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Savage Weapons

“Don’t kill me, don’t kill me,” the demon said. Cordwell didn’t kill him. The demon sat down. “You know, these Baskin Robbins’ places have got thirty-one flavors. What is that, vanilla? What are those, nuts?”

“What is this, a social call?”

The demon Magan leaned back in the imitation cast-iron chair. He lit a cigarette and dragged on it deeply. The coal blazed red; Cordwell heard the tiny flame roar. “I don’t think you think this is a social call,” Magan exhaled sulphurous smoke.

“We’re not exactly friends,” Cordwell said.

“No. There was a falling out.”

Silence. Cordwell let it lengthen. Cordwell could wait. Magan looked smug. Cordwell knew he was faking.

“The renegade,” Magan said finally. “He’s your problem. He’s my problem.” Magan made a circular gesture like he was stirring a big pot with his fingers. “We have a mutual problem.”

“An unprecedented situation,” the angel said.

They had an unprecedented conversation; they closed out the ice cream shop.

Cordwell watched the sunrise from the top of the Akron Firestone building. Perched on the giant F of the Firestone sign, he spread his wingtips as high and as far apart as he could reach. The cold morning breeze stirred his feathers.

“You’re not still pissed about your novelist, are you?” Magan had asked.

“I’m still pissed about my novelist,” Cordwell told him. What could he say? He was a fundamentally honest creature. It was a failing of his kind to take things personally.

“Why not just recruit Esquie?” Cordwell asked Magan, to change the subject back to the renegade, the newest fallen angel.

“Truthfully,” and Magan sucked on his cookie dough float, “there are those who would. The Diabolical Pashas of the Howling Abyss, the Supreme Warlord of the Infinite Pit, probably Colonel Excruciating and the Merry Flayers. But infernal politics are plagued with infighting. Some people want him, some people — look, this is embarrassing, but Hell is full of dumb, vicious fucks who think Occam’s razor is an ax for cutting off heads.” The demon shrugged. “And you don’t want to see an old comrade in arms go all the way to the bottom. We find him, we kill him. Mercy. In fact, I’m only really doing it for you. I’m feeling bad about your novelist.”

“No you’re not.”

“You’re a good guy. I don’t like constantly undermining your self-esteem by outsmarting you. It’s like poking a pony with a sharp stick.”

“So why do you do it?”

“It’s in my nature. In the eyes. It’s like poking a pony in the eyes with a sharp stick.”

Magan was right. Cordwell didn’t want to see Esquie go all the way to the bottom. He didn’t want to see him lying in a welter of shed plumage, on a pavement of the scorched bellies of unbaptized babies. Or whatever they floored with. Cordwell had never seen the place. To learn about Hell’s interior decoration, Cordwell had to rely on information gleaned from demons, which he most often received third or fourth hand. Cordwell didn’t usually socialize with demons.

Usually.

Humans were often killed out of hand for fraternizing with demons. Heaven was still very much into forgiving the repentant, but by the time the average human was calling up people they knew to be demons to go miniature golfing with the kids, they were long past redemption.

Cordwell had spent the 1920s with three other angels hunting down a cabal of demonolators in France. There had been eighteen in the Paris cell, and the angels visited upon each the wrath of God. The diabolists had traded their immortal souls to Hell for champagne and women, basically — the founding eight were all veterans of Ypres, and the war had made them nihilistic sensualists. It was Esquie’s insight that had uncovered the demon who had been manipulating the demon who had been manipulating the idolators. Esquie had also uncovered the affiliated cell in Nice, and been in the forefront of the effort to root it out.

For angels, associating with demons was winked at if it could be used to angelic advantage; but let the demon get the better of you, and there would be Heaven to pay. Demons were notoriously self-serving, and there were even those reckless enough in their ubiquitous treacheries to sell out Hell. But no demon ever had a crisis of conscience over betraying an angel. More than one servant of Heaven had seen a long inventory of failsafes and double blinds dissolve into burning schools and elderly neighbors savaged by dogs, and a demon laughing somewhere close by, and subterranean. Cordwell’s nature told him that Magan was to be trusted like a 1985 Savings and Loan.

Outside the Baskin Robbins, Cordwell and Magan said their goodbyes.

“So, Cordwell,” Magan took an apple from his jacket pocket, polished it on his sleeve, eyed it for color, “I need an answer buddy, sweetheart. You want to tend to the flock or no?”

“I’m in,” Cordwell told him. “Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow night,” Magan said, and bit into the apple with a crisp report.

