Continued from Chapter 5.1, here.

Read it from the beginning, starting here.

Axiom 5: Learn as much as possible.

“Eremiel, huh?” I asked, as we ambled back to our home base, the angel plodding along in between us.  

He nodded as he walked along.  Even though I didn’t see any wounds or marks on his wings from when we’d dropped the cables on him, he didn’t seem motivated to fly above us.  I wondered if it was bad manners to ask, but eventually my curiosity overcame my reticence and I asked him.

The angel just shrugged.  “I don’t particularly feel like flying,” he replied, and I decided to leave it at that. Continue reading →

Continued from Chapter 5.0, here.

Read it from the beginning, starting here.

Axiom 5: Learn as much as possible.

“Oh my god,” I said for at least the fourth time, staring down at the angel trapped in our messy collection of weighted cables and wires.  “Oh my god.  It worked.”

“Of course it worked,” Alice replied, although the expression on her face looked just as shocked as I felt.  “I told you it would work, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t believe you.”  We started picking our way cautiously down towards where the angel still struggled and grunted, working carefully to keep mostly hidden back behind the rocks.  

In my hands, I hefted the baseball bat that I’d brought along as a weapon.  I doubted that it would really do much to an angelic messenger of God, but it still felt comforting in my grip, and I hefted it in front of me like a sword.  On the other side of the narrowed pathway, Alice held a shotgun that she’d retrieved from a sporting goods store, and that she carried with a sense of disturbing familiarity.

Two humans against an angel.  I wondered how far we were from even odds.

Probably pretty far away. Continue reading →

Continued from Chapter 4.1, here.

Read it from the beginning, starting here.

Axiom 4: Keep clear and open communications.

Eremiel grumbled to himself as he drifted along, following the same path that he’d traced out for the last two months.  The grumbling was odd, particularly because Eremiel hadn’t noticed how odd his grumbling truly was.

Angels don’t grumble.  What is there for them to grumble about?  They are the beloved of God, the chosen messengers who carry his Word far and wide, to all reaches of the Heavens and the Earth.  They get to sit and attend with their creator, the most Divine One.

In short, they have the kind of job that would make a recruiter bite a pencil in half.

There’s no reason for an angel to grumble.  Besides, even if one of them did entertain thoughts that cast doubt on the incredible kindness and munificence of his employer, he had only to remember what happened to the last angel to raise a few quarrelsome points, and he’d quickly change his tune.

And yet, despite all of this, Eremiel grumbled to himself as he floated onward.

At the moment, he was growling about a small rock. Continue reading →

Continued from Chapter 4.0, here.

Read it from the beginning, starting here.

Axiom 4: Keep open and clear communications.

Huddling behind a rocky outcrop, Alice and I did our best to not move, breathe, or make a sound as the angel drew closer.

I had a dozen different thoughts running through my head, all of them competing with each other and screaming over the others in a wild attempt to be heard.

The angel was going to sense us.

The shadow wasn’t deep enough.  It could see us as soon as it turned its head.

We were going to die.  

Alice smelled strangely good, pushed up against me.

The wires weren’t going to stop the angel.  It was a creature of God, after all – how could it fail to break through a few strands of cable from a hardware store?

I really had to cough.  My throat tickled.

We were really going to die, right here. Continue reading →

Continued from Chapter 3.3, here.

Read it from the beginning, starting here.

Axiom 4: Keep clear and open communications.

So, one question: how do you go about capturing an angel?

The question proved to be a lot harder than I, or even Alice, anticipated.

The answers, however, began with a trip to the hardware store.

“What are we doing here again?” I complained as I tried to adjust the straps of the backpack slung over my shoulders.  We weren’t even halfway through the store, yet, and Alice had already loaded me up with at least twenty pounds of stuff.  “And why do we need all of this crap?”

“We need data, Jack,” Alice replied immediately, not stopping.  I watched as she paused to hoist a spool of thick wire, and groaned as she turned to me, holding it out to me.  “We can’t make bread without flour.”

“We’re making bread?” Continue reading →