A Deafening Silence In Heaven - Thomas E. Sniegoski Page 0,65

great mechanical beast.

“Well?” he prodded.

“She’s been especially hungry lately. Will you . . . ?”

“Yeah, I will,” Francis said. “I promise to bring her back well fed.”

This seemed to satisfy the owner, and he hung up without saying good-bye. Francis put his phone away and turned back to the vast storage of his collection. There were a few things he had to pick up before going to get her.

Walking to the center of the storage, he stopped, digging through his memory for the layout of the place and attempting to remember where he’d stored one of the Plagues of Egypt.

• • •

Michael turned his head ever so slightly, focusing his one good eye on the still-unconscious Remy Chandler, who now lay on the floor before the archangel’s throne.

He felt a loathing the likes of which he had not experienced since—

In the pool of darkness that collected in the empty socket of Michael’s eye, the archangel saw it all again, as he always did. The end of Heaven brought about by the ceremony of Unification.

The angel shoved a skeletal finger into the empty socket, wiggling it around to disrupt the disturbing imagery for a time. He didn’t want to see any more, preferring instead to focus on the body of his foe lying before him.

He’d thought this angel dead, either reduced to ash in flames that burned hotter than the sun as Heaven and Hell vied for the same moment in time and space, or crushed beneath the rubble of Heaven’s golden spires as they toppled down upon humanity and the cities that they’d built.

But here he was, looking the worse for wear, but alive nonetheless.

At least for now.

Michael had believed his angels had slipped even further into madness when they’d told him they had found another of their kind in the ruins of the city as they’d searched for a sinner who had escaped their clutches. They’d told him that this angel was different, his body covered in sigils of magickal power.

Fascinated, Michael had gone so far as to leave his throne made from the bones of the unworthy, his domicile, to see with his own eyes—

Eye.

Who it was that his soldiers had found out there in the wasteland.

Never could he have imagined this. If God weren’t dead, he would have believed that this was a reward for what he’d gone through since the fall of everything.

The darkness within his missing eye started acting up again, and the angel violently shook his head, attempting to rattle the imagery that had once more started to play in the theatre of his mind.

Michael leaned forward and reached a trembling hand down to the slumbering Remy, pulling at the collar of his shirt to see the markings etched upon his flesh.

Sigils. Sigils of power. He had seen such markings before, inscribed upon the flesh of angels who had sided neither with the Lord God Almighty, nor the Morningstar, during the great war. He’d called them cowards, but they referred to themselves as Nomads—angels who had no real place, wandering amongst the realms of Heaven, Hell, and Earth.

Had Remy fallen in with that craven angel sect? An all-too-familiar rage welled up inside Michael at the thought of those angels and how the Almighty would have forgiven them their indiscretions as well, allowing them back into the bosom of Heaven, if Unification had happened.

But it hadn’t, and the Nomads remained unforgiven as they should have. If Michael had had his way, they would have been hunted down and put to death long ago. For if there was one thing the archangel could not stomach, it was cowardice.

That was the one thing he never would have ascribed to the angel before him; insolence and naïveté, yes, but never cowardice.

The darkness in the socket of his missing eye started to fill with memory again, and this time he let it play out, watching the angel who lay prostrate before him now, as he had been when the Lord God summoned him—when the Lord God had summoned them all. How beautiful they had been; how wondrous it was supposed to be.

Michael snarled. He’d known something bad was going to happen, had felt it tingling in the very fabric of his being, but how could he tell his Creator—his Lord of Lords—that what He was doing would lead to nothing but despair?

The archangel had wanted to be wrong; he really had.

But he wasn’t, and it all went to—Hell.

The angel smiled sadly as the memory played out. He saw the