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  The creature retreated a few paces and spit up a black luggage bag with wheels. Clutching its handle, the demon opened its mouth to smile. The size of its maw was large enough to swallow me whole. But what disturbed me more was that instead of razor sharp teeth, I found myself staring at swollen gray lumps. No teeth, just nubbed gums.

  Snapping its jaws shut with a sharp clop, it then pirouetted on the spot and strode off, managing to walk over the mangled corpse of Gaffrey Palls—a solid th-thump from its rolly bags for his troubles. And then it slammed the door to its room.

  Barely a second passed when the door flew open again and music came pouring out of the room. With one of my towels dragging around its waist and another tied around its head, the pudgy little demon strutted its way to the bathroom and used a light ass-bump to slam the door shut.

  As the hiss of the shower came on, I found myself able to take a breath. Cradling my broken wrist in place, I managed the strength to stagger to my feet and take a good look around. Amidst my ringing headache, broken glass, and the amniotic goo—the realization of what I had signed up for began to billow in my mind like a cloud.

  With its rent swells, fare hikes, rubbery bagels, pizza rats, taxis that smell like bathrooms, bathrooms that smell like crime scenes, and the Mets, I struggled through the first-third of my life trying my ever-loving best to survive this sardine can packed with 8.5 million people that insist on rubbing, bumping, and burping on each other in the name of basic human interaction. I had managed this by maintaining the little square feet this city would allow me and by keeping the outside world where it needed to be: on the outside. I was perfectly content with this and it’s safe to say that I had a good thing going.

  And then there were crows.

  CHAPTER 2

  “I REBUKE THEE, YOU FOUL, DISGUSTING MESSENGER OF BEELZEBUB! I REBUKE THEE! MAY YOU FOREVER BE BANISHED TO THE LOWEST RUNGS OF THE DARK PLAINS, OH HELLSPAWN, AND MAY YOU FOREVER BURN IN ETERNAL DAM—”

  “—only for a limited time. Enjoy the Double Bacon Back Barbecue Crisp. Why have a bacon burger when you can have bacon stacked atop bacon ... atop bacon ... atop bacon? That’s right. Seven layers of bacon, lathered in secret sauce and stuffed in a half-cooked bun. The Double Bacon Back Barbecue Crisp. And when the ambulance asks you to describe that debilitating pain in your chest … just tell ’em ‘Mmm mmm mm’!”

  This was how I spent the next three days. Nothing fancy. Nothing flashy. This was all my impish roommate did to pass the time: horror movies and commercials. The horror movies part I get, I mean, it’s a demon. Even without actual eyes to see, it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise that a creature like that would get off watching people getting dismembered and tortured. The same goes for when it used my laptop to rip a bootleg of The Exorcist and watch it every other second of every other day; twice if nothing else was on. I mean, the same crab-walking, puke-spewing little girl, over and over, doesn’t get old. It’s one of my favorite movies, but seeing this little hellspawn enjoy it so much was off-putting. It always viewed it in this silence—the kind of quiet a normal person watches a documentary. Or a home video. Package that with the fact that it had the stature of an overweight seven year old, and I don’t have to tell you—all levels of creepy.

  That’s the first, most typical thing that took up its time. All understandable, right? Creepy but understood to an extent.

  The commercials … the commercials were weird on an entirely different level.

  The creature never spoke, not a word, but it did murmur and purr from time to time, and only when watching commercials. And of course, it had no eyes, so who knows how it was managing to watch anything at all. Any commercials. All commercials. Phallic looking kid’s toys, women’s sanitary napkins made to smell like Belgian forests, Pinot Grigio flavored dog food—the demon watched them riveted as if taking the most profound of mental notes. A few times I saw it raise a claw to where its chin should have been and lightly tap there, like a human-being thinking. And when a show would start―or restart―it would throw its hands up in the air, grumble, and then grab my phone to play six more levels of Sugar Spank until the next show break.

  Yeah. It fixed my phone. It also fixed my kitchen, my fridge, my window, and picked up Gaffrey Palls and put him away.

