Excerpt

Ezekiel climbed atop the granite boulder in the heart of the prayer circle. A full moon silvered gaunt faces lifted toward him in anticipation. When he began the chant, a hundred voices rose to match his powerful tenor. The chant had no words, but its melody rose and fell. His followers had performed it many times and they knew every note.

The angel would hear their music, feel their devotion.

And it would come.

They settled into rhythm, bowing until their foreheads brushed cooling sands, then straightening to raise two hundred arms to the cold moonlight. With each breath, they inhaled the clean smell of ponderosa pine and exhaled wisps of crystalline white that vanished in the darkness. The advancing night leached warmth from sand and rocks and fragile bodies. The smaller ones shivered. But their discomfort didn't matter.

Only the angel mattered.

Hunger and thirst dropped away and fervent concentration took their place. The chanters strove to move in unison and chant as one. Ezekiel demanded perfection. Nothing less would satisfy the angel.

As they lost themselves in the melody, they forgot that they hadn't eaten in days. That no water had passed their lips since the sun first brushed the wrinkled stone folds of Mount Garner. That they had spent the day in silent prayer, burning in clear sunlight or stifling in tents. That they had abandoned parents and partners and children in the plains. Tonight one of them, they knew, would be touched by an angel.

And that person would be raptured from this plane.

Rabbits and mice burrowed deep underground and coyotes circled far to the south. Even the crows grumbled and took flight, risking lurking owls for peace. Soon the tiny valley held no living sounds but the chanters themselves. Still they sang.

Ezekiel glanced at ragged tents ringing this sacred space. They'd pitched them on government land, and the forces of earthly law would force them to move on. Soon sweating men in suits would brandish papers and speak the hateful tongue of lawyers and drive his people from these ancient stones. He prayed they wouldn't use guns and sticks on a man of God and his followers—so many innocent women and children—or at least not right away. But even if they didn't, even the presence of their disbelief might hinder the angels and sow doubt in his less devout followers.

He raised his voice and his followers' voices rose to meet it.

Then the angel sense awakened in his palm. His phalanges throbbed with a deep cold. He flexed and released his hand, welcoming the pain. It meant that the angel itself ached to come into the moonlight and join with him. Green flashes danced across his vision.

Faster. His chant called to the angel across the celestial barrier. His followers were ready to meet it when it arrived, its verdigris mist swirling and dancing in the night air until it chose one to bless. They were ready.

Tonight it would take him. His followers were but simple tools. Only he mattered. This angel would recognize that.

His blue eyes watched carefully, searching faces for any sign of doubt. But they believed. They'd seen. They trusted.

His gaze lingered on Hope—new and young and beautifully devout. She wasn't yet used to the rigors of the ritual. Like all female followers, she'd submitted to his carnal desires and she would give him this, too.

"Hope," he called softly.

She hastened to drop into a deeper bow, exposing the long curve of her neck with its circle of bruises. Her curly hair brushed across the sand. He longed to reach out and grab handfuls of her hair, to control her every motion with it as he had done so often in the past, but he held himself back, content to look and chant. She'd been so innocent when she came to him. Not yet understanding the symphony of pain he could play upon her body.

Next to her, Isaac glanced over and matched her motions. Soon everyone moved with renewed vigor. Yet it troubled him that Hope and Isaac sat too close, that they had exchanged glances.

Were they forming a world apart from his? He had forbidden this. He must watch them and when he was sure, Isaac would be driven out and shunned. No one was allowed to couple with the women but him. Ever.

Above their heads the battered moon crawled higher. Wind grabbed sand from between rocks and hurled it against the tents. Pines shuddered on the mountainside.

Night had made the angel stronger.

Then it whispered. Soft, seductive sounds brushed his ears. Alien emotions throbbed in his brain. The angel was tumescent with anger and longing. He stirred in response, panted as its desire grew. As he silently begged for a crescendo, it wrapped a web of energy around a bright mind and pulled tight. It trembled with longing. So long it must have waited.

Ezekiel raised his arms and the chant grew louder, the movements frenzied. It was close. They all felt it. They all ached to greet it in their own world.

The angel moved across jagged edges, darkness corroding sharp surfaces. Agony screamed from its wounds. The distance was vast and the cost great. But it wouldn't relent. Their prayers were setting it free.

It neared the bright world. Their world. Ezekiel moaned with animal joy. It was so close.

At last it thrust itself against the bright mind it had chosen. Wetness pounded around it. It gloried in the heat and the slipperiness. The hot, wet joy of life. It rushed through the body, traveling a million rivers in an instant. Arteries, veins, capillaries pulsed with hot, metallic blood. When it reached the heart, it exulted in each throbbing beat. The heart thundered so fast, so fast. It couldn't go on for long. It had only days, perhaps hours, before it would still. Ezekiel reveled in the sound.

