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

of yourself. Stop thinking of yourself as an imp and embrace that you are now an angel.”

An angel. What a thought. Me?

I stared up at him. Biker George, despite his rude kidnapping of me from my life, did not look down on me the way the gray angel did. He saw me as a novice, but not unequal to him. I rose to my feet and asked him. “Why are you doing this? I can tell the gray angel hates me—”

“His name is Asahel,” the biker said.

“As a hell?” I stared at him, not sure I heard right.

Laughing, biker George shook his head. “No. Asahel. It is Hebrew. It means God hath made. He was a swift warrior in his day, though he does not talk about it much. Asahel is not sentimental. But you can keep calling him the gray angel if you like. I think he would prefer it actually.”

“What’s his deal?” I growled, feeling incredibly put upon. “Is he some kind of archangel?”

Biker George shook his head. “No. I think the mortal equivalent is, uh, supervisor. He is in charge of the North American region with a few other ‘gray angels’.”

My eyes widened on him. “So ‘gray angel’ is a class of angels?”

He chuckled, shaking his head more. “Uh, no. I was just trying to simplify it for you. Let me be clearer, there are several kinds or classes of death angels. They are not all equal. And I cannot say they are all good either. The war is still happening in Heaven and now on Earth. We still have our agency. We can still choose to do evil if we so wish. For you and me, this is a state of purgatory, so to speak. But God does not waste a talent.”

This was news, and it shook me a little. “What do you mean by talent?”

He nodded to me. “You. The most recent incarnation of the vimp—a sad cursed creature who apparently beat the odds and fought against her nature. That’s amazing. Most people merely accept their nature and use that as an excuse to commit more wickedness. But you figured out the secret of life—transcendence. Or as the Christian world puts it, conversion.”

I stared. I wondered how many religions these death angels acknowledged. I had an inkling they were the kind to listen to any worthy prayer regardless of which god someone worshipped. They certainly reaped death on everyone, regardless of whether they believed in God or not.

“People tend to forget that the word conversion means change,” he said, interrupting my train of thought.

I nodded.

“But you get it,” he said. “You get that change is what life is all about. We were never meant to stay one way. We were meant to grow and become something glorious.”

Shivers ran down my arms. That was something Hanz used to say. I wondered if biker George had been spying on us for a while.

“But anyway,” biker George settled onto the top of an air vent, “You asked about death angels. I think it would be wise if you come into this whole deal informed. So here we go.

“Initiates, such as yourself, come from four walks of existence. The first are like me, Second Chancers. Us death bed repentance types are actually quite rare as most human beings are judged on a different scale than those who have memory of Heaven. You… technically are not a Second Chancer though you have a mortal memory, but that is mostly because you are a demon. You are the second type, which is a little less common. You are a Side-changer.”

“But I—”

He held up a hand. “I know. You personally are not evil. Your choices have proven that—except those from Heaven remember you as a Side-changer. You are extremely rare as you are mortal. No other vimp has accomplished what you have. But God will be fair in his judgement.”

“Is it fair if those other vimps had no chance?” I protested. I had learned enough about the previous vimps to know that their life circumstances sucked. It made total sense to me why they all had become violent monsters. The moment a vimp is born, the imps—if they are aware of it—attack it to kill it. And in self-defense, as an infant, the baby vimp ends up slaying its own imp relatives, and it lives with that horror for the rest of its life. And if a vampire ever comes across a vimp while in its still immature state of childhood, they attack it. All the previous vimps grew up having to savagely defend their own lives, trusting no one. I had learned this when I had spotted my birthmother again, who was a tiny hideous she-imp, and had caught her to ask questions—especially about how my birth father was killed, if she knew anything of it. Since then, I had spent time imagining what my life would have been like if I had not been born early and my vampire father had not left me with my human family. I had been spared.

George seemed to know this and nodded. “Yeah…. I see what you are saying. But trust me. God will be fair in the end. We just can’t see then end now.

“Anyway,” he continued, “Those demons among the group that you saw are Side-changers. We don’t trust them much, though. Some of them are filthy back-stabbers and turn back to their old ways.”

I frowned, knowing the gray angel saw me that way.

