Gideon

In a split second I knew exactly why Phil had been assigned to work the Podunk town of Muddy Gap, Wyoming. The missile blasted out of his bazooka with a deafening boom and flash of light. It hit the demons all right. He did a great job and I had no complaints on his accuracy. The unfortunate part was when he got blasted backward off his feet, blown clean off the snowy bus and whooped like a madman as he rammed right into me. I got the butt of his metal bazooka embedded in my skull.

“Whoohoo!” Phil yelled triumphantly. “So that’s what it does. Sweet!”

There was a wide gaping hole in the demon ranks and practically a lake of black tar where demons used to be. Edward, much to my chagrin, leapt out of the way in time and didn’t get a mark on him. The rest of the demons scattered.

Phil and I saw our opportunity to freedom and we both made a wild dash to get to our feet. I scooped up the bazooka and made a run for it. Edward was screaming at the top of his lungs for his demons to close in and trap us. There was no way they would get back into formation fast enough.

I bolted as if the devil was hot on my heels, which he was… sort of. Edward Fathead was chucking balls of demonfire at me, willy nilly and his aim was erratic. He was pretty ticked off as he shouted curses at me. I shouldn’t have laughed at him, but it was kind of funny when he lost his temper.

“You will not succeed,” he sputtered. “We had a deal!”

“The deal is off, Dorkface,” I hollered over my shoulder.

“Not this time,” Edward said. He stopped chasing us and I heard the hissing sound all demons make as he formed demonfire in the palms of his hands. One second Phil was running like a crazed madman at my side and the next he yelped in pain and was yanked backward.

I skidded to a stop and spun around. Edward got the demonfire formed into a whip and lashed it to Phil’s ankle. I’d never seen demonfire do that before. Edward dragged Phil backward by the leg out in the open parking lot and pinned him down to the asphalt with his foot.

“Run, Gideon!” Phil bellowed. “You’re almost free!”

“Yes, run, Gideon,” Edward taunted. “Abandon your friend.”

“Don’t listen to him. Just go!” Phil said. “I’ll take on this jerk.”

“Such harsh words, Phil,” Edward said to the angel under his foot. “I really thought we had something going on between us.”

“There is nothing going on... no way…not a chance!” Phil sputtered.

Edward batted his lashes at Phil. “You sounds so, like, sweet, Phil,” he said, girlishly high. “I just love being your special Dispatch girl.”

Phil’s face turned beet red. “Dispatch Babe is you?” he bellowed.

“Who else did you think it would be?” Edward said.

“But…but you warned us about the demons. You sent us to Jeffery City…”

“Because I wanted you to keep all away from Gideon’s Mortal. You fell right into my perfect plan every time.” Edward grinned greasily. “Just like I wanted you to.”

Phil eyes bulged. He was fighting mad now and I’d heard enough. I grabbed at my shotgun, but Edward was faster. He gathered a sphere of demonfire and slammed it down into Phil’s chest.

“NO!”

Once there was a solid torso on Phil and now there was a huge, smoking hole. The lights went out in Phil’s eyes. Honestly, I didn’t know how much abuse an angel could take and survive. I’d never stretched the boundaries of my immortality that far and Phil took a straight shot of demonfire to the heart.

I grabbed my shotgun and began firing. Demons had caught up and were closing in, but I had eyes only for Edward. I was going to blast him to smithereens and then blast his smithereens to smithereens.

“Nobody takes out my friends,” I shouted, pulling the trigger again and again. I got in the last shot as dark hands closed in over my wrists, dug into my mouth and piled up around my legs. I couldn’t move. They let me keep my shotgun, but it was useless. I was out of ammo.

There wasn’t much left of Edward. A demon held up Dorkface’s mouth and an eyeball. The mouth sneered at me.

“I hate to hurt you like this,” Edward the Mouth said mockingly. “We could have come to a desirable agreement where nobody gets hurt, but you insist on making this difficult.”

I should have been weirded out having a conversation with spare body parts, but I was too mad to get the full effect.

“Bite me,” I spat. I meant it literally because when a demon is reduced to only a mouth and eyeball, what else could he do? Well, I guess we could have a staring contest.

“Funny,” Edward said. “So, angels do have a sense of humor. I thought they were all serious and stodgy, working endless hours for The Boss, or whatever you call Him these days. You’re more like us than you think, Gideon.”

I glanced down at Phil for a brief second. He lay at Edward’s feet, the hole in his chest smoking. His eyes were open, the lights out and staring at nothing. It was creepy. Angels weren’t supposed to die. I had to get him out of there, but being bound by scores of demons crawling all over me, struggling to keep me still kind of put a damper on mobility.

Phil’s fingers twitched. Then his eyelid fluttered slightly. My heart leapt in my chest. If I gave him enough time, there was a chance we could bust free. All I had to do was chitchat with a demon for a bit.

Ugh.

I’d already stopped to talk with Edward twice and I wasn’t looking forward to doing it again. I took a deep breath and steeled myself. If Edward could spout lies, I could spout insults.

