Revival conjured up images of billowing white canvas and a balmy Southern afternoon. Instead, she found a church of concrete blocks that seemed grayer in the Chicago wind. She joined the straggling line of people entering the building.
An usher gestured her down an empty aisle in one of the dozen semicircles of folding chairs. “I pray you find what you are seeking tonight.”
She ignored the handbills—all invitations to join the church—and watched the small choir file haphazardly onto the stage. They opened with a hymn just out of tune enough to make her wince. A faint nimbus of light glowed around the stage lights, and she blinked. The choir wasn’t so off-key that it brought tears to her eyes. But the halo remained.
A flicker of awareness rose in her. She knew anyone looking would see her eyes glinting violet.
She edged forward on her seat. Was a demon sneaking in? Besides hers, of course. She scanned the room. The spotlights left no shadows for even a scrawny malice to hide.
The choir shifted into a processional. A man stepped toward the stage, his silver-tinted hair reflecting the lights, but Sera’s gaze arrowed to the short, red-haired woman in practical flats behind him.
Her head was bowed, but when she glanced up to take the stairs, her eyes glinted an otherworldly gold.
Sera eased back, her heart knocking counterpoint to the thud of footsteps on the stage. The choir hit a more or less high note on “Yahweh” just as realization hit her.
“An angel.” If the toughest part of angelic possession was suffering through tone-deaf singers, she wondered whether she could still trade up.
The silver-haired preacher launched into a sermon on the nearness of heaven.
“Closer than he knows,” she muttered. “Unfortunately, so’s the other side.”
The crowd stilled when he lowered the microphone and let his gaze roam the room. Slowly, he lifted the mike. “Someone is hurting, and no aspirin out of the bathroom cabinet, no solvo out of the alleys is going to cure it. Let the Spirit in. Who is hurting here?”
An older woman stood with a slight wobble, and Sera almost heard the grinding pain of hips gone bad. Two ushers flanked the woman’s progress toward the preacher, who stood with one hand outstretched. As the woman stepped up to the stage, her forehead connected with his hand. The choir burst into song. The woman fell backward into the ushers’ arms.
Sera squinted against the aura that blazed up, not around the preacher, but off to one side.
The redhead stood, hands clasped. Around her, fragile, scintillating whorls of gold sparked and glowed. The otherworldly light expanded, like a blown bubble. The aura engulfed the first row of seats, then the next, spreading toward Sera.
She stood, uncertain how angelic energy would interact with the demon. She didn’t think it would leap out of her chest like some horror-movie alien. Neither did she particularly want to test her theory.
“Are you hurting?” The preacher pointed at her. “Come forward and receive the Spirit.”
Hadn’t she learned anything by falling for the demon’s promise to answer all her questions? She’d been folded into a deeper layer of mysteries, only to find another, still-deeper stratum beyond that.
She stepped into the aisle. Apparently she hadn’t learned a damn thing. She walked through the ring of angelic light, hand over her chest. Just in case.
The redhead swayed. Did she sense a disturbance in the force? Sera wondered wryly.
The preacher smiled, capped teeth almost as big as a feralis’s, if not quite so scary. “My dear, does your heart pain you?”
An usher thrust a second microphone at her.
“What?” She dropped her hand. “No. It’s my . . .” Actually, the demon had done a lovely job. Even the dull ache in her shoulder was mostly gone. “It’s my soul, I suppose.”
The red-haired woman lifted her head. Her eyes shone gold.
Suddenly, tempting her to a game of possessed chicken—whose otherworldly passenger would flinch first?—seemed colossally stupid. Could she tell Sera carried a teshuva and not a djinni? Would it matter to her possessing angel?
“Isn’t it always the soul?” The preacher beamed. “Come closer, child.”
She realized she’d taken a half step back. Maybe her demon was trying to tell her something—or was it a lingering, childhood resentment of the God who’d taken her father’s time, yet hadn’t saved her mother?
She shook off her uncertainty and stepped forward. His hand touched her forehead. She couldn’t help herself; she closed her eyes.
And staggered back as the choir launched into another bombastic hymn, the bass cabinets under the stage thudding in her chest.
“Be healed,” the preacher cried, “of all that afflicts you.”
Since she didn’t want to add ruptured eardrums to the list, she reeled away. But not before she’d looked hard into the blank, gold eyes of the angel-ridden woman.
A few-dozen people advanced up the aisle. Sera threaded between them out the back door to cool her head, which spun with possibilities.
The clouds had consumed the last of the day’s sun. In the charcoal light, she rubbed her eyes, as if she could smear away the violet tint she knew was there.
The revival carried on into the night. Finally, the crowd trickled out, all smiles and eyes reddened with human tears. Sera slipped back inside.
The angel woman stood next to the preacher. Gold light still glimmered, now closer around her, as if the evening’s work had sapped her. But when he put an arm around her and kissed her forehead, the glow brightened.
A call from the other side of the stage drew him away, and the woman looked up to meet Sera’s gaze. They met at the front of the stage.
The woman fumbled in her pocket. “Have you come for your money back?”
Sera shook her head. “Why would I want my money back?”
“Since we couldn’t heal you. Your soul is still divided.”
“As was noted earlier in this very spot, isn’t it always?”
“Sometimes more than others,” the woman murmured. “A complicated philosophical point I don’t feel like arguing right now.”
Sera took a leap. “So I take it your husband doesn’t know you are angel-ridden.”
The woman touched the wedding band on her finger. “We call it hosting.”
“Does sound less invasive that way,” Sera agreed.
The woman smiled faintly. She sat and patted the chair beside her. “I’m Nanette, and I don’t want a crick in my neck. Unlike the teshuva, my angel won’t mend every bump and bruise.”
She sounded more envious than condemning, so Sera joined her. “I’m Sera, and I apparently had a crick in my soul. How long have you hosted an angel?”
“Since my miraculous recovery from leukemia at age seven.” The woman wrinkled her nose. “When my aunts talked about angels watching over me, they had no idea.” She studied Sera. “You haven’t had yours long. I see remnants of hell still popping off you like sparks from a firecracker.”
“Tell me I don’t stink of brimstone.”
Nanette smiled. “No. But you shouldn’t look anyone in the eye when the demon is active. The purple is too intense even for colored contacts, although people will try to explain it that way.”
Sera remembered the glint in Archer’s eyes when he confronted her on the bridge before the demon had come to her. She’d thought it beautiful.
“I’ve never seen your kind here before,” Nanette said.
“Maybe they’re smart enough to hide.”
“I wouldn’t have missed them. They just don’t come. Neither do the angel hosts. Most possessed think they’ve learned enough about the battle between good and evil.”
“But you’ve stayed connected with . . .” Sera thought a moment. “I was going to say the real world. Maybe I should just say oblivious.”