Articles
1. Feathers
The angel screamed as I tore out his wings.
Or maybe it was _her_ wings.
I didn't really know, or, frankly, care. I had better things to do with my time than hunt up a calendar, and since angels are some sort of quasi-hermaphroditic species, cycling from male to female to neuter and back again, it'd take more work than I cared to do to determine the proper pronoun.
Hell, call it an it.
Whatever the gender, it screamed as I tore the feathers from its body -- big, fluffy handfuls of feathers, like the ones stuffed into the better class of bedding, like what you think feathers should be when you're a kid, and every little piece of fluff dropped from a passing bird seems somehow magical, making you dream about flying, or creating the perfect quill pen, or fashioning an arrow that will always shoot straight.
That's what these feathers were like. The tips were silky, gossameresque. The shaft like the finest steel. Sitting in my hand lightly, like a fistful of spider webs, but embued with some manner of hidden weight.
Or perhaps the weight was from the blood. You see, pulling the feathers from an angel isn't an easy task, or a painless one. By the time I was done, the room looked like the motherfucker of all pillow fights had been staged here, with blood and feathers and sweat and tears everywhere you looked. I was splattered with blood. Little bits of dander had stuck to the congealing liquid and dried into my clothes. The feathers I held in my hand were a mixture of gleaming white and blazing scarlet -- fire and ice, swirled together. Bile rose in my throat.
The angle sobbed now, hoarsely.
It had been screaming for hours, perhaps days.
The angel's screams froze my blood, made the marrow in my bones ache. The screams are why I don't know how long I'd been at my horrific project: At times, it was all I could do to continue, numbing my mind and entering some sort of lethargic fugue state, where time passed by heedlessly. I didn't sleep, for fear of the screams echoing in my dreams, consuming me until I never awoke. I didn't eat, for that would have required some measure of concentration, of thought -- and if I thought at all, I feared that my brain would dissolve under the pressure.
Screams. The screams.
These were the screams that we speak of now as myths, when we talk of the banshee. Screams of death. I have no doubt that this is where tales of the dark lady -- the bain sidhe of death -- come from, when some unfortunate was hunted down by the angles, and the victim's cries mingled with the screams of the angel hunters until death claimed their rotten, mortal souls. Harbingers of death.
Rest assured that someone would die. It would not be me -- not now, not when I had the angel's wings in pieces in my hand.
No, it was far more likely that the angel would be the one to perish, brought down by one of its myriad of enemies. An angel without its wings is like a declawed cat, let loose in the alleyway as prey, fallen so far from its perch higher up the food chain.
Angles are not an easy thing to kill. Swooping, diving, wielding their golden swords, fury personified, justice incarnate. But now? On foot? With its sword forever gone due to its own foolishness?
That is why the angle sobbed.