“You want to know what I think? Demons are a pile of hellrats, smelly ones,” I said. “Last I checked, I don’t smell like B.O. and sewage. Oh, my bad, it’s sulfur and brimstone, right? It must really stink in Hell. At least at Headquarters we have air freshener.”

“Again with the insults,” Edward said. “So very demon-like.”

“Dude, I don’t think you’re quite getting the point of a verbal battle, Dorkface,” I said. “We angels have been around a long time. I’m telling you, after a few thousand years of zingers, you pick up a few things at the Academy. Baiting demons is our specialty.”

“And you are ignorant of your potential” Edward spat back.

I snerked. “My shrink is more insulting than that.”

Edward’s nostrils flared and glowed red as if he was going to blow fire out his nose. He was riled up and completely ignoring Phil, which was a good thing.

“I was once like you, Gideon,” Edward said. His face was slowly reforming. Soon, I’d be talking to a disembodied head, not that it would be an improvement. “Full of righteous fire.”

“Now you’re just full of skunk fire and gas. Great combo. If you light a match near your mouth, will it explode? Because your breath, I hate to break it to you, is that bad.”

Edward’s lips pressed into a firm line. He was on the verge of a breakdown, if that was even possible as only a mouth an assorted facial pieces.

“I wanted nothing more than to be the best. The best Guardian Angel The Boss had ever had,” Edward said.

My brain went trippy. I had a reservoir of backup insults, but I blanked with the news he’d just laid on me.

“You’re kidding,” I said. He had to be because I wasn’t mentally handling that Edward the freaking Dorkface used to be an angel. “You? An angel? In what life did that happen?”

“Lifetimes before you dreamed of being a Guardian Angel and I will be here lifetimes after you fail,” Edward said. His head was whole now and a neck was starting to regrow. “All angels are faced with one fate: To fall.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said dismissively. “Go back to the part where you were an angel.”

Edward’s lips lifted at the corners. As long as he took his dear sweet time, I didn’t care what he talked about. The hole in Phil’s chest was slowly closing in as he carefully folded the blasted bits of himself back into the open space. He took care to not move too quickly, but he needn’t have worried. All the demons attention was on me and Edward was focused on his backstory. As long as I kept him talking, which was bad but good. If that made sense at all. It felt like I’d have to clean the demon filth out of my ears for a month.

“I was the most brilliant Guardian the Angel Corps had seen in eons. I had hundreds of Mortals in my charge and I took great care of them all. I was The Boss’s favorite,” Edward said, his face dreamy in remembrance.

“Uh, I hate to break it to you, but The Boss has no star Angels,” I said. “It’s not like we get extra kudos for being awesome, because we’re all pretty freaking amazing. I mean, we’re Angels, duh.”

Edward’s face twisted in anger, which was really doing something considering that he had no body to really pull of ‘menacing’ and his hair regrew in sparse tufts.

“I was His favorite!” he shrieked.

“Okay, okay,” I said, putting my hands up. “You were the bomb. Geez. I was just saying that The Boss isn’t exactly big on favoritism.”

Edward’s nostrils flared again. It took him a second to get under control.

“I had it all. I was on my way to raising above all the rest. I was going to be king of the angels.”

Whoa. Okay, Edward the Dorkface was seriously delusional. There was no such thing as king of anything at Angel Corps, but I wanted him to continue talking. Phil was halfway healed.

“Let me guess, you had one problem that kept you from achieving total awesomeness,” I said. Edward glared at me, his dark eyes licking with red flame. “What?” I shrugged. “Am I right? It was just a guess.”

“I made a deal with the devil,” Edward said. “He made me an offer no angel can refuse; a free pass.”

“Pass to what? Insanity and a burning stink hole?”

“Freedom.”

I tried. Honestly, I did. I tried hard to not laugh in his face. I bit down on both my top and bottom lips to force my mouth closed with my teeth and keep from busting a gut.

“He gave me freedom. An end to all my struggles,” Edward said dreamily.

“Yeah, let me clue you in on how ending struggles really works,” I said. “Hard work and determination. Two key ingredients right there. Then, there is this cool trick you can do with The Boss. It’s called open line communication. Do you know, he’s got a phone service going non-stop? It’s pretty cool—”

“Enough!” Edward shouted in my face. Even without his body, his breath still stank like a lava pit, sulfur extraordinaire. It was disgusting. “I am offering you the same release, Gideon. I offer you the possibilities of eternity and you scoff.”

“Well, misery does love company,” I said. Phil was ninety percent healed and he had his tiny peashooter gun out and loaded. He gave me a miniscule nod and aimed for Edward’s head.

“And you will join me soon enough,” Edward said as he jerked his head to his minions to haul me off. Or worse. I wasn’t sure what they were going to do to me. “Twenty four hours is just enough time to come to a decision, don’t you think? Your Mortal won’t live much longer.”

“Wait,” I said and suddenly, I wasn’t feeling so cool headed. “How did you know about that?”

Edward grinned evilly. “As a fallen angel, I know how both sides work,” he said. “Your Mortal gets put on The List and you get notified. All I had to do was intercept the message. Do you really think that your communication with Headquarters got cut off by chance or that all my sweet little chats with Phil just happened for no reason? It’s incredibly sweet of you to think so naively, Gideon, but I have you trapped and when your Mortal dies, you’ll wish you’d made a deal with me.”

