Chapter 7

They dropped out of the sky in a blur of light, landing in front of the police station. Aria strode inside, glowing with her rage.

There were gasps and yells as the glowing angel walked into the station. The front desk was staffed by a short, middle-aged man with a shaved head. There were several seats in the main room for visitors, with three of them occupied. Aria walked up to the officer behind the window at the front desk, her eyes glowing violet while the rest of her glowed white, making her brilliant red hair stand out even more.

“I need to speak with the police chief immediately,” Aria informed the man, her voice layered with authority and power.

The man was frozen in a kind of stupefied shock. She fluffed her wings aggressively, making the man jump skittishly. “The police chief. Now.”

“H-h-e’s out of town,” the man stuttered, his eyes filled with awe and terror.

Aria studied his meridians intently, looking for the streaks of tainted energy she had begun to associate with evil, like the men she had killed in Beverly Hills. The man’s aura was clear of any kind of taint, even showing a fair amount of purity and compassion. Aria smiled inwardly to herself as she realized she was getting closer to being able to see auras the way Calypso did.

“How long have you worked on the police force, Jared?” she asked him in a less intimidating voice.

“Almost three-“ he stopped to lick dry lips before beginning again. “Almost three years now,”

“There are officers here aiding and abetting human traffickers,” Aria declared, watching his aura closely for any sign of surprise. “Were you aware of this repugnant activity?”

There was an astonished gasp from the three visitors who were sitting in the waiting area. She could practically feel the phones being held up by the arms of the visitors recording them.

The man was like a mouse cornered by a cat. She could see in both his aura and his eyes that he was aware of something.

“How much do you know about it?” she asked him, forcing the harshness out of her voice. “I’m not going to lie to you, Jared. I’m going to kill every last one of them unless there is a very compelling reason for me to show restraint.”

There was another gasp and the sound of breath catching from the visitors at her dark pronouncement.

“I didn’t know it was human trafficking,” he spoke quickly, his eyes worried at her talk of killing. “I just knew they were doing something illegal. There is a clique of about fifteen officers who are involved.”

“How many of them are here in the office right now?” Aria inquired, noticing that someone in the back offices had finally discovered there was an angel in the building. She heard them going door to door telling the other employees about her presence. She smelled fear from some of them at the revelation, stark and rank. The ones without fear quickly gathered in the briefing room and started fighting about who would get to talk to the angel.

“Um, I think, um, maybe eight?” he continued fumbling his words.

“Thank you, Jared,” she told him with a tight smile. “You’re a good cop.”

He blinked when she was suddenly no longer there. He didn’t have time to wonder where she went due to a deafening bang as the steel door that separated the offices from the front area suddenly buckled inward, taking most of the door frame and bricks with it. There were several startled yelps that cut off right after they started.

Aria had followed her nose to the stench of fear, knocking the men out with a chop to the neck quicker than the eye could follow. Some of them were in their own offices while others were in an open office layout. There were a total of eight who stunk of fear, confirming Jared’s estimate.

“How many of you knew that your coworkers were trafficking children?” Aria asked the stupefied officers as she appeared suddenly in their midst at the front of the briefing room. She studied their auras intently but detected no malevolence in their auras. She had been losing faith in the police after two back-to-back incidents with dirty cops. It was nice to see there were still some good cops.

To the people in the briefing room the bang from her breaking the door had happened at the same time that she arrived. They were unaware of their unconscious colleagues.

At her words, one of the three women gasped. Several of them blanched at the accusation and there was more than one curse.

Calypso suddenly appeared next to her so fast that it looked like she had teleported. Recognition lit up in every eye in the room as they stared at arguably the most famous person in the world.

“These are good people,” Calypso murmured in relief. “Their auras are pure.”

“You’re Calypso and Aria,” one of the young men spoke in reverent tones as he stared at Calypso almost worshipfully. “You really are angels.” He broke off and punched the officer next to him in the arm playfully. “I told you she was an angel.”

“I’m not going to be a sore loser,” his friend sighed with a rueful shake of his head. “You were right.”

“Is the police chief involved in the trafficking operation?” Aria interrupted, trying to get the conversation back under control.

“I think so,” a small dark haired woman said quietly.

“Nancy, can you tell us what you know about it?” Aria asked gently.

The woman flinched when she heard her name, as if it confirmed everything she had been told about heaven, angels, and hell. Her voice was shaky as she spoke.