“And then there are the elves,” he said. “Elves are a special case. They were like angels, servants of God and co-creators under God’s direction. But most rebelled against God a little after creation, thinking their duties of maintenance of their plots of Earth rather tedious, and many of them neglected for pleasure. Some of them even propped themselves up a gods, playing it for the mortals until God punished them. Others grew jealous of mortals and started to inflict maladies and plagues on them just for spite. Most elves have fled underground and into the unseen realm. And those elves who had rebelled were cursed. Not all elves rebelled, you know. Just a large portion. They’re also mortal in a way. They can be killed, but they do not age. Yet some elves who wish to return to the graces of God serve a portion of time as a death angel, do what we call dirty work against the wicked elves still plaguing the earth, then they are instructed to return to their duties as they were originally charged. Most death angels are such.

“But there also are select angels in the service of God given the hard duty of guiding spirits to the other side and directing the wayward such as us seeking redemption,” he said. “Some of them are those gray angels. Most are simply angels chosen from the dawn of time to do this service. They don’t talk much, and they aren’t very merciful. They have a saying, in fact—‘Mercy is from God. I am just an angel’.”

Shivers ran down my arms and back, tickling also the back of my scalp as if an invisible hand were running down it. Deidre had mentioned those angels. Those were the cold ones. The merciless ones.

“Now, after novice angels are assigned, such as yourself,” he said, folding his fingers together as if to tell a longer tale and he was getting comfortable, “There is hierarchy you get slotted into. The lowest level is a simple reaper—which is what you are. Your job is to capture wayward spirits clinging to this world—and trust me, they are fast. They have no body to hold them down and they are good at hiding, so good luck with that. And second, your job will also be to claim marked souls for death.” He sighed. “I don’t enjoy that part.”

“Marked for death?” I wondered what he meant by that.

He nodded to me. “Yes, such people will bear a mark on their foreheads or backs, easy for you to see. They will even look healthy and it will seem shocking that it is their time to die. But your job is to wait until the moment when death comes and you are to reap them.”

That did not sound good. Not just marked for death, doomed to die.

“But let me tell you,” he said in a lower voice as is to hide from someone listening in. “The marks are not permanent. Most are temporary. So whatever you do, do not reap until a sure death happens. That means a bullet to the head. A stopping of the heart. A flat line on an operating table. No earlier. That’s my rule.”

It sounded like a good rule. I nodded.

“Now I am telling you this because some reapers see the mark as a decree from God and not a simple possibility for death,” he said with a firm look. “I am not one of those reapers. I mostly chase wayward ghosts—which, by the way, I thank you for helping me with way back when you were still a child.”

“I was sixteen,” I retorted, remembering well the first moment I had seen him. He had reaped a number of ghosts in the Bale’s haunted house.

But he just laughed. I guess sixteen to him was a child. I wondered now which era he was from. He was a biker in jeans and black leather, but that was a classic look that did not change that much from era to era. He could have been from that black and white film Rebel Without a Cause or Lowrider, or even Ghost Rider.

“Anyway, most reapers do this task. But other reapers are sent to warzones to reap in-mass.” He shook his head. “I can never tell if it is considered a promotion or a punishment. The job of these reapers are to also dispatch demons who would feed upon the dead bodies on the battlefield. So you kill a lot of mortal demons. They can see you and they are also very good at hiding.”

I nodded. It was creepy, but it totally made sense that one kind of death angel reaped specifically for war.

“Then there are the plagues,” he said. He shook his head. “Again, I don’t know if these reapers are being entrusted with these plagues, or if they are being punished with them. They bring death to those who don’t deserve it, but as a condition of life and the natural consequence of things, plagues are carried by reapers to all parts of the world.” He then laughed painfully, as if having a bad memory. It was possible he had carried a plague once and had been relieved of it at some point.

“And finally, are the guardians,” he said. “Some are given shields. Others are given swords. Their jobs are puzzling, as they often protect people against us.”

“What?” I stared at him.

He nodded to me. “God’s politics is strange. I don’t quite understand it. But I figure it is something like… uh… someone is marked for death, but the prayers of his family and friends have invoked God’s mercy and a guardian is dispatched to protect him from being reaped. I like meeting them.” He grinned with a sigh, thinking on it. “I’d loved to be one actually. But, uh, a guardian with a sword is also given the gift to dispatch any wayward death angel. I have even seen angels with swords battle one another, unable to see who was sent to censure whom. But then again, some of us just quarrel.”

That didn’t sound very angelic.

He laughed, seeing my thoughts on my face. “I know. It is all absurd. But anyway, we need to get to what you have to do here. Come on and follow me.”

He reached out his hand this time for mine.

My wings fluttered nervously. He always moved way too fast. My wings could not keep up.

“Let go of the fleshy part of you and embrace the insubstantial,” he said. “If you want to get up to speed,