In the Beginning

In the beginning was an angel, a church and a knife.

I had hunted down the angel, Remiel, in Barcelona. He was working as a living statue, one of those street performers whose job it is to separate tourists from their money before someone else does. His office was a wooden pedestal on La Rambla, the pedestrian boulevard by the harbour that every visitor has to hit before they start exploring the real city. He was tucked away among the kiosks that sold everything from postcards and magazines to live birds. A silver robot stood on a box to the left of him, while a clockwork man dressed in gears, wheels and pistons was on his right. Remiel was made up like a demon with golden skin, bat wings and two tails, holding a leather tome bound with three locks. He looked like just another out-of-work circus performer vying for tips. Apparently even angels have to make a living these days.

If you've been to Barcelona, or any other city with a tourist district, you know the scene: people with cameras and sunburns wandering around while living statues, jugglers, magicians and pickpockets compete with each other to earn a few of the local coins.

And me.

You wouldn't notice me. I'd be just another passing face, another man from somewhere else with a hat, sunglasses and backpack. I'm a pretty convincing nobody, thanks to centuries of experience.

But Remiel turned his head and scanned the crowd as soon as I caught sight of him. Angels have a sense for each other. He was looking for me. Trying to find me like I'd found him.

The problem was he was looking for the wrong thing. I'm not one of them. I can never be one of them. I'll let you worry about whether that's a curse or a gift.

I ducked into a kiosk and pretended to look over a selection of fridge magnets depicting La Sagrada Familia, the city's famous Gaudí church, while keeping an eye on Remiel in the mirror on the sunglasses stand. He fluttered his wings and lashed his tails, which prompted people in the crowd to applaud and toss money onto the mat at his feet. But he wasn't acting for them. I knew his demon form wasn't a disguise - he wasn't wearing makeup and using props like all the other performers. He wasn't even using a sleight to hide his real form. This was actually one of Remiel's incarnations. And he was genuinely agitated at sensing my presence but not being able to find me. I would have been amused by the situation if I wasn't so damned desperate for grace.

He hopped off the box and gathered up his mat and money in one smooth motion. He looked around some more as he put them in a shoulder bag he draped off one of his wings. Then he made his way through the crowd and into a side alley. I followed him, careful to keep clear of the people filming his exit. You never know when some enterprising law enforcement officer will think it's a good idea to look at people's cameras after a crime and then track you down at the bar or airport lounge where you happen to be enjoying a few drinks. And then you have to come up with answers to all those questions that are so difficult to answer.

After all, it was a photo that had led me to Barcelona. Printed on a piece of paper and tucked inside an envelope with no return address, delivered to a hotel in Prague where I'd been staying to ride out a heroin withdrawal. I'd wanted to cultivate an addiction so I could forget about various things I no longer wanted to remember, but my body had rejected the drug. It had worked for only a few weeks, hardly enough time to forget who I was, before my body started cleaning it out of my system. Healing me like it always did. Just doing its preprogrammed job. You'll have to trust me when I say I can't recommend going through withdrawal while you're still high.

A cleaning lady slipped the envelope under my door, because I'd instructed the hotel staff to stay away from my room until I checked out. Strange things can happen when I'm seeing things. The man at the front desk told me later the envelope had just shown up on the counter with nothing on it but the alias I was using at the time. It was written in blood, but I didn't point that out to him. And if he noticed, he was professional enough to not say anything. I won't share that alias right now in case I want to use it again. Although, all things considered, I probably won't. When I opened the envelope I thought for a moment that maybe I was still hallucinating. There was Remiel, golden-skinned and red-eyed on La Rambla, smiling into the camera as he spread his wings for the tourist shot. The first angel I'd seen in years. Even through the photo, I could sense his grace - the heavenly essence that made him what he was. I yearned for it far more than I ever could heroin or any other drug. It was time for me to chase a new high.

