“I’m still seeing it,” one of the others muttered trying to blink away afterimages.
“It came from the direction of the Hansen place.”
Someone whimpered.
The silence stretched past the point where it could be comfortably broken and then went on a little longer. Finally, the shift senior, a man with eighteen years experience and two citations for bravery, cleared his throat. “I didn’t see anything,” he said.
A mumbled chorus of, “Neither did I,” followed the collective sigh of relief.
“But…” Brent looked out into the darkness of Christmas Eve, at the starlit beauty of the velvet sky above, at the strings of brightly colored Christmas lights innocently mirroring that beauty below, and remembered other visits to the Hansen house. Or tried to. Most of the memories were fuzzy—and not warm and fuzzy either, but fuzzy like trying to pull in the WB without either a satellite dish or cable, picture skewed, one word in seven actually audible. And the harder he tried, the less he could remember.
Except for the incident with the burning bush. That, he couldn’t forget.
Denial became the only logical option.
Happy to have that settled, he turned back to the game. “What moron just chose Charmander against Pikachu?”
The light should have dissipated.
Should have.
Didn’t.
Instead, it found itself in an empty, cavernous room in a large, two-story brick building. Caught by the power woven into the snowflake pattern, it rose up through the crepe-paper streamers toward the ceiling, was filtered and purified, and poured back through the center hole.
More now than merely a glorious possibility, it hovered for a moment above center court, then, following the pull of need, it passed through the window, and out into the night.
Lena thoughtfully flicked her lighter on and off. She’d already taken the batteries out of the smoke detector in the hall, but after a certain point that became moot and her father would come charging down into her room demanding to know if she was trying to burn down the house.
There were six candles burning under her angel poster, nine among the angel figurines on her dresser, three votive candles in angel candle holders, and one in a souvenir Backstreet Boys mug on the bedside table.
Close to the limit.
One more, she decided, and started searching through the stubs of melted wax for something worth burning. Nothing. Unfortunately, that one more had gone from being an option to being a necessity during the search. Slowly, she turned to her bookshelf.
The angel standing beside her CD player was an old-fashioned figure about a foot high in long flowing robes and wings. He was even carrying a harp. His gold halo circled a pristine white wick.
Heart pounding, Lena approached with the lighter. This had been her very first angel, plucked out from between a broken Easy-Bake oven and a stack of macramé coasters at a neighborhood yard sale. Oh, please, she thought as the flame touched the wick. Let this sacrifice be enough to make it happen!
There was no need to be more specific about what it was. It was always the same thing. She’d wished for it on a thousand stars, her last three birthday cakes, the wishbones of four turkeys, Christmas and Thanksgiving, and with a penny in every body of water she passed. The school custodian had fished enough pennies out of the toilets in the girls’ washrooms that he’d treated himself to a package of non-Board of Education toilet paper—the kind that couldn’t be fed through a laser printer.
The wick darkened, a bit of wax melted on the top of the golden head, and then the flame roared up high enough to scorch the ceiling, filling Lena’s basement bedroom with light.
The light moved slowly away from the candle, into the center of the room.
“It’s an angel,” Lena cried, eyes watering, eyebrows slightly singed.
And because she believed, it was.
The light took form.
And substance.
And became everything a not quite seventeen-year-old girl wanted in an angel.
In the moment of making, the door flew open and a large, dark-haired man, waving one hand in front of his face to clear the smoke, burst into the room. “Lena! How many times have I told you…?” His eyes widened, and his bellow became a roar. “What the devil are you doing in my daughter’s room?”
Lena knew that angels were sexless, but her father didn’t know that the beautiful young man with the bicolored hair was an angel, and his belief in what he was seeing was as strong as hers.
The last little bit of substance formed out of a father’s fears.
And, all things considered, it wasn’t actually that little.
His expression a cross between confusion and panic, the angel ducked the first blow, slipped under an outstretched hand, and ran for the bedroom door. He would have made it except that he hit a bit of unexpected anatomy on the edge of a chair and the sudden pain dropped him to his knees. The second blow connected.
Lying on the floor, hands clasped between his legs, he stared blearily up at the angry man standing above him, and wondered just what exactly was going on.
He wasn’t the only one.
“What do you mean, he had no clothes when he got here?”
Diana, heavily shielded and doing her best impersonation of nothing at all, waited in the triangle of deep shadow behind the love seat, determined that this would be the year. From where she crouched, eyes grown used to the dark could see the entire fireplace—top to bottom, side to side—and, beyond it, the lower curve of the Christmas tree. On the mantel, beside the cards, was a glass of milk and three cookies. Homemade chocolate chip cookies, with the chips still soft from the oven. Only the best bait would slow him down.
She’d almost caught him a couple of
