Love Bites Then it Sucks by Julie Steimle (best self help books to read .TXT) 📕

The demon angel seized my legs and both of them together pulled me through the wall and onto the roof.

Lifting me off, they zipped us all out of there. We ended up back at the stupid Ordway Building. Most of the death angels were gone when we returned.

“Did you succeed?” the gray angel asked, looking hardly moved from the time we were last there. I wondered if he often stood like a statue. Perhaps he posed around catholic cathedrals to blend in.

“She wrote her note,” the biker said, setting me down.

“Several,” the demon angel murmured with a chuckle. He seemed to enjoy that I had defied the ‘rules’.

The gray angel glared at me. “I though the agreement was a note. Did you not even try to restrain her?”

“She writes quite fast.” The demon dug earwax out of his ear unconcernedly.

George snorted.

Eyeing them then me, the gray angel then said, “Fine. It is time for her to leave here.”

“You suck.” I rose to my feet.

“You cheat,” the gray angel replied.

Pulling back from him, I nearly snarled. “Yeah? Well you people stole me from my life.”

Biker George raised his hands and backed away from me. “Hey. Don’t kill the messenger.”

Messenger indeed. He wasn’t just a messenger. He was an accomplice. What was I to do now? There was no way out. I had to play along, at least until I figured a way back to mortality, back to Hanz.

The gray angel stepped up to me, chin high as his gray eyes fixed with resignation on my face. He declared in a loud voice to the others, “Everyone here will stand as a witness that I did my duty and obeyed the command which I was given. Eve Marie McAllister has been chosen for redemption.”

He then reached out to me.

I ducked away.

Shaking his head, the gray angel said to me, “I have to put my hand on your head, or you will remain in this limbo state forever—neither as one of us nor as one of them.”

Moaning, I hung my shoulders. With resignation, I held still and allowed that gray angel to rest his heavy hand on the top of my head. He said in a resonant voice, “I now bestow upon you the first gift and your first responsibility.”

In that moment, I felt something solid form in my hand. It took shape as a handle, then it spread up from out my fist into a sharp blade. It was a hand scythe. I stared at it.

“What’s the matter?” one of the elvish angels asked mockingly. “Not what you expected?”

I shrugged. “It’s just… kind of small.”

The vampire set for redemption smirked at me and said, “That is entirely up to you.”

He then pulled his own out. His formed long in his hand from nothing, like a true grim reaper’s scythe.

Each of them had a different type of scythe. The elvish scythes had an almost plant-like quality to them. The demon angel had one which looked like it had been made from bone. Some carried both scythe and sword. One held a shield.

“How many kinds of death angels are there?” I murmured.

The gray angel said with uplifted chin, “Each to his own. And I will show you to your responsibility soon enough. This meeting is adjourned.”

But the words of the vampire sunk into me as I felt the scythe in my hand. I could sense that I could put it away and summon it as I wanted, not unlike my wings which I could in the past retract at will. Examining the hand scythe in my grip, I instinctively retracted the scythe itself, drawing it inside my palm as it became immaterial and shrank into nothing more than a mark on the heel of my thumb. But it was not just any mark. Like my wing birthmarks, running inside my palm from my thumb to my index finger was a scar-like tattoo, shaped a bit like a scythe. Feeling it with my fingertips, sensing the weight of the weapon I now carried, I understood what he meant. The weapon’s shape was up to me.

Summoning that scythe again, it came out standing taller than me, the handle dark color of my fleshy wings, with a wickedly sharp blade. Those death angels still there lurched back, their eyes widening on me.

Biker George stared, whistling from high to low.

The demon angel cackled, winking at the gray angel, “Looks like she was born for this.” And he flew off on wings of fire which ripped out of his back as if they were blowtorches.

The other death angels also flew off, except for George and the gray angel. George’s smoke wings were out though, each ‘feather’ curling and fluttering insubstantially around him.

“What is with the wings?” I asked, pointing at George’s with my scythe. 

The gray angel flinched, eyeing the blade in my hand as if giving me a weapon was a bad idea.

And it was. I was furious. I wanted to reap him, or least teach him a thing or two. Only I knew he was much faster than me. I would lose a battle against him with his sword, regardless of my new sharp weapon.

“The wings are symbolic vestments of power,” the gray angel replied. “Only you have functional wings—and that is what is slowing you down.”

I glowered at him.

“You are too attached to the temporal world,” he said. “As reaper, you must leave behind mortal cares and focus on the spirit. Time will now be immaterial to you. You will cease to age from this moment on. Your duty from now on will be solely to guide the spirits of the dead safely to the other side.”

