[r.Astro] We're so close to something better left unknown

Hadriel had felt God before; all angels had, at some point in their existences. Where humans possessed souls to tie them to the preternatural afterlife and the deity that ruled them all, Heaven’s winged guardians had their grace—a direct line to God and His power, a thread that connected them to their Father as well as to one another. It was the source of their abilities as supernatural beings; it was a small kernel of God’s power that dwelled within them, allowing them to relocate, to smite, to heal. It was also their means of telepathic communication between themselves, and the spiritual inbox for mortal prayer should the whispering human know a specific angel’s name.

But God and His power were not the same thing. Over the centuries, the latter had taken the place of any obvious presence of the former—a shadow, an afterglow, an empty shell of what once was, as evidenced by Heaven and Earth’s very existence. The fire remained but the match had burned away at the mercy of its own vigor, consumed by the very flames it had launched from the potential it carried. As much as the Hashmal wanted to believe, it had become apparent since the Divide that Hadriel harbored more capacity than most to question and to doubt, and it was not easy for her to accept what no longer sported evidence. She had not initiated the rebellion, but she had recognized the side she was meant to fight for.

And fight she would. But that was too much to explain, too much to reveal; for the time being, what little this Fetch seemed to know about Hadriel’s kind would have to suffice. To fully explain the reasons and motives behind their war would mean traversing lengthy territory regarding angels and their very nature, none of which she thought Julia was ready to hear. Subconsciously, she reached up and wrapped her fingers around the softly-glowing crystal suspended by a chain around her neck. It was warm and cold at once against her fingers, and the prickly feeling on her skin reminded her of one of her purposes there—that it was inevitable her home conflict should spill over into the mortal realm should she not act quickly.

“There is a rift in the Spheres,” the angel continued, as though it should have been perfectly clear from her previous vague description and any further elaboration was superfluous. “Those who remain faithful to the old ways outnumber those who have recognized an absence of what once we felt so strongly.” She looked down to her empty plate, connecting the remaining crumbs with invisible lines that tracked the movements of her troubled gaze. “I do not expect you to understand just yet. But I believe you will try.”

The curly-haired young woman grasped the Fetch’s hand firmly, meeting Julia’s gaze with a ferocity that was laced with satisfaction. “Your trust is not misplaced,” she told her confidently, her tone boasting a certainty that the angel wasn’t sure she could actually afford. “I am an angel of my word, and I—”

Suddenly, she froze—her hand still clasping the Fetch’s—and her gaze flicked over the blonde’s shoulder to focus on something beyond the bubble of their cracked vinyl booth. She pressed her lips into a flat line and relinquished her grip without shifting her stare, lowering her hand slowly to hook her fingers on the edge of the table. With her other hand, she dipped lower, reaching to bring the scythe at her feet to rest upon her lap. She did not need to say it aloud, but the word escaped her lips nevertheless.

“Reapers,” she whispered, tensing. “Outside. Do not turn around.” The angel at last looked back to the Fetch, extending the heavy scythe to her under the table with one hand. “You must take it.”

Whether or not Julia was ready for the truth of what was happening in the bigger picture was debatable. She was a Fetch; she was far from anything typical that walked the Earth (although she only tread soil with corporeal feet approximately half the time), and there was little that could throw her for a loop. Even the concept of angels or devils and a higher purpose wasn’t entirely beyond her realm of understanding, for all that leaned dangerously towards startling. But Hadriel was right about one thing: the Fetch was damned well going to try. Particularly now, as she’d just shaken hands with a higher being, weaving herself into the framework of this insanity.
Particularly since, all of a sudden, she was able to tip the scales at the moment of life and death.

Or, maybe it hadn’t been so sudden… On top of the possibility of reconnecting with her mortality, this Angel could have answers for her. If she ever decided to divulge.

It was in that same moment, when their hands met, that uncertainty dampened Julia’s resolve, however. If I live long enough to get the answers I want. “Yeah… I guess we’ll see about that,” she drawled, wishing bitterly that she had something more reassuring than this Angel’s word (which was not reassuring at all) to instill her with the confidence that she was, in fact, trusting the right person. 
And, like oxygen to a fire, that lingering doubt very quickly ignited into something dangerously akin to sore regret.

“What?” Eyes fixed on Hadriel, the feisty blonde searched her face in hopes of one, small possibility. “You’re kidding. Tell me that’s a really bad joke.” A pause: “…oh, fuck. You don’t know howto joke.”
As if she required further confirmation to that sinking feeling in her gut, the cold metal of the scythe beneath bumping against her knee sent a jolt cold reality coursing through her veins. The Fetch was on her feet in seconds. “Are you fucking crazy! What the hell do you expect me to do with that thing? I don’t even know if I can lift it!”

Whatever paranormal heart pumped blood through her body killed leapt into her throat. She could practically feel their stares—their, fucking plural—, the reapers just beyond the spotty windows of the old diner…
…which, according to the ticking Felix the Cat clock on the wall across from her, was closing in fifteen minutes. It was only a matter of time, and Reapers had all the time to bide.

“Okay. Okay, no, this is fine.” Julia breathed out, hands clenched into fists on the table as she met Hadriel’s amber gaze. “We’re just sitting ducks here… They won’t do anything. Not right out in the open, when I’m corporeal and people can see me—and not with a fucking Angel around. Come on.”
Breathing deep and slow to calm her fraying nerves (it didn’t work, incidentally), the Fetch did just as Hadriel had advised not to do and turned around, face to face with three Reapers, only a thin pane of glass as a shield.

But glass was no shield, and she might as well have been standing in the same room. That was the logic that pulled Julia’s feet one in front of the other until she was once again surrounded by the cool night air.
And, soon enough, by Reapers. Three of them, two of us… Do Angels count as more than one person in a fight?

“Julia. It’s always you. Why is it always you?” The first Reaper to approach her—and to seize her by the front of her jacket—was another young woman, ironically one smaller and younger in appearance than Julia herself. “Three souls go missing, and it’s on your time. Then, we find one of ours dead, and your blood on the ground. I think you need to tell us what’s going on. We might even decide to let you walk away with just a few broken bones, if you’re quick about it.”

“What? No, that wasn’t me—I mean, not the dead Reaper, just…” The Fetch started to stammer when she realized all too suddenly that she didn’t really have a plan. And that it had been stupid to assume that the Reapers cared about who witnessed the spectacle, when normal mortals would forget all about it the moment they vanished from sight. “Don’t look at me… She’s the one holding the fucking scythe!”

The female Reaper frowned and looked up, her expression taking on that of someone who sucked on a lemon when she laid eyes on Hadriel. “So I see. But that doesn’t make you any less of a problem. Someone was already sent to deal with you, and now he is dead. Why are you always more trouble than you’re worth?” Stretching her neck, the Reaper met her the eyes of her comrades and angled her head in Hadriel’s direction. “You want to go find out just who the hell that bitch thinks she is, carrying around a Reaper’s scythe? I’m a little occupied.”

Julia became up close and personal with the ground for the second time that night, when the Reaper shoved her hard onto the ground. A flash of gunmetal grey sparkled in the street light as the bitch pulled her scythe out of fucking nowhere, as Reapers often did. “Oh, don’t look at me like that. You know how many people give a shit when a Fetch goes missing?” The Reaper smirked and brought the middle finger and thumb of her free hand together to form an O. “Zero. Because you aren’t real to anyone, Jules; you Fetches are a dime a dozen and don’t weigh against your purpose. Send me a postcard, tell me what Death is like for the un-alive.”

The blade came down upon Julia so quickly that she didn’t even have time to let out a scream, didn’t even have time to register the pain…
Wait a second…
No pain. There was no pain, none at all. Not from the scythe that had passed through her without drawing a drop of blood, or from the fall she had just taken. There was no cold night air, and no pressure, no feeling as she sat up, hysterical laughter tearing from lungs that had not been severed.

“What’s wrong, Elizabeth? I thought you wanted to hurt me… Oh, wait, you can’t. Because I’ve reached the end of another fucking cycle. Not so disadvantageous being a nothing, sometimes, is it? Suck on that, baby!”
The last that Julia saw in the yellow light of the street lamps as she was summoned to another departing soul was the Reaper’s angry scowl, and the shock of Hadriel’s curly brunette locks, suddenly right next her.

o.o.c :: disclaimer: I wrote basically all of this and then realized I might have read your post wrong because how 2 interpret so if it's terrible or way off the mark JUST LET ME KNOW i was going to ask but you weren't online and i'm posting it anyway i suck so much i'm sorry

The angel’s expressionless regard of her new companion was a false façade, a default look that, though it was not quite neutral, betrayed nothing of the sudden rush beneath her skin. The Hashmal was built for battle and programmed to command, and the flood of human feeling—fear, she imagined, as well as anticipation—on top of her celestial instincts quickened her pulse and brought a flush of excited rose to her pale cheeks. 

Julia’s reaction was far more straightforward; fear and dread were spelled out in her eyes the moment Hadriel made her identifying remark. The angel had suspected they might encounter the scythe-wielding creatures again, especially after her own interference; like any proud or loyal species, Reapers undoubtedly harbored the need for vengeance when one of their own was so unexpectedly taken from them—and when their rules were blatantly broken by those of lesser rank. But even if she could relate on some level of principle, Hadriel’s natural inclination was not something she could fight off or deny—and that was to eliminate threat in whatever form it decided to take. She and the Fetch had struck a deal, and part of their agreement had been keeping breath in one another’s lungs.

The angel may not have known the secret to getting back Julia’s mortality, but she knew how to survive. Whether or not the Reapers could detect Hadriel’s identity as an angel, she wasn’t sure, but the Fetch had a point—in full view of the other patrons, with the blonde in her corporeal state, they wouldn’t dare initiate an assault. They would have time to formulate a plan. Hadriel could even take them somewhere else, as much as she would hate to run away. But all of that didn’t matter, it seemed, because as soon as the angel drew a breath to speak, the Fetch was turning around—and suddenly the reflective glass was nothing, and the blonde was stepping into the night as though physical objects possessed no hold.

Hadriel, forgetting about other people in the diner that might witness her spectacle, stood so quickly that the displaced air from her movement sent her empty plate clattering to the scratched linoleum. She held the scythe across her body, its blade angled downward, and watched in stunned silence as Julia boldly began the confrontation. Fool, the angel thought bitterly, standing completely still as she watched the scene playing out beyond the glare in the glass. She narrowed her eyes when the Reapers turned their attention to her, but still she remained where she was—perhaps there would be no need for violence. Perhaps she needed to give Julia more credit.

But the angel couldn’t have been more wrong, and she knew it even as the thought occurred to her—not because she had no faith in Julia, but because she knew better than to presume any semblance of peace from a Reaper. And sure enough, as though it were in slow motion, she watched through a reflection of a paralyzed waitress behind her as the petite female outside raised her scythe to Julia and brought it down like a lightning strike—

—where it met Hadriel’s stolen blade with a screech powerful enough to rattle the windows of the diner, a trail of blue-white sparks exploding from the impact of the icy metal just above the ground. Julia was there only for a moment before she disappeared—their blades having sliced through the air where she once was—and the Hashmal heard her companion’s laughter echoing behind her departure like the ringing after a gunshot.

The female reaper growled her annoyance and then laughed, her chuckles simultaneously grating and melodious, and looked down at the crouching angel with a disdain the Hashmal had never seen outside Heaven. “And who do you think you are?” the Reaper demanded, pressing down harder on the scythe.

Hadriel was at a disadvantage in position so low to the ground, but she held her own, her knuckles white with the effort of countering the Reaper’s force. The angel looked up and smiled nevertheless, her red-brown eyes gleaming like wet crimson blood in the moonlight. “You presume to think I would give my name to something like you?” she said, her voice laced with sweet venom. She could see the woman’s true face behind its innocent human mask.

The Reaper laughed—precisely the response the angel had hoped to coax from her foe—and Hadriel wasted no time in acting upon the momentary distraction. She relinquished the pressure she had been exerting against the Reaper’s weapon, using the sudden forward motion of the Reaper’s blade to propel the back of the angel’s stolen scythe into the woman’s slender ankles. The shriek of pain was precisely as Kale’s had been only hours before, and the woman stumbled to the ground in a fit of agony that caused even her two Reaper cronies to hesitate.

Hadriel was on her feet now, blade gripped tightly in both of her small fists, and she turned to face the two shadowy males as the woman writhed on the ground. “Consider this your warning,” the angel told them, her voice soft and yet thundering as she dropped to her knees at the fallen Reaper’s side. Draping her palm across the woman’s forehead, Hadriel bit her lower lip and exterminated the injured creature, its eyes glowing bright before its body disintegrated into ash. Ignoring the second scythe (what would she need with two cumbersome weapons?), she flashed the remaining Reapers one final look before she vanished, sending the gray dust of their fallen comrade swirling into the night air.

She reappeared, panting, at Julia’s side, somewhere the angel did not recognize. “They will undoubtedly follow,” she whispered, looking around beneath furrowed brows. “Where are we?”

((o.o.c: omg stop worrying it was fabulous as usual <3 IT ALL WORKS OUT i'm sorry my writing was so vague i finished at 4am omg hadria what are you doing to me))

It had all happened so quickly, like a twisted mosaic of darkness and pain and street lights and yelling and steel and laughter and lightning—

And then it was gone. All of it was gone; the reapers, the Angel, the greasy spoon diner and its near vacant parking lot. Julia brought herself slowly to her feet, the sharp ache of being thrown to the ground for the second time that night shooting through her lower back, eliciting a wince and a gasp as she straightened her spine. For all it hurt, her condition certainly did not hold a flame to the pitiful creature that had apparently summoned her.

The man was young, with blonde hair and an athletic build, all tawny arms, strong-looking legs and flat abdomen. Distant streetlights did not do justice to the natural tan of his complexion, undoubtedly a result of his frequent outdoor pass-times; a hobby that, as it seemed, would lead to his ultimate demise. The bent body of a mountain bike sat, twisted and fully beyond repair, several yards from the athlete’s unconscious form, somewhat mirroring the condition of its unfortunate owner. The young man’s arms and legs did not lie at any angle that would suggest bones broken beyond a fracture, and he might have been considered lucky were it not for the blood that streaked his slack face, trickling from his nose.

“Fatal concussion, huh…” The Fetch mused aloud, her feet carrying her forward, to stand at his side without even thinking about it (the knee-jerk habit had become so engrained in her nature that it was almost as impossible to resist as blinking). Julia had seen death manifest is so many creative and incredible ways that it had become something of a morbid game, guessing at the exact cause that was the catalyst for severing the mortal soul from the immortal body. A single glance upwards showed her the rotted, missing guardrail where his bike had undoubtedly swerved, carrying him down into the brush off the highway overpass. In the gathering darkness of night, he must not have seen estimated the sharpness of the turn he had taken.

Hadriel’s voice startled Julia out of her silent musings such that the Fetch jumped, glancing to her right as the Angel approached. “How did you even find me- you know, nevermind. It probably doesn’t matter.” Something told her that this would take some getting used to, the higher being’s propensity for doing whatever the hell she wanted, going wherever she pleased, with little more difficulty than the use of her own divine willpower. “The Reapers always try to follow, but it’s not like they have a homing device on everywhere that my corporeal cycles end and begin again, so I’m not worried. This guy,” she motioned to the fallen young adult with her foot, “was apparently the one who called me out of my cycle. By the looks of it, we’re just off the highway leading out of the city.” It did occur to her to thank the Angel; although her corporeal form had begun to fade the moment that Elizabeth’s scythe was about to come down on her, Hadriel had blocked it nonetheless, a fail-safe in case her body hadn’t begun to dissipate fast enough. But the reminder that it was all part of the Angel’s own agenda somehow dampened her gratitude, so she decided to currently let it lie, unspoken. 

“Looks like he took a bad turn on that fancy bike of his and suffered a fall that he won’t survive. Damn… Not that there’s ever a good way to die, but to die from doing what you love? What a shitty way to go. He’s not even that old.” Already she could feel the pull of his fleeting soul at her left hand, begging her to facilitate its release. There wouldn’t be long to wait; he was dying fast.
But, the Fetch realized with a start that almost made her laugh, he didn’t have to.

Without a word to the Angel, Julia moved to the young athlete’s head, placing her hand above his mop of blood-streaked blonde hair, but she did not bring it down, did not mark him for the passage from life to death. Like she had thrice before, she felt the desperate soul struggle, glowing bright beneath her palm as it sought release, but within moments that warm glow faded, receding, settling back into that sacred space from whence it came. And the young man, almost dead just seconds before, drew a long, congested breath.

“…you know what I don’t understand? Why I can do this, but you can’t. Or won’t.” Julia glanced sidelong at Hadriel, before bending to pick up the cell phone that had flown from the young man’s pocket. “I mean, you’re an Angel, right? Don’t you guys, like… perform miracles, and stuff? Surely it would be within your power to do exactly what I just did.” Dialing a 9 and two 1s on the impeccably undamaged cellular device, her finger paused before pressing send, brows furrowed as she met the Angel’s eyes. “Hey, don’t give me that look. This guy’s like, what—twenty? Surely he’s got more of a right to a second chance at life than your Anthony Brennan did. Heart attacks happen at fifty-five; freak accidents like this shouldn’t happen to twenty-somethings.”

