When Angel woke up that morning, she slipped out of her tent, languidly stretched, observed the sun rising over the horizon, and smiled. The grass was green, the birds were chirping away, and the morning rush hour traffic on the highway she had set up her tent alongside was full of honking and drivers swearing at one another that blended together into a symphony that spoke so clearly to her.
“Today’s gonna be a good day, Lew,” she declared with a firm nod. “I’ve got a feeling.”
[Well I’ve got a ‘feeling’ that cop I see in the oncoming traffic will have words to say to you about camping next to the goddamn road.]
She turned to squint at the long line of motor vehicles, and just as Lew had indicated, there was indeed what appeared to be a police car. Lew had suggested last night that camping here would attract unwanted attention, but she had been quite tired at the time and, being used to some of his advice being less than stellar, had decided to ignore him.
She shrugged. If the police pulled over, then she would handle it then. There was no sense in worrying about what might happen in a minute’s time when she had a camp to break down.
[Or—just saying—you could make a portal and leave.]
“But that would mean leaving my things,” Angel pointed out, thinking he must have overlooked this fact, as she set about rolling up her sleeping bag. This part always required her full attention because if she wasn’t careful, she invariably managed to roll it up such that the middle of the swirl poked out. Though she could poke that part in, it always bothered her, and she didn’t want anything upsetting her plans for a good day so soon after it had begun.
She carefully focused on the task with her tongue slipping out the side of her mouth, rolling up the bag just so, and Lew insisted. [Buy new ones! Take the sketchbooks and pencils, since they mean so damn much to you, but the rest of this shit you can buy new at sporting goods store!]
It should be noted that Angel typically wouldn’t have been able to buy anything at all. When Angel first possessed Lew, he had originally tried to convince her to replace everything using her magical Ledger, but she had stubbornly insisted on paying for everything instead. The trouble was that what little cash she had after buying her sketchbook ran out almost immediately, and she had forewent buying anything in favor of ‘waiting for her first paycheck.’ The demon had tried to explain that his kind didn’t get paychecks because they just made anything they needed, but she had been insistent. Lew had grown tired of tired of the whole affair after a week—one might have thought he took pity on poor Angel, but if such had been suggested to him, he would have vehemently denied it—and had taught her about the ‘bank account withdrawal spell.’ The existence of such a spell was complete poppycock and in truth the same spell Angel had used to create a banana on her disastrous first job and likewise the same spell she might have otherwise used to make any number of things but had insisted on not doing. The deception perpetuated her incorrect assertion that she got paid for doing any of this corrupting business and required her to actually track down and buy things instead of just making them to begin with, but it ultimately reached the same end, and Lew had decided he would just need to be okay with that.
“I wouldn’t want to be wasteful,” Angel pointed out as she set the bag aside and began dissembling her tent. “I should use them until they wear out. I can buy new ones then.”
[Sure, sure, whatever,] he replied dismissively. [Oh look, told you they’d come.]
Sure enough, the lights on the police car flared to life as it pulled off the road and out of the busy traffic right by Angel’s half broken down campsite. She kept chugging along at putting everything away though—one didn’t finish a task by stopping, after all. In fact, the officer in the driver seat took so long getting out that by the time he had, Angel had managed to completely put everything away in her backpack, which she settled into place on her back.
“Ma’am, may I ask what you were doing out here?” he said as he stepped around the hood and crossed over to her.
Angel thought it was quite obvious, but her Mama had always raised her to respect the law, and that meant respecting the people who enforced it as well. “I was sleeping.”
“You were sleeping.”
She cocked her head to the side, confused. “Yes, that’s what I said.”
The officer’s lips curled down into a frown. “There’s no call to get snippy.”
“Oh no, I don’t have any scissors to snip anything,” she reassured him, even more confused at the change in topic.
[Kid, that ain’t what he meant. He thought you were back talking.]
“I was talking back to him, Lew!” Angel insisted, highly bewildered by the strange conversation.
The officer tensed, his hand twitching towards his belt but ultimately remaining where it was. “Ma’am, I’m going to need to search your bag for drugs. Set it down and step away.”
First they had been talking about camping, then about using scissors, and now they were talking about drugs? It was certainly the strangest conversation she’d had in some time, and just two days ago she’d had a case where her target had talked using her hands—it was easily the most bizarre manner of communication Angel had ever seen.
“Do I need to? I just got done packing it up, and I’d rather not—”
The hand that had twitched before moved fully to the gun at his waist, slipped off the restraint, and hovered nearby, though the gun itself remained where it was. “Drop the bag and back away now. This doesn’t need to get difficult.”
