The sky was beginning to change in colour when Colm stood back and surveyed his work, his hands set on his hips. His whole body ached from the labour, his shoulders humming with the exertion, streaks staining his body and trousers from grass and earth alike.

The strimmer he had returned to old Mr Delaney, who lived three doors down and had beautifully kept hydrangeas growing along his hedge border, and now he had some great piles of grass, hedge trimmings, and branches piled up beside the old shed.

There were rhododendrons tangled in with the rest of the hedge, and he didn’t care for those, would probably untangle them and prune out their roots, but there were other plants he was delighted to have – red currants and black currants grew in one tangled lump at the end of the back yard, and the gooseberry bush was a little overgrown, but healthy.

He hadn’t yet started tilling over the soil, because he’d want to segment it all out first – he’d probably use the old wood from the shed for that, ramshackle thing as it was, and as the wood was near enough to rotting anyway, it would suit for piecing apart the garden’s vegetable rows before sinking down beneath the soil.

Moving into the house, he kicked off his boots, and hesitated as he came into the main room, looking down at Jean-Pierre where he was sprawled on the sofa, long legs almost falling off the end of it, his face slack in sleep on the pillow he’d shoved into Asmodeus’ lap. Asmodeus was focused on his book, his lips twisted in an absent-minded frown of concentration.

“The neighbours are going to ask where those scars are from,” he said mildly, turning a page, and Colm looked down at himself as he passed behind the other man, at the scattered cuts and ragged scars laid over his chest, and the wet-looking, shiny patch of skin along his righthand side, where he hadn’t quite gotten out of the way fast enough during a bombing in ’23.

“They know better than that,” Colm said, pouring fresh milk into a glass.

“There’s bags for your grass clippings in the press under the stairs,” Asmodeus said. “I thought you’d need them.”

“In the press, are they?” Colm repeated, mocking Asmodeus’ pronunciation, and Asmodeus chuckled, marking his page and setting his book aside before he put one arm over the back of the sofa, turning to look at him. “I wake him up?” He was aware of the regret in his voice, knew that Asmodeus probably heard it too, but to his credit, he didn’t point it out.

“I know we’ll need to get to the hardware store before you can get to work on the house,” Asmodeus said softly, “but he can’t put his sound-dampening enchantment until that’s done.”

“That glazing’ll need redoing, too,” Colm said. “Can’t be dealing with the one pane of glass. I’ll do the measurements for that and order the panes tonight. There’s no other big things that need doing but for the porch, though, I don’t think.” He took a long swig of his milk, putting his fingers over the fridge – they’d not had a fridge in College Station, because Asmodeus had enchanted the cold cabinet himself, but the kitchen was a lot smaller here, with less wall space for cabinets.

“You been into the cellar?”

“There’s a cellar?”

“Hatch is in the pantry. Thought you and Jean might like your armoury onsite rather than having to drive out to the thing, if you could manage it.”

Colm smiled slightly, putting his glass down. “You thought of everything, huh?”

“This time.”

“How long are you going to be with us?”

Asmodeus considered the question for a few moments, and it wasn’t the calculating silence of a man trying to avoid the question, or trying to think of how best to answer it, because Asmodeus wasn’t that sort of man – Colm could see him look into that strange, long-reaching datebook he had tucked away in his head, could see him working it out.

“At least three months,” he said. “Assuming I’m not urgently called elsewhere, but I don’t see why I would be. You don’t like the house?”

“No, I like it. I like it a lot – better than the one we had in College Station, actually.”

“You didn’t want to leave Texas?”

“I was fine leaving Texas – it’s nice to come back home, even if it is to Dublin. Look, can we— I’d rather have this talk outside.”

“Alright,” Asmodeus said softly, and Colm watched the tender care he took to ease Jean’s head from his lap, settling it back down on the sofa. Jean-Pierre was under his own blanket, one of the patchwork things he’d made back in the ‘80s, and Asmodeus had took another blanket out from the ottoman and thrown it over him. Asmodeus was always careful with Jean, treated him like he was some pretty, fragile thing made of china – it would piss Colm off, except that Asmodeus treated Colm like that, too, and he supposed to him, fragile was exactly what they were.

Asmodeus hung up his cardigan on the coat stand as Colm got the recycling bags, but he didn’t bother to change out of his salmon-pink shirt, instead just rolling up the sleeves, and he kept on his skinny trousers, too.

