I was close to grabbing him by that little white collar and shaking him. Instead, I balled my fists at my sides.
"Eion!" I cut him off. "I have to get out of here right now. Show me your room, or I swear I'll rip those clothes right off your back."
"Going?" Eion's eyes glittered with panic. "Where?"
Morningstar had said in the church: "I could kill her now, ruin all your plans... Your plans." So, I thought with a sneer, it was determined all along.
"Dee?" Eion's voice was thin. "What should I tell Michael?"
My lips pressed into thin, hard resolve. "Tell him I've left him in your 'capable hands.' "
LINK site path – LINK-angels, what are they, what are your experiences with them...
The nature of angels, a Unitarian perspective: by Darcy O'Donnell
Like everyone, I experienced the LINK-angels on a very personal level. Phanuel appeared to me while I was out in the "back-forty," as I like to call the far end of my urban garden, picking aphids off my William Baffin roses. I'd been absently listening to International Public Radio via the LINK, and suddenly, the angelic visage peered at me between the slats of my wrought-iron fence. We stared at each other, me with my crushed-aphid carcass-encrusted gloves, and he with his absent, worm-eaten eye sockets. Then, like any good Unitarian Universalist minister, I attempted to engage him in a philosophical debate.
It's the oldest joke about Unitarians, of course. When faced with the diverging paths on the road to enlightenment, one with a sign reading, "This way heaven," and the other with, "This way to a discussion about the existence of heaven," the Unitarian always picks the latter.
So, although I stared right into the face of a LINK-angel, possibly a portent of the empirical existence of God, I said to it, "If you're a real angel, why do you only appear on the LINK? Why, when I see you, is my heart filled with dread? Shouldn't even the angel of death fill me with radiance?" Then, true to my doubting nature, I attempted to touch it, and it faded away.
Since then, I have been thinking about angels. I dusted off my King James version of the Bible, my copy of the Torah, the Koran, and a whole slew of other religious books, and went looking for passages and information about angels. What I found surprised me. The first biblical mention of angels is in Genesis 19:1-3, "The first time angels appear in the Bible, they are fully human. The two angels arrived at Sodom in the evening, and Lot was sitting in the gateway of the city. When he saw them, he got up to meet them and bowed down with his face to the ground. 'My lords,' he said, 'please turn aside to your servant's house. You can wash your feet and spend the night and then go on your way early in the morning.' 'No,' they answered, 'we will spend the night in the square.' But he insisted so strongly that they did go with him and entered his house. He prepared a meal for them, baking bread without yeast, and they ate."
Here are angels acting like men. They argue, they eat, they need a place to spend the night. Later in Genesis, Jacob also greets angels of the Lord as if they were men and invites them to stay in his house. The Hebrew word for angel, "Malach," means, simply, "a messenger." In the Koran, though the angels are clearly spiritual beings early on (we see them in The Cow 2:3 at creation speaking directly to God), in The Family of Imram 3:39, they act as messengers to Mirium for Allah. It has been postulated by more learned scholars than I that the Israelites were influenced in their thinking about the spiritual nature of angels when they intermixed with Arabic peoples (see Jeffrey Burton Russell's series about the history of Satan.)
The Septuagint renders the Hebrew into aggelos which also has both significations – holy and secular messengers, as the original was written. By the time the Bible is translated into Latin, however, the divine or spirit-messenger is separated from the human, rendering the original in the one case by angelus and in the other by legatus or more generally by nuntius. Even if you believe the hand of God inspired the Bible, the division between these concepts was created wholly by human decision-makers.
As a Unitarian, I have always believed that if there is a God and he does directly influence Earth via messengers such as angels, he would probably do so through real people, like Sojourner Truth, Martin Luther King, Jr., etc. So why electronic angels, why such an obvious move from God...
Chapter 13
The shoes were too big for me, and they rubbed the backs of my heels raw. As I'd left the church, Eion had reminded me that impersonating a priest was a federal crime that carried the death sentence. I didn't care. Each jab of pain kept me anchored – kept me from thinking too hard. I was too angry for rational thought, anyway.
I leaned up against a wall. My fingers scraped against the concrete for support. The smell of urine and rotting garbage wafted on the breeze. Picking up my head at the odor, I began to wonder where my feet had taken me. Suddenly, I realized I was walking on the street and not in the skyway.
Less than two blocks away loomed the glass city. I could see the outer rim of a blast line. The skyline glittered like a forest of crystal. Straight edges of buildings, windows, and high-rises burst with prisms of color. Thanks to the traffic tubes, it had been a long time since I'd seen unfiltered sunlight. Here, in the old city, there were none. The apartment complexes, once gray and drab, now reflected the blues and whites of the sky. Only a hint of color could be seen under the sheath of the Medusa bomb's glass, unifying everything in a shimmering whiteness. Hulks of ancient cars stood like enormous jewels in the glassy road.
I gave up standing in favor of slumping against the wall. No wonder my feet were sore; I must've walked for hours to make it as far as the glass city. I tried to rub some life back into my toes, then took a long breath – probably my first calm one in hours. I pulled up my knees and wrapped my arms around them, hugging myself. The crumbling asphalt warmed the soles of my feet, too bad the sun did nothing for my soul. I rubbed at my shoulder, willing it to hurt. Despite my efforts, the pain refused to come. The miracle stubbornly clung to my body like a parasite.
I shook my head sadly. So much for going for a short, ten-minute walk. Michael would have to wait. I wasn't ready to talk to him yet. I wondered if I ever would be.
My thoughts ground like gears. Michael couldn't leave me with child; his body was a shell of air, impotent. Eion hallucinated the connection to the Visitation; or maybe the fact that we dreamed the same thing was coincidence. Anyway, if I recalled my Sunday school lessons correctly, it was the archangel Gabriel who spoke to ...
A gear derailed, crunch. I hid my face in my hands as I remembered Jibril, rather Gabriel, offering Michael advice about me: "I've been there, you know." Michael responding, "Who could forget!"
"Jesus Christ!" Then, to banish the thought, "No! No. No."
Despite my protests, my mind conjured an image of a black Madonna and the chocolate-skinned Jibril naked and sweaty. I wondered: did she have to coax him?
The engines came back on-line with a lurch. These weren't biblical times. I was certainly no virgin, nor especially worthy. I was excommunicated, a disgrace to the Church. What Michael and I did back in the belfry was not sacred. It was good sex, but hardly miraculous.
My shoulder twitched. Okay, maybe there was a miracle involved, but it still bore little resemblance to the holy virgin birth. Besides which, I didn't want the job. I've never been exactly maternal. I didn't own a dog or a cat, not even a goldfish. I wasn't responsible enough to raise any kid, much less the second ... an angel's kid.