Fell the Angels, Joslinne Morgan [free novel 24 .TXT] 📗

– so hot! Her blood was pumping into the water and she couldn’t do a thing to stop it. “Get out! How did you get here? Who the hell are you! Let me die! Go away!” she was crying. She didn’t want this person to save her, she didn’t want anyone to try and talk her out of this!
It’s too late now, anyway, you’re going to die.
She was getting warmer. Was it simply her? She was shaking completely now, and it was getting hot. So unbearably hot. As if she was being burned.
The whole room around her was going up in flames. They burst through the floor, the roof, the walls. The tiny window shadowed, the dingy red curtains going up in an instant. She couldn’t breathe, the thick black smoke billowing all around her.
The stranger, standing in the midst of the fire, was untouched. She just stood and looked at Heather with those sad blue eyes.
The flames were coming closer. They singed Heather’s fingers and she cried again, pulling her hand back and pulling it to her chest.
“Fire!” Heather screamed. “Fire-!” she glowered at the stranger. “What is WRONG with you? Why don’t you do something? Why are you just standing there!”
Because she doesn’t care about you. This is why you wanted to die, remember?
“Idiot,” she sobbed.
The stranger in the middle of the room began to cry. It was the most heart-breaking sound Heather had ever heard.
It was also the last.


Amy wept. It is a sad thing when an angel weeps. It is sadder still when they weep over their own failures.
She had failed. As a guardian angel, she had failed. She had sworn to keep Heather safe, and now this had happened.
She wished she could have done something. She could have wrenched the knife out of the girl’s fingers if she could have – she would have done anything to prevent the girl actually killing herself! But as a rule, angels were not allowed to interfere with humans. The Almighty had granted them free will. Angels, particularly guardian angels, were only allowed to steer them in the right direction.
And she had failed.
It was the greatest shame for one of the heavenly host to fail an assignment. She had been given a particularly difficult one, this time. A soul for which the prince and the almighty both vied. A young teenage girl steeped deep in depression, possessing both a learning disability and mild insanity. There had been nothing that Amy could do to stop her from putting the razor to her wrists. Nothing. She had failed.
Failure was unacceptable.
Heather had ignored everything, and now this had happened. She had seen the look on the girl’s face during those last few moments when life still clung desperately to her body. It had been one of pure terror, a look she had seen too often on the face of many dying mortals.
The girl was only sixteen; there was still a remnant of hope. Amy waiting impatiently for the inevitable – either the Pilot angel would come, and bear the spirit away to Heaven, or one of the Fallen would appear, and whisk the spirit away to hell.
It was only a matter of who arrived first.
She remembered even now the moment the girl’s last breath left her lungs what it looked like. The body, now an empty, expressionless husk just lay there in the blood-filled bathtub. Dried up in appearance, devoid of all emotion. The poor soul staggered from its shell, pure horror the only expression that Amy could make out on the blurry face. Horror at what it had done. What it had been too late to correct.
And with a high-pitched wail, the soul covered its face and dropped to its knees, trying to pull itself as far into a corner as possible .
Oddly, the Pilot and the Fallen arrived at the same time.
The Fallen was one she recognized. It was Mephistopheles, best known for his temptation of Faust – one of his more fabricated legends. She knew him well from the days before he … fell. And she had kept up with him since then. Out of desperation, probably, or out of longing.
The Pilot angel was easy enough to recognize. Great and terrible in his beauty, Dante had not done him justice when writing about his miraculous form. He was often called the Bird of God, and well-respected amongst the hierarchy of angels.
Mephistopheles did not even spare her a glance, his focus was entirely on the Pilot angel. A fierce battle was about to begin. If the soul did not go to one or the other willingly, or managed to elude both their grasps, they would battle for it.
Mephistopheles didn’t give the Pilot angel the chance.
He lunged forward, grasping the soul by the wrist. The soul screamed, and Mephistopheles’s face contorted into a wicked grin, entirely of teeth, where his lips seemed to vanish.
His head then turned to regard Amy, performing almost a 360 degree turn. For a brief second, Amy felt terrified. This had never happened before. She was a guardian angel; she was supposed to see this death through until the end. But never, never before had either of the angels so much as acknowledged her presence.
Ice-cold hands, fingers as thin as twigs, wrapped around her arms and hauled her backwards. Amy screamed, but her voice was drowned out by another’s – by laughter.
Darkness closed in around her.


