God's Gone AWOL

[5] Angels of a Feather

The three souls led them out of the park and back into the main part of the city. Xander was watching them carefully, trying to figure out what they were doing, exactly. Lucy was following closely behind, his expression a mixture of curiosity and concern.

It didn't take long to find their destination: one of Paris' many narrow one-way streets that stretched its way behind an old, brick grocery store.

What first caught Xander's attention were the familiar sounds of a physical fight. The fast-paced footsteps, the scuffle, the occasional vocal cry. Due to his centuries of experience, he could visualize the layout of the struggle, even without directly seeing what was going on. Based on the sound of motion, he guessed that there was one person fighting off a silent group of enemies. This one person must have had extraordinary footwork and very good spatial awareness in order to keep up for this long. Naturally, Xander couldn't help but take a look.

He leaned around the corner of the building to peek at the source of the scuffle, but immediately pulled back again, pushing the curious Lucy up against the wall with him. At first Lucy made a noise of protest but was quickly silenced by a slap over his mouth. Xander held his breath and very cautiously stole another glance.

A figure spiraled in the center of the alley, dressed in white and black with long, swinging cornrows. Surrounding her was a strange sort of white cloud which glowed slightly in the confines of the alleyway. The things she was fighting off were humanoid in form, but just barely —as though the strange figures were struggling just to hold a consistent shape. However, despite their fragility, they still pressed the angel backwards, reaching forward with strange tendrils of white smoke, striking and slashing against her like a hoard of peculiar translucent zombies.

Perhaps it was the spell Lucy had cast over his eyes, but from Xander's view, it was quite difficult to tell just what was happening. The souls appeared to be attacking the angel, but he couldn't be sure. Especially because he had never seen such a situation before. Typically souls were nothing more than passing ghosts; they could hardly interact with the world, let alone behave aggressively towards it. It was truly a strange occurrence, and he and Lucy had only managed to witness it through chance.

There was only one reason why a loose soul would attack someone and that was resentment. However, if the faded conscience behind any of the souls held a grudge against this particular angel, the situation still wouldn't be like this. They wouldn't be able to band together and attack in this sort of formation, so the only possible reasoning behind the aggressive behavior was the one that Lucy had suggested earlier: the souls were being controlled by someone.

But such a thing was just about impossible. There hadn't been any recorded attempts at manipulating the separated spirit of a being for thousands of years. Some of Lucifer's loyal followers had tried in the very early stages of Hell's magical revolution, but none were particularly successful. And the practice was very quickly outlawed due to simple moral standards, so that was that.

Xander wasn't sure what was going on, but it gave him the heebie-jeebies.

It was especially difficult to tell what the result of such a scuffle would be. Although the angel was highly skilled and quick with her movements, the figures materializing from within the cloud were incessant and overwhelming. There were a couple of instances where they managed to land a hit on the side of her flawless features, or tear at her robes. Although they were no match for an angel in one-on-one combat, the sheer amount of them was enough to leave their victim at a disadvantage. It was intriguing, but a little concerning.

After a moment of thinking, Xander's curiosity got the better of him. He gripped the hilt of one of his blades and took a careful step back out into the alley.