Julia delivered a brief description of the emergency and the location when the operator picked up on the other line, but hung up before the woman could ask her name, or for any more details. All that mattered was that an ambulance would be sent for the guy, and unless further crises arose, she would not be seeing him again until he was very old and in frail health.
“I’m surprised your kind don’t do this more often—if you, in fact, do it at all.” She added, dropping the phone next to the semi-conscious young man. Her fingers were beginning to lose feeling; another cycle was about to begin. Hopefully one that was long enough to let her rest; and Reaper-free. Julia extended her hand to the Angel. “I’m about to transition back; you can come along or find me later. The Reapers have probably already taken off, looking for me; they won't be there when we get back.”

Taking a moment to catch her breath, she stood still as marble stone at the Fetch’s side while her right hand continued to grip the long handle of the weighty scythe. The air was different here; she inhaled deeply, the night’s cool air thick with the aroma of earth and soil and wet leaves. It was a dramatic change from the bright, artificial interior of the diner, with its overpowering fluorescent glow and the hot, greasy smell wafting from its tiny kitchen. The odor clung to the angel’s clothing and hair, and where an hour before it would have made her nostalgic for the bizarre dive on Interstate 80, now it made her stomach churn with a feeling she could not quite identify.

They were alone, too, another stark contrast to the dirty restaurant on the highway. Even when the diner was slow, it was never truly abandoned; the motel behind its south wall kept a steady flow of patrons at all hours of the day, and even when the trucker lots were vacant, there was always the steady stream of traffic thrumming just beyond the gnarled hedges out front. Here, it was comparatively silent. Hadriel took a moment to listen closely to the cry of cicadas in the treetops above, allowing her eyelids to flutter closed as the breeze ran its invisible fingers through her curly auburn mane.

Julia’s startled question brought her attention back, however, and she shifted her gaze from the Fetch to the crumpled young man lying limply in the underbrush. “You disappeared close enough in proximity to me that I was simply able to follow your trail before it grew cold,” she explained quietly, instinctively lowering her voice in response to the new environment. “You should be thankful you are otherwise so difficult to locate. The female has been taken care of, but I left behind the two men. I imagine they will not be satisfied with your escape. Nor mine.” She tilted her head, studying the blonde carefully, and tried to smile.

The weak expression fell as soon as Julia began to speak about the athletic young man in front of them. As poorly versed in appropriate human behavior as she was, Hadriel instinctively knew that this was a moment for introspection; while she was not trained in the management or guidance of human souls, that breed of respect was deeply engrained in an angel’s psyche. Humans had misconstrued that fact for their own reassurances—using it to explain kindness, even mercy done to their kind—but their interpretation took far too much liberty from the truth of it all. There was a place for good human souls in the afterlife, after all, but it was not the Heaven that Hadriel had anything to do with.

“Miracles are events that humans cannot explain with their logic. Events that perhaps their brains are not equipped to understand,” the angel said leisurely, watching the Fetch as she picked up the man’s cell phone. “I can perform miracles by that definition, yes. I could answer prayers if they were addressed to me as well. But that is not my purpose. It is not my…job.” She paused before murmuring the last word, the syllable feeling strangely inadequate to describe her duties.

“I am not well-versed in the manipulation of human souls,” she went on, looking down to the unconscious man at their feet. “My duties are militant in nature. Being closer to humans, angels of the Third Sphere are better practiced in those matters than we of the Second.” The angel cleared her throat softly, running her thumb along the carved handle of her cumbersome weapon. “Perhaps I could, were I to try. But the soul, I fear, would not recognize my hand as it recognizes yours. What I can do, assuredly…” She trailed off, lowering the scythe to the ground and kneeling before the victim in the grass. “…is heal damage to the flesh.”

She draped her hand across the boy’s forehead and closed her eyes. In hardly more than a moment, she opened them again to find his snapped bones repaired, his scrapes healed over, and his breathing deep but not labored. Hadriel looked up to Julia stoically. “Perhaps it is two means to the same end, your ability and mine,” she commented. The angel rose slowly back to her feet, retrieving the scythe with one hand and gently grasping the Fetch’s outstretched palm with the other. “I would like to accompany you,” she said, the words barely spoken before she felt the beginnings of a departing tug…

It should not have been with such awe that Julia watched the cuts on the boy’s face heal, the bruises and scrapes fade to nothingness, and his unconscious breathing become even and deep, not congested or constricted as it had been in the throes of death. She already knew that the Angel could heal; the tear in the back of her jacket with perfectly-intact flesh beneath that, under any other circumstances, would have yet had time to heal on its own was proof enough. 

What she hadn’t considered was the bizarre harmony of their conjoined skills. Her influence, as it appeared, was on the soul. She could guide a soul to Death, or coax it back into a human body, but if it had initially been compelled to leave the body because it was damaged beyond repair… That was not something that she could fix. For all she knew, the person might still die soon after, tended by another Fetch (although that seldom occurred; a Fetch was typically assigned to a person for life, for every brush with Death that they suffered). She could not undo what had caused them to die or to nearly die in the first place.

But Hadriel could. Without any effort whatsoever. While the Fetch was suddenly a first responder in the crisis of a life, that barrier between Death and the soul, the Angel could restore the soul’s environment to its optimal conditions. Funny, how—should they choose—their partnership could save and restore so many lives. But that wasn’t on Hadriel’s agenda.

“So answering prayers is below you, huh?” The Fetch did not even attempt to mask the mild disdain from what she read between the Angel’s words. Sparing one more glance at the unconscious young man, she wrapped her fingers around Hadriel’s hand as she (and, vicariously, her divine companion) faded from the scene to return to the parking lot in front of the diner. The beginning of another precious bout of hours where the flesh that Julia wore was real, and the world could see her once again. “Well, as you so eloquently put it before, the likes of me can’t ‘force your hand’ to do anything you don’t want to do. But it might do you good to get a little more in touch with humankind; I mean, what happens up there inevitable affects the people down here, doesn’t it?”

Julia released the Angel’s hand when the streetlights in front of the diner (whose front light was out, and bore a white and red CLOSED sign on its door) flooded the pavement with yellow, and the night air had taken on that faint smell of burnt rubber and gasoline once again. “But me, on the other hand… I mean, I can pretty much stop death, can’t I? There’s got to be a reason for it… So many people aren’t ready to die. That guy back there sure as hell wasn’t. Maybe my duty to those people isn’t to sit back and watch their soul fly away; not when I can fucking save them.”

“You. Both of you.” A booming male voice that Julia did not recognize interrupted the silence of the night like nails down a chalkboard. And, for the third time that night, the Fetch found herself seized by an unwelcome pair of hands. But these hands did not seek to harm her; not right away, at least. Instead, the Reaper shoved her so hard out of the way that she at least had time to break her fall with her hands. “We’ll deal with you later, you little punk. You think we didn’t sense what you just did? You think you’re too fucking good for your role, then we’ll just have to find a way to rectify that. But right now, you’re not our biggest problem.”

“Just what the fuck are you?” The first man’s companion demanded. Julia was discarded and temporarily forgotten as the two of them advanced on Hadriel. “You wield a Reaper’s scythe, but you’re no fucking Reaper. You’ve killed two of us in one night, and you’re glued to this Fetch’s side. Frankly, we wouldn’t give two shits, except that now, not only did murder our pals, you’re getting in the way of our work.”

In no time, the Reaper’s hands were occupied with their own scythes, and they circled the Angel like predators. “You wanna play with scythes? Let us show you how it’s done.”

It was like watching a bad thriller in slow motion, and for the longest time, Julia felt positively frozen in place as soon as she got to her feet. Hadriel was a warrior, that much was clear, but even she could not hold her own against two practiced Reapers out for her blood.
And if Fetches in their corporeal flesh could bleed and be wounded… For all she knew, the same went for Angels. And there would be no self-healing if she was mangled beyond repair.

But it wasn’t until the Fetch heard the distinct clang of metal hitting the ground that she suddenly, helplessly, felt compelled to act. Because in the streetlight, she saw a scythe hit the ground and skid on the pavement with the force with which it had been dropped. And that scythe did not belong to either of the Reapers.
“Fuck…” Julia cursed, drawing a breath as she did what could possibly be considered the stupidest thing in the history of her existence, and she ran directly into the chaos. The Reapers had their backs to the discarded scythe, and were advancing on the Angel, slowly backing her into a corner against the old diner. They didn’t notice when the Fetch picked up the scythe (which was not nearly as heavy as it looked) with shaking hands and gripped its handle so tight that her knuckles turned white.

“Hey, douchebags.” She spat, her voice bolstered by more confidence than she actually felt. “You mind if I say something? I’ve always want to say this to a Reaper.” Julia waited until the men turned their heads, and watched the surprise and confusion register in their faces. It was the most satisfying expressions she had ever witnessed, but not nearly as satisfying as what she did next. “Who’s got the shit end of the stick now? Oh, and fuck. You.”
Brandishing the scythe in a clean arc, Julia swept the heads clean off of their shoulders with the crook of the blade. She didn’t even clue into the victory until she saw their bodies crumple at her feet, leaking a dark substance akin to blood.

Snapping out of her temporary stupor, her wide blue eyes fixed on Hadriel seconds later, relieved to see the Angel still intact. “I take it back,” she said, still gripping the scythe like her life depended on it. “I’m glad you grabbed this when you did. Can we go somewhere Reaper-free, now?”

“Answering prayers is below me,” the angel said factually, her brows lightly furrowing as she turned her gaze back to the blonde. “It is assigned to those of lesser ranks, or those who are more well-known amongst humankind. You have heard the names Michael, Gabriel, Ezekiel, Elijah…but you have not heard the name Hadriel. It is of no detriment or shame to respond to the prayers of men, but it is a duty primarily divvied to the originals of the Third Sphere.”

Despite the disconnect in information, the mismatched pair was more similar than the angel had initially presumed. It startled Hadriel, too, that their abilities were so contradictory to the nature of their beings. Where it could easily be imagined that an angel of Heaven would be familiar with the soul, it was bizarre to think that the Fetch—the creature associated with Death, with endings, with physical finality—was the one who initiated the trek to the afterlife. Hadriel could heal; she could repair the vessel in which the soul resided, but there was little she could do to reassure the grace-like essence of a whole, complex person. Feeling a sudden pang of inadequacy, the Hashmal tightened her grip on the Fetch’s hand and allowed herself to be pulled away, thankful for the distance between herself and the faint unexpected twinge of insecurity.

Traversing time and space with the Fetch was an entirely different experience than Hadriel’s method of flying (which was really another way of describing divine teleportation). It was more gradual this way, less jarring; the angel took comfort in the familiar surroundings of the diner fading in from the momentary nothingness around them. But something wasn’t right…the air was too cold for the season, and the very wind itself seemed to shiver in the presence of something venomous. She was too distracted by the sensation of uneasiness to process Julia’s words, and before long, they were both being interrupted—by the scythe-wielding beasts that Hadriel had allowed to live.

She immediately placed both hands upon her stolen weapon as the ghastly-faced creatures circled around her, sparing a quick glance to Julia, who had been tossed aside with more force than Hadriel had imagined Reapers capable. Angels could indeed bleed; they could be wounded and damaged and battered in their human bodies, a feat the Hashmal did not doubt their razor-sharp scythes could achieve. But she was better-versed in combat and had power in her palms to smite, and a surrounded angel would be hard-pressed to surrender. Whatever these Reapers wanted from her, she was not willing to give it—and she would sooner die than allow the satisfaction of their victory.

But for all she was a soldier, it was clear that the angel was out of her league with a weapon as foreign to her as a scythe in her small fists. She crouched low, tensing her muscles, and spun in place as the icy vultures circled. Sparks burst forth like frigid fireworks when she parried the first blow with her borrowed blade, and she growled, using the backwards draw as an opportunity to strike. But in the blinding aftermath of the initial explosive impact, she misjudged the distance of the second enemy to her side. He struck quickly as she wound back, knocking the weapon from her hands and sending her small form teetering off-balance.

She fell to her knees on the sharp gravel of the parking lot, rolling lithely to her side and launching herself back to her feet—or so that was her intention, had the first reaper not slammed the staff of his scythe into her left shoulder. The burst of resulting pain was distant for the angel, however, and with lightning-quick reflexes she wrapped both hands around the horizontal handle and shoved upwards with more strength than her tiny form should have been capable of producing. She used the momentum to haul herself to her feet, and she stepped backward slowly as the sneering Reapers rebounded and began once more to advance.

Hadriel reached into the folds of her jacket and drew out a long dagger, the length of its blade catching the glow of the diner’s sickly yellow floodlight. The Reapers’ response was to laugh, and they spun their blades in unison, the curved metal slicing through the wind with audible hisses. She was prepared to spring, but the shriek of blood-curdling agony froze her muscles in place—and she watched, stunned, as their skulls dropped unceremoniously from their severed necks.

For several long moments, the angel did not speak, but simply regarded Julia with what could have been described as shocked gratitude. Slowly, Hadriel replaced her blade inside her coat and stepped forward, looking down at the fallen Reapers expressionlessly. She knelt between their toppled heads, placing her palms on each, turning their corpses to ash without a trace of excess light. The Fetch, it seemed, had done a thorough job.

“Hold on to that,” she instructed hoarsely, nodding to the scythe in the Fetch's hands. She extended a hand to the blonde. “Let’s go.”

And with that, they left the diner—and the gray embers of the fallen Reapers—behind.

Like all beings (alive or semi-existent) that walked this imperfect planet, Julia had the capacity to be brave, if faced with the right circumstances. It was not a characteristic that the blonde-haired, hot-tempered Fetch often had the opportunity to express; not when your purpose was to walk the Earth, fading in and out of plain sight when summoned to deal with the souls of mortals passing on. And, when faced with altercations (ergo: when she had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, in light of a bored Reaper), in her experience it always tended to yield better results to simply bear the pain and refrain from reacting too expressively. Those bastards weren’t so unlike schoolyard bullies, and it often made her wonder if this was what became of those very bullies, after death: not good enough for Heaven, and not bad enough for Hell (which also made her beg the question: what the hell did she do that was so wrong to make her end up at the bottom of the cosmic food chain?).

Regardless, it didn’t pay to be brave as a Fetch, even when there was a need. But in the heat of this fight, this third terrible encounter with the very scoundrels that plagued her partial-existence, she realized too quickly that nothing good would come of allowing the Reapers to slay this Angel. Perhaps there’d be consequences; Hadriel was apparently something of a ‘big deal’ (too good to answer prayers, at least), and there was always the possibility of divine retribution taking down these two assholes once and for all. But then all of them would be dead—along with whatever chance Julia had of regaining her mortality, and walking among men as a real person once again.

It was not out of necessity alone that the young woman embraced the surge of courage required to decapitate the Reapers in front of her; Hadriel had saved her more than once, and whether or not the Angel was keeping tabs, the Fetch wished to be in nobody’s debt. But, even so, courage was still a stranger to her. And it dissipated as soon as her divine companion turned the Reapers’ bodies to ash, and as soon as she took a closer look at the scythe in her hands, dripping with the dark blood-substance of the creatures she had felled.

“No—no way, it’s yours. You picked it up, you wanted it. You can keep it.” No sooner did the Angel suggest she keep the scythe that Julia pushed the weapon back into her hands, before wrapping her arms around her middle and speed-walking in the opposite direction of the diner. “I just fucking killed two Reapers… Hadriel, I am going to be in so much shit. It’s bad enough the lot of them are all pissed off because thanks to me, souls destined for death are now going unaccounted for, but now I’ve got their blood on my hands. No offense, but I’m not sure you’re cut out to protect me anymore. And I’m not even sure why you’d want to.”

It had long since gotten late, and if Julia hadn’t been exhausted before, she was now. As the streets finally gave way to the park at the heart of the city, the Fetch made a beeline for the rustic wooden benches, so relieved to sit down that one would think she hadn’t rested in a month. “I really don’t get it. You’re some big shot Angel, and yet you want to enlist my help on your side of this ‘holy war’, or whatever… Don’t you have any friends in your ‘sphere’ that can do what I can do? Or are they all too busy acting important, like you?”
The Fetch snorted and pulled her knees to her chest, staring up at the starless black sky. That was the downside of being in a city; you didn’t even have the luxury of starlight.

“Anyway… I think you’re in over your head. Because now you’re associated with someone who royally pissed off some of the most dangerous semi-existent beings that lurk on this Earth. Believe me when I say the Reapers never have enough renegade souls to chase…” A sad truth, but a truth nonetheless. As little as Julia thought of her own purpose, she couldn’t say she envied the Reapers; must be really fucking boring to not have a steady stream of work. No wonder they were such assholes. “They’ll track me down, eventually. Which means they’ll find you, as well. And—no offense—but you just about got your ass kicked by two of them. Imagined if we’re faced with ten, next time. What then? Somehow, I imagined you’d be able to do more than wield damage with a lesser weapon. Like unleash some unstoppable, divine power, or something… But then, I know shit all about your kind.”

Hadriel caught the scythe in her hands when Julia thrust it in her direction, and she frowned, a shiver running down the length of her spine when the carved metal brushed the skin of her palms. She watched for a moment as the Fetch took off towards the city, gnawing at the inside of her lower lip as she contemplated what had just taken place. The blonde woman, the creature who claimed to be worthless in her own unique hierarchy, had just saved the physical existence of an angel—a being that was, to Hadriel’s knowledge, far more powerful and significant than her rescuer. It was humbling. She found that she was once again surprised by the Fetch, by her character now as well as her strange ability to handle human souls.

