Saviors 101

Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Dana sat on the spiral rag rug she’d made as a preteen while waiting for a truly amazing event to occur in her life. At age fourteen, when nothing had, she’d stopped work on the now massive rug, and set off to make things happen.

But not tonight.

No way.

No how.

No such luck.

She glared at the little angel who sat in the opened lid of the pizza box. She pulled another piece of pepperoni off her slice and began nibbling along the edge.

“So, God sent you.”

“Not exactly.”

It was hard to read expressions on a face so small. Dana was half tempted to grab a magnifying glass, but that felt rude.

“Not exactly? Are you always this uninformative?”

“Oh no,” she perked up noticeably and her tiny halo glowed a little brighter. “Why Michelle frequently accuses me of being too informative. Why just the other day I was telling her a little anecdote about how St. Peter had lost his St. Bernard on the Elysian Fields due to an unmapped portal and the dog had wound up having a mad romp with a World Cup Soccer ball and she kept trying to cut me off before I got to the funny bit—”

“St. Peter has a St. Bernard?”

“Well, once he had a poodle. You know one of the real ones, not those little things, like me.”

The angel heaved a tiny sigh which almost evoked sympathy from Dana before she remembered how angry and confused she was. Her hesitation was more than enough time for the angel to forge ahead.

As Henrietta babbled, Dana laid her head down on the rug, but that didn’t help. Her ear ended up too close to the old heat register.

Her mother was singing happily along with Meatloaf’s reprise of a Bat Out of Hell. In the background Talin was singing along in his nonsense language. He could speak just fine when he wanted to, but usually he sang. Both his songs and his key signatures were from some musical tradition that couldn’t possibly exist in any rational world. She was being harangued by a foot-tall angel, what did she know of rational worlds.

Dana closed the vent with a slap that must have rung downstairs because her mother missed the opening chorus of Meet Me in St. Louis.

Dana reached out a finger and poked the angel in the ribs.

Henrietta giggled and choked on her morsel of pepperoni. And hacked again, turning an alarming shade of pink as she gasped for air.

Tapping a choking, tiny angel sharply between the wings with repeated flicks of her forefinger rated as one of the strangest things she’d ever done. And she’d done a few strange ones. Well, not really, but she’d meant to try one and see how it felt.

Once the angel had recovered her breath, taken a large sip of Coke from a child’s tea set Dana had unearthed, and released a tiny burp that made her wings flutter, she picked up her pepperoni again.

Dana sat up cross-legged and looked down at her unwanted guest.

“Perhaps we should start from the beginning.”

“Oh no,” she shook her head. “How old do you think I am? I remember the whole of evolution, of course. The getting-life-out-of-the-sludge part. And that was a nasty, icky job if every there was one. It took me hours and hours to get the goo out of my feathers. All to rearrange a few silly little molecules into proto-life just because He thought it might be amusing. Of course, it took Michelle’s hand to actually make the whole thing work. That’s where the man first, then woman myth got started, I think. But that was Michelle’s doing, not His.”

She picked up a slice of green pepper and eyed it suspiciously for a moment before returning it to her pizza slice and selecting a mushroom to nibble on next.

Dana rubbed her face vigorously, as she had many times in the last few hours. The angel remained, and her words, though apparently logically connected, couldn’t be absorbed by her weary brain.

“You’re telling me that the God and Devil of the Bible were responsible for the evolution of the species?”

The angel nodded vigorously.

“How did Darwin take it?”

“Oh, he wasn’t very amused, but he came round after they both assured him that they weren’t interfering with the evolution of a bunch of silly birds in the Galapagos Islands.”

“As a matter of fact—“

Dana knew she should try to be a better listener. But her brain had gotten so cluttered with the sheer volume of the little angel’s words that there was no way to unravel them.

She’d become a pro at “tuning out” not long after Talin had been born and started his semi-melodic ramblings through the spectrums of human speech. Well, perhaps before that, her mother’s incessant music had certainly initiated her strategies to deal with noise pollution.

So she “tuned out.”

Stepped back.

Got a good distance from the entire morass of impossibilities that had poured over her in the last hour or so.

