A Strange Angel

I found Alice again by getting killed in a Paris library by a strange angel.

I wasn’t looking for the angel, but they have a way of showing up when they’re least expected. I hadn’t even intended to be in Paris that day, and I wasn’t certain how I’d wound up there. I’d passed out drunk the night before under a bridge in Prague, while resting my head on a discarded jacket and listening to someone sing Édith Piaf’s “Mon Dieu” from somewhere deeper in the city. Yet I woke under a different bridge in Paris. I knew it was Paris because I sat up to see tourist boats making their way down the Seine, the people on board staring at me as if puzzled by my presence. I was more than a little puzzled myself.

I had no memory of how I’d come to be there on the wet stones of the riverside walk, so I searched through my pockets for some clue. They were empty of anything but a few coins and crumpled receipts from hotels and bars I’d visited around the world while searching for Alice after she disappeared.

No, there was one thing. A simple note scrawled on a folded piece of stationery. It was from a hotel that had been destroyed in London during the Blitz some number of decades past. Even stranger, the note was in Latin:Tu es in debitum. Someone was telling me I was in their debt.

Maybe one day I would find out who had brought me to Paris and why. There’s a story to everything. Then again, maybe I wouldn’t. Often the best stories are those that never get told.

And some stories are better off forgotten. I wanted to get drunk again and forget about everything that had brought me here. I wanted to forget about how the world had nearly ended at the Sunken City, when Noah had tried to use God’s bible to wake the Sleeper there. How it would have ended if I hadn’t fought a mad battle alongside the Atlanteans, Ahab and the white whale, and countless scores of the damned from Hades to defeat Noah and destroy his apocalyptic ark. How even then the world would have ended if not for Alice.

Most of all I wanted to forget how Alice had thrown herself into the path of a spectral cannonball to save us and had been lost to the whirlpool it created. God’s bible had been lost along with her, but I cared less about that than I did her. The bible had done more harm than good in its time. That’s the way of most bibles. But Alice? She was my oldest and dearest friend, ever since she’d ventured out from the pages of that Wonderland book. And the Sunken City hadn’t been the first time she’d saved me.

Only I didn’t have enough money in my pockets to buy myself a single drink, let alone enough to forget such memories. Nor did I have even a breath of grace left within me that I could use to turn water into wine. I had been