Dancing on the Head of a Pin

  And there they were, the Nomads standing upon the rooftop, gazing out beyond the city below, the eerie song they sang wafting about them. Their dark robes seemed to be crafted from a night sky, a dusky bluish black that twinkled with pinpricks of starlight. They wore hoods that hid their features. There were eleven of them, and Remy wondered where the others might be. In his mind, he pictured skyscrapers around the world, Nomad angels standing atop them, frozen in eerie contemplation, singing their strange song.

  “There is genocide in Darfur,” one of them stated suddenly, his voice like the rumble of thunder at a distance. The angel turned its hooded head to stare at Remy, and he recognized Suroth.

  Suroth’s eyes were distant, still seeing the atrocites perpetrated by supposedly civilized cultures in the western Sudan. Tears of sorrow streamed down his face, the manifestation of the sadness he witnessed.

  Remy remained silent, allowing the angel’s eyes to focus upon him.

  “Hello, brother,” Suroth stated, a hint of a smile teasing the corners of his mouth. “I sensed that someone of an angelic persuasion was visiting us, and I’m pleasantly surprised to see that it is you.”

  “Hello, Suroth.” Remy bowed his head slightly.

  “It has been too long,” the Nomad leader stated, moving toward Remy, away from the others, who continued to stand in quiet observation.

  Suroth was huge. Even covered in robes, the Nomad leader couldn’t hide what he had once been, an Archangel commander in service to God. But he had abandoned his weapons of war, shed his armor, and replaced them with the robes of the wandering Nomadic order.

  An order in search of answers to the questions birthed by the savagery of war.

  “It’s horrible,” Remy said, looking out over the world. “Horrible what they do to one another.”

  Suroth’s large hands disappeared within the sleeves of his robe. “It has gone on since the beginning, and will continue until they are no more.”

  “I like to think that eventually they’ll learn.”

  “As we learned?” Suroth asked. “Beings that once stood within the radiance of our Lord and Creator?”

  Remy remained silent. There was truth to the angel’s words. The Great War had shown how far from perfection they actually were.

  “To what do I owe this visit?” Suroth then asked. “Have you come at last to join us, brother Remiel?” the Nomad leader continued, using Remy’s formal name. “Adding your mysteries to our own, awaiting a day when we will have our solution, and a new beginning will dawn.”

  “It would be nice,” Remy said, returning his focus to the rooftop and the powerful angelic being towering before him. “No, I’m afraid I’ve come with some bad news.”

  Suroth tilted his head inquisitively. “Bad news, brother?”

  Remy nodded. “One of your own has died,” he said. “We found him in a Denizen hiding place. He’d given himself to them.”

  The Nomad leader said nothing, his eyes again going frosty as he searched the world.

  “He was called Amael,” Suroth stated. “I feared something like this.”

  “I spoke with him before he ended his life,” Remy explained. “He said that he deserved what was happening to him.”

  “Amael never truly adjusted to our Nomadic ways,” the leader of the order said. “The pull of Heaven was great upon him, but the guilt over what he had done in God’s name . . . he felt that it robbed him of his place there, that there was no way he could ever return.”

  Remy recalled the look of torment on the angel’s face. “He said that he bore a secret sin; that was why he had to suffer.”

  Suroth leaned his head back, his features lost within the shadow of his hood. “We all have our secrets, Remiel.”

  Remy glanced toward the building’s edge, and found that the others had all turned and were staring. He could feel the intensity of their eyes upon him.

  “For some, the weight becomes too much to bear.”

  It was silent on the rooftop, and Remy began to wonder if they had gone back to observing the world again, when Suroth spoke.

  “His material form?”

  “Destroyed,” Remy said. “I couldn’t leave it for the scavengers.”

  “We owe you a great thanks, Remiel,” the leader said, and all bowed in unison.

  “No problem,” Remy told them. “I thought you should know.”

  He glanced at his watch. He’d had pretty much all he could take of the mysterious Nomads, and besides, he was supposed to meet Francis for lunch.

  “Your time with us is at an end?” Suroth asked.

  Remy put his hands into his coat pockets. “Other responsibilities,” he stated. He backed up toward the door. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said, immediately feeling like an idiot.

  “Are you certain that you must leave?” Suroth asked. The other hooded Nomads had come to stand around him. “Our number is deficient by one,” he stated, holding up a long finger. “Do you not seek the same answers as we?” the Nomad asked. “Join with us, brother, and we shall find the solutions together.”

  “Join with us, brother,” the other Nomads repeated in unison, their hands reaching out, beckoning to him.

  “I’m sorry,” he told them. “The answers I need I’ll find on my own.”

  Suroth’s hands disappeared inside his robes again.

