Cassie's Corpse

Chapter 1

I breathed my first breath on a hospital bed, bloody, human, and completely ignorant of the fact that humans who had been clinically dead for ten minutes weren't supposed to breathe.
It took a few moments to process my surroundings, and it was the noise that struck me first. Squeaking and screaming and crying and talking and breathing and swallowing. It all assaulted my new ears with painful clarity and I could do no more than breathe in the strangeness.
Doctors and nurses crowded in around me, doing very poor jobs of hiding their panic, checking vitals and blabbing incessantly. If only I had figured out how to speak, I would have told them all to shut up. It took a few more moments for brain function to return fully, and once it did I explored with hands, eyes, ears. I felt the sharp sting of cold metal beneath me, smelled the cloying smell of what I assumed to be blood, felt something wet and slimy beneath my fingertips. Bright light shone directly into my eyes and I found myself unable to look away, staring in a vegetative state at that lamp for quite a while, just existing. What a marvelous thing it was.
I turned my head slightly when I felt the presence of someone breathing-speaking-into my ear. I resisted the urge to shrink away.
"Cassie, sweetie." A middle-aged woman was whispering into her daughter's ear, telling her about the open-heart surgery, how it was a miracle that she had survived, that everything was going to be okay and she was healthy and her sister was waiting to see her.
I blinked and turned the corners of Cassie's mouth up slightly, imitating the woman's expression in a gesture that I assumed would be received warmly by any human.
Little did Anna Ketcher know, Cassie was dead. Digging around through my body's memories, I found that there were no 'correct' ways to tell someone that their daughter had died during life-threatening surgery and that the creature that had slipped into her shell wasn't even of the same species. So I just nodded.
Cassie's sister, Reese, looked exactly like her: long red hair, pale skin, red lips, blue eyes, slim and tall. Neither she nor the mother gave any indication that they knew something was amiss.
I realized I must have blacked out somewhere along the way, because suddenly I wasn't covered in blood and I was lying on something soft and spongy. Reese held her sister's hand and talked about how she finally got her mom to agree to letting her do online school so she could be with Cassie. They were going up north to their cabin to stay for the rest of the year, because the doctors told Anna that time away from the Michigan suburbs would do Cassie good. If Cassie was going that meant that I had to, although I really didn't feel like moving. I liked this place, if only it were quiet.
It wasn't like this in Heaven. It wasn't loud and painful. Angels communicated through wavelengths of energy, which is much more efficient than talking, from my perspective, although as an Angel that might be a little biased.
I grew bored of Reese's talking, not because I didn't like her but because the noise was just too much of a shock to my system, and I pretended to be asleep.
It was peaceful, at first. Everything was quiet and dark. But then I started thinking-a very dangerous pastime for humans, I later realized-and Angels screamed in my ears in the only way that Angels could scream; not so much a sound but rather a scraping inside my head. And I saw flashes of blue light streaming towards one another, ripping each other apart, Angels literally being burnt up and killed.
Angels weren't supposed to die. I think that was the disturbing part. We hadn't had a reason to kill each other until...until me.
Finding out God wasn't God but just an Angel playing pretend was disturbing. Knowing that I was the one to discover it, a legend up in Heaven, causing the Angel War, killing God-that was even more disturbing. As previously mentioned, Angels weren't supposed to die. They couldn't die, as far as we knew, up until I ran the Lying Lord through and extinguished him. And so the Angels, some gone mad with freedom and others unable to function without a divine purpose, began massacring each other. Brother against sister against brother.
And me? Valiant Varielle, the broken Angel? I took a cowardly high-dive out of the clouds and onto concrete. Earth was much different from Heaven, considering it was another dimension, and I was torn between speechless wonder and disgusted horror.
Smiles and laughing and smells both gross and wonderful to my nose, an imperfect species doing their best to do right in a world where it was often all-too easy to do wrong.
But then there was the heartache that I, as an Angel, was able to pick up on from all around, and the shadows in the corners that haunted me. There was something else here, too, something achingly familiar and yet foreignly twisted. It didn't feel wrong, necessarily, just dark. Angry.
I didn't dare open my eyes to look, even though Reese and her mom were gone and I was alone.
I didn't want to be alone with it.
The feeling got stronger as time went on, and I could feel it sending out waves, poking and prodding, begging me to open my eyes and Come and play sister come and play come play come play.
"Go away, Nicolai." My voice, so very new and fragile, was simultaneously quiet and commanding. I felt it in my head, a jagged scratching. It was laughing at me.
Eventually, whether I was driven mad by the incessant laughing or I feared turning my back to it for too long, I opened my eyes.