She did not set off after the woman for several moments. The air still tasted of death; the wind still reeked of what Hadriel could only assume was the blood of the slaughtered Reapers soaked into the gravel. It was brackish and strange, and all at once it was too much. The angel at last picked up her feet and followed the Fetch, weaving her way through the night and the city streets with a long-handled, long-bladed scythe balanced upright on her slender shoulder. It was fortunate that the weapons were invisible to mortal eyes; to see a girl as small and young and wide-eyed as the curly-haired Hashmal striding down the avenue with a blade as huge and ominous would be a scene straight from a mainstream horror flick.

The angel caught up to her unlikely companion at the benches, placing the weapon on the grass before lowering herself to sit next to the Fetch. The adrenaline that had coursed through her human body was finally subsiding, and for a moment she thought she recognized within herself the same exhaustion that was spelled out plainly in Julia’s posture. She sighed, gazing across the expanse of short-cropped green.

“I have many friends in my sphere,” the angel said at last, a deep weariness creeping into her voice that her physical expression was incapable of portraying. “They are holding their ground in Heaven. We can spare only a few soldiers to venture here at a time.” Looking down as if to reassure herself the scythe was still at their feet, she folded her hands in her lap and threw back her shoulders. “We act as important as we are. Surely you understand that.” She shifted her gaze to Julia, her red-brown eyes searching the Fetch’s blues. “Our ranks were clear before the Divide. If we do not maintain that order now that we have broken apart, then there is no hope for peace. And chaos above can only spell chaos below. Perhaps not right away, but eventually. There will be no going back.”

She slid her hands into her pockets and leaned against the wooden bench, ignoring the way the weathered planks dug into her bony spine. “The blade I carry is a valuable weapon,” the angel said, staring back across the city park. “It was forged in the First Sphere and has etched on its blade some very formidable spells…spells that are designed to kill. It will slaughter an angel, it will smite demons, and I am certain it would kill a Reaper. I am more skilled with it than with this”—she nudged the scythe with her toe—“but you are right, there were…other things that I could have done.” She drew a breath to continue, anticipating a demand for explanation before the blonde could ask it. “But it does not differentiate between ranks of Death. It would not have known you from the Reapers, and it would have taken you. We made a deal.”

Often the victim and seldom the aggressor, it was out of instinct that Julia flinched and scooted a good handful of inches away from the Angel when Hadriel drew the blade from out of her sleeve. It was long and intricate, but didn’t look particularly menacing. A little old, a little sharp, but for it to kill a Reaper… Julia was not exactly a woman of faith, and that was something that she would have to see to believe. It just didn’t look like it could measure up to one scythe, let along multiple blades of that calibre.
“Huh. Pretty sure if the Reapers knew that it was capable of that—and that you were capable of using it—they wouldn’t even think to fuck with you.” She said all the same, not bothering to voice her doubt. “Did it ever occur to you to maybe, like, tell them you’re an angel? They might back down, and then no one has to die.”

Die… Four Reapers had been killed that night. Two by Hadriel’s hand, and two by the Fetch’s. And although they might have deserved it, although they were assholes and Julia really didn’t want anything to do with them, although it had been so dangerously satisfying decapitating those two fuckers with one swing of the scythe… There was no denying that, directly or indirectly, their fates and existences had been changed indefinitely because of her. They were gone; the very essence of them was gone. They would not have another afterlife, another second chance.
Had the really deserved it, though…?

“…what happened to them?” The Fetch turned her attention back to the Angel, brows furrowed contemplatively. “Are all of those Reapers, like… gone for good? What happens to the preternatural when they die?” It wasn’t a question she really expected Hadriel to answer and, in truth, it was not one to which Julia was convinced she really wanted to know the answer. Up until the past evening, she hadn’t been convinced that she or any other semi-existent entity could actually die. Part of her was glad she was now in the know; a stronger part wished she were still ignorant to the fact. 

Adjusting her posture on the hard wooden bench, she watched with cautious eyes as the Angel replaced the dangerous blade. It would not have known you from the Reapers, and it would have taken you. If that was true… What the fuck could the thing do? Julia decided she didn’t want to ever find out. She’d find her own scythe, next time, if it came to it. Funny, how self-preservation had never been more important, now that she was no longer technically alive.

Suppressing a yawn, the Fetch raked her fingers through her hair, sorely tempted to ignore the Angel in favor of a few precious hours of dreamless sleep. “Well, I don’t know about you lot that float around in your ‘spheres’, but I’m tired and kind of feel like I’ve been run over by a truck…Hey, what is that, anyway?” The glow near Hadriel’s chest had caught her attention before, piqued her curiosity, and now that fatigue was dimming her judgement, she finally reached for the cord upon which hung a pendant far brighter than she’d anticipated. Her blue eyes were compelled to squint, looking at it directly. What was that inside? A crystal? “Frig. Wouldn’t be hard to find you in a dark place, with this thing… No wonder the fucking Reapers were on us so fast and so frequently.”

Julia let the pendant fall from her fingertips and back against the Angel’s chest before she could react unfavourably, finally letting her lids fall over her tired eyes. “Just in case you happen to have an answer, though I’m not betting on it… Do you know why people like me turn out the way they do? Why some are Reapers, some are Fetches, and some just get to pass on? Is it all just some shitty luck of the draw, or did I royally fuck up when I was alive?” It was a shot; nothing ventured, nothing gained, and it had always been something that the Fetch had wondered. Something for which no one had been able to provide her with an answer. “Though if your ‘Heaven’ is as chaotic as you say it is, and the only alternative is Hell… maybe I’m one of the lucky ones. It’s not so bad down here, I guess. Just…” Lonely, she almost said, before realizing it was none of the Angel’s business. At least it was only lonely half the time; that half when she was an invisible nothing, among the living and the breathing.

It was interesting how Earth could be so oblivious to the happenings upon its surface. Where it had been a small-scale massacre outside the greasy dive on the interstate, with tension crackling like lightning in the air, here within the city limits the world continued on in blissful naivety. They were soldiers who had traipsed away unscathed from a battlefield, traversing blood-soaked gravel to tread upon plush emerald grass untainted by signs of struggle. The sparrows that slept on window ledges and rooftops knew nothing of the preternatural assault that had taken place a handful of miles away; the tree boughs kept up their dance with the breeze as though the thick saline perfume of the spilled Reapers had never before sullied their performance.

Of course, it was the people, in all their innocence, that were the guiltiest of ignorance; they laughed and walked and joked and talked without the burden of knowledge weighing on their shaking shoulders. Hadriel, watching several pairs stroll across the open green of the city park, wondered what it was like to endure such a blocked existence. Heaven may have been strictly regimented, but Earth was organized into walled-off sections that seemed to defy the natural order of cause and effect. By contrast, Heaven was hyperactive and electric, a world of absolute ubiquity and immediate result—a fight on one plane was sensed by all on each of the others; a deviation in one sphere was instantly felt reverberating across the whole of their contained celestial universe. It would have been impossible for other angels to go on in such a state of blissful ignorance. In Heaven there was nowhere to hide.

The magnitude of her thoughts manifested in a heavy sigh, and she turned back to Julia, crossing one leg over the other. “I don’t believe it wise to broadcast my identity,” she said softly. “As much as I want to believe you are right, I doubt the Reapers would find it suitable to leave me be. Even with a blade like this up my sleeve.” She shrugged, a very human gesture, and wet her lips with her tongue. The Fetch had no business knowing how it worked, she supposed, but the angel continued anyway, finding a small comfort in sharing what she could never explain to another.

“It can be used as a regular dagger,” she went on, “and it will kill angels, demons, anything bound by flesh. But do you see this?” The Hashmal held the handle towards the blonde, angling it so that it caught the light of the nearby street lamp. Etched in the silver were a series of intricate symbols that wrapped around the frosted hilt in a swirl of contrasting shapes and lines. “All I need do is put my own blood on its blade. It can only be done on Earth, as you might guess by the necessity of blood, but once the spell is activated and thrust into the ground, it unleashes the power to smite from a distance. And it spares very little.”

She cleared her throat, tucking the blade back into the folds of her jacket and looking down at the rudimentary scythe in the grass. She didn’t look up again until she felt a tugging on the chain around her neck, and she turned, suddenly face-to-face with the Fetch as the blonde studied the glowing pendant.

The Hashmal hesitated, knowing very well she had every right to refuse an explanation. But they had forged an accord with one another that was built on trust, and that breed of reliance was not born of silence and secrets. “I doubt its light is what attracted the Reapers,” the angel said matter-of-factly. “It’s probably more due to the fact that it is a captured piece of human soul. Anthony Brennan’s soul.” She tried to smile, succeeding only in making herself look especially mischievous. “But whole or not, it would not have made it into the Heaven from whence I came. My Heaven is not the Heaven of souls. They go to the outermost sphere, the Fourth, and angels have very little to do with it. I could not describe it to you because I have never been.”

Hadriel looked to the Fetch with something akin to sympathy. “I’m afraid I can offer you no explanations that would satisfy you or put you at ease,” she said. “That is a question only Death can answer. But it is perhaps something we will learn more about along the way, as you hone your talents. Perhaps it is not such a curse as you believe your position to be.” She lowered her gaze. “You seem fatigued,” the angel commented. “Do you wish to sleep?”

“…smite.” Julia tried the word on her tongue. No one said crap like that down here on earth; hell, she’d be surprised if the majority of humankind even knew what it meant, anymore. She couldn’t read the runes and markings on the slender silver blade, and yet the sight of it sent a shiver down her spine. “So, you’re telling me that… You bleed on that thing, valiantly shove it into the ground, and everything within… what, a million meter radius turns to dust? That’s a little extreme… impressive, I imagine, but extreme.” More akin to what she had envisioned a warrior of Heaven would be capable of. And just as she was beginning to grow comfortable with the fact that Hadriel might not really be all ‘that’…

Clearing her throat, the Fetch tucked her hair behind her ears, her attention deviating from the weapon of divine destruction to the beautiful, albeit eerie, pendant that hung around the Angel’s neck. The most peculiar piece of jewelry she’d seen in a while, and something about it made her intensely uneasy. She discovered just why that was when the Angel ventured to explain.
“Soul. Wait, you took a peace of that guy’s soul? As in, part of him? Part of what he is?” Though having been on the verge of falling asleep just a moment before, Julia was startled awake by the uncanny revelation, spine straightening as she sat upright. “You can’t… you can’t just go and do that, Hadriel. Taking a part of someone’s soul, that… That is some fucked up shit. It’s all they’ve got left of them when they die. I don’t care how little you know about people, but surely to hell you know that.”

The defensive rebuttal was borne of a sympathy to which the Fetch had never really been attuned, towards the dying with which she dealt every day. It was easy to shut out the crying and pleading, a little bit of a pain in the ass to deal with the souls that rebelled, but what Julia had never been able to shake was the permanent nature of the essence that kept human beings alive. Creatures so finite, so fragile, all pushed along like clockwork by a part of them that was so much bigger than they could ever imagine. Admittedly, there were times during the great release, when the soul severed from its host and departed for that other place beyond, that the Fetch found herself in reverent awe at the subtle glow of the essence that only she could see. Good or bad or in-between, there was nothing more pure and more whole than raw lifeforce.

Except, of course, when some asshole of an Angel decides to take part of it, to accommodate their own agenda.

“You realize that poor son of a bitch is probably changed, right? You’ve taken part of who he is. He’s probably a different person, now, and he’s probably going to wonder why he’s going to live out the rest of his life feeling so incomplete.” No, the pendant wasn’t nearly so pretty anymore. Pinching the bridge of her nose to refrain from saying something she might regret, the Fetch stared at the ground, at the head of the scythe in the soil, of the tip of it that was still tarnished black with the blood of four different Reapers. How could so much wrong happen in a period of under twenty-four hours? Bad luck was supposed to be for the living.

“Not to mention, I think it’s exactly what drew the Reapers to us. You know what Reapers do, right? Well, what they’re supposed to do… They’re first responders to deal with renegade souls. So what you’ve got in that jewelry of yours is going to be like a fucking homing beacon to them, and they’re going to keep fucking coming at us… And I am way too tired to deal with this shit.” The Fetch pressed her fingertips to her eyelids and pressed gently to ward off the threat of a headache. “I think I will sleep, if you don’t mind. Just do me a favor and wake me up before I get my ass kicked by any more Reapers. If one more person throws me on the ground, I swear to God—” Julia failed to catch herself, and her words stuck in her throat for fear that she’d offended. That was until she realized the hilarious irony of it all, considering the possibility that there might not be a God, after all. Not anymore. “Or… whatever. Give me fair warning if you decide to smite anything so I can take cover.”

Leaning her head back against the bench, the young woman wrapped her arms around her middle and relaxed her shoulders. Some people might have taken comfort and found it easy to drift off, with an Angel next to them. Those people, apparently, were idiots; and Julia’s sleep, for all she was exhausted, was restless, at best.

Julia’s hyperbole was lost on the sheltered angel, and Hadriel furrowed her brow in mild confusion. “The effective zone is hardly a million miles,” the bemused angel replied, tilting her head. “But space is more condensed here. I’ve not used it on plain soil in a very long time, and I cannot give you an exact number.” She looked apologetically to the Fetch, as though the blonde woman was actually interested in specific measurements. It was beyond the angel’s rudimentary comprehension of human expression that her companion could be joking or facetious.

But she could sense anger, or at least discontent, and with the revelation of the true contents of her glowing pendant Hadriel could detect immediate irritation in her new ally. The moral implications of taking a piece of a man’s soul—however small it happened to have been—had been lost on the Hashmal until that moment, and it was still puzzling to her as to why her actions had been problematic. “He is a single soul,” she said in defense of herself, her tone not argumentative but rather genuinely perplexed. “His is one soul against billions of others, against the whole of Heaven and the million angels it contains.” The curly-haired young woman looked up, searching the Fetch’s azure gaze for answers. “If he is changed, it is for the greater good. And the change was meant to be, it was written in his fate.”

Did she really believe that? Subconsciously, she reached up to finger the crystal at her neck. This time she wasn’t so sure of herself. The Fetch had unwittingly put a crack in the angel’s steadfast resolve, and now the hairline fracture was threatening to lengthen its jagged, serpentine path beneath the pressure of new information. Hadriel was a warrior, a commander; she was a fierce creature of the Lord who had risen up to stand her own heavenly ground against an impossible foe, and certainly she had killed in the name of what she believed, but she had never fancied herself a bad person—she was not inherently a malicious beast. Where the binding of Brennan’s soul had seemed a necessary move before, in the aftermath of the Reaper attacks she was not so sure her insurance had been worth the price of the policy.

Nevertheless, what was done was done. Hadriel cleared her throat quietly, tucking the necklace inside the collar of her shirt to rest against her skin. “Perhaps it was foolish,” she admitted, her uncertainty still obvious, “but there is little to be done now. You know as well as I that releasing it will only attract them faster, and I do not believe it will survive long without the remainder of its essence.” Saying it aloud brought an inexplicable lump to the angel’s throat that she couldn’t swallow away. The pendant sat against her sternum like a patch of hot ice, and she did her best to ignore its nagging presence. Perhaps she was experiencing a small degree of what Reapers knew—an itch, a discomfort, a restlessness that suddenly made her all too aware of its proximity to her flesh.

As Julia prepared to sleep, the angel nodded her agreement to stand watch, folding her arms across her chest as the cool night breeze caressed her face. The night wore on in relative harmony, the hours passing uneventfully as the time slipped towards dawn. Hadriel sat still as a statue, unmoving but for the way the wind played with her curls, her eyes trained straight ahead. But as the eastern sky began to brighten, painting the lingering rain clouds above the city skyline a saccharine peach, she felt the cold again—the frigid shift that could only mean one thing.

“Reapers,” Hadriel whispered, nudging Julia sharply with her elbow. “Not far.” She moved to the edge of the park bench, her brown eyes wide as they scanned their surroundings. “We could run before they’ve spotted us,” she suggested, more excited than appropriately frantic, “or we could stay. It’s up to you, Julia.”

The longer Julia spent in the presence of her angelic companion, the more she realized how much of a chore this partnership was going to be, if for no other reason than because of the staggering differences in their moral framework. He is a single soul. That much was true, Anthony Brennan was no more special than any other average Joe in the city, some washed-up, blue-collar man with an average family from what she could remember. Live or die, changed or unchanged, what happened to him might not weigh against the fate of all of Heaven or mankind. 

But that did not make him worthless. With all of the souls she guided towards or away from death on a daily basis, it was probably hard to believe that any given Fetch could value life in all of its individual forms. But the truth was that not every dying person she encountered had the same face. None had the same story, the same fate, the same personality… They were all different. And, whether or not anyone (herself included) chose to acknowledge it, they all mattered to someone. No soul ever flew under the radar as being insignificant; no soul was more important than another. They all weighed the same, exactly twenty-one grams of pure, unadulterated energy. How did that not count for quality?

