The Dirty Streets of Heaven

said, pointing to one of the rickety chairs and lifting a bottle of wine off the huge wooden wire spool he used for a table. “You want some Bull’s Blood?”

I usually liked the stuff just fine, but not today. In fact, just the thought after the previous night’s binge made something bulge painfully behind my eyeballs. “No, thanks. But don’t let me stop you.”

He shrugged and poured himself a full tumbler. “So you have got yourself in some serious shit,” he said after he’d taken a swallow. “That’s no good, that horned fellow. I knew a man at Adrianople who saw one take a bad priest. Not a pretty sight. The man who saw it, his hair turned white all over.”

“Do you know anything about it that might help me?”

Orban ran his fingers through his beard. “The horns say it is from India or Mesopotamia-they loved their bulls and buffalo, those old river people, and that’s the kind of dark spirits they call up. But I heard the Egyptians knew this ghallu bastard and thought it was their god Set. They couldn’t kill it either.” He frowned. “Tell you truth, Dollar, I don’t think I ever heard about someone killing one.”

“Thanks. You’re really cheering me up,” I said. “Did you bring me back here just for a pep talk, or did you have some other help to offer? You said the silver bullets needed to be special if there’s going to be any chance- special, but not blessed. Special how?”

“Don’t know.” He shrugged again and took a long swallow of the Egri. “Just know what I read in manuals.” I should mention that manuals of the sort Orban referred to are pretty obscure, since as far as I know, things like where to shoot a chimaera and the best ammunition to use on various sorts of undead don’t make it into the standard Smith amp; Wesson user’s guides. “But I’ll do some thinking, and I’ll tell you if I come up with anything.”

“Great. Okay, here’s a weird one. Anything to be done when facing off against a Grand Duke of Hell?”

“Say your prayers.” He snorted. “You sure don’t kill one of those-not with any weapon I work on, anyway. Just make them angry.” Orban took a long drink. “Do you want to wait for your bullets? It will take most of the day.”

Disappointed, I got up. I hadn’t really counted on Orban having anything useful in the way of advice, but I had still hoped. “Nah. Can’t wait. Too many irons in the fire.” I thought about where I was. “Not literally, of course. I mean I’ve got a lot of things to do.”

He wiped his lip with the back of his hand and gave me a dry look. “I understand metaphor, Dollar.”

“Sorry.” Sometimes it’s hard to forget that even the really old ones have been living in the present as long as the rest of us have, it’s just a smaller percentage of their total experience. I shook his hand, which was as rough as his voice. “Do you want me to give you a deposit?”

He made a face. “Normally, I say no. You are good for the money. But with a ghallu after you…?” He nodded. “Yeah, give me check for half when we go back inside.” But he still wore an odd expression, and it took him a moment to speak again. “I thought you were out of this kind of business, Dollar. It’s been a long time since those days. I thought you were advocate now-nice safe job. Why is something like this after you?”

“Somebody said something that wasn’t true to somebody who isn’t nice. That’s basically it.”

“Keep your eyes open, Dollar,” Orban called after me as I left. “You always were the kind of stupid bastard that attracted trouble.” But he said it in a nice way.

All right, all right, I admit I haven’t been completely honest about everything. I haven’t lied-I’m an angel, remember? — but I have been, in the famous words of a British politician, a bit economical with the truth. Yes, I did have another job before I became a heavenly advocate. That’s where I met Sam. Orban, too. And my old mentor, Leo? That was where he did his mentoring. But to explain I have to go back a bit.

Like most other angels (or at least most of those I’ve talked to) I first woke to the light of the Celestial City. In a way I was born there-not as an infant, knowing nothing, but as something else entirely, an angelic being with the general but non-specific knowledge of a human adult. I wish I could tell you now exactly what I did and didn’t know at first, but those memories have been muddied and confused by all that’s happened since.