  That’s right. I said “put-him-away”.

  In New York, it’s not uncommon to come across a used condom lying on the ground. It’s totally gross and totally the reason why we New Yorkers stare at the ground half the time (that and certain levels of eye contact … I’ll tell you about that later). Palls was like these used condoms: worn, wrinkled, and spent. Without bones or organs, I watched as Gaffrey Palls—now a crunchy and empty waste—was rolled up and placed in my new roomie’s room like a cheap poncho.

  The demon even took the liberty of fixing the broken wrist and ribs I picked up the night before. With a quick tap of its claw, my skin folded up into itself like a tiny puckering mouth, sound effects and all. Below the surface, the muscle, tendon, and bone waltzed, cha-cha’d, and in no time, the whole thing was moving just fine. This was the only time it paid any attention to me at all.

  Like I said, it spent those first few days on my TV, and I didn’t feel the need to say something to the guy/gal/thing (insert proper pronoun for a demon here) that was paying the cable bill. So I lay on the sofa, laptop on my lap, looking for the next source of income. Because sure, the demon had paid my entire rent for the next twelve months, but from what I could tell, it didn’t eat. And I still did, so …

  For those three days, Barnem the Seraph would come by and stand outside my apartment. How would I know? Because I could see him! With my front door still lying flat on the ground, I could see him glaring at me. Honestly, the demon had taken care of everything, but it left the door for the super to fix. And Barnem, with his bloodshot eyes and five o’clock shadow growing in, stared at me until I invited him in.

  “Yes. Barnem. Yes.”

  The Seraph straightened his shoulders and stepped in. He stood behind the creature as its short legs swung from the green recliner without touching the ground. On the screen, a commercial for self-warming prostate gels played as Barnem slapped his hands together and raised them slowly over his head. He began chanting.

  A torrent of wind whirled about the room.

  The floor shook and plaster fell from the ceiling.

  His chanting got louder.

  And louder.

  “This again? What are you doing, Barnem?” I shouted without looking up from my laptop. The creature grumbled and tap-tap-tapped the volume button on the remote.

  “I’m trying to evoke my spiritual weapon,” Barnem screamed. And continued to scream. The wind erupted at his feet and my walls vibrated. His body began to hover, ever so slightly, from the ground. My toaster unplugged itself from the wall, skipped across the floor, and committed suicide out of my window.

  Slowly, I got up, pushed the chanting angel’s floating body aside, and headed toward the kitchen.

  “Want some lunch?”

  “Sure,” he said, giving up instantly and falling onto the couch. The wind, the chanting, the small-scale earthquake clicked off like a switch. “It’s not those awful ramen noodles again, is it? Because you keep coming up with really shitty ways to cook that stuff.”

  “It’s cheap and my parents bought enough for me to fill a bomb shelter with. Ch-ch-check it out.” Opening my freezer, I removed a tray that sported tiny toothpicks poking out of the cubicles. I pried one out and shoved the brownish creation in Barnem’s face. “Ramen pops!”

  “A new low, Grey,” he muttered, but he dumped one into his mouth anyway.

  The creature, as if abiding by some internal clock, jumped up and turned off the television. Then, scratching the back of its head and yawning, it dragged its feet to its room to close the door and lock itself away. It did this ritual every day at 1:34 p.m. Three days had gon
e by and I’ve never been able to look inside that room.

  I banged on the door. “I swear, you’d better not be getting ram’s blood on the floor and walls or the super’s taking our security!”

  Barnem hated the ramen pop so much that he had a second one. He was unemployed and I’m not really sure how he came up with rent. Who knows, maybe angels get insta-money powers, too? Barnem wasn’t saying a thing about it, but it didn’t take a genius to see that he and my new roommate were tied in some way. And something told me it had a lot (see also: everything) to do with why a grand old Seraph was living in Queens to begin with.

