Things?
"Yeah, it seems like there are all these things out there that I had no idea existed, and to be honest, it"s super complicated to keep track, okay? So what is he?"
He"s a Thrall.
"What"s a Thrall?"
A slave.
"A slave?"
Yes.
My body was beginning to tire. It"d been a very long day. But I had to stay alert. I had to.
"Can you tell me more about these Thrall slaves?" I asked, hoping it would be a straightforward enough question for this terribly literal ghost thingy to answer. "I"m just...I"m just going to go sit back on the swing and listen. You come with me."
It felt odd giving it orders, and yet somehow right. For some reason I wasn"t scared of the creature anymore. It still looked as freaky as heck, but its personality was starting to grow on me. And it certainly had had the chance to do whatever it wanted to me and it hadn"t hurt me or anything. Well. Not yet.
Obediently, it followed me over to the swing. Though, it wasn"t like it followed me, it was more like when we were over by the swing it had been there the whole time.
"Okay, go," I said, sitting down.
Thralls are slaves to the Circle of Seven. You are right that the lesser angels work for the Archangels. But there are some tasks that even angels will not do. So the Circle of Seven decided to take humans every once in a while and turn them into their slaves.
"They did?" I"d never read anything about this in my research. This was a totally new concept for me. "But, if this is something they do a lot, how come there"s no literature about it, how come we never heard about the Taking until six years ago?"
They take only a few, now and then. They have generations of slaves going back to the beginning. They do not need to take that many at a time. Humans did not notice. Or if they did they were considered insane when they explained what happened. Excuses were given. In current times, for example, they say it is an alien abduction.
"Oh. So Thralls steal humans for angels."
No.
"No?" No? "So what"s happening to us then?"
It"s different here. Usually angels take humans and turn them into slaves, into Thralls. But here Thralls come to do the taking.
"Why?"
I do not know.
This was a lot of information to process. I went over it in my brain. The Circle of Seven were Archangels. They were the bosses of the lesser angels. And they also had slaves that were once human but who had been turned into Thralls. "So let me get this straight. Fifty years ago Gabe was taken by angels. In that flash of light Etta Mae told us about."
Yes.
"And then he came back six years ago as a Thrall and took other humans. He and some of his Thrall b affected by our powerazkidd uddies."
It would appear so.
"And you don"t know why." That seemed pretty hard to believe.
I do not.
"But you know everything."
I do not.
"You seem to."
I only know what I have observed from here in this town.
"But you know stuff about angels. You know about the Circle of Seven, the angels that work for them, the Nephilim..." I was starting to feel seriously sleepy. "And the Thrall slave things. You know more than I do."
I come from the other place. Angels, Nephilim, Thralls. They all come from the other place. I know of them as you know of other humans, animals, plants, and so forth.
"The other place."
Yes.
"Where is this other place?"
Here.
"Here?"
And not. It is and it is not. It is now, then, and will be.
"Well, that"s straightforward..." I sighed and curled my legs up underneath me, resting my head along the back of the swing. I could probably just sleep in it for the night at this point, I was so tired.
I"m glad you find it so.
The ghost thingy seemed almost pleased with itself.
"I was joking."
Oh. And, after a pause. You should stop doing that.
"I should?"
It is very confusing. You should speak plainly.
"What, like you do?"
Yes.
I sighed again. "That was sarcasm again."
Oh. Once again a pause. But I speak plainly.
"Well, the things you say might be obvious to you, but they aren"t to me."
It didn"t reply but seemed to be considering what I"d said. We were quiet for a moment, and I could hear the sounds of gently swaying branches creaking in the breeze.
You care very much about this Thrall.
"About Gabe?"
Yes.
I woke up several hours later. It was still dark out, but I could smell morning on the air. There was a mist over the lawn, and I was covered in a cold damp. I sat up and stretched out, my muscles aching from sleeping clenched in the swinging chair. Of course, the ghost thingy was nowhere to be seen. I was relieved. The thought of trying to speak with it again seemed overwhelming.
I stood up and made my way back to the house and up to my room. My bed had never felt quite so comfortable before. My pillow was unbelievably soft. I drifted back to sleep. My alarm went off an hour later. I decided it had to die, so I threw it across the room. The sound of it breaking against my wall woke me up properly, and I sat wondering what on earth had possessed me to be that violent. I"d never done anything like that before in my life.
What was the obvious question? The thought popped into my head before I could solve the throwing the clock across the room conundrum.
Then I just wanted to get all the questions out of my brain, so I got out of bed and had a shower.
At breakfast I sat opposite Gabe, watching him gulp down his eggs like he"d never had a meal in his life. Mother had gone out of eye contact with him"sh. Couldher way to make us this crazy huge breakfast in honor of Gabe"s return. She"d been so glad to see him last night that she"d actually cried. I think that had made Gabe feel really terrible and yet really awesome at the same time.