“Prick,” Colm murmured as he stepped past him to drag on his boots, and he heard Asmodeus laugh as he moved out into the yard.

For a long while, with the sun beginning to set over their heads, they worked in companionable silence – no matter that Asmodeus avoided physical labour unless he was asked, he was nearly twice Colm’s size and almost as built with muscle, and he was more than able for putting his shoulder to the plough when it came down to it.

They filled a good eight bags with clippings from the meadows and the hedgerow – the biggest of the branches Colm set in a pile to build the compost heap out of, and one bag of the meadow he’d keep back, too, the better to build that up and insulate it.

“So?” prompted Asmodeus as he tossed the last of the bags aside.

Even after all that, no clippings or mown pieces clung to his clothes or his skin, although one curl of black hair had come out of his place – and honestly, that made him look even more picture-perfect.

It was uncomfortable, sometimes, how good Asmodeus looked.

Jean-Pierre put it down to him being handsome, but Colm had never thought it was about that, not really: there was something about Asmodeus that just left him looking picture-perfect no matter the situation, even when he was dirty or bloody, and there was an uncanniness in perfection at the best of times, an uncanniness Colm ordinarily shied away from.

“Just feels like Jean and I don’t do much these days,” Colm said quietly. “I know we help out when friends call us in, take our own targets as they come up – and back in Texas, Jean had his radio station, I had the church group, the community garden, but… I don’t know. Feels like we’re just not living up to what we could be. What we used to be, centuries back.”

Asmodeus nodded his head, his lips loosely pursed, his expression focused – he was taking this seriously, Colm could see, and Colm wondered how much he really understood, how much he could understand.

“What can I do?” he asked. “To help?”

“I don’t know,” Colm said quietly. “I just— Seems like we only help the family, these days. I feel like I’m not doing enough for… everyone.”

“Please don’t feel I’m holding you here,” Asmodeus said softly, “nor Jean-Pierre. I do my duty to the family, but I never meant to force that you should share in it – if you wished to go somewhere else entirely. I can call on the Embassy, if you’d like a position there, or you could go back to living in Berlin, be close to Heidemarie, or you could join the army, if you wanted, I wouldn’t stop you.”

Colm laughed, softly, and when Asmodeus stared at him, uncomprehending, Colm gave a small shake of his hand. “No, I’m not… You’re not holding us here. It’s not that. It’s not you – it’s me. My choices. I like what we do, what we did in College Station, what we’ll do here – I like the human connection, the charity, the… peace that goes by for weeks and months at a time, and Heidemarie doesn’t need me near to her. I suppose I just don’t know if that’s wrong of me.”

Asmodeus gave him a slow, wry smile. “I’m not exactly an expert,” he pointed out, “when it comes to right and wrong.”

Colm’s laugh was low and hard, harder than he wanted, and he put his hands on his hips, pressing his fingers into the unyielding flesh there.

“Just feels like we’re your tagalongs, sometimes, or as though we’re some kind of inconvenience you have to remember to move around every twenty years or so. I mean, take this house – the yard for me, Ireland for me, all that red and gold for Jean inside, the cellar for us to work in, and don’t think I didn’t see all them leaflets on the kitchen side, brochures for university for Jean, leaflets about the nearest allotments and volunteering services for me. I mean, did you pick anything in this house for you?”

Asmodeus was silent, and Colm hated how he couldn’t glean a damn thing from him, hated how he couldn’t even reach for what he was feeling under the surface, what he was feeling at all – he might as well try to empathise with a brick wall.

“You’d be happier in the country,” Colm said. “Some place in the wilderness – or, Hell, in Nottingham, maybe, that’s where that weird furniture-maker you like lives, isn’t it? You don’t have to do everything for us. We can do it ourselves, you don’t have to—”

“I want to,” Asmodeus said, interrupting Colm in one clean, smooth movement. “You ask what I picked in the house for me? You two. A house with you two in it is the house I’d pick every time.”

“You never picked us,” Colm said. “You found Jean when he was sad and lonely, and he decided to cling to you ever since, and me, I did the same thing, because I was just tired of—” Colm trailed off, not able to stand the blank expression on Asmodeus’ face any longer, and he turned away, staring at the orange skies instead. “We aren’t special. We’re not any different to any other angel you’ve picked up after the Fall.”

