THE CHALDEAN ORACLE

Freeing Ishtar

Chapter 8

In the weeks following the “incident” I did something I never thought I would do—I opened my school books and not to study for an exam.

            It was ridiculous to think that I had needed a near death experience with a Fallen Angel as my saviour to make me take my school books seriously.

            I wanted to understand why that Fallen Angel had saved me and to do that I needed to understand Fallen Angels. The thing was I really didn’t know that much about them. That’s where the school book came in handy. For one thing, I realized that it was not just the appeal of having wings again that made Fallen Angel become Demons so fast, it was also the fact that Fallen Angels had to survive on the Holy Spirit their bodies still contained because they couldn’t go get any in the Sheol or in the Khaos. In Angels and Demons, the Holy Spirit was mostly contained in the wings. That meant that when an Angel had its wings ripped off, it lost its Holy Spirit, or at least the largest amount of it, and then it needed to use up all the remaining Holy Spirit to heal if the tearing up had been ugly.

            That was why there were so little Fallen Angels running around.

            Honestly if someone were to give me a pop quiz on everything I had been researching lately I truly thought I could nail it. I never would have said that for any exams.

            Now, with all this information, what about that Fallen Angel that had saved me, Levi? Obviously, he hadn’t seem weak and in desperate need of Holy Spirit. I clearly remembered the blood stain on his white shirt. He probably had been stabbed, and he had obviously healed. Did he save Ishim in exchange for Holy Spirit? If he did, how could he pull that one off? Maybe he was just a very new Fallen Angel. He did sound young and stupid, not old and wise.

            Again, I was till left with many questions and no way to answer them. If I wanted answers I needed to see him again, and I highly doubted that would happen.

           I was also trying to deal with the whole “your biological parents actually know you exist” thing. Obviously, they had taken arrangements for me, but they had never tried to contact me. What was I suppose to make of this? Should I call them and scream “MOMMY! DADDY!” I highly doubted so. It was just very weird to live with that information. And it sucked to think they had cared about what class I would take but not about introducing themselves to me.

            I jump on my seat when my phone rang beside me. It was buried under a ton of books—I had taken my latest addiction on the kitchen table to try to be more organized than on my room’s floor, but of course was failing—and it took my a little while to finally answer.

            When I did I was greeted by my overly excited—more so than usual—blonde friend. “Oh my goodness! Check your mail! Right. Now!”

            I knew instantly what Florence was referring to.

            “You got it? You got it, you got it, you got it?” I chanted, while rushing to the front door.

            “Yes, yes, yes, yes,” she exclaimed with joy.

            Florence had gotten her affectation for the Two Month Field Assignment. We were going to be sent to the human schools next week. Everyone had been waiting eagerly for those letters. And I wanted to have mine too now.

            “Where,” I asked.

            When she said the name of the school I automatically sulked. “It’s a French school Flo.”

            “So?”

            I didn’t groan but I really felt like it, and stepped outside. “I suck in French. They’re definitely not sending me to a French school.”

            This sucked. I had hoped I would be with Florence. There were five schools you could be sent to. Two in French, one big with many Ishims sent there—the one Flo was going to—and the other one consistently smaller with only three Ishims sent. The three other ones were in English—two big ones and one smaller. I would probably be sent to a big English one, I had less chance of screwing up that way, if I was surrounded by many of my pairs.

            “Please, you’re not that bad,” Flo said in an encouraging voice but she wasn’t fooling me. No way was I going to a French school. This sucked.

            “Not good enough to go to High School in that language though.”

            “Then maybe they’ll just put you in a lower grade. They put me in Secondary Four. Can you believe it? They made me a junior! I’ll share a classroom with fifteen year old kid!”

            I tried not to laugh. Flo had the small and cute thing working for her, but that didn’t mean she exactly enjoyed it.

            “Please, you’re only eighteen, that’s not so bad, plus you can totally pull the cute younger Blondie part to catch Demons.”

            Her tone was chipped when she replied. “I would argue on this but I have another line… wait… Oh it’s Gotz!”

            “Conference call,” I offered.

            “Conference call,” Florence agreed.

            When I heard that Gotzone had probably just got on the line I purred, “I dream of you at night,” just for the heck of it.

            “Conference call,” our friend guessed.

            “Yep,” Flo answered happily.

            “Oh and nice to know about that Clea.” I was sure he had a little smirk when he said that.

