Lorelei And The Angels

ANGELS – Samantha Crosby

The Chef was nodding his head and humming vaguely in time to some inner music only he could hear. Lorelei was humming along as well. She had a talent for getting inside a man’s head when he wasn’t looking.

“When are you ever going to get off this prog trip?” she asked him, inside his head, shouting over the ramblings of King Crimson.
The Chef jumped and dropped the battered wooden spoon he had been using to alternately stir the bubbling pot before him , and conduct Robert Fripp.

“What’s cookin’?” Lorelei asked, in the real world.
She examined the cauldron over the campfire. The Chef tapped the side of his nose and winked a chocolate brown eye.

“Smell, Lorelei, smell.”
And she did, hard and deep. Honey, chillies, a hint of lime, something…..else. Gold. Yes that was it. Gold. Oh dear.

“You didn’t. Tell me you didn’t.”

The Chef grinned.

“I did.”

Lorelei breathed hard. Mr Punch had been bad enough. But this?

“Where did you get…it?”

The Chef tapped his nose again. Lorelei reached out and punched him on it, hard enough to spray blood.

“Where. Did. You. Get. It.?”

The Chef uncrossed his eyes and wiped his face with a faded blue handkerchief.

“Goat Boy said he…found it.”
He wouldn’t look at her.

“Damn him.Damn you. Shit, this is bad.”
But already she was dipping a finger into the pot. She never could resist Angel stew.


After the seaside incident, Lorelei had deemed it prudent to have some brains and some muscle around her. By muscle she meant The Other One. There weren’t any brains. Goat Boy and The Chef came as part of the package regardless. One of them permanently cooking or drunk, the other dopey and sex obsessed and also usually drunk. Or stoned. Or both. But she needed them, right now and they were more than happy to watch her stride along in front of them in her tight dress and the high heels Goat Boat was always trying to hide so she was bare foot. She worried about him.

For a while they had shacked up on some Astral plane, keeping away from the real world, the Doc, everything else. Lorelei had lost count of the times she had ordered them to take no risks, draw no attention to them, until it was safe. And now that damn goat had gone and ‘found’ an Angel. That was bad enough but the Chef had gone and cooked her. Angel Stew. It made Lorelei’s mouth water just thinking about the taste on her tongue. Full, rich, luscious. Nothing like it. And also guaranteeing the eater would be pursued by hordes of avenging Angels with nothing more on their minds than separating the eater from their soul. Lorelei sucked her finger .A few drops of the stew and she was on the verge of fainting with pleasure.

“Oh, mmmm, yes, yes, mmmm”. She couldn’t help herself.

Goat Boy appeared, a slightly glazed look in his hazel Goat eyes. The bottom half of him being the man half today.

Lorelei composed herself and tried not to stare at the impressive lower portions.

“What did you do,” she demanded.

“Baaaaaaahhhh.”

“Don’t play the innocent animal with me. What did you do?”

Goat Boy shifted subtly and his halves reversed.

“Found her.”
He was nothing more than a shuffling, naughty schoolboy now.

“Where? And was she dead?”

“Sort of near that tall rock thing we passed a day or so ago. Definitely dead. Dead. Really.”
He looked at Lorelei and she knew he was telling the truth. He was stupid, indolent, carnally obsessive. But not a liar.

“That rock thing. You mean the monument to a Fallen Angel? The one that warned death to any that so much as touched it?”

Goat Boy nodded, but carried on meeting her gaze. Lorelei sighed and kicked the Chef hard on the shin with a bare foot. Her shoes had gone missing again.

“Quit laughing. Don’t think you get away with this for one moment.”

The Chef smiled lazily.

“I ain’t the one with my finger in the pot honey..” he drawled, and she hastily withdrew her hand from the cauldron and spat on the floor in front of him.

“Fuck you.”

Goat Boy looked up expectantly. Nothing he liked better than a foul mouthed woman sans footwear...

