Roland followed me the whole way home and parked behind me in the circular driveway. I ignored his truck at first as I hobbled inside in search of Arwen. She didn’t answer right away when I called for her, but the house smelled fragrantly of baking bread, so she had to be here somewhere. How was Arwen always disappearing when I needed her most? Kaiser barked once in greeting down in the den, asking to be let out. When I peeked through the blinds I saw that Roland had left his pickup idling, a window down as he sat behind the wheel and drew on a fresh cigarette. I wanted someone to tell, but there was no one. I felt exposed and alone. I let Kaiser out of his kennel and coaxed him up the circular staircase before fetching the last remaining Dr Pepper from the fridge.
This I carried out to Roland in his truck. I knew he had followed me home to intimidate me, but I figured someone guilty would stay hunkered down inside the house. Would he ask about my name again, or threaten me? I resolved that I would not be afraid. I was a man with a Dr Pepper, a geriatric German shepherd, and nothing to lose. Halfway to his truck, I paused as a new thought struck me. This isn’t the first time he’s done this. This isn’t the first time he’s followed someone home. Maura, did this man know about us? I tried to keep my hand from shaking as I raised the Dr Pepper, my peace offering. A geek bearing gifts. But Roland didn’t wait around. He shook his head, flicked out his burning cigarette, and rolled up his window. Once he got his rig turned around, he peeled away.
Growling, Kaiser lifted his back leg and loosed a stream of urine into the snow. I cracked the Dr Pepper. “I know,” I said. “That guy is going to be trouble.”
I knew I’d be seeing him again and soon. I had to find out what happened to Maura, which meant I needed to go back to The Land, and when I did I would go to Mother Sophie. She owned the property and had founded the church, so everything began with her. She was a woman who held a healing fire in her hands, a woman who had told me about a living God who held me in His palms as a sparrow, a God who knew the number of hairs on my head, knew me when I was in the cradle of my mother’s womb, knew the lies and deceptions I would grow up to speak and loved me still. Of all of them, she was the one I felt I could reason with. I had to find out what she knew. But not yet. I needed to think this through and wait for early morning tomorrow when Elijah was likely to be out on a call.
I found Arwen in the garage of all places. I hadn’t thought of checking there. She was dressed in jeans and a black hoodie, the hood up as she sat on the bottom step with the wounded raven in her lap. She must have caught it somehow, or trained it to feed from her hand. I remembered my dream, the swaddled bird, the blood after she split the tongue to make it speak. Arwen didn’t turn around at first. “You didn’t hear me calling?”
When she did turn, her eyes glittered with tears. “Edgar’s dead,” she said, using the name I had told her about a few days before.
I walked down the steps and sat beside her. She cradled the bird as though she held a child and not some wild creature. “We should have taken him to a rescue center,” I said.
Arwen stroked the glossy feathers. “How? We couldn’t catch him once he got up into the loft.”
The raven’s eyes shone white like river pebbles, filmed over in death, the terrible tongue with its dream prophecies sealed inside the beak. “I need to tell you something,” I said. I wished I had before. I spoke of the storm of ravens filling up the pines and their war in the snow, the carnage I’d seen, and how this bird had been the lone survivor. I told her about my sense of the evil driving them to slaughter one another in a time of famine and how sharing this story in the church had made me seem like some kind of prophet to the people at Rose of Sharon, one more proof the world was ending when we were living in a time of miracles and apocalyptic horrors.
Arwen listened without commenting. She lay her head against my shoulder. “You’re a strange person,” she said.
I had a difficult time arguing with her assessment. I had expected her to be angry that I had withheld such a story. Did that mean she believed me? Strange was a better alternative than crazy.
“So you believe in all that Y2K stuff?” Arwen said. “You think the world is going to end because you saw some birds lose their shit?”
“Maybe,” I said. “All I know is that I’m living in a world right now where things are happening that I can’t explain with logic and reason. I’ve just been trying to figure it out. There has to be some reason these things keep happening.”