  “Know that there will always be a place for you,” the leader said.

  The others had already left him, returning to the building’s edge, looking out beyond the city, singing their strange song, searching for the answers to the questions of their existence.

  Francis was sitting outside at a table in the far corner of the little Piazza café on Newbury Street.

  Remy was about to call out to his friend when he realized that the former Guardian angel had hidden himself from the lunch crowd that was taking full advantage of the first springlike day. Remy did the same, anyone who had taken notice thinking that he had been nothing more than a trick of sunlight and shadow on their eyes.

  “Why are you sitting here invisible?” he asked, joining his friend.

  Francis craned his neck to see around him. “I don’t want to be obvious.”

  “Obvious about what?” Remy asked, turning to follow Francis’ gaze.

  He could see a waitress taking an order from a table of two women, multiple shopping bags at their feet. “The two women?” he asked.

  Francis shook his head. “The waitress.”

  “The waitress?” Remy turned in his seat again.

  She was cute—tiny—no taller than five-two, shoulder-length dark hair, athletic build. She danced on the line of beautiful but clearly didn’t take herself too seriously, a nice quality to have.

  “Very nice,” Remy said as he turned back to Francis. “Now, why are you sitting here, invisible, watching a waitress?”

  Francis shrugged, his eyes behind dark-framed glasses following the woman as she walked across the patio and into the restaurant.

  “Y’know, that’s a good question,” he said. “One that I’ve been trying to put my finger on for the last few weeks.”

  “You’ve been watching her for a few weeks?”

  Francis nodded. “Think it has something to do with the whole Guardian angel thing. In the old days she would’ve had a legion of us fighting over the right, but now she’s got nothing.”

  The waitress returned with a tray of drinks for the ladies: a Corona for one and some kind of fancy cocktail for the other.

  “Her name’s Linda Somerset: age thirty-five, was married, but now divorced, takes night classes in childhood development at Northeastern, lives in Brighton.”

  Remy looked back at his friend. “What, no astrological sign? No dress size?”

  “She’s a Leo, and her dress size is—”

  “Enough,” Remy said, holding up his hand. “It’s very nice that you’ve found a hobby in stalking this poor woman.”

  “Not stalking,” Francis said indignantly. “I’m lookin
g out for her well-being.”

  Linda left the waiter’s station to check on one of her other tables.

  “Why don’t you just introduce yourself?” Remy asked. “Talk to her.”

  “I couldn’t do that,” Francis said bluntly. “That’s not how it works.”

  “How what works? You’re not a Guardian anymore, so why are you acting like one?”

  “Old habits die hard, I guess,” Francis said.

  “I guess,” Remy agreed. He crossed his legs, watching the crowds pass on the busy Boston street.

  “I went and saw the Nomads this morning,” he told his friend.

  “You found them?” the Guardian asked, surprised.

  “Yeah, I’d picked up some information a while back that they were on Tremont Street.”

  “Let me guess,” Francis said. “Someplace high?”

  “Yeah, office building.”

  “They give me the creeps,” Francis commented, pushing his glasses farther up onto his nose.

  “Why’s that?” Remy asked, curious.

  “I just don’t understand them,” he started to explain. “They were Heaven’s elite, but they gave it all up, and now they wander between the earthly plain and Hell. They say they’re looking for answers, but I can’t even figure out the fucking questions.”

  A woman with a yellow Labrador puppy jogged by, and Remy remembered when Marlowe was that small. It seemed like only yesterday.

  “It all happened so fast,” Remy said. “One moment we couldn’t imagine being more happy, one with the Creator and all, and the next thing, we’re killing one another.” He paused, the weight of it all bearing down on him. “I think they just want to understand how something so amazing could turn so horribly wrong.”

  A hostess tried to seat an older couple where Remy and Francis were sitting, but the woman insisted on another table. Big surprise.

  “What was the name of that guy you asked me about?” Francis asked, changing the topic.

  “Alfred Karnighan,” Remy said, happy to oblige.

  “Karnighan,” Francis repeated. “I think I had some dealings with him a few years back at a private auction. He’s a collector. Both of us had our eyes on an especially sweet medieval battle-axe, if I’m not mistaken. What’s up with him?”

  “Got a phone call from him yesterday,” Remy explained. “Says he wants to hire me. I don’t know the specifics yet, but it involves stolen property. I’m meeting with him tomorrow morning.”

  Francis nodded his approval.

  “So that’s it? He’s a collector. Anything more you can tell me?”

  “Nothing more to say, really,” Francis said with a shrug. “The guy deals in rare antiquities, with a special appreciation for weapons. You can see how we would’ve crossed paths.”