Later, the stew still cooking, Goat Boy and the Chef smoking joints like they were going to be outlawed at any second, Lorelei sat on a rock a little way away from them and worried. This was serious. They had taken a dead Angel, probably a self-sacrificial one, and they had cooked her. Little point in not using the term ‘they’, she reflected. Since Mr Punch, they were definitely ‘they’ now.

She glanced up at the darkening Astral sky. There was nothing up there, not yet, but even dead Angels had their guardians.

“Hell honey, you look a little mad.”
The Other One sat down beside her and undid his purple and yellow spotted jacket to reveal a Twisted Sister t-shirt. Lorelei apparated two cigarettes and half a bottle of bourbon. For a while the two of them smoked and drank and watched the campfire.

“We got trouble,” said The Other One at length.

“Tell me about it. We’ve got Angel on the menu.”

He looked at her.

“That’s not the worst of it.”

The Other One stood up and whistled low through his teeth. In the distance, Agatha, his horse, came ambling into view. There was something, someone, lying across her back. As Agatha drew nearer, Lorelei peered into the thickening gloom and drew in her breath sharply.

The Other One sighed.

“Yup.”

Lorelei took in the multi-hued wings, the voluptuous form, the endless pale hair that shone from within. The lack of clothes.

“Tell me you didn’t?” she began.

The Other One held a finger to her lips.

“I didn’t see her in time. You know what they are like. She was just eating butterflies and had her eyes closed and Agatha just ran right into her. Silly thing had herself half unseen.”

“Is she dead?”

“No, just knocked out.”

“Shit.”

If you were going to ride your horse into a Faery then you had better make sure you killed her because when she woke up, her fury was going to be more than a match for you, even if you were a daughter of darkness that hung out with killer clowns, chefs from hell and Goat Boy.

The Other One lifted the Faery off Agatha and laid her by the campfire, covering her with his jacket. Although it was hard, Lorelei managed to keep her fingers out of the stew.

“What now?”

The Other One shook his head.

“Leave her, and that pot of trouble, and get gone. Now.”

“They’ll come after us.”

“I know.”
He took her hand in his, dwarfing her slender fingers in his grubby white glove.

“I’ll look after you kid. You know that.”

The Faery sat up. Lorelei and the Other One scrabbled backwards, drawing knives and having heart attacks.

“What am I doing here?” asked the Faery, her voice being waterfalls in the spring.

Neither of them could speak. The Faery stood up, the jacket fell to the floor. The Other One looked away. Lorelei froze in fear and abject admiration.

“I SAID, what am I doing here?”
Her voice was now a thunderstorm.

“I..it...I”
The Other One’s breath was torn from his throat. She was killing him. Lorelei felt her heart beat faster and faster. Her pulse was racing. The Faery was also killing her.Blood began to run from her nose, her mouth. She could no longer breathe.

“One more time,” began the Faery, and then Lorelei felt herself released, heard The Other One muttering thankyou thankyou. And the Faery was gazing open mouthed at Goat Boy, who had nodded off but was now stumbling over to the odd trio, smiling slightly and drooling dreadfully.

“Whose is THAT?” asked the Faery.

Lorelei gulped hard.

“Y-yours. All yours.”

The Faery turned to look at her. Lorelei felt herself drowning in eyes so old yet so bright that it hurt the back of your head to look into them.

“For me? Then thank you..”

Goat Boy stopped stumbling but continued drooling.

“Naked,” he managed through a barrage of dribble.

The Faery continued to regard him, her head on one side, her lips parted.

“Pleasing.”

She extended one glowing hand toward Goat Boy, and he fell, quite literally, at her feet.


*******

Lorelei and The Other One sat in the dark desert of the Astral Plane, back to back, knees bent, just sharing the silence of each other. Every so often, Lorelei apparated a couple of smokes and a slug or two of bourbon, and they tried to ignore the quite frankly animalistic noises coming from Goatboy’s tent. The Faery had dragged him off, and going from the aural outpourings, she was eating him alive. Quite literally.

