THE ABYSS: ABADDON

One thousand, nine hundred sixty-two years here and each moment is as sharp as the last. It would be too much to ask that the all-consuming depression of the abyss steal my awareness away. But perhaps we are too matched. My aura is heavy enough to pull at the brightness of other auras, like a black hole, like the abyss. Perhaps even if Lucifer had not anchored me to the wall the abyss would not take me if I tried to make the leap. Perhaps our consistency is too much the same and it would ignore me, spit me back out.

Demetri. By the time the name reaches me it is amplified and echoed by a dozen different voices, all of the lesser angels assigned to the abyss with me. I phase toward the human plane automatically, turn my head, and the bonds Lucifer wrapped around me pull and chafe at the movement. Water moves across my skin. Pressure that would kill a man feels like being wrapped tight in layers of silk.

Demetri. He is half-phased in the water before me -- how appropriate. He is human enough that the pressure this deep could kill him. His aura is heavy, dragging, though it means little against the weight of my own. But there's a connection I haven't felt in nearly two millennia.... "Demetri." Water fills my throat and lungs but it means nothing. The sound of a human voice does not travel this deep even when shouted, but he won't miss the name.

Abaddon. Still no 'Father.' I have not been Father in one thousand, nine hundred eighty-three years now. Which reminds me.... But he isn't finished. How long have you been like this?

A flash through his eyes: I am half-suspended in the rock wall of the abyss, only visible because my aura is blacker than the lightless wall ensnaring me. Lighter bonds lace through the rock around me, but Demetri still isn't trained enough to see the telltale hint of iridescence -- and feel the honeysuckle touch to them -- that marks them as Lucifer's. The image was unintentional. Demetri withdraws immediately. "One thousand, nine hundred sixty-two years," I answer his question.

Since I joined Lucifer, Demetri says. He's right. His grasp on time is not as good as mine, but I suppose there are some dates he cannot fail to mark. I don't respond. There's no need to. But I watch Demetri, hovering before me, the water like air to him as he straddles planes. One thousand, nine hundred sixty-two years since I saw him last. I wonder what his physical form looks like now. Still the body of a youth? Perhaps a man in his prime. How does he age? When he can bear my stare no more he turns away, and the new tendril of connection between us trembles. I feel it. It seems fragile at a brush, but there's a thread of iron in it. What has brought you here, my son? What has changed after so many centuries?

He turns back. His aura is warm with confusion, and there's lightness -- but not brightness, not yet. Why did you masquerade as human? he asks. It is not the core question, but there is intensity to it.

"To see what it is like," I answer. The water barely registers the vibration in my voice, but still he will not miss it. "I was curious. The favored creation, purely because of the ignorance. What must it be like?"

But you couldn't know. You weren't ignorant.

"No." I half-phase back and lose the feel of water on my skin. I am no human. Even flesh, I do not suffer their weaknesses. Human, the water would crush me. As it would Demetri in his physical form. But I can't quite dredge up jealousy anymore. It has been too long, and he does not seem so human after two thousand years.

And it has been two thousand years. That anniversary passed just months ago. It seems I have missed your birthday. The flux in his aura is minute but unmistakable. A landmark for you.

Only my second millennia, he says. Nothing to the rest of you.

Ah. He feels his differences acutely. Neither human nor angel. Born, but immortal, at least so far as we can imagine. You have been walking among mortals again. A supposition, but I am certain.

I met a woman, he says. She makes me wonder. There is so much I was told that I accepted. But I have never flown with graced angels before. He hesitates, and I can piece together this woman from the fragmented bits of memory and image that escape through the cracks in the hold he keeps around his mind. He never could hide all his thoughts from me. I can see how he has improved over the centuries, but I am glad I can still peer in through the cracks in his control. She is a healer of some sort, and a believer. Why did you fall?

The construction of the woman scatters. Once I might have expected this question from my son, but not now. Not after almost two thousand years spent in Lucifer's service. I was... tired. I was bored. I was angry. Still it is a difficult question to answer. Demetri may be half angel, but he is still graced with some of the ignorance of man. He cannot understand what it is like to be as old as God but inferior to His lark of a creation. Mankind. Two things separate us: ignorance and power. And the ignorance saves them. We are not so different from humans, Demetri. We have will and weaknesses. But His expectations for us.... We were to perform His will perfectly. There was no room for error. Because we knew Him, we had no excuse of ignorance.

The lightness in his aura is growing. Only a bit, but I can feel it as a tangible thing. I bristle in response, the well of my own aura lightening with curiosity. It will not last long, not once Demetri has gone again.

