“I don’t need to be guarded.”
“You do,” Cal assures me.
“From what?”
He gives me that exasperated look I’m starting to recognize. It’s almost endearing now. “You know.”
The river. “You can’t read my thoughts but you can go into my dreams?”
He says nothing.
“Why won’t you let me…?”
His eyes harden. “It’s dangerous, Benji. You don’t know what you’re looking at.”
Truer words were never spoken, I think as I stare up at him. I need to change the subject. I can’t let him go on with this. It suddenly seems important, this dream. I’d gotten further into the river than I had last time, seen more—the tires spinning on the truck, the figure standing up on the road in the rain. I need to distract him somehow. An idea, something I’d considered as I fell asleep the night before. “What about the others?” I ask.
This confuses him. “What do you mean?”
“The other people of Roseland. You said you were the guardian angel to Roseland, right? How can you be protecting everyone if you’re here?”
He studies me before he speaks, as if gauging my sincerity. Somehow, I don’t think I’ve fooled him. He seems, at times, to have an almost simple demeanor. But other times, like now, the intelligence that flares behind his eyes is a breathtaking thing. He knows my game, but he’s letting it slide. For now.
“There are shapes,” he says. “Patterns to follow. Designs to read. It’s… hard to explain.”
I wait.
He sighs and steps back, leaning against the wall near the spare bedroom door. I try to focus on what he’s saying instead of looking at the muscles carved into his stomach, the lines of his hips, the white that is his skin. “I can’t tell the future,” he says, sounding almost frustrated, as if this fact is the bane of his existence. “I can’t speak to God’s plan. I don’t think anyone can, even the higher-ups, the archangels. Sometimes I wonder what exactly Michael knows, or what Raphael or Gabriel or David can see, but I don’t think even they know what the future will bring. Metatron may have known, but no one has seen him in generations, so I can’t say for sure.”
My head is starting to hurt again. “Metatron?” I mutter. “More
than meets the eye?”
Apparently he doesn’t get my feeble attempt at a joke, the seriousness never leaving his face. “Metatron is the highest angel, supposedly the first. But he disappeared and no one knows where he went. He’s more legend now than fact.”
My weak understanding of any kind of religion is fairly evident. My dad and mom were never ones to go to church. About half of Roseland goes to Our Mother of Sorrows, the local Catholic church. Different faiths head to nearby towns to worship. I asked Big Eddie once why we didn’t go. He told me that a man should be free to choose to do as he pleases on Sundays, even if it meant watching the Seahawks. I never argued with the logic of my father.
The names are familiar (Raphael and Michael, Gabriel and David) but he might as well be speaking in Latin for all I understand. It might be too early for an angel hierarchy lesson. I shake my head, trying to clear my thoughts. “What does this have to do with Roseland?”
“It’s the pattern,” he explains. “I can see threads weaving out from Heaven and down toward Earth. They form shapes. An outline. A design for each human being on the planet. Think of it like… like a loom, and these threads are woven, a plan for an individual. While I can’t see them being woven, I pick up the ends of the threads and follow them. There are signs in them, signs that I have to watch for, of actions that I must take, or actions that I must not take. And they’re all connected, some way or another. You humans are more connected to each other than you could ever realize. You may not see it, but I do. I see it every day.”
“And this is God telling you to do this?” I ask, incredulous. “How can you know if you’ve never even seen him?”
“Faith, Benji,” Calliel says, like it’s that simple. And maybe to him it is. “I have faith that my Father knows what he is doing, that he knows what is right. That he has a plan for the way things will turn out.” His eyes darken and he frowns at this last, but the moment passes. I almost call him on it, but I don’t know what he’d do. He still scares the royal fuck out of me.
“And God does this for everyone on this planet?”
He laughs, and it’s a big sound. “Everyone here and everywhere else.”
“What do you mean ‘everywhere else’?”
“Questions,” he growls at me, but there’s a small smirk there. “Always with the questions. There are more… places… than this one.”
I hold up my hand. “I don’t want to know. I’ve already got too much going on inside my head to know that there are aliens.”
He grins at me. It’s almost feral.
“Can you see my thread?” I ask, feeling ridiculous.