  The first three days followed the same routine. The demon would watch its commercials in the morning and Barnem would take over the TV in the afternoon. He watched nothing but news reports for what he called “the oddities” every day. And every day, he gave up after two or three hours.

  “Still nothing,” he said, scraping the edge of his face with the remote. “This is a real terrible thing you’ve done, Grey.”

  “Says the guy who ate the whole tray!”

  “Not that. The Shades, Grey. Your little stunt a few nights ago has unleashed these evils upon the world.”

  The Shades.

  This is what he called the six crows that had sprung up from Gaffrey Palls. Each one, he explained, was a harbinger of death; a vicious demon capable of throwing the world into unending darkness. I guess I lucked out because my roommate was not part of that equation. Ol’ blobby barely did anything. Couple that with the Seraph himself, who—minus his attempted save the night Palls came calling—was pretty un-marvelous in every single way. I must admit that this made me pretty damn hopeful. Three days had gone by without anything weird outside of those two. It made me hopeful that life was ready to return to its normal kind of weird.

  But there was one of us that was none too happy about that fact.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Barnem muttered, turning off the screen and tossing the remote aside. “If it were going to happen, it should be happening right now. I should be able to spot these things already.”

  I closed my laptop and removed my glasses. “How can you tell what’s on the news already isn’t one of those Shade thingies?”

  “Shootings in schools? Cannibalism? Home invasions,” he said, rattling off a list of the most recent news, “all man-made sin. All very human problems. The brand of chaos the Shades will bring … should be bringing by now, is going to be unlike anything you’ve ever seen.”

  “Well that’s good, right? Back to business as usual.”

  I watched his face, just his face, as some dull emotion ran through it. I’m not sure if angels are supposed to have emotions, but Barnem definitely did. And the one showing on his face at the time was saying that he was less worried about the lives of the people when these things ran wild. That not only was Barnem the Seraph expecting some bad shit to go down, he was also, in a way, looking forward to it.

  Then, the creature waltzed out of his room.

  Barnem peeked over at him without turning his head. “You say he hasn’t left the apartment yet, right?”

  “Nope,” I replied with a sigh, watching it go through my CD collection. It seemed to be in a Neil Diamond sort of mood. When Barnem didn’t say anything else, I pressed the issue. “So what’s the story with the little guy? Just a few days ago, you wanted to slay it. And now? It’s a Shade, too, isn’t it?”

  Barnem stood up, but instead of lunging at the creature, he stretched his back. He still smelled like wet feathers and I tended to get extended whiffs of it whenever he moved too close. “Least of my problems. This one’s the runt of the litter. You saw how he came out, all scraggly and tiny?”

  The demon slipped a CD into its dark palm and let out a hissing chuckle. Jane’s Addiction. It scurried off to its room and closed the door.

  “He is pretty useless,” I said casually. “No maniacal laughter. No fiery embers. I mean, at the very least, I was expecting him to go outside and lick an orphan or tip over an old lady. No. Nope. Nothing. He doesn’t even leave hairs in the bathtub after a shower. He has to be the worst demon I have ever met. But, and I really hate to say this, he’s been the best damn roommate I’ve ever had.”

  Still lying on my back, I stretched my arms and yawned, but when I opened my eyes, the angel’s face was hovering over mine, almost nose to nose. Barnem was bent over the sofa where I was lying, staring me down.

  “You have no idea the scourge you have let loose upon humanity,” he said with a blank expression, eyes dead.

  “Scourge. Got it,” I replied with an even blanker expression, my lips barely moving.

  “You have to find the other Shades. You have to make this right or else the end of mankind will be on your head.”

  “Right. About that. Barnem, I’m pretty sure where you’re from, information comes in scroll notifications or trumpet blows. But down here, we have Wikipedia. That’s right. I looked you up and it says that you Seraphs are really ‘go-getters’, you do the jobs that need doing. That you kind of get off on it, actually. So I think you can go kill the nightmare leprechaun in the next room and then find the other Shades yourself. ’Kay?”

  Barnem’s eyes began to bulge. “Grey. I’m going to need you to listen.”

