Aside from my other duties, I enjoy the bartending gig. The evil people share with a bartender is better than what they tell a barber, hairdresser. Sometimes it's better than what they tell a priest.

The drinks I serve deaden remorse, repentance, and they tell me, because they look into my eyes, the color of cigarette smoke—yeah, their real color—and know I understand.

I get a lot of "Frank, I swear to God, the little bitch was askin' for it." That kinda thing.

I always smile, because I do understand. It's like a light to warm myself with. They all come to me and I love them for it.

All but Ithuriel, my brother and adversary. For as long as Dark's has been open, Ithuriel has been here. Back when Heaven held the lease, he had my job. Then I had to hunt the pack of mortals, and other things that fill the place. The new management has reversed our positions.

But Ithuriel doesn't hunt. He sits at the end of the bar, wrapped in a cloak of wings that do him no good and something else he has no name for. If he were mortal, or demon, he would call it misery.

Still, he is the one piece of purity in this place. His goodness is always a threat. There's that danger it will spill out of him and raze Dark's like a cleansing fire.

I watch him shake his last cigarette out to light. Crushing the cellophane and paper, he tosses it to the bar. The motion is graceful and intimate. I smile and tease a fresh pack from the carton I keep below and send it skittering across to him.

"Fuck." Ithuriel breathes out the word like he's savoring it, tasting it. As though it gives him the same pleasure nicotine once did. It won't last; sensations fade so quickly here, but he doesn't need me to tell him that.

A cold wind sweeps the bar and Ithuriel's wings twitch. He knows something has entered Darks' that he needs to attend to.

I group four mugs and a full pitcher on a tray. My new waitress, Lydia, glides over to pick it up. I can't help grinning. "For the babykillers that just came in. First round's on me."

"I believe," Ithuriel pauses to take a drag off his cigarette, "they prefer the term Bogeyman."

I laugh out loud, and lean over the scarred bar top toward him. "Yeah, well. Y'know, people in hell want ice water too, but I could give a rat's ass."

Ithuriel gives me that faint bemused smile of his and shakes his wings out a little. I know how he longs to unfurl them, catch an updraft and fly. But no-one flies in this zip code.

He doesn't need to turn and stare, to identify the fiends that settle at the table across the room. We can smell the individual scents they add to the dank mold of despair that clings to the air here.

There's Shadow Man, smelling of the sweat of nightmares, and worse, Grinning Man, with the sharp yellowish scent of rotting teeth, Hook Hand, who carries the hot copper smell of fresh spilt blood.

And last, the Lonely One. He smells sweet and fresh, like Ivory soap and baby powder. Only when you're too close do you realize it covers the sweeter odor of decay.

He is special among the collection of fiends at the table. He's the only one who has ever been Mortal. He spread so much chaos and misery in his life as a child killer that upon death, he was transformed. Or maybe hell was just full.

He is the Bogeyman Ithuriel has business with tonight.

"Hold my place," he sighs to me as he gathers up his cigs and beer mug.

Swiveling his stool around, he climbs off. He folds his wings tighter against his back to make himself as small as possible. Even so, he can't avoid the brush of the damned and almost damned as he moves among them to cross to the table, leaving me with only the option to eavesdrop.

"What's your name, little girl?" Grinning Man asks Lydia as she comes into range. "Come over here and sit on my lap."

She leans across the table to place the pitcher in the middle, dodging his long bony fingers with a sneer that displays her teeth, filed to points. "Yeah, that's somethin' I'm likely to do." She flips blue/black bangs out of her eyes. "What's your ass even doin' outta the closet?"

Grinning Man freezes and Hook Hand laughs. "Isn't she a little old for you?"

Ithuriel shakes his wings like he feels a prickling between his shoulder blades as Lydia stalks past him. He exists side by side with evil, accepts that without it, he would be out of a job, but these are creatures that specialize in torturing innocent souls. They take such pleasure in the corruption they leave, like a trail, that even I am uneasy with them.

"Boys." Ithuriel speaks, just under the current of the music.

All four of them sort of shrink together for protection. Their fear makes him smile. Just like the old days. He snags a vacant chair, turns it around to jam it between Hook Hand and the Lonely One, straddles it, and sets his stuff down. "How y'all doin' over here? How's business?"

They freeze again, from the impact of his presence.

"Where's Evil Clown?" Ithuriel takes a drag off his cigarette. "Or is he too good to be drinkin' with you now?"

Hook Hand narrows his bloodshot eyes, thunks his hay hook into the tabletop and draws it back, making the wood scream. "Don't mock us, Angel. You are not invulnerable here."

A laugh issues from somewhere within Shadow Man's cowl. It sounds like the scuttle of rat's feet.

Ithuriel raises one thin eyebrow and smiles. Eyes on the hay hook, he taps ashes into the tray in the middle of the table. "That's true," he admits. "What're you gonna do about it?"

Silence again. Hook Hand backs off, like he feels the scorch of Ithuriel's gaze.

"Nothin'," Grinning Man answers for all of them. "N-nothin' at all."

I chuckle at that. Of course not. Cowards, all of them, unless they're dealing with creatures too frightened to defend themselves.

