“So let me get this straight,” Mr. Frederick Mullins of Washington, D. C. said, his tone drier than an on-fire stretch of street in the middle of Arizona during a drought. “You want me to believe you’re an angel—”
“Oh, no no. My name’s Angel, but I’m a demon,” Angel helpfully corrected as she kept pace with him as he walked down a sidewalk in the city alongside a street that was very much so not on fire.
“Riiight. You want me to believe that, that I’m going to die in the next two minutes, and I’m currently going to Hell, but it ‘might not be so bad there.’” His briefcase with its leather body and brass buckle looked quite snazzy as it dangled from his hand as he checked his watch, which matched the briefcase exactly.
“That’s what the demon in my head says, though he does have a spotty record of telling me the truth and really doesn’t seem to like God very much. Oh, and,” she quickly consulted her Ledger, flipping forward to the front. “I actually said two and a quarter minutes, but it’s about a minute and ten seconds now. In theory you can avoid death by not doing what you were about to do and maybe doing the opposite instead, but I’ve only had someone successfully avoid death once, and I still don’t understand how. If you don’t mind death though, I could help you do something redeeming, or else you could stick with Hell. What do you prefer?”
The man came to a stop before turning to give her an unimpressed look. “This has got to be the most absurd way one of you people has begged for money that I’ve ever heard,” he remarked as he unbuckled his briefcase and reached inside. He pulled out something around the size of a business card and held it out to her between two fingers with an almost contemptuous look on his face. “I already donate regularly to this city’s homeless shelters and in no small sums. Take this and stop bothering me.”
Angel took the card, completely nonplussed, and printed on it in neat, tidy characters was the name ‘Coalition for the Homeless’ followed by an address and a phone number. She obtained this information by reading the card from top to bottom once, and though she understood its contents for what they were, she did not understand why the card had been handed to her. Consequently, she reread the card once more, taking extra care in her review of the black letters and numbers and their arrangement upon the off white card. This reexamination did not resolve her state of confusion, and faced with this dilemma, she made the smart decision to ask Frederick why he had handed her the card.
She looked up only to see he had left the moment she was distracted and had already reached the crosswalk and was rushing to the other side of the street despite the hand signal being lit. She wanted to rush after him, to give him one last chance, but no sooner had she thought that when he was struck by a car at speed that hadn’t seen him. This alone was bad enough, but his flight through the air resulted in him landing in the middle of the opposing lane just before a fire truck roared down the street with sirens blaring. This was not because a stretch of street in the middle of Arizona was on-fire during a drought, though the narrator could understand why you might think that under the circumstances. No, it was a perfectly ordinary fire in a perfectly ordinary building of apartments containing perfectly ordinary and regrettably flammable people, as most humans generally tended to be.
But these were no ordinary people! Well, most of them were, as has been painstakingly established, but one of them would have grown up and headed the company that would have developed how to turn greenhouse gases into new ozone. This wasn’t nearly as important as being the scientist who actually made the discovery, but without this lamentably flammable person there to save the company from bankruptcy—hopefully the narrator didn’t forget to mention that detail, seeing as it’s the lone element of the story that establishes this person’s necessity—that scientist would never have gotten the job there and would have instead gone on to get a job at a company specializing in conveying the liquid remains of dinosaurs to people who wished to burn them as sacrifices for their metal gods on wheels to take them places. Alas, the fire truck squealed to a stop after running Frederick over with not one but three of its tires, which left him his body distinctly pulped and his soul off to Hell.
Lew burst into laughter in her head as black smoke spewed from the Ledger. [Surprise surprise. When are you going to realize all this is pointless? Free choice? Redeeming people? Trying to save them? It was a fluke before—you’ll never be able to recreate it.]
“It’s not pointless,” Angel mumbled as people all around began to scream and point and the firefighters leapt from the cab of their car to see if there was anything to be done for the corpse formerly known as Mr. Frederick Mullins of Washington D.C. “He got to choose. That means something.”
[I’m pretty sure he didn’t choose to be a blood stain on the tires of a fire truck.]
“No, but he chose to continue doing what he was doing instead of not doing it!”
[Yeah? You know that for sure? What if he’d been about to get stop at that fucking bagel shop on the corner, but he was so freaked out by you that he ran into traffic to get away?]
