by Jane Lebak
Saraquael said, “It’s taking more energy for them to do damage control than to believe what the guards saw and heard.”
Gabriel shrugged. “Give them some time. Any Cherub worth the name would ask the same questions when faced with the impossible.”
Gabriel and Saraquael sang together when there was no one else around, and then Saraquael played the flute while Gabriel sang to accompany, and afterward Saraquael read poetry while Gabriel listened. Peter and John came, but the angels felt warned not to appear to them, so they watched the men search the tomb, take the burial cloths, and then leave.
“Not enough faith,” Saraquael said.
Gabriel said, “Peter is pretty shaken by what he saw, not to mention what he did.”
Saraquael squinted.
“It’s one thing to think you denied your lord when he’s dead.” Gabriel looked over his shoulder. “It’s quite another to know you denied him and you may have to explain why. It’s hard to unsay a denial like that.”
“Words last,” Saraquael said. “They last a lot longer than the sound they make.”
Gabriel pulled his wings tighter around his shoulders.
Saraquael clapped a hand on him. “We’re free to go now. Let’s see if Michael needs any assistance at Sheol.”
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#
Sheol was chaos. Gabriel stared for a long time before he could even sense the presence of Hell in the distance, and from that he deduced his approximate position.
Raphael appeared at his side. “Incredible, isn’t it?”
Gabriel’s wings tightened involuntarily, and he sidled toward Saraquael.
Saraquael did a double take. “It’s a blizzard of rock bits!”
Indeed, a blizzard of black snow in razor-sharp slivers. Gabriel couldn’t see further than a half mile in any direction even with long-distance vision. Intermingled with the shards were larger chunks, ranging in size from fruit to meteoric, and each moving randomly.
Raphael shifted so he had Gabriel cupped in his wings. “You’ve got to be careful of the larger chunks—angels keep getting hurt when they come together too fast. They’ve got an attraction for one another.”
Gabriel moved away as if trying to get a closer look, then flashed a chunk to himself inside a Guard. It didn’t like being contained and kept moving away from him as if by magnetic repulsion. “Why are we here at all?”
Saraquael said, “Gabriel, look away from Sheol. All around.”
“Where’s away?” He dragged his gaze away from the heart of the tumult and tried to scan long distance.
Saraquael pushed between him and Raphael, pointing. “Follow out that way. See them?”
About to wonder what he could possibly see through the debris, Gabriel hesitated. A glint in the darkness. Another.
“Are those demons?”
Saraquael said, “That looks like an army to me.”
Gabriel could see only a couple, but he trusted Saraquael and his Dominion’s sense of the hidden.
Raphael said, “Michael thinks it’s the whole army.”
“But why?”
“Human souls. We need to pull them free and keep them safe until Jesus judges them, but the enemy has to want them too.” Raphael put his hands on Gabriel’s shoulders. Gabriel tensed as he looked into the bit of darkness Guarded in his hands. “As long as they’re trapped in the rock, they stay asleep, so we’re getting them out.”
Gabriel sent his energy into the Guard, shattering the stone. Three human souls wriggled loose, sleepy and confused.
Saraquael snared them, and a moment afterward there were Angels looking them over to identify them. Within a minute, all three souls had been reunited with their guardians.
Michael appeared, his armor dented and his clothing ripped. “Saraquael, I want you out there with Zadkiel to keep a perimeter against Satan’s forces. If they do anything, alert me. In person—we can’t communicate through this stuff, so we’re reduced to running messages.” He turned to Raphael. “You need to get back to helping the wounded.”
Raphael took Gabriel by the arm, but Michael put out his hand. “Gabriel’s staying with me.”
“Oh.” Raphael looked suddenly lost, then brushed his wings by Gabriel’s. “I’ll be back with you as soon as I can.”
Gabriel nodded, and Raphael vanished.
“Try not to get separated.” Michael wiped the soot from his face but succeeded only in smudging it around.
Gabriel and Michael headed into the debris field. Michael spoke with numerous teams of angels and helped them destroy some of the larger chunks. Angels and Archangels were sifting out the silting bits and reuniting humans with their guardians. Gabriel followed Michael from site to site, assisting when the opportunity presented itself but mostly observing.
After half an hour, Gabriel said to Michael, “What did you want me to do?”
Michael shrugged. “I didn’t want you to do anything. I’m keeping Raphael out of your hair.”
Gabriel backed up, startled.
“He was all over you, and clearly you weren’t comfortable with that, so you’re with me.” Michael gave instructions to one of the Archangels, then returned his attention to Gabriel. “If you can come up with a better system for harvesting the sleepers out of the stones or for getting the smut out of the atmosphere, I’m all for it. But as far as I’m concerned, keeping the two of you apart is enough.”
Gabriel frowned.
Michael returned to work while Gabriel focused on nothing. His senses prickled from the presence of so much death. When he reached out further, to try feeling that dark army just beyond his vision, he felt none of it. Unnerving to say the least. The area swirled with sleep and wakefulness, concern, the joy of reunion and the frenzy of the parted, confusion from the newly-wakened. Another half-hour had elapsed when he said to Michael, “Why?”