The sun was climbing above the buildings and trees when Cordwell stretched his wings out, rocked slightly and launched himself into the air. It was just a few blocks to Vaughn’s house, and he beat his wings desultorily as he glided in the morning updraft. Cordwell stooped steeply as soon as the wood-sided house came into view. He landed running in the street, and burned off his momentum by making the yard just a second before he would have been clipped by an oncoming S-10.

He approached the house and peered in the second floor window of Vaughn’s office, and right into Vaughn’s bleary eyes. Cordwell had been invisible to humans since about five thirty that morning, so Vaughn kept right on, a bony man leaning on the window frame and staring with unperceptive exhaustion at the yard outside.

Vaughn’s habit was to work from about midnight to six AM. At noon he’d get up and do the errands which needed to be done in daylight. Sometimes between nine and midnight he slept. Sometimes he went out. Sometimes he stayed in. But he was in his office at midnight five or six days a week. Vaughn called it “the midnight disease,” although he admitted he’d picked up the phrase from Michael Chabon. This was typical ambiguous irony from Vaughn — he professed not to like Chabon’s novels, but he repeated bits in conversation.

Cordwell had been assigned to Vaughn in 1965, two weeks before Vaughn was born. Vaughn had a destiny as a great writer; it was predictable that Hell would try to destroy him, so he merited a full-time angel. Vaughn was three before Cordwell detected Magan’s presence as Cordwell’s opposite number.

When Vaughn was fifteen, Magan had started giving him disturbingly sexual dreams about eight year-olds, hoping to provoke either child molestation or suicide. That went on for eight months, and Vaughn was still ashamed of the memory of it, before Cordwell managed to push the isolationist boy genius into a healthy sexual relationship that lasted three years.

Magan had tried to get Vaughn to drink himself to death as an undergraduate, but Cordwell had snapped Vaughn out of that with thirty days in jail when Cordwell arranged for Vaughn to assault an officer during a diabolically instigated bender. And so on back and forth, forever and ever, world without end.

Cordwell’s latest project was to get Vaughn married to the graduate student he was dating; Cordwell was debating whether or not a pregnancy would do the trick. But Cordwell had gotten so caught up in managing the obdurate Vaughn’s love life, and had become so short-sighted in his defensive tactics, that he hadn’t paid any attention to the love life of Vaughn’s younger sister. Her new boyfriend was a slim, sophisticated guy with a smack habit he wanted to share, and cigarettes that smelled ever so faintly of sulphur.

Her death six months ago had stalled Vaughn’s second novel so completely that Cordwell worried the writer had abandoned it. But since the beginning of June, Vaughn had forged ahead with the project. The tone of the letters from his agent and publisher was now one of hopeful relief. Cordwell knew this novel would catapult Vaughn to stardom, if he’d just finish the thing.

Vaughn turned his back on the angel, and Cordwell watched him pull his t-shirt off and shamble towards his bedroom.

Cordwell knew that Vaughn’s girlfriend Loren was the only reason Vaughn had a recognizable emotional shape. Vaughn didn’t know it, but when had that ever mattered? And at the moment he wasn’t ready to know it, anyway.

That night, the demon and the angel stood among stone yard deer in a quiet, upper class Cleveland suburb.

“Where would you hide, Cordwell?” Magan scratched his chin, and Cordwell heard the hard nails scratch as against scales. “I mean, if you were a proud angel cast out of the presence of God for your heresies? If all the hordes of the glacial pit were after you and Heaven had shut its doors, where would you roost, Cordy?”

Cordwell looked at him. Magan shrugged. “Hypothetically, I mean.”

It was 10:30 and fully dark, with only a sliver of moon in a partially overcast sky. For the angel, nights were attacks of goose bumps probing the sentry of his celestial flesh; they were a draft that lurked, held tenuously at bay.

Magan, on the other hand, looked muscular and confident. “Where is he, Cordwell?” He lit a cigarette.

“Shut up,” Cordwell told him. Cordwell was shirtless, his wings half spread as he cocked his head to the night wind. He was invisible to humans, as was Magan. Cordwell held his broadsword in one hand.

Cordwell looked past the clouds, watched the planets rolling in their orbits, and listened to the music of the spheres. Magan was oblivious to it. In the music, Cordwell heard an undertone of wounded pride, self loathing, profound rejection.

Cordwell knew Esquie was nearby.

“Oh, Jesus Christ fucks your mother,” Magan muttered. Cordwell wasn’t surprised. He’d smelled the new demons a moment ago.