Arwen blew out an exasperated breath. “Maybe there isn’t any reason. Sometimes nature writes a horror story about the battle for survival. Things die. Especially when you’re trying to hold on to something wild. Something wild in a place where it doesn’t belong.” She rocked slightly on the step as she spoke. “Will you help me bury Edgar? I don’t want the wolves to get him.”
We dug a hole for the raven behind the ruined rose hedges while a bitter wind nipped at our cheeks. Even a grave only two feet deep proved difficult as we hacked at ground caked with ice, my steel shovel chipping away at iron soil. The effort left me short on breath. “You want to say anything?” I asked Arwen when the hole seemed sufficient.
“No. I’m just pissed he’s dead.” She set the corpse in the hole. In his shallow grave, the raven was so dark against the whiteness of the snow all around. “Besides, you’re the prophet.”
“Let’s get inside,” I said. “I’m cold.” On the way back after tamping down the ground, the shovel loose in my left hand, I pointed out the frozen-over koi pond and we stopped there. You could see their bodies encased in their icy tomb, a blur of orange inside a coffin made of glass. It was shaping up to be a melancholy afternoon.
“Your parents didn’t say anything about tending them. They’re down there, a couple of fish popsicles.” The thought gave me an ugly premonition. In this part of the country when the snow melts, when sheets of ice sealing shut the lakes and rivers give way to running water, the springtime can reveal ugly, buried secrets. In the spring the land gives up its winter dead.
“They’re down there in the mud under the ice,” Arwen said, bumping against me so we stood shoulder-to-shoulder. “But I don’t think they’re dead. Pond’s deep enough to keep it from freezing all the way. A koi can slow its heartbeat to a single beat per minute when it goes into hibernation.”
“They’re alive?” It seemed impossible.
“You’ll see,” she said. “Winter can’t last forever.”
I was no longer so sure about that.
“And,” Arwen added, “not every miracle defies explanation. There’s a life force at the core of every being, stronger than any of us can realize.”
Her hopefulness surprised me. I tried my best to argue against it. “We are also more fragile than we know. So easily snuffed out.”
“Not the koi,” she said. “They’re aquatic life-ninjas, truly badass. You just wait and see.”
As soon as we left the shovel in the garage and stepped inside we smelled smoke, an acrid scent. Then everything happened at once as the smoke detector in the hallway began to screech when smoke curling along the ceiling reached it.
“Damn!” Arwen said. “I forget I had bread in the oven.”
I went to get a chair to silence the alarm while Arwen hurried into the kitchen. In the chaotic moments that followed neither of us recognized the sound of the doorbell ringing. I thought the sound was inside my head, a remnant of my time at the firing range, or this alarm, so loud I could imagine my eardrums bleeding into my brain. I only knew what I was hearing when I saw Arwen hurrying down the hallway after I’d yanked out the battery. She glanced up at me, still stupidly standing on a chair in the middle of the hall. “I’m not here,” she said in a firm voice, and she disappeared into her room, closing the door carefully behind her.
Roland must be back, and I would have to confront him alone. Kaiser barked downstairs, stirred up by the noise and smoke. The doorbell buzzed again, insistent. When I made my way down the hall and peeked through the peephole I saw it wasn’t Roland after all, but instead a police officer in Navy blues, a young man who didn’t look much older than me, his face freckled, his orange hair shaved to stubble. He held his hat in one hand and pressed on the buzzer with the other.
I opened the door halfway, conscious of what the chaos inside must have sounded like to him here at the threshold. Downstairs, Kaiser continued to carry on, knowing a visitor was here.
After the officer and I exchanged greetings, he said, “You’re the boy the Krolls asked to tend this place?”
I nodded, though I didn’t like him calling me a boy. He had eyes like blue fire, like the twin flames of Bunsen burners. His shaved head and intense glower bothered me. He would have fit right in with the skinheads who had been coming and going on The Land.
