Love Bites Then it Sucks, Julie Steimle [top 50 books to read .TXT] 📗

stumble through the rest of the neighborhood, in pain. I needed a place to rest. Stretching my wings, I launched into the sky and landed on a rooftop where I reassessed the damage. My clothes were stained with my blood. The holes in them were real. The wounds I had oozed, but did not flow, which was odd. And all of them hurt. I began to realize that my headache was more from the bullet in my skull than from hitting the ground. And the one lodged against my heart, it killed with every beat. Surely, I should be dead, and I wasn’t.

“You can’t suicide yourself,” a voice said from up above me.

I looked and saw the gray angel. He was glaring down at me disapprovingly.

I abruptly stood to my feet, bristling. “That wasn’t what I was doing!”

“You aren’t the first to try suicide to get out of this duty,” he said.

“I wasn’t!” I shouted. My wings fluttered, lifting me so I was up in the air where he was. “Three girls were going to—”

“You should have let them die,” he said.

“LIKE HELL I WOULD!” I shouted back, my scythe appearing instantly in my hand. “I can’t let innocent people just get killed!”

“What does innocence have to do with death?” the gray angel asked, calmly, hardly ruffled by my hot-faced fury at him.

“It’s not fair! They didn’t deserve it!” I screamed. “They are just kids!”

“And that newborn wasn’t just a kid?” he asked me, infuriatingly calm.

Breathing hard, I realized now that he had been watching me this entire time. It took everything to restrain my impulse to tear him apart. “You are sick.”

He pulled back from me with a smug huff. “Well… isn’t this a surprise. A demon such as you sympathizing with humans.”

My anger continued to swell within. I really wanted to tear him a new one now. “Up until I was fourteen, I thought I was human. And even after that, I never felt that I wasn’t one of them. Being a demon was just a condition—”

“A condition?” He nearly squawked the word, affronted by the idea. “You are a damned soul! You are only in this temporary position because God had pity on that poor man who was throwing himself away on you!”

My wings stiffened and I dropped down to the roof. His words fell heavily on me. Had the whole thing about ending my curse been a lie?

“And when this is over, you will return to Hell from whence you came,” he said, his words sharp and brittle like glass.

“So you lied to me?” I murmured from the rooftop, feeling sick. Not just for myself, but also for Hanz who would be looking for me, and for my family who I was sure was worried to death. All of this was for nothing?

Yet Asahel bristled. I no longer wanted to see him as an angel, gray or otherwise. He was my jailer. The prison guard. And yet as I watched him, I saw discomfort on his face, as clearly he didn’t like being called a liar. He averted his eyes and said, “I did not lie to you. I passed on the message I was commissioned to deliver to you. And thus I did it. However, I do not agree with it.”

Hope returned in me again. It was as George the biker had said. Asahel just hated me.

“So, you are just prejudiced against me,” I said, feeling better.

He stiffened more. His eyes fixed coldly on me as if he would spit venom, yet he said nothing.

Deciding to change the subject, I said, “So what’s the deal? I thought I was immaterial—neither dead nor alive. How come the bullets hit me?”

Glowering at me, he answered, “You put yourself in the way.”

I rolled my eyes. “Duh. But as an immaterial half imp, bullets always—”

“You are a death angel,” he said darkly. “Different rules apply—and you broke the rules.”

I stared. “What rules?”

He grunted, restraining a moan. “You impudent—! The rules of death and reaping. If you try to stop a death that you should reap, you bear the wounds they would have borne.”

Oh. I felt over where I was hit. One girl would have been struck in the head. One would have probably been killed by the bullet that hit my heart. And the ones that riddled my gut would have killed the third. But as I was undead, I could not die.

“And?” I felt them over again as the pain killed.

“You will forever bear them,” he said with an ugly smirk, as if he believed I deserved whatever pain I got.

But I thought about it. Those girls were alive because I had put myself in the way. It was what I had wanted at the time. And they were alive.

I nodded to myself. “Ok.”

He huffed, turning to leave. “Don’t do it again.”

And he shot off into the sky like lightning, the heartless jerk.

I could not understand why God used such cold people as angels. George had said something about career angels like Asahel. He had hinted that Asahel had a life once, had been a mortal man at some point in time, but I wondered how long ago his mortality had been. I also wondered why Asahel lacked compassion. He was the cold reaper that clearly felt no mercy for the dying. I never wanted to be like that.

After a while of resting, hoping to recover from my wounds, I realized that they were not healing, and the wounds continued to ooze. I wondered then if this was a permanent condition. Asahel did say I would forever bear them. It just barely occurred to me I would bear them as wounds and not as healed scars. That gave me pause. This was not something I wanted to do daily. Saving those girls, I felt, was a good thing. But the pain was entirely unpleasant, and I knew after sitting there, that it would be chronic and irreversible. Perhaps Asahel was a little right in that I really should avoid doing this sort of thing on a frequent basis.