"You know why I'm here." Ithuriel continues, reaching for his beer. "You boys'll wanna give me and the Lonely One some space."

Grinning Man's lips twist back from a mouth of teeth as jagged and sharp as broken glass. "We won't leave him to your mercies, Angel."

"Don't test me," Ithuriel warns, his voice mild, but heat building behind his eyes. He straightens his back to ruffle his wings. "I cast Satan out of the Garden with just the touch of my spear. Do you doubt that I could burn your rotten flesh from its bones with a touch?"

Instead of challenging that, the three of them rise and back away to the farthest empty table without another word to the Angel or fiend left behind.

The Lonely One squirms and whimpers like one of his lost victims. He trembles as his feeble, hungry mind twists and turns in on itself, trying to deny what is happening.

Perhaps he knows that whether he fights for his prizes or gives them up voluntarily, he's screwed.

Like Ithuriel and yours truly, the Lonely One is soulless. Unlike us, he isn't eternal. If it's God's Will, Ithuriel will snuff him out as though he never existed. No soul. No afterlife, not even Hell for the Lonely One.

And at least a couple of us here tonight know that it is God's Will.

Ithuriel stabs out his cigarette and twists his lips up into a bitter smile. "Why couldn't you do what you were told, Paul? Why did you have to have more?"

His mortal name from the lips of an Angel terrifies the Lonely One. It churns up the memory of that life, when he killed children for his own pleasure. Now he's a little cog in the great master plan.

Until recently, when he started collecting souvenirs again.

"They're mine," the Lonely One whispers, shrugging further into his shabby green army coat.

Ithuriel laughs. "Paul, you know that's not true."

He reaches to open the creature's coat but hesitates. There is still enough Mortal smell on him under all that Ivory Soap that Ithuriel is loath to touch him.

The Lonely One dodges away and Ithuriel grabs his collar. He yanks it open to reveal what he's looking for. A necklace of bottles, the largest of which is perhaps the length of a child's finger. There are a dozen or so, knotted onto thin rope and wire. They are all different shapes and sizes and the light that streams from them is every possible combination of color.

Ithuriel seems momentarily transfixed by their beauty. The Lonely One uses the distraction. He scrapes his chair back across the uneven floor and stands.

Ithuriel arches an eyebrow again as the Lonely One stumbles and forces his way across the crowded dance floor to the door.

I sense no anger from Ithuriel, of course, only an exhausted kind of annoyance. It makes me wonder if he's deciding to tank this one, let the bogeyman slip away unpunished.

That thought alone might lose an Angel his wings, but I interfere anyway.

There are souls jammed into all those tiny bottles around the Lonely One's neck. He siphoned them off the children he tormented to death and has distilled them for himself.

Even I know he can't keep them. I grin and close my eyes. I send a silent suggestion out over the dance floor to corral the Lonely One, seal off his escape and send him back to Ithuriel.

Ithuriel pushes to his feet, sparing me a glance of either gratitude or annoyance. It's hard to tell which.

He stretches out an arm to gather the errant fiend up.

Just then the bogeyman breaks to the side for the john. He nearly body-slams Lydia out of the way in the process.

She doesn't have time to steady her tray of Black Russians before Ithuriel does the same, sending her down in a hail of liquor and glasses. She glares and snaps her teeth as he walks over her.

I stretch my consciousness to follow him. Ithuriel bursts through the door, and lets it slam behind him. The Wrath of God shimmers off him in waves. It licks up the crumbled tile walls, boiling away the filth.

The Lonely One is cowering in one of the doorless stalls, on his knees. Shards of three or four of his soul bottles lie around him on the floor. He smashes the neck of another against the stained porcelain of the toilet, and drinks its contents down.

Ithuriel is on him that instant, pulling him out of the stall, knocking the bottle away. He pins the Lonely One against the wall, but too late. The tiny vessel that contained a tiny soul is empty as it hits the floor.

The sound of it against the linoleum seems to spur Ithuriel on.

He leans his arm across the Lonely One's windpipe and rips the necklace away with his free hand.

"How dare you?" Ithuriel thunders.

The effects of the souls he's ingested infuse the Lonely One with a kind of euphoric glow. His drawn, pinched face realizes into a terrible parody of a child's smile. His eyes clear to a crystal blue. "Have mercy, Ithuriel." His voice is soft, calm, like he believes mercy is in Ithuriel to give. "They've healed me."

Ithuriel doesn't budge. "It was not your right to take them. It's not your right to be healed."

"Please."

Ithuriel dips his head to seal his lips against the Lonely Ones'. His kiss is deep and long, the kind that make girls like Lydia weak-kneed for a month.

The Lonely One tries to buck Ithuriel off, but it's no use. The Angel's embrace is like steel. All he can do is whimper as Ithuriel sucks each soul out of him.

I see the light of innocence transfer from mouth to mouth, extinguish in the Lonely One's eyes.

And then his whimpers turn to screams as he begins to die.

He burns from the inside out. Too hot for flames, he seems to dissolve directly to ash. When Ithuriel is done, the necklace in his fist, he leaves the bathroom, dragging a hand across his mouth. All that's left of the Lonely One is a shadow burned into the wall.