“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.
The angel looked at me, and its face was less flame and slightly more human, not in the pretense of humanity it had shown at first, but like it was deciding on a real face for when it became more solid. This one was in real danger of losing some of its pure spirituality. If I had truly been an Angel Speaker, I would have reported it to those who were supposed to have the ear of God. Now all I could do was warn the angel itself, which I’d done. They didn’t have free will, but the more time they spent on the mortal plane the closer they got to it.
“Very well, Detective Zaniel Havelock, have you answered your own question yet?”
It took me a second to remember it. I was getting too distracted by the angel. It had been so long since I’d been near one in this raw a form. I could admit to myself that it felt good to be near the power, like I’d been cold for years and suddenly I could warm my hands.
“The adversary can sometimes hide its minions from the angels.”
“Yes,” the angel said.
“If a demon did this, the entire apartment would feel evil, and it does not.”
“It does not, but it should.”
“So, the murderer is a demon,” I said.
“No, but it should be.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Neither do we.”
I stared at the angel, wishing there was a face so I could read its expression, and the wish was enough that the face began to shape into cheeks and fiery hair, and . . . I forced myself to stop thinking about the angel’s form. I stopped my imagination in its tracks because flesh could influence spirit. My training as an Angel Speaker didn’t make it easier for me to force the angel into a shape of my choosing; the training enabled me to stop before it happened. It was partly a safety measure so that when angels appeared to humans, they didn’t drive us insane, but it was more complicated than that. I took a breath and let go of my need to see human features on the fire shape in front of me, and it settled back into something even less human. Good.
“Are you saying that you, the angels, do not understand what the murderer is?”
There was a sensation of it moving again, and I could feel it listening again. I had a second of thinking that if I listened hard enough, I could hear the music of spheres, the shining language of creation that kept reality running. I fought off the urge because I knew how dangerous it would be for me and for . . . others.
“The murderer is something that should not be.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“The thing that should not be has changed the fate of the woman. If this is allowed to continue, more fates will be changed and God’s plan could be disrupted.”
I blinked at the glowing angel and swallowed past a sudden lump in my throat as my pulse sped up. “Only free will can interfere with someone’s fate, and nothing can interfere with God’s plan,” I said.
“Some humans have fates so tightly written that free will is not completely possible.” It completely ignored the part about God’s plan, but I stuck to what it was willing to talk about, because if an angel decides it won’t talk about something, it won’t. Human imagination can change their appearance, but it can’t give us any insight into their thoughts.
I shook my head. “I know you have to believe that, but I don’t.”
“And that is your free will, Detective Havelock,” said the angel.
“It is,” I said, “but are you saying that this woman, Megan Borowski, was one of those people whose fate is so tightly written that free will shouldn’t have been able to change it?”