Chris edged away from the field, overwhelmed by the music. Releasing the hand of her daughter, she stole into the forest’s thinning mist beneath the grackle’s silent aegis.
“Michael?”
Her voice felt tinny to her against the pressure of the choir. She glanced around, found the trail of what could only be his steps, and dogged them. The pressure of unexpected tears weighted her eyes until she found she was running, the ferns slapping her with wet switches of green.
The broken plants and the dew-crushed footsteps stopped abruptly in a clearing. One step, two, three... and then none.
“Oh, no... Michael! Michael! Come back!”
Chris stumbled to a halt and pressed her fingers to her mouth, waiting until the urge to sob subsided. She ran her hands through her unbrushed curls, stopped with them tangled in her hair, pale elbows naked, her sleeves bunched at her shoulders.
“Mom?” Marie slid out of the shrubs, her voice hushed against the backdrop of the choir. Brad was behind her, blinking owlishly in the radiance of the new day.
“Hello, Cat.”
Marie joined her in staring at the last footstep. The girl touched her mother’s arm.
Said Chris, “I’m too late.”
Marie shrugged. “Are you sure? After all, it is God we’re talking about.”
“It is, isn’t it?” Chris said, clearing her throat.
Brad stepped out of the surrounding foliage. “He won’t be forsaken.”
“How can you be so sure? His crimes were far worse than Lucifer’s ever were.”
“Maybe,” Brad said. “But somehow I don’t think it matters. God is like that, it seems."
"What I wish I knew," Marie said, soft, "is why. Why did he do it?"
“Love," Chris said, rousing herself to answer. "A blind and jealous love, but still.”
“Seems crazy to hate someone you love so much," Brad said.
Chris shook her head, let her hands drop and fought a shiver. "Love and hate... they're not so far apart, sometimes."
"If that's true," Marie said, "then maybe one day Michael will flip back to love, and leave hate behind."
"I hope so," Chris whispered.
They all looked at the last footprint.
“Come back with us?” Marie asked at last.
Chris nodded.
Stephen could not pull himself away from the music until the sun had risen far enough into the sky for true morning. Reluctantly he retreated, facing the choir until he could gather the discipline to actually turn from it. It was easier then to stride further away.
The torn field had an unhealthy look. Stephen paused to stare at it, wondering what nagged him about it. He crouched down to rub his fingers through it.
Thus Mephistopheles found him laughing on the edge of Armageddon. He stopped, perplexed, snow-pure wings unfurling a few inches.
“Stephen?”
The priest looked up at the sound of the gravelly voice, mouth split in a broad grin. “Mephistopheles. Would you look at this?”
The angel joined him, standing over him. “It looks like a white line.”
“It is. This, my friend, is the Jesuit football field. This is probably the first time our side has ever won a game of any kind on it.”
Mephistopheles chuckled hoarsely.
Stephen fingered the soil. “But besides that... the earth. In places it’s softer than a baby’s skin, in others, it’s hardened and bitter.”
“In one place, the effect of our fighting, and in the other, the effect of our dead. You remember the bags Gabriel upended?”
Stephen nodded, looking up at the other man.
“When we are extinguished, what passes for our flesh fades to dust. That was the dust of the passing of the newborns.”
Stephen’s shoulders tightened. He let the soil spill unevenly through his fingers. “I wish there had been some other way to bring the blush back to the earth.”
Mephistopheles opened his belt pouch. “It will mend itself. What they say is true... time heals all wounds.”
“Only clean ones,” Stephen said, smiling wryly.
“True. By the way... you might be interested in this.” He tossed something to the priest.
Stephen glanced up, snatched it from the air and studied it: part of a broken clay medallion, depending from a damp and ragged satin cord. “What’s this? Another token back to Hell?”
“Back to Heaven, depending on how you look at it,” Mephistopheles said. “That’s what kept the battle Bound.”
Stephen turned it over in his fingers, frowning. “Bound?”
“You know Lucifer can make planes. He can isolate parts of them, as well. Not tidily and not for long, but....”
“The mist,” Stephen said suddenly. “Why no one saw us.”
“And why the Earth abides.” Mephistopheles’s pinions mantled. “Michael himself broke it open with his blows, an irony I'm sure you'll appreciate. It was a near thing: had the battle gone on too much longer, it would have faded. He is not omnipotent, my lord. But he thinks ever of you all, Stephen. In that, he reflects his Maker.”