It was in the corner, huddled over and shaking. It didn't look like an Angel anymore. It looked like a mutilated human corpse. Gray skin, pointy teeth dripping blood, single strands of dark stringy hair hanging in its face. The eyes were sunk back in its skull and foggy, completely white. Not a trace of my fellow brother remained.
"Nicolai," it copied me, but it's voice was wet and rough and I could hear blood bubbling in its windpipe, "go away." It laughed.
I remembered Nicolai when he had been an Angel, how he had stood by me, fought with me, and, when we fell, he taught me about Earth. He had been a Watcher, an Angel who looked over Earth through windows from Heaven. They couldn't be seen on Earth, and Angels couldn't exist outside of Heaven without being corrupted, but I never imagined that it would change Nicolai so drastically.
He hadn't wanted to find a vessel, even after I reminded him that he would go insane, but he didn't care. "Heaven is a lie," he had said, "and it's only common sense to assume that Hell is, too. All the demons are here, Varielle, and I'm one of them."
That's when I had left to find an Earthly vessel so I wouldn't become like him. I hadn't expected him to follow me. I wasn't even sure this was Nicolai anymore. Did he remember being an Angel? Or was that all washed away by madness?
"Go," I said again, and I'm ashamed to say that my voice cracked. "Leave, Nicolai."
"Leave, Nicolai," it gargled, hunching over and shuffling towards me. It reached a hand out and stroked one long, rotting yellow nail down my face. I didn't do anything. What right had I to condemn this immoral creature? I was no different, just less insane and more fresh. Nicolai had been like me once, and now I was like him.
It paused, grinned at me with bloody teeth, and I saw through stringy hair that the eyes really were white. It vanished completely when the dividing curtain was thrown back and Anna came into the room carrying a tray of food. She plopped it down next to me and told me to eat. I didn't recognize any of it, not the hot liquid in the bowl, nor the triangle of spongey material with brown and purple goop smooshed in the middle, or the strange little box with sweet tasting liquid, but I ate it all.
It was disgusting. I was so unused to eating and sensitive to even the slightest Earthly occurrence that I could taste nearly every molecule. It overloaded my tongue and twisted my stomach. It was fortunate that I didn't necessarily have to eat-I could if I wanted, but I would maintain this vessel just fine all by myself. No human functions necessary.
A nurse came in later and gave me some medicine to help me sleep, and the next day I had a full examination by the doctor, who pronounced me 'right as rain'. I was under the impression that rain fell down instead of to the right, but then again, what do I know about Earth weather patterns?
The day after that I was discharged and led out to a metal machine. A quick scan of Cassie's memories, no matter how fuzzy I found them, told me it was called a car, and the two Ketcher's and the Fake piled on in. Reese and I had to squeeze in between all of the luggage that would be taken to the cabin, and it was an uncomfortable fit.
Nicolai, of course, followed.
I couldn't see it, but sometimes it laughed.
It was quite a long drive, long enough that I searched through Cassie's memories and learned all there was to know about Reese.
She was seventeen, a violinist, loved French Fries and the Beatles. She was close with Cassie, and during the car ride we played games and she told me all about the online school she had gotten accepted into the week before, although I only vaguely understood the concept of school and I didn't know what a computer was. She said she was keeping it a secret until after the surgery. I must have listened and nodded and "mmed" in all the right places, because she didn't accuse me of being a body-stealing Angel, which I took to be an omen of good fortune. If I could pass for Cassie in front of her sister and best friend I could do it all of my life. Well, not my life. I planned on dumping this body as soon as it aged enough to the point that people began to question how Cassie was still alive, and after that I'd move on to the next one.
It was a fair punishment for an abomination such as myself, and so far it seemed to be working brilliantly. I felt like ripping my own eardrums out at any given moment and it infuriated me that no other human seemed to have a problem with all of this chaotic noise.
Music blasted from somewhere in the car and I could hear the whir of tires on rain-slick pavement.
I honestly couldn't imagine a worse fate for myself than here on Earth, with all of the imperfections and chaos, the human trivialities, because I was alone.
Yes, that's it. Broken Heaven didn't hold a candle to the horror that was down here-an Angel without kin, slowly rotting away as insanity slipped through the cracks. But that was only if I let it. I could last for eternity down here, and I intended to.
In the back of my mind I heard Nicolai laugh. "I can make it worse."
"Do it," I thought fiercely, "rain down upon me all of the suffering I deserve and then some. Show me the wrath of God I would experience if God were real."
"Heaven shall punish you," Nicolai gurgled, "you shall bleed for your sins."
"Of course, " I told him, "always happy to bleed for my Faith."