Thief Read online

  Next he considered the biological impossibility of a women with wings.

  Breaking down her image as she flexed her wings he built a three-dimensional topographic map of her body, and studied the muscles as they rippled. It was a most impressive map. The angel was probably the most muscular woman he’d ever heard of, and that was based upon only the muscles he could see. Somewhere in her torso, probably around her kidneys, he realized she had to have enormous flight muscles. They probably connected to her buttocks much as the quadriceps did in a man. She also had to have massively developed pectorals. Two sets; one for the arms, and one for the wings. Her sternum surely had to be shaped like a bird’s bursa with raised crest for muscle attachments. The inter-scapular and shoulder regions also ought to have their own anatomical mysteries.

  Yet if that was so he conjectured, they should show. Even through her gauzy, puffed out dress he should be able to see the bursa muscles, but there was nothing. She looked to his male eye, like feminine perfection, totally human, with wings attached. Her body defied the laws of bio-mechanics.

  Then there were the wings themselves, massive surely beyond use. Their twenty plus foot span could only be achieved by having each of them double jointed so that when she stood there was a three foot segment to the top arch, a seven foot drop almost to the ground, and then another three foot segment curving back up to the wing tip. Such wings couldn’t be designed by nature. They should weigh a ton, and be far too massive for any creature to flap. And yet he’d seen her fly with them. Not just fly but also hover, wings flapping gently and showing not the least sign of strain. What sort of muscle could support such a strain over such a wing span? Surely she couldn’t be mammalian. Yet her form argued otherwise.

  Also strangely, the wings didn’t weigh that much. He’d held her, carried her, and even then known that she was surprisingly light. Wings and all she’d be lucky to weigh a hundred pounds. Yet how could that be?

  Not an expert in anatomy and physiology, he still found her body structure fascinating. If only she hadn’t been wearing that white dress he cursed, he could have studied her better. And then he thought of what he’d asked for and crossed himself hastily, the distant memory of a Catholic upbringing rearing its ugly head even after so many years.

  Hastily he turned his attention to other things. Specifically, the databases. If he couldn’t discover anything that made sense from her, perhaps others might have. After all, angels had been spoken of for at least as long as recorded history.

  An avid reader, he’d taken the liberty of building his own library decades in the past, and then over the years had extended it and extended it again. Then finally he’d scanned it on to computer. As a result he had an extensive knowledge base, larger than most city libraries and it was completely searchable. It also should have considerable information on biblical things. After all, some of the treasures he’d stolen and returned to their rightful owners in the past, were religious artefacts. It was amazing how much gold and silver the churches had stashed away over the years.

  It occurred to him briefly that perhaps that was why she’d come. He’d returned the churches’ treasures all right, when he’d occasionally recovered them from the crooks, but he hadn’t returned the money. It had largely gone to charities rather than churches. Call it a philosophical difference of opinion he had with organized religion. Money should go to feed the poor on earth, not enrich their souls for the afterlife.

  Could she have come for it, a sort of heavenly debt collection agency? He shook his head and rejected the idea instinctively. Surely not. While nothing else made sense, it still seemed completely wrong.

  His initial search turned up over fifteen hundred references to angels, and he spent the next hour or so searching through them, picking out the morsels that related to his predicament, and discarding the rest as the ramblings of the insane and delusional. But each time he discarded some other piece of fantasy, he kept returning to the central knotty problem. How did he know they were fantasy? There was an angel in his garden. She was real. It was all fantasy. And quite possibly it was all real.

  While he learnt a lot about angels in general, always assuming any of it could be considered as accurate, he learnt little of the specific, and nothing directly related to his situation.

  Where did she come from? It was surely the first question he had to answer and it had an obvious answer, but one that was completely useless to him. He didn’t have the geographical coordinates for heaven, nor the ability to make any use of them should he find them. He wasn’t alone in that. Long ago Voltaire had found the same answer.

  “It is not known precisely where angels dwell—whether in the air, the void, or the planets. It has not been God’s pleasure that we should be informed of their abode”.

  Three centuries later, with an angel in front of him and with every technological advance known at his fingertips, he found he was unable to add a single thing to that simple statement. It was more than a little depressing.

  However, he did glean two facts during his research. Firstly, nowhere in the bible, not in any of the five versions he held, nor in any of the other holy books he held, was the name Sherial written. He quickly checked all the other versions of her name, Latin and Greek especially. Not a thing. Was she new, or had she simply been overlooked by history? On a hunch he ran a query on the internet, searching for her name, and again found nothing that related to the angel. Yet such was its size he could have found thousands of articles about the history of even an unknown street urchin. Was he her first assignment?