“Is that what you think?” asked Asmodeus, his voice slightly louder than before, slightly harder, but with no easily discernible emotion in it: Colm set his jaw.

“You can’t tell me we’re your favourites,” Colm said. “It would go against your duty, wouldn’t it? To have favourites?”

“No,” Asmodeus said. “You two are my favourites – the two I choose to live with, to throw my lot in with. My duty is what I decide it is – and my duty is to you two, first and foremost. Close family comes before the rest. I love you, Colm, and Jean-Pierre too. You understand that, don’t you?”

Colm remembered it in flashes, their first meeting, the cold spot that was Asmodeus hoving out of the darkness – darkness that Colm could barely see through, his head thrumming with the cold salt ater, his vision swimming with it, and then Asmodeus touching him, pulling him out of that choking, freezing mess of the Atlantic keen to swallow Colm whole and drown him in its embrace, Asmodeus warm and unspeakably cold all at once, and Colm coughing and spluttering into his shoulder as he was dragged to the surface, certain that this was an omen of death, come to ensure he would die now he had Fallen.

It hadn’t been exactly like that, in the end.

He hadn’t gone with Asmodeus until later, decades later, and then…

“You don’t feel things the way that we do,” Colm said quietly. “You said that to me, once. Emotion, it’s distant, for you.”

Asmodeus’ hand clasped tightly at Colm’s shoulder, dragging him around, and he held tightly to both of Colm’s shoulders, looking down at him seriously, the muscle in his jaw twitching slightly with how tightly it was clenched. Asmodeus’ eyes, the dark, keen green of uncut emeralds, stared into Colm’s with more intensity than Colm had ever seen from them.

“Then think how very much I must love the two of you,” he rumbled, voice coming from so deep in his chest that the resonance of it actually hurt Colm’s ears slightly, too close to a Voice for his Fallen understanding, “for me to tell you for certain that I do.”

Colm heard the shocked exhalation he let out, heard the relief in it before he felt it, and he fell forward, dropping his head against Asmodeus’ chest and letting the other man hug him tightly – so tightly, this time, Colm thought he might bruise, and was grateful for it.

Colm pulled away, and Asmodeus reached to cup his cheek, sliding one thumb over the stubble there. “I love you,” he repeated, and Colm nodded.

“We love you too,” he said softly, and Asmodeus gave a nod of his head. “I meant to ask, um— the nearest church?”

“Saint Fiachra’s Parish,” Asmodeus said softly. “Just around the corner – Latin mass is Sundays at 10:30. Two priests.”

Colm crossed his arms over his chest, and he gave Asmodeus a flat look. “You have a preference for which of them does the house blessing?”

“Father James Byrne, please,” Asmodeus said pleasantly.

“I don’t suppose you’ll be joining us for Mass?”

“I don’t suppose I will.”

“What’s wrong with him? Byrne?”

“Now, Colm,” Asmodeus said, his voice honeyed and playful. “You have your hobbies, I have mine. Come, let’s finish up the yard before we head in.”

*     *     *

COLM

Colm lingered back for a second as Jean-Pierre’s wings unfolded, unable to keep the stricken look from his face as he saw them come apart. It was different, when Jean got into his own head and forgot to brush his hair or scrub the blood off his skin – that sort of thing was visible, could be pushed at, tugged at.

His wings?

They were hidden away.

They were great things, massive compared to Jean-Pierre, and perhaps one might think they shouldn’t really suit his body, because where Jean-Pierre was delicate and willowy, with a dancer’s muscle, the sort one forgot about as soon as one looked away, his wings were thickly corded with muscle and massive, each one of them seeming as big as Jean-Pierre was himself – his wingspan, when they were fully outstretched, was something like fifteen feet, and it should have been cartoonish.

It wasn’t, though.

The wings seemed so natural where they sprouted from the second set of shoulder blades, pressed beneath the first set, and ordinarily, their plumage was a beautiful burnished gold, a dark yellow that actually shone and glittered in the sunlight, when they were groomed correctly.

Now?

Jean held his wings tight into his body at an uncomfortable-looking angle, and Colm could see where the muscle was knotted and tangled under the thinner flesh at their base; half of the feathers were rumpled or bent out of place, some of them with their quills snapped; over their surface, even furled as they were, he could see patches of thick, caked oil stuck in grey lumps in amongst the plumage, and patches, too, that were blood-raw or scabbed over, where broken quills had dragged at the flesh under his feathers.