If he is changed, it is for the greater good. And the change was meant to be, it was written in his fate.
And that was where the Fetch called bullshit. This wasn’t that man’s fate, to escape death, only to wander around for another thirty or forty years with a fractured soul. At least, it hadn’t been. Not until a certain divine entity had decided to intervene—and to make Julia have a part in it. It would take more than Angels and Heaven to convince the feisty blonde that there really was such thing as divine predestination. Mankind carved its own destiny; until decisions such as stealing away part of their souls were made without their consent.

Julia was lucky that she didn’t dream, for the disquiet in her mind wouldn’t have painted very pretty pictures in her slumber. Nonetheless, she remained tense and relatively on edge for a good part of the night, only beginning to fall into a deeper, truer state of rest when a sharp jab to her ribs startled her awake with a gasp. “…ugh. Do you mind…?” Through her squinted, sleep-fogged eyes, the Fetch couldn’t make out anything out of the ordinary in the amber light of dawn. It wasn’t until a moment later that the Angel’s belated warning registered in her mind, bringing her fully, startlingly, awake. “Wait, where? How far? How do you know? Oh, fuck all, like hell I’m hanging around here. Come on.”

Staggering to her feet, Julia seized the Angel by the sleeve, perturbed that she wasn’t moving quickly enough, and hurried through the park. “Reapers, already… It’s that fucking necklace of yours, isn’t it? I told you they’d smell it from a mile—”

They appeared out of nowhere, all five of them, scythes already drawn, all at once; literally. No extravagant entrance with music or fire or any heroic poses, but a simple matter of absence, and then presence. Reapers—the Angel had been right—but not the usual assholes that Julia faced on occasion. But that was what worried her the most.
“…you don’t belong here. I’ve never seen you before. ” The Fetch murmured, her feet carrying her backwards until she bumped into Hadriel. “You… you can’t be here, this isn’t your jurisdiction!”

“And your jurisdiction is not denying souls their rightful release.” A tall Reaper stepped forward, one who might have been grandfatherly in appearance, had Julia not known what he was capable of. “Nor is it destroying four of your own city’s Reapers. We’re here to replace what has been displaced; and to stop you, both of you, before your antics throw off the balance of nature any more than you already have.”

The resolve in the Reaper’s voice unsettled Julia, not because of the menace that it already promised, but because it was too assured. Almost to the point of sounding scripted, or planted. “Oh yeah? What gives you the right, anyway?” She challenged, though didn’t dare move far from Hadriel, despite her bitter doubt that the Angel could save both of their asses. “Or rather, who?”

“Right?” The elderly-looking Reaper raised his eyebrows in surprise. “No, it’s not about a right, little Fetch. It’s more about…incentive.”

Before Julia had a chance to further inquire into exactly what ‘incentive’ this asshole was talking about, the sound of advancing feet impelled her to turn, shoulder to shoulder with Hadriel. More Reapers… There were ten of them. Ten fucking Reapers, ten fucking scythes; in a matter of seconds, they had not only been outnumbered, but surrounded.
“If, by some miracle, we manage to get out of this one alive,” she murmured, glancing over her shoulder at the Angel, “you are going to ditch that fucking necklace of yours, or this whole camaraderie is so over.”

They were coming—she could smell them now, the sharp, bitter reek that painted the air frigid. It was one of the advantages of having Reapers on their tail; they may have been vicious creatures out for blood and souls and vengeance, but they were far less stealthy than they supposed of themselves. To the angel, at least, the change in the air was as much a giveaway of their approach as snarls and footsteps, and it afforded them time enough to focus and to flee. She was surprised, however, that the Fetch was not so attuned to their impending presence; the Hashmal would’ve guessed Julia of all beings would have been the most sensitive to Reapers’ arrivals and departures.

But whatever the method of detection, the fact remained that they were once again being pursued, and Hadriel wasted no time in following her blonde companion’s lead as she leapt to her feet and strode swiftly away from the park bench. We should fly, the angel thought, pursing her lips, but it was already too late—the vultures appeared, ghostlike, in the open expanse of the park. Scythes drawn and glinting dangerously in the early morning light, five Reapers formed a tight arc around the unlikely pair, their faces dark and shadowed as they sneered.

The obvious elder of the group stepped forward, exchanging words with the Fetch that Hadriel hardly paid any attention to. Her gaze focused on each of the man’s cronies in turn, her red-brown glare peering through narrowed eyes and long lashes. She was at the disadvantage, but no one would ever guess as much by her stance, her determination—with an expression as cold and hard as the metal of the scythe in her tight grasp, she was poised and at the ready, her muscles tense as stone. It wasn’t until she registered that she was being addressed that she shifted her attention to the old man, and even then, it was only with an infinitesimal turn of her chin.

“Yes, you,” the man was saying, his voice too smooth, too calculated. “We know all about you. Who you are, who you work for.”

Hadriel bristled. “Then who am I?” she demanded quietly, her lips hardly moving as they formed the words. The elderly Reaper hesitated, and the angel’s eyes narrowed further in an expression that could have been mistaken as a smirk of satisfaction. “I thought so,” she said, her voice hardly louder than a whisper. “A bluff.”

The man threw back his head, his laugh just as ugly and inhuman as the true face behind the wrinkled visage. And that was it, that was all it took to trigger a flurry of activity, an explosion of black movement and frozen air as the Reapers simultaneously converged. Hadriel, not expecting such a synchronized strategy from creatures who had only proven themselves greedy and hasty, threw herself to the ground as the beast closest to her swung its scythe where her neck had been just seconds before. “Julia!” she exclaimed, throwing her own scythe to the unarmed Fetch as she scrambled to her feet, her hands finding the silver blade tucked away in her sleeve.

The two Reapers who faced her laughed, raising their intimidating hooked blades high above their heads, pausing in the position while Hadriel held out her dagger. Without missing a beat, she seized their moment of confounded distraction and lunged forward, striking the first in the heart with her blade—he collapsed immediately into ash at her feet—and swiping the second across the chest and shoulder. He screamed, dropping his weapon as he fell to his knees, and the angel wasted no time in severing his head from his wounded body. Wasting no time in celebrating her victory, the Hashmal spun, catching sight of Julia (who seemed to be holding her own for the time being) before the angel was knocked to the ground from behind.

Had the wind not been knocked from her lungs, she would have swore. Instead, she fell to her knees and rolled to the side before being pushed back to the dirt with a Reaper’s harsh foot. He reached down slowly with the tip of his blade, nicking the tender skin beneath her chin as he hooked the chain around her neck and tugged free the glowing crystal. No, her thoughts screamed, and she tried to right herself, writhing beneath the pressure of the Reaper’s shoe. She watched in horror as he wrapped his long, skeletal fingers around the pendant. A snarl escaped her throat, and she sliced at the creature’s ankle only to be cut short as the blunt end of his scythe collided sharply with her cheekbone. They couldn’t win, she realized, pain shooting through her limbs. There was only one way…

The rest seemed to play out in slow motion—Hadriel brought her dagger not to her assailant, whose skull she could not reach to smite, but rather to her own free hand. She gripped the razor-sharp blade as tightly as she could, coating silver in deep crimson as the edge sliced open her palm. As the Reaper raised his scythe to deliver a fatal blow, the Hashmal cried out, twisting against him before planting the dagger firmly into the soil.

It cut through the earth as though it were warm bread, embedding itself between the blades of grass as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Hadriel released the hilt. A burst of yellow-white light as blinding as a thousand suns exploded outward from the blood-covered silver, sweeping across the dewy lawn to seize the Reapers and render them ash.

She collapsed backwards behind the force of its swift expansion, lying flat on the ground until the last of the Reapers’ cries were silenced from the force of the divine power she had unleashed. When at last she dared move, she sat up slowly, surrounded by a motionless field of gray ash and abandoned scythes—and Julia.

“Are you hurt?” the angel called tentatively, glancing to the blade still embedded in the ground and back again.

There was surprisingly little to which Fetches were attuned, including the presence of Reapers. Perhaps it had something to do with securing a spot at the very bottom of the other-worldly food chain, or perhaps the less than stealthy hunters of renegade souls were still faster than their even less stealthy underlings.
Or, maybe, Julia simply never learned, never reacted quickly enough. Were she to be questioned in this instance, she would have laid blame to the fact that the bastards had been on their way while she was still waking up from the fog of a dreamless sleep. There really was no outrunning them in her experience, not unless she were to reach the end of a cycle (or were the Angel to put her own abilities to use and get them the hell out of danger).

But that was neither here nor there, and the fact remained that they were taken off guard, outnumbered, and shit was going to go down very quickly…
“Hey, look, we wouldn’t have had to fucking kill any of you jerks if you’d stop taking your boredom out on people like me,” The funny thing was, this was the Fetch’s solid effort put forth to be diplomatic and reason with the gaggle of Reapers before them. “You guys do realize that your job isn’t to makes Fetch’s afterlives a living hell, right? Hadriel was only acting on my behalf when she took down Kale and— ”

Too late, and even if it hadn’t been, Julia was no diplomat. The orange dawn-sky glinted on the collection go menacing scythes that were soon airborne with their owners, and the Fetch was certain that she’d have seen her life flash before her eyes (had she been alive to begin with). In the next handful of seconds, the Angel was calling her name. Julia’s hand outstretched to catch the scythe on a kneejerk reaction, before she had time to even realize what she was doing. She didn’t like the thing, the cold piece of jagged metal that had severed her own flesh in the hands of Kale. But now was not the time to contemplate likes and dislikes when she was faced with an eternal death at the hands of these bastards, and she didn’t even have time to call a ‘thank you’ to the Angel over her shoulder before two Reapers were on her, and the scythe was being put to good use.

Or… perhaps not good use, but use all the same. There was something to be said about beginner’s lucky, perhaps, for while only hours ago she had saved Hadriel’s ass and decapitated two Reapers with a single swing, that skill apparently did not generalize to saving her own ass. Two bodies against one, two scythe’s against one, two fighters against someone whose experience with a weapon was so limited it could be counted by minutes. The Fetch appeared to hold her own at first, taking a defensive as opposed to offensive approach, saving her limbs ad body from being nicked and sliced by the merciless blades at the hands of the dark creatures who, as far as she knew, didn’t have to be her enemy.

“You don’t have to do this!” She growled, hardly able to catch a break or even her breath, for that matter. “We’ve done nothing to you, can’t you just—”
Julia’s words were cut short the moment the weight in her fingers gave way, the scythe flying from her hands as the butt of one of the Reaper’s weapons came down hard on her wrist. She could have sworn she felt bone fracture, but that was the least of her worries. Stunned with pain, that was all the opening that the Reaper’s needed to sweep her feet from beneath her. Once again, the Fetch became intimately acquainted with the cold, hard ground. Her wrist aching and throbbing, the wind knocked from her lungs, insult was added to injury as one of the Reapers pinned her to the ground—literally, with the long tip of his scythe, more angular and slightly less curved than the others. The only reason Julia did not scream is because she did not have the breath; not to yell in pain, and not to call for her heavenly companion.
Who, as it appeared, did not appear to be any better off. The both of them were down for the count, and there didn’t appear to be any mans of turning the tables in their favour.

Fuck, Hadriel… The Fetch mouthed, looking on passively as a glint of silver in the Angel’s hands caught her eye. That dagger, the one with the runes, and Hadriel was… She was cutting her own hand?

No…
“Hadriel…” Julia bared her teeth, her voice barely a rasp over the wind. “Hadriel, no, don’t…” It was one thing to be fucked because they were outnumbered and outsmarted by a bunch of Reapers. But ’fucked’ didn’t even begin to cut it if that blade, covered in the Angel’s blood, made contact with the earth…
Too late.

The light came on so fast and so bright that it was physically painful to behold. Exhaling her defeat, Julia squinted her eyes shut, the burning ache in her wrist and the agony in her impaled shoulder falling to the back of her mind as she prepared to wink out of existence completely, hardly sparing a moment to even feel sorry for herself.

Cries all around her, shrieks and yelling and profanity that at one moment was deafening, and in the next, was gone completely. As the light passed over the Reapers, incinerating them on contact, the Fetch held her breath, hoping that the process of being burned to death would be quick. Sure enough, something warm, hot, and potent passed over her body from her head to her toes, but not hot enough to burn, or even to hurt, for that matter. And then, it was all gone, all over, and so were the Reapers.
Silence enveloped the park at dawn, save for the laboured breathing of the Angel and the Fetch. Once again, they were alone. Safe. Alive. But, in Julia’s case… how?

“You tell me.” The blonde called back, still flat on her back with the tip of a scythe keeping her a companion to the soil. With her uninjured hand, the Fetch gingerly reached up, wrapped her fingers around the blunt part of the blade, and pulled. And she cried out, feeling more skin tear as the blade came out the way it had gone in; one agonizing minute later, it fell to the ground with a heavy thud, and she forced herself into a sitting position, accompanied by groans the entire time. “How did… how did you do that? I mean, how did you know that little knife of yours wouldn’t send me to oblivion with the rest of those fuckers?”

The expression on Hadriel’s face was all she needed to glean an answer.
“…no. You’re kidding, right? You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, Hadriel.” Fury alone brought Julia painfully to her feet. Fractured wrist hanging at her side, she pressed her good hand to her injured shoulder, blood immediately pooling between her fingers and from the exit wound on her back, without the soil to absorb it. “You were ready to incinerate me along with the Reapers, weren’t you? You had no idea that I’d still be standing, you… you are un-fucking-believable! What happened to all of this partner bullshit? You team up with someone, you don’t do something that can kill them, you socially-impossible idiot!” So consumed by anger and betrayal was the Fetch that the thought didn’t even occur to her that the fact she was, in fact, still standing, might be something to consider.

It was eerie, the scene in which the angel found herself as she dragged herself to a sitting position and opened her eyes. Where the city beyond the park continued on, oblivious, the wide expanse of green seemed frozen in time, shocked into absolute stillness by the surprise of the sudden attack. They sat amidst a battlefield painted gray rather than scarlet. It was made stranger by the demure backdrop of the infant dawn, its soft light painting gold what remained of the obliterated corpses. Even the breeze seemed to be making detour around their zone of combat, leaving the piles of ash intact like dark gathering storm clouds petrified on a grassy sky.

The scythes lay scattered in the open like haphazard markers next to gray-black graves. It was curious how the weapons remained behind when the Reapers bound to them had gone, but the novelty of their survival had worn off for the miffed Hashmal. With a groan escaping her throat, she reached over to pull her dagger from the ground. It had been unwise to assume she could efficiently wield as foreign a weapon as a scythe against creatures who used it instinctively, and yet the one she had stolen from Kale had saved both herself and the Fetch on more than one occasion. Now, though, she would have been content never to see one again.

“Socially-impossible idiot I may be,” Hadriel admitted between ragged breaths, her delicate features twisting into a grimace as she forced herself to her feet, “but I did just rescue us from a horde of Reapers.” She gritted her teeth and pressed one arm across her abdomen, taking one step in Julia’s direction before halting abruptly in her tracks. The woman’s tone—anger, she told herself gingerly—was warning enough that the angel should not approach. “I am programmed for command and leadership in battle,” she said hoarsely, looking away. “I have had millennia to learn that there is no sense in the death of two when a chance remains for one.”

But the truth was, she hadn’t considered that logic in the rush of the moment. She should have; it was part of her nature, her training, her purpose. But all she’d been able to think about was the entrapped soul of Anthony Brennan, the injustice not only in Heaven but the idea that she, a high-ranking Hashmal of the Second Sphere, could be slaughtered by a lowly, sniveling Reaper—it had taken her, possessed her, knocked sense from her calculating mind and forced her to justify her actions solely in hindsight. She would have made the same decision, she realized, but nevertheless it alarmed her the ease in which her instincts had been thwarted.

“Perhaps you’d rather us both be dead?” she posed, bitterness creeping into her tone as she turned back to the Fetch. This time she took several unsteady paces forward, purposely kicking a discarded scythe in her path. The angel bit her tongue and reached out quickly before the blonde could dodge her touch, placing her uncut hand on the Fetch’s slender shoulder to heal the wounds she had suffered—including the fractured wrist.

She decided against following up her question, turning her back towards her companion and sighing heavily once more. Warm blood still oozed from her severed palm, dripping down her curled fingertips and into the grass at her feet. Tentatively, she opened her hand and studied the self-inflicted injury—two deep parallel lines—watching as the crimson liquid pooled and stained her pale skin.

“The dagger is harmful to angels,” Hadriel said quietly, unsure even if the Fetch was listening. She had taken care of the rest of her aches, including a fractured cheek, but the raw cuts throbbed distantly with each beat of her heart. “I cannot heal it, not straight away. It hurts,” she added, surprise creeping into her voice. She looked to Julia questioningly. “Perhaps I should…cover it.”

“Yeah. Yeah, you did rescue us from a hoard of Reapers.” The Fetch bitterly agreed, voice passing a barrier of clenched white teeth. Her jaw ached from the tension. “But you know what, Hadriel? That means shit all when the happy ending turns out only to be some weird, happy mistake! Hindsight is twenty-twenty, sister; what were you thinking in hindsight? Because something tells me that I didn’t exactly factor into it.”