“Why’d you bring her with you?” asked Lorelei at last.

“I don’t know. I couldn’t just leave her there. What if something came along and took advantage of her? This is the Astral Plane. ‘S full of weird creatures.”

“Yeah, most of them us. We really do need to leave you know. A rampant Faery is one thing, a herd of Angels is another.”

The Other one stood and helped Lorelei to her feet.

“OK , let’s go.”

Lorelei kicked the Chef awake. He had been lying beside the dying camp fire, stirring the stew in his sleep.

“Come on, we are out of here. Now.”

“Damn, Lorelei. I don’t wann…”

“NOW! Do I have to remind you who my father is?”

The Chef shook his head, and took the pot off the fire, stamping out the flames and rubbing the embers into the ground.

“You gonna get him out of his tent?” he asked sullenly, nodding his head in the direction of the ululating canvas.

Lorelei nodded and opened her mouth to speak. Then she didn’t have the time to worry about Goat Boy at all. Because the dark sky was suddenly as bright as day, and filled with Angels. At least thirty of them, fluttering down on darkened wings, eyes red with rage.

“Shit.”

The Other One moved to stand beside Lorelei. He slid an arm around her shoulder and pulled her close.
The Chef came and stood at her other side, doing his best to stand behind her and not appear to be doing so at the same time.
An Angel was standing in front of them.
He opened his mouth and spoke imperiously. None of them understood a single word he said.
The Angel tried again, in a different language.
Not a language any of them knew.
Finally, after several more attempts, including something that may have been ancient German, they recognised some English. Oddly, spoken in a Salford accent.
“That,” said the Angel, pointing to the now almost cold pot of stew, “Is one of us. And you have cooked her.”

The Chef shuffled his feet and coughed. It looked like he would have to be brave, but the Angel was so tall, and so dark and , well, red glaring eyes always unnerved him.

“I cooked it…her. It was me.”
That was as brave as he got.
“But I didn’t kill her!”

The Angel raised a hand.

“Shut up, mate. The point is you cooked her. “

“I.. yes. I did. It’s what I do, cook.”

“And you knew she was an Angel din’t you? “

“Well, yeah.”

“But you didn’t kill ‘er?”

“No.”

“Then who did?”

The words tumbled out of Lorelei’s mouth before she could stop them.

“Goat Boy found her. But he says she was already dead. And he couldn’t kill anything. He’s too stupid.”
She glared at the Angel.

“You made me say that didn’t you? Bastard.”

The Angel waved a hand at her and turned towards the tent.
He raised a hand and his wings fluttered dreadfully.

“Kill him.”

As one, twenty nine towering Angels advanced on the still shaking tent. The first one to reach it stretched out a hand and tore the material in two, to reveal a prone Goat Boy, his bottom half very obviously the man half, with the naked Faery straddling him very strenuously.
As one, twenty nine towering Angels started skipping backwards, bumping into each other in their hurry to get away from the Faery.
She looked up.
The harsh cry of rage that came from her shook the ground. And greatly pleased Goat Boy.

“HOW DARE YOU!” she screeched., clambering off Goat Boy and drawing herself to her fairly unimpressive full height. The Angels were still backing away, and even the one that had spoken was looking very unhappy.

“You have a bloody Faery. Shit. You never said.”

“She is… she is.. his wife! Yeah, his wife!” Lorelei garbled quickly, hoping to any deity going that the Faery hadn’t heard her.

“They don’t have me. I have them.” said the Faery and Goat Boy was suddenly beside her, licking her shoulder with his goat tongue. He knew she was most troublesome when she was quiet, even though their relationship was less than hours old.

She glanced at Lorelei.

“I am not his wife.”
Lorelei sucked in her breath.
“But he is my pet. And you..?” she said as she turned her ancient eyes on the Angel that had been talking.