“Who else is there in the house with you?”
“Just me and the dog,” I said. The lying felt like second nature by now. “What’s this about, Officer?”
He craned his neck, trying to peer past me. “Mind if I come inside?”
“Actually, I do.” Corny lines about asking for a warrant flitted through my mind, straight from television. “Look, I’m really busy right now.”
He frowned, his whitish lips thinning. The splash of freckles across his nose and cheeks made him look young, I decided, but those eyes were cold and calculating. “Smells like something’s burning.”
“I’m not much of a cook,” I said, “but I can’t see how that concerns the Aurora Bay Police Department.”
That didn’t even buy the crease of a smile. He had come here hunting for something. Or someone. “The Krolls themselves called our department and asked us to look in. Apparently, they haven’t been able to reach you.”
I held my arms across my chest, the chill from the open door getting to me. I hadn’t been home much of the last week, spending most days on The Land.
“They’re worried their daughter might try to come home.”
“Daughter?” I hoped my voice sounded surprised.
From his pocket he took out a folded printout with Arwen’s mugshot. She had long black hair in the photo, ebony waves that must have fallen to her waist, a hippie princess. But her eyes were hard as she glared defiantly at the camera or the person behind it. “You seen anyone who looks like this? Goes by the name of Arwen? The Krolls think she’ll try to come here.”
“Huh,” I said, “I didn’t even know the Krolls had a daughter.” My voice broke high with the lie.
His pale eyes scoured my face. I could tell he knew I was lying. He folded the picture again and took out a business card with his name on it, Officer Connor Sheehan. “You call me if you see anything unusual. I’ll be stopping by again to check up on you.”
He was halfway to his cruiser before I called out to him. I could have told him about Roland’s threatening presence, his trespassing. Maybe even what I’d seen and heard on The Land: rumors of dynamite and ex-cons fresh from Stillwater. I could make trouble for Elijah, a convict who wasn’t supposed to own or operate firearms. “Officer Sheehan, why do they think she’s coming here?”
He turned, his hat pulled low, his eyes alight under the brim. “Seems she ran into some trouble across the country in Washington. Authorities in Bellingham want to speak with her. They tried contacting the Krolls after she vanished, and the Krolls in turn have tried contacting you.”
Standing before the open door I was so cold my teeth were nearly chattering. “What’d she do?” Not asking such a question would’ve raised more suspicion.
He walked toward me a few paces, snow squeaking under his boot heels. “The Bellingham PD believes she witnessed a murder. They would like to question her.”
“Well,” I said, “I’ll let you know.”
“You do that.” Officer Sheehan didn’t drive away at first, instead strolling the perimeter. He would see two sets of footprints in the snow instead of one. The garage door opened with a freshly used shovel lying inside. A wrong smell. A long time passed before he drove away. I had a feeling he would be back.
Before I went into the kitchen I checked the phone. Sure enough, Arwen had pulled the cord from the wall. Again. No wonder the Krolls hadn’t been able to reach me. I plugged it back in and went into the kitchen, sitting in a chair to wait for her beside the burned loaf. I rubbed my hands together to try to get heat back into them.
A few more minutes passed before Arwen emerged from her back room and stood surveying the charred brown wreckage of her baking efforts. “I suppose you have questions,” she said.
She carried the loaf and pan over to the sink and started scraping away burned portions. Flickers of wings beat at the edge of my vision, which made Arwen look like she floated over the floor, the aura all around her. I worried that the edges of my miraculous healing were beginning to fray and come undone like everything else in my life. She carried the loaf back to the table and fragrant steam bloomed when she cut it open. The deeper smell of pumpernickel, dark and sweet as molasses or unspoken secrets, lived on under the char. She slathered a few pieces in butter and pushed them toward me. “Eat,” she commanded. “You don’t look well.”
“If you talk,” I said. Arwen watched me eat for a while, her own plate untouched.
