Angels & Patriots

by Salina B Baker

  Liam’s eyes fluttered open. He tried to absorb the comfort of his archangel, but it felt out of reach.

  “I think I prolonged ya death by infusing some of my spirit with ya spirit. I didn’t know.” Colm looked into Liam’s half-open eyes for a moment. Then, he took Liam from Abigail’s arms, lifted him, and set him on his feet. Brandon and Patrick reached to help steady Liam so he could stand somewhat on his own.

  “Liam, do ya know what we’re doing?” Michael asked tenderly.

  Liam remembered that Michael was his archangel’s brother, but he remembered little else about the beautiful angel standing before him.

  “He can’t do this!” Ian protested. “Colm, we have to cast the spell without him. He’s too sick!”

  Michael turned to run from the room. Paul and William hooked their arms around him so he could not escape. Michael struggled with them for a moment and then gave up the effort.

  “Wait a moment!” Abigail said, jumping to her feet. “Liam can do this, but you must let me speak for him. If some of you can keep him on his feet, and ensure he holds the words to the spell in his hands, I can be his proxy.” She looked at Gordon. “Will that work?”

  “I don’t know, but it appears we have no choice.”

  Seamus and Fergus handed the pieces of linen to each angel and Abigail.

  Paul and William released Michael.

  The angels gathered in a circle around the table. Brandon and Patrick supported Liam. Michael ensured that the linen with the words to the spell stayed in Liam’s hands even as he held his own copy of the spell.

  Colm stood across the table from Liam so he could keep a close eye on him. His eyes flashed silver light as bright as stars in the darkest night sky when he looked at each member of his brotherhood. They were outwardly calmer than he expected, but he sensed their strong inner apprehension.

  Joseph came to Colm’s side. Colm resisted the urge to fall into Joseph’s arms and sob.

  Joseph said, “You can do this. All of you can do this. No matter what happens tonight, you will find the strength to go on, knowing you did what you thought was best.”

  William, Paul, Gordon, Abe, and Jeremiah gathered amongst Abigail and the angels.

  “Let’s begin,” Colm breathed.

  With trepidation, the angels spiritually touched one another. Their wings rustled. A breeze swept through the room and blew out the candles. They were plunged into a frightening darkness that reminded them of Liam’s impending death—chained in eternal darkness forever. The angels released their auras, and with Abigail, began to chant in unison.

  “Hear now the words of the Angels.

  The secrets we once hid from the Children of Man

  Joseph and Jeremiah exchanged worried glances.

  The oldest of God’s creations invoke their power

  The melody of the ancient tune of Heaven is deafened.”

  The Sigil of Lucifer began to glow green, purple, blue, yellow, and red.

  “In this night and in this hour

  The Love of our God is discarded

  In favor of the devotion of the Children of Man

  Devotion God forgot thousands of years ago when he punished

  His Sons with a wrath unworthy of a loving Being.

  Liam moaned. The angels quivered. They clung to the strength of their brotherhood.

  We finally and completely turn our backs on our Home and our Father

  Knowing that We have strayed too far.”

  The last ounce of physical strength Liam possessed drained away. His knees unlocked, and he slipped toward the floor. Brandon and Patrick tightened their grasp on him. Terror propelled Colm to vault over the table and land on his feet beside Abigail.

  She backed away to give the angels room to tend to Liam. Dread settled in her soul. William wrapped an arm around her trembling shoulders.

  The light from the angels’ auras intensified. Paul ludicrously thought that the angels’ bodies would explode if their auras continued to intensify. Jeremiah thought of the time, in Burkes Garden, when Liam went missing for three days, and how the angels had nearly self-destructed as their stress over Liam’s absence escalated.

  They ain’t gonna survive this, Jeremiah thought. Tears daggered his eyes.

  Colm cradled Liam in his arms. He sat on the floor and held Liam’s body tight against his chest. Colm’s wings unfurled and a faint golden light surrounded him. Joseph kneeled beside him. The other angels fell to their knees around Colm and Liam. Their wings unfurled in a shower of silver crystals, and blocked Colm, Liam, and Joseph from the view of the others in the room.