“Oh, Jean,” Colm said softly, and he thought about reaching out and taking Jean’s pain on himself again, as he had earlier, but Jean-Pierre hated when he did that at the best of times, and he knew that to do it twice in one day would lead, at least, to Jean spitting in his face.

Jean started to carefully unfurl his wings, doing it little by little, and while he could stretch the one on the right out almost entirely, the left was stiff, and Colm could see his twisted expression of pain as he tried to roll his shoulder, shifting the muscle.

“It hurts when you do it,” Jean said sharply as Asmodeus stepped forward.

“Only because you’ve neglected them,” Asmodeus said, and carefully touched the edge of the stiff joint where Jean was struggling to open himself up, pressing on the tense muscle. Jean let out a sobbed noise, but he managed to move the muscle out, and now, his wings were almost entirely spread out, the tips of his feathers touching the wall on one side and brushing the side of the fridge on the other.

They looked worse, like this, ragged and thick with tangled feathers, red streaked all over their surface, as much as the gold.

Colm didn’t have wings. Most angels didn’t, when they Fell – Asmodeus had explained, once, that it had to do with what they’d been before they’d Fallen, though Colm had never met an angel who remembered what they’d been before the Great Fall.

Asmodeus did, he thought, but Colm had never yet dared to ask.

Wings were a common manifestation of angelic power, usually paired – as Jean’s was – with exaggerated senses of empathy or mild telepathy, or with healing powers; some angels commanded certain elements, or could heal wounds, or perform impossible feats of strength.

Colm, he could manipulate the way other people felt, impart emotions onto others or take them away – and, more importantly, he could make flowers grow, give plants life and let them grow under his fingers.

He wondered sometimes, what it might be like, to have wings like Jean-Pierre’s, but it wasn’t as though it was just wings slapped onto a human body – Jean’s bones were light and hollow, like a bird’s, so that he weighed almost nothing, and if you fed him dairy or alcohol or anything else, he’d be sick for days. Wings, he might like, but the rest, Colm didn’t think he could stand.

And right now, this? This, he couldn’t stand either.

“It’s okay, Jean,” Colm said softly, and reached for the first awry feather, tugging it out from the plumage with a small pinch: Jean hissed, and curled more tightly into his foetal position, face fallen forward against the back of the sofa, his back to the fire. “You want me to take some of the pain off you?”

“No,” Jean said, through gritted teeth. “Just— just get it over with. Please.”

“We’ve got you,” Asmodeus said quietly, and he and Colm got to work.

*     *     *

JEAN-PIERRE

There were a few different kinds of pain that went with a grooming session like this.

Ordinarily, there was no pain at all – oh, it was uncomfortable to drag at the occasional crusted clumps of oil, yes, and there was a quick sting to pulling out a bent feather, but it wasn’t pain. It was satisfying, even, satisfying, pleasurable, in an exerting way: Jean remembered well how much it had pleased him to be groomed, when it was Jules doing it, feeling his warmth at his back, feeling the gentleness of Jules’ hands buried in his down, or Jules’ kiss at the back of his neck.

There was no pleasure here, not now.

His wings ached as great walls of sore, tense muscle, and the clumps of oil dragged and tore at the skin as they were scratched and scraped free of his skin, pulling out some of the feathers as they went, and that aside, too many of his feathers had grown in wrong, bent or twisted or tangled, so that they had to be pulled free to let the rest grow in again, properly.

He was going to have patchy wings for weeks, and he’d have to keep rubbing a balm into the cut patches if he didn’t want to risk an infection where the oil wasn’t spreading with enough down to let it flow.

Colm’s hands were gentle as they worked on one side, always massaging where a quill pressed under the skin before he pulled a broken feather free, always pressing very carefully through a clump of dried oil before working it away.

Asmodeus, in contrast, was brutally efficient. He didn’t feel most of the feathers being tugged free initially, because he did them suddenly and quickly, like someone tearing off a plaster, but after, the spot ached. It was almost better, though, that he moved so fast, because the process wasn’t so drawn-out.

He didn’t know when he started crying.

