I set his tea in front of him and sat down across the table from him, because I wanted to see as much of his face as I could. Profile wasn’t enough for me to read him.
He looked at me with those big brown eyes. They’d always dominated his face so that you saw his eyes and then the rest of him. Compelling was what one of the other female Angel Speakers had said once: “Levanael’s eyes are so compelling.” She’d been right.
“What happened next?” I asked.
“Emma, that’s her name, said that she dreamed about me coming to the shop.”
“Wow,” I said, and felt like we were ten again and had just seen some bit of angel magic we’d only read about before.
“I know, it was extraordinary. Not just that she had the dream but that she was willing to trust it enough to take me back to one of the small rooms where they do reiki and tarot. You know what I looked like before, Heaven help me, smelled like before, but Emma just took me in the room as if I was normal.” He smiled and sipped his tea before adding, “The owner of the shop was there and wouldn’t let Emma close the door. In fact, she stayed at the door watching over us. I can’t blame her. In fact, I’m glad she was looking out for Emma. She’s this amazing gentle energy that just feels good to be near.”
“Like the right kind of angel,” I said.
He nodded. “That’s sort of how she feels, but it’s like when we were around the priests that felt right. The energy of faith, true faith.”
“That’s really rare,” I said, drinking my own tea. It was good and I really needed to drink it before it got cold this time.
“It is.”
“What did she do to”—I made a vague motion at him—“for you?”
He took another sip of tea, sighing happily. “I’m so glad I can taste things again.”
“Me, too,” I said, and meant it.
“The healing started with Emma’s energy, and then she did actual energy work on me. Part of it was reiki, that’s what she’s got certificates in, but part of it was just intuitive energy work, that’s what she called it.”
I drank my tea and didn’t say that I’d never seen just energy work make a miracle like this. It could help, but this kind of change took more than one miracle cure.
“It was crystals and herbs and her guides talking to my guides.”
“You mean your Guardian Angels?”
“Not just the angels, but the other spiritual beings that are supposed to help protect me.”
I thought about Ravensong’s raccoon, the great bear and the blond Goddess or Valkyrie at her back. “Spirit guides and totems, you mean?”
“Yes,” he said.
I wondered if I lowered my shields and opened my senses, would I see some new power around him? I didn’t do it because it was too risky. I’d seen what was around Ravensong, and then I’d been in that place beyond where music was visible and angels moved along the humming strings of the universe. I couldn’t risk having Jamie follow me into that place, because it was traveling to it that had driven him mad.
“Did Emma help you get cleaned up, too?”
“She helped me get some clothes from Goodwill and she let me use her bathroom to get cleaned up. Her boss made sure that Emma’s roommates were home while I was there.”
“I take it that the owner of the New Age shop doesn’t have the same energy as Emma.”
He stirred his tea, smiled, frowned, smiled again, and said, “No, her energy feels very pointy like a porcupine, so that nothing gets in her shields.”
“Anyone sensitive to energy wouldn’t want to be around that.”
“True, maybe she only was pointy at me, keeping my energy off outside her shields,” he said, sitting back down with his tea. He wrapped his hands around the mug as if it didn’t have a handle. He didn’t drink from it right away, as if he was more warming his hands on the mug.
“You look great,” I said.
He shook his head. “I look better, but great, I’ll get there.”
I reached across the table and put my hand on his arm. “You look great to me, Lev-I, Levi.”
He put his hand over mine. “Thanks, Z. I’m sorry for everything I put you through.”
“You don’t have to apologize, you were sick.”
“I do need to apologize, but thank you for saying that.”
“Does Emma know what caused everything to go . . . off?”
“You mean why I went crazy at the very end of training to be an Angel Speaker?”
“Yes, but if it’s hard to talk about we can wait. It’s just that no one at the College understood what happened.”
“We’re not a hundred percent certain, but we think it’s my telepathy.”
“There are other telepaths at the College,” I said.
“But no one as powerful as I am, Z.”
“No one but Master Bachiel,” I said.
“Emma thinks that he, or some of the teachers, should have protected me more. She says I had almost no ability to shield my gift.”
“They did teach us how to shield ourselves,” I said.
“I never got good at personal shielding, remember?”
I thought about it. “That’s right, it was your weakest skill set.”
“Inside the College it didn’t matter; the wards around it are so solid and well constructed that they protected me.”
“They protected us all,” I said.
He nodded. “But when we started working directly with the realm of angels, there was nothing to shield me from them.”
“Shield you from the angels?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No, not from them, from the thoughts of all the people praying to the angels and to God.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Can’t you hear prayers?”
“Sometimes, if I’m not shielding tight enough, or if the prayer has a lot of need or emotion behind it.”
“How did you filter out the prayers inside the angelic realm?”
“I don’t hear prayers unless I’m listening for them there.”
“What do you hear?”
“Music,” I said.
“Music, just music?”
“Beautiful, amazing music like the universe is created out of music and light.”
He stared at me as if I’d said something terrible. “Music and light, just music and light?”
“I see angels and I see the light and lines of creation.”
“You didn’t hear the voices of all the people praying, asking for God’s help?”
“No,” I said.
The blood drained from his face so suddenly that I got up to put a hand on his shoulder in case he fainted. “Jamie, Levi, are you okay?”
“I heard voices, millions and millions of thoughts, prayers, screams of pain, people screaming in agony and begging God to help them.”
I knelt by him so I could look into his face. “You heard people screaming for help, while the rest of us saw music and lights?”
He nodded, his face so pale his lips looked bloodless. “I couldn’t shut it out. Even when the teachers brought me back from the heart of creation, I could still hear them.”