Merrily was on the ground, twitching and trying hard to maintain her breathing. There was a crack of white sky above her, slowly turning blue as the daylight hours came to an end. There was a needle in her arm, with a band tied above it. She hoped, as she lied on the cold hard ground, with all her might that this wasn’t the last time she’d fully recover from the physical damage heroin did to her body. She could sense that her immortality was coming to a gruesome end. A handful of sins more, and she knew her time would be up.
“Merrily...”
It was the voice of Merrily’s closest friend, a girl of the same species called Tox. Tox was standing over her, staring down in pity with her menacing toxic green eyes. “You don’t have to cloak yourself anymore. It’s just me.” Merrily was too stoned to speak or even move. “I’m worried about you...” Tox got down on her knees and put her hand on her friend’s face. Merrily was warm. Tox had her own heartbeat for several months, but it still came off as strange when she felt it in another angel. “Let’s get you someplace safe.”
Tox lifted Merrily off of the ground with her somewhat superhuman strength and carried her out of the alley between the two crumbling abandoned buildings.
“We don’t have much longer.”
Angels Clauss, Caspio and Chelsea, ex-friends of Tox and Merrily, were standing out in the street. All three of them had their arms crossed, and their wings out defensively. Albino Caspio’s wings ruffled anxiously. “All of us can sense it.”
Suddenly, a rush of dark feathery wings gathered above their heads, in enough numbers to block out the daylight. Angels upon angels had also sensed it coming: their rapture. And they knew their transcendence into heaven was to begin at any second.
Tox’s legs wobbled. What a crowd. She knew they were all there for her. Whether they would attack her or praise her, though, she couldn’t determine. It was all too much for one girl to handle. Her legs stopped supporting Merrily’s weight and she and her friend toppled over backwards.
“No- not yet!” Clauss caught Tox, but Merrily landed behind them in a crumpled, undignified position. A pathetic gurgling moan barely escaped her numbed lips. Clauss could not have cared less about Merrily though. “You,” he informed Tox, “can’t lose your immortality yet. You can’t die. You’re gonna give birth. You’re gonna be a mommy.” His voice was mocking and his smile, sarcastic. He turned back to his two friends. “Where are we taking her?”
“Back to the club,” Chelsea responded. “She lives there. If anything, we won’t draw in so much attention there.”
“Good idea.” Clauss lifted Tox a few inches off the ground, stretched his wings, and batted off the ground with a terrible force. The group, as well as the massive congregation of angels in the sky above, were on their way towards Tox’s workplace, a strip club in the bad part of town.
***
Nobody knew what David was, since he was cloaked and appeared as no more than a curious human. Underneath the cloak, he was barely demon, barely immortal and clinging to his immortality as much as he was clinging to the door frame.
There was terror in his eyes as he watched the enormous crowd of angels surrounding his unconscious girlfriend on her pink, lit up bed. He had shared that bed with Tox not even ten days ago. What was happening in front of him was all his fault, and he knew it, yet...he felt as though he had done something right. He sensed the solution to all his problems just around the corner. It would be a solution to all demonkind’s problems. The fear remained though. His only love was in labor. Labor! The thought of parenthood was beyond him. He grimaced and backed away.
Right into a very concerned-looking angel woman.
“Why haven’t you shown yourself to her, asshole?”
“How is our private life any of your business?” he responded, baring his teeth.
Chelsea had always hated the demons. She had advised against fraternizing with them all throughout her childhood, and abhorred the very idea of friendship between angels and demons. Although she knew it would be necessary for an angel and a demon to reproduce in order for other angels and demons to go home to their particular heaven, she despised the lesser species. “It’s my business because you are a key to the salvation of my species. And yet you hid your ugly face from your woman because you’re scared of...what, commitment?”
“What does it matter to you if I’m scared? Wouldn’t you rather have me out of the picture? After today, you won’t even see me again. She probably won’t ever see me again.” He was still half-growling with every word. Honest was a thing that physically harmed him to be, causing his teeth and head to ache. Chelsea never had to go through what he was going through. Her lover was the same species as she, and therefor going to the same heaven in the end.
“It’s in my nature, moron. That child needs both its parents. It needs you.”
“Won’t ‘it’ be going home with you?”
“We don’t know yet.”
The two looked back into the room. Several angels had put on surgical masks and were setting up a birthing tent. There were blue tarps and silver rolling tool tables everywhere.
It was beginning. Only two months after she had conceived, thanks to the strange combinations of divine supernatural genes, Tox was giving birth. An unearthly vortex that appeared to come from Tox’s body seemed to pull the cloaking right off of David. His large batty wings unfurled into the room, as well as his long pointed tail. Several of the angels turned their excited gazes back at him. He bent at his knees, cloven hooves scraping at the ground as his hands touched the tiles. “I’m sorry!” he cried, as the wind picked up angrily all around the room. Apologizing was one of the many things the demonic deity that created David loathed. A bead of blood slid down David’s face as punishment. The angels surrounded him.
