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“Hope, a faithful companion, runs to the rescue and offers
the avenging sword and inspires a love…
Hope rebukes the extinguished Vice with a sacred mouth:
‘cease your grand talk; God breaks every proud thing,
great things fall, inflated things crack, swollen things are pressed down.’”
- Prudentius, Psychomachia
With twenty-four hours before the Rapture, every minute was urgent. Mortimer spread his wings, flitting with speed from mortal to mortal, seeking out the souls he could save in time. He had five in mind for his quest – and hoped his gentle guidance would steer them onto the path of virtue before their time was up. He knew he should have attempted to blend in more. He took on his human form…for the most part. He refused to indulge in walking; the speed of his wings in flight could not be superseded by mere pedestrian movement.
Mixed in this picturesque town of Pleasantview was the aroma of scorched brimstone and scant vaporized droplets of iron-heavy blood, which still hung for centuries in the air. He should have known that she’d be here too. Mortimer only had to keep his eyes open; if he focused too much, she would obscure herself. In his peripheral vision, he could spot her like a trail of fire.
The Arch-Angels would be displeased to learn this. No sooner had the angels arrived to do their work in Pleasantview than the Daevas had too — and they would be looking to taint the soul harvest.
As Mortimer rounded the corner to guide his first soul, he felt her presence before the first sight of her. That heat she perpetually carried now since her fall. The fragrance of smoke and wilted roses. The glow of the fire contrasted to her bronzed olive complexion. She, too, decided to take on human form to walk amongst the mortals, except for the small black horns atop her head and the charred marks from her fire she left in her wake. And always that red dress that tantalizingly clung to her — the very color of temptation. Queen Jezebel herself would have envied her. Imagine if she had had the same influence as Bella; with the sheer tilt of her head or the sway of her hips, she could have seduced the most devout of beings to blindly worship her instead.
“Is it time for the Rapture again already, Mortimer?” Bella purred lightly, her voice as alluring as her eyes which glowed hot like embers.
“Yes. One must always prepare for redemption, Bella,” he surmised coolly, noting how she watched the woman they had both set their sights on. “However, I'm not looking to battle you today.”
She tilted her head in the slightest of ways – a playful luster that danced in her eyes. “Isn’t it always battle and strife with us now?”
Mortimer forced himself to look away. “Only because you insist upon it.” She was Temptation – both incarnate and ethereal. It always seemed that no matter how he tried, she was always there, waiting to break his firm resolve.
Bella filled in the empty space, even when he began to retreat ever so slightly. She moved closer to him and whispered, “Only because you still believe you have control.”
“Not true,” he countered, ignoring how her words ignited something that lay sleeping in him for millennia. “I believe free will is a necessary component. Without choice, souls can’t move on the path—”
“The path to salvation, yes, we know the mantra,” Bella interrupted, rolling her eyes. “You want to explain that one to Elissa? When she burned herself on the pyre for Aeneas instead of ruling the Phoenicians? At least the touch of the fire purified her faith, no?”
Her words struck him like a Carthaginian spear piercing his chest. He faltered, unable to reply – unwilling to acknowledge her point. Mortimer needed to ignore her. His focus had to be on the mortals now.
He flew down to the woman’s side – his first planned soul for the harvest. Her name was Brandi Broke. Single mother of three boys, recently widowed. And she spent more of her time idling in front of the television drinking boxed wine instead of caring for her sons, especially her first-born, Dustin.
And thus their battle for the first soul began. Mortimer gave a proclamatory wave of his hand, changing the program to a commercial. He watched with relished justification as Brandi sat up briefly and stirred, watching the advertisement for a local job recruiting office.
Bella was here, too, flooding Mortimer’s senses, and making her presence known. The scent of brimstone and the heat of her flames warmed the air. She appeared beside him and wiggled her fingers toward Brandi, who was holding her half-empty glass of wine. Brandi suddenly had an immense thirst and downed the drink, only getting up to refill it. Mortimer followed behind the woman, urging her to set down the boxed wine and pick up a pen and paper instead. With his gentle guidance, he could encourage her to write down that job recruiting office’s phone number she said aloud in memorization.