“You weren’t supposed to be here,” she said. Arwen had come home knowing her parents planned to spend the winter in the South, believing she could live here in secret. She wouldn’t have come otherwise. Her childhood had been half-feral, the only happy times when she wandered the woods with Kaiser. Verbally abusive, her father made her life difficult, and her mother had been distant and distracted, a woman who only seemed to love her gardens. Arwen had run away at the age of fifteen and hadn’t looked back.
She told me some stuff I already knew about finding her way out west and her life in Seattle with other kayak-activists, how much she’d loved the ocean—her first arrest came at this time, a trespassing violation during a Greenpeace protest. She told me that she eventually came to Bellingham and lived with the other flower children down in Fairhaven, where she thought she would spend the rest of her days. Until she met Gabe.
“You remind me so much of him. Before the accident.” Arwen picked at the slab of pumpernickel before her but didn’t eat. “That’s when everything changed. Gabe was riding his bike down Alabama Hill—the steepest hill in town—when a car pulled out of a driveway and right into him. He flew over the hood and hit the asphalt headfirst. The helmet saved his life when it cracked, but his momentum . . .” Arwen pushed her plate away and drew in a shaky breath. “He lost so much skin. Shattered his chin. He broke bones in his face I didn’t know could be broken.”
She swallowed hard before she went on. I was glad she didn’t elaborate. I could imagine what someone would look like and feel like after so much damage. How well I knew.
“They reconstructed his chin,” she went on, “but he wasn’t ever the same. It’s like the head injury opened up something mean inside of him. And all those surgeries left him in pain. All the time. He got addicted to the pills. Percs. Vicodin. Whatever he could get his hands on after his prescriptions ran out. We were living apart from the others by then. With Gabe’s habits, money from the settlement didn’t last long.”
I didn’t know if I should reach across the table, try to hold her hand. Arwen was dry-eyed as she told her story. “He wouldn’t go into treatment. Even just talking about it made him furious. Gabe needed the pills. God, he was so pitiful. He would wake crying as he relived the accident. Half the time it was like living with a child. The other half, he raged.” Arwen crossed her arms, hunching into herself. “When he got the idea to start breaking into houses, I didn’t try to argue him out of it. He couldn’t do it alone—Gabe wasn’t a planner. He wasn’t smart like that. So, I drove him, and we cruised neighborhoods. We did most of the robberies during the day, when we could be certain that no one was home. All the usual tricks. Hitting houses on the corner, houses with backyards blind to neighbors. Gabe could get in and out in minutes. He took what cash or jewelry he could find and raided medicine cabinets. I think I knew we would get caught from the beginning—thieves always do—but I didn’t see it coming when it happened.”
Arwen’s face looked washed out in the gray light filtering through the kitchen skylight. “We had simple rules. He went in unarmed. Get in and out within five minutes. No places with dogs. No busy streets. And never, ever go back to the same house. But Gabe had made a big score at a house up on Bear Creek Road, got a whole bottle of Vikes from some old-timer’s cabinets. A week later he thought we should hit the house again in case the owner had refilled his prescriptions. I couldn’t talk him out of it.”
Arwen returned to picking at her slice of bread, which had been fairly dismantled. “It was raining that day, one of those cold, drizzly afternoons when there would be few people out walking around. I dropped Gabe off at the corner and then pulled around the block, where I could watch from a distance. I saw him go over a low fence into the backyard. The house looked dark. I remember feeling kind of drowsy. The rain sounded pleasant, dripping down through the firs and plinking on my roof. I dozed off, for how long I don’t know. We’d used the earnings from one score to buy a couple of Nokia mobile phones. We wanted to use them like walkie-talkies. I looked down at the time on mine and when I glanced back up I saw a light go on in the bedroom upstairs. My heart went into my throat. Gabe knew not to turn on any lights. There had to be someone there, someone who was waiting for him. I called Gabe on the phone to warn him. He must have picked up just as the guy was coming into the room. I screamed ‘Get out!’ but he didn’t respond. I heard his phone hit the carpet.”