  Silver tears dropped from Colm’s eyes and soaked Liam Kavangh’s handsome face and dark hair. Colm shook so badly that his right arm slipped; Liam’s right arm flopped backward, and his limp hand slapped the floor.

  The angels’ spirits clung to their archangel to keep from being washed away in an emotional flood of hysteria.

  Abigail sobbed. William held her tighter. Hot tears burned his cheeks.

  Gordon and Abe hardly noticed the tears that spilled from their eyes and blurred their sight.

  Paul stood beside Abe, dry-eyed and stoic. The last bastions of his unquestioning faith in God had been destroyed. An angel had died and no one, not even an archangel, had been able to stop it. What was worse was the knowledge that God let it happen.

  Colm looked at Joseph through bleary eyes. “I killed him.”

  “No, you did not,” Joseph said in a strong yet trembling voice.

  “I punished him for his disobedience. I didn’t protect him.”

  “This is my fault!” Abigail cried out. “I asked him to show me his heavenly beauty!”

  “No, Abigail,” William whispered. “It is not your fault.” He stroked her dark tumbled hair. “They will never see it that way. You know that.”

  Joseph touched Liam’s wrist to check for a pulse. There was none. Liam’s vessel was dead.

  Michael fluttered his wings. They brushed Joseph’s face with the delicacy of a mother stroking her newborn infant’s cheek.

  Joseph waited until he could speak in a controlled manner. Then, he asked Colm, “What did I say to you just before you cast the spell?”

  A river of tears streamed down Colm’s cheeks. His throat constricted, and he struggled to draw in a breath. “No matter what happens, I…will find the strength…to…” He gulped in another breath. “to go on… knowing I did…what I thought was best.”

  Colm’s gold radiance flashed.

  Joseph said, “Stay in control. You cannot let your men become hysterical. You cannot—”

  Colm looked at Joseph. “I can’t sense him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can’t sense him.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  Lines formed on Colm’s forehead, and his eyes exuded confusion. Salty tears ran over his quivering lips and into his mouth.

  Joseph looked into the faces of the other angels for an inkling of clarification. He saw nothing but the same confusion and angelic grief.

  “I can’t sense him,” Colm repeated.

  Michael wiped his wet cheeks and eyes. He edged in closer to Liam and reached to close Liam’s blue eyes so he looked as if he was asleep instead of dead. Then, he looked at his brother and said, “He’s gone. Just gone.”

  Colm studied Michael’s face while the realization of what had happened to Liam settled in his spirit. Michael was sensitive to everything. That was why his behavior was often volatile and explosive. Colm knew it was also the reason Michael understood what had happened to Liam before the others in the brotherhood.

  The question and the answer terrified Brandon, but he asked it of Colm anyway. “Liam’s not dead?”

  “Michael’s right,” Colm said. “Liam’s just gone. I don’t sense him suffering in the chains of eternal darkness. He didn’t die an angel’s death.”

  Patrick exhaled a loud frightening cry. “Maybe you cain’t sense him because we ain’t
angels no more!”

  “I don’t feel different,” Brandon said.

  “I don’t feel different either,” Seamus said. “Do you feel different, Brother?”

  Patrick sniffed and shook his head.

  Ian remembered little of his own miserable spiral toward death, but he had been pulled from the precipice of eternal darkness before he had chance to look over the edge. Had Liam been aware that the edge of death was the rim of the black pit of nothingness? His wings fluttered.

  The brotherhood unconsciously fluttered their wings in sympathy.

  Fergus was trembling as badly as Colm. “I don’t feel different, but…when I think…about Liam…I feel like I’m falling.” His fluttering wings flapped, and a feathery whisper stirred the air.

  “So do I,” Michael cried. He crawled in closer to Colm.

  The angels’ wings flapped in concert with Fergus’ wings. Then, they sped up.

  Gordon slapped the palm of his hand on the sketch of the Sigil of Lucifer to keep it from blowing off the table.