On the flight to Barcelona I wondered what had happened to the owner of the camera. I figured it was another angel who sent me the photo because who else would know the truth about both Remiel and me? But there was no way Remiel would have knowingly posed for one of his own kind. Angels didn't particularly trust each other these days, and with good reason - they were always trying to kill one another. Which meant some real tourist had taken the photo and then given up the camera for it to reach me. Hopefully it was just a straightforward theft. I'm tired of people dying on account of me.

I don't trust the angels any more than they trust each other, which is why I assumed I was walking into some sort of trap as I followed Remiel away from La Rambla. But he had grace hidden inside of him, and that's the one addiction my body can't resist. Besides, when you're not capable of really dying, even if you want to, you tend to grow a little cavalier about threats.

Remiel wandered through the old stone buildings of the city's Gothic Quarter, leading me through streets so narrow the evening sky was just a memory overhead. We went past produce and clothing stores, a bookstore with a cat sleeping on a crate of books outside, a sex store with live mannequins modelling clothing in the window and a row of wine bars. Remiel kept looking back, trying to find me, but I stayed hidden in the crowd, stopping to look at a poster advertising a concert, slipping into a group of people stumbling out of a nightclub who asked each other if it was evening or morning, stepping briefly into a tourist shop to buy a hat of a different colour.

It went on like that for a while, as Remiel led me out of the Gothic Quarter and across the city to the Gaudí church. I wasn't expecting that destination. I'd thought he'd take me to an abandoned building somewhere, like the apartment tower where I'd found Abraxos in Chechnya, its lower floors knocked out by tank shells. Or like the walled-off chamber in the Paris sewer where I'd killed . what was that angel's name? The one that had torn out his own eyes and tried to recite T.S. Eliot to me even as I strangled him. I like Eliot as much as the next lost soul, but that wasn't going to stop me.

So rather than hide, Remiel headed for the most popular tourist spot in the city. There's no accounting for the logic of angels.

Remiel changed into a different incarnation along the way, stepping into the shadows of a doorway, then emerging a second later as a man of average build, with dark hair and glasses. He'd also traded the gold skin for street clothes, and the wings and tails for a Starbucks cup. He kept the shoulder bag with the money, though. He looked like anyone else in the crowd. But he wasn't. Neither of us were.

The sky was dark now, and the ticket booths at the entrance to the church had just closed. Remiel went around to the exit at the back. The rear of the church is what everyone recognizes from the postcards, with its towers that look as if they were dreamed up by insects, or maybe mad angels. Or maybe mad insect angels. But they weren't. I knew Gaudí, and you'll have to take my word for it that he was no angel. Besides, angels generally aren't all that creative when it comes to making things. They're more inclined to destruction.

Remiel lingered by the gate as the last of the tourists filed out of the church and into buses for the trips back to their hotels and air conditioning and rooftop wine bars. I went past him on the other side of the street and tried not to stumble too much as my body tugged me in his direction. I needed grace. I sat on the patio of a café across from the church and ordered a glass of red and a bowl of gazpacho. You can't go wrong with the wine or the gazpacho in Spain, even at the tourist traps. I watched Remiel look at the statues carved out of the walls of the church. Angels have always had a thing for statues. I don't know what it is; maybe they see them as kindred spirits: "Hey, you look human but you're not. And your creator's been dead for ages. You're just like me."

All right, to be fair, no one knows if God is really dead or not. But he's definitely been MIA for a very long time.

If Remiel still felt my presence, he didn't seem concerned now. He leaned against a wall and waited until the last of the buses had pulled away and the guards had locked the gate, then he pulled out a phone and talked on it for a while. I sipped my wine and savoured my gazpacho, enjoying the good things in life while I considered whether or not he was calling for help. I decided he was probably just faking the call to look like he wasn't waiting for the guards to go back inside. It's what I would have done.

When the guards set off on their rounds, Remiel put away the phone and tapped the gate with...