Chapter Two: Another Lost Soul

Where did I go wrong?
It was the only thought Linda had had for the past few hours, ever since she had arrived home and discovered her daughter’s body in the bathroom tub. The entire way home, she had felt as if there was a knot of despair in her stomach, as if something were horribly wrong. She nearly got a ticket speeding back all the way to the little trailer park where she lived.
Her fears had been horrifyingly confirmed when she had stumbled in through the front door. She called Heather’s name, but there was no response. Anxious and irritable, she had called again, opened the refrigerator door as she did so. Perhaps there was just a little bottle of something in there to ease the tension in her stomach.
But no, the bottle of tequila was gone.
Linda bit her lip and shut the door. So that was it – Heather had broken into her bottle and was probably passed out drunk, hanging over the toilet in the bathroom. Now, as opposed to anxious, she was livid. She couldn’t count all the times when she had told Heather specifically not to touch the alcohol!
At the end of her rope as far as stress could go, Linda ran a hand through her thick brown hair and reached for the pantry. If she was correct, there should be something left over in there, something she had not yet consumed in her desperate effort to forget all of her troubles. Unfortunately, it was often the bills she was more prone to forgetting.
“Aha,” she said softly, grabbing at the bottle of vodka that had managed to find its way in the very back of the pantry. Only a few swallows remained, it was probably a leftover from New Year’s Eve that had passed not a month ago. She couldn’t believe she had allowed it to go neglected this long.
“Heather!” she called again, just for the sake of it, while putting the mouth of the bottle to her lips. It was just the thing to take the edge off of her nerves – now she could yell at her daughter all the more effectively.
Bottle in hand, Linda stood up with some difficulty and began making her way down the cramped hallway. She called Heather’s name again, drowning it out halfway with another swallow of vodka. She banged on her daughter’s bedroom door, but there was no response. Muttering a curse under her breath, she banged the door yet again with the bottle to back her up, cursing and swearing that she would ‘break the damn door down’ if Heather didn’t ‘get off her lazy ass’.
When yelling was deemed ineffective, and the door proved to be locked, Linda abandoned the pursuit with one last curse. Her daughter would come out at some point, she had to. Linda would catch her then.
Exhausted and emotional, Linda trudged into the living room and collapsed onto the old brown couch on which she spent most of the remainders of her evenings. She usually didn’t get home until eight o’ clock, and sometimes later than that. She would sit on the couch (half of which was covered by a mountain of laundry, the other half the dog had chewed up, when they still had a dog), and watch re-runs of old sitcoms well into the unholy hours of the morning. Booze was her best friend on those cold, lonely nights. It kept her warm whenever the heat had been cut off; it kept her company whenever the saddest Lifetime movies came on.
Hours passed. Linda drifted in and out of consciousness. She woke up once when the bottle dropped out of her hands and hit the edge of the coffee table, but then she just shrugged and drifted back to sleep. She woke again by her stomach twisting itself into knots. She hadn’t eaten in several hours, and there was nothing in her stomach save vodka. This would not end well.
Struggling not to throw up, or to at least wait until she hit something she wouldn’t have to steam-clean, Linda bolted for the bathroom. She flung herself against the door and landed on her knees next to the toilet, throwing her head over the bowl and vomiting. The bile burned in her throat and left a bad taste in her mouth, and it wasn’t until she had been reduced once more to a mild dry heaving did she notice that she was bleeding. Somehow, she had managed to gash her foot open.
Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand and looking around, Linda noticed that close to the door lay a bread knife, its jagged, glittering teeth stained very faintly with blood. Her own, she supposed. She sighed. How the hell did that get here?
“Crap,” she sighed, shutting the lid to the toilet and crawling to sit on top of it. She pulled her foot up to rest on her knee as she examined the extent of the damage. Not too bad, maybe a few stitches, but the urgent care was closed at this time of night. It would be fine until morning. Until then, just stop the bleeding and go to bed.
She allowed her foot to drop and set it gingerly down on the linoleum, hissing with the pain, and prepared to stand.
And then she looked up.
Linda screamed.


The darkness was overwhelming, suffocating. It was almost tangible – as if it intended to slither down Amy’s throat and choke her. She struggled wildly to break away from Mephistopheles’s grip, but a frail bird-like angel and a lost soul were not much of a burden for him.
The transition from darkness to wood was not sudden – it was almost as if the trees sort of melted into view. Amy didn’t even notice until her feet hit solid ground with such an impact that her whole body jolted, and Mephistopheles released her, watching her tumble head-over-heels until she reached a stop.
Amy raised herself up on her