“I’m beginning to understand that,” the priest replied. He rose, dusting his hands off on his pants. Stephen took a deep breath and looked at the once-demon. His hair was still black, his blouse torn and breeches bloody... but his glittering eyes matched the light of his halo, and the bleached white of the broad wings embraced the sunlight. “Well, my friend... whither now? Back to Heaven?”
“Heaven!” Mephistopheles laughed. “How much do you think has changed, Stephen? Halos and wings make our jobs easier, our lives more meaningful. But who will catch all the human souls before the Wind comes?”
“But... you won!”
“Did we?” Mephistopheles asked. His heavy baritone sounded utterly at odds with the glory tapestry woven by the thousand-fold voices beyond them. “The battle did not play to its natural end. There was a...,” he paused, then laughed, “A deus ex machina. Michael did not allow us back into Heaven. And he did not die. While he still lives, his is the word that rules.”
Stephen stared. “Would he stop you? In God’s Name, Mephistopheles! After such proof of God’s approval? Surely not even Michael would try to stop you!”
Mephistopheles smiled sadly. “Oh, he would not stop us. But my liege-lord will not press either. You forget that there is love between them. Lucifer will not push on Michael something that Michael does not desire. So until Michael opens his arms to us, we will remain in Hell, and shepherd the souls that cannot withstand Heaven’s scrutiny to our breast.”
“Love between them,” Stephen said. He shook his head. “I could believe it of Lucifer. But of Michael... it’s harder.”
Mephistopheles’s wings ruffled. “Harder to believe it of someone with such passion? I would believe true hatred of someone who remained cold to the sight of suffering. The Archangel had to work himself into a frenzy to beat my liege-lord, Stephen. He wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.”
“Mmm. Well, I can’t resist being a little skeptical.”
Mephistopheles chuckled and reached out a hand to grip Stephen’s shoulder. “Always skeptical, eh? Somehow I see some of that skepticism has flown from you, my friend.”
Stephen’s mouth twitched into a wry smile. “Hard to be skeptical when smothered with feathers and halos, isn’t it?” He shook his head. “But lack of belief has never been the root of my skepticism, Mephistopheles. Only bitterness.”
The angel canted his head.
Stephen broke away and began walking back toward the campus.
“Stephen,” Mephistopheles called, voice as soft as the gravel in it allowed.
He stopped.
“I’d like to know. And I think you want to share it.”
Stephen turned, folded his arms and looked down. “Maybe so. But it’s going to sound... well, after all this, it’s going to sound ridiculous.”
“Atoms, Stephen,” Mephistopheles said. “It’s all atoms.”
The priest looked away, closed his eyes, drew in a long breath through his nose. “There were things I’d seen all my life. When I was young, especially. My mother loved me so very much, but we didn’t live very well after my father left her. It made me sensitive to other people. The things they hid. And God—she’d always talk of Him, everyone did—did nothing.
“I looked at her, and everyone else... it made no sense. I perceived what I thought to be God’s cruelty, and I hated Him. I wanted to punish Him. To make Him hurt. The priesthood was perfect. Not only could I reach out to the people who suffered, but I could deprive myself of all the things in life that were supposed to make us happy. A family. A wife. Wealth and prosperity. Freedom to do whatever we wanted, no matter what. I thought I could hurt Him the way I saw Him hurting everyone else. People crushed by disease, by poverty, by other people. I couldn’t stand it.”
“And now?” Mephistopheles murmured.
“And now... I don’t know.” Stephen laughed. “What do you do when angels use your football field to fight a battle over the fate of human souls? It might be a long time before I work it all out.”
“I suspect you won’t be the only one,” the angel said. He stopped. “I should go back. It won’t be long before the choir can no longer be veiled from human hearing.”
“Back to Hell... and me to my classroom,” Stephen said. He stopped, rested his hands on Mephistopheles’s upper arms. “I’ll miss you, you know. For a demon, you’re good company.”
Mephistopheles grinned. The sunlight rendered his halo nigh invisible, save when he tilted his head. “And you for a human. Don’t worry. You’ll see me again.”
“In this life?” Stephen asked, a spark of hope rising.
The angel shook his head. “Probably not. But I’ll be there, when you die.”
Stephen’s breath stopped in his throat. He swallowed and stepped back. “Until that day, then. God with you, Mephistopheles.” He grinned against the ache. “You do Him pretty proud.”
The angel’s wings fanned open and he inclined his head, fisted hand crossed over his chest. “We’ll be waiting for you.”