“He didn’t seem scared of me…”
[Eh, I’ll give you that one. You’re about as scary as a wet paper bag. But that still doesn’t mean you did nothing that caused his death!]
Angel squirmed as she considered that. “I dunno…”
Trial and error wasn’t unfamiliar territory for Angel. She had been more or less figuring things out as she went the entire time she had been possessing Lew’s body, after all, but back at the start, none of it had been personal to her. When she had gotten things wrong at the Piggly Wiggly and been scolded by her managers, she always been able to leave those issues in the store when she left for the day. She had brought that same mentality to doing Lew’s job when she had first taken over, but things had changed after her visit to Kra. Redeeming people was harder than corrupting them, and even worse, she had begun to care whether she succeeded or not.
And then there had been the girl in the arcade. Angel had been so preoccupied with acquiring and enjoying a slush from Orange Augustus—and it had been very good treat indeed after a job well done—that she forgot the girl’s name by the time it occurred to her she should have asked why the girl’s fate had changed. The girl’s name had been wiped from the Ledger and without it, she had no way to investigate what had occurred that day. That meant Angel had to keep trying over and over to replicate the scenario, and five years later, she still hadn’t managed to. And five years was a long time for a string of failures when you actually wanted to save people…
[Face it: What you’re doing is hopeless,] Lew argued, sounding disturbingly convincing. [Even worse, you’re dooming yourself. Eventually Repugna is going to look at your numbers, and the moment she sees them, she’ll break her ritual and give me back my body. No body means you’re dead. Is that what you want? To die?]
“No…” She whispered, her head falling.
Sensing weakness, like a clown near children, he moved in for a finishing blow. [Tell you what. Let’s make a deal. Pick a name at random from the list, and try one last time. If you succeed, you get to keep on trying to save people. But when you fail, you give all of this bullshit up and do the job the way it’s supposed to be done—by corrupting them.]
“But what if I need more time, and I have other targets I need to go to?”
Lew scoffed. [You realize you’ve never once taken a day off, right? It’s fucking crazy how hard you work… Anyway, I’ll tell you how to activate vacation mode until whoever you picked is six feet under. Now, is it a deal?]
Angel hesitated. All her life she had been raised to believe working hard and trying your best were the ways to succeed in life, but for years she hadn’t saved a single person and had only managed to redeem a few targets who hadn’t already been heaven-bound. Was Lew right? Was she really going about this all wrong, trying so hard… for nothing?
She opened the Ledger to the front pages.
----------------------------------------
Angel’s luck was a peculiar thing that always seemed to be supernaturally high. She had been lucky enough to accidentally redeem a serial killer by having him kill a child that would grow up into an even worse serial killer. She had been lucky enough to have the supernatural Mr. Henry Godfrey watching over her, when Angels were so rare that Lew was shocked to see one. She had been lucky enough to lie her way into a bar in the UK when her feeble fib had every reason to fail and then managed to trigger a bar fight out of accidentally tasting beer for the first time. She had been lucky enough to fall into the warehouse out of the back of a police cruiser with precisely what she needed to corrupt both her target as well as a bonus target at the same time. She had been lucky enough to witness a meteorite strike in person, albeit one unexpectedly featuring the spattered head of her target. She had been lucky enough to befriend the one Krae on who was able to get her out her impromptu piercing and torture session. She had been lucky enough to get to witness the world’s first cryogenically frozen pizza being unfrozen and taste tested. And most surprising of all, she had been lucky enough to somehow accidentally save the life of the girl in the arcade.
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
What the narrator is trying to say while not so subtly reminding you, the reader, of the journey Angel has gone through to get this far, is that where matters of chance are concerned, Angel’s luck was guaranteed to put on a good show—unless she was swiping a card to play skee-ball, of course. Bearing all this in mind, it should come as no surprise that when Angel opened the front of the Ledger and randomly pressed her finger down in the midst of the list of upcoming targets, the pad of her finger landed on none other than Anja Visscher. To Angel and Lew, both of whom had long since forgotten the names of the twins from the arcade, this name meant nothing. To you, the fastidious reader, however…
Angel’s portal to Anja’s location placed her squarely into a closed closet, if the darkness and myriad hangers with clothes upon them was anything to judge by. She had almost reached forward to push the closet door aside when a raised voice reached her ears.