He only realised there were tears on his cheeks when Asmodeus pressed his handkerchief into Jean-Pierre’s hand, and he wiped at them hard enough that he felt like his cheeks would bruise.

“Are you nearly finished?” he asked, in a thick mumble.

“No,” Asmodeus said, and dragged his thumb through a crusted piece of oil, making Jean cry out in pain. “I’m sorry.”

Jean believed that he was sorry. Asmodeus was many things, but he wasn’t a sadist, and he hated to see any angel in pain, but Jean-Pierre and Colm especially. Jean didn’t reply, and buried his face harder in the sofa’s cushions.

*     *     *

COLM

Later, they all gathered in Jean’s room, where Colm had set up the television on Jean’s chest of drawers, the three of them crammed into Jean’s bed. He was sat half in both his and Asmodeus’ laps, his wings curled around the both of them, leaning back into the soft, thick down on the underside of his wings.

Colm always forgot how much he liked the scent of Jean-Pierre’s feathers, when he went for a while without smelling it: it came from the oil that was secreted throughout his wings, which helped keep his plumage clean and insulated, and it was a woody, spiced scent a little too acidic to be called citrusy – sometimes, in the old days, people would ask Jean-Pierre why he smelled so much like frankincense, although now, people didn’t normally recognise it.

Jean-Pierre was flicking through movie after movie on the TV, unable to decide on anything, but Colm wasn’t particularly fussed either way tonight, and Asmodeus wouldn’t watch whatever was on unless it was at least seventy years old – already, Colm could see his hands twitching to go back to his book.

“Did you pick Dublin for Colm?” Jean-Pierre asked, apropos of nothing, and Colm saw Asmodeus stir slightly – with Jean-Pierre’s wings as they were, both of them curled back into the curve of one, he couldn’t see Asmodeus’ face, and he realised that the twitch of Asmodeus’ fingers hadn’t been him wanting to reach for his book at all – he’d been falling asleep.

“No,” Asmodeus said after a moment’s pause, collecting himself.

“You picked it for a Fall?”

“Soon.”

“Are they going to come stay with us? Whoever Falls?”

“Perhaps,” Asmodeus murmured. “It’s never possible to say what they’ll be like, until they arrive – the Embassy already knows this one is coming, and we’re not the only angels in Dublin.”

“We’re not?” Jean-Pierre asked.

“No,” Colm said. “Pádraic Mac Giolla Chríost lives here, remember.”

“He’s a member of St Fiachra’s congregation, too,” Asmodeus said softly.

Jean’s lips parted, and although he didn’t look away from the options he was flicking through, Colm could see his brow furrow in thought. “The one with the daughter? Bedelia?”

“That’s the one,” Asmodeus said.

“Is she really his daughter?” Jean-Pierre asked.

“Of course.”

“Biologically, I mean,” Jean-Pierre pressed, and even without seeing his face, Colm could see that Asmodeus wasn’t going to answer that particular question – there were some questions he never did, and never would, and anyway, it wasn’t as though Jean-Pierre’s questions on the subject of parenthood would ever be kind or thoughtful.

“What does it feel like?” Colm asked. “You always know when one of is going to Fall – how do you know? Is it like remembering dates on a calendar, or do you feel it, like you can feel a change in the wind?”

“It’s as though I’m remembering something I don’t quite recall,” Asmodeus said. “It feels like I’ve heard the sensation of déja vu described. A ghost of memory, indirect and incomplete.”

“Don’t a lot of the Embassy hate him?” Jean-Pierre asked. “Mac Giolla Chríost?”

“Pick a film, Jean,” Colm said when Asmodeus said nothing.

 It was rare that Asmodeus fell asleep before them. He hadn’t slept much on the cruise, Colm was aware, because he’d spend a lot of his days with Colm, but the nights, he’d spend comforting Jean – Colm having been banned from Jean’s cabin, lest he feel the temptation to take away some of the seasickness, which Jean had furiously labelled hypocrisy.

Asmodeus fell asleep before more than five minutes had passed into the film, and Jean paused the movie to push Asmodeus down in the bed, so that his head was laid on the pillow instead of uncomfortably leaned into his own shoulder. Colm threw a blanket over him, and when Jean wriggled back on the bed, no longer in Colm’s lap but instead behind him, Colm allowed it, laying his cheek on Jean’s chest.

