db1bd484fe8700408f51338793ca8c56

“I’d rather have flaming swords,” Claire sighed. “It’d be easier to find. Given the stuff Lena had in her bedroom, we’re probably talking a New Age kind of angel; human appearing, frighteningly powerful, smug and sweetly sanctimonious busybody.”

“Kind of like a jed…”

Her palm covered the cat’s mouth. “We don’t have enough problems?” she demanded. “You want to add trademark infringement?”

“What I don’t understand,” Dean interjected before someone lost a finger, “is how an angel can be a bad thing.”

“This kind of angel isn’t, not in and of itself—ignoring for the moment the way they always think they know what’s best for perfect strangers.” She paused, and when it became apparent Austin was not going to add a comment, went on. “But I can’t help thinking that much good walking around in one solid clump is well, bad.”

“Good is bad?”

“Metaphorically speaking.”

“And a remarkably inept metaphor it is, too,” Austin sighed.

They drove in silence for a few minutes, then Dean said,“So what do we do?”

“We hope Father Harris tells Diana where the angel went and that he went with a purpose so that, purpose fulfilled, he’ll go home. If not, we hope someone convinces him to go home before…”

“Before what?”

“I don’t know.” She stroked Austin’s back and stared out at a set of headlights approaching on the other side of the median. “But I can’t shake the feeling that something’s about to go very, very wrong.”

[Ęŕđňčíęŕ: img_6]

The darkness that had been seeping through the tiny hole in the woods behind J. Henry and Sons Auto Repair since just before midnight Christmas Eve struggled to keep itself together. While adding a constant stream of low-grade evil to the world might have been an admirable end result in times past, this time, it had a plan. It didn’t know patience, patience being a virtue, but it did know that rushing things now would only bring disaster—which it wasn’t actually against as long as it was the stimulant rather than the recipient. Had anyone suggested it was being subtle, it would have been appalled. Sneaky, however, it would cop to.

It had been maintaining this isolated little hole for some time, carefully, without changing anything about it, unable to use it but keeping it open when it might have sealed on its own—just in case. The hole was too small to Summon a Keeper, and because it was in the woods behind a closed garage outside a small town no one ever came to on a road that didn’t actually go anywhere, it was unlikely that either Keeper or Cousin would ever stumble over it by accident.

When the other end of the possibilities had opened and shifted the balance so dramatically, it saw its chance. It allowed the change in pressure to squirt it up through the hole and the concentration of the light to help keep it together.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Physics as metaphysics.

It grew steadily, secure in the knowledge that the nearest Keeper was too far away to stop it.

But, because inactivity would make them suspicious, it indulged itself with a little misdirection.

In the parts of the world that had just celebrated Christmas, holes created by family expectations widened and the first strike capabilities of parents against unmarried adult children became apparent.

In other parts of the world, low levels of annoyance at the attention paid to exuberant consumerism cranked up a notch, and several places burned Santa in effigy. The people of Effigy, a small village in the interior of Turkey, took the day off.

[Ęŕđňčíęŕ: img_5]

Somewhere else, a man picked up a pen, stared at it blankly for a moment and, shuddering slightly, signed his name, renewing“Barney” for another season. But thatmight have been a completely unrelated incident.

SEVEN

[Ęŕđňčíęŕ: img_4]

ANXIOUS TO GET AT WHATEVER IT WAS he was supposed to be doing, Samuel had slipped out before dawn.

Dawn. The first light of day. The rising of the sun. The sun. A relatively stable ball of burning hydrogen approximately 150 million kilometers away. Higher knowledge hadn’t mentioned anything about how early it happened.

He yawned and scratched, then walked to the road, stepped over a snowbank, and stood looking around at the world—or as much of it as he could see from the sidewalk in front of St. Patrick’s. It wasn’t what he’d expected. It was quieter for one thing, with no evidence of the constant battle between good and evil supposedly going on in every heart. He’d expected turmoil, people crying out for any help he could give. He hadn’t expected his nose hair to freeze.

Actually, until he’d traced the tight, icy feeling to its source, he hadn’t known hehad nose hair.

Wondering why anyone would voluntarily live in such temperatures, he started walking down the road.