In the End (22 page)

“
Damn straight, I do! If I didn't, the alien rays and laser beams would get into m'head and scramble m'brains like eggs for Sunday breakfast.”

Jocelin looked into the sky fearfully. “Yes. Yes, we know of what thou speakest,” the angel whimpered. “We have seen Him.”

“
Joc – Angel Jocelin,” Lalael corrected himself firmly, “It's okay, there's no such thing as aliens.”

“
Like Hell there aren't!” Mr. Norton snorted. The vibration rippled across his torso like a tidal wave. “There are too. Li'l mother-lovin' bastards getting' in m' flower beds all the time nowadays. I seen 'em with my own eyes. Them li'l red things with the horns and the tails, jus' like Father Edmond were tellin' us.”

(“Dost you and we flee now?” Jocelin asked, clutching Lalael's wrist.

“
No, Angel Jocelin, we don't need to flee.”)

“
Red and with horns?” Lucien asked.

“
Except for the green 'uns. Blend right into the grass, until ya got 'un tryin' to eat you up.
Then
you see 'em right clear.  There was the time when I were sleepin', and I woke up – ” Hack, hearty spit. “ “ – right, and them aliens were crawlin' all over me. So,” he smacked his lips in satisfaction, “I leaped myself outta bed, and I grabbed m' trusty rifle, and I shot them betitches until not a 'un of 'em moved again, yup.” Hack, spit.

“
Fascinating,” Lucien said. “Mr. Norton, I believe the creatures you saw were, in fact, demons.”

“
Ah, pull th'other 'un, there's no such thing as demons. I was never into all that religimagous –” he drawled the word into seven or more syllables, “stuff. I got some wild boar smokin' out back. You folks wanna come have a bite?”

CHAPTER
THIRTEEN

Against all odds, no one died of starvation.

***

There had been a storm the night before. Lalael liked days after rain, when everything was fresh and cold and still moist from the freezing winter rain.

In addition to the agreeable damp, it was a lovely morning, at least in Lalael's opinion. The trees had lost all their leaves, but the grass continued growing green, and winter birds chirped in the trees, and he was chasing after an angel that ought to have been stuck in a padded room
centuries
ago. That last point seemed to be ruining things.

It should have been a perfectly good morning walk along a path through the expansive flower garden that had mysteriously appeared around the house the night before, and the house itself had grown three extra wings, third and fourth floors, pillars, and a distinctly sacred appearance. There wasn't any way someone could look at the former house and not think, “That's a temple and something lives in it
.”

“
Well, Jocelin –”

“
Angel Jocelin, if it please you, Angel Lalael.”

Lalael, falling a step behind the other angel, huffed silently, and took comfort by glaring at a cluster of yarrow.

“
My apologies, Angel Jocelin,” he recovered. “Are your accommodations to your satisfaction?” Lalael had taken to the formal speech with resignation, contenting himself with rolling his eyes when Jocelin insisted on the inane titles, which was several times per minute.

“
We are honored to be such a treasured guest as to be granted our own room, Angel Lalael.”

“
You didn't have your own in Ríel?” Lalael never had, except for a brief time at the very beginning, but they weren't going to waste that kind of space on him.

“
We weren't allowed in the buildings,” Jocelin murmured vaguely. “Nor in the Army halls.” The angel swayed alarmingly, but regained balance and continued on down the hall.

“
Didn't your superiors give you shelter?” Lalael asked, breaking into a trot to keep up with Jocelin's long strides. Abruptly, the other angel stopped and looked back at him curiously, head tilted slightly to one side.

“
Superiors?” Jocelin asked. Lalael stared at the other angel for a moment, but his gaze was broken when Jocelin looked about sharply, turned in a swirl of cloth, and continued pacing down the covered walkway.

“
Where are you going?” Lalael called as he caught up.

“
This is a very strange place,” Jocelin said, stopping yet again and stroking one of the columns. “What is it for?”

“
Which place? Which it? The column? The temple?” He added saucily, “The world?”

Jocelin fixed the angel with uncanny eyes. “Any. We want to know.” The angel looked back to the pillar and stroked it again, this time with a fascinated air.