Over the course of what seemed like a few years I became more and more aware of what was going on around me in Heaven as well as back on Earth (although I hadn’t yet visited my old home). Somehow, though, I still knew I belonged down there, or had belonged there once. Yeah, like a lot of heavenly stuff, it’s hard to explain. And after a while I became aware that things were expected of me, that I wasn’t merely around to enjoy growing up, like a pampered child, but had a duty to take my foreordained place on the walls of Heaven, defending it against the constant threat of the Opposition. The Highest and His Adversary had been in conflict since the earliest days, since shortly after light and dark were separated, and the only reason there was anything like peace now was because of the protocols they had established. And Earth was neutral territory, open to both sides-an open city, like Casablanca during WWII. But Earth was also the main battlefield.

And as I grew in Heaven and became more and more aware of my duty, I was also being observed and shunted (in the most subtle of ways and by authorities I never knew) toward the role for which they thought I would be best suited, an Angel of the Lord’s Vengeance-a member of a Counterstrike Unit. The Highest’s ambition for me was finally revealed, and I was sent to Earth to begin my long training process.

If, as I assume, I lived my pre-angelic life on Earth, I returned there from Heaven in the early 90s. It was strange beyond belief to leave the Celestial City and inhabit a meat body, to feel the firing of nerves and the pumping of blood, to be covered in a garment of living flesh. On Earth, everything around me seemed so present, the things I saw and felt right on top of me, almost overwhelming my strange, frail human senses. Sunsets and sunrises could make me weak with joy, and the stars suddenly seemed distant and mysterious.

My first waystation in this new life was a walled camp out in the California desert north of Barstow. Camp Zion-now that was an interesting place, but I’ll save most of those stories for another time. I will say, however, that if Earthly sunsets were painfully intense, being sent down from the cool, comforting shimmer of heaven to the baking, shit-colored mud of the Mojave was staggering in a completely different way.

From the moment I walked into Zion my education was in the hands of my staff sergeant (as you’d probably call him-his heavenly title is more like the Greek lochagos, the leader of a small band of warriors, which was why we called him “Leo the Loke”). Leo was African-American, or at least his earthbound body was; he had a flat, knowing stare that could make any of us stammer, and he was nimble as a dancer but strong enough to crush rocks in his fingers that the rest of us could barely lift with both hands. The “us” in question were the unit’s new recruits, half a dozen in all. (Although we hadn’t become friends yet, my buddy Sam was one of the squad’s veterans.) We were now part of Counterstrike Unit (or “CU”) Lyrae, named after a constellation and informally called the Harps.

Don’t get me wrong, the other rookies and I weren’t just being trained like army guys are trained, running obstacle courses and firing guns-or at least that was only a small part of what we were learning. We were Angels of Vengeance, after all, so what we studied more than anything else was the Opposition-their habits, strengths, and weaknesses, how they preyed on the innocents of Earth, and what we were allowed to do about it. As I mentioned, Earth is a very complicated place for the forces of Heaven and Hell: the appearance of neutrality between the two sides has to be preserved at all times, even if underneath we all know it’s complete bullshit.

Anyway, since I’m trying to keep a long story short, I learned my job as part of a twenty-five angel unit, two dozen men and women and our leader. Leo the Loke had two corporals. Sam-or Sammariel as we called him then- was one of them. Sam scared the shit out of us, to be honest. He’s always had big Earth bodies, and he’s built like Jack Dempsey or one of those old boxer guys, big arms, big torso. He talked slow, thought fast, and could make you squirm in shame with only a couple of well-chosen words. Later on I found out he could make you laugh just as easily. I also didn’t find out until later that when I met him he was already rethinking his career choice and (perhaps not coincidentally) busily drinking his earthbound body to death.

After about a year and a half we graduated from training to actual work-counterstrike, which meant we went into situations that had gone wrong and did our best to put them right and also, quietly, to send a very strong message to the other side that such things would not be tolerated. I have no idea what was going on in other CUs, but CU Lyrae was strictly reactive.

I’ll gloss over the nearly eight years, Earth-time, that I spent as an Angel of Vengeance. Suffice to say that some of it was exhilarating, much of it terrifying, quite a lot disgusting, and almost all of it dangerous. Our territory,