Julia exhaled her anger, nostrils flaring as she approached her supposed comrade, whose face wouldn’t know the look of guilt to see it, let alone replicate it. It was difficult to determine the extent to which she felt hurt versus just plain angry. “You know what? I really don’t give a rat’s ass about how you were ‘programmed’, or how long you’ve had on the battlefield. You don’t have an army, not here. It’s not the same, and the same rules don’t apply. Just like all of your other rules and mannerisms don’t exactly apply down here.” 

Hadriel’s question finally confirmed her hurt-to-rage ratio. For all the Fetch was quick-tempered and verbally volatile, and was not one with any particular penchant towards violence, she came very near smacking the Angel then and there, flat across the face with the back of her good hand. “As opposed to what? Just me dead? I mean, I’m just a nothing, right? What’s another Fetch? Nevermind my abilities apparently go above and beyond what they should.” Lip curling, she was about to throw more words (and possibly a fist) like stones, when to her surprise, she felt Hadriel’s hand on her shoulder, covering her own bloodstained fingers. A feeling akin to dry ice or searing heat shot through her shoulder, front to back, and then all the way down her arm until it reached the hairline fractures in her wrist. As soon as the feeling was there, it was gone, and in its wake was healed flesh and the absence of pain. Not to mention a distinct dampening of the fire that fueled the Fetch’s outrage.

Julia’s attention was then directed to the clean cuts on the Angel’s palm, nowhere near life-threatening, but bleeding freely. So they do bleed… just like the rest of us. “Of course it’ll fucking hurt: you just sliced your own skin, genius. Maybe you should’ve thought about that before you went slicing your own skin with that thing.” Came her apathetic reply, but contrary to her reaction at face value, the Fetch shed her torn up and bloodstained coat, and tore along its hem over and over, until it was about half the size it was before, and the remainder of it consisted of rough strips of faux-denim in her hand.

Wordlessly, she took the Angel’s hand and pressed a thick wad of fabric against the small lacerations in her palm, before wrapping the remainder of the strips horizontally to keep it in place, and tying it tight (and, perhaps, a little less gently than she could have managed). “Hold that tight; keep your fingers wrapped around it, even if it hurts. You can thank me later.” The last part was added without even attempting to mask the sarcasm, knowing full well that Hadriel probably wouldn’t find reason in her analytical mind to be thankful at all. Someone who justified self-preservation when there was even a hint of possibility that a comrade might not be lost… The Angel was beyond socially-impossible. It might not have been entirely inaccurate to describe her as being heartless.

“And, for the record, Hadriel?” The Fetch had begun to walk on, in hopes of finding somewhere slightly more populated to take refuge, in case witnesses were anything of a deterrent against renegade Reaper activity. “You ask someone to join your cause, it’s kind of common courtesy to have their back. Or, you know, at least consider tactics that might not fucking get them killedwhen faced with adversity. If you’re only concern is your own self-preservation, then I really don’t know what the hell I am doing here.” Only then did the glaring anomaly of the situation occur to her, preventing her from turning her back to the ruthless Angel. 

Brow relaxing, she took a pause to consider her question before asking, in case the answer was obvious. It wasn’t. “Why didn’t your little knife trick kill me, anyway? Just the other night, you were saying how you wanted to refrain from using it because the both of us wouldn’t be walking away from it alive.”

Angels were peculiar beings. Like Demons, and even like Reapers, the only way they could walk the earth was to adopt a physical form, to manifest in flesh and blood that was as prone to worldly physics, harm, and pleasure as any mortal-born human. While their grace allowed them to maintain a steady connection to Heaven, they still were just as capable of bleeding and dying as any other living thing. Bound with mere bone and muscle and skin, their internal power was usually enough to maintain their bodies with very minimal effort. Hadriel did not need to eat, although it made her stronger; she had no need to consume water, no need to sleep, no need to don a jacket to shield herself from the cold. She could take care of herself from within, and usually, that was all it took.

But that routine could be disrupted; the system, despite the angels’ divinity, was nevertheless imperfect. There were spells that could ward away and banish her kind just as there were rituals that could do the same to demons; there were ways to entrap and weaken them with little more than select Enochian syllables and a handful of key ingredients. But perhaps the worst weapon against angel-powered flesh were the creatures’ own Heaven-forged silver blades, which were capable of killing her kind with a single stab through the heart. Hadriel was either tremendously foolish or incredibly courageous for voluntarily wounding her own flesh with its razor edge. Though it took an angel’s blood to activate the magic it contained for self-defense, it was not a cut from which the angel could recover quickly—and the Hashmal was learning firsthand that painful price.

She said nothing as Julia bandaged her wounded hand, pursing her lips tightly together as the pressure of the makeshift gauze caused the parallel slices to sting. Hadriel was not altogether a stranger to pain, but she was so rarely subjected to its nagging discomfort (since her healing was generally instantaneous) that it struck her anew as a curious, and completely unwanted, sensation. She shook her wrist gently as though the gesture would rid the feeling from her severed skin. It only succeeded, of course, in making it hurt worse, and she looked forlornly to the Fetch as though the blonde held the cure.

But, of course, she did not. The angel found only disdain in the woman’s glare, and for the first time she felt a pang of something that might have been remorse. But it passed as quickly as it had welled, and she cleared her throat, watching as the Fetch started to walk away. There would be no use in apologizing; even if the angel was enough in tune with her emotions to mean it, there was very little chance Julia would find Hadriel’s words genuine. It was better, she figured, to remain silent, to traipse after her companion wordlessly and without complaint, to take the scolding and anger with pursed lips and expressionless eyes.

Hadriel caught up to the Fetch when the blonde paused, her bandaged hand still in a tight fist. The sensed that the bleeding had slowed if not stopped, but the fabric at the base of her fingers was stained dark with moist crimson. “The blade will not kill those who have bled on it by choice,” she said, looking up stoically at the taller woman. “I knew I would be spared. I do not know why you survived…” She hesitated, biting her lip. “But for what it is worth, I am very glad that you were spared. I will…consider my actions more carefully next time.” It was the closest thing to regret Hadriel had ever attempted to express, and judging by the Fetch’s face, she had not done well with its conveyance. “But it does present an interesting quandary. I imagine it has something to do with your abilities. You are a Fetch, but it also seems that you are not a Fetch, not by tradition.”

They had started walking again. When they crossed the threshold between the grass and the pavement of the city sidewalk, Hadriel breathed a sigh of relief to have the makeshift graveyard behind them. “Do you have any way of predicting the start and end of your cycles?” she asked.

Julia was cold, and stoic, and was not one with a penchant for sympathy towards the hurt and the dying; but, believe it or not, that was a conscious decision, and entirely her own choice. Some might have deemed it a defense mechanism, given the nature of her existence: you couldn’t go around pointing people’s departing souls in the right direction without being touched by despondency. Of course, the Fetch had met numerous others of her kind who claimed not to experience affect, but it was all bullshit. They had all been human once, just like her. They might not remember it, but it didn’t stop them from feeling it. Julia was no exception.

Even the Reapers, those bastards with a shoot first, ask questions later attitude, were not void of simple human emotion. In fact, they harboured all too much of it, many gone mad with the power of their scythe and the thrill of the chase when it came to hunting down renegade souls. They felt; they just felt in all the wrong ways.
The exception to the rule, as it appeared, was Angels: not immoral, but amoral creatures of black and white, who only saw the goal, the end, and gave little thought to the means. To say that Hadriel was socially inept was a gross exaggeration of what she lacked; as soon as Julia watched that blood-soaked blade part the green and brown fibres of grass and earth, if she survived, then she would conclude the Angel was downright hopeless.

Perhaps that was why Hadriel’s apology did not resonate in her like it should have. She didn’t miss the look that flickered across her face, but even that look itself appeared to be conflicted, some confused mesh of remorse and surprise and bitter hindsight that somehow made the Angel appear even less genuine than she really was. That rag around her injured hand was more than she deserved for overlooking the Fetch’s life—especially considering that part of their deal had been the restoration of her own mortality.
Really, it was all just very rude.

“Yeah. You do that.” Julia muttered, hugging her now bare arms, with naught but a bloodstained white T-shirt as a shield against the early morning chill since she abandoned her ruined coat back the park. “Here’s a reality check, Hadriel: down here, you’re gonna want to fucking think your actions through. Here, we’ve got things like ethics, and not to mention, if someone is on our side, they are not collateral damage!”
The Fetch breathed deep, exhaling as quick and sharp as she let her anger seep out in tendrils on her breath. But it was gone almost as soon as it was there; it was impossible to be angry at someone who hardly understood what they had done wrong. Like a child breaking a favoured heirloom, bewildered at the raised voices of their parents.

Leaving the park behind them, Julia made for a stretch of red-bricked apartment buildings, coloured more vividly in the maturing sunrise. Racks of clothing long-since dried sat adjacent to one another in front of the two-feet of dead lawn in front of the doors, forgotten since they had been hung, and Julia made a beeline for the swaths of fabric. “What I’d like to know is how long I’ve been apparently deviating from the norm,” the young woman mentioned, grabbing a blue graphic T-shirt that looked like it would fit, along with a still-damp denim jacket that was far less ratty from her other one, before it had been torn to shreds. “None of this starting happening until you showed up. How are we to know you aren’t the catalyst for all of this weird shit? The Reapers, too… They’re messed up, but not so messed up that I get more than ten of them on my ass in a span of twenty-four hours. If you ask me, something’s not right.”

Without bothering to spare a glance for onlookers, Julia pulled her bloodstained white shirt over her head and replaced it with the new short-sleeved tee, accompanied by the jacket (that, as it turned out, was a size too big; but beggars can’t be choosers). For all intents and purposes, it was stealing, but Julia hardly ever saw it that way—because no one ever missed what went missing. Perhaps one of the few perks of being a Fetch, bordering on only a partially-existent plane; just like they forgot that they had ever spoken to her the moment her during the end of a cycle, nobody ever seemed to miss what she took. Convenient, perhaps, but the thrill had died off long ago.

“You realize you’re basically asking me if I know how much time will pass between people dying,” came Julia’s flat reply as she smoothed the wrinkles out of the jacket. “and the answer is no. I never have any idea how long I get to actually have a physical body before I’m called to perform my duty. The shortest cycle has lasted minutes; the longest, an entire day. And I’m not only on call for people who are going to die, but people who might die. So a shitload of false alarms also factor into that. Honestly, it’s worse than being a doctor; at least they get the choice to say no.” Wrinkling her nose at the blood on the Angel’s clothes, she turned back to the rack and pulled another shirt from it before tossing the garment to Hadriel. “Put that on; you’ve got blood on your clothes, and if people can see you, it’s gonna look pretty fucking suspicious.”

Hadriel was at a loss. She had, in her own way, and perhaps the only way she knew how, apologized to her companion and expressed as much remorse as she was presently capable of mustering. She had explained herself, put forth a perfectly logical explanation for her actions, and had even posited a theory regarding the blonde’s unlikely survival of their battle. So why, then, was Julia still harboring such anger? It radiated from the young woman like the warmth from the steadily-rising morning sun above the building rooftops, and the angel did not know how to combat it.

The Fetch was right in one regard, at least; angels were not necessarily immoral beings, but they pointedly lacked the natural morality that seemed innate in the majority of mankind. They had their traditions, they had their orders. They were a species that consisted largely of followers, beings who had no need to question ethics because their obligations were to their superiors. The higher-ranking angels, therefore, had a greater responsibility to uphold honor and goodness and logic on behalf of their underlings, but their positions in the hierarchy did not guarantee their being reasonable. And some, like Hadriel, had simply never been asked to deviate from their black-and-white norms. 

Each angel was different, after all. And like humans, some were stronger, more intelligent, more in-tune than others. Hadriel belonged to the group who was smart, quick to act, and absolute—but she was also brutal in both attitude and tactic, and she could be strict to the point of cruelty. Those characteristics seemed apparent now more than ever. The Hashmal had been hidden away in Heaven for so long that she had forgotten how to emote anything else, never having need for other feelings deep within the Second Sphere. Beneath it all she was compassionate, however, and contrary to what the Fetch might think of her now, she was quite loyal to the causes in which she believed—including the beings she loved, and those with whom she allied herself.

She followed the Fetch without a word, letting the other woman’s angry speech ring unanswered in the air between them. They arrived at a tall apartment building constructed of red brick that looked orange in the early morning light, and Hadriel watched as Julia unpinned clothing from the stretched wire in the yard. She pursed her lips. She didn’t know whether to be curious or bitter, whether it was appropriate to maintain the current state between them or to act as if nothing had ever happened. At least, she reasoned, the Fetch was answering her question—that had to be as good a sign as any.

“You cannot predict these…deaths. Or near-deaths. But how are you assigned the souls?” she asked, not accusatory but rather curious. “Is it predetermined, is it random, is it proximity? Surely more people are dying in this world at this very moment than you could possibly mark.”

Robotically, she caught the shirt Julia tossed in her direction and slid her old jacket off her shoulders to land in a puddle at her feet. She slipped off her own blood-stained v-neck and slipped the new shirt over her mass of curls. Another jacket, this one made of corduroy, swung from the line, and she tugged it free while the clothespins spun in protest. Like Julia’s denim coat, this too was much too large for the angel’s tiny frame, but it would have to do. Hadriel had no notion of fashion; she cared only for function.

Tucking her crystal necklace into her new garments, she reached down to the pile of discarded cloth at her feet and fished out her bloodstained blade. She wiped it clean on her old shirt before carefully threading it into the sleeve of her updated attire, careful to avoid slicing the bandage Julia had fastened on her wounded hand.

“Thank you,” she said, although the timing was so bizarre that it was unclear what, exactly, the Hashmal was grateful for. Continuing as though nothing were strange, she asked, “What is it that you normally do between cycles?”

A stalwart authority, and a child. This was the strange dichotomy that Julia observed in the Angel, each and every time she spoke. Hadriel was so self-assured in her motives and her actions, and yet so naïve in other respects where the Fetch might have expected her to be more informed. Perhaps, then, they were both guilty of predetermined assumptions: just as easily as the Angel could look down on Julia and assume her inferior in nature and knowledge, the Fetch was just as quick to assume that Hadriel knew too much—about the above and beyond, as well as the below, here on earth.

Perhaps that was the reason why it was too tiring to remain annoyed with her, ludicrous though her questions might be. She knew nothing about Fetches; from where she hailed, she was too important, and earth was not her usual jurisdiction. Being angry over such technicalities was nothing but a waste of time and energy, and while the blonde was not lacking for the former, she did not have an endless supply of the latter.

“You know, I really wish I had these answers.” Julia laughed at the irony of it all. Here she thought pairing up with an Angel would get her some answers to long, long-sought questions; and, instead, Hadriel was parroting the very inquiries that had plagued the Fetch for what felt like eons. If an Angel doesn’t have the answers, then who the hell does? Maybe this absentee God of which she spoke?
Raking her fingers through her hair, she returned to the sidewalk, not bothering to look over her shoulder to see if the Angel followed; she could hear her soft footfalls not far behind. “I wish I could say for sure; hell, I wish I knew for sure. But, when it comes down to it, I don’t know much more than you, sister. So all I can do is guess.

“That said, my best guess is that the answer is both. From what I know, this is my city; I can’t remember ever attending the death or near-death of someone in a place that I don’t recognize. Maybe it's because I died here, too; I can't say for sure. But there are a fuck-tonne of people here, and more death than even I can realistically deal with on a daily basis… I’m not the only Fetch in this city.” Again, it was just a best guess, and all the young woman could do was shrug for emphasis. “If I’m assigned to someone, from what I gather, they’re on my agenda until they finally die. The only time a soul who I was summoned to is ever out of my hands is when they go renegade; at that point, they’re fair game for Reapers.”

Julia wasn’t paying any special attention to where she was going; after multiple ambushes by Reapers the previous evening, she was doing well to put one foot in front of the other. It wasn’t until a familiar tavern came into sight that a spark lit the burnt out wick inside of her, lending some life to her tired face. “You wanna know what I do in-between cycles? Come on, I’ll show you. Don’t prepare to be amazed or anything.”
Picking up her pace, she flashed her heavenly companion a wry smile and pushed on through the city’s slowly awakening streets, all the way to the only tavern in town that opened as early as it closed late, just as good a hub for breakfast as for beer.

The front doors had barely been unlocked for a solid five minutes when Julia stepped inside with Hadriel in tow, grinning at the surprised expression on the owner’s face. “What? I guess I just can’t get enough of your hospitality, Mal.”

“Do you even know what time it is? This is weird, even for you, Jules. I’ve never seen you during morning hours.” The older man shook his head of salt and pepper hair. “Everything all right? Who’s your friend?”

“She’s not—” Julia paused, stopping herself just in time before she made this look even stranger than it already did. After clearing her throat and recollecting her thoughts, she went on, “This is Hadriel. She’s not from around here. We both kind of had a rough time, last night, and you said it’s pretty quiet in here until about 10AM…”

“By all means; you’re both welcome to stay.” Malachy informed them warmly, tossing the dishrag he’d been using to clean the tables over his shoulder. “I hope you’ve got a hankering for coffee, though. We don’t start up with the booze here until noon.”