Bella stood in front of Brandi and casually moved the wine closer, enticing her with the familiar vice. The chanting of the phone number stopped, and she grabbed for the wine instead. The woman sighed wearily with a sense of resignation for the person she knew herself to be. Pouring another glass, Brandi Broke sat down before the TV, just to have one more drink before her younger son, Beau, would wake from his nap.
Her victory caused him to bristle right down to the shafts of his feathers. His wings flapped once and he took off. Mortimer floated through Pleasantview, in search of more souls to save. The clock was still ticking. He knew Bella would follow after him — to sabotage and then taunt him for his failures.
“Do you honestly still believe you have a chance, Mortimer?” Bella teased, a dash of flame shooting from her fingers, deriding him further with her probing questions.
He dodged and swatted at the ember that landed on his white pristine wing. “Do you still think bringing out the worst in mortals is worth it beyond your own personal enjoyment?”
“Oh, Mortimer,” Bella chastised, “you know that’s where you’re wrong. I don’t take pleasure in my duties. Perhaps you do, and we should examine that.” Her eyes studied him, not with the familiar seductive glint from before, but almost a solemn reverence.
It was something akin to how she looked, back when they worked together – on the same side.
“I wonder what Ahura Mazda would have to say about such things?” she teased him again.
“He’d probably show more compassion than you, who chose to believe the selfishness of Angra Mainyu!” His wings flapped fiercely and he sped away to the next located target, a condominium on Main Street. There were not one but two souls to save before the reckoning to come.
Bella’s feet formidably touched the sidewalk, concrete blistering from the impression her toes left upon the surface. She remained at a distance while she watched Mortimer survey the scene: two mortals, twins yet opposite in many ways. Nina and Dina Caliente. Nina, the tempestuous redhead, caught Bella’s attention first as she argued with her sister’s apparently duplicitous nature. The blonde sister, Dina, adjusted her top, in the hopes of readying herself to secure a rich husband.
“Oh no, Mortimer, you can’t possibly see redemption in either of them?”
Mortimer ignored Bella’s comments as he plotted ways to guide them back to righteousness. True, it wasn’t the job of an angel to interfere with free will exactly; but like the prophet son of Yah-Weh making fishers of men with the powerful Word, perhaps he, too, could lure them from sin and lead their way to the light. Mortimer waved a hand over the redhead, his fingers wiggling as they sucked the air slightly from her lungs. “Breathe,” he whispered, hoping the deep inhale would ground and calm the hot-headed twin. For a moment it seemed to be working. Mortimer spotted the hardened edge of her jaw begin to relax, the wrinkle in her brow began to smooth. And then just as Mortimer had urged Nina to serenity, her sister incidentally lost her footing, falling into Dina. Nina lost control of her temper and gave her twin a fierce shove.
Behind Dina, Mortimer spotted Bella, her hip conspicuously jutted out to cause the domino effect. “Oops,” she said coyly and straightened herself.
Mortimer shook his head disapprovingly. “Naughty little she-devil!” he chastised, as he turned his back on the twins momentarily. The women were rolling on the floor in standard “cat fight” fashion.
“Can’t win them all, Morty…Angel,” Bella teased, clearly ready to celebrate another triumph.
He scowled, fists clenched and jaw tightened. “With you here, I haven’t won any!”
Bella grinned knowingly. And that irked him.
He whirled back and parted his hands, causing the girls to physically cease and desist their rivalry. They lost all enthusiasm, especially Nina who had folded so easily to wrath.
Already Mortimer’s focus was on Dina. He stood before her, eyes locked with hers, trying to quell this mortal’s pride with some humility. “Come on, you can say it,” he whispered in that angelic voice. “You can apologize.”
For the briefest flicker, there seemed to be something. Bella held her breath in anticipation as Dina’s glazed eyes seemed to absorb Mortimer’s words. A moment of lucidity. Dina blinked, eyes lowered and reflective. Then they moved up to the face of her sister. Her red lips finally opened in response.
