Angels Unawares

By Wesa

Series: Brimstone

AU: TTD

Disclaimers: Brimstone characters belong to Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris, Warner Brothers, and now I guess to SciFi. Cassie and Lindor belong to me (Sorry, Luke). Israfel belongs to himself and to God.

Rating: PG-13 for suggested violence.

By Wesa.

The people Luke and Cassie sought gathered in small groups on the streets at night, but when they were working they were not particularly receptive to conversation. Instead, they found them in the afternoon at the mission where free or low-cost food and health services were available, or at the mobile clinic that dispensed clean needles for used ones.

Somewhat more restricted in his mode of travel - he had to take the bus - Zeke arrived at the mission a good two hours after the angels, unable to believe his good luck in finding them the first place he checked. He saw Cassie first, sitting at a table with five women, presumably human ones. She seemed mostly to be listening in great concern to a woman with more bruises than face. As Zeke watched, Lindor ran up to Cassie's side and leaned against her trustingly, the pupils of his eyes dilated with horror as he stared at the woman's battered features. Certainly Lindor's parents knew more about young angels than he did, if they could remember that far back, but Zeke wondered if they were right to expose him to the cruelties of the world at such a young age, though he didn't try to interfere.

"No man has any right to treat you this way," Cassie growled in a low, angry voice as Zeke passed unacknowledged. "I don't care if he is your pimp. Why do you allow him to beat you like this?" Well, he certainly had no quarrel with that line of thinking. Cassie was right. A pimp who protected his girls was a sleaze. One who beat them was intolerable.

Zeke continued looking, turning into a hallway that led toward the back of the building. He wasn't certain what he was looking for; he only knew that the Devil often dropped very oblique hints about which of the fugitives he wanted targeted next, and the brief conversation about the Devil wearing a clerical collar might fall into that category. With that in mind, Zeke wandered around the mission, keeping his eyes and ears open for anything out of the ordinary. And Cassie was here; where had her husband got to?

Finally he heard a familiar voice, though instead of the normally brash over-the-top tone, this voice was velvety. It tickled the mind intimately and caressed the soul in a way that made the hair on the back of Zeke's neck stand on end. He could almost feel long fingernails edging under his moral code, trying to flick it away like a dried scab. Why was the subject of the soft-spoken tirade staying to listen? At first Zeke couldn't make out what the Devil was saying, but as he came closer the sounds separated into distinct words.

"You must tell someone," the voice purred. "If you don't, you'll be as responsible as he is. Could you live with the knowledge that you could have stopped it and didn't?" Another voice, a tortured one, replied unintelligibly. "Why wouldn't they? You're a priest, after all. What possible reason would you have to lie?"

Another noise answered; this time it sounded like a sob. "There, there, Father Joseph," the Devil soothed. "I know you will find the answer to your dilemma." A moment later he stepped through the door, silently closing it behind himself.

He smiled at Stone. "Good afternoon, Detective," he said, still speaking softly as he took Zeke's elbow and led him away.

"You're taking confessions now?" Zeke asked. "Won't that upset your Father?"

"It's the admission of guilt He wants," Luke told him. "The listener isn't important. Well, I am, but I'm not the usual listener."

"What did he do?"

"Father Joseph? Nothing, yet." The Devil grinned maliciously. "The beauty of it is, I get him either way. If he tells, he breaks a vow he made to God. If he doesn't, he's complicitous."

"In what?" Zeke pressed.

"Ah-ah, you know I can't help you," Luke reminded him, shaking a finger at him warningly.

Zeke stopped in his tracks, twisting his arm free of the strong hand that gripped his elbow almost casually. "Father Joseph knows something?" He turned away to return to the door through which the Devil had exited.

"He wouldn't tell me; he certainly isn't going to tell you, Ezekiel," the Devil warned. "The silence of the confessional, you know. Of course, there is a difference."

Zeke paused and turned back. "Which is?"

He smiled, sending a cold chill down Zeke's spine, and replied, "I already know." Luke left as abruptly as always, the flash of light that accompanied his departure momentarily blinding Zeke.

***********

The Devil never did anything, never said anything without purpose, Zeke knew, including pointing out that Father Joseph wouldn't break his silence for a dead cop if he wouldn't break it for the Devil himself. Therefore, Zeke settled on employing a time-honored police procedure: he set up a stakeout.