Cold night air caressed soft skin. Delicate gooseflesh rose on the nape of its neck, on bare arms and legs. The body clenched.

But it hadn't come for Ezekiel.

It raptured Isaac.

Isaac leaped to his feet and skipped barefoot to the center of the circle. Sand blew over his toes. An eerie grimace displayed his teeth. The bones in Ezekiel's hand stiffened and he stepped away, cradling his aching hand against his chest. Alone.

Isaac threw back his head as a high foreign gibberish rolled from his throat. The chanters fell silent. Ninety-nine faces raised to see him. Ninety-eight hearts exulted in his presence, but only the cold poison of envy pulsed through Ezekiel's veins.

Isaac turned in a slow circle, moonlight reflecting off his eyes and gleaming teeth. Sounds whistled from his lips, more like bird song than human language. But unlike any bird Ezekiel had ever heard.

The beauty and mystery overwhelmed Hope and she swooned into the sand. Ezekiel watched her head strike a rock and dark blood run onto the ground, but he didn't go to her.

He stayed at his post near Isaac and strained to understand the angel's words. His fingers clenched into a stiff fist around the fierce shard of the angel's chill. Sounds thrummed in his head, alien and insistent.

They refused to coalesce into meaning.

Then Isaac spun like a dervish, movements so fast his form was a blur. Turning and turning without stopping while notes poured uninterrupted from his throat. A human couldn't move like that. And the song. Its unearthly melody pierced the night. A few braver chanters formed a tighter circle around him, hands reaching to touch him as he whirled by. The others held back, breathing quickened with fear.

Isaac tore at his face, his eyes, his ears. Blood arced from his body as he spun. Then he collapsed to the sand, convulsing, and two hundred hands caressed him before he struggled to his feet. Again his song rang out high and shrill and his blood watered the thirsty desert. Ezekiel hadn't known humans could make such sounds before the angels came. Eerie and beautiful, their melodies haunted his dreams.

Isaac would sing and dance for three days and three nights. Although his feet would draw bloody trails in the sand, he would never slow. The sun would burn his skin a deep red and it would peel away in sheets but he would seek no shade. He would neither eat nor drink. He would suffer the anguish of the exalted until his body gave out, and his soul would be taken up to heaven.

And Ezekiel's wouldn't.

Chanters circled Isaac, Ezekiel in the lead. He hung on every blessed sound, trying to make sense of the angel's song. It had something to tell him, this he knew. But three days was never long enough to understand it. But still he and his followers listened and bore witness.

On the third night, Isaac collapsed on the sand and didn't rise again. Ezekiel's head rang with the silence and a few followers clapped their hands to their ears. Across the valley a flock of crows took flight, rusty caws the first earthly sound Ezekiel had heard since the night the angel joined them.

Isaac twitched once. The blood that had streamed from his feet for the last day stopped pulsing onto the sand. His head tilted back, mouth soundlessly agape. A green film raced across his lifeless eyes.

Slowly, the angel seeped into the night air. At first the dark green mist traveled the length of Isaac's lifeless body as if assuring itself he was truly dead. Then it hung swirling a foot above his chest.

Searching.

The circle of humans stepped back as one. Except for Ezekiel. He pushed forward and held out his cold, stiff hand. He'd earned this. Twenty times over, he'd earned this.

His followers gathered behind him. They knew without him they would never have seen an angel, never listened to its unearthly song.

He waited.

Sometimes the angel rose high into the sky until they could no longer see it. Other times it vanished into the sand itself. When that happened, the angel didn't return. It had gone back to its world and waited to be summoned again.

Tonight it wasn't ready to leave.

But, like every time before, it rejected Ezekiel.

Instead it raptured Hope, whirling around her slender arms and legs. It entered through the soft palms of her hands and the dirty soles of her feet. She screamed in ecstasy before her legs and arms lashed in dance. Notes burst from her throat.

And it began again.

Stung, Ezekiel dragged Isaac out of the circle. He pointed to two followers and they grabbed the body under the shoulders and dragged it to the Resting Place. He followed and watched while they covered Isaac's mortal husk with dirt and stones rimed with frost. Beyond his cairn a field of barrows stretched. Small mounds marked the bodies of children. The angels had claimed the youngest first. Some of them had been rejected, as Ezekiel had.

As he prayed over the cooling body of his victor, he vowed to bring forth a new angel of anguish. Next time he wouldn't fail. This one would choose him and they would do great things together.