The Angels' Mirror Pack 2: Books Four through Seven

by Harmony L. Courtney

  Jason picked up from there. “They said a special prayer at each pause, and most of the time, we repeated them. It wasn’t eighty-eight different prayers, they seemed to be in rounds according to what our scale here would be,” he told everyone, patting his wife on the leg when he was finished, and giving her a smile.

  “So, as I was saying,” Justice continued, a laugh in his voice, “we followed them until we reached the last landing, where three doors stood before us. And can you believe it? They asked us to choose from the heart which door to enter. Without telling each other, we all chose the same one, and, thinking back, I wonder if the one we chose didn’t have something to do with how what we saw on the other side presented itself,” he said, raising an eyebrow toward Edward.

  “I hadn’t thought of that, but it actually makes sense,” he replied, smiling back and taking Paloma’s hand once more. “With the detailing on each, and what they may have signified, it very well could be so,” he concluded.

  How had he not thought of that?

  “What did they look like,” Chosen wanted to know, and so, Masao, picking the story up, described each in detail, but left out which order they were in, left, center or right.

  “And so we all chose the same one,” Masao continued, shifting in his seat, “which we know because there was only one key given to us. It had been with one of the angels the whole time, I believe, and God knew our hearts and provided what was needed.”

  “But how would there only be one key if one of you had changed your mind when you saw them,” Clayton asked them quietly, adjusting his glasses for the fourth time since they’d sat down.

  “Well, Sweetheart,” Paloma said, “I think what Uncle Masao is trying to say is that, because God knew who was coming and what was in our hearts, He only provided one key because He knew we wouldn’t shift in our thinking based on appearances.”

  The boy shook his head and smiled, his braids jumbling and clacking in the process. “Alright. So, then what happened.”

  For the next fifteen minutes, Edward, Justice, Masao, and occasionally Jason and Paloma, filled in some of the details of the time from when they stepped foot through the final door to when they tumbled down. Thankfully, they were able to avoid who they met in Heaven, the fact that the thrones were assembled in the valley, and the way each of them looked, specifically. And they’d left out what their senses picked up from the Holy Spirit in the sense of anything personal that, upon discernment, might have been uncouth to share with the whole group.

  Overall, Edward was pleased with how they’d done, and of how they’d managed to stay away from answering questions about the more minute details of the Godhead. He felt kind of bad about it, but better to wait for an unction from the Spirit giving release of that information, if it ever came, than to give too much away and regret it because it changed the course of history and the world with the wrong people finding out.

  The image of Quentin came to mind again, where there was a group of people near an ancient waterway.

  Did it have anything to do with the mirror?

  A shudder ran through him, like electricity, and in his mind, he heard the words of Arieh – or was it Ari’el? – telling him he was on the right path. “Do not seek to exclude him, for he is part of the story,” he heard as he moved to stand and stretch after the group had finished the discussion.

  Trying not to be too obviously shaken, he moved toward the refrigerator and grabbed one of the last three Bull Dog root beers that remained, popping of the twist cap and taking a nice long drink. He grabbed one of the remaining slices of pepperoni and green pepper pizza and took a couple of bites before heading back to the living room, food and beverage in hand.

  And still, he sensed the words echoing through his mind, and straight into his heart.

  Quentin was part of the story, and as such, they needed to get past merely forgiving him. All of a sudden, he sensed they must embrace him back into their lives, come what may.

  Twenty Seven

  Perpignan, France… May 23, 1707

  A cry in the night wakened Gaspar with a start, only to find the candle guttering nearby. He shook his head, trying to clear it, when another cry pierced the night.

  Galya!

  After the attempt on her life, she and the baby were both alive, but it had been touch and go. The doctor still didn’t know for sure if they would make it, and Gaspar had spent hours upon hours pleading with God to spare her; to spare them both, somehow.

  His knees, sore from kneeling on the hard wooden bench beside Galya’s bed, where he’d spent upward of five hours at a time, moved slower than he cared for as he moved to sit up and throw an extra layer of clothing on before rushing to his beloved’s bedside.

  And for the first time since the horrible moment when he’d watched her collapse in pain and then, be rendered motionless, there she was, her eyes open. They seemed distant for a moment, focused on nothing, really, as the doctor took her pulse.

  Gaspar moved quietly to the other side of the bed, where a mahogany chair sat. When he wasn’t praying, he was often there, a book in hand, reading, in the hopes that she would awaken while he was at her side. The doctor had warned him about spending too many hours without sleep, but he couldn’t help it.

  He’d been allowing himself no more than the occasional nap at her side in that chair for the first week. Then, too tired to argue with the doctor, he’d tumbled into bed and slept for nine hours solid. And since then, he’d tried to balance the two, much to his own chagrin and against his heart’s desire to be there every moment.

  And this is what he’d feared: she would awaken to find him gone. Did she think he had abandoned her?

  “She is doing better,” the doctor said. “But she will need to eat. She has had so little, and that, mostly liquid, considering what’s happened, and I fear for both-”

  “Yes, don’t say it. I understand,” Gaspar reassured him. He moved quickly from the room, headed down the stairs two at a time and into the kitchen area, where he knew some soup would be left from earlier in the day. It might not taste as wonderful cold, but it would have to do… along with some of Mlle. Delphine’s wonderful bread. Yes… he could dip the bread into the soup, and it would soften enough that, hopefully, Galya would eat some of it.