Of course Lindor saw him and ran to join him, but Cassie intercepted him, whispering just loudly enough for Zeke to hear, "Not now, angel, Ezekiel's working. Don't interrupt him." From the glaring stares Zeke received from other denizens of the mission afterward, he was pretty sure that either the others around had heard something entirely different or that no one else had heard her words at all, and simply made assumptions from the way Lindor thereafter avoided him.

While he fidgeted on his self-imposed stakeout, Zeke had time to listen to Cassie admonishing the prostitutes in her counseling group to take advantage of one of the drug rehabilitation programs offered through the mission, or even one offered by the state. "Look at what drugs make you do. Is there anything you wouldn't do to get more? Amber," she addressed a girl of about seventeen with a baby in her lap, "if someone offered to trade you drugs for your child, what would you do? Be honest with yourself, if not with me."

The honey-haired teenager looked at Cassie in horror. "What kind of monster do you think I am?" she asked, offended.

"I don't think you're a monster at all, dear. That's why I want you to get off the drugs, before they make you do something monstrous. Because as long as you're addicted, you're not in control of your own actions," Cassie explained gently. "I know you love your daughter. But if it came down to choosing between her and the meth, which would win? Because you aren't in control, the drug is. The drug wants your total devotion, and won't draw the line at harming or even getting rid of your child to enforce it."

"Shit, girlfriend, you know she's right," drawled a dark-skinned woman. Her bracelets jingled together as she crushed out a cigarette. "That's why I give my babies up to foster care almost as soon as they was born." She looked at Cassie, and even from across the room Zeke could see the tears glistening in her eyes. "I seen the oldest one last week. He won a spelling bee at school..." Her sentence dissolved into sobs, and Cassie took her into her arms to give comfort.

"It's not too late," Cassie told them all. "Give up the drugs, get into rehab, take back your God-given free will." She stroked the sobbing woman's hair, rocking her gently. "Get clean, stay clean. There's no reason you can't get your children back, Leila," she added softly. "If any of you want to fill out a form tonight, I can help."

Amber stood up, hitching her baby higher on her hip. "I have to take Ginny to my mother's. I'm going to be late for work as it is."

Cassie looked at her in disbelief. "He beat Joylee, and he makes you punch a timeclock?" she asked. "And you do this for him willingly? I don't believe it. It'll only be a matter of time, Amber, before he starts pushing you to get rid of Ginny. And why? So you can sell your body to pay for the meth. What happens when the drug distorts your body so that men no longer want it? What will you sell then?" She looked meaningfully at the dark-eyed child Amber held. "Will you become just like him, and put your child on the street?"

"Oh, she's good," Luke said admiringly in Zeke's ear as Amber rushed out angrily. "She's made her point with that one."

Zeke turned. "I would have thought you'd want them to prostitute themselves. Adultery and all that," he said as the Devil sat down beside him.

"It's no good if they don't do it of their own free will, Ezekiel," Luke explained. "Addiction saps self-esteem, which is good; you humans think too highly of yourselves as it is. But it also drains free will, and you can hardly sin if you aren't in control of your own actions. No, if these women are to be mine, they have to do the deed with conscious intent. For money, to please their pimp, because they just like having sex with half a dozen or more strangers each night; the actual reason doesn't matter, as long as they are able to exercise their gift of free will, which I've always said leads naturally to damnation."

"But if Cassie can get them into rehab, won't that tend to make them leave the profession?" Zeke challenged.

"Most likely," the Devil admitted, reaching for an apple from the bowl of fruit on the table. "There are other paths to my realm: hatred, murder, or theft, even lying." He cocked his head, studying Zeke as he took a bite of the apple and chewed it. "You disbelieve me?"

"C'mon, lying?" Zeke objected.

"I'm not talking about the answer you give when Rosalyn asks if the new dress she's wearing makes her look fat, and it does," Luke chastised him. "I'm talking about the corporate spokesman who claims a new chemical is innocuous when he knows perfectly well that it causes cancer, and is contaminating the drinking water of millions of people. I'm talking about the corporate executive who testifies that nothing was added or concentrated in a product to make it addictive when he knows perfectly well that's exactly what was done," he continued, getting angrier as he spoke. "I'm talking about the politician who claims that there's no evidence to support the theory of global warming only because the oil companies contributed to his campaign. I'm talking about the military officers and politicians who claim they're running a moral war, yet deliberately bomb civilians and children, because the actual target is enemy morale." He paused and seemed to shake off his fury. "No, Ezekiel, it's the conscious decision to do wrong that brings souls my way. And no one can make a conscious decision when addiction controls him or her. Sometimes I think God created these plants, these chemicals, just so some people would have an out," he added, scowling, "but the conscious seeking out of drugs to abdicate responsibility is a decision in itself. Really, they can't win. I don't know why they try."