“You are nothing. With your false wings and your stupid ideas.You are not an old race, and you do not rule anything. And you need to leave my pet ALONE.”
She hadn’t raised her voice but the venom was deafening. The Angels shuffled backwards. Suddenly the Faery seemed fifty feet tall.
Goat Boy swapped ends and stopped the licking.

“You all leave my Valerie alone!”

“Valerie?” The Other One whispered in Lorelei’s ear, as she stifled a snort.

The Angel grimaced, and tried to look brave in front of all the other Angels that were herding themselves like scared school girls behind him.

“These people ate one of our own.”
His voice was stuttered and shaken, but his eyes were red with hatred.

“So?” boomed Valerie. “She was roadkill. Why do you not bury and honour your dead? Instead you leave them lying on cold stone, to be eaten by Astral carrion?”
She paused and ran a hand over Goat Boy’s trembling shoulder.
“MY Astral carrion.”

The Angel shook his head.

“She was an offering.”

Valerie surveyed him levelly.

“So, you kill those in your realm you do not like and you dispose of them as offerings to your higher kind? Did she choose to be an offering?”

The Angel was silent. There was a shuffling in the ranks behind him, and a smaller, paler female Angel stepped from the herd.

“She did not want him.”
She nodded her head at the Angel who had been speaking.

“So he…he…”
Black tears ran from her red eyes.

Valerie continued to stare at him.

“I see. You kill what displeases you, or you cannot have, and you dress it up as divine sacrifice?”
Lorelei knew it would happen before it did. She closed her eyes and slipped her hand into The Other Ones.

“S’ok honey, you’re ok.”
He gripped her fingers hard.

Valerie shone. She had glowed before, as Faeries do, but now she was intense sunlight, shining hot and hard onto the Angels. They were immobile, their wings smoking and then bursting into flame. In their enforced stillness they could only open their mouths and scream to their maker as their wings ignited, their bodies burned from within, black blood running over fiery skin, until they were consumed and finished in crisp decimation. Even the one that had spoken out.

Lorelei had never felt colder in her life. She wanted her mother.

Finally it was done.
Lorelei was still.
The Other One drew her to him.
Valerie was smiling.
Goat Boy was drooling on Valerie’s shoulder.

“Barbecue anyone?” wheezed The Chef, through a rather large joint.
*********


Later, in the early Astral morning, Lorelei insisted that the now tentless Goat Boy and Valerie advance into the desert. Their cries and passions were getting irritating.

“Don’t give Agatha the bones!” she admonished The Chef, who was patiently feeding The Other One’s horse with charred Angel.

At her side, the Carny nightmare slipped an arm around her waist.

“What’s it all about, darlin’?” he asked gently.

Lorelei shook her head.

“I don’t know. My father, he wants me dead. Or needs me dead. And I don’t know why. But I have to find out. Find him. End this. I am not safe in the real world, and obviously the Astral is getting a little racy these days. “

“We’ve got her.”

“Valerie? She’s blinded by lust and she will only protect Goat Boy anyway. No, we can’t stay here anymore. She can’t kill off every Angel on the plane, and there will be more coming.”

“We go back to the real world then?”
The Other One tucked a finger under Lorelei’s chin and smoothed back a strand of white streak in her black hair.
If he kisses me, I bloody well will let him, she thought. But he didn’t.
Instead he drew away and walked a little distance from her.

“Ok guys, wagons roll. We are off.”

The Chef stamped out his joint on the sand and reached for his knives. In the pale distance Goat Boy and Valerie appeared, hand in hand. Both looked dazed, Valerie more so. Her feet were somewhat bruised. In a good way.

“I shall come,” said Valerie flatly.
Goat Boy met The Chef’s eye and sniggered.

“We have to go back to the real world, “ said Lorelei.”I have something to do, but I don’t know what. Yet. To make this all stop.”

“Where exactly we goin’, ma’am?” asked The Chef, adjusting the pies in his copious pockets.

Lorelei looked at The Other One.

“Scotland.”