Before There Were Angels

ISBN
              1482023741

EAN
              978-1482023749

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

‘Before there were angels’ is published by Taylor Street Publishing LLC, who can be contacted at:

http://www.taylorstreetbooks.com

http://ninwriters.ning.com

‘Before there were angels’ is the copyright of the author, Sarah Mathews, 2013. All rights are reserved.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters in the novel are fictional. Any similarity to anyone, living or
dead, is coincidental.

Chapter 1

There was a time when everything was perfect, when there was pure love, and pure hope, and pure dreams - pure ecstasy.

W
e had it all.

But that was in the time before there were angels.
Avenging angels.

And some angels will avenge anything.

When I saw her for the first time, that was it: pure love, even pure thoughts for a second or two.

She was tall, lithe-limbed, with knowing eyes and Scandinavian white hair that invited me to dive my fingers into it to make her tense and preen.

Yes, those pure thoughts really did only last a few seconds.

A
stonishingly, my immediate reaction to her was reciprocated. She wanted to rake her hands through my hair (dark and tangled) too and to run them down me as we kissed, as she told me afterwards many times when we reminisced about that first meeting.

We were a human taste explosion that neither of us had ever experienced with anyone else, and it wasn’t as if either of us was inexperienced.

Nothing had ever happened to us like this and nothing could again, or so we thought.

We were magic together from that first moment of that impossible soul fusion.

And already our best moments were behind us, and not for want of trying.

Before she became an avenging angel.

Chapter 2

That was
Rafaella. She was originally called Claire, Claire Allendale, but the Archangel Rafael was the first archangel to stroke her hair whenever she was upset, so she renamed herself after him. I suppose Gabriel would have worked too - Sandolphin and Metatron not so much. They say you don’t pick your archangel; your archangel picks you.

By the time we were through, and I mean really
, really through, Rafaella had a whole detachment of twenty-four archangels stroking her hair and reassuring her that everything would be OK. I never quite understood that because everything would have been OK if Rafaella would just have let things be.

During the last years of our marriage, the twenty-four archangels gave
Rafaella daily advice on anything from which financial investments she should make to how plates had to be rinsed with fresh flowing cold water after being washed in liquid detergent. I was never sure how archangels qualified for this level of practicality but Rafaella assured me that their advice was infallible. Actually, what she mostly said was that she suggested her ideas to the archangels and that they instantly confirmed her instincts, indicating that her level of wisdom was right up there with theirs.

Given that every decision
Rafaella made in the real world was impractical to begin with and disastrous in its ending, I really have to question their infallibility. Rafaella would get an insight into a sure-fire investment opportunity, the archangels would confirm that the investment was a must-do, and a month later our investment was worth about a quarter of our original layout. Whoever was giving her these tips was not so much ‘infallible’ as ‘reliable’ - reliably wrong and not the sort of angel you’d want to take to Vegas with you.

Rafaella’s
brilliant sure-to-be-a-winner decisions embraced every aspect of our lives: where we lived, what car we should buy, where we should eat out, what colors to paint the walls - all of it. Every one of her decisions was about as wrong as it could possibly have been, and I mean according to Rafaella rather than according to me. There was always something catastrophically wrong with the house - it didn’t have the right flow, it contained bad energy, it was too dark, or too cold, or too damp, or the garden was wrong. The cars fell afoul of Rafaella’s critical judgments too - annoying rattles, accident-prone, too expensive to run and the wrong color. Eating out, the food would be good but not the service, or vice-versa, or both were lousy.

I was confused how
Rafaella could pronounce her archangels infallible and yet declare that every choice we made was wrong. When I challenged her on this, she would tell me that the universe regularly changes its mind, and anyway the defects were largely due to my choices - I had upset the waiter here; I had persuaded her to order the wrong dish there; if only I spent as much time in our garden as I did working on my computer, she would be able to live with the garden as it could have been; I drove too jerkily and therefore used too much gas; and so on.

By the time I walked out on
Rafaella, I had well and truly had it. The only really messed up factor in Rafaella’s life was me and I had to go.