Michael turned to him. “Why what?”
“Why did you think you needed to separate us?”
Michael sighed, then waved one of the Archangels away. He moved closer to Gabriel and spoke in a hush. “Look, every time he got near you, you got like this.” Michael stood completely stiff, his arms tight to his sides, his wings tense, but his face a startled blank. Shrugging, he returned to his normal posture. “It was obvious to everyone except Raphael that you wanted Raphael gone.”
Gabriel bit his lip. “But— I probably should be with him.”
Michael waved a hand. “You’re free to go.”
Five minutes later, Gabriel was still shadowing Michael through the debris field.
“This isn’t right,” Gabriel said.
“Of course it’s not right!” Michael turned to him. “I’m sorry, Gabriel. I owe you a tremendous apology for not stepping in to stop him.”
Gabriel shook his head.
Michael grabbed him by the forearms. “I couldn’t have stopped him from being angry, but I could have prevented him from harassing you. He was under my command. When you didn’t react to all his provocation, I thought you had it under control, but you didn’t. You had yourself under control. I needed to step in, and I didn’t.”
Gabriel reached up for Michael’s hands. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“God summoned me in front of the throne,” Michael said. “He reprimanded me for allowing one of my officers to be harassed. When I protested that I’d stepped between Satan and Israfel as quickly as I could, He said I hadn’t protected you.” He bowed his head. “I’m asking your forgiveness.”
Gabriel hugged him. “You have it. I’m sorry you got into trouble on my account.”
“I got into trouble because of what I failed to do.” Michael’s face darkened. “I’m not going to fail to do it again, which is why you’re here.” He folded his arms. “What did Raphael say to you after you pulled him away from Sheol?”
Gabriel kept silent.
“Do you realize he was overheard by the guardians of the Romans? Because whatever he said, it sent four of them running for help. I ha
d one in front of me the same instant Saraquael had one in front of him, and in the next minute a third was begging Israfel for help—only none of them would repeat what he said.”
Gabriel turned away, bringing up his wings. Michael added, “The fourth ran to Uriel, who found you first.”
Gabriel swallowed. “I didn’t ask anyone to take sides.”
Michael glowered. “I didn’t think you did.”
A Principality reported to Michael about the status of the perimeter. The damned angels had formed a ring around the field, but they were otherwise silent. Quiet and watching in the void. Their leaders weren’t making themselves apparent, but their finger-prints were everywhere. Michael acknowledged and sent the Principality back to Saraquael.
Gabriel said, “Do you have me following you because I’m not trustworthy to finish my assignments?”
Michael stopped in his tracks. “Please tell me you don’t believe any of what he said to you. Please.”
Gabriel swallowed. “I’m not a very good judge of character.”
Michael laughed. “Who is?”
“Well, Raphael.” Gabriel watched the debris in full swirl. “I usually follow his lead.”
“Am I a good judge of character?” When Gabriel nodded, Michael continued, “Are my other friends all those things he said, the things you won’t tell me?”
Arrogant, legalistic, block-of-ice, uncaring. Gabriel began to vibrate with strain. “You may be with me as an act of charity.”
“As an act of charity I’ll forget you said that.” Then Michael stiffened, focused distantly, and turned back to Gabriel. “God says you’re going to misinterpret that, so I’ll be clear: I love you. I don’t spend time with you as an act of philanthropy.”
Energy starting rippling from Gabriel, or maybe it was grief. “He wouldn’t have accused me of something he hadn’t already thought.”
Michael softened at the note in his voice. He cocooned them both in his wings, and within that makeshift shelter he shone so he could look Gabriel in the eyes. Be totally honest. Is the dam about to burst?
Gabriel looked aside. It had gone down a long time ago.
Michael pressed his forehead to Gabriel’s shoulder and Gabriel rested his cheek against Michael’s hair. Again from Michael: sorrow. From Gabriel: It was awful, horrible, just too much had happened, but he was stable now. He just needed the ground to stay still under his feet. He needed not to be untrustworthy and all those other things, and maybe then he could forget or at least ignore what had happened.
Ignore it. It had worked for Raphael. It had worked for so long.
Michael pulled back from. “You can stay with me, but you don’t have to. You can have a team of your own and keep working. You can leave. It’s your choice.” Michael smiled. “Should I prove I don’t think you’re incompetent?” And Gabriel finally smiled.
Michael turned him loose to secure a particularly thick field of debris, assigning him his own team of Archangels. Gabriel sized up the area and immediately dismissed all other angels to work in other areas until he’d secured it. “The sleepers aren’t in pain,” Gabriel said. “There’s no immediacy. The rest of Sheol is not without work to do.”
He studied the fragments, fascinated by their attraction to one another. With a little coaxing and the right infusion of energy, a handful of dust-like shards in a Guard could be compressed until they locked together instead of flying apart. He showed the Archangels how to do the same. “This is going to take a long time, but this process might reduce the silt enough to communicate over distances.” He pointed to one of the Archangels. “You, get me another Cherub. Anyone.”
Gabriel and the other Cherub argued about ways to net the silt. Once they had a method of filtering, he sent the Archangels to promulgate the process while the Cherubim debated ways to control the larger chunks.