Oh man. He played me good.

Edward’s head leaned forward and speared me with his fiery eyes.

“Besides, you don’t strike me as the type of angel who would appreciate puberty stricken janitor work for eternity.” His pitying smile was patronizing. He pulled away and his minions flowed in around me.

“Pull!” Edward’s head shouted.

Demon hands, hundreds of them, took a handful of every section of my body and began to yank outward. Getting torn to pieces wasn’t fun. The only peace of mind I had was seeing Phil pull the trigger on his peashooter and watching Edward’s head shoot off into oblivion like a punctured balloon.

Okay, so, getting pulled in a hundred different directions isn’t comfortable. It hurts really badly. Like, epically bad. My arm went flying off across the parking lot and I lost sight of a foot disappearing in the snowstorm. My head must have been next. There was a sickening crack and then all went black.

There is no such thing as death after you’ve already died once on Earth. I just wanted to clear that up, in case anyone was wondering. I admit, I had a moment of panic when Phil got blasted in the heart with demonfire and the home fires in his eyes got snuffed out. But angels and their immortal bodies are like rubber, we bounce back.

Relatively.

For a brief moment there was nothing and then I was in a room with what looked like ten million telescopes of all different shapes and sizes. There was everything from a slapped together wooden doohickey that looked old enough to be Galileo’s first working model to a shiny brass tube that could see the head of a pin floating around in space across the universe. The room wasn’t really a room either. It was a sphere made of glass windows. Did I mention that it was huge? Freaking enormous and I was standing between a duck taped redneck version and a completely computerized model that recalibrated every few seconds to an exact point.

I wasn’t alone either.

“Welcome, Gideon,” The Boss said with a half Asian, half French grin. His eyes were beyond psychedelic as they morphed colors in a speedy blur.

“Whoa! This is amazing!” I said. For a second I was completely derailed from my troubles down on Earth and what I was looking at. I’d never been to The Boss’s personal pad before.

“My thoughts exactly,” The Boss said. He waived me over excitedly. “Come look at my latest acquisition. The clarity on this model is amazingly accurate.”

I picked my way through the legs of tripods and tried hard not to upset any of the telescopes. I’m sure they were all pointed exactly where they needed to be as they looked in on whatever Mortal or angel The Boss wanted to see.

“I call it the Lookster three thousand,” The Boss said proudly. “I created it myself.”

“Lookster?”

“It’s only a place keeper. I’m still working on a cool name for it,” He said. “Want to take a look?”

He stepped aside and offered me His spot. The Lookster had a long wide barrel and two lenses for binocular viewing. The image was crystal clear, which gave me a wide range of large and small snowflakes. If I focused in on one clump of snow, I could see each individual formation of the frozen crystals.

“Amazing,” I said, staring fascinated at the artistic swirls of the storm.

“That’s what Phil thought too,” The Boss said. “Though, he seemed more eager to get back to Muddy gap than you seem to be.”

I froze. That was the Wyoming snowstorm I was looking at. Quickly, I panned out and saw the scene as a whole with Phil at the center of a swarm of demons fighting like a madman. At his feet was me, in pieces.

“Holy moly!” I pushed away from the telescope. “You’re right, I’ve got to get back. Phil won’t last much longer on his own.”

“Agreed,” The Boss said with a curt nod. “Get down there and kick some demon butt.”

Call me crazy, but this was The Boss, The High and Almighty, Alpha and Omega and he held out his hand to fist bump me. It was weird, but I went with it. I laid some knuckles on Him and scrambled to the hatch I’d come in through. I was about to drop myself back down to Earth when I had a thought.

“Hey, Boss?” I said.

“Hmm?” The Boss was engrossed in the goings on of another telescope, taking notes of what he saw on a pad of paper.

“What about Dorkface?” I flinched. That wasn’t his name. It just slipped out. “Sorry, I mean…”

“Edward.” The Boss straightened up with a sigh. Silently he turned and pointed to a pile of scorched telescopes in the corner. They were marked up in black tar and red demonfire, not something The Boss could do, but the mark of the demons. There wasn’t a big pile, but each one told a sad story.

“Edward chose to fall, Gideon,” The Boss said. “As it will be your choice as well. I cannot force you to go or to stay.”

I paused again. Not because I had more questions, but because The Boss said I still had that choice to make. I wouldn’t fall. There was no way.

A nagging voice in the back of my head reminded me that The Boss knew all, even the future. Desperately, I wanted to ask him what my fate was. I had to know.

“Hurry back, Gideon,” The Boss said. “Your friends need you and you must get Katelyn off The List. She must live.”

“Yes, sir,” I said as I stepped to the hatch and grabbed the chain.

“Oh, and Gideon?” The Boss said.

“Yes, Sir?”

He tapped the binocular telescope honed in on Muddy Gap with his silvery pen. “I’ll be watching.”

I don’t know if that was comforting or scared the living daylights out of me. I yanked hard on the chain and fell with a whoosh into open space.