The Multitude, стр. 74
Abelia burst into tears.
Oh, not this. Why did angels have to be so damned sensitive? He came up beside her, hesitated, then gave in, draping an arm across her shoulders.
“I did it,” she said between sobs.
“You did what?”
“I transformed the king into a pillar of salt!”
“I think he deserved it, Abelia.”
She sniffled and looked at him with tears running down her cheeks. “We’re supposed to observe, protect, and love. I turned a man to salt!”
He shrugged.
“What would God say, Henry?”
“Good job?”
She broke into a moist-eyed smile. “You’re just trying to cheer me up.”
“You acted in self-defense.”
“No, I didn’t. I’m invulnerable.”
Henry guffawed. “Not from where I’m standing. You were out cold for half an hour.”
“You try turning a man to salt. Then tell me whether that doesn’t sap every ounce of energy you have.”
He took her hand. “So why do it?”
She sniffled. “Are you trying to start me crying again?”
“It doesn’t make sense is all.”
“I needed to protect the soldier.”
“And if he hadn’t gone after the king?”
“I would have pretended to die when the king stabbed me.”
Henry had trouble following the logic but hesitated to question her motives further for fear her story would become all the more muddled. Unfallen or not, this red-haired beauty of an angel seemed as great a schemer as Gabriella. “Abelia, who exactly do you angels observe, protect, and love?”
“Chosen ones.”
“Such as Maynya?”
“Not only her. The soldier, too.”
“But we left them behind.”
She gave his hand a gentle squeeze. “God spoke to me.”
Right. He’d heard that one before. Still, he couldn’t stifle his curiosity over what yarn Abelia might try spinning next. “What did He say?”
“Go with Henry.”
“Excellent. We old men are always on the hunt for groupies.”
Abelia snatched her hand away. “He didn’t tell me what a trial you’d be.”
They approached a break in the woods. The cabin came into view through thinning trees. He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the portal of smoke still waiting beside it. “Do you know of this Gabriella?” he asked.
“I do.”
“Then tell me. Who is she observing, protecting, and loving?”
“No one,” Abelia said.
“Because?”
“Where did you get the notion she’s an angel?”
He’d gotten the idea from Gabriella. Good Lord, how gullible had he been to believe anything that schemer might say? “What is she then?”
“The multitude.”
“The what?”
“It’s complicated.”
CHAPTER 32
Back at the gravesite in Kenosha
Falling.
Falling.
Brewster came to a sudden stop. He gasped for breath, risked opening his eyes, saw the steep drop beneath him, and clamped them shut. He couldn’t be floating in the air.
“Actually, you are,” a woman said from below.
“Stay out of other people’s heads, Abelia,” her male companion muttered.
He reopened his eyes to the same harsh reality, hovering facedown, some twenty feet above Sarah’s grave.
“Closer to thirty,” the woman said.
“You can’t stop yourself, can you, Abelia?” the man retorted.
Damn. He should have taken Kara seriously when she warned him about her curmudgeon of an “uncle.” The man glaring up at him had to be Henry Stoddard, a tall, dark-haired, brooding sort, unassuming in appearance but for the jagged lightning bolt crackling upward from his outstretched arm.
“Let him down.” The barefoot red-haired beauty tugged on Henry’s sleeve.
Brewster thanked his lucky stars the lunatic had brought this Abelia woman along.
Stoddard shrugged her off. “Why were you sleeping on my wife’s grave?”
“I zoned out.” After the homicide cops’ bombshell about Carla, followed by the police tail, the bank takeover at work, and random women popping up everywhere with butterfly tattoos, the eighteenth-century dates on Sarah’s gravestone must have finished the job, shorting the circuits in his befuddled mind. He remembered getting woozy. Maybe he’d fainted.
“Tell Henry the safe word,” Abelia said.
“Huh?” Brewster could barely remember his own name, let alone some safe word. A sparrow chirped overhead. He waved off its attempt to light on his head.
Abelia’s gentle voice tickled the back of his mind. “Vagrant.”
First levitation, then telepathy. If Igor Tesfaye’s girlfriend had told him half what to expect from this lunatic and his pals, he would have steered clear of Kenosha and taken his chances with the cops.
“He isn’t a lunatic,” the woman whispered in his head. “He’s a blessed man with trust issues. Use the secret word.”
“Vagrant!”
The lightning bolt faded.
Brewster floated down, landing on his knees beside the grave where the dates on the marker flabbergasted him all over again. 1676-1756? This Sarah hadn’t walked the earth in over three hundred years, yet her husband was still alive and…
He scrambled to his feet and groped to introduce some sense of normalcy to yet another rip in the fabric of time. Smiling as best he could, he shook hands with Abelia, then tried to do the same with Henry, unsuccessfully. He plunged ahead with a greeting, anyway. “I’m Brewster DeLay. Kara said I might find you here.”
Henry folded his arms. “Don’t tell me she dumped a perfectly good poet for the likes of you.”
Great. He’d definitely scored points already. “We’re only friends. She said you could help me.”
“If this involves Gabriella, you can be on your way.”
Abelia stepped between them. “Henry, I wasn’t entirely straightforward about my reasons for coming through the portal with you.”
Henry gave her a long, hard look. He shook his head. “Here I thought I’d found Virtus’s version of a Russian bride.”
“I came as God’s version of a messenger.”
“Doesn’t He believe in email?”
“Go tweet Him and ask.” She turned her back on the crusty guy and took both of Brewster’s hands in hers.
The world went into a slow spin. A kaleidoscope of images converged into a forest scene. The air grew damp and piney. Brewster looked down at a kneeling woman in a prairie dress and two bearded thugs holding their dicks in their hands, each dressed like a nineteenth-century frontiersman.
The woman glared at the taller one. “I’ll bite it off.”
The man unsheathed a sword, but Brewster barely registered the motion. With heart leaping to his throat, he