Angel personally thought their discussion so far had been difficult to follow, but her Mama had explained that some things were just going to be harder for her in life because she was special. She shrugged off her bag and gently set it down before taking two steps backwards.
“Further back, over by that rock there,” the officer said, gesturing with his off hand. “Go on.”
“Are you understanding any of this, Lew?” she asked as she moved to the large rock he had indicated and plopped down on it, grateful that she had her human disguise on and therefore need not worry about sitting on her tail by mistake. That hurt quite badly, after all.
[You probably shouldn’t keep talking to me,] Lew tried to explain, knowing her proclivity for speaking aloud when talking to him in her head would do.
“Who the hell are you talking to?” the officer demanded, his eyes scanning the area.
[Oh no. Kid, don’t you dare say—!]
“Oh, Lew’s the demon in my head!” she chirped, happy to finally be on a topic she could follow. She did, after all, tell most everyone she encountered that Lew was in her head, much to the demon’s chagrin. “I wasn’t really understanding our conversation, see, so I was hoping he did.”
He stared at her for several seconds then reached up to the radio strapped to his chest. “Dispatch, I need some backup.”
[Goddammit…]
Two more cop cars arrived some time later, driving along the side of the bumper-to-bumper traffic to reach them. Four officers were in these cars, and two of them were women, and accompanying these humans was a German Shepard wearing a black vest with embroidered yellow letters spelling out POLICE. Angel had a great deal of fondness for dogs and wanted to give this one many pets and affirmations of what a good dog they were. There was a problem with her doing so, however, and it wasn’t that she was not allowed near the detector dog.
The dog, you see, was apparently not a good dog at all.
“Hey Lew, what’s the orange light ‘round the dog mean?”
The officers had long since begun to ignore her talking to ‘herself,’ so the female officer searching Angel’s person for weapons and drugs didn’t bat an eye as she proceeded with her search.
Lew would ordinarily never have let anyone examine him so thoroughly except for the purposes of anonymous sex, which meant that unlike the irenic Angel letting them do their job without a complaint, he was on edge. [Fucking mutt’s an optional target. Means you— Oi, lady! You really think there’s a glock hidden between my ass cheeks?! What’re you even doing back there?!]
“Optional?”
[Ugh. Means they’re gonna die soon, and more than likely gonna go to heaven, but you might be able to corrupt— I mean really, I know you’re wearing kinda loose jeans, but do they honestly think you’ve got packets of coke strapped to your legs?!]
The officer tugged off her shoes and socks to check those as well, and Angel pondered this new wrinkle. “I thought all dogs went to heaven.”
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
[What? The fuck gave you that idea? Pretty 50-50 overall, really. Police dogs though, they’re usually set for hell. They’re either goddamn snitches, addicted to drugs, or both. Who knows why this one isn’t an easy case.]
“She’s clean,” the officer finally pronounced as she handed Angel her socks and shoes.
The rest of the officers had been searching her backpack and the immediate area for any drugs or weapons. Lew knew they would find nothing, of course, since Angel avoided pharmacies like the plague, and the only weapon she had was her Ledger, which would appear to be nothing more than a black book full of gibberish symbols to mortal humans when they examined it. He was therefore just as surprised as she was when the original officer announced, “We’re gonna need to ask you a few questions, ma’am.”
[The fuck?! I normally don’t mind you bastards harassing innocent people—so easy to corrupt—but this is ridiculous!]
“What’re your questions?” Angel inquired, far more sedate about their predicament but no less confused.
The officer held up a small plastic bag, and Lew groaned in realization. “You’ve got at least a couple grand in here, plus who knows how much else in other currencies. We don’t even recognize some of these. Where in sam hell did you get all of this?”
[Tell ‘em you found it on the side of the road or something,] Lew immediately spoke up. [Just whatever you do, don’t tell them about your job!]
“But Lew, there’s nothing wrong with holding down a job!”
“Job? What job?”
[Don’t—!]
“Oh, I corrupt people, so they go to hell when they die!”
[I just want you to know,] Lew informed her, [that when I get my body back and you properly die and go to hell, I’m going to track down whatever circle you end up in and torture you until you beg me for forgiveness.]
“But I don’t wanna die, Lew!”
The five officers conferred amongst themselves for a moment.
“What do you think?”
“I’m not sure if she’s actually got some screws loose or just pretending, but that bit about corrupting people sounds like dealing drugs to me.”
“Might not be that she’s the dealer. We’re not that far out from the outskirts of the city. Might be we’re dealing with a two party scheme. The real dealer goes in to look for marks while he’s got this one here as a patsy to hold onto his things.”