“The most obvious is to hold the larger chunks inside a Guard while we detonate them,” said the other Cherub, “keeping the Guard permeable to human souls to permit them to escape, then compressing the debris into a sphere to prevent further silting.”
Gabriel said, “That has a side benefit that when we find spheres or spheroid objects, we’ll recognize them as already harvested and not waste time re-blowing material that’s already searched.”
The Archangels returned to find the Cherubim arguing about methods of corralling the meteoric boulders. They stepped in between to find out what the two methods were (as it turned out, they’d developed five) and who championed which (neither Cherub could remember) and the Archangels asked permission to begin with the implementation.
Gabriel protested, “We haven’t optimized a process.”
The Archangel heading the team said, “We don’t need an optimal process. We just need a process.”
Each Cherub took a small group and instructed them in a different method of grabbing the rock and shattering it safely. As expected, two of the five methods proved impossible to implement; the other three had varying degrees of success depending on the outside factors: the crowding, the silting, the size, the speed, and the number of souls within.
Gabriel had just snagged a medium-sized boulder to experiment with another technique when he felt Raphael excited at his back.
“They found Tobias!”
Heart pounding, Gabriel studied the boulder. “Have you seen him yet?”
“You have to come with me.” Raphael zipped around to the front, his eyes afire and his smile broad. “I can stay ten minutes before they need me back with the healing angels. Let’s go!”
Gabriel had fallen into the same stiff-limbed stance Michael had made fun of before, and he rolled his shoulders to relax himself. “I’m in the middle of something.”
“It can wait.” Raphael put his hand on Gabriel’s arm, and he went tense again. “I want to see the look on his face when he recognizes you.”
Gabriel pulled back more roughly than he’d intended. “I’m streamlining the process so we can work more efficiently. I need to concentrate.”
“But—”
“Go without me.”
Raphael sounded confused. “I kind of wanted to show you off to him.”
Gabriel released the boulder and spun to face him. “Why are we still having this conversation? You’re wasting minutes. I told you to go without me.”
The confusion yielded to hurt. Raphael’s voice dropped. “I don’t understand.”
“What is there not to understand?” Raphael’s sparks made him dizzy, so Gabriel armored his heart against Raphael’s fire. “Visit Tobias and have a good time. I’m not going with you.”
Inside Gabriel was a flood, and he realized he’d been wrong when he told Michael the dam had already gone down; he’d built a new one in the interim, one that threatened another breach. He couldn’t let that happen here, not in front of everyone, not in front of Raphael. So he fled into an analysis of how many seconds of Raphael’s ten minutes he’d already spent, how to answer Raphael’s arguments most efficiently, the logistics of how to manage separate visits to Tobias—forever, if necessary.
Raphael lowered his voice. “But he’ll want to see you.”
“Eternity’s a long time,” Gabriel looked back into the debris for his boulder. “He’ll see me eventually.”
Raphael reached for Gabriel’s heart, and Gabriel tensed. “Ever since you came back from his household, I’ve been thinking about how we could see him the first time together. How we’d surprise him.”
Gabriel folded his arms. “Far be it from me to criticize your planning abilities, but maybe you should have factored that into the equation before informing me I was a disgrace to you.”
Raphael radiated pain. “You’re still angry at me?”
Reverted to being a legalist.
Several of his Archangels monitored the exchange from a distance. It couldn’t be helped. For that matter, there was a demon army assembled outside the debris field, and they could be monitoring it too. Mephistopheles, laughing because Gabriel hadn
’t believed him the one time he’d told the truth.
“I’m not angry.” Gabriel struggled not to raise his voice. “But I’m also not going to embarrass you in front of him. He’s going to want to know why I was in his house for six months, and I’m going to have to tell him.”
His eyes huge, Raphael whispered, “I’ll explain.”
“Did I ask you to explain?” Gabriel stepped forward, his wings spread. “I’m abiding by your wishes. You don’t want to hear about that time, but I’m going to talk about it with him. That means we can’t visit him together. Am I being clear?”
Gone was Raphael’s spark, Raphael’s smile.
“Protesting my decision isn’t an efficient use of your time.” Gabriel gestured with one hand. “Eight minutes and fifteen seconds remain. Go.”
Raphael whispered, “You said…before…if I gave you five minutes…you’d trust me again.”
Gabriel said, “Perhaps that was an unwarranted optimism,” and Raphael gasped.
That pain went right through both of them, and Gabriel wanted to say something, anything that could explain— No. He was only telling the truth, and the truth was the truth: you faced it because you had no choice. There was nothing to say other than what he already had, not without getting into… But he shouldn’t need to. His solution made sense. It was just logical to visit Tobias separately so he could explain what happened without disgracing Raphael in the man’s eyes. If anything, Gabriel should have made sure to get there first.
Of course, right now Raphael didn’t appreciate the logic in visiting separately because with typical lack of foresight he had longstanding plans and couldn’t synthesize his conflicting wants.
Raphael finally managed, “Afterward, when I’m not there—” His shoulders hunched. “Afterward, you’ll go see him?”
Gabriel perked up. “You do understand.”