Stephen watched Mephistopheles turn and walk away. He rubbed at one eye with the back of a hand.
The wind ruffled the grass at his ankles as he trudged home beneath the sun’s bright regard. Stephen breathed deeply of the cool air, but the cold did not quite banish the ache. He ducked beneath the old oak and across the ditch to his building. He pressed a hand to it and leaned against the wall, rasping his stubble-lined jaw against the coarse surface of the brick.
Stephen sighed, then opened the door and dragged himself up the stairs.
The door to the residence was ajar. He pushed it open and started.
“Asrial!”
Still clad in her magnificent robe, Asrial smiled. She did not rise from the couch, her hands clasped lightly in her lap and an afghan untidily arranged around her waist and over her arms. Her halo shed light like water, droplets of gold.
“Stephen.”
“What are you doing here?” The priest stood in the door, unable to move.
“I thought I’d spend one more night on Earth,” Asrial said. “I wondered... if I could spend it here?”
“But... the others, the singing... are you sure?”
Asrial smiled. “I have a token to return to Heaven when I wish. But I have learned so much here, so much in the past few days... I have to savor it. I don’t think I could do that in Heaven, or in Hell. There is too much light, too much darkness, too much singing and silence. Earth has just the right combination for me to consider both.”
Stephen laughed, and the laughter loosed tears. He allowed her to escort him to the couch, and he kneeled on the ground with his head against her knees. He wept, harsh, reluctant sobs, until spent he could cry no more.
Asrial’s fingers rested on the crown of his head.
“I’m sorry, lady.”
“Why?” she asked. “Do you grieve for the loss of your innocence? Of the way of thinking you left behind?”
Stephen managed one sole exhalation in lieu of the chuckle he felt but could not sound. “No. Yes. I don’t know.” He thought of the cross in Hell and his heart contracted.
She stroked his hair, as if she could sense his grief returning. "Sssh."
"I'm trying," he said. "I gained so much. But what I lost... what we lost!"
"Sometimes," Asrial murmured, "what we thought lost was simply... misplaced. For a time."
He looked up at her, hope rising in his eyes.
"I don't know," she said softly. "But with God, all things are possible."
He sighed out.
"So much pain," she murmured. "But there can be no regretting growth, Stephen.”
“No, I guess not. But it’s human nature, Asrial. We regret. We long for things we have left behind. Simpler things, simpler times. Don’t you?”
Asrial’s fingers paused in their slow, rhythmic caress. “I... I don’t know, Stephen. I do not think so. What I have learned is so sublime, so magnificent, that I do not think I can imagine ever not knowing it.”
“And what is this thing you have learned?” Stephen asked.
Her wings fluttered, dripping their rich, thin citrus fragrance. “I have learned that His mercy is so vast it encompasses the Fallen and every living thing He has ever made. Even coarse humanity.”
Stephen let out a long sigh, staring at the empty hearth. He had no desire to move. “Even coarse humanity. It’s so hard to see.”
“Yes. You do not live in a place that makes it easy. But no matter what, you must make your own fate, Stephen... as must all your kind and mine. We are what we have made ourselves, and He can only watch and hope.”
Stephen chuckled. It was a weak sound, but genuine. “I said the same thing to Mephistopheles. I don't think I'll ever forget the feel of all those pebbles.”
Asrial’s fingers fluttered against his head. “When?”
“In Heaven, when I was sure everything was lost. He told me,” here Stephen paused and laughed, “Well, let’s just say his response sounded a lot like mine would have a few years ago. He seems happier now.”
“Yes.”
“Though...”
“Yes,” Asrial said. Neither of them said it; spoke of the seeming permanence of the rusty gravel of the once full baritone. Instead, the angel said, “None of us will go unchanged from this.”
Stephen smiled, though the set of his face was solemn. “As it should be.”
They remained that way as the morning advanced. Hunger drove him from her finally, and he kindled the fire and engaged himself in the kitchen. The angel remained on the couch, silent, staring at the flames.
Stephen turned down the bed at gloaming. Though they did not speak, she went to the room and settled on it. He left her a cup of hot chocolate and sat on the sofa, wrapping himself in the high, heady scent of her feathers. The perfume drew him prone, and finally into sleep.
Asrial finished the cup of hot chocolate and sat on the edge of the priest’s bed, staring at the clear night. She drifted to the edge of the room and peeked out of it. The priest rested with his back to the door, the afghan curled tightly around his body and his back rising and falling in a slow, measured rhythm.
Asrial smiled and slipped away.
