trying to teach me for as long as these lessons had been going on. They blazed in white fire against a starless black sky, just like she had taught me. As soon as I called the symbols to mind, they began to squirm and twist in my inner vision. This was a language the human brain wasn’t meant to hold.
Once, this had been my native tongue. Now that I was human, it had taken months of painstaking effort just to memorize these three symbols. The angelic script couldn’t be written; the glyphs melted away as soon as they were committed to paper. The ones in my mind were currently trying to do the same thing.
I struggled to hold the mental image in place as I opened my eyes. I extended my hand and shouted into the small, echoey room. “A hasda!”
Before I spoke the first syllable, I knew it wouldn’t work. The glyphs in my inner vision had warped beyond recognition. They ran down the edges of the black background like water. The words hung in the air, flat. The cardboard target sat there untouched, silently mocking me.
Margot shook her head. “You need to find your faith. Otherwise we’re both wasting our time here.”
“You were the one who told me to try again.”
“And you’re the one who keeps coming back here week after week, even though I tell you the same thing every time.” Margot plucked the rosary from my hands. “You need your own focus, to start. Borrowed faith won’t get you far. The focus has to mean something to you, or it has about as much power as a toy gun.”
I opened my mouth. She pointed a stern finger at me. “And don’t you give me that line about how the world has enough faith to fuel your magic without you adding any of your own. Even if I believed in teaching someone how to be a freeloader, there are no free lunches here. You can’t sail to the sea without a river to ride, and you can’t tap into what’s out there without finding it inside yourself first. That’s what the focus is for—to get you on the river. Have you given any more thought to what might work for you? An old family Bible, maybe?”
“I don’t have any family. And God and I were never on good terms.”
“I’m going to let you in on a secret.” Margot leaned in close and stretched up toward my ear, like she thought the Virgin Mary across the room might be listening in. “Whatever they might say in church, it doesn’t much matter what you believe in. God has never let me down, but if you two don’t get along, then think about looking elsewhere. You believe in something, don’t you? The wonders of the natural world, the goodness of the human heart…” She studied my face and gave me a small, secret smile. “Or maybe all you believe in is yourself. I’ve seen that be enough for some.”
I shook my head. “I’ve seen too much to have any believing left in me. Sounds like I’ve been wasting your time. I won’t waste any more of it.”
“Pah. You and your excuses. You think I haven’t seen as much as you?” For a second, her bland accent slipped, turning her vowels rounder and her words thicker. The sound of a place I had never been and didn’t recognize. “But the angels carried me through it all. They’ve been there protecting you too, even if you haven’t seen them.”
I managed to restrain my laughter, but it was a near thing. The angels were out there protecting people, all right. Or they had been. But I doubted Margot had been on their list. And they sure as hell weren’t looking out for me.
“But all right, say your faith has run dry and you can’t fill that well again,” said Margot. “It can’t have always been that way. Go back in your memory. Find the last time you believed in something so strongly you’d give anything for it. It doesn’t matter what—maybe it was the girl next door. That’s still faith.” She pressed the rosary back into my hand and closed my fingers around it. Her skin felt like creased silk. “You go back to that memory. You breathe that feeling in deep. Then you’ll know what you need to find if you want to do more than waste your breath screaming at the furniture.”
I wanted to tell her there was no point in searching for memories that weren’t there. But then I would have dragged myself out here at five in the morning for no reason. I closed my eyes and cast my mind back, already knowing I would come up empty. I had served the Divine Throne once. But what I had felt for the one who had sat there wasn’t faith.
Back when there was a God, He wasn’t some kindly old man watching over humanity from Heaven. He was a tyrant grown fat on praise and drunk on incense smoke. He got off on watching humans run around like frantic ants trying to earn His favor, and locking down His angels’ powers until we could hardly scratch our asses without His permission. Worse, though, was how that lock also worked as a key. When the power took control of me, I had to use it, even when I would rather have turned it on myself than follow His orders.
Until I Fell, I was a guardian angel. It was a shit job, and we all knew it—a punishment for those of us who didn’t bow low enough before the Throne. My job: protect the humans who had earned God’s favor. The ones who fed His ego by praising Him loudest and longest. No matter how they indulged their private sins on their altar boys or their neighbors’ wives.