“He’s exhausted,” Jean said softly against the top of Colm’s head. “He never takes care of himself when we’re moving.”

Colm hadn’t considered that, and tried, for once, to go a few minutes without feeling a fresh wave of guilt – he did not succeed, and closed his eyes, listening to the bird-fast beat of Jean-Pierre’s heart in his rib cage.

“He’s picked out a priest,” Colm said quietly. “One of the two at St Fiachra’s.”

“I wish he wouldn’t do that.” Jean rested his chin on top of Colm’s hair, wrapping his arms loosely around his body. “There’s already a shortage. You know in Ireland, the average age for a priest is seventy?”

Colm did know that – he’d forwarded the article to Jean-Pierre when he’d read it, but Jean never remembered where he learned things from. “Somehow, I feel like the one Asmodeus picked is a bit younger.”

“Do you think he’ll ever fall in love?”

Colm looked down at Asmodeus’ sleeping face, his expression relaxed, but somehow uncomfortably perfect, statuesque, even like this. “With a priest? No.”

“No,” Jean-Pierre said. “With someone else.”

No, Colm didn’t say. “Maybe. Feeling lonely, are you?”

“It’s been a long time,” Jean-Pierre mumbled against Colm’s hair, and Colm nodded his head. It had been a long time, really – the last time Jean had taken up with a man properly, that had been Farhad, and he’d died forty years ago. Before that… Well. It didn’t really bear dwelling on.

“You never have that much trouble, once you decide to start looking,” Colm said.

“Nasty,” Jean-Pierre said, pulling Colm’s hair, and Colm chuckled.

“You’ll find someone,” he said quietly, and as the film flickered on, he let his eyes close shut, feeling the warmth of Jean under his cheek, feeling the cold sink of Asmodeus on the other side of the bed. “I love you, Jean.”

“Tá grá agam duit,” Jean murmured.

“You sound so fucking stupid when you talk as Gaeilge.”

“At least I only sound French,” Jean murmured smugly. “It could be much worse. I could sound like I was from Kerry.”

Colm laughed, and shoved him out of bed. 

*     *     *

AIMÉ

Saturday morning saw Aimé painting on St Stephen’s Green, like it normally did: an alcoholic he was, and hungover he was, too, but he was a creature of habit.

He was mixing his palette when the smell caught his attention, like a sweetened frankincense, wafting on the air, and he looked up to where it had come from, and he was arrested.

The man was beautiful beyond measure, tall and possessed of a ballerino’s grace, his golden hair allowed to run free in thick tresses around his shoulders. His skin was as pale as porcelain, his eyes brightly blue, and he laughed freely, his eyes crinkling as he did so, and drawing attention to the scar under his left eye, bright pink and slightly twisted where the rest of his skin was perfect and unmarred.

He was dressed in a heavy, red jumper three or four sizes at least too big for him, so much that he swam in it, but his legs were clad in tight jeans that left absolutely nothing to the imagination, showing the muscle in his calves and his thighs, and Aimé wondered if it was worth cursing whatever cruel God that might exist, because the long jumper meant that a glimpse of this perfect creature’s arse was beyond hoping for.

“But I love them, Colm! You’re my brother – aren’t you meant to care for me?”

Christ, that voice, a beautiful, smooth tenor, and better than that, the accent – a Frenchman, really? His pretty lips looked even prettier, putting a purr to every softly rolled r.

He was gesturing with his pretty hands as he spoke, showing off paint on his nails – oh, and how cute, he’d painted them red, white, and blue. The beautiful angel was soft in the head – a patriot. Who needed brains when you were that pretty?

“You grew them in Vietnam,” the angel went on.

“Do you need me to explain the difference between the climate in Vietnam and Ireland?” was the dry-toned retort. “It’s a cactus.”

“But, Colm,” was the beseeching reply, the angel tugging on his brother’s sleeve. “Dragon fruit!”

Watching after them as they kept moving along the path, Aimé softly sighed, and then looked back to his canvas, primed and ready, and threateningly, damningly blank.

He thought of the frankincense-scented stranger laughing on the bench beside him, eating his dragon fruit – whatever the fuck that was – and forced himself to smile, then picked his cigarette out of his travel ash tray, holding it between his lips as he reached into his satchel for his water bottle.

The taste of vodka was a punishing balm on his tongue.