            “Ha ha.” I rolled my eyes and kept walking towards that mail box. “So?”

            When he named his school Flo squealed with joy. I’m sure she was bouncing up and down too.

            “What grade,” she asked.

            “Sec Five, of course. Heck, I shouldn’t even go to Secondary, we should all be in college technically. Why?”

            “The made me a damn junior,” she groaned.

            And it was on.

            I just knew it, they were going to argue, I could just feel it.

            “Oh dear! And you throw a hissy fit when I make comments on how young and precious you are.”

            “Because I’m not!”

            “Are too!”

            “Shut up! Anyway that’s not what’s important right now,” she chastised him. “Clea? Do you have it?”

            “I’m opening the mail box right now,” I informed them and then took out everything in it. One electricity bill from Hydro-Québec. Some publicity.

            And there it was; the envelope made with expensive paper with my name on it.

            I opened it, holding my breath and skipped the blah blah none sense going right to the important and read the name.

            I frowned. “This has to be wrong.”

            “What? Are you with us,” Florence asked eagerly.

            I shook my head even though they couldn’t see me. “No…”

            “Where?”

            Just another weird thing to add to my never ending list of weird things. “They put me the smaller English school.”

            “Well that’s….” Gotzone trailed softly.

            “Extremely odd?” I offered.

            That night around the table during dinner I shared the news with my family. My mother was giddy, obviously. It was like she never saw the bad and worrying in anything. At least she was over that whole protective thing after the “incident” and she hadn’t talked about getting me a boyfriend for a while, so that was a nice change.

            “I’m so proud of you sweetie, it means you’re doing well at school if they’re sending you to one of the smaller schools,” my mother pointed out proudly, passing me the peas.

            Technically that was true. If you were an awful student—like I was—you’d be sent to one of the larger school that way you had less chances of screwing up. So that was why this was all so odd. 

            “Or they want to kill you off fast without getting in trouble,” Kalvin pitched in with a smirk.

            I glared at him and shoved him with my elbow. Wait, what if they did want to kill me?

            “Don’t listen to Kal, he’s just jealous because when he did his Two Months Field Assignment he was sent to one of the bigger schools,” Michio said, and I smiled at my little brother, grateful to have him back me up. 

            “All of you, no arguing around the table,” mom chastised and then forced us to rant about what our favourite part of the day had been.

My mother was seriously weird sometimes.

            When dinner was over, I stayed in the kitchen, putting my books back on the table since I had to put them on the floor earlier. I was trying to push the thought of my Assignment away by thinking more about every detail I could remember from the other night with the Fallen Angel. The other night with the Fallen Angel… It sounded like a bad title to a sappy harlequin romance.

            My father lingered in the kitchen too, speaking in the phone with someone—probably from work.

            I sat at the table, flipping through my books but a thought was nagging me now. I couldn’t have answers for a lot for a lot of things because I would have needed to ask them to the Fallen Angel. But there were some things I could learn without him. There was something my father could probably answer.

            When he hung up the phone I turned my head to gaze at him. “Dad? Can I ask you something?”

            My father took a step towards me, smiling. “What is it Clea?”

            I frowned a bit. “The headmistress… she said you had a prisoner, a Demon, Xezbeth, the one that died that night. She said he had information you needed…” I took a deep breath “Do you know what it was?”

            It wouldn’t answer all my questions but it would definitely be a start.

            My father chuckled. Well at least he wasn’t glaring at me so that ought to be a good sign. “Why would I answer that?”

            I tried my best dazzling smile. “Because I’m your only daughter and you love me?”

            My father laughed again, and came to sit at the table with me. He was going to answer me. I just knew it. His eyes travelled from my books to my face. “You remember that Fallen Angel you said had looked at you funny?”

            I held my breath. I had sort of anticipated that whatever information that Demon had it was about Levi. With the way the Fallen Angel had talked with him, something was just telling me that Demon was going on around telling stories about him. “Yes.”

            My father ran his hand through his hair, like he wasn’t sure if he should be answering me, and then took a deep breath. “When Xezbeth walked by his cell and saw him he started to scream that we needed to find the person that took care of him, the one that is always with him and that we had to look out because she would probably free him because she always does.”

            Woah, okay I hadn’t expected that.

            “She?” The thought of some girl helping him had me frowning, which was ridiculous considering that I really shouldn’t care about a girl that always took care of him and that was always with him.