  Remy could, ancient weaponry one of the only things the former Guardian angel actually seemed to take enjoyment from. That and Jeopardy; the fallen angel loved Jeopardy.

  “The guy’s got bucks,” Francis stated. “If I were you, I’d charge him double.” And then he was out of his seat.

  “What’s up?” Remy asked.

  “Looking after my charge.”

  Francis moved past him to a table where a less-than-pleasant man was giving Linda a hard time. Evidently the bartender had decided to cut him off and he was taking it out on his waitress.

  Bad idea.

  It was when the guy, his face flushed from too much alcohol and anger, picked up his empty glass and shattered it on the tabletop that the invisible Francis made his move, sinking his fingers into the soft, fleshy area around the man’s thick neck.

  Remy winced in sympathetic pain as the drunken man suddenly leaned violently forward with a scream, his face bouncing off the table. The shrieking continued as he lurched to his feet, tipping over his chair as he tried to pick bloody pieces of glass from his face. Linda, along with some of the other Piazza waitstaff, had retreated to the safety of the restaurant doorway. The manager and what appeared to be the bartender were now dealing with the injured man. In the distance, a police siren wailed.

  Realizing that he was likely in trouble, the big man grabbed a cloth napkin from a nearby table and wiped at his mess of a face. Tossing the stained white cloth to the ground, he tried to force his way past the café employees.

  Francis stuck out his foot, and the fleeing man tripped, his drunken bulk plowing into a recently vacated table, still covered with dirty lunch dishes. The crash was tremendous, the man falling to the ground, the table and all its contents landing atop him.

  At least he had the good sense not to get up again.

  Francis returned to their table as the police pulled up. Remy shook his head, trying to hide his smile of amusement.

  “It’s an absolute sin when a man can’t hold his liquor,” Francis said, watching as two officers picked the bleeding man up from the patio floor, and escorted him to the waiting cruiser.

  “Good thing he wasn’t driving.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Remy had been to this place before.

  The air was rich with the smell of the sea, aroused by the passing storm, the moist sand cool between his toes. He was on a beach at the Cape—in Wellfleet. This was where the Apocalypse had been thwarted, where he had joined with the Angel of Death to realign the balance of nature—of life and death.

  Where he had refused God’s request to return to Heaven.

  He sensed their approach, as he’d done that cataclysmic day when the world almost came to an end, and turned to face them.

  Thrones.

  They were God’s messengers, bringing His word to those deemed worthy enough to listen.

  “The Creator asks for your return to the City of Light—for the honor to sit at His right hand,” they had said that day, in voices that sounded like the planet’s largest orchestra tuning their instruments at once.

  And Remy had told them no.

  Now here he was before them again, their pulsing radiance like three miniature suns, though the surface of the sun, he was pretty sure, was not covered in multiple sets of scrutinizing eyes.

  The Thrones silently stared at him, their resplendent forms rolling in the air before him.

  “Greetings, emissaries of Heaven.” Remy finally spoke to them in the language of his ilk.

  The Thrones remained silent.

  “To what do I owe this latest visitation?”

  And suddenly his mind was filled with the sound of their voices, his face contorting in pain as the cacophony assailed his senses.

  “We were called, and we have answered.”

  Remy was startled. “You are mistaken. I did not summon you.”

  “No, you did not,” the Thrones replied.

  He was about to question them further when he felt his Seraphim nature stirring, beginning its ascent from the dark recesses of his being. Finally he understood who had summoned the Thrones and why. With all his might he tried to push it back down, to quell the powerful and destructive nature. What he was . . . what he was capable of scared Remy, and he would do all he could to keep that part of himself locked away. In the past he had been strong enough.

  But now it seemed impossible.

  Remy began to scream, his human guise turning to so much ash as the Seraphim exerted control.

  As Remiel exerted control.

  “Why have you summoned us, Seraphim?” the Thrones asked the armored angel now kneeling before them.

  “I want to go home,” Remiel said, lifting his gaze to them, bathing in the light of their resplendence.

  “I wish to return to Heaven.”

  Remy awoke with the sound of the Seraphim’s request echoing in his ears.

  It was still dark outside, and he lay atop the comforter. This was his first night back in the bed that he had shared with his wife, and he could not yet bear the thought of lying beneath the covers.

  Marlowe stared at him from the foot of the bed, his animal eyes glinting red in a flash of headlights as a lone car drove up Pinc
kney Street.

  “It’s all right,” Remy tried to reassure the dog, as he pushed himself up into a sitting position. He studied his hands to make sure that the human flesh was still present, and not the pale, luminous skin of the Seraphim. “Just a dream is all.”

  He threw his legs over the side, somewhat surprised that he had actually managed to put himself in a semirestful state. It had been a while, though he could have done without the dream.