  His own stomach roiled within him as he collected what he was looking for and, just as he was turning to head back upstairs, Mlle. Sonya, wiping sleep from her eyes, came in to see what the clatter was all about.

  “She has awakened. Now, back to sleep. I will take care of this tonight, and if I cannot, I will call for you and Mlle. Delphine, be assured,” he said, moving briskly.

  The woman beamed at the good news, shook her head to finish waking up, and praised the Blessed Virgin as she moved back toward her quarters. He could hear her continue to mumble as they moved in separate directions, his heart racing within him.

  As hungry as he was, he knew his wife and their child were in much more need. And there was no point waking up all of the staff at this late hour – whatever time it was.

  He glanced out a window as he passed it, noting the position of the moon in the sky. He could just barely hear the sound of crickets in the distance, and guessed it was sometime between eleven and three.

  For had he ever heard crickets after three in the morning?

  He hastened his step, making his way back into his wife’s bed chamber with victuals in hand, and the doctor looked up at him as he entered. “She has been calling for you,” the man told him. “She knows you were here.”

  Galya could sense the movement around her, and even note that her husband and the doctor were nearby, but why couldn’t she move her limbs? They felt like they’d been cast in lead. And what of the baby? She tried again to move her hands toward her belly, but it seemed an impossible task.

  At least she could sense movement. It was vague, but it was there.

  She followed Gaspar’s movements with her eyes as much as possible, seeing that he’d brought food
. She couldn’t place the smell, but at this point, she didn’t care. While she wasn’t sure she could eat, she knew she must; for the baby’s sake, even more than her own. The baby was an innocent. Galya knew she would need to sustain energy to keep her little one safe and help him or her to grow strong.

  She watched her husband tear off some pieces of bread and dip it into something. He moved one of them toward her mouth, and instructed her to eat it; pleaded with her to eat it.

  Her mouth, at first, didn’t work, but she concentrated and finally, just as it had taken effort to call out, she opened it.

  The flavors of beef, onion, tomato, and celery hit her tongue as the bread popped into her mouth, and she did her best to chew it. After what felt like a long time, she finally swallowed it, and the process began all over again.

  She tried to count the bites as she accepted them, but kept forgetting the words in English or French; she could think of them only in Hebrew. At least she could count that way.

  It was something.

  The fourteenth bite came toward her mouth, and her stomach began to respond. She opened her mouth and accepted the moist morsel, chewed it up as well as she could and swallowed it, hoping she wouldn’t choke on it.

  She knew she needed to eat more, but her system didn’t seem to know what to do with the food. She sensed she might throw up, but she couldn’t move. She widened her eyes, and Gaspar and the doctor helped her to sit up a bit more.

  “Can you breathe alright,” the doctor asked. “Blink once if you can breathe alright. Twice if you’re having trouble.”

  She blinked a single time.

  Didn’t they understand?

  She felt ill, not like she couldn’t breathe. She felt like she was going to unload all the food her loving husband had just put into her system. Her eyes went wider still, and again, she tried to move, concentrating on her fingers.

  And she was able to wiggle a few of them for about three seconds.

  Not exactly enough to tell someone one feels like they’re about to be sick all over the bed, but it was something.

  Gaspar looked into her eyes a few moments and smiled at her. “Je me hasarderais à dire que, en fait, ma femme, elle est malade, si les jours avant cet incident sont une indication. Est-ce donc, mon Champignon? S'il vous plaît, ouvrez et fermez les yeux un instant pour me dire si c'est droit,” he said softly, to her relief.

  She closed her eyes, counted to five in her head, and opened them again. Thankfully there was a container nearby, and she prayed she wouldn’t need it.

  Just the thought of getting sick was making her feel sick.

  Twenty Eight

  Vancouver, Washington… May 23, 2025

  Paloma watched Edward in the bureau mirror as she finished combing through her hair with her pick. He was moving slower than usual, which could only mean one thing.

  Something was off; he was more quiet than usual, and deep in thought. The kind of depth he usually reserved for very heady considerations. And it had begun before Officer Miyazaki had left. So, what had the men discussed? Or what had happened to shift his mood so much?

  “Honey,” she asked. “You doing alright?”

  “Mmm?”

  He shook his head and turned to look at her, his eyes not quite meeting hers a moment before they focused.

  “Are you doing alright?”

  She moved closer to where he sat, at the edge of the bed. He had their compact disc collection in hand and had been flipping through it, over and over again. Finally, he set it back in its place by their old player and shrugged, picking up the Bible.

  “Just thinking,” he told her as he began flipping now through the pages of the Bible. She watched him in silence for a few more minutes as she finished getting ready for bed, and then sat next to him.

  “About what?”

  He began to laugh; not a happy laugh, but one that caused sadness and anxiety to move through her a moment. “About Quentin Quimby, actually, of all people and things. When Officer Miyazaki showed up, he was already kinda on my mind; even when I was before the thrones, and so when he mentioned that they’d run into each other earlier today, I guess I just…”

  He let the words trail off.

