God's Gone AWOL

[3] Meeting Sneakers

Despite the dreary rain that had enveloped the entirety of France, the weather up in the United Kingdom's countryside was actually reasonably nice for once. Sunlight was interspersed with large, fluffy cumulous clouds on their way to terrorize everywhere south of London. It reflected off the little shiny pearls of dew left in the thick grasses and on the petals of the blooming flowers, causing the entire landscape to sparkle. It was like a breathtaking painting brought to life on earth.

Huddled in a cluster of trees and shrubs, tucked between the marigolds and foxglove, and hidden behind a curtain of wild ivy-vines, was a little stone house. It was the kind of house with a hearth that had been providing endless warmth for hundreds of years. The kind that could watch half a dozen generations of one family come and go in and out of life and still stay standing, good as new. The kind that had first been built as a home, and had never once been called anything else. It was a house, plain and simple and beautiful.

The front door was made of a thick, dark wood. It was sturdy and heavy, designed for keeping the cold out and the heat in. Just looking at it, one could tell it was quite old —fashioned back when things were designed to last, and it fit onto its hinges where it would swing open and closed until it decayed. That door was nearly a hundred years old, but Bentley was older. So she knocked on it loudly without any reservation.

Shortly after the two idiots left the shop, Frances had the delightful little dwelling's address sent to Atticus' phone. And with just the flap of an angel's wings, they were already on the front step.

"I find it a little suspicious that Frances just happened to have this exact person's address. Don't you?" Bentley asked.

"If Micaiah the Prophet is in the Earthly realm, but is still exposed to the supernatural, of course there would be a connection to Frances," said Atticus.

There were very few people on Earth who were involved with Heaven or Hell or any of the business involving the divine. Sure, there was organized religion; the church, the pope, the Quran, all that fancy stuff. But those followers, prayers, and religious texts only ever directly connected to God. When it came down to the nitty-gritty-less-important affairs of angels and demons, mortals had been left in the dark for obvious reasons. So the rare person, such as Hazel, who had been roped into the mess, was most likely to be on the same neutral grounds as The Cupboard, and in turn possibly Frances or their uncle Rueben.

"I still don't trust this whole situation," said Bentley, "I'm only going along with it cuz' it's the only lead I have."

"There's nothing wrong with being wary. In any case, I'm here if anything goes sideways," Atticus told her.

"You're the one I'm most suspicious of, Halo Head," she said blatantly.

Before Atticus could reply, the old, dark door opened.

The face behind it was that same face Atticus had seen on the television the night before. That same beautiful, ageless, elegant face. That impossible face. With an even more impossible appearance that was even more angelic than Atticus, but even more demonic than Bentley. That impossible person.

This was Micaiah the Prophet.

Except there was something significantly different about the Micaiah they were face-to-face with now. While that person on the screen back in the bar was a man, the person standing in front of them was clearly a woman. She was a woman, but she was identical to the man from before.

Neither angels nor demons had the ridiculous black-and-white gender system that humans had desperately tried to uphold for years and years. When appearing in human form, they would take on reasonably straightforward visages, often as a typical "male" or "female", but certainly not always. Because at their cores, angels and demons were actually giant, genderless, horrific balls of light, feathers, and eyes spinning and hovering like a terrifying version of a classic sci-fi UFO, as seen in the Bible's Book of Ezekiel. Atticus himself had presented in a perceived "female" form for the majority of his life, despite aligning his personality more with the "masculine" side of that old black-and-white mentality. There just wasn't that same line for angels or demons.