            My father nodded, oblivious to my mental rant. “That’s what he screamed…”

            I frowned, making connections. “And you think that whoever she is, she’s the one that sent those Mushhushshu to free him and everyone else?”

            Again, my father nodded. “It’s somewhere to start.”

            “It doesn’t really add up though…” I sighed. “What about all the other places that were attacked?”

            “A cover maybe,” Dad shrugged.

            “Well if it’s her, whoever she is she got into a lot of trouble to free him,” I trailed.

            If this was true this was somewhere to start. Maybe I could try to look through records of a couple of Fallen Angels that caused havoc… That still didn’t answer my questions about why he had helped me though.

            The next day at school, the excitement was almost palpable. Everyone had gotten their assignment and we wouldn’t be having any classes for the day. We would all gathered by school groups to get our instructions as to how we should proceed for the next two months. Most people, especially those who already had good grades and were sent to bigger school treated it as a vacation. In a way it was. You went to a school with humans, going through material you had already learned almost three years ago, and if you were lucky you’d catch a Demon and kick his ass with the help of your fellow Ishims. We were stronger in bigger groups and most of the time the Demons didn’t expect to see us on their territory. Most of the time Demons didn’t bother with Ishim; they saw the Angels as the bigger threat and were worried about them. Because of that they weren’t exactly very informed on how things worked in our schools, they didn’t care. And because they underestimated us, that’s why we were efficient.

            The ego of a Demon was often its biggest weakness.

            Gotzone and Florence headed to the room where they would join the other Ishim while I walked slowly to the little classroom where I would find whoever I would spent my next two months with.

            My breath caught in my throat when I pushed the door open and found Joseph Leon sitting at a desk right in front of the class, head bent over a book.

            Joseph Leon. Oh flap.

            I would spend the next two months with him? I wasn’t exactly sure if I was supposed to jump up and down with joy or puke. I mean, there were great chances of me screwing things up. If I did, I didn’t want him around to see it.

            But I had no say in this. Joseph would go to the same school as me.

            Damnation…

            Joseph raised his eyes from his book and they rested on me. He smiled. “Hi.”

            I smiled back, though I think it took me two second too long and waved a little. “Hi.” Could I look more awkward than this?

            Luckily, things didn’t have time to get more awkward because one of our teachers, an Arche, walked in the class, closing the door behind him.

            “Miss Ivory, you may take a seat that way we can get this over with quickly” he asked me kindly.

            I frowned a bit. “Won’t there be at least one other person?”

            “Your groups get smaller and smaller every year.”

            I sighed and sat down. True, there were less and less Ishims as years passed by.

            “So, this won’t be long unless you have many questions. Two new students enrolling the same day might feel odd, therefore Miss Ivory will start school on Monday and Mister Leon will follow suit on Friday.”

            Flap, one week alone? I’m gonna die…

            “After that, what you need to keep in mind is everything you’ve learned so far.” Great. “You have to be extremely careful. The purpose of this field exercise is to get you accustomed with dealing with humans. A big part of our job is to protect humans from the evil that surround them, without them ever noticing. Demons prefer to stay young, young enough to look like they can fit in a high school, but still mature looking enough to get into bars or to college or even working in big corporation.”

            I had the Fallen Angel in mind when he mentioned that.

            “So, that’s a way to spot them. They’ll fit in but not perfectly. They’ll feel like they’re more. Don’t doubt your instinct. If something feels wrong it probably is. And do not ever let your guards down. It’s not because you found one Demons that there aren’t going to be any more just because you’re in a small school. There are always more of them. And do not underestimate them. They are strong and powerful and cunning. They’ve been roaming this Earth longer than you. They know ways to tick you off.”

            Well thanks for the warm and fuzzy feelings…

            “Your only advantage is that while you can probably spot them, there is a chance that they won’t. Because we are still partly human it is your protection. They don’t waste time on humans and you don’t have enough Holy Spirit in you to tick them off. The hiding spells on your weapons don’t always work on Demons, depending on how powerful they are. So stay on alert. Watch each other’s back. If Demons catch you they have the bad tendency of dragging whatever they want to do, so if they want to kill you, they usually do it slowly.”

            Again, seriously, way to go, don’t sugar coat it.  

            “If you look out for each other you’ll be able to protect each other. But the most important thing to remember is don’t get killed.”

            This is going to be fun…