“The chief ignored too many complaints against certain officers,” she explained, her eyes worried. “He would come down hard on the rest of us for anything outside of protocol, but his inner circle of buddies never caught heat for anything they did. There was a lot of abuse reported from the community for how they handled themselves. They made no secret that they were above the law and would arrest women they found attractive so that they could grope them when they roughed them up. The chief had too many closed door meetings with that group too. When kids turned up missing, it was always his inner group that handled the investigations. I submitted complaints to Internal Affairs, but they dismissed them as spurious accusations. I think there are more people involved, higher up the food chain.”

“All the way to the top,” Aria nodded grimly. “And they’re going to get what’s coming to them soon.”

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A few of the officers were staring at Nancy in stunned incredulity, their eyes wide and their faces slack.

“The chief was a human trafficker?” a blue eyed Leroy asked in disbelief. “But he’s a family man! He’s got children, for god’s sake!”

“Leroy, there probably isn’t a city on earth that hasn’t had some tie to human trafficking, however tangential,” Aria told him sadly. “There is a whole hidden class of people who have malice in their hearts that walk, talk, and act just like you and other good people. They are drawn to power and exploit societies hierarchal structure to exercise their dark and twisted desires in secret. That time has come to an end. The time of deceit and aggression is over. We’re going to fix this broken world and end the nightmare so many innocent souls are trapped inside of once and for all.”

The words she spoke felt like they were coming from somewhere deep down inside of her. They felt right when she heard herself say them, like they were the proper instructions for a kit that needed to be put together.

Calypso was looking at her appraisingly, her lips pursed in a way that Aria felt looked too inviting.

“How do you know our names?” Leroy asked, his face bright with hope. “Can you read our minds?”

“Your name is written on your soul,” Calypso informed him, her eyes studying each of them individually. “Though Aria cannot read your minds, a person’s aura reveals much about how they feel and what kind of a person they are. You are all good people, and it warms my soul to feel your purity and light.”

At Calypso’s words, Nancy slowly deflated with relief. Another person thinking we are here to represent a deity and dispense judgement, she thought to herself wryly. Of course, she was there to dispense judgement, to a point.

Aria heard groaning in the other room. Like a switch had been flipped, she went from benevolent angel to avenging angel instantaneously, light pouring out of her as she exited the room and stared at the man slowly trying to get to his feet.

“Martin Grubbs, you have violated children for greed and lust,” Aria intoned as her eyes grew brighter. “May you make better choices in your next life.”

As she finished, the light from her eyes shot an intense beam of brilliant light that instantly vaporized him. In less than a second she had also vaporized the other seven corrupt cops.

“What the hell is going on here?” a voice demanded from where she had destroyed the door to access the office area.

She felt his aura pulse like sickening slime as she turned to face him, revulsion in her eyes. His eyes widened when he finally realized he was in front of an angel. Before he could do or say anything else, he was vaporized as well.”

“That makes eleven,” Aria noted grimly. “Four left.”

Several of the officers had followed her out to see what she was doing. Their faces were masks of shock and trepidation as they witnessed her burning their colleagues from existence with less emotion than a person would show swatting a fly.

“Are they dead?” Nancy quavered, her eyes staring at Aria with a fanatical zeal.

“Yes,” Aria gave a definitive nod. “There are four more that need to be dealt with, including the chief. There are some young girls that I promised would never be harmed again by these monsters, and I intend to make sure that remains true. What would be the best way to get everyone into the station? I would rather not have to hunt them down one by one.”

“It’s shift change in a few minutes,” Nancy informed her helpfully. “That’s why Derek showed up a minute ago.”

“Thank you, Nancy,” Aria smiled appreciatively at the small woman. “I’ll just wait for them to arrive then.”

“Is it true that you can’t be killed?” a man named Roger asked diffidently, absently rubbing his hand over his shaved head.

“So far, that seems to be true,” Calypso answered with a nod. “We survived a nuclear explosion last night while we were removing camera’s from satellites. I’m not sure what humans have that outclasses a nuclear bomb.”

“Too bad our clothes don’t survive as well,” Aria muttered with a sigh.

She didn’t realize that she had said it that loud. Several of the officers blinked at her, then seemed to struggle not to undress the two angels with their eyes.

“How hard is it to get into heaven?” Nancy asked hesitantly, her cheeks coloring as both angels turned to look at her with their inhuman eyes.

“If you don’t have wings of your own, you can usually take a jet or other aircraft,” Aria answered, keeping her face neutral.