Suddenly, one of the angels closest to David began to glow with a platinum yellow light. Then she vanished with a chiming sound, leaving nothing in her wake except a large hole in the ceiling above. The other angels stared up through it. For two stories up, there were holes in the same place.
Another angel disappeared in an upward-traveling beam of light, as if unwillingly teleporting away. David inched away, pulling back against the vortex of swirling wind, back against the wall, high hopes that he wouldn’t be next. The ground began to rattle. Angels were being whisked away by an unseen force every which way. Soon enough, a path to Tox...to Trudy, that little girl he tricked into making a suicide pact with him, was cleared enough so that David could get to her. He dug his long, black claws into the wooden floor, and dragged himself over to the magenta-pink, overly gaudy round whorehouse bed. Tox’s legs were in a surgical tent, hiding all her parts only his eyes were meant to see. He grabbed onto her arm.
Tox’s eyes shot open and she looked over to him. She hadn’t seen him in days. “David!” she shouted, over the sounds of the ground shaking and the wind whipping everything in the room around. Tears started to drip from her cheeks.
“Babe!” David shouted back, pulling himself close to her.
“I don’t wanna do this!” Blood started to leak from beneath Tox’s bright pink hair and into her face. Her god was angry. This was her destiny.
“You have to,” David insisted, pressing his flattened, goatlike face against her cheek. “For your friends. For your people. You have to do this for us. Trudy, I’m sorry.”
The last of the angels in the room, Clauss, Caspio and Chelsea, all disappeared with the sound of tower bells. The ceiling beams crashed into the floor.
The power went out. The noise ceased.
***
“Get up.”
Trudy felt strange. She was warm, sweaty, and smelt and felt blood all over herself. She also felt heavy- not so much in the sense of weighing more than before- she had just given birth, after all, but it was as if gravity had been turned way up. Everything was also bright and blurry. She had to blink several times to regain her focus. When the world around her became clear again, the first thing she noticed was that the room was empty of all the furniture from before. The ceiling seemed to be torn off and the golden light of the sunrise was pouring into the room.
She reached up and touched her forehead, from where she had been bleeding. There was blood all over her head and in her hair. Then she noticed something very new about herself: her hair was brown. Light brown. She tried with all her might to will it to its natural shade of pink, but it was useless. When she set her hand back down on the bed, she felt the soft, warm skin of another. Finally, something familiar. David, her lover, was collapsed beside her. He looked completely human. His hair was short again, and his skin was chocolate. There was blood all over him, too. She whispered his name and his eyes cracked open ever so slightly.
“GET UP.”
The voice that called Trudy to awaken was so loud, it shook the walls. She stared directly upward, where the sound had come from. Above her bed, in midair, Merrily the angel child floated. She had no wings. She was no more than ten years old. All her black markings and ear feathers had returned.
She was holding an infant.
“This is your spawn, the creature who paved the path for us all to return home.” She spoke about the baby as if it required a strong gut to even hold it. The angel child’s feet touched the wooden floor and she walked soundlessly toward Trudy and David. As she got closer, a sound similar to a heavenly chorus accompanied her. She placed the baby in Trudy’s lap, not bothering to remove the cloths from its face. Trudy held her newborn baby close.
“You don’t get to come home.”
“What?!” Trudy and David both blurted out in complete protest. “After all we’ve done to get everybody else home?” Trudy continued. “After all of what just happened?”
“You’re so special that you managed to make yourselves completely exceptional.”
“What do you mean by that?” David barked, though his voice seemed much weaker than normal.
“Well, you’re human. Both of you.”
“How come you’re not human?! I know you were on the verge of turning!” Trudy shrieked.
“I guess I’m just lucky. You squeezed your little spawn out at just the right time.”
Trudy shoved herself up and prepared to wring the little girl’s neck. She was furious. She deserved, after so much, to return to heaven with her angel brethren. She deserved to be with her mother again. After a few inches, it turned out that childbirth made it very hard for her to move much further without immense pain. It didn’t matter anyway. Merrily had disappeared from in front of the bed and reappeared in the sky.
This time, floating beside her was demon girl Kathulla, David’s childhood friend. She had reverted to her childhood form just as Merrily had.
“Bye Davy!” Kathulla called, sticking out her tongue.
The two disappeared, to where David and Trudy knew would be their separate paradises. Forever, without so much as a hint of advice to the two new parents on how to survive the world as humans.
THE END
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