Page 71 of The Fallen
TEA & VODKA
BL JONES
PROLOGUE
AZRAEL
When I died, there was no light to absolve me or darkness to claim me.
There was no warmth, no coldness, no pain, no relief.There was no brimstone to catch myself on or clouds to hold fast to.
There was only the Nothing.
Until.
Itplunged into that ocean of Nothing and tore its gnarled fingers through my chest cavity, curling them around my rib cage and yanking meout.
Then I was loose, running free and feral, gnashing teeth, desperate for hot blood and heart spoils. For soul flesh.
I was a husk, a cavernous corpse reanimated and hungry for what it could no longer possess.
Whatever stole me from the Nothing put me in a cadre with three other undead things. None the same except for the wings arching out of our backs, feathers pitch black, bones jarring awkwardly, like they were broken and never reset.
Angels, It calls us.
You hunt the lost now, It said. It breathed that mission into my mouth, filling my empty lungs with purpose.
We track down souls who escaped before the Nothing could claim them, and we send them to their end.
I can’t see myself in mirrors or any reflective surface. I am a mystery to myself. Or I was before the others.
“White eyes,” Raphael tells me, “mark you as ours. Our sister.”
I probably belonged somewhere once, before the Nothing, but I don’t remember.
“You won’t,” Sariel promises once, in the beginning. “That shit, whatever shit you had, it doesn’t own you anymore. We do.”
My mouth tastes like ash.
“Mine tastes like dirt,” Uriel whispers into my ear when he catches me scraping my tongue over the roof of my mouth, trying to scrub up the bitter tang of burnt bone.
Raphael tells me all he can taste is salt water. Sariel doesn’t ever say.
There are scars on my arms, slashes across my wrists and down my forearms. They’re engraved deep into my skin, like grooves in stone. They don’t heal, but they don’t bleed either.
“There’s no blood to waste on our pain,” Raphael says the first time a soul fights back, sticking a blunt kitchen knife through my neck.
Sariel pulls the knife out, swift but careful even if she doesn’t need to be. I won’t die. Can’t. What’s done is done. Fire has taken care of the rest, consumed my blood and given it back to the earth.
Pain is dull, not as exhilarating as I thought I remembered.
“It’s the nerves,” Uriel explains. “They’re barely holding on.”
I’m not holding on. There’s nothing to hold on to.
Souls don’t always fight when we come for them. Some kneel down at our feet and beg. Some don’t even look at us, white eyes glazed and staring into the distance, at a world we aren’t part of anymore, with longing or regret until our teeth sink in, and we tear them apart. Then they scream. The quiet ones scream the loudest in the end.
The others are marked too, with white eyes and scars.
