Stealing the Angel's Innocence Read online

  Idris MacManus

  Stealing the Angel's Innocence

  Heaven and Hell's Romance Company Book 1

  Copyright © 2019 by Idris MacManus

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  First edition

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  Contents

  The Angel Assignment

  Meeting the Angel

  Minding the Angel

  Convincing the Angel

  Teasing the Angel

  Taking the Angel

  Epilogue

  Also by Idris MacManus

  The Angel Assignment

  Heaven and Hell were never made for contracts together.

  I’d always heard the same thing as a child, even before I grew the metaphorical horns and held the pitchfork; the men upstairs were pompous and couldn’t be trusted. They existed only for the positive things in life, to grant wishes and answer prayers, and they knew nothing of the messy and sticky nature of the world because they kept their hands clean of things like that. For all of those gruesome and hard to handle cases of the afterlife, only we were there to pick up the pieces; the very same beings that humans stayed away from, lit incense for, panicked over. We were the ones that punished their cheating husbands. That disciplined their abusive parents. That carried the justice for malicious men.

  I’d spent my entire life as a demon, and I’d never thought about it for more than a second. My mother had sat me down in the early stages of my life and told me upfront. Oramon, she’d said, If you should ever meet an angel, keep your gaze low. They are difficult, difficult creatures.

  Their innocence was a ruse. That much was made clear every time I saw one. Most recently, at the scene of a car accident. I’d shown up with my hands in the pockets of my long coat, looking around at the souls that were wandering through the wreckage of the cars for the one that belonged to me. It was a bit like a list; though there’d been many casualties in the pileup, only one had lived terribly enough to deal with me. I’d gotten that assignment, and I’d intended to walk up to the accident and gather my man, drag him back down to Hell, and drop him off at the chambers of judgment, a type of purgatory for those that didn’t deserve the opportunity to go to the top.

  “You’re in the wrong place, demon,” The angel had said, waltzing right up to me. It was so obvious that he was an angel. His gait, the way he wore his coat open to expose his ridiculous polo shirt as if he worked on a golf course toting around the word of God and walking people to Heaven. He was blonde, go figure. I rolled my eyes and moved away from him, searching quickly for my guy so that I could leave.

  “I’m not,” I told him firmly. In front of me, a red Volvo had been ripped in half. In the front seat was the driver that belonged to me. “That man ain’t yours, right?”

  “His scale isn’t tipping too heavily in your direction. He could go with either of us. How was it decided that he belonged to you?”

  “I don’t make executive decisions. That’s a question for my boss.”

  The way that Heaven and Hell worked was by a mutual understanding that there were some cases more… difficult to close. When a person died, their scale had to be considered. It wasn’t a scale that simply judged their moral actions. It considered their entire livelihood, their intentions, the bigger questions of good and evil according to the philosophy of human beings. I understood why the angel questioned me. The soul in the car was named Louis. He’d made a reckless decision that had ended the lives of nine people, and in doing so, tipped his own scale. It weighed in our direction, no matter how small that change. He would be judged from Hell.

  As I approached, Louis caught sight of me and flinched.

  “You’re…”

  “Louis Wilson. Aged twenty-three. Time of death, 13:28 on March 5th of the year 2018. Cause of death, cerebral hemorrhage. Unfortunately, you’ve been sentenced to purgatory for your actions and as such, will be coming with me.”

  “…the devil.”

  “Not the devil,” I clarified, reaching out to grab a hold of him so that I could carry him to where he was supposed to go. “But I know him.”

  I could have said anything to make him panic. My presence alone was enough to force his soul into submission, and yet as I walked with him past angels who were on cleanup duty, listening to their soft consolations for those younger and more innocent souls who would be spending their golden days basking in the sun of an eternity, I couldn’t help but feel an ache of bitterness sting me. This man had played roulette with other people’s lives and the results had been devastating.

  I took him down to Hell quickly.

  The point of it all is that I’d known about angels my entire life. They never made things easier for me, always looming and judging people from their high horses. The rumors and stories I’d heard as a child could have all been false and my instinct still would have been to never trust them, because as far as I knew, angels and demons didn’t work together. We worked alongside each other in two very different realms and we dealt with each other. That’s the way it had to be.

  It was a rainy Saturday evening when I was called into my boss’s office about a special case. My boss was a high-class demonic entity named Baalial who worked with fate for cursed individuals. He was intimidating, but not because of his size or composure. He had blood red eyes and jet black hair, and when he spoke, his voice was like daggers dragging uncomfortably over my skin. I struggled to maintain a conversation with him, but I had little choice when he summoned me, the message burning terribly on my wrist and effectively calling me to him.

  His office was cold and isolating. When I walked in, I wrapped my coat tighter around myself.

  “Morning,” I said. I went straight to him.

  “I have an assignment for you. It’s rather unpleasant.”

  Pfft. When wasn’t it?