There was one piece that didn’t fit. She felt it stick out. She just didn’t know which it was yet. She was an expert in patterns, had cleaned energy lines that perplexed her mother, had built and published a website on the intersections of the Pacific Northwest lay lines used by Gods of power. That’s how she knew all the Wicca ones were wrong. They gave specific locations, which was a totally irrelevant concept. First, the lay lines never stayed still, always in flux. Second, any fool with half a clue would know…

There it was. The hole in the pattern.

She tuned back in.

Henrietta was happily telling her about the time, “…oh, a dozen centuries ago I reckon, that St. Peter’s St. Bernard, named Lowell, mistook me for a tennis ball and retrieved me by the head. My halo doesn’t fit right to this day and cleaning off the saliva had been, well in a word—”

“Henrietta?”

Waving her hands didn’t work either. She finally flicked her finger against the angel’s halo.

A great ringing filled the room, the house, perhaps the city block, like all the church bells in Paris being struck by ball-peen hammers at the same instant. A high, bright, sound that obviously had much greater depths behind it.

Henrietta dropped the bit of pizza crust she’d been nibbling on, grabbed her halo, and bent forward, clearly unable to catch her breath.

“Don’t do that. Oh my goodness, but you have no idea what a kafuffle that sets up in my head.”

“Sorry,” Dana picked up a slice of pizza she didn’t want, but was too embarrassed to put back down once it was in her hand. She took a bite anyway.

“I just wanted to ask you a question.”

“Why didn’t you just say so? For a girl who never says a word, you sure take your time getting around to joining the conversation. Why did you know—“

Dana readied her finger to ping the halo again.

Henrietta dropped the crust she’d just retrieved and grabbed her halo once more. Apparently she couldn’t speak in that position, so Dana took advantage of the moment.

“Did you say the software claimed man was first over women?”

“Well it certainly wasn’t the Creator’s idea. He isn’t likely to notice if you’re a lion or a dandelion, never mind if you are a gender male or gender female of one of the lesser species. He’s far too easily distracted to notice such things or remember them if he does. Now, Michelle, that woman is a hazard. She never forgets a thing…or at least not for long.”

“Lesser species?” Dana’s bite of pizza tasted suddenly of old cardboard. She dropped the piece back into the box.

“Well, what do you expect.” The angel waved her bit of crust at her in an admonishing way. “There’s only what, seven billion of you. Not bad for a mammal, but try a fish, or a housefly. Billions, I’m telling you, trillions.” Her voice rose toward a piercing squeak. “And the stars—“

“Stars are sentient?”

“Well,” Henrietta waved her bit of crust dismissively and leaned into whisper, “no, if the truth be known. But don’t say it too loudly, they may be dumb, but they are also quite irritable. Flaring up all the time and exploding with no posted warnings. It’s never a good idea to make them mad.”

Dana pictured a grumpy face backed up by a not too sharp brain, like when she told Kurt the high school quarterback to get his hands off her unless he wished to be neutered.

“Look,” she held up a single finger over Henrietta’s halo when the angel started to open her mouth. Henrietta frowned, much as Kurt had, but kept her silence for the moment.

“I have no reference points in this conversation. Who is Michelle? And what’s this software?”

Henrietta eyed Dana’s finger carefully until she pulled it away, but Henrietta held onto her halo with one hand anyway.

“Michelle is the Devil Incarnate.”

“The Devil is female. Right, I knew this universe was designed by a man.”

“Actually, no. The true origins of the universe…”

Dana raised her c****d finger and Henrietta clamped her mouth shut.

“And the software is, what? The program that the Devil uses to keep track of the souls she is torturing?”

Her tiny jaw dropped. “She doesn’t do that! Well, she smashes my computer every now and again, but that hardly makes her satanic. Well, not very satanic. I mean she does really seem to have a passion for crushing them. But it could be just from working with the software for too long.”

Henrietta rose and paced to the far corner of the pizza box and back with her hands clasped behind her back. She was actually silent as she stared up at Dana for a long moment.

“And I was trying to explain if you’d just listen.”

Rather than complaining that she’d done nothing else tonight, a night that she was supposed to be doing nothing but having glorious s*x, she nodded and kept her mouth shut. Who knew what tangent it would send the angel down if she said what was really on her mind, the feeling of Sam’s hips and hands for the few moments that they had crushed together.

“The software is the origin of the universe. It came first. Then God and the Devil and the others all came much later.”

Dana felt as if someone had just rapped on a halo of her own.

And rapped it hard.