  “I guess I’ve just had a lot on my mind, and some of it makes more sense than it should, I think. I mean, call me crazy if you want to but…” He hesitated, looking into her eyes.

  She could see a sheen, as though he were trying to keep tears from falling.

  “Call me crazy,” he said again, “ but earlier tonight, I heard, in my mind, one of the angel twins telling me that Quentin is part of this whole thing; he’s part of why the mirror is here. I have no idea what it means; no idea what he could possibly have to do with it, other than the fact that he’s who was trying to scare you the night I came through the mirror. Could it be that, if not for him, we wouldn’t even have met?”

  Paloma started.

  Well, something about that actually made a weird kind of sense, and she’d wondered about that over the years, too, but… could he have more to do with the mirror than they thought?

  “He is Arthur Reynolds’ cousin,” she reminded him, watching as he turned pages again, keeping a thumb to hold the place in Luke where he’d had it before. “Could it be that?”

  “I don’t have any idea. I kept seeing….”

  “What?”

  He looked at her again, the tears now beginning to fall. She leaned in to wipe them away with her thumbs in the silence that enveloped them before he spoke again.

  “It’s like…. How do I put it? It’s like I see an overlay of Quentin, along with a number of us who have known each other all these years, and we’re at this old… this old waterway or something? And he’s standing to the side, away from the rest of us, just looking down at it, as though none of the rest of us are there; as though he doesn’t even see us. And the twin angel – Ari’el or Arieh – one of them – keeps repeating over and over that he’s part of this, and then I see an image of the angel mirror, and an old, old man I’ve never met but who, somehow, seems familiar to me, all the same. maybe he was in the crowd before the throne, I just don’t… I don’t know.”

  He sighed, and the tears sprang to Paloma’s eyes as she thought about the implications of what he was saying.

  The words she’d heard in front of the throne came back to her once more.

  “Siloam,” she said in a whisper.

  Edward jerked his head up and set the Bible aside. “What?”

  “Siloam. I think – now it’s my turn to sound a little crazy, maybe but – I think you were seeing the pool of Siloam, in Jerusalem. I…” she paused, unsure how to express what had happened to her in Heaven; in that totally unexpected Heaven.

  Unexpected, because she’d always pictured it so different from what she’d experienced; so much more regal, not that it hadn’t been amazing. Just… totally different from her preconceived notions of what it would be like.

  Should she have had any to begin with?

  She hadn’t taken everything literally, about streets of gold, or anything, but still. She’d not imagined rainbow-colored grasses and thrones in the midst of it, in a field or valley sort of setting. She hadn’t considered that her introduction to the thrones would be seeing the backs of them, or that her tears would be caught in the hem of His garment.

  Just thinking of the hem of the garment reminded her of healing. Is that what that was about?

  “Let me try this again,” she told him. “When I was before the thrones, I had a sense that the water Timothy used was… well, from the pool of Siloam. I know there’s no way to prove it or anything, unless we see something stating clearly that it was, but I just… the feeling was overwhelming. Is overwhelming,” she told him in a rush.

  She kept her eyes on her hands, which were folded in her lap as she spoke, until he used his thumb and forefinger to gently move her face so they were seeing eye to eye. Just seeing the compassion there, in his eyes; tenderness and love and a swe
etness she’d known only in his eyes made her tremble, and then, he moved to kiss her.

  Something like electricity ran up her spine for the few seconds their lips touched, and then, he moved back away far enough to look into her eyes again.

  “Believe it or not, I understand. I started to wonder… I mean, how many places are still there, in terms of waterways, from when Timothy would have been alive? And could he have been…?”

  “Been…?”

  What exactly was he trying to suggest?

  “Could Timothy be the old man I keep seeing? The one who seems familiar but I’ve just never met? I mean, all I see is a face; no clothing to try to decipher when or where he’s from, but he certainly looks like he could be from the Middle East,” Edward told her, raising an eyebrow at her. “So, could it possibly be?”

  He took both of her hands in his as she tried to wrap her mind around the possibility.

  Could it be Timothy?

  Seriously?

  But what would Timothy be doing in the here and now? Had he traveled through time, just as his great niece had – whenever and wherever she had ended up?

  And where had she ended up, anyway?

  Surely not the last several years, or they’d have met her. Right?

  “I don’t know,” she said finally. “I guess, with all the rest of what we’ve experienced… with every miracle and every odd occurrence, less and less surprises me anymore. I think God has shed so much of my fear and anxiety and doubt – not all of it, but much of it – and shown how very possible even the things we find impossible are to me, so,” she continued, looking at their entwined hands.

  His nails, short and slightly bitten; hers, a little longer, with a sheer coral polish on them. Their rings, recently cleaned. His right thumb rubbing against the top of her left hand. Her hands, paler than his by a few shades, but both still quite light. Both just beginning to show some age-related wrinkling, much to her chagrin.

  “Well, it is whatever it is,” he said, rather suddenly. “And we can’t change it, either way so…. Would you mind if I read you something?”