“Cunt.”
Mortimer sighed in defeat. Bella grinned triumphantly. “You know,” she began, “this almost reminds me of that time we were assigned in Gomorrah? When Abraham tried to negotiate with Yah-Weh to—”
“Oh hush up!” grumbled Mortimer. “And it was in Sodom, the other city of wickedness. And He was right not to spare that one!”
They moved outside. Mortimer’s wings flapped frantically as he surveyed the street. He was running out of time. Ahura Mazda would be here. Yah-Weh would send his Arch-Angels. The rapture would be a puny harvest.
And it would be his fault. All because he’d failed. He needed to find someone – anyone. Just one soul to save. With a double flap of his wings, he took off.
“Mortimer! Wait!” Bella hollered after him, zipping through the air and burning off the fine hairs on mortals’ arms in her path. “Hold up!”
She stopped zagging through the crowd and spotted him. His great wings flapped once before he let them rest along his back. And then Mortimer stopped, hovering slightly above the ground. His eyes were steady on the soul he’d found.
Mortimer surveyed the scene. A blond man lugging shopping bags down the road. Retail therapy? A cruel vice in itself. The man’s eyes were determined, and too hardened about something for Mortimer to fully read what lay within his heart.
Bella looked between Mortimer and this pitiful soul. “Oh, no, Mortimer,” she said while shaking her head in disgust. “You can’t possibly think this one is even worth redemption??”
At first, Malcolm Landgraab strode up the street like he owned it; yet his eyes shifted from each corner of his eye like he was on the watchful prowl. So that no one would suspect him. With his hands full of shopping bags, he walked stealthily down the road. As he traveled closer toward them, Mortimer’s demeanor changed. He couldn’t read his heart, but he could read his mind. And he knew now it was a losing battle.
Mortimer shook his head in dismay. “Stolen goods. All to sell for a profit.” He sighed, chest heavy and wings like lead on his back. “No, this one is too far gone.”
“Don’t take it to heart, Mortimer,” Bella said softly, reaching out like she wanted to comfort him for his presumed loss. “It’s not your fault you failed.”
He backed away. “It’s not over yet.”
“You’re running out of time and you know it.”
“I can find one more!” he insisted, hoping he could believe his own declaration. There had to be one soul with a remaining shred of purity still in this forsaken town!
“This isn’t the siege of Troy,” she reminded him.
Mortimer flapped his wings in defiance and glowered at her. “I know that. I think of that moment every day.” How could he forget? It was the day she chose to leave the choir, to leave the Heavenly Host and fall from grace.
Bella sighed in dismay as she found Mortimer peering through a large window of a condominium on Main Street. She appeared before him with a flourish of smoke. “Mortimer, you’ve got to face reality.”
“Just because you swayed Helen to leave her husband in Troy,” he whirled on her, attempting to squelch the anger rising in his failure today, “it doesn’t mean I couldn’t have stopped her.”
“Actually, it does,” Bella retorted. “And given that was my first try, I’d say I’m pretty decent at this.”
“You corrupt souls, not save them like I do.”
“Oh, I do beg to differ, Mortimer, darling. Enlightenment requires strife.”
Mortimer shook his head. He ignored Bella’s tenacious eyes and peeked inside the condominium to watch the soul in question: Don Lothario, reclining on his couch and reading. He was a medic at the local hospital. He chuckled quietly to himself. What did Bella know about saving souls anyway? “You’re going to corrupt a man of medicine, Bella? He probably doesn’t even believe in us. And he’s sitting there quietly reading.”
“Did you notice the book?”
Mortimer’s brows drew together, puzzled. “No, and I don’t see why that—” His breath hitched slightly in a soft gasp. Then the book cover came perfectly into view: The Ups and Downs of Polyamory.
“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me!”
Her touch warmed his shoulder first before it seared his wing. He shuddered slightly at the sensation before shrugging her away. “Don’t!”
“Why not?”