Thank you, Father. He phases angelic and flies: a flurry of aura, gone in a second. Maybe I would follow, were I not bound to the wall of the abyss.

Perhaps not. It doesn't take long for the comfortable lethargy to return.

MILAN, ITALY: LUCIFER

This place was once my Demetri's home, but I can't imagine why he returned long enough to grow distracted by his human woman. He had not been here in one thousand, nine hundred eighty-three years, and there is not a speck of the place he was born left in the city found here now. Ancient Mediolanum of Rome was grand for its time, but miniscule next to today's Milan with its chaotic clash of modern industriousness, Renaissance grandeur, and decaying Roman majesty. The few remaining Roman colonnades and basilicas are not even of Demetri's Rome. They came later, in the age of rising saints and Christianity.

I prefer it the way it is now. Chaos is much grander on a modern scale. The quick snap of a wagon axel in ancient Mediolanum might have caused no injuries at all, only inconvenience. But snapping the axel of a car in modern Milan, particularly a car cruising at a comfortable hundred twenty kilometers an hour, creates a mass of twisted metal, fire, and screaming human flesh sufficient to keep Demetri's doctor stuck in her hospital through the evening. And with her preoccupied with the futile task of trying to save some of the mortals from the wreck, I am free to slip into her apartment and await Demetri's return from the abyss.

Dear Abaddon. I will have to check on him next. Perhaps Demetri's visit will have breathed enough life into him that I won't want to set fire to my flesh whenever I'm around him longer than a few moments.

I will have some time. I fly to the little apartment and phase flesh just inside the doorway. The sense of Demetri is strong; he has spent a lot of time here in the last few months. The apartment is small, particularly for a doctor, and it is crowded with furniture. One too many loveseats in the living room, though the expensive tan leather upholstery marks the furniture as a set. I trail my fingers along the frames of pictures on the end tables.

And stop on a wrought iron frame shaped into ivy around a picture of the lovely doctor. Her skin is dark for an Italian, perhaps deeply tanned, and her thick dark hair frames a long face. There is curl to it. It is easier to define her features from a picture where there is no aura to interfere, and memories provide her petite height and slender frame. She could be from the world Demetri was born in, small enough that he dwarfs her even short as he is.

Imitating her flesh is not difficult. The aura is harder. My Demetri never mastered aura reading, but even he can't mistake the brilliant highs and bottomless lows of an angel's aura from the smaller range of a human's. Reminding myself of days as a graced angel is a quick way to deepen my aura, but it runs the risk of darkening too far.

It is impossible to lie to an angel, but fortunately Demetri is half human and thus half fallible. I have longed to see how far I can push a lie before he sees through it.

There's the sense of him in the hallway. I wear the form of his woman flawlessly by human standards, and my aura is as neutral as I can make it. A glance unlocks the apartment door, and I sink onto the leather sofa with my arms wrapped around my knees. This form is half the size of one I would normally take, and it has its own curiosities. Perhaps I should play at being petite more often.

Demetri's three firm raps come through the door. I haven't tried the woman's voice yet, but I've heard it before and it won't be hard to mimic. I pretend at weariness and call out, "Who is it?"

"It's me," he answers. I so rarely hear his voice through flesh ears anymore. It's pitched low, and though he hardly speaks loudly it carries easily. Normal human ears cannot appreciate the resonance in his voice, the way it harmonizes with the human heartbeat.

"Come in."

The door opens silently but for the breath of the air it disturbs. "Gianna?" Demetri asks, and he is at my side in an instant, one hand on my back and one on my leg. It seems I've made my aura a tad too dark.

I can manage that. I've already engineered the perfect excuse. "Work was difficult." I avoid meeting his eyes for the moment; it might well give me away. "There was a terrible accident. Injured pouring in, some of them already dead when they got there."

The shift in his aura lets me know I've done something wrong. Perhaps her speech patterns. You wouldn't think it would be difficult to fake a mortal's speech patterns, but it's tricky, particularly when you've hardly heard your subject speak. But it'll be too soon for him to suspect I'm not who I appear to be. His hand smoothes circles around the muscles of my back. "Difficult is an understatement," he says.

I nod, then risk looking into his eyes. Instantly he recoils, hissing like any wild beast, and half phases. His aura flags out behind him, vivid and dangerous. What is it about the eyes? Even an observant human can tell a false form by the eyes. I smile innocence. He squats low away from me, his fingers curled and tense. "My Demetri. What's wrong? Don't you recognize me?"