“What are you doing with this?!”
“What are you even talking about?” a second voice irately but more quietly replied. After a moment’s pause, the voice’s tone shifted. “What is that?”
“Don’t play dumb, An!”
“What’re you being such a bitch for? I said I don’t know what the fuck it is!”
“I spoke with your dealer. I know what it is, and I know he’s been selling it to you.”
[Doing hard drugs, huh?] Lew remarked, tsking. [It sounds like your target is pretty irredeemable.]
The screech of wood on wood filled the air followed shortly after by the dull thud of something striking wood. “What the actual fuck, Cass?! What did you say to him?!”
“Enough,” the first girl replied evasively.
“Don’t give me that shit!” the second girl screamed, sounding like she was one second away from trying to claw out her twin’s eyes. “Tell me what you said right now!”
“What were you thinking?! Why would you ever buy—” She quickly and quietly hissed out the last word, like each syllable was poison and she’d be caught if she spoke to loudly “—heroin?!”
Angel, who had just been beginning to think she had better come back at a later time, gasped. Having arrived inside the closet via portal, it occurred to Angel that she ought to take steps to keep the two speakers from hearing her in a place she had no reason she should be. A multitude of means for accomplishing this goal came readily to Angel’s mind, with the first being stifling her gasp with a hand over her mouth. This being only the first idea with many more prospects on the horizon, Angel decided to temporarily set aside the idea of stifling the gasp via hand for later and considered her other pending ideas. There were quite an awful lot of clothes on hangers in the closet as previously established, and Angel debated the merits of shoving some portion of one of these hanging articles into her gob. This seemed like it would be more successful at muffling the noise than a mere hand placed over her mouth, but these were not her clothes, and Angel didn’t think their owner would very much appreciate her spit all over them. This brought Angel to considering whether she might stuff her own clothes into her mouth. This definitely seemed like the best idea so far, but in attempting to execute it, she found there was a tad bit more logistical difficulty in execution than previously anticipated. The obvious fix to this new dilemma was removing an article of clothing in order to more easily cram it into her mouth, but this was not without its own complications, as she would need to take off her backpack in order to take off her shirt in order to cram it in her mouth in order to stifle the gasp of shock at hearing the accusation that one of the girls had purchased heroin.
Arriving at an acceptable solution sometime later than was actually necessary to suppress the aforesaid gasp, the closet door was flung open, revealing two older teen girls staring down at her with expressions that were a mixture of shock at her presence in the closet and lingering fury with one another. Behind them laid a room that appeared to be a bedroom for two complete with a bunk bed and two desks.
Lew cackled. [This is too rich! Keep going—you’re starting to entertain me at this point!]
The girl on the left’s hand came into sight, and with a quick flick of her wrist, the knife held in it snapped open. “Who the fuck are you, and how the fuck did you get in there?!” she snarled, brandishing the knife threateningly.
Having never been in a similar situation before, Angel wasn’t precisely sure what the appropriate response would be. And so, she defaulted to the basics. “Uh, hi, I’m Angel.”
The girl on the right’s eyes went wide in recognition, and she gasped, her hand shooting up to cover her mouth. She was rather unsuccessful at silencing herself, which seemed par for the course at the moment. If only she had crammed her mouth full of the clothes in the closet. There was a decent chance some of them were hers, after all, and that meant she could shove them in her mouth as she pleased.
“It’s you.”
The other girl’s eyes flicked towards her companion before immediately returning to Angel to stay vigilant. “Wait, you know this creep?”
“You do too,” she breathed out, her gaze shifting back and forth between Angel and Anja as if unsure where to look. “She’s the cra— the lady from that day at the arcade! The day I came out of the closet to you!”
Recognition sparked in Anja’s eyes as well, and Angel stared for a moment longer before suddenly flipping forward to the front of her Ledger, excitement infusing every flick of her fingers. “Oh! Oh! Anja Visscher, I know you too! The arcade—then that makes you…?”
“Cassandra,” the other girl quietly replied. “Cassandra Visscher.”