A guardian angel protects the innocent and the righteous. That’s what the humans believe, anyway. And that kind of thing seeps into your bones after a while. You start to believe it, even when you know it’s a lie. I started to believe it. But instead of protecting the innocent, I had to keep on protecting the ones who hurt them.
There was no faith to be found in the things I had done.
Except once. When I wielded my sword in the Last War—well, Michael’s sword, but I didn’t leave him in any shape to take it back. When we stormed Heaven and spilled divine blood on its golden streets. When millennia of helpless rage came together in one brief shining moment of ecstatic hate. When at last, I could do what I was made for, and fight for the good. For justice.
The glyphs flared to life in my mind. White flames seared into my vision. I didn’t have to try to force them to hold their shape. They felt as solid as the floor under my feet, burning in three dimensions and setting my scars ablaze with their heat.
The fire spilled out from the symbols and down through my body. It hurt, but it was the pain of driving past a place you used to know and not seeing anything you recognize, or pulling out an old family photo and counting up the people who have died.
I was home.
I had no home anymore. Maybe I never had.
My fingers tightened around the sword I wasn’t holding. I remembered home. I remembered hate.
The white fire of the glyphs turned blood-red. The angelic words roared through me, a sensation more than a sound.
A low boom. The tinkle of shattering glass. My eyes snapped open.
The target was gone. Not hit through the middle. Not blasted into pieces. Just gone. So was most of the divan. A scorch mark two feet across blackened Margot’s floor. A few scraps of charred fabric lay scattered around the edges, along with broken glass from the bottom half of the picture frame. The remains of the picture swung slowly back and forth, Mary’s eyes staring at me in solemn accusation.
One look at Margot’s face told me this wasn’t a success.
“That was not what I expected,” she said, in the voice of someone holding on to their calm for dear life. I had never heard her shaken before.
I looked down at my scars, which now glowed red as hellfire. I still had the rosary clutched between my fingers. Whatever I had done, it hadn’t damaged the beads any. I handed the rosary back to Margot, who took it back with the hurried care of a cop disarming an unhinged suspect.
“You’re sure I did that?” I asked.
“You did something. What it was, I couldn’t tell you. This is one of the most basic formulae there is. I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve seen it used. I know what it’s meant to look like.”
“Not like that,” I guessed, with a gesture toward the ruins of the living room. My forced smile hung at an angle like the remains of the picture.
“This is meant to be a precise strike. Done properly, the flame would have burned through the center of the target and left everything else untouched. Done improperly, there should have been no effect.”
“Like all the other times I’ve tried.”
“And the flame should have been white. Red is… I don’t know what it is. Nothing I’ve ever seen.”
And she’d been practicing angelic magic for more than half a century. Since long before I Fell. “Maybe I just need more practice.”
“No,” she said sharply. Then, after a deep breath, “I don’t know what memory you called on today, but it’s one best left locked away. For now, go home. Put that memory out of your mind. It won’t serve you in this work.”
The rosary trembled in her hands.
“I don’t know,” I said, trying to sound like her nerves didn’t scare the shit out of me. “That kind of thing could be pretty useful if I’ve got my back to a wall.”
“Hatred can be a force like no other, when it’s strong enough.” Her blue-black eyes held mine with an intensity that told me she had gotten more insight from my burst of power than she wanted to admit. “And yours may be the strongest I’ve ever seen. You honed your hatred to a weapon once. You accomplished great and terrible things.”
I broke our gaze and walked as fast as I could toward the door without running. “I’ll send you a check for the damage.”
She blocked my way. “Faith connects us to something greater than ourselves. What you called on today can’t draw on anything but your own being. You could use it as a substitute for faith. Maybe. For a while. But it will burn away all you have inside you, and leave you empty of everything but despair.”
I wasn’t so sure I had anything left to burn away. I’d given it all in the last battle of the Last War. I had no regrets. But I didn’t have much else in me, either. “I won’t bother you again.” I reached past her for the doorknob.
She stepped aside. I walked out into the gray dawn.
“Next week,” she called after me. “Usual time. And don’t even think about trying to pay for the damage.”
I didn’t answer.