I returned to the hospital and reaped a few more ghosts who had not expected me to be back so early, then I took a nap in an empty room.

My first summoning to ‘angel counsel’ was a startling one. At the time I had been resting on the awning of a building while breathing in the aroma of a hotdog vendor, wishing I could still eat (I had tried to take bites of food held out in a person’s hand once or twice, but to no avail. My teeth would not break off a piece, and I could not swallow). The tug, calling me toward the high city rooftop came like a trail of light in the sky, pierced me in the chest and yanked me upwards. I lifted off the awning and followed it.

Through the smoggy damp air up where it felt like all the stenches just mixed with fuel exhaust, I broke over the top of the city and soared down onto the skyscraper. A collection of sixty-or-so death angels were on the flat roof when I arrived—and like in California, they were an eclectic bunch. Most were cold, large feather-winged beings of various ethnicities. I noticed gangster types, prostitute like ones, and the solid robed folk among a few in hijabs and turbans. One was a nun. Another death angel wore a small billboard that said ‘THE END IS NEAR’, which was peculiar. I spotted the witch and the former hunter standing on opposite sides of the roof. I also noticed two elves in naturalish, mossy, leaf-like clothing, and one demon who looked like he had tumbled off a catholic carving from Europe. There were also two actual grim reapers in dark hoods and robes, with bloody, emaciated hands and faces. They were not boney though. Rather, they looked battered and abused.

“It appears she has started on the grim path.” One of the feathered angels, seeing me, chuckled to another when I landed.

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you to dodge bullets?” another called out to me. He had on a gray tie and was in a Wall Street type business suit. He had dollar bills and foreign currency for feathers in his wings, which was weird. Perhaps he used to work the stock market.

The witch eyed me funny though. Curious this time. She had out her staff, and was leaning like she was posing for a comic book cover.

My large dragon-sized wings fluttered and shank to hand-size as I looked for a place to sit among them. There wasn’t much space left. I limped. The bullet in my leg had made it painful to walk.

“What is she?” one of the angels asked another, hardly lowering his voice.

“A vimp,” called out the ex-hunter, not bothering to mask they were talking about me.

The crowd of angels bristled like birds on a wire shuddering in the wind, pulling back from me—though the witch looked intrigued.

“Not just a demon?” she inquired. Clearly she knew what a vimp was.

“No,” the hunter replied with a dark look at her. “And she is friends with a werewolf.”

“Oh, shut it,” I said, approaching him. “…And I was about to forgive you for shooting at my friend, by the way, but now I am not so sure. You’re a jerk.”

The demon and elves snickered. Clearly they agreed wholeheartedly.

“Who is her friend?” one of the angels asked, his eyes raking me over.

“Howard Richard Deacon the Third,” the hunter said, sneering back at me as if my opinion did not matter one iota.

Several of the angels bristled more, staring at me as if I had offended their mothers—though a group of them remained unconcerned. The elves were now gazing at me with heavy curiosity. But the demon huffed, rolling his eyes with a mutter that sounded like “Meddler.”

“Oh, my gosh! What’s your problem?” I snapped at the hunter, then walked to the edge of the roof. I sat on it. I had no fear of heights, so my back to the far street down below was nothing.

“That explains how he survived so long,” one of the feathered angels muttered.

I shot him a dirty look. “Rick survives because he is a good person.”

I got dirty glares for that comment. Clearly a bunch of the angels did not agree.

A few more death angels arrived after that. A fluffy-looking lady angel landed with huge downy wings, her scythe looking more like a dental pick than a reaping tool. I muttered under my breath to no one in particular, “Who is that? The tooth fairy?”

The angels near me smothered chuckles. And though they had shied from me initially, they now watched me with interest.

Another winged angel came and then another demon angel arrived. He was a skulky, shriveled sort of thing which, sadly, reminded me of Gollum. His reaper staff was nothing more than a small Soviet-style sickle, one which could have fallen off the flag. Everyone shied away from him—and no wonder. He smelled of sewer. Admittedly, I wondered how he ended up on reaping duty. Maybe Tolkien had seen him once and had patterned Gollum after him. I kept expecting him to pull out the one ring and call it his ‘precious’. But then he pointed at me and spoke with a sweet soft voice that could have soothed a sleeping child. “What is that vimp doing here?”

He knew what I was. And startled, I stared back at him, my cheeks feeling hot.

“She’s been claimed for redemption, supposedly,” one of the angels reluctantly replied to him.

The demon snorted, pointing at me, specifically my head. “Don’t you know you are supposed to avoid bullets? Not get in the way of them?”

My shoulders sagged, noticing the grim reapers lift their heads in particular to watch my reaction. “So?”

The demon laughed, his voice rich and tempting. For a moment I got the impression that he was more like Pennywise, able to lure a kid into a sewer. He just forgot his makeup.

Folding my arms, I