  As the angels dwelled on Liam’s fate, their wings threshed in a horrible attempt to steel themselves against a nothingness they didn’t understand—a place that was beyond their senses. Their wings swept the ceiling and the floor in a flurry that stirred a wind storm of silver crystals.

  Abe, Gordon, Jeremiah, Paul, William, and Abigail dashed out of the reach of the angels’ frenzied wings.

  Abigail’s motherly instincts tempted her to offer comfort to this cataclysm outpouring of emotions. She glimpsed, through the threshing wings, the inner circle of the grieving celestial beings. It was all bright light and emotion. It blinded her and overwhelmed her soul.

  Joseph was inside that circle. She wondered when and how he had found the strength to withstand the grief of the sons of God. Abigail heard Joseph speak in a gentle tone she had heard him use often.

  “Colm, settle them down. They cannot go through this again if another of you—” Joseph swallowed and started again. “You are at war and have been for thousands of years. Do you realize how fortunate you are to have come this far and to have lost only one of you?”

  Michael sidled closer to Colm.

  “Look at me, Colm,” Joseph said.

  Colm’s eyes shifted to Joseph’s face.

  “I understand what you have done tonight is unprecedented, and that Liam did not die the way you expected him to die.”

  Colm’s wings quieted.

  Joseph continued, “You told me once that you are the closest being to God, and that you are a warrior. Your fear and exhaustion has dimmed that warrior. Find him again. If you find him, they will find theirs as well.”

  Colm heeded Joseph’s comforting words. He closed his eyes and let the last of his tears seep away. His wings stilled.

  The angels’ wings stilled. Their auras dimmed.

  The glowing sigil dimmed in response.

  Gordon reached to pick up the drawing of the sigil and thought better of it. The octagon, in which the drawing lay, had shifted to a heptagon, and it was seared into the table top. He nudged Abe and pointed at the heptagon.

  At forty-five, and before he met the angels, Abe would have said he had seen almost everything. What he witnessed tonight convinced him that he would never fully understand anything again.

  “It changed,” he said, surprised.

  “The spell worked,” Gordon said.

  Jeremiah and Paul looked over Abe’s shoulder to see what Gordon had pointed out.

  There had been eight. Now, there were seven. The notion hit Jeremiah like a thunderbolt. He left the house to grieve under the cover of the moonless night.

  Colm calmed his grief and guilt to the point that a new emotion crept in on him—rage. Liam wasn’t chained in eternal darkness because they had succeeded in rejecting Heaven, but Henry had ultimately erased Liam’s existence. Colm’s gold radiance brightened with his rage. He backed it down. The pledge he made to himself when he was alone in the woods burned brightly in his spirit. He felt strong enough to stop Henry from making him choose.

  At first, the angels thought they should bury Liam Kavangh’s body in a different place than the little graveyard beyond the stream. But Liam Kavangh and Ian Keogh had died as human brothers-in-arms in Wexford, Ireland in May 1169, and their bodies deserved to rest side by side.

  Joseph took Abigail home to Braintree two days after Liam’s loss. She spent the last days at the farm weeping and trying to come to terms with the notion that the angel who occupied Liam Kavangh’s body no longer existed.

  In fact, all the children of man who had been with the angels that night found it difficult to cope with the knowledge that even an angel’s existence could end at any time. Furthermore, the human regret that Liam had not had a chance to say goodbye saddened them.

  The heptagon seared in the table in the living room was a constant reminder of their loss. Michael, Patrick, and Brandon chopped the table into firewood and burned it in the fireplace.

  Colm sent Fergus back to Dillaway House.

  “Ya succeeded in becoming a general by learning to understand the children of man,” Colm said on the morning Fergus left the farm. “I have a long way to go, but I’m learning, too. Ya fight the British, we’ll fight the demons, and we’ll all end this thing.”

  Fergus’ boyish face had aged just a little. “I thought I was strong enough to leave our brotherhood. Now, I’m unsure.”

  Colm thought of Joseph’s words the night Liam died. Do you realize how fortunate you are to have come this far and to have lost only one of you?