The tension eases, but only slightly. His aura contracts back around his body. Fascinating thing. Vivid as any angel's, but volatile, blinking from one end of the spectrum to the other when he is startled or shocked. There's the feel of salt to him, like the ocean but lighter; perhaps wind off the water. And the mixture of angelic iridescence and mortal refraction intensify one another until he is nearly magnetic, even to a human. "Lucifer," he says, his voice still a hiss, but he bows his head toward me. Old habits.... "What have you done with Gianna?"

"Nothing." I don't lose the smile. "There truly was a traffic accident. She will be at that hospital for hours."

"Working," Demetri says. My, but he has grown wise to my games.

"Yes, working," I answer. "I assure you, no harm would come to her through me. I can see what she means to you."

His expression is skeptical, but his frame relaxes and he moves back to sit on one of the loveseats. "What do you want, Lucifer? And take off that form."

"I haven't seen you in some time," I answer as I shift into the form of a short man who could be his Gianna's brother. I allow my aura to unfold around me again, broader and brighter than any human's. "I am wondering what has kept you in the mortal realm so long. I am wondering what has been occupying your thoughts."

His aura darkens and shrinks around him. "My two thousandth birthday passed," he says simply.

Well that clears some things up, perhaps. "Oh, dear Demetri. Had you but told me, we would have marked the occasion." But why is he still here? Why is he dallying with a mortal woman, a Christian woman? He is as far distant from mortals as he is from angels, after all.

"I am not certain I would have liked to celebrate the way you would have," he says.

Drat.

He has begun to doubt me. He has begun to wonder about God.

No matter. It is natural for one such as Demetri to wonder about God. To know of his existence, to be surrounded by those who have served him, and yet never to have met him, well, I can understand the curiosity. I suppose it was inevitable. "I see. Demetri, my Demetri."

His eyes burn when they meet mine. "I am not yours."

I bow my head and rise from the couch. "Very well." A temporary inconvenience. Having met God, it will be just as inevitable for Demetri to return to me. Even if God accepts him into his service -- and he may, if he allows the human half to outweigh the angelic -- after a few centuries of service, Demetri will return to me. Theoretically. "Know that I will always have a place for you."

Then again, I've never quite been able to predict what he'll do next.

MILAN, ITALY: GIANNA

I've almost made it home before the weight of it all hits me.

It's like a sack of bricks. Like the rhinoceroses I saw fighting in the zoo, barreling toward one another at full speed, only with me in the middle.

Like a car crash.

I slide down the wall of the lift. I don't look up when it stops moving. The last thirteen hours have been a running prayer, one that wasn't answered. Three people died under my hands despite all my help, one of them a child. Another may yet die before dawn. Still others are uncertain. One young man lost both his legs below the knees.

And though the horror of it is too much to bear, I can't keep it from flashing across my eyelids whenever my eyes close. I stare at the wall across from me, trying not to blink.

Lord, are you listening? Is this some sort of test? Was there a point? Did I pass? How would I know? How could so many die in one accident? Did we do something wrong? More wrong than usual? Is this a warning? Did I fail you? Could I have saved them? What was I supposed to do?

"Gianna." Demetri's voice breaks a little on my name. An arm slides under my knees and across my back, and he lifts me from the floor easily. I don't know how long I sat there, but I ache, and I can't stop shivering.

It isn't cold.

"I heard about the accident." His lips are soft against my ear. "I'm sorry, love."

I wrap my arms tight around his neck and press my face into his chest. The doubts are suffocating, choking, but can I voice them? Demetri has made it clear enough how he feels about God.

Maybe that's what I need now.

"Am I being punished?" I keep my face pressed to his chest, but though he's quiet, I know he understood me.

I feel his hand in my hair and his lips brush against the top of my head. "No, love. Of course not."

"Why would God allow this to happen?" My voice cracks and breaks.

"I'm not sure," he says. "But there must be a reason."

There's a strange quality to his voice that makes me look up. We're in the apartment, on the sofa, though I didn't feel him walking. He still has me curled in his arms. His eyes are slightly distant even when he looks down at me. "Demetri?"

"You need sleep," he says, and his eyes clear. His smile is gentle. "How long did you work today? Far too long, I'm sure. You'll feel better in the morning." He stands and moves toward the bedroom.

Sleep. Yes. I lay my cheek against his chest and match my breathing to his.

Maybe he is coming around to God. Either way, it soothes me just to know that he comforted me in a moment of doubt rather than making it worse.

MILAN, ITALY: DEMETRI

Once Gianna's breathing is deep and even, I kiss the side of her head and phase angelic. I will be back before she wakes.

Until then, I have a god to confront.