“A couple of coffees would be great,” The Fetch agreed, taking a seat in the corner, away from the blinding beams of early morning sunlight. “This is where I come between cycles.” Came her reply to the Angel’s most recent question. “It’s… pretty safe, here. It’s been my haunt for the past five years, but… in another five, or so, I’ll probably have to find somewhere else. Mal over there is sharp; he’d get suspicious when suddenly I don’t look as though I have aged in ten years.” Her tone took on an embarrassingly melancholy current as she looked down at scratched tabletop. “I can’t speak for the other Fetches, but basically, this is what I do. Find a place where I can pretend to be real for a while, until reality insists I move on, before I rouse suspicion… Not gonna lie, it isn’t exactly all that ideal, but...hey.”

Something glowing faintly beneath the collar of the Angel's shirt caught Julia's eye, and before she could think twice, the Fetch reached across the table to tug on the cord around Hadriel's neck. "I thought I told you that if we survive, you were going to fucking get rid of this." The Fetch hissed under her breath, eyes wide with paranoia. "If that's what keeps drawing the Reapers to us, then we could be putting people in danger just being here!" Technically, the Reapers' scythes were not designed to tear living human flesh... But everything was going awry, and Julia was not so certain of what she thought she knew, anymore.

Except for amongst their own kind, angels were not quick to trust. They were natural skeptics, believing simultaneously in the correctness of their God (or so had been the case prior to the Divide) and in the incorrectness of those too far removed from His presence. From afar, Hadriel had always presumed the human race was too foolhardy and disconnected. They simply could not be depended upon to resist the temptation of evil; they hadn’t the strength of mind or character to hold their ground and stay true to a cause larger than themselves. It wasn’t in their nature, and the Hashmal could hardly hold them at fault for that.

Julia was proving herself to be different. She was not human, Hadriel knew, but she had been once—and, if that were true, it counted quite a lot in the woman’s favor. For any creature conscious of the passage of time, immortality could be daunting; few, if any, emerged completely unscathed from being thrust into the throes of forever, especially when they had once known the prospect of finality. It was a testament to the Fetch’s strength and endurance that she had existed so long in her position without having gone completely mad, having lost all capacity to relate to a world (and life) so dependent on the passing of minutes and hours.

And so the angel was presented with yet another internal quandary, a contradiction whose dissonance was too strong to maintain allegiance with both sides of the realization. It was precisely the Fetch’s humanity—the very substance of which the angel was dubious, the inherent faults of mankind that she had been designed to distrust—that drew Hadriel in, that proved to her that this young woman was far more than the initial impression had revealed. This Fetch had beaten the odds, and more than that, she had agreed to aid in the angel’s quest with her own unique set of skills—all for the hope of returning to the mortal realm. How much of Julia’s success was a direct result of her unusual abilities, Hadriel did not know, but she was in no position to complain; if ignorance was the price, she would be forced to pay it in installments until a better offer came.

And so, it seemed, would the Fetch. Neither of them had the answers, and the questions they voiced only served to frustrate the opposite party with lack of information. Hadriel pursed her lips as the blonde explained herself, listening carefully to responses that were decidedly non-answers, and was surprised to find herself outside the very establishment before which she’d smote Kale, their first Reaper antagonist, when at last she resurfaced from her clouded thoughts. She followed Julia inside, completely ignoring the greetings from Malachy, and silently took a seat when the Fetch selected a table. Had the woman not already been familiar with the angel’s bizarre demeanor, she might have mistaken Hadriel’s expression for a childish pout—which it may as well have been, given her current state of silent discontent.

But that did not stop the Fetch from reaching out to snatch away the glowing crystal around the angel’s neck. The chain, already damaged from the Reaper’s assault, easily gave way to the sudden grip and tug; Hadriel bristled. “What do you propose we do with it, then?” the angel demanded softly, balling her hands into fists in her lap. “A human soul left behind, however small a fragment, poses more danger to innocent lives than if we keep it and protect it. We need to focus on larger matters, and this may be the key to some kind of explanation.” Unsure if she actually believed the words she spoke, she cleared her throat. "Explanations, it seems, are few and far between."

“Oh, come now, Hadriel, surely it’s not as bad as all that.”

The familiar voice startled her, and she turned her head quickly to face its source immediately to her right. Her brows knitted together. “Muriel,” she said quietly, tersely. “What are you doing here?”

“You never checked in per our arranged schedule,” the other angel, dressed entirely too suavely for Julia’s establishment of choice, said casually. He pushed a pair of thick-rimmed spectacles up his nose and tilted his head curiously, suddenly aware of the Fetch’s presence across the table. “Who’s this?” he asked politely.

Hadriel looked more confused now than irritated. “You know who—”

Muriel silenced her with a friendly sidelong look, and he extended his hand to the blonde woman. “Forgive Hadriel,” he said, smiling crookedly. “My name is Muriel, Archangel of the Third Sphere. And you are…?”

It wasn’t uncommon for Julia to speak before fully thinking through the message she intended to convey; and, likewise, Hadriel was not the only one lacking in the skills for proper human interactions, at times (if her reaching for the Angel’s necklace without inquiry was any indication). For all the Fetch liked to fancy herself a pseudo-mortal, fading in and out of existence a she did (and therefore posed with the opportunity to interact with humankind), she was unpracticed specifically when faced with adversity and confusion. She could talk to Malachy like she was nothing unusual; and she did, night after night, just as she had for the past handful of years. But the barkeep was an unassuming individual, easy to speak to and relatively accepting of peoples’ faults, given the wide array of individuals that set foot in his tavern.

But the more Julia thought about it (which, often she did not, for the sake of her own sanity and preservation of her ego), he was the only one with whom she could have a prolonged conversation, the only person who did not make her trip over her own tongue trying to interpret intentional rudeness from sarcasm. Truth be told, Julia not only did not have friends because she was afraid they would find her out to be something other than mortal (it wasn’t a lie so much as it was an excuse), but because she simply did not trust herself to make them. People were unpredictable, and there was little enough that she was able to predict in her sad partial-existence; it was a burden that she did not need, and a luxury she simply did not trust herself to handle.

That, however, was far too deep an insight than she was willing to share with the Angel across from her at the table. And for all Julia’s faults, Hadriel still paled in comparison as a socially capable creature. Not to mention, interpersonal intelligence wasn’t the only area of expertise in which the Fetch was beginning to suspect her unlikely comrade lacked. 
“How the hell am I supposed to answer that? I don’t go around stealing fragments of peoples’ souls.” The blonde argued under her breath, just in time for Malachy to return with a coffee for each of them. Thankfully, the older man hardly spared Julia more than a curious glance before being on his way, and returning to the duties of his establishment.

Turning the pendant over in her hands, she quickly decided it was far too creepy for her liking, and set it down on the table between them, deciding instead to occupy her hands with the mug of hot coffee. “So did it not occur to you, prior to stealing part of that poor sucker’s soul, that it would put a fucking homing beacon on you for the Reapers? No, of course it wouldn’t… you hardly fucking knew about Reapers until about fifty of them did us in last night.” Once again, the irony of this higher being’s ignorance was not lost on the blonde. “How is it ‘dangerous’ to anyone, anyway? And what the hell kind of answers do you think it’s going to provide? Because if you ask me, all it’s done so far is gotten us into some real deep shit…”

And she could have gone on, were in not for the sudden interruption by another presence at the table, who had not been there just seconds ago. Hadriel’s startle response was nothing compared to Julia’s who, unfamiliar as she was with this man in smart spectacles and with a suave haircut, jumped about a foot from her seat and jerked her coffee mug, spilling a third of the hot beverage over the table. “But how did… You weren’t here just…” It occurred to her soon enough that trying to rationalize anything that pertained to Hadriel (this man included, as they appeared to be acquainted) was only a waste of time and energy, so the Fetch exhaled her exhaustion and incredulity and slowly sat back down. The dude certainly had been discreet about his entrance; no one else in the establishment appeared to have noticed.

“Right now? I’m a lot of things, confused, tired and a little be irritated, to name a few. Oh, and I’m a Fetch, though something tells me you’re already aware.” The young woman responded, sarcasm coming as a natural defense to the fact she’d been taken off guard. But this guy—yet another Angel, although she shouldn’t have been surprised—had more of a way with words, gestures and overall affect than did Hadriel. That ought to have earned a little bit of respect; a handshake, at the very least, so she obliged the well-dressed newcomer by accepting his hand, however tentatively. “But if you’re looking for a name, it’s Julia. And since I’m at a total loss, maybe you can convince your friend, here, to ditch this little fragment of human soul she decided to take,” she added in a low-toned whisper. “Because it almost got us—well, at least, me—killed multiple times last night. It’s drawing Reapers out way, and I’ve had about enough of them, thanks very much.”

“I was asking for a name.” From behind his thick-rimmed black spectacles, Muriel’s eyes met the Fetch’s, and he smiled hospitably. “It’s nice to meet you, Julia. I’ve heard reports of you from Hadriel.” He pursed his lips before breaking into a kind smile, glancing to his angel companion and leaning back in his seat. With his arms folded across his chest, he appeared contemplative and thoughtful, a misplaced academic clad in tailored tweed struggling to determine his place in the world. He looked comically out of place even in the bar’s early morning vacancy—a character from an early twentieth century novel reanimated and thrown into an alternate universe without a debriefing.

The young woman at his side reached up to rake her fingers through her thick mane of curls, her expression unreadable. Hadriel was always pleased to see her angelic companion; Muriel had proven himself a thousand times over a loyal and intelligent ally, perhaps even a friend. But now, in the aftermath of the multiple Reaper attacks, she felt a pang of concern—not for his safety, necessarily, but for the way in which he might perceive the assaults. She had emerged victorious from each battle, it was true, but she had resorted to drastic measures that she could not sweep beneath the metaphorical rug. It was important to her that she have Muriel’s respect. For him to question her logic—or worse, her orders—would be hugely detrimental to the Hashmal’s status, even if only in her own eyes.

“But Hadriel is a creature of very few words, and she is not the most receptive being in Creation,” the light-haired angel continued, reaching over with his arm to drape it over the back of Hadriel’s chair. He pressed a finger into her shoulder gently, but it was obvious the teasing nature of the gesture was completely lost on the inexperienced Hashmal. Muriel looked to Julia. “I would like to know more about you,” he stated simply, ignoring Hadriel’s bemused stare in his peripheral vision. “What I want to know are the things you have not divulged to our mutual friend.”

Hadriel narrowed her eyes in silent understanding. She was proud—perhaps entirely too proud—but at the same time she was unbendingly factual. And the fact was, Muriel had far more experience with humankind than she did, both from careful observation and direct interaction. From her space in the Second Sphere, Hadriel had virtually no contact with the mortal realm if she did not seek it specifically, whereas Muriel had originated far closer. It was one of the many benefits of their comradeship; he could read her shortcomings and make up for them with his strengths, just as the opposite was true. They were inseparable, as close to siblings as was possible for angels of differing Spheres—though it was perhaps difficult to detect on Earth.

“What I mean, Julia,” Muriel went on, “is any little detail you can possibly provide, like your preferred brand of cigarette, or your recurring dreams—you do dream, do you not? But what I am really curious about…” He paused, his gaze straying to the necklace the Fetch had discarded on the table as if seeing it for the first time since his appearance. Reaching out, he took it in his hand and closed his fist around the glowing crystal, his expression falling just enough to indicate his surprise. But even with Julia's prompt, he said nothing about it, even as Hadriel seemed to stiffen at his side.

“What I’m most curious about,” he repeated, momentarily ignoring what he had just clasped in his grip, “is your memory. What memory is your earliest, as a Fetch?” He held out his hand towards the other angel without breaking his gaze from the blonde. Hadriel opened her palm, taking back the fateful necklace and holding it in her lap, out of sight. She had the distinct suspicion that Muriel was unhappy, but without the extreme cues of Julia's anger she had a difficult time confirming any negative emotion from the easygoing archangel.

Arms folded across her chest, Julia looked from one Angel to the other and back again. The confident but stoic expression of the woman brought her no more comfort and inspired no more trust than did the reassured and nonchalant demeanor of the man, and it was with a start that the Fetch realized how this suddenly felt more like an interrogation than a peaceful morning coffee, after an entire night of fighting off Reapers. A point that she did not hesitate to bring up, reminded by the way her foot bumped into the scythe beneath the table that Hadriel had procured.

“Okay… in case you didn’t understand the first time around,” she began slowly, uneasy under the scrutiny of one of Hadriel’s kind, let alone two. “There are Reapers out to get me. In the past twenty four hours, I am pretty sure I have almost fucking died aboutfour times, and fought off—how many, Hadriel? Ten? More? Does this not mean anything to either of you?” Apparently it didn’t, if their expressions were anything to go by. Come to think of it, short of doing what had to be done (slaying the Reapers with her bright, angelic light, and then by way of that eerie little dagger), the woman with the mane of curls hadn’t reacted much at all on any of the near-death accounts. Hadriel hadn’t feared for her life much more than she had cared for Julia’s, at least during their last encounter, when that dagger was supposed to have killed any living thing within miles of that park.

Reaching for her coffee, the Fetch took a long swig, wincing at the way the hot liquid burned her throat in excess. “Let me make something clear, Muriel; we don’t have a “mutual friend”. She—” Julia angled her head towards Hadriel in emphasis, “very nearly got me killed, thanks to that little knife I’m sure you already know about. What was it about it, Hadriel? It’s supposed to basically kill anything that’s not an Angel when you ram it into the ground?” No, she was far from letting that go, and would probably perseverate on it for days to come; nevermind that the Angel had saved her life more than once. In Julia’s mind, that didn’t count when Hadriel continually put her in danger.

But that, she realized, was more than Muriel deserved to know; particularly that she survived some angelic smiting that should not have left her standing. She didn’t trust him; she didn’t have a reason to. The only reason she was at all invested in Hadriel and her cause was for the promise that, when this madness had resolved, she would be reunited with her mortality. Were that possibility not on the table, she have turned away from the very beginning. Just because she was an anomaly as far as Fetches went did not give these celestial beings leave to fucking study her. And if this Muriel thought for one moment that his slightly more personable demeanor would convince her to open up, he was wrong.

“I’m not… there isn’t anything about me to know.” She sighed, overtired and irate. “And there sure as hell isn’t anything special about my brand of cigarettes or any other ridiculous detail you’re looking for. I’m a Fetch; I get summoned when people die. For the rest of the time, I’m in and out of reality, depending on where I am in any given cycle. And I really don’t understand what Ihave to do with this war you’re both involved in, because let me tell you, there was nothing weird about me or my existence until your friend here forced her way into it. And now, suddenly, I’m able to keep souls at bay and ‘save lives’; maybe Hadriel is the one you should be looking at, not me. And, for the record, I don’t dream.”

That last bit was, however, only a half truth. As far as the blonde knew, she dreamed just like everyone else, but it was memory of her dreams that evaded her; she couldn’t remember the last time anything from a dream had ever occurred to her during the day. At the odd time, a snippet of something—an image, a thought—would force its way to the front of her mind, only to fizzle out before she was able to properly process it. But if she couldn’t remember, then it only stood to reason (in her mind, anyway) that it couldn’t be too important to begin with.

“…memory? Are you serious?” Julia put down her coffee before she feared she’d feel inclined to throw it. “What is it with you Angels not knowing a fucking thing about anything beneath you? I’m a Fetch; I don’t have an earliest memory. As far as I know, somewhere along the line, I died, and this is what I became. I don’t remember being alive, or dying, or the first soul I guided to death; hell, the name I died with might not even be 'Julia'; it's just something I've always been called. I feel like I’ve always been what I am now…” Her voice trailed off, then, knowing full well that she hadn’t always been this meager half-existing entity. She’d been mortal, once, and Hadriel was going to help her regain that. But just trying to imagine what it had been like, that time before she'd been condemned to this half-existence... The Fetch furrowed her brow and pinched the bridge of her nose. It gave her a headache just thinking about it, sharp pains behind her eyes, so she stopped trying. “Seriously, though, don’t you guys have bigger fish to fry than picking my brain for answers I don’t have? I don’t even see how you think I can help, at all... Not unless you've got a hell of a lot more dying people who you don't want dead.” And even then, she didn't feel that her uncanny ability to force a dying person's soul to stay put wasn't something that Hadriel or her kind couldn't do, given their superiority in the celestial hierarchy.

The ease at which Muriel had adopted his human flesh was startling next to Hadriel, who was stumbling along like a fish out of water with every confidence in her nonexistent legs. Like anything, she knew, adopting human form came with its own set of requirements to practice, and she simply had not put in the time to learn. Had Hadriel been anyone but Hadriel, she might have found the archangel’s natural aptitude discouraging or even irritating; being who she was, however, Muriel’s comparative expertise garnered nothing but complete and total apathy from the Hashmal.

But what he possessed in more advanced social skills he lacked in battle experience, and that was where Hadriel had him bested. He might have had a point in cutting straight to the personal chase, but the facts were precisely as the Fetch spelled out—the two women had been attacked more than once in the past twenty-four hours by creatures whose numbers only seemed to multiply, and the only reason they had survived was because of Hadriel’s dagger. Even that had posed a great risk—one that the curly-haired angel had recklessly been willing to take—and it was only by very strange happenstance that the both of them had emerged relatively unscathed. 

“It’s important to know what she remembers, even if they aren’t human memories,” Muriel insisted, looking naively surprised when not only Julia protested his prodding, but Hadriel as well. He could feel her cold stare at his side, and he resisted turning to meet it until he could tolerate the sidelong attention no more. “Hadriel, you cannot pretend to know what I am getting at with this,” he said, his tone suddenly as stonily matter-of-fact as the angel’s he addressed.