Arwen’s face dropped into her hands as though she needed something to steady the weight of her head, the weight of what she knew. “His phone was still on, so I heard it all happen. I heard Gabe pleading, ‘Please don’t kill me.’ The other man’s voice was muffled, but he went on for a long time, until his voice rose to a shout, and Gabe shouted back, and then there was the boom of the gun. I heard it all. I heard his body fall.” One hand massaged her throat as though it hurt to speak the story aloud. “And I just drove away. I just left him there to die. I stopped on the way home to call the police from a pay phone. I didn’t want to use the Nokia. I was only thinking of how to save myself by then.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I reached across the table and wrapped my hand around her cold wrist, squeezed. Arwen didn’t respond. “I can’t imagine going through something like that.”
“When the son of a bitch turned himself in, he claimed self-defense,” she said flatly.
“No wonder they want to talk to you, right? I mean, should you tell them what you heard?”
Arwen yanked her wrist from my grip, pushed herself away from the table, and stood suddenly. “No,” she said, though she couldn’t bear to look at me. “It wasn’t just him and Gabe in that room. His wife was there, too. She told the police all about it. Gabe down on his knees. Gabe begging. The speech her husband gives about ‘protecting his property’ before he pulls the trigger. When the news stations came to interview her she almost sounds proud of the son of a bitch. But every night I go to bed, I hear the phone fall, I hear Gabe begging, I hear that terrible boom.” Arwen sniffed and glanced my way. The aura still haloed her faintly, but there were no tears in her eyes. Why had she cried over a dead raven, but not her boyfriend? It wasn’t flintiness, I thought, but the story of someone hollowed out by grief. She had been all cried out long before she came here.
“So, if I go back there,” she said, “all they will do is arrest me as an accomplice. I can’t help Gabe. I packed my stuff in a duffel bag and left the same night before the cops showed up at our apartment. They already have enough to convict this man. He made a speech of his own for the cameras. Like he was some kind of avenging angel. They were waiting for Gabe. Somehow they knew he would come back. They were waiting and they executed him. Whatever happens will be up to a jury. If they convict him of premeditated murder, he will go away for life. From what I could bear to read, the wife was sick and the pills were hers, so maybe they’ll go easy on her. But that’s the deal. Gabe’s dead, and nothing I do will make any difference.”
I wasn’t so sure about that. I could imagine Arwen saying what she had just told me to a jury. Explaining how Gabe went in unarmed. Helping them see the humanity of a dead addict and thief. But Arwen turned and walked away before I could say anything else, shutting herself in her room.
After she left I fired up the percolator on the stove. I would drink the entire pot myself if I had to. I had work to do. While the coffee perked, I went into my own room and downed an Effexor—technically one of the antidepressants I’d been prescribed—a preventive measure to hold off the migraine. I felt guilty taking the medicine, like I had given up on the miracle, but I left my pain meds alone. I needed to think clearly.
I sat on the edge of the bed and felt a faint pressure in my back pocket. The pamphlet Roland had given me to be photocopied and distributed. I’d forgotten all about it. I couldn’t even remember putting it into my back pocket. I touched the drawing of the woman who so resembled Maura, a likeness that had provoked Elijah as well. Or maybe I was just imagining the resemblance. Already her face was fading inside me.
Maura, maybe I never saw you clearly at all.
I carried the pamphlet into the kitchen. What bothered me worst about it were the distorted faces of the gangbangers and the Jewish judge. The distortions were cartoonish, meant to be comical. They invited the viewer to be on the inside of one big, cosmic joke. And if you were on the inside you gained the power to laugh, the power to mock and demonize those who were different, the power to harm those demons you had invented.
