Gabriel’s tail began to wag furiously as he padded down the path and barked a friendly greeting. How good is this? he thought. A full belly and now somebody to play with.
The female flinched, startled by his approach. Her tail wagged cautiously. She, too, was a yellow Labrador retriever and she wore a pretty, red bandanna around her neck, as well as the chain.
He moved closer. “I’m Gabriel.”
The female continued to stare, and he noticed that the hackles of fur at the back of her neck had begun to rise.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said soothingly. “I just want to play.” He lay down on the ground to show her that he meant no harm. “What’s your name?”
The female moved slowly toward him, sniffing at the air, searching for signs of a threat. How odd, thought Gabriel. Maybe her family doesn’t let her play with other dogs. “I’m Gabriel,” he said again.
“Tobie,” she replied, hackles still raised.
“Hello, Tobie. Do you want to chase me?” he asked pleasantly, rising to all fours.
Tobie sniffed at him again and growled nervously. Slowly, she began to back away, her tail bending between her legs.
Gabriel was confused. “What’s the matter?” he asked, advancing toward her. “You don’t have to chase me if you don’t want to—I could chase you instead.”
Tobie snapped at him with a bark, her lips peeled back in a fierce snarl as she continued to back toward the playhouse.
Gabriel stopped. “What’s wrong?” he asked, genuinely concerned and quite disappointed. “Why won’t you play with me?”
“Not dog,” Tobie growled as she sniffed the air around him. “Different,” she spat, and fled around the playhouse in the direction she’d come.
Gabriel was stunned. At first, he had no idea what Tobie meant, but then he thought of that day when he had almost died. He flinched, remembering the intensity of the pain he had felt when the car struck him. Aaron had done something to him that day, had laid his hands upon him and made the pain go away. That was the day everything became clearer.
The day he became different?
He left the play area, his mind considering the idea that he might not be a dog anymore, when he heard Aaron call. Gabriel quickened his pace and joined his friend and Camael. They were cleaning up their trash and getting ready to resume their journey.
“Where’ve you been?” Aaron asked as they headed toward the parking lot.
“Around,” Gabriel replied, not feeling much like talking.
A car on its way out of the lot passed them as they waited to cross to their own vehicle. In the back, he saw Tobie staring intently at him. It wasn’t only the window glass that separated him from her, he thought sadly as he watched the car head down the road.
“Are you all right?” Aaron asked as he bent to scratch under the dog’s chin.
“I’m fine,” Gabriel answered, unsure of his own words—recalling the truth revealed in another’s.
“Not dog. Different.”
INTERLUDE ONE
“This will sting, my liege.”
Verchiel hissed with displeasure as the healer laid a dripping cloth on the mottled skin of his bare arm.
“Why do I not heal, Kraus?” the leader of the Powers asked.
The blind man patted down the saturated material and reached for another patch of cloth soaking in a wooden bowl of healing oil, made from plants extinct since Cain took the life of his brother, Abel. “It is not my place to say, my lord,” he said, his unseeing eyes glistening white in the faint light streaming through the skylight of the old classroom.
The abandoned school on the grounds of the Saint Athanasius Church, in western Massachusetts, had been the Powers’ home since the battle with the Nephilim. This was where they plotted—awaiting the opportunity to continue their war against those who would question their authority upon the world of God’s man.
Verchiel shifted uncomfortably in the high-backed wooden chair, stolen from the church next door, as the healer laid yet another cloth upon his burn-scarred flesh. “Then answer me this: Do these wounds resemble injuries sustained in a freak act of nature, or do they bear the signature of a more—divine influence?”
He was trying to isolate the cause of the intense agony that had been his constant companion since he was struck by lightning during his battle with Aaron Corbet. The angel wanted to push the pain aside, to box it up and place it far away. But the pain would not leave him. It stayed, a reminder that he might have offended his Creator—and was being punished for his insolence.
“It is my job to heal, Great Verchiel,” Kraus said. “I would not presume to—”
Verchiel suddenly sprang up from his seat, the heavy wooden chair flipping backward as his wings unfurled to their awesome span. Kraus stumbled as winds stirred by the angel’s wings pushed against him.
“I grant you permission, ape,” the angel growled over the pounding clamor caused by the flapping of his wings. “Tell me what you feel in your primitive heart.” His hands touched the scars upon his chest as he spoke. “Tell me if you believe it was the hand of God that touched me in this way!”
“Mercy, my master!” Kraus cried, cowering upon the floor. “I am but a lowly servant. Please do not make me think of such things!”
“I will tell you, Verchiel,” said a voice from across the room.
Verchiel slowly turned his attention to a dark corner of the classroom, where a large cage of iron was hanging from the ceiling, its bars etched with arcane markings. It swayed in the turbulence caused by his anger. The stranger taken from the monastery in the Serbian Mountains peered out from between the iron bars, the expression on his gaunt face intense.
“Do you care to hear what I have to say?” he asked, his voice a dry whisper.
“Ah, our prisoner is awake,” Verchiel said. “I thought the injuries inflicted by my soldiers would have kept you down for far longer than this.”
The prisoner clutched the bars of his cage with dirty hands. “I’ve endured worse,” he said. “Sometimes it is the price one must pay.”
Verchiel’s wings closed, retracting beneath the flesh of his bare back. “Indeed,” the angel snarled.
Kraus still cowered upon the floor, head bowed. “You will leave me now,” Verchiel said, dismissing the human healer. “Take your things and go.”
“Yes, my lord,” the blind man said, gathering up the satchel containing his tools of healing and carefully feeling his way to the exit.
“Why do they do it?” the prisoner asked as he watched the healer depart. “What perverse need is satisfied by the degradation we heap upon them? It’s a question I’ve gone round and round with for years.”
“Perhaps we give their mundane lives purpose,” Verchiel responded, advancing toward the cage. “Providing them with something that was lacking when they lived among their own kind.” Verchiel stopped before the hanging cage and gazed into the eyes of his prisoner. “Or maybe they are just not as intelligent as we think,” he said with perverse amusement.
“And that’s reason enough to exploit and abuse them?” the prisoner asked.
“So be it, if it serves a greater good. They are aiding us in carrying out God’s will. They are serving their Creator—as well as ours. Can you not think of a more fulfilling purpose?”
Still dressed in the tattered brown robes of the Serbian monastery, the prisoner sat down with a smile, leaning back against the bars of the cage. “And you seriously have to wonder what it was that struck you down?” He chuckled, making reference to Verchiel’s scars. “Wouldn’t think you were that dense, but then again…”