“
Inquiring mind?” No answer. “The pillar is to hold this part of the roof up, and the temple gives us a place to sleep. We have space for people who were further away now, so they can be closer to food and water sources. We're helping people.”

“
And the world?” There were the eyes again. It wasn't so much that they looked through you, Lalael thought, as that they looked at you as if you weren't there. As if you were an empty space. A vacuum.

He shrugged. “Who knows?”

“
I do.” Another sharp turn, and Jocelin was striding away, leaving Lalael standing in bewilderment amongst the dragon's-wort under the softly dripping eaves.

***

If Jocelin was capable of rational thought, the world would be a nicer place for the people living in the temple, as they all realized within the two weeks following the new angel's arrival.

If Jocelin was capable of doing things other than drawing a random weapon on Lucien whenever the Fallen happened to step too close (and 'in the room' seemed to be the definition of 'too close'), then the world would be a less stressful place, as well.

No, there were no words for Jocelin, the congregation agreed. 'Flighty' wasn't right: It assumed that the angel's mind jumped about from one thing to another relevant or closely related thing and back, when in reality, whatever mind Jocelin possessed worked in a series of horizontal and vertical jolts from what the angel was looking at in any given moment to things that had happened at some other time, or was happening now somewhere else, or in one memorable instance, something that had, apparently, happened tomorrow. The closest thing anyone could come to tactful was “temporally challenged.”

You had to give credit to Lord Lalael, they also agreed, as they watched him scurry after the new angel day after day. He was doing his best, and he seemed to be the only one who managed to get anything coherent out of Jocelin, though you could tell what it took out of his lordship to do so. He'd stopped carrying weapons after Jocelin had said something about it.

Gossip ran rampant every time someone tried to speak to the strange angel. First, a casual comment or query would be placed, followed by a long, blank stare from Jocelin's peculiar blue eyes. The observers would slowly back away, flustered and strangely embarrassed, turning to one another and beginning conversations about the weather, how tedious hand-washing laundry was, or the latest victim of Lord Lucien's impatience. Jocelin would stand, staring for up to half an hour at the spot where the person who asked had been, before wandering off with brisk strides. Hours later, when people had forgotten the incident and were forgetting to shy away from Jocelin, the angel would respond, barking out accusations or answers to the questions.

The only conclusion anyone could come to was that the temple's mutations were because of Jocelin's presence. At the feast, for example, Priest Dave had nearly had a nervous breakdown when startling food kept appearing in the basement where the food was kept – a whole roast peacock, for example, with its tailfeathers artfully reattached, and a roast ox, and bushels of fresh fruit that suddenly just seemed to
be
there though by any rights they shouldn't have been, and a plate of some kind of tiny
worm-like things which Lord Lucien took one look at and identified as hummingbird tongues, and
bread.

Jocelin had been the only person to be entirely unsurprised about all this. The angel had eaten the entire plate of hummingbird tongues without any help.

No one could figure out if Jocelin even meant to do it or not, but sometimes the air around the angel's shoulders shimmered and left a trail behind like mirages on a hot day.

Exactly two weeks and three days after the angel's arrival, the kitchens kept getting lost every night. What had been a modest little house one day, and half a Greek temple the next, was a large building modeled after a Buddhist vihara the morning after, and an Arabian palace the morning after that. It was causing everyone no end of locational crises, because when the buildings changed, so did the furnishings inside.

Lucien in particular was already irritated with falling asleep in one bed, such as the original sensible thing they'd found in the house, and waking up on another, such as an
enormous
mattress
, in the middle of a ridiculous expanse of marble floor, with orange and red silk banners waving gently from the ceiling, and Lalael curled up in the corner of the same bed about, oh, fifteen or twenty feet away. The
same bed.
With
fifteen feet
between them.

It was an insult to his dignity, is what it was, Lucien fumed, firstly because his old bedroom had been
his,
and this vast room would have fit the entire house in it, probably,
and secondly because he preferred to
know
that he was going to be waking up in the same bed as someone, even if “same bed” was a really liberal description of the situation.