“Gotta bring her in for questioning either way, so let’s figure this out back at the precinct.”
The officers, having thus decided upon a course of action, set about handcuffing Angel’s hands behind her back and walking over to one of the cars.
“Wait, only bad people ride in the back of police cars!” Angel protested when they opened up the door.
[Kid, your job is literally encouraging people to be evil.]
“If you didn’t do anything wrong, then you have nothing to worry about,” the female officer behind her said as she forced her to duck and take a seat.
“Please!” Angel wailed, tears beginning to fall. “Mama wouldn’t be happy if she found out!”
The officer turned to look at her colleague, who had been loading Angel’s backpack into the trunk. “You hear that? Could be her mother’s the real drug dealer. Fucking low, using your disabled kid like this.”
That redoubled Angel’s keening. “My Mama ain’t a drug dealer! She would never! She always told me, ‘Angela Cherie Kirk, don’t you go near them drugs or alcohol! Them’s the gateway to all sortsa evil!’”
The other officer pulled out a notepad and began scribbling away as the first lady asked, “Honey, what’s your mama’s name? Do you know where she is now?”
“P-Please! I ain’t done nothin’!,” Angel cried, shaking her head. “Lemme go!”
The officers sighed and resumed climbing into the vehicle while Angel continued to bawl her eyes out. In short order, the three vehicles were in motion with the first police vehicle leading the car Angel was in and the car the dog was in back to the precinct.
[Geez, kid, think you can turn off the waterworks? You’re killing me with all this wailing and gnashing of teeth…] Lew uncomfortably asked when five minutes later Angel still hadn’t calmed down even one iota.
“Leeeeew! I don’t wanna be in a cop car! I’m not bad! I’m not!”
[For fuck’s sake… Look, just leave then! You know all you gotta do is want the Ledger and you’ve got it, so call the damn thing and let’s blow this taco stand!]
“I don’t want tacos, and I’m supposed to listen to the police!”
The driver turned up the radio to drown Angel out, and his partner gave him an unimpressed look. “What? Even if she is special in the head, that doesn’t mean I want to listen to her blubbering the whole way back.”
Lew didn’t want to either, and that meant he needed to remove Angel from this situation. Now Lew may have been a lazy, easy to bore pervert who drank too much vodka on work nights, forgot to set alarms, and hated nature and all of its splendor, but he wasn’t dumb. He knew Angel well enough to know that trying to convince her to do something her Mama told her not to do would be like trying to set up a nuclear fission reactor—difficult to do, guaranteed to result in unwanted byproducts, and a metaphor that proved the claim that he wasn’t dumb—which meant he needed to appeal to something else. Namely, her work ethic.
[Hey kid, didn’t you have a target you were supposed to corrupt this morning?]
Angel’s eyes, which had been clenched shut as she wept, snapped open in a panic. “Oh my gosh, you’re right!”
The chain on the handcuffs snapped in two as she hurriedly brought her hands in front of her, the Ledger appearing in one hand as she hastily began drawing a portal with the other. Ordinarily this would have drawn the attention of the officers in the front seat, but they didn’t hear the sound of the handcuffs breaking on account of the conveniently loud radio blaring the hits of the 80s, and they neither noticed her arms were free nor that she was drawing a demonic circle made of fire with her fingertip because they were distracted by the craziness of city drivers. You see, at that precise moment, someone had jaywalked a block ahead and been struck hard enough they flew through the air into the back of a passing truck full of manure. The driver of the vehicle Angel was in noticed this and depressed the accelerator to the floor to indicate his desire to go fast, thinking to himself they ought to go check whether the injured jaywalker was okay after having been struck by a moving vehicle and thrown headfirst into what amounted to a pool of shit.
Unfortunately, Angel finished drawing her circle at that precise moment, turning the nebulous lines of fire that had been until then moving in relation with her body into a portal. Now, as we all know, portals are obviously Einstein-Rosen bridges from one fixed location in the universe to another fixed location in the universe. Obviously. This sudden introduction of a portal to the back of a vehicle moving at speed meant that everything that entered the portal moved to a different area, but everything moving around the portal did not. In this particular instance, Angel flew straight through, but the backseat and all of the trunk behind were introduced quite abruptly to an unmovable object and torn apart, sending a portion of said backseat and trunk—including Angel’s backpack, quite conveniently—hurtling through the portal right after Angel. The driver of the vehicle the dog was in failed to move out of the way in time, likely because he was caught off guard by the sudden presence of a hole in the fabric of spacetime, and both he and the dog in the seat behind him were likewise sent hurtling through the portal the moment before it sealed itself shut.
