Free Thy Fearful Symmetry by Richard Wright Page B

himself. Between blinks the wings were gone, the fingers were slender and beautiful again, the eyes his normal, haunting brown.  
    “Calum,” he struggled to calm himself. “Calum, I'm sorry. You don't understand what it's like. I've been terrorising you people for so long .” To his surprise, he was distressed, his hitching breath hinting at tears barely suppressed.  
    Calum appeared to sense this, and stepped forward. After witnessing the spectacle of Metatron, Ambrose's little performance required little recovery time from the priest. How quickly humans adapted. “And is that what happened in the club, Ambrose? You couldn't resist?”
    Ambrose shook his head. “No. I mean it. It wasn't like that. If I had sinned, would I be able to stay overnight in a church? I have no new crimes to confess, I promise you.” Sticking out his tongue, he waggled it for a moment. “Look, no fork.”
    Calum almost smiled. “What happened then?”
    “I tried something, a trick of angels. I wanted to see if I could still do it.” In Ambrose's head, the dancers were collapsing around him again, dropping to the floor as hearts imploded and nervous systems shorted out. “I gave them rapture. It's a spiritual, physical joy, the most intense sensation it's possible to experience outside of Heaven. In the old days, angels used to let exceptional humans experience it - saints, prophets, and so on.”
    Calum's face was despairing. “But these people died.”
    “They did. It took me by surprise, I have to admit. Your kind, men and women, just can't process joy anymore, not real joy. You're inured to it. The moments of joy in your lives are pale shadows of the real thing, and by injecting them with something pure, I overloaded their systems. It was a mistake. An honest one.” Smiling at the irony, he tried to analyse how Calum was feeling. Just dipping a mental finger into the man's emotional centre, he could feel the twisting currents writhing there.
    “All right.” Calum sighed, and some of the tension left him. “All right, a mistake. I'm still responsible though. It still wouldn't have happened without me.”
    “What else can they do to you? Having already given you the harshest sentence their rules permit?”
    Calum almost smiled again, but Ambrose didn't trust how he was reacting. Something wasn't right, and he could guess what must be going through the man's head. If he had caused all this trouble by helping Ambrose and Pandora, two celestial criminals, escape their pursuers, why couldn't he fix it by handing them over again? Ambrose kept his own expression carefully neutral. If that was his fate, he would deal with it. For now, he needed the sanctuary.
    “I still don't understand why Metatron didn’t know I was lying, why he didn't just sense you here. You say he's as close to being God as any physical being?”
    Ambrose smiled. “And much more bound by God's rules than any other. Metatron has forgotten what it feels like to be a man.”
    “He was...”
    “Human, once. The prophet Enoch, confidant of God, taken into Heaven and made mightier than all others just before the War that saw me cast out. Quite a story, if we had time for it. The reason he couldn't tell you were lying is because you didn't. You told the truth. Metatron just asked the wrong questions. He didn't strip your mind because he was in a hurry. Finding the information you're looking for in a mind isn't like browsing a well-indexed book. It's more like trying to find something in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, with the articles in random order and no content's page, in the dark. Better to just compel the mortal to tell you what you need to hear.” Ambrose paused, frowning. “I'm not entirely certain why he'd be in such a hurry though.” Now that he thought about it, that was very odd indeed. Ambrose and Pandora were immortal. So were those hunting them. What was the rush?
    “That doesn't explain why he didn't just sense you. You said you could sense