  The other thing he discovered was not a fact but rather an omission. Nowhere in any of the references was there a description of an angel as being sexy. They were; glorious, wondrous, beautiful, spiritual, radiant, marvellous, miraculous, stupendous, admirable, and exquisite. They were also overwhelming, awesome, awe-inspiring, and breathtaking, fearsome, terrifying and frightening.

  Reading between the lines, he guessed some of the authors would have classed them on the same order of magnitude as a nuclear mushroom cloud, every bit as glorious and twice as scary. But nowhere were they ever described as sexy. It was a trap, said his paranoia, and it was usually right.

  He became discouraged early on his reading, unwilling to believe that anybody really knew much about angels at all. They had just dreamed it up as they went along. How else could he explain how vague were the things that were written, and how often they contradicted each other? If it wasn’t for the fact that he had an angel sitting outside his house at that very moment, he would have described many of the authors as irrational naval gazers.

  But mixed in among them he found occasional writings strikingly similar to the creature who had waylaid him. In particular he found one quote that floored him with its accuracy.

  “The angels are so enamoured of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not.”

  Ralph Waldo Emerson had stated that many lifetimes earlier, and it was as true now as it had been then. Her manner of communication he realised with awe, while never actually understood by anyone he had read of, must have actually been heard before. For while she didn’t speak any mortal tongue, surely the language she spoke was that of heaven. Emerson, or one of his sources, must actually have met and heard an angel. Mikel wasn’t alone.

  He read on.

  Angels he found were almost universally accepted as part of every major religion, though their roles differed more than a little. Most classed them as in some way the agents of God, doing His bidding and speaking His words, while a few others classed them either as other creations like man, or else as divine spirits left free to roam.

  But they hadn’t always been the cute and fluffy creatures envisioned in the popular press. They were listed in the Old Testament as powerful creatures, often as warriors bearing flashing swords and fighting the lords battles. They destroyed cities, tore
down walls, carried plagues and prevented man from returning to the Garden. Angels would also sound the trumpets at the end of the world. In one book he found a passage that seemed to sum up the traditional view:

  "If the archangel now, perilous, from behind the stars took even one step down toward us, our own heart, beating higher and higher, would beat us to death. Every angel is terrifying."

  Was Sherial terrifying? He couldn’t answer that question. Certainly she scared him, but not necessarily in her own right. It was what she represented, what her presence meant to him that troubled him most.

  Sherial herself ensorcelled him. Difficult as it was to admit, he knew he would crawl naked over broken glass should she but ask him. Of course she never would. On the other hand he had no doubt she was far more than the simple innocent beauty she looked. She was more dangerous than a tiger, and on an awful lot of different levels. If she chose to harm him, he was certain he couldn’t have stopped her no matter how well prepared. Nor he was sure, could he harm her. Even had he been able to bring himself to that point, he would be no match for her, on any level.

  But for all that she didn’t terrify him. She made him feel safe and warm. She made him feel loved.

  Reading on Mikel noted that in the Middle Ages theologians had mapped out a detailed hierarchy of the heavens, based on the writings of Dionysius. They divided the heavenly host into choirs, each with its own task. In their layers of heaven, the highest angels were the seraphim and cherubim, those closest to God who existed only to worship him. Then there were the thrones to bring justice to mankind, though what exactly they meant by justice, he wasn’t sure. The dominions regulated life in heaven, again something that defied his understanding, while the virtues were responsible for making miracles. The powers protected mankind from evil, presumably evil spirits, something that Mikel suddenly found he also had to accept might exist. It wasn’t something he particularly relished.

  Archangels and angels were considered the lowest forms of angel, serving as guides and messengers to human beings. Looking out at her in the garden he had to disagree. Even if Sherial was only a basic grade angel, there was nothing lowly about her.

  Reading on through what he found, Mikel couldn’t help but shake his head in disbelief at some of it. These were the writings of the major churches, surely those who must know the most there was to know about angels, yet much of what they said couldn’t possibly be. Cherubs for example, couldn’t possibly be four faced, four armed, four winged angels riding around in chariots covered in eyes. Could they? Who knew? All he could say was that if they were, Sherial wasn’t one of them.

  Then there was the question of her body. According to the scriptures, angels were creations of spirit. Though they might appear in the real world to carry out his works, they did not truly have bodies. Yet Sherial was solid. He had picked her up and carried her like a baby. He’d seen blood coursing through her veins. That could surely be no mere manifestation. She was flesh and blood as well as spirit.

  Guardian angels were a much more recent concept of the churches, not found in any of the really early works. They, along with many of the other more modern beliefs, didn’t seem to square at all with the traditional view. However, they were found in a lot of religions. Some even believed that every human soul had an attendant guardian angel. Had Sherial come to protect him? Looking at her through the screen, Mikel couldn’t bring himself to believe she had come here just to protect him. She had much more than his well being on her mind. Besides, he could look after himself. Couldn’t he?