Now, dear reader, you may be wondering where Angel’s portal had been pointing to. As it so happened, Angel’s next target was a drug kingpin who would have been a shoo-in for hell if she hadn’t donated large swaths of her money to a charity focused on the prevention of breast cancer. Said kingpin had been in a warehouse full of cocaine bricks when Angel, her backpack, a policeman, a detector dog wearing a vest boldly proclaiming POLICE, and the shattered scraps of two police vehicles came unexpectedly tumbling into the area. Needless to say, she was quite put out by this turn of events and withdrew the glock she kept on her person—and notably not between her ass cheeks—and began to shoot at them all. The policeman, despite having just been moved from one area on the planet to another, proved himself a credit to his police force by promptly returning fire. Several shots went wild, hitting some cocaine bricks and spattering the ground nearby with the white powder, but after only a few seconds, they both managed to hit each other simultaneously. Having just shot an officer of the law, the kingpin’s balance of good and evil tipped towards the latter, and her soul was subsequently pulled into hell when she died from bleeding out and the trauma of her wounds. The dog, meanwhile, had been understandably distressed by the gunfire and turned to what it knew best—sniffing out drugs. As you may recall from earlier in this very paragraph, some loose cocaine had been strewn on the warehouse floor, and in its fervor to sniff as it had been trained to, snorted cocaine. This being a grievous sin, its balance of good and evil likewise changed, the shift being substantial enough the poor pup became doomed for hell the very second before it died from having snorted cocaine, which was very bad for a dog to do.
This left Angel with a surprise double whammy of a success and Lew in a shocked stupor.
[So… that just happened.]
Angel, however, saw the black smoke spewing from her Ledger and immediately focused on more pressing matters. “I’ve gotta tell Mama I did a bad!”
[Say what now?] Lew asked, perplexed and still reeling from the conclusion of that unlikely chain of events.
But she wasn’t listening, having already begun drawing another portal, which she jumped through the moment it appeared.
----------------------------------------
Elizabeth Camille Kirk
April 17, 1977 - March 12, 2020
Forever our beloved Lizzy
Lew was uncharacteristically silent as Angel knelt in front of the tombstone.
“Mama, I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I did something bad today. I dunno what, but some police officers put me in their car, and you always said bad people went in the back of them, so I musta done something wrong.”
She was silent for a moment, the tears from earlier back, though this time without the keening wail. If anything, she was reverent as she continued her quiet conversation with her deceased mother.
“I, uh, got a new job. I get to travel and see all sortsa nifty places—just went to the United Kingdom the other week and everythin’. Trouble is, it’s… well, it’s real hard. Mr. Godfrey said I’d do well, but I ain’t so sure. I dunno what I’m doin’ most of the time, so I screw up a lot. I’m afraid my boss ain’t gonna like me when we do our review in six-hundred-something years. I thought that was a real long time, but Lew—he’s kinda like my coworker—he said that’s just ‘cause I’m a puny mortal who can’t grasp the universe stretches on time immemorial, whatever that means, so I’m real anxious.
“Sorry if that’s a lot all at once. I just… I needed to talk to you, ‘cause I figured you might understand all this stuff about life, the universe, and everythin’.”
She paused and held out her hand, a look of concentration on her face, and internally recited, Z̵̨̽ǐ̵͈m̶̯̏ ̴̫͒z̵͕̈a̴͊ͅḿ̸̟ ̷͙̍š̴̜p̶̐͜h̸̢̋a̸͉͘l̵̰͊õ̵̰o̶̩̔s̴̿͜h̵̯̓i̷̭̚e̷̍ͅ ̴͚̽ḧ̴͚́e̷͍͊n̴͉͂g̸̊͜ ̷̣͝a̸̻̚k̸̬͠a̵̪͑ȟ̷̪k̶̲͒ą̵͐ḧ̴͙́-̷̦͊k̵͇͋ȃ̵̗l̵͔̎ã̵̲h̸̞͗ . A fern leaf appeared in her open palm, and she laid it down against the tombstone.
“Wish you were here. Love ya, Mama.”
She stood and wiped at the tears in her eyes. “Sorry, Lew. I know you probably don’t like being in a graveyard, what with all the crosses and such.”
That made no sense whatsoever, but for once, Lew didn’t feel up to needling her about it. “Eh. You, uh… I dunno, wanna go draw some’a that nature stuff you like or whatever?”
“Yeah… Yeah, I think I’d like that just fine.”