Jamie laughed, too.
She looked at both of us. “What did I miss?”
“Suriel, our friend, she got memories in meditation from what she thought might be a past life, but when she tried to tell our meditation teacher that, well, he used it as a chance to tell all of us that there was no such thing as reincarnation. We had one lifetime to make our place in Heaven and if we screwed it up, we went to Hell forever.”
“Wow, that’s harsh,” she said.
“It’s the truth,” Jamie said.
“No,” she said, “no, it’s not true, or at least it’s not to my faith. You and I have known each other in past lives, Levanael. You felt the connection from the moment we met.”
He nodded. Then looked at her with eyes as full of sadness as they’d held anger earlier. “I know we’ve known each other before, Emma, but I still believe in Heaven and Hell and all the awful things they terrified me with as a child.”
“Before Dante wrote his fictional Hell, it was just separation from God, that’s it,” she said.
I nodded. “She’s right; I found people who read the original languages that the Bible is written in, and that’s all Hell was: separation from God. It’s like the Fallen can no longer hear the voice of God.”
“You don’t believe I’m going to burn in Hell for all the shit I did on the street?”
I reached across the table and put my hand over his other hand while she held the other one. “No, Jamie, Levanael, no, I don’t believe you are going to Hell. A seraph spoke through you today and you felt energized and better. If you were impure and damaged, you would have been destroyed by it.”
That smile lit his face almost as if he were glowing from inside. I blinked and called that second sight, and he was shining with white light and there was an angel behind him towering up to the ceiling and beyond like a winged shadow at his back. I hadn’t seen his angel looking this good in years. I started to tear up and looked down to hide it. I wasn’t ashamed to cry in front of them, but I didn’t want Jamie to think he was making me sad. I didn’t want to upset him or take that glow from him.
“Did you say a seraph, as in one of the seraphim?” Emma said.
Jamie and I looked at each other. I finally answered, “Yes.”
“Wow, they are like the closest to the throne of God, right?”
We both nodded.
“I didn’t think it was possible for anyone to channel one of them.”
“It’s rare even at the College of Angels,” I said.
“I’ve never done it before. The highest before was a cherub,” he said.
“One of the cherubim? That is impressive, too; you do understand that the higher orders of angels almost never interact directly with human beings, right?”
He looked at me again, and I nodded. “I’ve been crazy for ten years; I don’t know what normal is outside of the College. Inside, a handful of us were able to work with the higher orders of angels, but it wasn’t long after I channeled a cherub that I went insane.” He looked very seriously across the table at me. “So how did I do a seraph today without going crazy again? We weren’t in a warded area, no special magical protection except what I was carrying with me.”
“I had the apartment blessed when I moved in,” I offered.
“Maybe that was it,” he said, then frowned. “No, Z, a blessed apartment isn’t as much protection as everything that surrounds the College of Angels.”
“You have your totem protecting you now,” Emma said.
I wanted to ask what his totem was, but I knew from working with Ravensong that it was considered a very personal question. I tried not to remember her raccoon too vividly, because I knew that if you thought too much about something mystically it was like trying not to think of the color blue; when people tell you to think of anything but blue, it’s all you can think of. I saw a white bird on Emma’s right shoulder. There was a dove cuddled up against her cheek. It was so real that for a second, I thought a real bird had flown in here somehow to perch on her, and then I realized it wasn’t a flesh-and-blood dove.
I glanced at Jamie and found myself staring not at him, but at the round face and dark orange hair of an orangutan. A huge male orangutan. It looked at me with gold-brown eyes that were not even close to the darker brown of Jamie’s eyes, but the look in the eyes seemed alike somehow, both gentle and waiting, but waiting for what? I tried to turn away, because I knew it was looking without permission, but of all the spirit animals that Jamie could have had . . . why an orangutan? And yet the longer I looked at Jamie with the great ape beside him, the rightness of it settled over me. They matched in a way that Guardian Angels never worried about. Babies were given an angel like the color of their eyes, just part of the equipment of being human, but somehow I felt that totem animals didn’t work that way.
I finally looked away as if I’d been caught staring at something too personal, and found Emma watching me. “What do you see, Zaniel?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to . . .”
“I didn’t ask you to apologize, I asked you to tell me what you see.”
“There’s a dove on your shoulder, and there’s an orangutan sitting beside Levanael.”
Jamie smiled. “I didn’t know you could see totems.”
“I can see the totems of people I work with when we’re doing magic together, though I’d thought my coworker had a bear as one of her totems, but today I realized that the bear felt different from a totem, more and less, more power, but less personal.”
“Bear is the symbol for several Deities, so it could be the representative of one of the Gods or Goddesses that your friend works with in her magical practice or her path of faith,” Emma said.
“I think Goddess, it felt like that kind of energy,” I said.
Emma nodded and smiled, though her eyes were darker gray and more serious than the smile. She seemed to be studying me, or maybe she was looking at me with more than just her physical eyes, too. I’d started it, so I guess I couldn’t complain.
“Can you see anyone else’s totem?” she asked finally.
I turned and looked at the rest of the customers. They were sipping their tea and coffee. Some of them were eating scones and muffins, a few sandwiches, and drinking bottled waters, but it was just people enjoying themselves at a café. There wasn’t another animal in sight, real or metaphysical.
“What do you see, Zaniel?” Emma asked.
“Nothing, I expected to see everyone’s totems the way I see angels once I concentrate.” I turned back to her and the dove was still cuddled close to her cheek as if it liked being there. The orangutan was still looking at me with that peaceful, gentle expression that mirrored Jamie’s to the point that when Jamie raised his tea, the orangutan raised its own phantom cup and drank.
“Jamie’s orangutan is drinking tea, is that typical?” I asked.
“You mean for the totem to mimic what we’re doing?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, fighting the urge to blink rapidly so I wouldn’t see the ape echoing Jamie’s movements. I don’t know why, but that bothered me.
“Sometimes; sometimes it works the other way. If we are in danger we can borrow or be filled with the fierceness of our animal, or we can imitate how they survive in their environment and it will keep us safe. They can also help us study or find our best way to live our lives in so many ways. Embracing the characteristics of our co-walker can teach us so much about ourselves and how we fit into the world around us.”