About Redemption
by James Buchanan
22 pages
/ 10000 words
Available file types - lit, pdf, prc, html
Anael Kerub's a former angel who's lost his way and his faith, condemned to eternity as a prosecutor in a court where there's far more at stake than a fine or a jail sentence.
Like a man's soul. A routine case of a wife murdered him up against defender Zach Tzivot, an idealistic angel with a passion for justice and a way of making Anael remember too much about his former life up on high.
As the two of them battle it out in the courtroom, setting off sparks, it becomes clear that there's more to fight over than one soul - and that even angels have weaknesses.
Sample
Some days I wonder why I do this. Today I wondered because I was running late, real late. It wasn’t awful in terms of being behind. My assigned judge hadn’t started on time since the dinosaurs roamed the earth. But you never know. The time I decided to push my luck might be the one time the man decided to show up when he was supposed to. Plus, being late always threw my form. I stumbled into the office, chugging my coffee and threading my tie through my collar. Not the easiest maneuver, but countless repetitions had perfected it.
I work for the office of the prosecution, chained to my desk by the duty to slap down the wicked and make the world a happier place. Fat fucking chance. Unfortunately for me, I’d worked here so long that I got the fun cases, the ones no one else wanted to try. It made me sick. My problem was that I’m too damn good. If I didn’t hate my job so much, that would be an arrogant statement. Regrettably, I had nowhere else to go; I wasn’t good at anything else. I’d forgotten how to do anything but rip out hope and send people down. And I’d seen everything here. Things I didn’t know human beings could do to each other. Kids pushing kids under trains for kicks, mothers who’d poisoned their own children, predators who did babies; terrible things.
I don’t sleep a lot.
Cutting past the intake desk, I caught my knee on the gate as, yet again, I forgot which way it opened. My theory is that they change the hinges every night as a subtle form of torture. But I hadn’t been able to prove that. A warren of cubbies and desks piled with ramparts of paper were jammed end to end. Minions of the machine bent their backs trying to prove men beyond redemption. We scoured their lives for crimes and intent to commit crimes, compiling, tallying, and recording what beasts they really were.
Our office would best be described as a pit. Fluorescents flickered intermittently over my subordinates. Within minutes after the bulbs were changed they started to go out. Maintenance claimed the wiring was at fault; old construction and all. I believed that as much as I believed the gate wasn’t possessed of an infernal intelligence.
Battered furniture, dating back to when Cain struck Abel down, was squished into every inch of space. Well, every part not taken up by files. Nobody ever expected us to see this much volume. And it was only getting worse. There weren’t any windows here, relegated as we were to the bottom-most basements. Dank, dark, and depressing; the three Ds; just what a dungeon should be. Since the lights, the crowd, and the smell of manila folders gave me a headache, I tended to be a pick-up-my-files-and-run kinda guy.
Carrie’s yell caught me as my palm hit my office door, “Hey, Anael, you’ve been reassigned.” A sinful grin flashed as she sauntered across the room.
Wickedly high heels, top two buttons undone, and a skirt just an inch short of decent had every eye following her. Well, every eye but mine. Carreau Ronwe was not my type. “You,” she drawled out, waving the blue-green form before my eyes like a matador taunting a bull, “pulled Judge Gabriel’s court.”
In those five words my world went from marginally shitty to outright irredeemable.