After she"d laid out the spread, she"d left us to go get dressed, so it was just me and Gabe, sitting eating together, for the first time in weeks. It was nice to have him back. Not just in body but in spirit. The old happy Gabe was sitting across from me and it warmed my heart.
But I also knew I had to tell him what I"d found out last night, even if that dimmed the mood somewhat. He had to know that he"d been kidnapped by angels, turned into a Thrall, and been a slave for the last 50 or so years. It was only right that he understand what he was. But that would also mean revealing to him that I"d talked with the ghost thingy, talked with it more than once, and hadn"t told him. Maybe there was a way of telling him the truth without, you know, telling him the truth.
"So I did some research online last night," I said, reaching for the b.u.t.ter.
"Yeah?" He looked up at me with a smile.
"I wanted to know if there were any myths or anything, about humans being turned into strange creatures by angels."
"Sweetheart, stop right there."
At first I thought he was telling me to stop b.u.t.tering my toast for some reason, but then I realized he meant to stop in my explanation. I did.
"Is there anything you can tell me that"s gonna change our plan?" he asked.
I thmy eyes. I was
I was right. My attention to the recruiting our army campaign was a pretty decent distraction from not just the "obvious question," but threatened to be a distraction from stuff like school work too. School just seemed so not the point with our new mission, but I also knew that whether we succeeded or failed at our mission, I"d probably still need a highschool degree in future. So I worked extra hard on working extra hard.
Two frustrating weeks pa.s.sed before we could find a time to meet with Father Peter. Our town was super weird that way. Sure we were all worshipping at the altar of the Angels, sure we had blindly changed most of our traditions and followed Pastor Warren, zombie-like, into this brave new world of his. But we still, without question, needed to celebrate the finding of eggs in strange and unusual places.
Father Peter obviously took Easter pretty seriously and had been arranging as many events as possible, considering it was this and Christmas that he was allowed to have any say on. He had begrudgingly joined forces with Pastor Warren, I think reasoning that it was better to get to preach to a crowd, than to hold ma.s.s in an empty church. That made it really tough to actually get to talk to him alone, without the epitome of evil standing close by.
So we had to wait till Easter was done. We had to sit through the mandatory Easter Sunday service, the first time in years that I"d attended one. Gabe didn"t, though. Despite the fact there was now an expectation that everyone would attend holiday services, he didn"t get in trouble for it. He didn"t tend to get in trouble for any of his "blasphemous" actions. He was that kid with the motorbike, no family, no interest in being a part of the town. So the town didn"t have much interest in him either. The service was extra long now because we had to listen to both Pastor Warren and Father Peter speak, and attend the annual Easter egg hunt in Codghill Park. The town seemed to be in some sort of trance.
I"d actually worried that maybe we"d lost Father Peter to this mob mentality, but I noticed the little looks he"d give Pastor Warren as they stood before us under the shining wings at the alter. I noticed how he stood off to the side during the Easter egg hunt and never quite smiled with his eyes when laughing at Pastor Warren"s jokes.
I didn"t wait long affected by our powerrckDivers...o...b..oks after that.
Tuesday after school, Gabe and I headed right to the Catholic Church. I couldn"t be sure, but I think I saw a look of fear cross Father Peter"s face when he realized it was me coming to see him. So last time maybe I"d made him question his own faith. Surely this time I was going to help him keep it?
"h.e.l.lo, Riley, Gabe. So nice to see you both. Close the door behind you. Shall we go into my office?"
I realized now what that look had meant as Gabe went back to the door to shut it and Father Peter ushered us silently into the backroom. I guess two teenagers coming to visit him at his church was a pretty suspicious sight now in our town. Supporting any other religion these days was seen as something deeply suspicious.
We took the two chairs facing his desk. Father Peter sat behind it. "And what can I do for you two today? Feel like a shotgun wedding?" It was nice to hear Father Peter joke again. But he did it half-heartedly.
"Funny you should mention shotguns..." said Gabe with a grin.
"Father Peter," I said interrupting Gabe before he got silly, "we have something very important that we have to talk to you about."
"Well, I thought as much. I don"t think you"d risk being seen here otherwise. Though I suppose neither of you really cares about public opinion..."
"You can say that again," said Gabe.
"So what"s up?" asked Father Peter, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his desk.
"It"s a pretty big deal," I said.
"Okay."
"No, I mean, you should prepare yourself mentally for it. It"s possibly the hugest deal you"ve heard."
Father Peter glanced at Gabe then back at me.
"I see," he said.
"You ready?"
"...Yes..."
I took a deep breath and then just blurted it out. "The angels aren"t angels." I stopped and looked at him. His expression didn"t change. "What I mean is," I tried again, "the angels, our angels, the ones taking everyone. They aren"t actually angels."