Saviors 101

Chapter 32

Chapter 32

Once they straightened out that Sam couldn’t see or hear the angel,

and that Michelle was purportedly the Devil Incarnate,

and that Dana really didn’t know all that much more than he did about what was going on,

and Michelle had called out for an extra-large pizza with the works,

an uncomfortable silence descended on the room.

And Sam was at the center of that last, a glowering sullen silence.

Dana chewed on her lower lip trying to figure out how to ask what she needed to ask without alienating Sam any further in the process. They were sitting up cross-legged now, though Michelle was still stretched out before them at perfect repose. Sam had already moved away until there was a little space between them on the blanket, and the warm strength of his hand, which she could really use at the moment, had been withdrawn.

His voice was little more than a whisper as he leaned close enough for her to taste his sweet breath.

“Why can you see this supposed angel and I can’t?”

“Well, you see,” Henrietta piped up. “Unless they’re of the Throne Choir, normal mortals can’t see angels. A seraphim would destroy a mortal’s mind if they could see them. Well, there are special circumstances on that one, but not many. A cherubim—”

“Shut up!” Michelle’s voice echoed her own and Sam flinched at the sudden dual expletive in what he had perceived as an extended silence.

Henrietta was so irritated she fluttered off Michelle’s shoulder and settled at last to sit on the Devil’s kneecap. She brushed an imaginary bit of fluff off her robe and scowled up at Dana.

“Apparently mortals can’t see the choir of angels to which she belongs.”

“But you can.”

“I can. She’s the one who interrupted us in the planetarium.” She had an uncomfortable itch between her shoulders. A tickle of familiarity like the moment that Michelle had walked, or done whatever she’d done, to get in the room. A nasty feeling that she’d be able to see any of the choirs, as if she once had.

She looked at Michelle. Really looked. She didn’t watch people’s energy lines or auras much anymore. She’d checked out Sam’s, of course, nice clean, strong, blue lines flowing smoothly through and around his body. It was good to know that she hadn’t misread him before that disastrous night in the planetarium. Circumstances had simply wandered a bit out of her control. She wasn’t going to let that happen again.

Michelle had no gentle aura of yellow or green. She was red, and not with the mere lines of energy and gently glowing pools of light at the seven chakra points. No, she was deep red. Strong, powerful, and all of one pure color. Not the color of temper, but a person completely involved in the world. No hint of orange to suggest that she liked controlling people. Just red of the materialistic soul. And she’d never seen such a pure color. No gentle warm overlay of pale red upon the corporeal body. No. Michelle was the red of ruby.

Except for a bright yellow spot on her knee. Why would her knee be carefree, frivolous, and unattached?

She blinked away the sensations of auric color just as one might blink away tears. Ah, that would be Henrietta. The pint-sized queen of the frivolous and inconsequential.

Michelle was smiling at Dana.

“What did you see?”

“See?” Sam’s voice was tentative at best.

The Devil, weird, but, she was beginning to believe, true. The Devil answered for her.

“Your girlfriend there, among other things, is a live Kirlian camera. Can see a person’s energy flow the way you and I see a moonbeam splashing down through the fog.”

That was the best description she’d ever heard.

“What do I look like?” Sam turned to her and asked.

“Blue,” she blurted out.

His brow knitted.

“A really, really nice blue. Balanced. Strong. Survivor.” She tried desperately to read his reaction, which slowly shifted from knit brow to a soft smile and a nod as if he liked that. It fit him so well, it really should.

“And her?” he nodded toward their unexpected guest.

“I,” the Devil answered, “am a materialistic b***h from Hell, or so I’m often told. I care deeply about getting things done. I like a universe that functions neatly and with some sense of purpose. Now if you were to look at God, you’d see yellow, just like Henrietta.”

“Really?” the little angel piped up. “Cool!”

“Frivolous, fun,” Michelle continued ignoring the interruption, “and when left to His own devices, designs platypuses and ten-foot high plants that smell like rotting meat. Completely ridiculous creatures. The Man never should have been trusted with all creation.”

“You’re saying we were created?” Sam sat up straight at that. He’d already told Dana how he came to the UW as a bio major before discovering the campus wind tunnel and switching to aeronautics.

“No,” Michelle tipped her head back as if considering the ceiling for a moment. “It doesn’t work quite that smoothly. The primordial soup was rolling pretty nicely for half a billion years before I realized He wasn’t going to do anything with it. So, I figured out how to get it kickstarted. And then God, taking all the credit as usual, instructed them to ‘be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas,’ etcetera, etcetera, ad nausea .”

“Nasty, yucky stuff,” Henrietta had complained about that more than once before.

A far-off knock thudded on the lower entry door. Faint but clearly a knock. As if someone really far away was pounding upon locked gates to get in.

“s**t!” Sam did not sound happy at all. “So is that God come a knocking?”

“No!” Henrietta cried out in joy as she fluttered out of the wind tunnel and turned for the front door.

“It’s pizza.”