Aetheoniel didn’t like taking corporeal form. Never had, never would. But he liked it even less since the slayings had started.

He leaned over the desk, the room still carrying the fading scent of The Supplanted’s life—paused, now, due to angelic intervention. Organised crime wasn’t his wheelhouse. Heck, he wasn’t even in the same ship. He stared into the scrying bowl, waiting for a transmission from Home Office.

Demons had all the unfair advantages in the celestial wars. They could jump in and out of mortal bodies with no real cost—just discard the meatsuit and find another. Angels? No such luxury. To influence the mortal plane, they had to take physical form—mortal, fragile, finite. Die in a vessel, and that’s it. Not dead. Not in Heaven. Just gone.

To protect the host, the human was safely transported elsewhere—memories scrubbed, false overlays installed. Most of The Supplanted never remembered their time away, though a few came back a little… off. Dislocated. Changed.

Aetheoniel’s current mission was urgent. The dark was growing bolder, and fewer angels returned from Earth. Every true death of a celestial became a soldier for the other side—turned by hatred, twisted by the void of being unmade. The angels’ numbers replenished slowly, through purgatory, atonement, and rebirth. The demons had no such bottleneck. And so, here he was. Undercover.

He couldn’t take the place of the soul they needed to save. That never worked—they always reverted to type. So instead, angels slipped into someone adjacent, someone who could influence, nudge, redirect. Sometimes it was a senator’s assistant. A security guard. A barista. This time?

The Mob Boss’s enforcer.

Marc King, to be precise. Not just any enforcer, either—Leon King’s brother. The soul in question.

Aetheoniel didn’t have enforcer vibes. He had “manages a charming tea shop” energy. Not “buries people under piers” energy. And yet, he was now inhabiting the scarred, gravel-voiced, Marlboro-soaked body of one of Solace Bay’s most feared men.

He didn’t like it. He really didn’t like it.

A glowing ripple passed through the scrying bowl.

“He’s done what?” Aetheoniel exclaimed, scandalised. “For Home Office’s sake—where did he even get a shiv? What is a shiv? It sounds so… savage.”

He rubbed his face, frowning at his nicotine-stained fingers. “So I need to… eff and jeff my way through every conversation? What if I need to discorporate someone to keep up appearances? He sent three to The Other Side last month alone!”

The bowl pulsed.

“Yes, yes, I know what Gabriel said. But they always look so sad.”

Another pulse. Impatience.

“Understood,” he muttered. “Mission briefing: inhabit Marc King, convince Leon not to start a war with the Bravos, nudge him toward redemption, and try not to get smote—or stabbed. And to do it all while pretending to be a brutal, terrifying mob enforcer. Oh, and did I mention he’s the soul’s brother? So that’s just wonderful.”

This was as close to insubordination as Aetheoniel got. And even now, it sounded more exasperated than rebellious. Still, the bowl didn’t glow again. It was done.

Aetheoniel sighed—and saw himself reflected in the still water: Marc King’s face stared back. Middle-aged. Granite-hewn. Eyes like old warfields. He scowled automatically.

Then came the knock.

A mortal. Someone was at the door.

He rose stiffly. Time to play the role. He barely resisted the urge to apologise for the delay before growling:

“You better have a fuckin’ good reason for knocking.”

He waited