And I kept thinking of Noah, his angry, disappointed tears. Of Professor Friedman’s quote in the article, about uprooting hate from the shadows. Arwen’s story had reminded me that evil is a real and active force in this world. The comic book violence in The Turner Diaries had inspired Timothy McVeigh to bomb the Federal Building, killing over a hundred, including a dozen children in a daycare on the lowest level. What evil might I unleash by distributing this? I tried to summon the outrage I remembered from my own near-mugging. I tried to summon the fondness I felt for Elijah and Mother Sophie, that sense of unity, us against the world. No. I recognized this for what it was. Not only vicious propaganda, but a lie that robbed people of their humanity. The percolator had bubbled over by then. I fed my pamphlet into the stove’s blue flame and then carried this burning page to the sink, where I dropped it in and watched it turn to ash.
I carried the entire pot down with me into the den. I felt worse than ever about the world I lived in, but I was also certain my own time was limited. If I were to die like Gabe, I didn’t want to leave this world without anything to remember me by. For all these reasons I spent the entire afternoon working on coding and design for my game.
In the last section I had written, a shadowy figure hovered at the edge of the scene, summoned by my subconscious mind. It was time to welcome Death into my game. I knew what to do now. My fool would have to play a chess game against Death, like in The Seventh Seal. If he won, Death would spare him, but if he lost he would have to journey into the Land of the Dead.
This became another cutscene, the fool playing the part that Spassky had played in Reykjavík, the impossible task of defending white against an all-consuming darkness. There would be no safe place for him to go but into the Land of the Dead.
Here again, I could twist the story to my purposes, because what looked like death once more would instead open up into another unexpected adventure. Bringing all this together fueled my excitement and my fingertips flew over the keys. I worked long past when my coffee had gone cold and the cursor blurred before me, dreaming in my fugue state, only taking brief bathroom breaks and a couple of short walks with Kaiser to stretch my legs. The migraine held off for now, the aura before me a blue light that past experience taught me would narrow to a dark and painful eventuality. Unless the miracle had been real. On those walks with Kaiser, I didn’t bargain with God over this. I prayed, instead, that I would be able to bear whatever pain was coming my way.
Even with the new cutscenes, my game wasn’t finished. The backdrop for isometric action changed from a forest to a charred landscape, a place of molten rivers and strange beings from the Book of Revelation. In the game engine I was using, the pixelated creatures had limited outcomes once they were defeated, turning to a smudge of dark smoke that vanished, but I realized I could make another modification in the coding. Instead of dying they would follow the fool, a shadow army trailing behind him, until he could challenge Death himself—the ultimate boss—bringing with him the souls he’d saved. Newly empowered after escaping from the Land of the Dead, his final task would be to defeat the evil king who had chased him into hiding. Would he be able to save the pregnant queen in time? I wasn’t ready to write that part yet.
I was grateful at least the people of Rose of Sharon hadn’t asked me to create a website for them. The Internet was a vast, uncharted territory. Just imagine how many people they could reach, people who could connect anonymously and act out their hate online. Or, my God, if they asked me to make a game based on The Turner Diaries? It wouldn’t be hard to make a simple MOD of Doom and change the demons to people of other races instead and then distribute it. I rubbed my face in my hands, disturbed by the thought. And yet, this could be my way back in. I would never actually make such a game or website for them, but by offering it, I could get them to listen. Mother Sophie, at least, who maybe didn’t know what had happened in Roland’s trailer. I could get her to listen long enough to find out what I had come for all along.
I worked on my own game all day, not knowing if it would even be playable. I didn’t know if I would ever get a chance to test out the beta and work out any bugs in the programming. This project allowed me for a short time to escape the problems pressing in all around me. If I was going to die or if the world was going to end, I hoped I would have something to say my life mattered.
Arwen left me to my project, and I didn’t see much of her the rest of the day. I made myself a dinner of Top Ramen with an egg cracked into the boiling water. When I went to bed later that night, I again avoided the pain meds, Arwen’s dead boyfriend looming in the back of my mind. I would need to hold on to my pain for what happened next.