  “Sure.”

  “Really listen, okay? Are you looking at me?”

  “I am.”

  “Really look at me.”

  “Barnem. I’m looking at you. You’re three inches from my nose. I cannot not look at you.”

  The seraph gritted his teeth and said, “My ‘job’, as you put it, is as a herald. A herald, Grey. A herald!”

  “A herald. Got it. Click! Save as.”

  “Not a messenger. Not a floating tongue of flame. And thank God I wasn’t made into one of those lazy ass harpists who sit on a cloud all day …”

  “Sounds annoying.”

  “… just plucking away. They aren’t even playing anything, you know that? It’s a harp. They don’t receive special training or anything. For passing their fingers back and forth on something? You don’t see me demanding special treatment for an instrument with the same instructions as a cheese grater. But I digress …”

  “You do.”

  “It’s simple. I call the name of the creator when He returns. I slay the beast on earth. I use my spiritual sword to slay the beast. But now you have scattered the Shades, which means no spiritual weapon, which means there’s no balance in the world, which means― Oh my god!” he practically screeched. “Are you asleep?”

  Peeking through my closed eyelids, I spotted Barnem slapping on his coldest glare. I realized that it was impossible to tell how old he was. Seeing him from time to time in the hallway—his uncombed, rust-colored hair, the thick creases dug into his face like warfront trenches, the way his skin always looked dirty—I kind of took him as any old looking young guy. Or young looking old guy? Whatever. On second thought, there were a few things that didn’t seem to fit that judgment call completely. His high cheekbones were of the supermodel variety. And he always stood in this posture and walked with a stride that reeked of a completely unnecessary superiority complex. In short, the guy reminded me of a homeless man who thought he owned the street only because he slept on one every night.

  “Are you going to say something, Grey, or are we going to lay there until kingdom come?”

  I blinked my eyes a few times before rolling them. “Is staring one of your super powers?”

  “I don’t have super powers, Grey. I’m from the holy book, not a comic.” Barnem stood up straight and shook his head. “And so tell me again why you don’t see any of this as even a bit off-putting? You nearly died a few nights ago.”

  “But I didn’t … which, let me say, would have ruined my entire week.” When he shot me a sour look, I added, “Aw c’mon. Did you leave your wings and your sense of humor back hom
e? Look at the life I’m living, Barnem. My rent’s paid up. Your spooky Shades? Haven’t heard a peep from them. I probably have the Devil’s nephew living in my house, but it doesn’t even have friggin’ eyes let alone anything even remotely evil in the works. I’m even finding the time to become a bodega gourmet. I’m living the dream. Zero. Nothing. Nada. No consequences. My life is totally ‘regret light’ right now.”

  Barnem wasn’t having it. “Is there any logical reason why you’re so amazingly aloof about things?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe it’s because I was homeschooled and never learned the true weight of possible circumstances?”

  Barnem scratched the back of his head. “Where the hell do you come up with this stuff?” Making for the door, I could hear him mutter under his breath, “Spent thousands of aoens on earth and this time He manages to pair me with the most frustrating person ever created.”

  I was going to tell him to watch his pronouns but without saying anything else, his holier-than-thou-ness strutted out of my apartment.

  I did have a point. It had been already three days and my life had returned to the status quo, boring business as usual. That’s what I wanted, really. Sure my parents might show up at any minute, but I thought I could figure something out in the clutch. The apartment was still there and that’s what was important. It’s what I kept telling myself, anyway.

  Flicking on the TV, I knew that some weird stuff had gone down, true, but then what? I had lived a perfectly average life before and I was in control of everything again. Barnem could go take the knot out of his sanctified panties somewhere else. When the TV came on, it was in the middle of a news segment.

  “… and neighbors say that they have never seen anything like this,” the news reporter said before cutting to a fat, balding eyewitness standing on a street corner. “Yeah. Freakiest ’ting, ya know. Been livin’ here for, I dunno, twenny, twenny-five years? And I never seen nuttin’ like dis.”