  “Sounds like it’s right up our alley then,” I agreed. As he handed me a folder over his desk and I flipped it open, I was shocked to find an ethereal face staring back up at me. It was a picture, but obviously not a picture of a human. It was an angel with big, blue eyes and soft lips, sandy brown hair, a tender gaze. He looked at me from the page, unmoving, and I stared back in confusion. Demons barely dealt with angels and even when we did, there were special forces out there to handle them. It wasn’t my place. So why had I been handed a folder with one plastered right in the middle of it? I couldn’t put the pieces together fast enough. “Okay… this isn’t… what?”

  “This angel ranks quite high,” Baalial spoke clearly. “His division has sent a notice for our help.”

  “Right.”

  That sounded an awful lot like a call for teamwork.

  “I would ask this type of cooperation from few others, Oramon. We are not bound by the desire for good things like those above us. And it’s not in our nature to help angels achieve validation, but we have very little choice this time, I’m afraid. We must work with them.”

  It wasn’t that I couldn’t adapt. The longer I stared at this new assignment, the less sense it made. The angel’s name was Sariel and he was ancient with a capital A. He’d been alive for centuries and specialized in prayers of peace-keeping and problem-solving. He was used for eradicating fear in children, boosting morale in adults, and exuding positive energy in misfortunes, but as the notes read in a scrawl that I could barely decipher, he had never visited Hell before. It was certainly no accident that he was the one chosen for the job. I had my doubts that he would last long among a bunch of Hell’s very own.

  And there was no doubt that he was coming to us. Demons were banned from the presence of the pearly gates.

  “When he arrives, you should receive him amiably. Watch his back. We can not risk a war with Heaven, but I doubt that the demons will allow a being of this caliber to occupy their space. Only earth is a middle ground. I am already thinking of a way to lessen the blow from our newest batch of company.”

  “Batch?”

  “They’re sending three. I’ve chosen my hosts very carefully.”

  So Hell was to be overrun by angels. Baalial was right. My initial thoughts were that nothing about those big-headed, white-suited asshats made sense in our place of work. We ran on the fuel of tortured and damned souls. Our pathways, our living spaces, everything about us was repulsive to their way of living, and it seemed like a disaster in the making to even invite them to the table.

  “Sir,” I started nervously.

  Baalial raised his hand as if he’d already expected my resistance.

  “No, It’s not ideal. Still, it must be done.”

  When he dismissed me, I slumped from his room with a knot in my chest. I was gripping the folder tightly enough in my fingers to ache, and the image of a man I’d never met before kept crawling to the forefront of my brain.

  No, not a man. An angel.

  My wrist went hot a second time, though it wasn’t Baalial who was
summoning me. It was my job, reminding me that a soul needed guiding. Without thinking, I compressed the folder into something small enough to shove inside of my coat pocket and then I went to collect an old woman named Janice, who had fallen down the stairs and broken her neck, and who had spent her whole life stealing money from the homeless shelter she worked in. When I showed up, there wasn’t an angel in sight.

  She begged and pleaded for her eternity in the clouds, and all I could think about was how fucked I was that my new partner was going to be walking around in soot for the next few weeks, dressed in a glorified tunic.

  Meeting the Angel

  It was almost comical how poorly the timing of Sariel’s arrival was.

  I was three knuckles deep in a gorgeous red-head and I’d taken him home because his freckles had stood out on his nose in the dim light of the club’s bathroom. I’d made a good choice. When he’d been in my bed with his head tipped back, panting into the air around him, I just watched the beautiful stretch of his neck, Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat with each breath that slipped past his lips. I loved how his skin flushed pink; he was wasted and horny, and as I spread him open on my thick fingers he ate it up, arching his back and groaning low in his throat.

  More than most things, I loved being inside of humans. It was so easy to reduce them to whispers and muttered syllables, grunts of pleasure. If my job had taught me anything, it was that they were always ready to beg for mercy in one way or another. I scissored my fingers inside of the stranger’s body, just staring at him from between his legs as he bit his lip and reached out to grab his cock. It was thicker than I was used to and as much as I’d have loved to see him work it with his small fingers, I stopped him.

  “Ah, ah, ah,” I said, disappointed. “I thought we agreed.”

  “O-on what?”

  I was surprised that he could even talk let alone ask questions. I’d spent the last hour sucking on his balls and playing with his nipples, abusing them until tears had fallen down from the creases of his eyes and painted my pillow. He was a sensitive man and I was a demon with a table full of toys.

  “If you want me on top, you get me on top but you do as I say. You don’t touch until I give you permission,” I growled. I fingered him hard, slipping in and out of his body easily. He was so warm inside, and I watched as his hole puckered around my fingers. It was like magic. I’d seen and done so much in my existence and none of it had ever compared to the look of a man stretched wide around me. “So what do we do, then, since you can’t be a good boy and listen, hmm? What do we do to boys that misbehave?”

