A Terrible Fall of Angels (Zaniel Havelock #1)(3)

“I know you are one who has walked through the flame and survived, but I did not understand what it might mean.”

I remembered standing in the middle of flames that did not burn, and cast no shadow, and surrounded me on every side. If my faith had not been pure enough, I would have been consumed by holy fire. I blinked the memory away and faced the much fainter light of the angel before me. “And what does it mean?” I asked.

“That you do not think as others do or see as other flesh sees. You are the only Angelus Dictum to ever finish your training and then turn your back on it.”

“I am not an Angel Speaker, I’m a cop.”

“You are a police officer, but that does not mean you are not also an Angel Speaker; otherwise how could I be here?”

I couldn’t argue with the angel and I very much wanted to, so I let it go. The conversation was getting too weird, and off topic. I was here to solve a crime, not dissect my past. “Maybe I was meant to be a police officer, and work with the angelic like this.”

“Perhaps.” Again, it did that “head” turn, but this time it was listening. The fact that it had to listen to hear God’s voice meant it wasn’t pure spirit anymore, or it wasn’t going to be for long. This one was at the beginning of a path that might lead it to be as solid as the angel we were seeking. They sent down pure spirit, but every time they talked to anything of flesh, they stopped being quite so much spirit, and a little more . . . flesh. This one had come down to talk to humans before, several times before. The next time I saw “him” he’d probably be male, or closer to it. The voice is the first clue, the first move in choosing a “gender.”

“What have you come to tell me, angel?” I asked.

“Can you not discern my name?”

“I probably could, but I’d rather not.”

“Why not?”

“You want me to name you, and you display curiosity about something that has nothing to do with the message you were sent to deliver. You haven’t been around flesh enough to be this distracted from your task, angel.”

“What does that mean?” it asked.

“It means that you may not be cut out for being a messenger to Earth. I think you’ll corrupt faster than normal. I think that God might want to rethink your job description. You might be better off polishing a star off somewhere away from things of flesh.”

“You judge me, Detective Zaniel Havelock. That is not your place.”

“You haven’t given me the message that God sent you to deliver.”

The cold flame made a movement that rippled through its shining light. At a guess, it was a stumble, or a startle reflex, as if it hadn’t realized how distracted it had gotten. “You are right, my apologies. The message is this: The woman was not intended to die here like this. She had many years ahead of her here on Earth, before being called home.”

“So why did she die here like this, if she was supposed to live?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” A contraction, instead of the full words, another sign of degradation.

I wasn’t upset that the angel didn’t know; they were given messages to tell us, but beyond the message they often had no other information. “Why was this woman important enough for the angels to leave their feathers at the crime scene?”

“She wasn’t important,” the angel said.

I tried again. “So, if she wasn’t important, then what was important enough for the angels to leave this many feathers behind?”

“You must find the murderer, Detective Havelock.”

“The regular police could have found her murderer if it’s another person,” I said.

“If they find the murderer without you there, they will die and there will be more outrages.”

“Do you mean rapes?”

“I do not understand,” the angel said. I knew he meant it; any angel that was this much spirit and so little flesh didn’t understand matters of the flesh, not sex, or hunger, or bathrooms. Nothing that “real” made sense to pure spirit.

“What do you mean by outrages?”

“Things that are not supposed to happen.”

I tried to think how to ask a question that might actually help us find the murderer. Then I realized I was treating the angel like I was still nineteen and an Angel Speaker, and not a cop.

“Where is the murderer now?”

“That is hidden from us.”

“Hidden? How can anyone hide from the angels?”

“You are an Angel Speaker; answer your own question.”

“I am not an Angel Speaker. I am a detective.”

“Then why did you keep your angelic name, Zaniel? Why did you not go back to the name you had before?”

“I’d been Zaniel longer than I’d been any other name by the time I left. It was how I thought of myself.” I realized I was trying to justify myself to the angel, which I didn’t need to do. “I completed my training; the name was mine to keep or not, as I chose, so I kept it, simple as that.”

“Is it simple, Zaniel?”

“Don’t call me by my first name.”

“Should I call you by your other name, the one that all the humans use? Should I call you Havoc?”

“No,” I said; somehow having a fiery angel say the word Havoc was unnerving, as if it were part of the message and there would be havoc on Earth. It was my nickname from the army, that was all.