“You can just fly to heaven-“ Nancy began with a puzzled expression but broke off as she saw Aria’s lips twitching. “Oh. It is real though, isn’t it?”

“Heaven just means skies in religious texts,” Aria pointed out with a shrug. “The skies are real. As far as the misogynistic bearded guy that has temper tantrums though, I’ll have to claim ignorance on such an entity. We do not serve a deity. We do serve a higher purpose, however. Calypso is a healer. She has a compulsion to help the sick. It’s her purpose. If you want to call this higher purpose we feel driving us a god, I suppose that word works as well as any other.”

“What is your purpose?” a man named Josh asked curiously. “Are you a healer too?”

“Hadn’t you guessed already?” Aria grinned at him as she glowed slightly. “My purpose is to vanquish evil, wherever I find it.”

“Wow, that’s badass,” he declared, his eyes impressed. “So, you’re an angel cop.”

“Bingo,” Aria laughed, brightening the room with love and merriment as she did so.

Three men pushed their way through the broken door a movement later.

“What the hell happened to the door?” the first one, Angelos, demanded in exasperation as he pushed his way past the wreckage.

“Chief’s gonna be pissed,” the flaxen haired man, David, declared ominously. “Heads are gonna roll.”

“Seriously, did the incredible hulk escape or something?” the last one, Dominic, asked in wonder. “How the hell did this door get so wrecked?”

Aria studied their auras. They were all slimy and tainted with malevolence so deep that it made Aria want to puke.

“Hello, Dominic, David, and Angelos,” Aria greeted them through gritted teeth as her core ignited. “You have not been good people. In fact, you have been downright evil. So evil that I have been sent to snuff your candles out. Goodbye.”

As she finished, her eyes blazed forth and blasted her energy beam into all three of them at once, vaporizing them instantly.

The men had noticed her right when she began talking. Their eyes had widened, and fear shot through them. They had grown more panicked as she spoke, one of them going so far as turning to run. It had done them no good.

“Now for the chief,” Aria spoke grimly. “It’s time to find out where he’s hiding.”

“How are you going to do that?” Josh asked curiously. “He didn’t even tell us where he’s going on vacation. He could be anywhere.”

“I need to smell something of his,” Aria explained, looking around the area. “Is that his office?”

“It’s locked,” Nancy warned her softly. “He keeps the key with him at all times. There isn’t a spare.”

“Sounds suspicious,” Aria declared, pushing through the solid wood door like it was paper. The deadbolt buckled as it was pushed against the metal door casing beyond its limits. “Let’s see if he has any leads to other pieces of shit hidden away in here.”

As soon as she entered the room, she noticed a horrible smell. It was like being in a reptile house. She looked around the room, noticing a safe on a desk. “Why does the chief have a safe?”

“He said it’s for confidential documents,” Nancy answered from where she had entered behind Aria. “Which doesn’t make sense, because we have locking file cabinets for confidential documents.”

Aria flared brightly for a moment as she vaporized the safe door. There was a thick binder inside. She pulled it out and looked at the pages within.

“This looks like a ledger,” Aria observed as she studied the pages. “Payments received and services rendered. Between ten to twenty thousand for each entry.”

“Are there any names?” Nancy asked eagerly, her face hopeful.

“No, but there are phone numbers and addresses,” Aria responded, flipping through each page until they were all in her memory.”

Aria lifted the binder up and smelled it. She recoiled as the stench of something so foul it would have caused her to vomit if she still had a stomach. She grimaced as she threw the binder down. “Okay, we’re done here. It’s time to take care of the chief. I’ll see if I can get some answers out of him for who these phone numbers belong to before he dies.”

“Nancy, you really are a good person,” Calypso told the small woman softly. “There was nothing more you could have done with the powerful people you were up against. Your aura can’t lie, and I see a soul full of compassion and purity when I look at you.”

“Are you sure you can’t read my mind?” Nancy asked, her eyes wide.

“I said Aria cannot read your minds,” Calypso smiled faintly at the woman, tapping her own forehead. “I didn’t say that I can’t.”

All of the cops stared at Calypso, some of them in consternation. She blushed slightly and looked at Aria. “I think it’s time to go.”

“Thank you, for being good people,” Aria told the small crowd around them, her eyes sincere. “Goodbye.”

The two angels vanished from the room at speeds too fast for human eyes to register. Nancy blinked as the two angels vanished right in front of her eyes.