The young woman quirked a brow. “I will not presume to understand your motive behind this interrogation,” she admitted, tone icy. She rested her feet on the scythe’s staff beneath the table, drawing her posture a little taller in her seat. That small change in stature was enough to humble Muriel, who suddenly seemed to shrink; in an unspoken exchange, she had established her superior rank and momentarily pulled the focus from his line of questions to her own line of concerns. “The Fetch—Julia,” she corrected quickly, “is right to be wary. We have been targeted by Reapers who are relentless in their pursuit.” Pursing her lips, she reached into her sleeve and drew out the long dagger, placing it parallel to the table’s edge and nudging it towards Muriel.

His eyes narrowed. “So it is true,” he said, neither critical nor celebratory.

Hadriel nodded once, then opened her injured palm. Clad in Julia’s stained makeshift bandage, the pain radiating from her wound had thankfully dulled, but the cloth was still damp with fresh crimson blood. “We do not know why Julia was spared in the blast,” she went on, returning the dagger to her jacket and taking a nonchalant sip of her steaming coffee. “But in combination with her ability to manipulate the destiny of souls, I believe her significance is far greater than she might think, even if we do not yet understand her role. And there is a great and powerful connection between a human soul and Heaven.” She looked to Julia. “They may not reside within our Spheres, but they are a part of it nevertheless. And you, by nature, are part of that cycle. That is perhaps why the Reapers are so desperate to recover this piece.” She opened her uninjured hand and allowed the necklace to fall unceremoniously on the table. “It is too powerful to have loose. And you are too powerful to have loose.”

Muriel nodded, but he looked skeptical. “Do you think it wise to hold on to the necklace when it does nothing but summon enemies?” he asked, shifting his gaze to the blonde Fetch before studying the glowing crystal between them. “It may hold power, but it is not power that can be utilized for our purpose. Or any purpose, really, other than its own.”

Hadriel gestured to the young woman across the table. “It is as Julia has told me,” she proclaimed, not without a hint of pride. “It is not about power, it is about balance. I believe this stray energy has upset this balance, which in turn tips off the Reapers. Julia has also seen fit to use her abilities on other occasions, which has likely angered them as well.” The angel’s voice contained no trace of accusation. Facts, pure and simple, were what fell from her lips, and Muriel couldn’t help but find amusement in her delivery. He looked to their companion, who seemed, as ever, far from charmed.

Hadriel, oblivious, tilted her head curiously to one side as she addressed Julia. “Do you truly think the Reapers would leave us be were we to surrender the pendant?”

And, all of a sudden, it was as if she was not there at all.
Although the barrage of complicated questions came to an abrupt halt, as the two Angels spoke amongst one another, their open conversation that blatantly and shamelessly concerned Julia did nothing to temper her early-morning ire. The only thing worse than being subject to an impromptu interrogation was to turn their backs to her (and not even that much; physically doing so might have been more polite) and speak as if she wasn’t there. As if she wasn’t privy to a single word they were saying. Perhaps they had nothing to hide (which, in a way, should have been reassuring), but this wasn’t exactly what she had in mind for passing her precious moments as a fully corporeal being on this early morning.

“Do you mind?” She said at last, tense fingers gripping the ceramic mug of coffee in front of her. “Am I so close to the end of this cycle that even you two can’t see me anymore? Because if you’re going to talk about me like I’m not sitting right in front of both of you, then you might as well go fly off to your war room and do your planning there.” 
But they weren’t listening, their attention having fully shifted to one another now, in a debate that was as silent as it was vocal. “Hadriel, you cannot pretend to know what I am getting at with this,” the newcomer was saying, with his partner promptly agreeing. That they didn’t even appear to be on the same wavelength as far as planning went did not exactly inspire confidence in the Fetch, especially not where it concerned her.

Nevertheless, Hadriel at least had the decency to acknowledge the startling number of Reaper attacks to which the two of them had been subject in the past twenty-four hours. It was far from enough to make the Fetch feel Validated, but at least she was no longer excluded from the conversation by some invisible wall that divided a third of the table. “Wait… what exactly is that supposed to mean? That I’m too ‘dangerous’ to be loose? The hell do you think you’re gonna do, put me on a fucking leash?” Julia furrowed her eyebrows, looking accusingly from Hadriel to Muriel and back again, silently faring them to confirm. “Because from what I’ve seen, the only ‘danger’ I am to anyone is myself, right now. I didn’t see anyone else almost about to get wiped out by about ten different Reapers lately.”

But it wasn’t all as one-sided as the Fetch tried to make it out to be, of that she was reminded by Hadriel’s words, and a mildly amused glance from Muriel. Colour blossomed faintly in her pale cheeks, and she offered a simple shrug in response. “All right—all right, yes. So I’ve been experimenting a little; can you blame me? You didn’t seem to have any answers for why I can do what I can, which goes against the entire nature of what I am.” She raised an eyebrow pointedly at Hadriel, but her expression was defeated. “Kale came after me because he detected some souls pegged for death had not completed their journey; I should have realized the Reapers might be sensitive to that. And, hell, knowing that, maybe I shouldn’t have saved that bike-accident kid off the highway. But, if you recall, the next couple of those bastards attacked out of vengeance because you killed Kale. Taken that far, I’d say we’re equally responsible. But…”

Julia’s gaze returned to the faint glow of the pendant, and she pursed her lips contemplatively. “I feel like there’s more to it than what either of us did. Maybe more to it than even this stupid necklace; I’ve never known the Reapers to be that… well, you saw.” Sighing, the Fetch turned her hands palms up, indicating that she was no more certain of anything than either of the heavenly beings sitting across from her. “But this morning, when you woke me up… What else would have attracted that many of them, all at once? It’s the only variable left that hasn’t been dealt with… but to answer your question, no. I don’t think letting those bastards get their hands on that soul fragment is the answer. They might be pissed that it was taken, but if it’s some source of volatile power, then I wouldn’t trust them to get their hands on it.” It all sounded too ominous, to her… Renegade souls were Reapers’ concern. Not shards of souls. It didn’t belong in their hands any more than it belonged in the hands of the Angel.

“How about this.” After a moment’s thought, Julia sat straighter in her seat. “You—” She jabbed a finger a Hadriel, “—lay off killing Reapers. Incapacitate them, break their legs, I don’t care so long as they're still breathing. And I’ll lay off altering what happens with a soul at the moment of death. If this is really about balance, and a disturbance in the balance has the Reapers all pissy, then we restore it. That said…” she closed her fingers around the pendant, which felt surprisingly warm to the touch. The essence of what it contained remained very much alive. “What are the chances we can give this back to Anthony Brennan? The guy’s alive: that’s all you wanted, right? Put this shit back where it belongs, and I’ll forget I ever discovered I’ve got some sort of weird influence on souls. I’ll make good on our deal, Hadriel, but any further disturbances you decide to create? Leave me the hell out of it. Admit it, you don’t need the Reapers on your ass any more than I do, and I don’t want to find out exactly who either of us will have to answer to if we kill any more of them. ”

Hadriel looked to Julia in confusion, her red-brown stare looking particularly crimson in the low light of Malachy’s establishment. Nevertheless, it was an expression of confusion rather than aggression that illuminated her preternatural gaze, and she tilted her head slightly to one side as she studied the Fetch opposite the angels. Human interaction—or rather, mortal interaction—was so unlike that of divine communication that she could have laughed, although even that would have been strange. Reading Muriel was as simple as looking beyond his physical manifestation; so connected were they by both their united cause and their close comradeship that the Hashmal and the Archangel often did not need to interact at all—rather, they could simply intuit one another’s thoughts and actions as though they were their own.

It was not so with Julia, as the Fetch was so keenly aware. Muriel’s place in the complex angelic hierarchy had afforded him more opportunity and more natural ability to become attuned with humanity than Hadriel’s comparatively sheltered position. But even still, and even with all the missteps already on her record, the curly-haired angel had developed a bond with the strange Fetch that she was not yet entirely aware of. As she searched the blonde woman’s face now, the angel managed somehow to transcend her own characteristic bemusement and catch a glimpse—for a split moment that came and went so fast she was tempted to dismiss it as a misfire of her mortal neurons—of what she could only describe as Julia’s essence. Her furrowed brow relaxed, and her entire posture shifted slightly forward, a move out of character for an angel who tried so hard to distance herself. But she shrugged it away with a literal lift of one shoulder, settling back into the vinyl booth as if nothing had happened.

Muriel had not failed to notice this momentary shift in his fellow angel’s demeanor, and a quick glance to Julia confirmed his assumption that she had witnessed it too. Even as Hadriel resumed her previous mannerisms, he could sense by the way she gently tapped the scythe beneath the table with her toes—even if she was no longer aware of it herself—that something was amiss. Not even amiss, he realized, pursing his lips; he was frustratingly unable to identify just what it was that had changed within his friend and, perhaps more importantly, what had prompted the shift.

“But we can see you regardless of where you are in the cycle,” the Hashmal was going on, unfolding her arms from across her chest and resting her fingers on the edge of the table. “Why would it matter where—”

“Hadriel.” Muriel’s interruption was patient, and the look he cast to Julia was almost apologetic—almost. “It is common courtesy to include those in physical company in present conversations. She was merely protesting that we were leaving her out of it when the discussion clearly involves her.”

It was clear from the Hashmal’s unchanged expression that she did not truly comprehend what she deemed a bizarre social nicety, but she knew better than to protest. Instead, she listened to the Fetch’s reasoning, nodding when she figured it was appropriate to affirm her understanding, following Muriel’s lead in terms of showing any sort of reaction to her words. Neither angel spoke until she had finished, and when silence followed, Hadriel (not surprisingly, but not altogether rudely either) was the first to jump to fill it.

“You’re right,” she said simply. “The Reapers are an unfortunate adversary. Less for us than for them in the grand scheme, admittedly, but I think Muriel will agree that matters have taken far too complicated a turn.”

Muriel nodded vigorously. “They have no place in this war. They needn’t be involved at all.”

“And yet they are trailing us.” Hadriel’s gaze fixed on the glowing pendant. “I am inclined to agree with the Fe—with Julia.” She cleared her throat. “The fragment is not the answer. They may not like it, but neither is it a suitable enough reason for the trailing and the violence. It seems they are using it as an excuse to cover up something larger, something perhaps worse. But whether or not it is happenstance that it coincides with our conflict, I cannot say. Neither can we determine whether their motives are ultimately offensive or defensive.”

A sigh escaped her lips, and she looked once again to the blonde across the table. Despite the angel’s youthful appearance, she seemed suddenly a thousand times older. “The arrangement is logical and fair. You stop manipulating souls, we…” A glance from Muriel interrupted her, earning a pause. “I,” she subsequently corrected, “stop killing Reapers.” She was quite pleased that she had not been forbidden from wounding them, but she kept that piece of information to herself as she went on. “In the meantime we shall find a way to reunite Brennan’s soul.” The angel sounded decidedly less certain about this, but could see no way around Julia’s absolute resolve. There would be time for negotiation later, she reasoned, and despite her relatively limited knowledge of human souls (those matters were for far lesser angels) she highly doubted they would be successful in repairing what Hadriel had purposely shattered.

“Do you know how much information to which the average Reaper is privy?” She raked a hand through her mass of brown curls. “I could not help but notice the way some of them yielded to the silver haired creature in our last conflict. I am thinking, of course, of torturing information from them.” The way she spoke the words was chilling in the casual nature of the delivery; even Muriel seemed surprised, but his lack of protest betrayed his agreement. The scythe beneath the table rang a metallic chime as the Hashmal purposely kicked it with her heel. “I can see no other method of discovering their motives, which we know now lie beyond a silly pendant. I would not, of course, lure them intentionally to us,” she assured Julia, making certain the Fetch knew she would make good on her promise. “But if one presents itself, do you have qualms against this? More importantly,” she added, lowering her voice and leaning in, “you have a unique position in this conflict. Would you be inclined to participate?”

“They have no place in this war. They needn’t be involved at all.”

Julia felt her cheeks go irrationally warm at Muriel’s simple observation, as the heavy feeling of bitterness settled on her small shoulders. He was correct; the Reapers were not designed for war (nor were they designed to reign all Hell on Fetches, but that was another story entirely). Their purpose was to track down and to reap rebel souls that resisted the journey of death, those that ultimately evolved into the poltergeists and restless spirits that tormented the world of the living. They were essential players in the journey of the soul, as were Fetches, and no matter the bearing of their curved scythes (which, incidentally, were not built to slay souls, but to force them to move on), the Reapers were not soldiers.

But neither were the Fetches, doomed beings at the mercy of Death and the process of dying, creatures that never had a say as to when they performed their jobs or how often. Burdened with a relatively solitary life, at the complete and utter mercy of the cycles that dictated whether or not they were visible to the living. Forgotten more than remembered, basically going through the motions of ‘living’ without actually ‘being alive’, or experiencing any of the benefits of what it meant to walk the earth. Neither were such creatures readily equipped in any way to be players in a war, when they could hardly stand up to the Reapers who chose to torment them…

So who the fuck decided that Julia had to be wrapped up in all of this?

The Fetch watched the exchange between the two angels with moderate fascination, once again coming to the same conclusion that she always did, when her feelings toward Hadriel tended towards aggravated. The Angel’s comprehension of human conduct was so poor that she was entirely unable to perceive her social offenses. Perhaps the same went for her decidedly distinguished companion: Muriel might have had a better sense of human beings’ social norms and how to conduct a proper conversation, but that didn’t mean the pragmatics of speech nor the content of what was spoken and what effect it had on the listener were obvious to him.

Then again, her uncanny ability to redirect the course of a soul perhaps—in these two angels’ eyes—made her something more than what she was. And automatically pegged her as a useful tool in this war about which she knew so little…

“Glad we could come to this agreement,” the Fetch said at last, leaning casually back in her seat. The nonchalance was a stark contrast to the tightness of her shoulders, suggesting this felt more significant than she was letting on. “I stop my games, you stop yours. You’ve got a deal.”

But it went beyond just that, Julia soon discovered as the Angel with brunette ringlets went on. It wasn’t just a matter of falling back into her old ways, because she was already involved, and already in trouble. What had made her think it would be so simple as to just return to Anthony Brennan what was rightfully his (if it were possible to repair a soul; even Julia did not know) and step away from it all?
“What do you mean? How am I supposed to know what a Reaper knows?” The fetch wrinkled her nose, rolling her stiff shoulders back. “I mean, they probably know as much as I do, plus a bit more. They can track the way a soul moves, they somehow have the ability to figure out when one has gone renegade as opposed to completing its journey… but whatever little game they’ve got going on that has their kind amassing outside their own damned jurisdictions, I have no freaking idea. Maybe if we’re really nice and take one out for tea, they’ll let us in the know. What are you getting at, exactly?”

Only after she got the answer was she sorry she ever asked. The plan apparently had nothing to do with taking anyone out for tea…
Torture. Hadriel—an Angel—wanted to torture a Reaper. And not even as a last resort! The fuck was this all about? Whatever happened to the holy, merciful being archetype? The Fetch’s eyes widened just for a second, incredulity settling in her stomach like lead. Torture. Okay… “I don’t care.” She shrugged, though the catch in her voice might have indicated otherwise. The very thought of Hadriel torturing something… no, fuck it; the thought was too fucking creepy to even picture. Almost as creepy as the last half of her inquiry.

“You ask me that as if I have a choice.” She rolled her eyes, standing from her seat as more people began to filter into Malachy’s restaurant. The Fetch wasn’t particularly in a ‘people’ sort of mood this morning; it was time to move on. “Look, if it gets us answers, and it doesn’t get me killed, I’ll do what I have to. Now let’s go before your creepy smile scares the other patrons.”

On her way to the door, Julia paused as she made to move past Muriel, a curious expression on her face mirroring the curious thought that suddenly manifest in her mind. “This is going to sound weird, but… you seem… I don’t know. Familiar...” And she couldn’t even put her finger on why… Her blue eyes took in the set of his jaw and the contours of his face, but she still couldn’t pit him to any sort of memory. Perhaps he just had one of those familiar faces…

Though Muriel seemed lost in thought, his gaze cast downward, his curly-haired companion fixed her attention squarely on the blonde Fetch sitting across from them. The Hashmal may have been socially inept, but she was nevertheless uncannily observant—and the catch in Julia’s voice as she claimed not to care had not escaped Hadriel’s notice. She was not entirely certain what it meant, but it had seemed to her like a falter, a hesitance. But she wasn’t adept enough to comprehend the subtle implications—that Julia was perhaps not as comfortable with the idea as she expressed verbally—and dismissed it solely as another difference between them. The angel’s frighteningly steadfast resolve rarely allotted for such displays, a hardness that Hadriel had always considered a strength.

“You have a choice over some things,” the young woman said thoughtfully, cradling her chin in her palm as she rested her elbow on the table. “Participating in the breaking of a Reaper is one of those things.” For a moment, she appeared altogether childlike and innocent, her brown hair cascading over her slender shoulders to frame her heart-shaped face and her wide eyes. Muriel, watching her now, realized that perhaps this was one reason the Second Sphere angels rarely adopted mortal form. She was ruthless and terrifying in a costume of bright youth and curls. He had seen what she could do in Heaven; there was a reason she was a key player in their War, the least of which being her willingness to go to extremes. To have that much brutality packaged in the flesh and blood of a small human girl…well, it gave Muriel sudden pause.