[Oh shit.]
“You called for me over the intercom using a name that only I knew.” Something shifted in her stance, and whatever vestiges of anger with her sister remained slipped away, replaced by unadulterated curiosity and need. “There was no way you could have known it. How did you know?”
[Hey, uh, about our deal. I’m feeling generous, and I’ll let you try two attempts besides this one, but you’ve got to leave right now, got it?]
Ignoring Lew with long practiced ease, Angel held up her Ledger. “When people are about to die but are balanced between Heaven and Hell, demons like me are sent in to push you towards… well, I’m supposed to try to corrupt you, but I don’t really do that anymore…”
Cassandra stiffened while Anja’s expression shifted to one of confusion, the knife in her hand beginning to drop down as she lost focus. “What’re you talking about? Cass didn’t die—she’s right here.”
“An…”
“What? It doesn’t make sense! You’re alive!”
[Three! I’ll give you three attempts, but you have to leave right now!]
Angel rapped her knuckles against the side of her head in an unspoken gesture she wanted him to be quiet. The movement caused Anja to bring the knife back up once she realized she had begun to slack. “You were supposed to die,” she told Cassandra. “You’re the only person I’ve ever met who didn’t die when my Ledger said you would.”
Tears were beginning to stream down Cassandra’s face, and Anja shot her a bewildered look out the corner of her eye. “Cass?”
[Stop this! Leave!]
No.
“I’ve been trying to figure it for five years,” Angel said as she stepped forward out of the closet. The twins stumbled backwards, and though Anja continued to hold up the knife threateningly, it was obvious she wasn’t going to do anything with it. “I don’t want people to die. I want them to have the chance to live! Please! You have to tell me how you didn’t die!”
“I didn’t see a way out…” Cassandra whispered. “It would never work. Everyone would hate me—leave me…”
“Cass?” Anja asked, her voice wobbly and concerned as her eyes flicked back and forth between her sister and Angel. “What are you saying…?”
“I… I stole Ma’s pills and brought them to the arcade that day because… because I…”
The knife clattered to the floor from Anja’s loose hand. “Oh god.”
Cassandra sobbed, and Anja was on her in an instant, pulling her sister into a fierce hug while Angel watched in a mixture of disbelief and horror. “The Ledger wasn’t wrong… You were going to die by suicide…”
[Fuck…]
“Yes,” the girl bawled. “I had just made an excuse to slip away when the name I had chosen—my name—came over the speaker. An hunted me down and interrogated me. I thought I was going to be sick—that all my worst fears would come true.
“You dummy,” her sister roughly consoled. “There was no way any of us would abandon you! We love you! I love you!”
“I’m sorry… I’m so sorry, I never should have doubted you. I was just so scared! I couldn’t think of anything else…”
“I’m sorry, I’m still trying to understand,” Angel murmured, bringing the girls’ attention back to her. “Was it me saying your name? Was it your sister questioning you?”
“It was An,” Cassandra said without a shadow of a doubt. “If you had walked up to me and said my name, then I… I still probably would have done it. I’m pretty sure nothing you could have said would have talked me down.” She hiccuped and laughed wetly. “But when An heard you say it, she hunted me down and bullied the answer out of me. Wouldn’t take no for an answer when she realized it was something important.”
[Leave, kid. Don’t do this!] Lew pleaded, already aware of where her thoughts were going.
She banged her knuckles against her head again. “Well, do you think you would be very good at bullying Anja?”
The air in the room palpably shifted, wariness overcoming both of the girls as Cassandra slowly asked, “Why…?”
Angel could have left right then and the outcome probably would have been the same. Where before Cassandra had been the one who was stiff about the subject of the arcade, Anja was now very clearly distressed by the turn of the conversation. Perhaps she should have left and let them come to their own conclusions together. But when that thought entered Angel’s mind, she rejected it straight away. Because ‘probably’ wasn’t good enough—not anymore.
[Kid…!]
“Because Anja is set to die the day after tomorrow.”
Anja’s eyes unconsciously shifted to look guiltily at desk on the side of the room where a small tin of powder laid open, a lighter and a capped hypodermic needle next to it. Cassandra’s eyes widened.
Angel’s Ledger began to vibrate.