It was the work of moments outside to crack the token and duck into the resulting ripple; this time when it dropped her into the thickness of Hell’s air she was ready, her wings tightly cupped around her body and her knees drawn to her chest. She reached for the ground, and it replied.
After a few breaths spent recovering, Asrial unfolded and made her way to the Gate, past the line of humans advancing, step by step, to their new home.
“Hail the Gate,” she called.
“Hail the walker,” the guard called out.
“I am just visiting,” Asrial said, stopping. Fatigue lined the guard’s face, but he held his head up and his back straight. The creamy wings with their green-bronze bands suited him far better than black ever would have. She smiled at him.
“Visitors are always welcome,” the guard said with a chuckle and a wondering look. “Especially you, my lady.”
Asrial paused.
“Your name is not unknown here,” he said, then indicated the Gate. “Pass on.”
Asrial dipped her head to him and stepped through the Gate. She took her time; it had been late evening when she’d left Earth, and there was no place she really needed to be. The silence no longer distressed her so much. She would not want to live here—could not—but for a short time the silence was pleasing.
Her feet carried her unerringly to the manor. Her reception at its gates was as warm as the one at Hell’s entrance. When the guard escorted her to the appropriate door, she paused with one hand on its knob. Then she gathered herself and turned it, letting herself in.
They were both inside: Lucifer at his desk, writing, the silver wings holding all the darkness of the room’s corners and all the crimson light of the flames in the hearth, and Mephistopheles in one of the chairs with a glass of wine. They both looked up at the sound of the door, and seconds later were on their feet.
“Lady,” Lucifer said. “I did not expect you here.”
Asrial cast her eyes down, leaning on the door. “You gave me the token, my lord.” She smiled and lifted her head. “You did not tell me how to use it.”
Mephistopheles chuckled, sitting again in the chair. “Ah, lady! You are certainly not the same angel I met in a clearing on Earth.”
Asrial ducked her head, blushing. “No. Nor you the same demon. And you have as much to do with my change... both of you... as anything else that has happened these past days.” She looked back up at them. “I came to thank you. And to tell you that I will see you, I think, soon.”
“Lady?” Lucifer said, brows lifting.
Asrial rested her head against the door, eyes lowered. “I want to go home, my lord. I want to fly again, to sing again. But I... you cannot ignore something... someone, when it has been shown to you that they feel as you feel. Weep, and laugh. Understand. I do not think I could bear anymore the thought of the Wind’s fingers on any single soul.”
Lucifer’s silent smile was as eloquent as the silver eyes.
“You cannot live here, though,” Mephistopheles said. “Not and be healthy.”
“No,” Asrial said. “But I thought I would benefit from knowing better the ways of His universe. Well enough, perhaps, to learn to travel between His worlds. For that, I would need a teacher.” She looked at Lucifer.
Lucifer laughed. “Ah... do you think I would say no? Could say it, even? You will always be welcome here.”
“Perhaps we can even take lessons on Earth,” Mephistopheles said.
Lucifer glanced at him, and the other angel shrugged with a grin.
“If she can learn, I wouldn’t mind knowing either. It would make things easier, to be able to get back from Earth without using one of the tokens. Easier on you as well, to have someone to help you make them for our scouts when they go against the Wind.”
"It helps enough that they have their halos," Lucifer said. "But I would not mind the teaching."
"How is it, then?" Asrial said, glancing at Mephistopheles's brow, the radiance glimmering off his dark hair. "The halos. Do you think you can stay here with them?"
"It's strange," Lucifer said. "Before, we could not have used them. I built this dimension myself, and there was nothing in the formula to permit it... we were too far from Him. But it's almost as if God has been through Hell, and woven a thread of light through it. Just enough to allow us to keep them."
"Just enough for us to hear Him," Mephistopheles said softly.
"Are you surprised?" Asrial asked, smiling.
Lucifer returned her smile with half of his own. "Not at all." He held out a hand to her, which she took.
"A little miracle," Mephistopheles said.
"One of many," Lucifer murmured, and they contemplated it in silence together, and found peace in it.
“Mephistopheles,” Asrial said after a while. “What did you tell Stephen, in Heaven? When you thought it was too late.”
Lucifer arched a brow.
Mephistopheles looked at her. "Is it important?"
"I'd like to know," she said.
Mephistopheles shrugged and told her. They were all silent afterwards, watching the firelight.
“Will you stay long?” Lucifer asked.
