This was going to screw the rescue. We’d have to try again. Maybe in the middle of the night. “I don’t know. Maybe she thought He abandoned her.” It was lame, it was all I could think of. But it might mean something, somehow, in some deep part of her.

“God doesn’t do that.”
Which was the truth. Or something very like it. “I wouldn’t know what God would do, and Monica never…talked to me about religion.”

My thoughts tried to drift off into philosophy at that point, but I corralled them. This wasn’t the time for it.

” My husband says she has to be punished, that she has to suffer until she comes back to Him.”

“And you call your God love?” I felt something then. It was anger, but it wasn’t the anger to fight.

“You aren’t Christian?”

“Are you going to try to convert me?” I sensed somebody behind me at that point. “You might want to talk to him.”

As I stepped to one side, Sarael moved past me. Hopefully I could let him take this over. Hopefully we could still get Monica out.

To die.

And now I understood her father’s mind, I hoped that he suffered. I hoped that he realized what he had done.

I knew what I really hoped – that the mouselike woman now talking to the angel would grow a spine and leave him. That he deserved.

Monica did not deserve what was happening to her, but Odin had never claimed to be love.

He claimed to be wisdom. I slipped past them now her focus was on him, catching a snatch of Christian theology.

Sarael was who she needed to talk to. When I got in the room, Monica was asleep or unconscious. The heart monitor showed a steady beat, though.

She was alive, for now. Not for much longer, and the alarms would go off when we disconnected her.

Well, except I thought I had a way around that. I glanced at Thruor.

“Is she…”

“Sarael’s distracting her.”

“I really wish the mortal followers of that religion would actually realize that acknowledging our existence is okay, it’s worshipping us that’s the problem.”

“Will does.”

“Will is a most unusual man.”

I agreed, but fell silent as she started to unhook Monica. My job?
To make sure nobody heard or rather noticed the alarms.