What Fits by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

The angel mask didn’t fit over my horns.

Methry Sanduskian threw the best masquerades in Hell. All the demons I crushed on went to her events. They never deigned to notice me when I went as myself. My horns were blue and short and had silver spirals around them, indicating angel or fairy blood. Nobody in Hell appreciated a touch of the angel feather, or so I thought.

My friend Sundry, who had a bit of mixed blood herself, suggested the angel mask. We were gearing up in her tiny apartment near Blood Fountain Square. She had a big closet. My place, by the River of Forgetfulness, was much smaller than hers, a cubby in a wall of cubbies — we lived like worker bees, we lower caste halfies. I had just enough room for my bed and a shelf to put my clothes on. Sundry and I always got together at Sundry’s place.

When I went to parties, I usually painted my horns black or red and tried to pass.

“Come on, Lirsa,” Sundry said. “Why not make your weakness a strength? People love dressing as what they’re not, but you do that all the time. Try something new.”

I hated the simpering angel mask, with its round blue eyes and pale pink lips. Its smile promised oatmeal goodness, and I wanted a ghost pepper life. It had pale, sparkling skin, and the gold stripe of a halo across its forehead. I couldn’t put it over my face without it bumping into my horns. I was ready to abandon it.

Sundry cut slots for my horns in the top of the mask until it fit onto my face. She dug up a curly blond wig from her chest of human disguises for maximum mischief. Most of our assignments involved irritating people up on the surface. Like me, Sundry worked at acting on her demon nature, suppressing her unicorn impulses to heal and aid. Like me, she couldn’t bring herself to ruin a life, but she didn’t mind causing a little mayhem.

She found a blue robe in her closet and held it up for me. I took off my black lace goth dress and slid my arms into the heavenly blue sleeves. It was like pulling on someone else’s skin. My flesh crept and goosefleshed, even though the new skin felt soft and light.

I looked at myself in her full-length spectral glass. I looked like the angels one saw in stained glass in old churches. My stomach churned, and sour bile rose, burning my throat.

I looked like everything I hated about myself.

“Fantastic,” Sundry said, slapping me on the back. “No one will recognize you!”

That would be a good thing. The last time I’d gone to one of Methry’s parties, two half-demons had almost talked to me, but something about me — my anxious hope, Sundry said — had driven them away. I couldn’t even get half-demons to acknowledge me, except a few of the people in cubbies near mine, who would grunt if I spoke to them. The only people I talked to on a regular basis were Sundry and our boss, Eliana, Mistress of Slights, who sneered whenever she gave me an assignment.

In these clothes, I could be unrecognizable. I took a good long look at the self I was pretending to be, closed my eyes, and willed myself into my new disguise. Among my powers, scant as they were, this was my strongest, to take on the seeming of other creatures. The blue robe fitted itself to my figure, and my figure flattened into gender ambiguity. The mask molded itself to my face. The hair rooted among my own much shorter, dark hair.

When I opened my eyes and glanced at the mirror, I cringed. If I had seen me walking down a street, I would have fled up the side of a building to get away, and summoned ravens to attack me. Only my horns remained of my everyday self, and their color matched my outfit.

Sundry combed some of the hair forward over my forehead, hiding the horns. “Perfect.”

I clutched my stomach and noticed my hands. The black claws didn’t exactly go.

Sundry supplied me with human flesh-colored nail polish.

She got into her own costume, Mother Eve, with candy-apple red hair, a poison-green minidress, and a live albino boa constrictor wrapped around her torso, waist, and shoulders, and we headed out.

The doorman at Methry’s looked at me, shook his head, and looked at me again. “Wow.” He glanced at Sundry. “That you, Miss Sundry? Who’s this?”

“It’s the angel who drove Adam and Eve out of the Garden, Memmit. Can’t you tell?”

“That’s not right,” he said. “I saw that guy, and he was big and terrible and had a flaming sword. This one’s one of them teaching angels or guardian angels, right? But chances are it’s your little light-heart friend. Can never remember her name. Anyway, she looks delicious, and welcome to Methry’s.” He opened the black and red door and waved us in.

Methry has the biggest dwelling in Second Sin. It’s even bigger on the inside. The high demons can afford things like that, their own spacial pockets. Some even have their own pocket universes. I always wanted to visit one of those to see if the rules are different, if maybe they don’t have to torture people in a universe where they’re the gods.

The Den of Iniquity was full of smoke and dancers and loud music made by sinners whose punishment involved becoming instruments and playing themselves. I heard it was incredibly painful, and if they didn’t play, it hurt even more. The music was divine-adjacent, but partying demons sang along in screechy voices that hurt the ears of those who had them. I stuffed my ears with tissues from a hidden pocket of my angel robe.