Or was it that I had to stay and become someone
else completely, someone who agreed wholeheartedly with everything Rafaella wanted to think, say or do? Mere compliance was no good; I had to think for myself but think the exact same way Rafaella would have thought if she hadn’t delegated that particular project to me. And then there was my resistance to her brilliant ideas, and my subsequent sabotaging of them, so that nothing she ever set out to achieve ever worked. I was a sort of a downscale courtier to Rafaella’s Elizabeth I, the all-purpose all around stooge of the glorious new age Rafaella was ushering in. Maybe so, but I frequently had the disloyal suspicion that Rafaella was just a gulag short of a domestic Stalin, and Siberia can be icy at any time of year.

“The archangels?” she challenged me one day. “I am now in direct communication with Kumar. He is my guide.”

“Who is Kumar?”

“He is the Detailer of God.”

“What does the Detailer of God do? I mean, what does he detail - cars?”

This ignorant question provoked an instant snort. “Look him up on the Internet, if you don’t know.”

Tragically, Kumar’s advice proved to be no less ill-guided than that of the archangels, but that was because I was still around, or worse, on the point of leaving, thus poisoning Rafaella’s future happiness forever. She had devoted her entire life to me (5 years), well the best five years of her life. She was a martyr to me and no real man runs away from his responsibilities.

But leave I did, in the certain knowledge that no woman other than
Rafaella would ever appreciate me and put up with my mannerisms, my smells, my bulges and my infections.

T
here was something else I learned with that same certainty: Rafaella was determined to have me back. It was either that or her having to work, and she was never going to waste her days on such loserish mundane obligations.

Back I would come, and with my tail between my legs (certainly not between hers).

Chapter 3

People ask me why I ever got
involved with Rafaella. I can’t really answer that except to point out that I am not the only person to have been charmed by her. She has a legion of fans, and a legion of enemies. I switched from a fan to an enemy, not entirely through my own wholehearted choice but, over time, with increasingly willing compliance.

The truth is, and I will claim this as a truth whatever the philosophical nature of truth or my credentials for accessing it, that
Rafaella just went more and more crazy over the five years I was with her. She started out intriguingly eccentric and playful, and ended up as close as you can get to frothing at the mouth without frothing at the mouth, but with eyes bulging and veins throbbing.

I learned
another truth over those five years - that the insane represent a viable, and probably growing, market for a vast range of seductive (if you are utterly insane) products and services.

The products are, of course, crystals, candles and incense, unless you are a born-again Christian, in which case you ca
n add crosses in all sizes, sometimes of the flaming variety.

As for the services …

Let’s start with psychics, as Rafaella did. These are people who can see into your past and your future, and into your soul and your chakras. Rafaella loved psychics. She bounced from one to the next with glee, never quite understanding that they told her exactly what she wanted to hear, just like mortgage lenders, before 2008 anyway. Actually, psychics and mortgage brokers have a lot in common - they cost a lot, they combine being friendly and helpful with being superior, and they get virtually everything that can be verified wrong, and they get away with it again and again.

Rafaella’s
psychics told her that she had lived hundreds of lives, sixteen of them with me, that she was highly evolved as a human being, had acquired all the learning through her many reincarnations that she needed to graduate from the school of life, that she would not be returning here again, that she had many gifts she could offer the world, and that she was about to become suddenly rich and live in exotic places.

As I
said, they get everything wrong, these psychics.

The cousins of the psychics are the communicators, whether that
be with those who have passed over into the light or with a lost cat. Rafaella was never much interested in the great mass of the dead because, after all, she was already in communication with higher beings such as Kumar and others of the Wise Ones or the White Brotherhood (such as Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King and various archangels), but she did need to track down our various cats from time to time.

These animal communicators were impressive, at least to her. “He is trapped in a dark place,” they would say. “He
wants to come home but he can’t. I see him in a shed, or a garage, or a cold room. Search the neighborhood.” Alternatively, “He has gone off exploring and lost his way home. Go out and search the fields.” What they didn’t usually volunteer, until every shed, garage and field had been thoroughly gone through several times, was that Tiddles had been squished by a passing car. That suggestion normally surfaced somewhere around Day Three.

These animal communicators usually had impressive records of finding pet mice in haystacks and snakes wrapped around car en
gines, not that there was any proof of their claims.

Moving on a bit -
have you ever been cursed? Were you cursed in your last life? Has a friend or family member of yours ever been cursed? Well, if so, fear not, because there are Curse-Finder Generals out there who will chart all your curses and remove them from your lives, suspiciously like a spiritual version of anti-virus and anti-malware software.