I was drifting off to sleep when Arwen stole in and slipped under my covers. She set a tentative hand on my chest, tracing the scar along my collarbone. “You’re not really going back there, are you?”
“Roland followed me here. He knows where I live now.”
“They’ll hurt you.”
I took hold of her hand, squeezed. “I need to see this through.”
“Whether she’s escaped or she’s dead, she’s gone, Lucien. She’s not coming back. But I’m here. I’m here now and I’m asking you to stay.”
I didn’t say anything, but I let go of her hand. Arwen was quiet for a long minute. She propped herself on her elbow, studying my profile in the dark. Then she took my hand and brushed away hot tears from her face and held my palm against her mouth. Was she crying for me, or Gabe, or the shitty place this world had become? She kissed my hand, the inside of my wrist, seemed to shake off whatever grief gripped her as she kissed her way up my arm to my neck, where she bit down, hard enough to leave a mark. I hissed in pain, surprised but unable to complain because her lips pressed against mine. Our kissing was fierce, animal-like, our teeth clacking together. She climbed on top of me and shrugged away her nightgown. I took her breasts in my mouth, one at a time, while she pushed against me with her hips. She lowered herself once more to kiss me on the mouth, her eyes open, dark with desire. Then she disentangled me from my boxers and reached over to the other nightstand. “I found some protection,” she said. “If you want to?”
I nodded, unable to speak, watching as she bit it open with her teeth. When she had it unrolled she kissed me long and deep, our tongues entwining, before she climbed on top once more and took me inside her, her chin tilted up toward the ceiling, her hips rocking gently, until it seemed like she rose to another place, like wings had sprouted from her shoulder blades. I rose with her, carried into the ether by the sweetness of her mercy. What kind of idiot was I to let her go to chase after a ghost? I held on for as long as I could, but eventually we had to come back down to earth.
In the morning, I rubbed my eyes and tried to figure out the time, well past dawn judging by the splash of light coming in through the curtains. The furnace rumbled downstairs. Arwen’s side of the bed was empty, yet I felt a presence in the room. A hovering. I wasn’t scared, not with the morning sun washing over me like poured amber.
In this light I saw the angel for the first time. For the only time in my life. When I remember this I try to rationalize that I was still dreaming, still half-asleep, and what I saw was part of the aura haunting my vision since the accident. A crack in my skull that was also a crack in my soul. Or maybe none of those things. All I know is that all these years later I believe the angel was real.
The angel took the shape of a glowing, golden man with black wings, as if the raven had shifted form. He was there in the waking seconds after my eyes opened, for just a breath. I know what I saw and what I felt. The angel did not speak aloud. His dark wings fanned the motes of gold dancing in the light, but otherwise he did not move. His face was too bright to behold.
When I blinked he vanished, but I lay there for a long, long time afterward, basking in the glow he left behind. A peace that surpassed all understanding. For the first time I began to hope things were going to turn out okay. The angel had come to encourage me. I had work to do. I had a person I needed to see. I had this work and I had a purpose. Find out what happened to Maura. Then I would be free.
In the years that have passed since, I have never again had dreams or visions like those that came to me in the winter of 1999. I don’t dream of the devil anymore. I don’t see angels or demons. I don’t see them anymore, but I know they are there. We are attended by angels and demons all around us. We just no longer see. It was no trick of light, no psychosis of a damaged brain. I have never told another soul before now, but here I set this down: Angels are as real as you and me.
I knew Arwen had left for good even before I got up. The door to her room lay open, her things gone. She’d left a short note:
I’ve been running away all my life. Coming home was just another kind of running. See you after the world ends.
Whether she was heading back to Bellingham to face her past, or just couldn’t bear to see what was going to happen to me, she was gone and it was time for me to face my own troubles. And yet if I could have foreseen what I was about to set in motion, I would have stayed the hell away from Elijah and the rest of them. Was I the light or the shadow in this story? Maybe I was both. All these years later I am still trying to understand.