The suavely-dressed angel cleared his throat and slid from the booth, taking Julia’s suggestion to leave after realizing Hadriel would be less likely to oblige. The Hashmal followed, pausing at the edge of the table to retrieve the scythe while the Fetch and the Archangel went ahead.

Muriel trailed after the blonde quietly, weaving their way towards the front door through the maze of mostly-empty tables. Though it was early in the day, the establishment held on to the remnants of previous nights like memories made physically manifest. The odor of stale cigarette smoke clung to the walls and the shabby curtains; peanut shells and unpopped popcorn kernels speckled the floor where hastily-handled broom bristles had missed the debris. A few patrons had even sidled up to the tall barstools since Malachy had allowed them early entry, their glasses already filled and emptied with potent amber liquids of various alcohol types.

So absorbed was he in the environment that when Julia made to move past him, he turned simultaneously in the same direction and collided softly with her shoulder. “Apologies,” he said stoically, the lack of emotion in his voice making it obvious that he was not sorry at all and simply going through well-rehearsed motions of human politeness. Given the Fetch’s feelings about his compatriot, he had not expected her to speak to him at all, and a look of genuine surprise flickered across his gaze.

“Oh?” Muriel said curiously, arching his brows. “I suppose it’s possible for our paths to have crossed in the past. I make trips here…frequently. I have been at more than one poor soul’s deathbed.” He studied her carefully, peering intensely through long lashes. He had not taken much time to look her over before; upon his arrival he had been swept up in Hadriel’s concerns, and admittedly he had not thought much of the creature about whom they conversed despite playing mediator in matters of propriety. Strangely enough, a pang of familiarity resonated through him, too, and the feeling heightened the longer they held their gazes locked. Puzzled, he broke their connection with a casual disconnect, turning his attention back to the lagging Hashmal—who was picking up the scythe from the scuffed floor.

A young woman in the neighboring booth stared, horrified, as Hadriel slung it nonchalantly over her shoulder.

“Hadriel.” The Hashmal recognized the warning in Muriel’s tone immediately. Following his nod, she turned abruptly around to meet the mortified stare of an ordinary human whose presence she had not even heeded—a pale, frail-looking girl who absolutely should not have been able to perceive the unusual weapon in the angel’s grasp. At the same time, tucked unseen and unnoticed on a chain beneath Hadriel’s shirt, the pendant flared to life.

The girl’s eyes flicked from Hadriel to Muriel to Julia in quick succession, then settled on the razor-sharp tip of the curved blade of the scythe.

As Hadriel opened her mouth to speak, Muriel stepped forward, placing a hand on her shoulder that silenced her.

The Reaper appeared seconds thereafter.

He materialized a handful of paces behind the booth where the petrified young woman sat trembling, directly in the mismatched trio’s line of sight. The scythe this one wielded was taller than Hadriel’s, its blade noticeably thicker in construction and inscribed with charred symbols she could not decipher.

“Go,” she hissed to Muriel, the conviction and authority in her tone so unmistakable that the Archangel obeyed instantly. He was gone as though he’d never stood at her side, the characteristic faint flutter of wings in his wake lost in the idle din of the oblivious chattering customers.

The Reaper grinned. Hadriel narrowed her eyes at its hideous contorted face, seeing at once his mask and his true appearance. Not here, she wanted to say, but it was too late—the creature was advancing, his footfalls sounding impossibly heavy on the cracked linoleum. The angel, bristling, took several steps backwards, nearly colliding with Julia. “Let’s at least leave this place. These people,” she muttered to the Fetch, making a slow move for the door before one last glance at the too-informed young woman in the booth. When they were outside, the angel tossed her silver dagger to Julia, who had no choice but to catch it.

“A precaution,” she said warily, gripping the tall stolen weapon with white knuckles. “Since I am inclined to think you are still unwilling to use the scythe.”

Hadriel was only half-correct; Julia did have choices, in many aspects of this grand predicament. But then, didn’t everyone have choices wherever they looked? They could choose to go to work and get paid, or not to. They could choose to accept help, or remain stuck in a situation. They could choose to reach out to someone, thereby gaining a friend or maybe something more, or they could remain entirely solitary.
Wasn’t that, though, just the illusion of choice? One path leading to a preferred outcome, while the other led you astray. If Julia wanted answers (let alone some shot at survival), then she had to go along with this, and trust Hadriel (even just a little) in her outrageous solutions to these issues as they arose.

Within reason, of course. “Hey, I’ve already got Reapers who want my head just because they think it’s fun to fuck with the underdogs.” She raised her eyebrows, holding her hands up in front of her, palms facing out. “If you want to torture a Reaper, I’m not gonna stop you; hell, I’ll even help you snag one. But I’ll let you deal with the actual interrogation part, if you don’t mind. Got kind of a weak stomach when it comes to, you know, maiming people.”

Yet another choice with which the Fetch found herself faced was whether or not to act on this strange suspicion that arose when she was near Muriel, some inkling of an idea that she had seen him before. But in this case, the decision wasn’t a difficult one; because they had no rapport, and she, therefore, had nothing to lose.
Julia wasn’t certain as to what she had been expecting for an answer; and she therefore couldn’t pinpoint the source of disappointment that occurred as a result. “Oh; I had no idea Angels went anywhere near deathbeds,” came her reply, accompanied by a slight shrug of the shoulders. “But I pay so much attention to the souls that I tend to get tunnel vision…”

Offering barely a ghost of a smile, she let the topic drop, as if it had never been brought up. Maybe it was that desperate feeling that reached beyond her solitary nature, that lonely part of her very being that wanted to be remembered; wanted to something more permanent in someone’s mind, not just a transient ghost whose existence was forgotten from cycle to cycle. And, for a second, she thought she might have seen a flicker of recognition in Muriel’s blue eyes… But, just her luck, she was mistaken.

A gasp from a nearby booth tore Julia’s mind from its introspective musings, and immediately she turned her head towards where Hadriel stood, collecting her scythe… which, apparently, wasn’t so invisible to a girl sitting in an adjacent booth. It was all the Fetch could do not to let her jaw drop at this blatant anomaly. “What the hell…” So the girl could see her; that was no surprise, considering she didn’t feel anywhere near the end of this cycle, not yet called to her duty by another soul ready to pass. What shocked her was that this girl, some mundane human being, could see the Reaper’s scythe. And she could also see Hadriel, and Muriel, and…

Oh, for fuck’s sake…

“You have got to be fucking kidding me.” This was insane—no, that wasn’t true. Earlier that morning, cornered by a gaggle of Reapers, now that had been insane. But for one to be so determined and bold as to manifest in the middle of a public venue… Things had officially become un-fucking-real.
This one was mean, too; taller, bulkier, with a scythe far more threatening than the one Hadriel had in her possession. Right away, it was a battle in which Julia truly did not want to partake, and she couldn’t blame Muriel for peacing out when he did (although it would have been more reassuring to have another body on their side… even if Muriel wasn’t much of a fighter, he was still an Angel, and thereby trumped anything she could do).

“Yeah, yeah, I’m going,” Julia was already backing towards the door, and the caution really needn’t have been voiced at all. Sticking around would’ve been a disaster for a number of reasons, the main one being the shocked girl with blonde hair, wearing an expression of fear and incredulity as she watched the pair leave, trailed aggressively by the Reaper.

“Dude, what is the deal with you guys!” Julia shouted, exasperated and wanting very much to just break into a run. She’d had enough fighting in the past twenty-four hours to sate the urges of the warrior in her that didn’t really exist. “Don’t you realize the only reason we’re fucking you up is because you won’t leave us the hell alone? How do you not see the direct correlation there—goddamnit, Hadriel!”

The Fetch’s hiss alerted the Reaper to the homicidal Angel, whose scythe only barely missed its neck by an inch, and only because it dashed away from the blade just in time. “We had a deal, remember? I keep my hands off the souls, and you don’t kill the Reapers!”

“So it is you, then.” The Reaper’s death-hungry eyes fixed on Julia, something of a sickly satisfied grin on his face. “The Fetch with peculiar influence, allied with an Angel… You’re causing quite a rift in the Balance.”

“And you’re not? This isn’t even your jurisdiction.” Julia glowered, gripping Hadriel’s knife so tightly that the ornate carvings along the hilt dug into the soft flesh of her palm. “How about we make a deal: you lay off and tell us what the fuck is going on in your little hierarchy of overzealous death bitches, and I won’t let this overzealous Angel kill yet another of your kind today—namely, you. Sound good?”

Combat. It was where Hadriel excelled, where she knew precisely how to proceed. Regardless of the motives behind the actions, a battle was rarely anything more than a matter of black and white—the dichotomy representative of her kind, the scenario in which such stark creatures thrived. There could be no right or wrong during such conflicts, not really; in the Hashmal’s mind, victory was the only thing that mattered. The means by which to achieve a win were unimportant in the grander scheme, and as long as nothing was broken—orders, namely; bones could heal, but trust was not so easily mended—there was only glory to be gained. And for a high-ranking Hashmal, that alone was lifeblood as sure as the crimson liquid that currently pulsed through her mortal veins.

The heartbeat that thundered in her human ears was exhilarating, echoing like war drums in the tension of the atmosphere beyond the establishment’s glass doors. A tiny smile curled the corners of her lips into something that resembled a sneer. Where she had exited Malachy’s bar as a slight young teenaged girl, ordinary but for the mane of tight curls that exploded from her scalp, she now looked positively terrifying and entirely unordinary—her posture was not rigid but rather loose, like that of a cat poised to strike her prey in an instant, her flesh trembling from the power and anticipation that boiled just beneath the surface of her skin. When her eyes at last looked up to greet the advancing Reaper, her gaze gleamed a menacing, otherworldly scarlet that shone bright like fresh spilled blood.

She struck without warning. The curved blade of her appropriated scythe sang like a chime at the speed at which it sliced through the air. The Reaper clearly had not been prepared for such a sudden attack, and he dashed out of the path of her strike just in the nick of time. A sliver of gray cloth from his shirt sleeve fluttered unceremoniously to the ground at their feet. Instinctively, Hadriel leapt back, although the dark creature only bared its teeth in a haughty grin, resisting any immediate counter action. 

Ugly guffaws gurgled from the Reaper’s throat as he laughed, rotating his own larger blade to rest horizontally in both of his gloved hands. The angel bristled, sidestepping slowly to place herself between the Fetch and the Reaper. If she had succeeded in startling him at all with her near-lethal swipe, he did not show it. “You think I owe you an explanation?” he bellowed, his voice rising in volume to an obnoxious shout. Hadriel wrinkled her nose in distaste—a bizarrely childish and innocent expression on a face that otherwise spelled murder in plain case.

“I don’t owe you shit,” the Reaper continued, standing perfectly still. Apparently Julia's bargaining had done little to alter his resolve, if he'd heard her at all. He seemed resistant even to the wind; the greasy strands of dark hair he wore combed across his broad forehead failed to sway even as the gusts increased. “You’ll be lucky if anything is left of you once we get our hands on you. The both of you!”

The angel watched this with suspicion, echoing his stance. “Who sent you?” she demanded, unfazed by his threats but concerned, somehow, at his refusal to consider what she believed to be very solid reason posited by the Fetch. Though she hadn’t raised her voice, the resonance of the angel's words overpowered even that of the Reaper’s, amplified by the breeze that refused to touch him. Perhaps now he would listen.

The Reaper laughed again, but instead of a verbal retort he responded with his scythe—lashing out faster than any human eye could follow. Hadriel leapt forward just as quickly, and, bracing for the impact, met the creature’s strike with her blade angled diagonally upward. He pressed down with all his strength, but he was no match for a Hashmal—a fact that the curly-haired angel had no problem impressing upon the Reaper. They were locked together in a momentary stalemate, but Hadriel’s plans did not include remaining that way for long. She pushed back furiously, causing the surprised Reaper to falter for a moment, just enough that she could rotate their stance to reinstate the balance with the creature’s side open and exposed to Julia. At that very second, the angel relinquished one hand’s grip upon her own scythe and wrapped it around the center of her adversary’s.

She had only intended to upset their equilibrium. She had not expected the hideous shriek that she gathered had come from the Reaper—neither had she foreseen the flash of strange gray light that erupted from where her palm grasped her enemy’s metal staff. A blast of pain shot down her forearm and into her shoulder. Blood dripped in glistening drops from the unhealed gash in her skin, and she suddenly buckled beneath the Reaper’s surge.

It seemed things weren't quite so black and white after all.

“Julia! Now!” she screamed, the wind gusting against her words. She had not once imagined that Julia might not understand her order; she could only hope, at that point, that the Fetch was intelligent enough to realize that their opportunity had come—and that her choice to intervene or walk away would determine just how deeply she would become buried in this divine and unfathomable conflict.

For all Hadriel’s human form was small, barely looking as though it had reached adulthood, the angel’s appearance took deceiving to a whole new level (something that Julia had discovered not long after the first time she’d laid eyes upon her). That small body was packed with the most insidious kind of danger, one that did not get angry, but instead acted before anger (or any emotion, really) could manifest. Beyond being an angel, which in and of itself was an existence to be feared and revered, she was a soldier. It was evident in the way that she moved, the pattern of her thoughts and the very fabric of her strategy that bled into any social interaction.

Julia, however, was neither an angel nor a soldier. The only advantages that worked in her favour were a sharp tongue that made empty threats sound all the more frightening, and—ironically—the fact that she was invisible to the world more often than not. And, even when she was at a point in her cycles that allowed her a true, corporeal existence, she tended to be overlooked… Or seen, and then immediately forgotten.

That said, fight was not second nature to her. And although she’d already faced more adverse scenarios that involved high degrees of violence, they weren’t becoming any easier for her. Not even with the reassuring weight of Hadriel’s angelic blade, cold against her palm

“Do you have any fucking clue who you’re up against?” Julia glared at the Reaper, maintaining a safe distance, her body automatically taking up a defensive stance with the dagger in front of her. “I may not be any match for you, but she—” the Fetch angled her head towards the Hashmal, “—is a fucking holy deathwish. So if you’re not going to listen to me, I suggest you tell her what she wants to know.”

Julia glanced at Hadriel as the angel posed her question to their adversary, her calm voice eerily clear over the wind and white noise of the awakening city. It sent a chill down her spine, and she wasn’t even the recipient of this hostile exchange. The Reaper would have to be a fool not to…

Well, as it turned out, he was a fool.

The Fetch staggered backwards as the being with the bigger scythe lashed out, coming down on Hadriel with fury that Julia wished she could place. Reapers tended to be real assholes by nature, but they weren’t bloodthirsty… What the hell was going on? What was spurring them to take to these acts of utmost violence, and why were she and the angel marked as targets? Surely their offenses did not warrant this…

Startled by a sudden flash of grey light that struck when the Angel managed a grip on her enemy’s weapon, Julia jumped and cringed at the blood-curdling shriek that followed. But it didn’t come anywhere near chilling her as much as Hadriel’s sudden, desperate order.
The Hashmal was in trouble. She had lost her edge, and now it was up to Julia to intervene… No longer permitted to stand by as moral support, it seemed.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake…” The hand gripping the holy blade trembled, but Julia’s feet didn’t hesitate. There was no time for further strategy, and no room to carefully consider their previous plan of action; it was Angel’s life or the Reaper’s, and between the two choices, there was no competition.
With a determined cry, she rushed towards the Reaper’s unprotected side, witnessing the surprise and horror in his hollow eyes as he turned his head, just in time for the Fetch to plunge the dagger into the side of his neck. The horrid creature hadn’t even the time to cry out, before a blinding light burst from its body, like a detonating bomb planted inside of it. Dropping its weapon, Julia watched in terrified wonder as its body disintegrated before her eyes, crumbling and falling to a pile of dust at her feet. 

She didn’t even realize how badly her hand was shaking until her fingers lost their grip on the angelic blade, and the weapon fell to the ground. But it was not her concern, anymore; her eyes were on Hadriel.

“You all right?” She asked the Angel, feeling breathless and light-headed despite that she’d hardly partaken in this battle. Offering her hand, she pulled the Hashmal back to her feet. “Sorry… I should have tried to keep him alive to interrogate, but I panicked, and…”
Her words trailed off, as did her gaze towards the entrance of Malachy’s pub. He blonde girl from before, with the innocent face and wide eyes, stood with her mouth agape, as if she’d seen…

As if she’d seen everything.

“You saw what happened?” Julia’s tone carried more of an accusation than a question. Looking from Hadriel back to the girl, she narrowed her eyes. “Who are you?”

“I… I’m sorry, I just…” The girl stammered, biting down on her lower lip, clearly uncomfortable with the gazes of the Angel and the Fetch firmly fixed on her presence. “What’s going on? That guy… that thing.” She appeared to shudder at the thought. “I’ve seen them before, but never… never like that.”
Swallowing her unease, she took a few tentative steps forward, shoulders stiff and steps light, maintain the leave to make a run for it, should it be necessary. “Are you both all right? I didn’t realize other people could see them, too…”