Asrial stared at her interlaced fingers, an image, an intention forming in her mind. “Not this time. There are things I must do... things I would like to do.”
Lucifer brought her hand to his lips, kissed her fingers. “We await the day.”
Asrial smiled, curved her hand around his jaw. She touched Mephistopheles’s shoulder, then said quietly, “My lord... I think I would like to go home. But there is something you can help me with before I go.”
Asrial erupted from the tear into the giddy brilliance of Heaven’s morning. Her wings stretched taut, and new feathers snapped into the empty sockets, arabesques of golden dust spiraling from the barbs. Her wrists and ankles lost their lace of blood and frayed skin. The music of the Creation spilled into her and filled her again, at last, with her halo to mediate it, to keep it from whelming her.
Joyous circles she traced in the sky as she laughed, pirouetting in the light spring breeze. Through the air of Shamayim, across its radiant sunlit translucence, she skipped and danced, flexing each feather and holding out open arms to the rising sun.
The currents carried her past the halo mount, its bell tower silent. Asrial’s eyes roamed over it. She took one last breath and then headed to the Gate into Raquia. She had one last errand.
Then... the songs in Zebul, and the sunrise on her favorite ledge. A bath in one of Heaven's tiny stream, and a new chiton. She would dance to His music and laugh when it freed the tears of joy from the vessel of her body. She had shed the veils over her eyes. Her soul rejoiced in the Lord.
She sang as she flew.
Stephen woke with a start on the couch. The perfume of Heaven teased his nostrils, already fading from the coarse yarn of the afghan wrapped around his body.
“Asrial?” He licked his cracked lips and swallowed past the sleep-taste in his mouth. No one answered him, so he pulled himself upright and checked his room.
The blankets were mussed and the cup beside his night table empty, but she was gone. Stephen leaned on the door jamb and sighed. “Couldn’t have lasted forever, could it,” he muttered, then smiled wryly at himself.
The clock beside the bed read 5:45 AM. A Monday morning. Stephen rolled his shoulders back, then rubbed one absently. He still had to grade papers... but there was time before class to do that, and maybe watch the sunrise.
He picked up his folder from the bedroom and stopped in the kitchen to check the small refrigerator. He left it with a yellow apple in one hand and the folder under his arm, walking for the door, when something stopped him. Something about the room.
Stephen gave it a cursory once-over, saw nothing out of place. On his second, more deliberate survey, he found it: a dull wink of something on the desk beside the fireplace. He approached the table, each step separated by a long pause.
It was the glitter of gold that had attracted him; veins of it running through some of the dull gray stones. Five sets of ten pebbles, some smooth and others rough, some dark and others light and still others variegated or split through with veins of gold, silver, and iron. The additional beads separating each decade followed the same pattern, if larger.
Stephen put down the apple and folder to lift the rosary with trembling fingers. Long threads of hair, braided copper-gold and black, connected the stones. He let his gaze drop, bead by bead, down to the climax of the rosary.
The cross had been tied together with a thinner tendril of braided copper-gold hair: a small, asymmetrical cross formed from a long thorn stained black and a splinter of wood bleached gold.
Stephen’s eyes closed.
He could not put it down. In the end, he found a soft pouch he used to carry his Bible and placed it inside, mindful of the thorn. He tied it to his belt, ignoring the occasional bite of the cross through the fabric, then picked up his papers and breakfast.
Stephen walked outside, behind his building to the field. There he leaned back, unmarked exams in his lap. He bit into the apple and watched the sun rise.
Clad in purest white bordered in silver-gilt embroidery, the female angels danced down the stairs, tossing rose petals. Seeing them pour from the throat of the birthplace, Gabriel waved his free hand to the nearest. “Are we too late?”
“Oh no!” the angel said. “They’re still opening.” Her eyes lingered on the man leaning heavily against Gabriel’s side, and she stopped beside him. Drawing the garland of opalescent lilies and curling ferns from her arm, she arranged it with gentle white hands around that angel’s shoulders before the dancers drew her away again into Heaven’s vibrant morning.
Raphael caressed the garland with trembling fingers, his barren wings tightly pressed to his back. Gabriel smiled at him, then helped him up the warm stone stairs to Zebul’s main birthplace.
Ruth stood before the doors. “Gabriel, Raphael! Come! They’re waking. The first have already come forth.”
Raphael lifted dark eyes. “They live?”
She rested her hand on his shoulder, and her smile had a hint of solemn tenderness. “Of course.”
Raphael closed his eyes.