  “When we first arrived in Boston, and Michael and Brandon encountered those demons in that tavern on Beacon Hill, I shamed them for being cowardly. I’ve been cowardly, too, and that ends now,” Colm said. “Joseph’s right. I…we have to find the warriors within us again.”

  “There’s something else weighing on you. What is it?”

  Colm realized that he had to confide in someone before the weight crushed him. “Henry’s going to try to make me choose between Michael’s life and Joseph’s life.”

  “How? When?”

  “I don’t know, but I have to kill him before he has the chance.”

  “The children of man will die just like they did in 1318 when you and Henry had your first confrontation.”

  “Aye.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “If I don’t survive, take care of them—if they survive.”

  Fergus supposed he should have faced the fact that another showdown between Henry and Colm would be their last. That was the fundamental reason they had come to Boston, yet somehow, the stark reality of it had escaped him and the other angels. “I will take care of them,” he promised. “What about the sigil? Gordon said the spell worked.”

  “It’s still just an assumption on his part.”

  “We will find out soon enough.”

  “Aye. Now go on, Fergus, and stay as far away from the brotherhood as ya can until this is all over.”

  Fergus mounted his horse. He smiled and gave his archangel a curt nod.

  Thirty-six

  Joseph’s thirty-fourth birthday was on Sunday, June 11. His friend and junior colleague, Elbridge Gerry, planned a surprise celebration at Hastings House in Cambridge.

  A lively debate concerning the party was held on the back porch of the farmhouse in Roxbury.

  “I am not going,” Abe announced the day before the party. “I do not fit in with the lawyers, doctors, merchants, and army officers who are Joseph’s friends.”

  “That’s stupid, Abe,” Michael said. “Ya are Joseph’s friend, too.”

  Gordon quipped, “Do you think I fit in? There won’t be another black man or woman there except the servants.”

  “How’re we supposed to know who fits in where?” Seamus pointed out. “We don’t know a damn thing about human celebrations.”

  “You’ve seen Shawnee celebration rituals in Burkes Garden,” Jeremiah said.

  “That cai
n’t be the same as white colonist celebration rituals.”

  Abe eyed the angels and said, “Your clothes are improper attire for a doctor’s birthday party. The only one of you who has proper clothing is Fergus, and he is not attending.”

  The angels glanced down at their grubby clothing with sheer unconcern. Michael stuck out his lower lip, looked at Patrick, and shrugged.

  “Liam had proper clothes, but we buried his vessel in them,” Ian said.

  Seamus frowned. “That ain’t helpful, Ian”

  Jeremiah and Gordon snorted a laugh.

  “Neither one of you look any better,” Abe scoffed.

  “Our clothes didn’t seem to matter to John Hancock, John Adams, or Samuel Adams,” Colm said, thinking about their initial meeting with the patriots. That meeting in the Green Dragon Tavern basement seemed so long ago even in the scheme of an archangel’s existence.

  Abe sighed and rolled his eyes. “This is a party. There will be ladies there.” He paused. “At least bathe. Do you want the ladies to be repulsed by your presence?”

  “Will they be pretty ladies?” Michael asked enthusiastically.

  “I wou’d say there is a good chance, but they will find your filthy hands and face disgusting.”

  Gordon had given up hope that he and Michael could be civil. Poking the angel was at least entertaining. “What difference does it make, Michael? You can’t do anything with them anyway.”

  “Fuck ya!” Michael shoved Gordon; he went sprawling off the porch edge.

  Michael leaned over and spit on him.

  Gordon jumped to his feet and onto the porch. He snatched Michael by the hair and yelled in his face. “I’ve had enough of your nasty behavior!”

  Michael jammed his palm into Gordon’s face and kicked him in the shin.

  Brandon ignored Michael and Gordon. The thought of having to speak to a lady gave him the urge to rustle his wings. He said, “Colm, maybe I can stay behind with Abe.”

  Patrick fidgeted with the hilt of the blade he held in his hand. “We ain’t got no idea what to do at a party.”