43

RAMI

I almost lost him to that vision. Don’t think I don’t see how he pauses, looks over his shoulder of feathers turned white, and gazes into the middle distance awhile. I kept the man I love from his version of paradise. I dragged him back to Hell, literally. I should feel guilty about that, but I don’t.

Heaven doesn’t deserve him. Heaven doesn’t deserve any of them.

Assistant Librarian Hero, 2020 CE

It might have been fair to imagine that it would be easy for an angel to return to Heaven. Rami could be faulted for the assumption, the way he had pined to return and enter past the Gates. But the fact was, for any Watcher, or angel who had been cast out, the way back to Heaven was a crawl over scorched earth. Not physically, of course, but it felt that way. Rami would have crawled over broken glass to help his friends, however.

The Gates never failed to dazzle, even to jaded old Watcher eyes. The light sang along the boulevard, reached in blinding columns and rows that funneled every approaching soul to the same elevated point just in front of the Gates. It was impossible to miss, and it was the way Rami allowed himself to be directed.

The desk seemed grander from this angle. When Rami had attended to it, it had felt like merely a shabby raft in the tossing sea of disgruntled souls. Now it rose above the crowd like an altar. Wide slabs of white riddled with filigree fretwork and gold details. Impressive and divine, just the kind of desk one would expect at the Gates of Heaven.

The only problem was, it was unattended. Rami frowned, but before he could find cause for alarm he heard a familiar voice.

“Well, it’s not my place to tell you where to go, but I hear Duat’s nice if you like poetry.”

The shuffling crowds parted for a breath and Rami caught a glimpse of a pair of stooped shoulders, only half there, the way all souls were until they crossed the Heavenly Gates. It drifted in a small orbit around a familiar slight figure wearing an ill-fitting suit and topped with a head of messy curls.

Rami smiled in spite of himself. “Leto.”

“One minute. I’m with some—” His head whipped around, and Leto, former lost soul, former junior demon, current caretaker of the Gates of Heaven, gasped. “Ramiel? Who—what—”

The teenage boy forgot the soul he was advising and began to forge gently through the crowd. Rami took the moment to take inventory. Most souls after they died reached a happy default in their preferred outward age and physical appearance. Leto had died as a teenager and remained much the same as the last time Rami had seen him. Still gangly, soft brown skin still freckled. He still wore a cheap suit, though somewhere along the way he’d ditched the tie and split the cuffs so they were easier to roll up to his elbows. An informal modification that reminded Rami of Claire with a pang of fondness.

But there was an assurance that had not been in the freshly dead teenager before. A quiet sense of self as Leto placed a gentle hand on shoulders in the crowd to slip through without disturbing a soul. The teenager Rami had known had been coltish and spun tight with doubts. All that tension, all that regret and fear, seemed to have drained away from the young man who stopped before him.

Leto barely hesitated a second before wrapping Rami in an effusive, if quick, hug. “I didn’t think I’d see you here again!”

“Is that why you’re directing Heaven-bound souls to Duat?” Rami asked, chuckling as Leto’s eyes went wide. “I couldn’t help but overhear.”

“It’s not like that!” Leto wrinkled his nose, and a brief flash of the awkward teenager trying to not get in trouble appeared. “I do my job and get to know everyone who comes in! Most of them go on. It’s just . . . well, Heaven is not some people’s idea of paradise, you know? Especially since . . .” He drifted a hand back toward the Gates, as if to indicate the complicated state of affairs Uriel had left things in. Left, after Claire had discorporated her.

“It started with just this one mortal—supercool lady. She did roller derby! Like for serious.” Leto got animated with his hands. “She was telling me all these stories and I just couldn’t help thinking how well she’d fit in with what I saw of Valhalla, so I mighta . . . kinda suggested that. And she liked the idea, so I sent her there.”

Rami was too tired to be scandalized at this point. “You’re diverting souls from Heaven to Valhalla?”

“Not just Valhalla. After that I started thinking about it and doing some research on world religions—do you know how hard it is to ask for books around here? Really made me miss . . .” Leto trailed off with a small grimace. “Anyway, now I interview everyone and help them figure out where they want to go next. No one’s ever been sent back, so I figure the other guys are okay with it?”

“The other . . . guys,” Rami repeated slowly.

“Sorry, right, my bad,” Leto apologized, missing Rami’s concern entirely. “Not just guys, obviously. I mean the other folks that do what I do. In other realms.”

The young man before him was so joyfully calm and confident that Rami didn’t have the heart to describe how he was flippantly upending, oh, several eons of religious doctrine and realm operation. And evidently drawing the affairs of several other active afterlife realms into the act. Did Walter know he had been doing this? Death had to know.

Walter’s suggestion began to make a lot more sense. “That’s great, kid,” Rami said absently.

Leto’s relieved smile was almost more blinding than the Heavenly lights. “Thanks. I kept on thinking about what you said about souls, you know?” Oh god, this was his fault. And then Leto’s head tilted. “How’s things back—you know. How’s everyone?”

Rami took a deep breath and began to talk.