Simon Benandanti knew better than to suggest that the fallen angel traverse the Hypokeimenon with him. She had, once upon a time, been cast out of heaven. Far be it from him to invoke God's wrath by returning her to the Presence. And so he tactfully suggested that they make their own separate ways into the city that the Caesars built, and meet at the place where she once lived. Her home, he reasoned, would be a good beginning place for the hunt for the creature that pursued her. Tarrasch, she'd called him, and said that she'd once known him. That the current situation was her fault. She hadn't looked the slightest bit guilty. She hadn't seemed anything but bored, dissolute. But who was he to judge"

So he went alone, and stood in a certain crooked street in the rioni Ripa waiting for her. Heat shimmered across Rome's seven hills; the mild Mediterranean spring was swiftly recalling summer, leapfrogging from winter's dry chill to muggy clinging warmth with no more than a few weeks in between. Knowing that, Simon had nevertheless worn a long-sleeved shirt, just as he always did. It hid the knives strapped to his wrists. He settled his hands into his pockets, leaned a shoulder against the stucco-clad wall of a hotel and waited. He looked enough like the natives, with his dark longish hair, dark eyes and beard's shadow that no one gave him a second glance. And his Italian was passable"when a grandmother told him what he could be doing for her instead of holding up the wall, he smiled faintly and returned her naughtiness in kind without earning a single wondering glance at his accent.

He waited, and watched the traffic trail up and down the crooked street...and peace and joy flooded his heart, soothed his soul. Simon had not had a good few months, and it was a stark contrast between that feeling and his current state. He closed his eyes for a breath, accepted the balm and basked in it as his chest rose and fell. Then he opened them and turned to the angel whose presence had the power to affect him so profoundly that he, who was so sober and serious, was left smiling and helpless with joy.

Fury's brilliantly white hair was pulled back in a severe chignon, held in place by a few unnecessarily long hair pins. Curls pinged loose about her face. No matter her constant desire to fade into the woodwork of a place, she stood out; in this place, especially, with that white hair, her height, her classically beautiful face with its movie-star lines and midnight eyes. She didn't seem frightened at the idea of coming face-to-face with this old adversary, or nostalgic for this place where she had lived so many years. As much as she showed anything, she showed a faint annoyance at the heat, plucking at her equally white shirt where it lay against her skin. Perhaps it was the fact that her stroll down memory lane involved memories that actively hunted her. He drew another breath. "Show me where to go, bella," he said, and gestured for her to lead the way. "When did you live here?"

She looked up and down the street, jerked a thumb in one direction"north"and started walking. "It all runs together, anymore. The buildings were not as tall. There was a Leo and a Pius...I forget the numbers." She paused. "I lived here for a while. It was easy to disappear. Things change...but churches rarely move."

Leo. Pius. The papacy had been last headed by a Leo and a Pius at the turn of the 20th century. He, meanwhile, had only known four popes in his lifetime. It was humbling. "I looked, but it's a big city." A self-deprecating glance at her over the tops of his lenses; he was sure that she was quite aware of that. "An idea of where to begin a good search would help."

"Well, perhaps," her eyes turned away from him to gaze the length of the street, "a good place to start would be where the purest of souls go. Church. Or rather, the church where I used to go...once upon a time. Sant'Anselmo all'Aventino." Once upon a time, said that faintly scornful glance at him, she'd been led to believe in redemption and forgiveness. "It is a bit of a walk. But not too far"I never lived so far that I couldn't walk to where I needed to be."

A tiny old blue Fiat roared around the corner, horn blaring as it narrowly missed them, and careened onward into the afternoon, the metal body rattling like dancing bones over the cobblestones of the street. Simon watched it go, shook his head afterward and muttered something unrepeatable in Italian. Returning his attention to her, he asked, "How do they attack, these Soulless" How do they consume a soul" Do you know?"

Fury had an odd habit of avoiding cracks in the pavement, he'd noticed. He added to that, after a few moments of watching her, an avoidance of lingering in shadows. She kept walking, her attention half on the sidewalk"roving along it to find just the right places to put her feet, keeping to the light"and half on him. "They leapfrog from shadow to shadow. It's not that they can't attack in the light"they can. They just prefer to stay in the dark. They fight dirty. And they won't eat your soul. No, no they leave you just breathing so Tarrasch can take it." Rubbing a hand down her face, she erased some expression he never got the chance to see clearly. "They're all teeth, claws and shadows.