  “We p-punish them,” the man chattered. He arched up off of the bed again, hands moving wildly against the sheets as he tried to decide what to do with them. I wanted him desperate, and I knew that the easiest way to get him there was to tease him until he couldn’t stand it. I used my fingers deliberately, pressing along his inside with sure and practiced strokes, and as he began to wail loudly, likely waking my neighbors and stripping his throat, I smirked up at him. I’d made the plan to lay him out and pound him, flip him over and give it to him so hard that I bruised him up, but I’d decided to make him wait a little longer. I could go forever but this human, he would break eventually. Just as I stroked in a way that had him screaming and kicking his leg out, I got the summoning.

  “Oh, shit, fuck,” I muttered, yanking my hand back and looking at my wet fingers. It felt like someone was sawing my wrist off and all I had to show for it was the lube coating my fingertips. I shook my hand out and then all but stumbled off of the bed.

  “Are you okay?” The man asked. He was watching me nervously and his chest was still heaving. The change of pace was probably confusing. I didn’t have much choice.

  “I, uh… yeah. I gotta go.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Listen, just, uh - you know,”

  Where the fuck were my clothes? I looked for the things I’d gone out in and quickly realized that showing up to a meeting wearing said clothes would result in a punishment of some sort. They weren’t office appropriate, certainly not for a first meeting with an angel. I fumbled around in my dresser for something better, and after that, went to gather a coat from the closet that would cover it all. If I buttoned it up and slipped on my oxfords then maybe I could trick them into thinking I had myself together.

  I had just started buttoning the coat from the bottom up when the floor fell from beneath me, plunging me into a darkness that didn’t clear for a few long moments. I was being forcibly transported back to Baalial. This hadn’t happened in years, but as shocked as I was by the change of location, I gathered my wits quickly enough to land with a loud thud on my feet right outside of his office door.

  It was the angel. I knew it was. Even the temperature around me had changed and it was no longer the dank and frigid entrance that I’d walked into so many times before. I fumbled with my coat buttons quickly but doubted that it could fix the rest of my appearance. I was a demon, for fuck’s sake, and I couldn’t even magic my hair back into something groomed and orderly. It was like there were zero perks to the job outside of the job.

  “Fuck this,” I grunted, swiping my palm over my hair and trying to whip it back into shape. When I was satisfied that I’d put in enough effort, I took a deep breath and nudged my way quietly through the door.

  The room was crackling with an energy I’d never felt. Immediately, it was like static sitting on my skin, burrowing inside of my body and making me shiver. I wrapped my coat around myself out of habit, but it wasn’t cold anymore. Someone was speaking gently and their voice was unrecognizable. I’d never heard something sound so sickeningly sweet in my entire existence.

  “It’s important that we set boundaries between us. We’ve been in this position before and know from experience that this operation won’t work without them.”

  “I don’t disagree.”

  The difference between Baalial’s and Sariel’s voices was quite easy to summarize: one sounded like a set of pins being pushed under your skin at a maddeningly slow pace, while the other felt like a cold drink of water on a scorching day in the desert. There was so little comparison between them that it felt foreign to have them both sitting in the same space. I assured myself that if this felt strange and out of place, dragging the angel around Hell and keeping an eye on him wasn’t going to be any easier.

  I cleared my throat and folded my arms across my chest. They both turned to look at me immediately.

  “You called for me, sir?” I asked.

  “Ah, welcome Oramon,” Baalial greeted. He waved his hand in front of himself and I felt the seal of the exit behind me, ward slowly slipping in place to prevent disruption. “Please, come and take a seat. I’d like to introduce you to Sariel.”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  There were a total of three chairs in Baalial’s office. The layout of them was completely intentional; the angel was sitting comfortably beside the only other empty chair in the room, one leg kicked up politely over the other, elbow on the armrest, head cradled by his thumb and his forefinger as he considered me politely. He was everything that his picture painted him to be. His hair was a tad shorter than I’d familiarized myself with, curling slightly around his temples and behind his ears, but he watched me with eyes that seemed impossibly blue and with a ferocity that I couldn’t understand. As far as I knew, the taboo of an angel in Hell wasn’t the only one being broken today; a demon of my caliber had never even looked at an angel like this before. I went to take the seat beside him, and while I wished that I could put some space between us so that he couldn’t tell where I’d been, it wasn’t possible. The seats were fixed in place.

  “I’m sorry to disrupt. Were you busy?” Sariel asked me, eyes glossing over my face quickly. His voice sounded even sweeter up close.

  “Well,” I started, unsure of what to say that wouldn’t be a dead giveaway. Demons didn’t sleep unless they were bored. They didn’t read unless they were high. The list of appropriate responses was so little that I just forwent the explanation altogether and stuck my hand out. “I’m Oramon, one of Baalial’s subjects. I work down in processing.”