I am one of maybe a thousand.
Lucius tried to count us once and ended up with a migraine. Yes, we still get migraines. Yes, they still suck. No, we can’t miracle them away. Miracles are inventoried and, if you want to get technical, are the province of the Archangels and Saints and upwards alone.
Jezebel – I’ve mentioned her already, I think, she’s a stunningly lovely demoness and very close… friend… who hangs out in the City on her off days – anyway, Jezebel says that it’s a bit more laissez-faire Down Under. She had to tell me what laissez-faire meant; I think she felt a little bit sorry for me at first. Now we’re closer than sisters – well, than most sisters, anyway.
She’s off-shift today as well, we’ve planned to meet up and play cards and drink Tequila and, maybe, other things.
Are you shocked?
You shouldn’t be – as I said, nobody bats an eyelid around here, and everyone needs a little comfort now and then.
I feel that I may have got ahead of myself, and that some exposition is in order.
Here’s what Azrael always calls the Org chart. He always does ironic air quotes around it to; it’s really quite insufferable…
Anyway.
Pay attention.
At the top there’s the Creator. We call him the Boss, the Big Guy, and other less appropriate names. Apparently only Jeshua, Gabriel and Michael see much of him, though there’s a running rumour that the four of them play cards twice or more a week with Lucifer.
(Yes, Lucifer plays cards against the Creator. No, they don’t play for souls. No, it’s not poker. People get that bit so wrong it’s funny. It’s Rummy and they wager matchsticks. Long story.)
So. Anyway… the Boss, the Archangels, the Saints (mostly complete mentalists, even after nearly two millennia in some cases), Seraphim, Cherubim, all the serried Host of Heaven…
And us.
The Revenants. Those who are Somehow Not Quite As Dead As They Should Rightly Be. Angels in most ways, but… not created that way. And not permanent, either; we’re a bit like awkward guests who hang around for a bit, help ourselves to the expensive booze, then piss off to somewhere else. I always get the feeling the Cherubim are gossiping about us, the cheeky little sods.
It’s all very bureaucratic. Not a harp in sight, unless you’re that way inclined.
It’s the ultimate in self-employment. A Renaissance fair writ large. Do what comes naturally because nobody really cares.
And my place in this pantomime?
I’m with the bureau of Mortality. If there’s one thing I know it’s how horrible it can be to die. So… so once I’d done my time in Limbo and… I won’t say been healed because that would be an outright lie, rather… once I’d learned to stop screaming and…
No.
This is all going wrong. I’m fucking it up.
Typical.
Let’s try a different tack.
My name is Gwenhwyfar Carew – that’s more-or-less Jennifer to those of you not blessed enough to be a countrywoman of mine. I was born in the hamlet of Kilryden in the year of your Lord 1793. I was eighteen when it was my time to go – stabbed twice (among other, less pleasant things) and buried alive (briefly) in a shallow woodland grave. The only flowers that ever grew for me were Celandine. No stone ever marked me, no parents got to cry over my shrouded and shriven corpse – I was a foundling girl, a ward of the Methodist Church, missed maybe only by the local priest who had loved me and raised me as best he could in his own imperfect way.
I woke up here. I’d been left a few decades to “ferment” as Lucius so flippantly called it. I woke in a clean white shift on a clean white feather bed in a plain little apartment, body free of the pox marks and the badly-broken-and-worse-healed leg and the eventually-mortal punctures from my killers’ knives.
I’d had clothes of quality utterly foreign to me, and food that seemed fit for a king, and wine enough to bathe in. And a mirror, in which I’d beheld for the first time my terrifying but ultimately quite fetching grey gull wings.
Everybody screams and shits themselves (metaphorically, mostly) the first time they see their wings. It’s just how it is.
Also, wings are bloody inconvenient, so mostly we don’t bother manifesting them.
And sometimes they seem to have a mind of their own.
But they are very pretty…
Anyway, so, I was healed in body.
My mind, of course, was not quite ready for all this.
There are no therapists in the afterlife. “True” Angels don’t need therapy, Demons wet themselves with laughter at the concept, and Revenants like me are mostly too broken to be helped by others.
All that really helps is time. Time, alcohol (yes, it still works on me, and the inability to get cirrhosis is a nice bonus), gallows humour…
And a sense of purpose, if you can find one.
Or a sense of porpoise, as Lucius is always so quick to pun.
Very few become like us – and nobody’s ever bothered to tell me the criteria. If there are any.
I’m not sure even Azrael knows.
So… that’s us. We work for a time – we help, we organise, we fix, we guide, we mend. The choice is always there for us – we can choose to continue as we are, or to forget and go back to the World and try again… or to take the final step and flicker out forever.
It is not much of a choice, when you stop to think about it. I’m not quite sure what the point is.
But… I’ve stayed. For now.
It’s better than 18th century Wales was, that’s for sure.
So…
I am Jennifer Carew. I’m almost, but not quite, an hemi-demi-semi angel of Death. Clerk of Death is as good a description as any; Azrael rather flippantly calls me his Usher.
I and those like me are gentle. We come, almost never when wanted, but we’re almost always there at the end.
We’re the first person you might meet, afterwards, sometimes.
If you’re lucky, though, you get to skip our part. Again, I’m not sure how it works. And I’ve never cared enough to dig.
The important thing is that you’re not supposed to really notice that we’re there until you see us waiting for you, and by then it’s all over anyway.
So you can probably imagine just how shocked I was when five foot nine of incandescent girl got me spread-eagled against a wall without so much as buying me a drink first.