The silence that surrounded them seemed insulated from the celebration, the petals floating on the soft spring breeze. Gabriel looked at Ruth from over Raphael’s bowed head, and his lips framed the name silently, his eyes making it a question: Michael?
She shook her head.
“Come,” the Choir Director of the Sixth Heaven said after a few moments. “We have mourned our dead. It is time to celebrate our living.”
“Amen, my sister,” Gabriel said, hushed but fervent. They passed over the threshold into the warm darkness of the birthplace. Zebul’s had been built larger, loftier than the smaller ones near the edges of Heaven. Grand columns of brown stone smoothed down by countless hands braced the vaulted ceilings, and sunlight streamed through the orange, gold, scarlet and roseate stained glass windows. Tesserae of warm light danced on the stone floors.
The three stood on the ledge overlooking the birthplace floor with its several score cloth-of-gold and chalcedony nests glittering in the light. Incense and dust mixed in heavy shrouds in the air, fragrant with the sweetness of dissolved globes, and angels moved in and out of them, greeting the newly born, clothing them and leading them up the stairs to the ledge where others of the Ninth waited to joyfully receive them.
Raphael took a shaking step forward as one of the globes below them cracked. Its halves sprang apart, and from it a body unfolded, arms spreading upward with the grace of a flower opening to the sun. The female angel rose to her feet and the globe’s pieces disintegrated, spiraling up to her brow and crowning her in a golden dust that spun until it coalesced. Finer dust skidded off the new halo, falling to pattern her skin with a net of iridescence.
Raphael stumbled down the brown steps to stand before her. A tunic was deposited in his nerveless hands by a gentle bystander, and he stepped forward, uncertainty in his every motion.
But she lifted great, grave eyes the color of storm-bellied skies to him, and allowed him to drape the fabric over her, clip it at her shoulders. Her white wings were barred with rain-silver and the gray of clouds.
“What is your name, little sister?” Raphael asked, holding her hands, feeling their warmth, their very realness.
“Nirel.” Her voice was a soft alto. Her eyes traveled without guile over his denuded wing-arms. “What happened to your wings?”
His lower lip quivered, and he smiled though his eyes had filmed with tears. “A test of faith I gave myself. Come up with us?”
“Yes.”
From the ledge, Ruth and Gabriel watched solemnly as the archangel on the floor of the birthplace drew the new angel away from her nest and toward the stairs. They barely heard the last exchange.
“Who are you, brother?”
“I don’t know yet. But I may be a healer... in time.”
“I don’t want to go to school.”
“I don’t care, Cat,” Chris said with a grin, balancing the laundry basket against her hip. The newspaper classifieds stuck rakishly from one of its corners. “Kick that no-good boyfriend of yours off the couch and into the shower and get out of the house.”
Marie sighed. “It just seems so dumb. How can we go back to normal life after having watched the Apocalypse and then spent Sunday morning listening to angels sing?”
“You’ll figure out a way,” Chris said. She rummaged through the basket and wrinkled her nose at the sight of a charcoal gray sweater, stained with blood. “Mmph. This is going to be a bear to get out.”
After Brad had showered and joined her downstairs, Marie picked up her book-bag. “Are you sure I can’t stay home?” she asked her mother.
Chris rolled her eyes. “You’re going to miss the bus if you don’t get moving.”
Brad grinned. “Yeah, but what are you going to do?”
Chris tilted her head. “The laundry.” She grinned. “Get moving.”
Marie sighed and padded to the front door, pushing it open. Chris listened to the door opening and smiled fiercely, reaching for the classifieds. She’d already opened them to the relevant section. There was always a need for skilled doctors....
“MOM!”
Chris stopped and frowned. She stalked to the front door. “Cat, stop hedging and get out—”
“Mom!” Marie was standing on the gravel path, mouth agape. “There’s—well there’s a horse on the lawn.”
The yellow horse lifted its head and stared at Chris.
“An Apocalyptic horse, even,” Brad added, grinning.
“I see that,” Chris said. She laughed. “Get moving.”
“But what are we going to do with him?”
Chris shrugged, walked to the horse. She petted its head as it lipped her bathrobe. “We’ll figure something out. Won’t we?”
The horse whuffed.
The bird flew over the burnt and plowed earth of the field, riding currents still heavily laden with the dust of Heaven. There would be riotous flowers come spring.
Its errand spent, the grackle circled the field, then banked toward the forest. It knew where it could find down of the finest quality, just right for feathering a nest.