The second point caused him the most distress. Lalael tended to thrash in his sleep.

***

It was awfully inconvenient that one could not affix a single gendered pronoun to the Angel Jocelin, Mara thought. Not that they had to, of course, but the
grammar
was just difficult to navigate.
If only Jocelin looked more masculine or feminine, then they could have assigned gender based on the angel's appearance, since the angel didn't appear to have a personal preference. But as it was, the angel persisted in mystery. 'It', Mara supposed tentatively, was the most accurate pronoun available in Webster's English Dictionary, but it seemed incredibly offensive and she didn't even feel comfortable thinking about using it.

So one day, after an especially confusing argument between Jocelin and Lord Lucien, Mara took up her patience in both hands and paid Jocelin a visit.
             
“Excuse me, Angel Jocelin?” She said, opening the door to Jocelin's quarters, which had rearranged themselves into a tiny room of Spartan proportions and comfort.

“
Honored High Priestess Mara! We are... Word? It is a little touch. It feels.” Jocelin's eyes closed and the angel swayed.

“
Happy?”

“
What is a happy?” The gray eyes snapped open and focused on her.

“
Well,” Mara said, “It's an emotion. Like when you see someone for the first time in a while. Someone that you love. Or when something good happens, or when you accomplish something you've been working on.”

“
What is love?”

“
Good question,” Mara said. She gestured at the bed. “Can I sit?”

Jocelin looked in surprise at the mattress, as if the angel hadn't realized it was there. “We do not know. Canst thou?”

“
I mean may I. I was asking your permission.”

Jocelin stared blankly at her. “We... We do not...” The angel blinked and somehow made a perfect straight posture even more rigid.  “We believe it is a possibility that thou may... sit... Yes. In the now that does not happen now,” Jocelin said loudly.

Mara sat. Jocelin relaxed. “So, uh. I'm trying to find a way to ask this in a way that won't, er, offend you.”

“
Offend us? What do we feel when we are... offended?”

“
When Lucien offends you, you pull weapons on him.”

“
We now understand.”

“
So... Alright, I'll be blunt.”

“
Thou shalt? But thou hast no sharp parts to change. We cannot hurt ourselves on thee, so thou art... blunt, art thou not?”

Mara shook her head. “Never mind.”

“
Yes.” Jocelin half-turned away and stared intently at the wall.

The priestess sighed. “That's not what I mean. Nothing. Forget it.”

“
We already forget nothing. And we have forgotten the Nothing. And the Nothing has forgotten us.” Jocelin swayed alarmingly.

“
I just have a question,” Mara said, a little desperately.

“
So do we.” Jocelin looked at her, head tilting. “We have many, many questions, all stirring themselves around in our head,” the angel, eyes drifting closed, crooned softly. “But no one and no one ever answers them.” The angel looked at her suddenly. “What is thy question?”

“
I want to know if... if you'd like us to think of you as a man or a woman.”

Long, long silence, in which Jocelin moved not an inch. “A... what? What are they?”

“
They're... Look, you know Andrew?”

“
It is a short one who bosses. He looks at many papers.”

“
He's a man. I'm a woman.”

“
Thou art? Ought we feel something for thee?”

Mara rolled her eyes. “Andrea and Esme are women. Lucien and Lalael and Paul and Dave are men. Hal Norton's a man. Granny Banner's a woman. Annie's a woman – a girl. Do you see?”

“
They not are! The Angel Lalael is one of the Host, and Fallen Lucien is one who has sinned.”

“
Well, yes, but they're men too. Do you understand?” she asked desperately.

“
How dost thou know they are?” Jocelin asked suspiciously.

“
Because that's what they look like and that's what they say they are and – I'm just trying to get this sorted out.”

Jocelin stared. “Why?”

Mara took a deep breath. Then she stopped and realized that explaining political correctness and how to be respectful of someone's personal identity to
Jocelin
was an exercise in futility. “Why what?”

“
Why are men?”

“
For... For – gods, I never thought I'd be telling an angel about the birds and the bees.”

“
We know about
them
. Birds don't touch the ground sometimes, and the bees bite us when we taste their golden water.”