“Merry Flayers,” Magan muttered. “Hey, guys,” he waved to the new arrivals.

Two new demons, both conspicuously huge, fangs extended, walking on goat legs, were coming around a Lexus in the next driveway over. “Magan, how are ya,” one said. “You found him yet?”

“Nah,” Magan replied. The Merry Flayers raised their submachine guns but a pair of semiautomatic pistols had already appeared in Magan’s hands and he shot them both twice in the head, pulling the triggers simultaneously so that the four shots sounded like two. The Flayers went down like bags of quick drying cement.

“He’s west of us,” said Cordwell. “A few miles.”

Magan holstered his pistols and unfolded a pair of leathern wings the color of rust. “Lead on, MacDuff.”

They found Esquie on the roof of a Holiday Inn on the freeway overpass. He watched them without comment as they approached across the roof, the demon and the angel, one grinning, one with a breaking heart.

Magan drew one of his pistols and extended it towards Esquie. “Last act, doves.”

“I’ll do this,” Cordwell snapped at him.

Magan turned to him insouciantly. “Oh, really, choir b...”

Cordwell looked at Magan the way he had once looked at the Pharoah’s legions on the dry bottom of the Red Sea.

“Yeah, okay,” Magan mumbled, lowering his head.

Cordwell looked at Esquie. Esquie’s wings were turning grey, folded, his plummage shedding. There were dark circles under his eyes. “Bonjour, mon ami,” Esquie whispered. “Have you come to say goodbye?”

“Oui,” Cordwell replied.

Cordwell studied his friend who was no longer an angel. Something had happened to the demon hunter Cordwell had known in Paris. He’d become proud, opinionated. Heretical. Rebellious. Like Lucifer, he’d been thrown down, although Esquie was traveling a well-reconnoitered path by now.

Cordwell tried to sympathize with Esquie. He tried to image how he could step outside the divine plan and say to God, “Now wait just a damn minute.”

But he couldn’t imagine it. It wasn’t in his nature. The Esquie he could sympathize with was Esquie seventy years ago, watching the sun rise from the very top of the Eiffel Tower on Christmas morning, murmuring to Cordwell, “Fear not, for unto you a child is born...”

It was for that Esquie that Cordwell stabbed him in the chest. He felt the point of his sword crunch through breastbone, felt Esquie’s heart split.

When an angel or demon’s physical body was killed, their essential selves reappeared in either Heaven or Hell. The Merry Flayers Magan had shot were answering hard questions in Hell right now, even as their bodies turned to a gritty red sand, about why they were back without Esquie. But during his fall, Esquie was unaffiliated. With his death, his soul was lost. It was the only way out of the war for one of their kind, but nobody thought that made it attractive.

Esquie’s expression lost its life. His wings sagged just a fraction more. The light dulled in his eyes. Cordwell wrenched his blade free.

A long noise, like a sigh, escaped Esquie’s wound, and then there was silence. The night breeze blew more feathers from Esqiue’s wings, and Cordwell’s eyes filled with tears.

“Tedious fucker. Troublesome, too.” Magan grinned. With a short gesture of his sword arm, Cordwell severed Magan’s gun hand just behind the wristwatch. Concentric circles of shirt and jacket cuff clung to the excised appendage.

“Ah-ahhh,” Magan gaped in dismay as black, oily smoke and blood spurted from the stump of his arm. He looked in shock at Cordwell. “Well, so much for infinite mercy, huh?” Cordwell twitched in annoyance and swept Magan’s head off with a backhand cut. Blood hosed up out of the cleanly sliced stump of the neck, falling on Cordwell like a heavy rain. He hardly paid it any attention. He hit Magan in the chest with the open palm of his free hand, knocking the corpse over. Then he squatted by the head, the eyes of which were still rolling about, as if looking for a way out of their predicament. Cordwell addressed the head, as the tears that had been knocked out of his eyes by his exertions rolled down his face.

“Loren’s dad likes Vaughn. Thinks any Yankees fan is a friend of his. He wants his little girl to get married. He wants grandchildren. He’d never start hinting around that Vaughn wasn’t good enough for Loren of his own volition. Did you think I’d miss that?” he asked the head. The head didn’t answer, although Cordwell could tell by its expression that it wanted to. He poked playfully at the head with his toe. “A few decades in the lake of fire, Magan, baby, sweetheart,” Cordwell told it, “and by the time he lets you out again, Vaughn will be in the freshman anthologies.”

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