Zeke snorted. "Maybe because Hell is such a lovely vacation spot?" he suggested sarcastically. The Devil just smiled at him. "So you think Cassie is doing this to condemn those women?"

"My wife doesn't condemn anyone, Ezekiel," Luke told him. "She loves sex, but she doesn't want to see anyone engaging in the activity who isn't doing so voluntarily, and she doesn't want to see them come to physical harm. She's practically the patron saint of whores."

Zeke shook his head. "Still seems to me like she's doing them a favor, trying to get them to give up drugs."

Luke's answering smile made a cold shiver run up and down Zeke's spine.

**********

The family of angels left the mission around nine o'clock; to have stayed later would have drawn attention to the parents of a young child. Zeke maintained his vigil, and finally around eleven Father Joseph left, too, completely unaware that he was being followed.

The mission wasn't in the best part of town, but the priest went into an even less respectable area near the late-night bars and the red-light district, but not as well lighted as either. Zeke followed, wondering what in the world the priest could want here. He worked with these people, surely he must know how dangerous the streets he was walking could be.

A drunk stumbled against Zeke, and in the moment the cop took to steady the man, he lost track of the priest. Zeke disentangled himself from the overly friendly alcoholic and hurried to the place where he'd last seen the man he was following, unfortunately drawing attention to himself.

"Hey!" cried one of the prostitutes on the sidewalk in front of the nearest bar. "It's the perve from the mission!" Zeke looked and saw that the speaker was Leila, one of the prostitutes in Cassie's counseling group. "Hey, baby, you interested in a real woman, or do you just like little boys?"

On a rooftop above, Lindor looked at Cassie. "Mom?" he asked. "What did Leila mean?"

Cassie glanced at Luke, who lifted Lindor to sit on the raised parapet at the edge of the roof. "Some humans misdirect their sexual urges, angel," Cassie told him gently. "When I stopped you from bothering Ezekiel at the mission, they assumed I thought he was such a man, and that you would be in danger from him."

"Zeke would never hurt me!" Lindor protested. "He's my friend!"

Luke combed his fingers through his son's hair. "Not that way, no, Lindor. You're correct. Ezekiel is not one of those who would do such things to young boys."

"But you're growing up, little one," Cassie said tenderly. "Soon you will be old enough to see all the evil there is on the earthly plane. Sex as a form of domination is just one of them. You need not worry that a living human will ever hurt you in that way, and none of your aunts and uncles in Heaven would think of doing such a thing to you."

"And those in Hell wouldn't dare," Luke added, "nor would any of the human souls who have been condemned to be punished for their sins in my realm. You need fear no one any more, my son. Watch now." He turned Lindor to look over the edge of the roof into the alley where Zeke had gone to get away from the scathing epithets of the prostitutes, then leaned on the parapet himself.

"Don't fall, Lindor," Cassie warned. "You must not spread your wings. We are still under God's orders not to show ourselves here."

"But why, Mom?" the little boy asked. "Doesn't God want humans to know about angels?"

"Humans have known about angels from the earliest days of their creation. We were there," Luke told him.

"Since they disobeyed God, we have rarely shown ourselves to them," Cassie added, "and then almost never in our true forms. Our Father wants humans to learn to trust Him completely. It's called faith. Watch, now."

Below, Father Joseph had interposed his body between Amber and a well-dressed man wielding a big knife, and had been badly slashed for his effrontery. But Zeke had pulled his attacker away, and was ready to send him to Hell when Amber lunged forward and twisted the knife from his hand, plunging it deep into his chest. He gasped, and died.

Zeke stood dumbfounded. He had been about to kill a living man. He looked at Amber wordlessly.

"What are you staring at?" she demanded.

Zeke turned to Father Joseph, found him lying on the alley floor, struggling to breathe. "We'd better get him to a hospital," he said, deciding to work out exactly what had just happened at some later date. "Who was he protecting?" he asked Amber. "You? Or him?" he jerked his head toward the dead man in the shadows.

Amber laughed gleefully and ran off into the darkness, shouting, "Everybody!" Maniacal laughter echoed crazily through the narrow spaces.

The girl was crazy. She had a big knife. And the priest would die if he didn't receive medical care immediately. Lifting the thin priest in his arms, Zeke staggered toward the street.

***********