“And my curse?” I asked, getting the feeling that I was lied to about that.

He nodded smugly at me. “That, you must figure out on your own. If you perform your duty to the satisfaction of Heaven and end the rebirth cycle of the vimp, then perhaps you may regain mortality and earn redemption on the level of a mortal human being.”

I stared at him then glanced to the biker. “What are you saying? You mean I am not like an elf or one of those demons?”

He laughed. It was not a pleasant laugh. It wasn’t even kind. But he was amused. “No. You, vimp, have a human soul. All the vimps did. If you hadn’t you would have remembered Heaven.”

I was human.

I don’t know why, but that brought me so much relief. All these years I had wondered. All these years I had been asking priests and other people who might know the state of my soul. What was I exactly? But none of them were able to answer my question until now. Gazing on the gray angel, for the first time that day, I felt gratitude. 

“A relief, huh?” George said with a crooked grin at me.

I nodded. “Yeah…”

The gray angel rolled his eyes. Apparently he did not look on humans as kindly. Honestly, I wondered about him. How could he be so smug? Humans were amazing. Every human being that I had met in my life, those that cherished their lives especially, were beautiful. Even the ones who had picked on me when we were kids. I had envied what they had had. And better still, if I had a human soul, marrying Hanz would not have been wicked.

Coming to that thought, I shot a hard look at the gray angel who was gazing impatiently on me, waiting for me to come to him for some reason. I pointed my scythe at him. “You told me marrying Hanz would have corrupted his soul. But if I have a human soul—”

“Your eternal soul is corrupt,” the gray angel said with a tired moan. “You are one of the damned. And until you earn redemption, it will remain thus.”

My mouth dug into a frown.

“And believe me,” he said with a degree of almost vindictive satisfaction, “It will take you an eternity to achieve that, if you ever do. Very few reapers with blackened, traitorous souls such as yours ever reach redemption.”

I leaned away, my frown deepening. “What ever happened to God’s mercy?”

“This is God’s mercy,” he said.

I shook my head, as to me this did not feel right. It was too medieval.

George put his arm on my shoulder, patting it. “She’ll learn. Now, are we off?”

Glaring at him, I resisted the urge to shove his hand off of me.

The gray angel nodded to him. “Take her there and show her the work.”

With a huge nod, grabbing me by the arms, biker George lifted us both off the roof of the Ordway Building.

“Close your eyes,” he said. “Or you’ll regret it.”

I huffed, wishing to do the opposite. But I had learned well enough to know when sincere advice is being given. I closed my eyes. The next second, and I swear I got whiplash as we tore through the sky.

 *

“… up here!” Hanz jogged up, breathless to the rooftop with two security guards behind him.

The gray angel stared at him, sighing as he shook his head in exasperation. “Give it up. She is not coming back.”

“There’s no one here,” the security guard said.

Hanz turned over the photograph in his hand, shaking his head as he looked at the writing on it. It said Ordway Building roof. “She was. She just was. But I don’t feel her near anymore.”

Halting, as he was about to go, the gray angel stared at Hanz curiously.  

“What do you mean, feel her?” one of the security guards said.

Shaking his head, Hanz went back down into the stairwell. “It doesn’t matter. It was a longshot to begin with.”

As Hanz went down the gray angel stared after him. It was worse than he had thought. Hanz Johaansen had become so acclimatized to that vimp that the man could tell when she was invisible around him. That was a danger he might have to warn the others about. He had to protect Hanz from that demon, that vimp, selected for redemption or not. And honestly, the gray angel did not believe it. He remembered her.

Bold speaker.

Troublemaker.

Liar.

And then she had just changed her mind?

Ridiculous.

She had led away so many. It did not matter to him how many she brought back when she claimed to have returned. He was sure she would betray God again. It was only a matter of time. Soon enough she would show her true colors. She was irredeemable.

Chapter Four

I had never been to New York before, but I recognized it on sight the moment we arrived. The skyline, the smog, the people and the noise. I looked around from atop the skyscraper, biker George setting me down so I could catch my breath.

“How do you move so fast?” I gasped. “I swear you are faster than an imp.”

“We have to be,” biker George said, hardly winded at all. He then eyed me, contemplating my question more. “The difference between me and you, is that you are still mortal. You are still weighed down by the world. You have to let go of that if you want to go fast.”

“I am still mortal?” I stared at him.

He smiled. “You aren’t dead. You are just in-between—much like those little devils are. But you have to let go of that part