"And very, very cold."

"So he travels with them. They incapacitate, and he finishes the job." His focus shifted from her to the street again. It told a crooked story, that street, one with no ending that diverged in half a dozen different ways just in the areas he could see. And there were plenty of shadows. Surely they wouldn't be anywhere nearby, in a city this size, his rational mind told him.

His paranoia disagreed.

"He might. He might not. Depending on when he's fed last..." She said it over her shoulder as she took a hopping step over a crack in the pavement. "He's like a snake. He'll feed. Then rest, wait and shed his skin"become even stronger. So if he hasn't fed, he may be with them. But if he has, then whatever they're hunting is for them alone, I suppose." Crooked street. Shadowed alleys. Surely, whispered his paranoia, the two of them walking together were brightly glowing beacons in a sea of dimly glowing souls. Surely. She continued up that crooked street towards the church.

And it was like an old Western. The street, so busy with traffic and passersby only a few minutes ago, cleared out in one of those sleepy warm afternoon hushes, leaving it momentarily deserted. There was the church, its blocky square bell tower capped with a terminal cross pointing upward into the sky above the squat stones of the building itself. There they were, alone in the little street. It was so peaceful.

And then the sun slipped behind a fat puffy sheep of a cloud, and the entire street was cast into shade.

"Questo " male?" Simon had just enough time to say, and then they were hit from both sides at once. Just as she had said, it was as if all the heat in their surroundings had been drawn off and a downdraft of frigid air rushed in to fill the void. They did not all come at once. Two and then three played leapfrog across the shadows, hopping and slithering in ways no human being would ever move. They were not zombies, but they were not living, merely husks of the people they used to be. Their mouths were gaping maws of razor teeth. Were there eyes" Sagging flesh made it hard to tell. Clawed fingers clicked as they dragged the streets, tapping as they circled. They hunted as a pack: one distracted while the others went in for the kill.

The one on Simon's left swiped at him. He might have been a ragged Eurotrash boy, once: he wore a t-shirt splattered with paint in the cheap imitation of a band logo, too-tight pants, cracked and scuffed pointed-toed leather shoes. But now he was a nightmare mirror image of what he had been, slumped over himself as if all his bones were given over to feed the endless hunger within him. He wasn't a he, Simon reminded himself as a fistful of claws arced through the air where the Benandanti had been a moment before; he was an it. Accordingly, he rose out of the crouch he'd fallen into, his hair still shivering from the nearness of that swipe. He filled his hands with knives, one dropping out of a sheath on each wrist. And he lunged, burying a blade in the throat of the Soulless.

The fallen angel Amitiel, he saw with a lightning-fast glance, had had the great bad fortune to be poised between two cracks in the street, just beside an alleyway so narrow that she could have spanned it with her arms. Out of it came a twin to the bawdy grandma, swathed in coarse black cotton, the lace headscarf slipping to one side as she oozed out of the dim and into the angel's perfect aura. A mouth that must have kissed a score of grandchildren yawned wide, and a foul and putrid gasp of glee escaped as she reached with gnarled yellowing horrors for hands at Fury. He saw Fury whip an elbow around into the jaw of the creature, then pull one of those too-long hairpins out and stab at it.

He'd expected a spray of blood, braced himself against a falling corpse pulling the knife out of his hand. That wasn't what happened at all. Instead, the body of the boy just...collapsed in on itself, imploding into a rancid puddle of gray-white ectoplasm only barely contained by the clothing that once held it. When it hit the street, it was nothing more than slime that swiftly dissolved into the million cracks in the paving that Fury had been trying so hard to avoid.

Simon's shock at the sight almost got him killed. There was another one slinking around his right, dressed in yellow: Capri pants, a neat little white tank top that had seen better days and was now barely hanging onto broken bone and peeling skin. She"it"had watched as Simon sliced her companion's throat. There was no snarl of disbelief, no howl of anger. It simply launched itself for the Benendanti like an animal going in for a kill. The thing was up inside his guard before he had a chance to react. It hit him in the chest with a flat palm strike that by rights should have cracked his sternum; it blew him backward, into a wall on the other side of the street, broken fangs gnashing as it slavered after his throat.