Gassly, one of the demons I had loved from a distance since I turned twelve, worked his way between jiggling and jumping demons, some with flaming eyes and mouths, some with wildly whipping hair, some shaking bat wings or barbed and spiked tails or extra limbs, some naked, and some dressed in scanty snatches of clothes. Most wore something small or big that could act as a costume: a mask with the face of a human, a dog, a dragon; elemental scarves to represent water, air, fire, earth, ether, with their own motions and powers, extra horns or boils or wounds or scars. Some dressed as political figures or celebrities, some as supernatural creatures other than themselves. Gassly’s costume was a bleeding slash down his chest and a blind white eye. I wondered whether these were actual physical deformities or special effects.

Sundry glanced at Gassly and smiled at me. She gripped the white snake as it gripped her, and swayed in among the dancers, her broad hips describing circles and bumping others into staggering falls.

Gassly wormed his way closer and placed one long-clawed hand on my shoulder. “Are you sure you’re in the right dimension?” he asked, but not in his assault voice. His words sounded sweet and concerned, almost like the milk of human kindness, which was one of his gifts, I knew, though he had never turned it on me before.

“Oh, dear,” I said in a voice unlike my usual alto, higher and richer. “I wonder where I went astray?”

“Perhaps I can lead you somewhere better.” His smile showed his fangs, which were tusk-like and polished black. My chest tingled, but I had no breasts or nipples; arousal was blunted by the form I wore. Gassly wrapped his long red fingers around my shoulder and nudged me toward the front hall.

This was the most exciting encounter I’d ever had as an adult. My body churned mildly, muting my pleasure. Curse my power of mimicry! It was too strong. I didn’t want an angel’s responses to Gassly. I wanted my own.

He steered us toward one of the orgy alcoves — my first time! My first time! — and gripped my hair to tilt my head back, then pressed his mouth against mine and sucked on my lower lip. Then he bit it. The pain was shrill, and I flinched and tried to pull away, but he held me: he had grown extra arms to wrap around me. I couldn’t move. “So sweet,” he murmured, and licked my blood off his lips with a forked tongue. “Are you truly a strayed angel?”

I licked my lip and tasted strangeness. How deep had I fallen into my disguise? I tried to will myself back, and found I couldn’t; as always, the wishes and hopes of the person I was with strengthened my assumed shape.

What followed was painful, without any of the joy or pleasure I sometimes stimulated in myself when I imagined a scene like this. He bit me, and it hurt. He pierced me, and it burned. He used me hard and broke things inside me. I had the full array of an angel’s power of suffering. I had as well my own mixed-blood power of surviving horrible things.

When he had sated himself, he went away, leaving me shattered behind him. Burning tears edged from my eyes as I waited, straightening my arms and legs when I could, so they mended more or less normally. By the time Sundry found me, I was strong enough to sit up. I was bending my wrists and elbows, ankles and knees to make sure they worked correctly. Healing was slower than usual, but it came.

“Well, look who’s had her first orgy,” Sundry said. Fang marks tracked down her neck like the cloven hoofprints of deer, and her bright hair was mashed and matted, some of it missing. The white boa was gone. “How was it? Lirsa,” she said in a different voice, “are you crying blood?”

“Am I?” I touched a fingertip to my face. It came away red.

I pulled myself to my feet, leaning against the alcove wall, and tugged the torn and bloody robe away from me, then tore it off. I jabbed my claws around the rim of my face, trying to pull off the angel mask, but I couldn’t find the edges.

Sundry wrapped her arms around me. “What you need is sleep. The mask will pop off when you dream your way back to yourself.”

I leaned on her, and she half-carried me back to her place and laid me on her bed.

I woke later with the face still pretending to be mine, even after I changed into my own clothes. Sundry cut all my hair off, the blond and the black, leaving me bald. Still, I couldn’t shed the mask.

“I know,” Sundry said. “Try another mask.” She rooted through her trunk of disguises and found me the mask of a scowling little girl. I had worn it before. I could do a lot of mischief in the form of a little girl.

I put it on and willed myself into the form, and finally I shifted away from the helpless being who had endured torment without fighting back. I left the pain behind. Memory ghosts stayed with me, though.

My horns had turned dark purple, and they were longer than they had been.

Sundry stroked them, and I shivered. I imagined using my horns like fangs, goring Gassly. Heat woke in my chest, and hunger.

Sundry smiled.

—

Over the past thirty-odd years, Nina Kiriki Hoffman has sold adult and young adult novels and more than 350 short stories. Her works have been finalists for the World Fantasy, Mythopoeic, Sturgeon, Philip K. Dick, and Endeavour awards. Her fiction has won Stoker and Nebula Awards.

Nina does production work for the The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. She teaches short story classes through a local college and through Wordcrafters in Eugene. She lives in Eugene, Oregon.

For a list of Nina’s publications, check out: http://ofearna.us/books/hoffman.html.