  Mikel found no place in any of the established scriptures that said people became angels when they died, nor that angels were restricted to playing Mr. Nice Guy either. In fact if anything the older the writing, the more it seemed that angels were unpredictable at best. They could, disagree, argue, fight, kill and even fall. Sherial it seemed, whatever else she was, wasn’t the soul of a dead person, and neither did she necessarily have to remain absolutely pure and nice.

  Worse still, in some of the earliest scriptures, angels had acted on behalf of God against mankind. Satan had begged for God to punish Job, on the pretence that he would no longer worship him were his life not so rosy. Angels at the Lord’s behest had destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, and brought the plagues for Moses. Angels with fiery swords had also guarded the garden against Adam and Eve’s return.

  Looking out at her in the garden still sitting and giving all her attention to her adoring congregation, he couldn’t even bring himself to imagine her with a sword in battle. There was no way she could ever do any of those things. War, conflict, battle; they were not in her makeup. And yet the established scriptures said otherwise. Were the scriptures wrong? Or was he so far under her spell that he couldn’t see the truth? Was that the purpose of her allure? To blind him? There was no answer.

  If anything he finally decided, angels seemed to be summed up as a more advanced form of life, one God had created before man, one created like him with free will, but one with a damn sight more power. Thus he had to accept that there could be fallen angels, and that raised the distinct possibility of an actual literal hell, somewhere he definitely didn’t want to go. On the other hand, would he have a choice? How bad did you have to be to be sent there? He drew his thoughts away from that dark and dismal place only with difficulty.

  Mikel’s next questions then became that assuming Sherial was an angel; something he either had to accept or go mad trying to deny, which realm did she come from and what purpose did she serve? Logically she had to be a basic angel or archangel to be dealing in the realm of man, but being both a thief and paranoid recluse he had the horrible feeling she was from the thrones, here to deal out justice - to him. Again there was no answer.

  Reading on he found that angels appeared most often in times of great fear and turmoil. They had been seen on countless battlefields, sometimes leading charges, and rallying morale, sometimes comforting the wounded. In World War One he suspected there had been more angels than soldiers on the fields, judging from the sightings. Doubtless the same held true for many other wars.

  In fact he realized, the number of encounters recorded was staggeringly large. As a phenomena they rivalled UFO encounters. But there was a significant difference. Most UFO encounters seemed to involve only mysterious bright lights in the sky. Angels generally interacted with people, making it that much harder to discredit them in the minds of those who had seen them. After all you could never dismiss an angel as a ball of swamp gas.

  Moreover, he strongly suspected most of those who had seen an angel would never tell. Certainly he knew he wouldn’t. For even if someone had the guts to admit in public he had seen an angel and face the ridicule, most still wouldn’t want to. Often their deeds seemed to be of an entirely personal nature, and absolutely not for public consumption.

  All of which left him wondering, how big an issue were they? How often did angels intervene in the world of man? How could he find out? Again there were no answers. They were just a few more questions to add to an ever increasing list.

  There were claims that every soul, by which he assumed every human being, had his or her own guardian angel. Six billion angels? Each looking out for their single human, keeping him or her from harm, guiding them? It couldn’t be, could it? Where did they all stay? What did they eat? Why didn’t you trip over an angel every fifteen seconds? Yet he still wouldn’t deny the suggestion either.

  A sudden leap of illogic hit him then as he made the connection between his day thus far and his particular angel. Sherial might or might not be here to save him, might or might not be his guardian angel, but she was still an angel and she still would look out for him on the spiritual level. Which was exactly what she was doing.

  Angels were apparently vegetarians, or at least his one was, therefore he had no meat left in the fridge, or anywhere else for that matter. Sherial was saving him from the terrible sin of meat eating. Which in turn meant he was unlikely to be able to eat any meat for all the time she was
around. No doubt if he went to a restaurant and ordered a steak, she would spirit it away to feed more lions, before he could take a single bite.

  Always judge people by their actions not what they say. It was one of the first lessons he’d been taught in psychology, and suddenly it was one of the most important. So far he knew the why, if not the how of what she had done. She was saving him from sin. That understanding led him neatly to the next question, what else did angels do? What other sins was she saving him from?

  Angels were also good, which meant anything bad would also be gone. With that though he started hunting through his library, both the physical and the computerized, searching for some of the “inappropriate books” he’d collected over the years. Sure enough the few arcane books he had on demons and satanic rituals were gone. So was his copy of Dante’s Inferno, and the writings of the Marquis De Sade. He didn’t particularly miss them, most having been acquired as parts of bigger lots, or acquired as a result of idle curiosity, but it would have been nice to have a say in the matter. It would also be nice to know how she’d managed to find and remove them.