He could feel the heat of her and his resolve began to buckle. He knew exactly why not. Despite the scalding touch of her fingers, Mortimer couldn’t deny that he craved her burn. He considered her fallen angel brethren, The Watchers, and how their arrogance and lust inspired them to take mortal women like human wives — and create the horrid creatures called the Nephilim. Now, if only an angel and a demon were permitted to mate. What celestial being could he and Bella have sired together?
His thoughts raced in a tangled mess of conquests. Submission. Seduction. No. It was essential he resisted. He needed to be the virtuous, the pure, to remain chaste, to—
His mouth was already on hers. The fire of her kiss, the sweetest agony he knew in this world. There wasn’t much joy to be had in the unyielding rigor of righteousness, was there? Mortimer fisted the dark tendrils of her hair in his hands, feeling the caress of each strand against his palms. Bella might have planned this all along, knowing he would inevitably stumble.
“You want me to fail,” he breathed against her skin, kissing along the column of her neck, lips trailing down as her body arched into his, molding to each other’s shape. “You want me corrupted, don’t you…” It wasn’t a question, for he knew the answer.
The heat of her touch left a trail of charred marks on his body. Threading her fingers through his black hair, Bella pulled his head back to look upon him. “Where you see corruption, I see salvation.”
He released a shuddering breath as her fingers moved downward, her touch activating him like a live wire down his back. Her energy pulsed back at him. Her hands circled at his waist. He gasped in supplication as her heated fingers tracked along his torso, moving downward to between his legs. “Because you know I’d follow you to the depths of Hell,” he breathed against her skin. The desire to merge together overwhelmed his senses.
“After all this time, Mortimer,” she traced her fingers up to the left side of his chest, dancing in a circle as she noted the staccato of his breaths for her. “It’s nice to know I’m still your weakness.”
His spirit energy surged with her in his chest. Gathering her into his arms before planting more kisses along her face, one hand moved to her thigh, urging her to wrap it around him as mortals do when joined in a passionate embrace. Head bent to her ear, he whispered, “Love isn’t a weakness, Bella.”
“It is when you still refuse to see,” her voice was like ice, cooling the fire that burned solely for her. “You still blindly follow the wrong path.”
His eyes opened. The burning ache for her dissipated like heavy incense in the air. Mortimer withdrew from her arms. To say such things now…?
He hated that she had played on his emotions. For the moment he had forgotten who she had become – and what he refused to be. His voice wavered as he recited from the Vendidad, “Yatha ahu vairyo.”
The betrayal in her eyes stung more than those shared kisses. The fire in her extinguished by the phrases. He continued the recitation, “He has delivered us from the power of darkness…in whom we have redemption through the forgiveness of sins.”
As each word lay between them, Mortimer watched as the spell she’d cast was broken, each fiber of her being leaving this realm in banishment.
Alone, he crumbled to the ground, on his knees and solemn. The hollowness inside ached with irritation. He was disappointed in himself. A stray puff of wind rustled the fire-damaged feathers of his wings. The ethereal hum of the Arch-Angel permeated the sidewalk where Mortimer still knelt.
“I bring tidings and news,” the Arch-Angel sang. Mortimer resisted rolling his eyes in blasphemy. The familiar greeting was the last sound he wished to grace his ears at this moment. Her Word rang out like heralded trumpets in his mind: You still blindly follow the wrong path.
Mortimer simply tilted his head in a small nod, still too forlorn to offer a proper reply.
“Our Lord says the rapture shall be postponed,” the many-eyed Arch-Angel declared. “There is more work to be done.”
For the moment, Mortimer believed his misstep had ruined it all: his brief fall from grace, nearly succumbing to temptation, to the Truth uttered by Bella. For allowing his heart to win over his duty; it had almost cost them the celestial realm.
But they were granted a reprieve. With the same small puff of wind on which the Arch-Angel arrived, the ethereal Voice from Above disappeared from this realm.
Mortimer was left alone with the words of the Arch-Angel: There is more work to be done.
Refusing to wallow in self-pity any longer, Mortimer arose from the ground. He dusted off his knees, gave a tentative flap of his wings, and took off to find more souls to guide onto the path.