He caught a glimpse of Fury down on the ground. The Soulless atop her was the size of a fully grown man; she'd gotten a knee between herself and it, but it was bigger than she was, and another one was already circling her. Then he had to focus on remembering how to breathe. The breath had been driven from his lungs by the blow, and it was all he could do just to keep the Soulless from tearing his throat out. An offensive against it was out of the question. Two others piled onto him, clawing and wheezing.

It was not looking good for the guys in the white hats.

The once-woman clawed at him again and finally scored. The smell of his blood bloomed like poppies across the pages of the crooked street's story. The shock of pain was enough to give him back his breath; he sucked it in, then shouted once in a wordless mea culpa of fury and gave himself over to the wolf. The thrashing pile of monsters atop him writhed as he began to tear them apart one ferocious bite at a time. The taste was the most horrible thing he could imagine, every concept of rot and decay packed into each mouthful as it deconstructed into goo on his tongue.

He heard a sharp crunch from across the thin slice of street as he wrenched and tore, as fouled ectoplasm matted his fur and clogged his nose. He stripped flesh from a sagging arm, then tore out a throat. As the last Soulless attacking him collapsed into a clinging gray mucoidal mess, he looked for Fury. She was on her feet again. The one who'd been atop her was slime in the street"the other big one had a grip on her arm, but Simon looked just in time to watch her slam a pair of hairpins through its ears and into its decaying brain. The sun chose just that moment to roll out from behind its curtaining cloud, shining down on the street like a benediction of their good works. Simon knelt on the other side of the street, back to the wall, surrounded by piles of stinking pustulent goo; it streaked his ripped shirt and clotted in his hair as it went through its slow dissolution into nothingness. It smeared across his glasses so that he could hardly see. His knives held his hands as tightly as he held them. He was still bleeding from a shallow slice just along the top of his shoulder.

"Are you all right?" he asked her between gasping breaths. Fury just stared at him for a moment, blinking. Even her eyelashes were coated with that ectoplasm of whatever it was the Soulless were made from. Her shirt was soaked through with it. She was covered in scrapes, cuts. One was splayed across the bridge of her nose. And still she was one of the most beautiful women he'd ever seen. "I'm really, really dirty," she said to him at last, plucking her clinging beslimed shirt away from her skin with a moue of distaste.

"That happens when you kill things," he said, and had no idea whether they were joking or sharing an instant of absolute horror. "Nn. Not all of them melt on you." She pointed at him as if noting the goop he was coated in. Turning her head, her tumbled hair clinging wetly to her face and neck, she sniffed at her shoulder. "I smell really bad, too. You probably don't smell so great either."

He breathed in through his nose and probably shouldn't have. As he coughed and gagged, a bus came scraping down the street between them, curious tourists gawking at them through the dirty glass windows. One or two snapped pictures; obviously this was some quaint local ritual! One soggy, stinking fallen angel and a slimy Benandanti.

Fury glared at the bus and its jolly passengers before pulling off her shirt and chucking it to the curb, revealing another marginally cleaner shirt beneath. "As picturesque as it is, I'd rather not hang around any longer." Her unemotional voice grew even drier. "I mean, unless you want to. We can go for a stroll, take in the sights."

"We can come back later," he said, trying not to strangle on the almighty funk. He coughed, hacked, spat.

She heaved a huge sigh of audible relief. "Good. I need to scour with steel wool for an hour or five. And thank you." For fighting alongside her" For believing her? He wasn't sure. She reached for his hand, avoiding the knife, and ran her thumb across his knuckles before letting go. Her fingers were cold. He was still shivering in the aftermath of that terrible spiritual darkness, and he couldn't get the damned taste out of his mouth. "I think next time will be more troublesome." She left it at that.

Simon blinked up at her for a moment longer. Then he nodded, made the knives vanish up his sleeves. A glance up and down the street revealed a few people out: far enough away that their state could not be easily identified, but moving quickly enough that that would change. They didn't need to answer questions right now, either one of them. They also didn't need to choke anyone else with their stench. "I'll find you," he said, and watched her starscape eyes as he climbed to his feet. "Be careful," said the man to an angel, and disappeared down one of those narrow side alleys that the street told to itself. A moment later, heaven sighed a breath between buildings.

(Adapted from live play with FuryRevisited, with thanks.)