Elias

"Eli? Where were you?" Abigail shouted from the kitchen as Elias closed the front door behind him.

He set his backpack down against the wall and threw his bomber jacket on top of it.

"I stopped by the gym after class," he replied. "What've you been up to?"

Abigail motioned towards the living room. "Some more research. But there really isn't much on Ramiel at all. He's only mentioned in the Book of Enoch and that's not even in the Bible. And what's in Enoch doesn't help much either."

"The Bible has two different Genesis stories mashed together in the same chapter. It's hardly the most robust source."

"There aren't many other sources to go to, are there? Maybe I should go chat with a priest or something." Abigail shrugged. "You hungry? I can make some burgers; I bought bread buns today."

"Sounds good."

While Abigail worked in the kitchen, Elias snuck a look at the open laptop she had left on the living room coffee table. She had been busy. He gave up counting the tabs she had left open. There was everything from Youtube videos to academic publications to dodgy-looking conspiracy forums.

The floor shuddered. Elias glanced up just in time to see Ramiel straighten up and hide his wings.

Shit.

"Ramiel?" Abigail poked her head out from the kitchen, then bit her lip. "Hi...um, you're back then. Why did you leave so suddenly? Did something happen?"

"No. Elias seemed to be recovering well, so I returned to my mission."

Elias closed the laptop. "Any success?"

"I followed up on the woman you spoke of," Ramiel replied as he looked around the room. "Sariel mentioned Yasara to me only once and in passing. Heaven endeavours to keep records of all nephilim, thus I attempted to find Yasara. There was little to find. The records for those days were sparse; Heaven had more pressing concerns than the lineages of the nephilim. The records state that she had been born in the Roman Empire, nothing more."

Elias chuckled. "That's not the least bit helpful."

"Ramiel, Elias and I want to eat. Do you want dinner too?" Abigail asked, frowning as she spoke.

The angel seemed as taken by surprise at the question as Elias was. He cocked his head at Abigail and was silent for a long moment.

"Angels don't require sustenance like humans do," he said finally.

"Ok, well, I thought it'd be polite to ask. You don't mind if we eat though, right?"

She didn't actually wait for Ramiel's answer before she withdrew back to the kitchen. There was banging of a pan against the stove top, which Elias thought didn't bode well, but to his relief, Abigail soon returned with two plates in her hand. Abigail and Elias took the couch and ate hunched over their plates, while Ramiel seated himself in the armchair.

"Elias, have you had any visions since we last spoke?"

"None about Sariel or Yasara."

Abigail set down her plate next to her laptop and wiped remnants of barbecue sauce off her lips. "What about the visions in the cave? There's got to be more than a single name. What did you actually see?"

"It wasn't a single coherent scene," Elias said. "First, it was Sariel in a burnt-out town. Two other angels were there as well, but there was nothing to be done. They had arrived too late to save the town. I think that was the moment Sariel first started thinking of creating this protective shield. Then he was in a cave, similar to the one the three of us found, but incomplete. Yasara came in and told Sariel to finish for the night. They then walked back to the place where she lived. And the last bit was barely anything — Yasara was dying. I didn't see how or when, just that Sariel was completely distraught."

"He was very fond of her," Ramiel said quietly.

Elias nodded, saying nothing. He had felt Sariel's rage and anguish at the loss; the English language lacked the words to convey the depth of those emotions.

"Did Sariel have any favourite places? The Roman Empire was pretty big, even by modern standards," Abigail said.

"None that I am aware of." Ramiel leaned in and examined the TV remote Elias had left on the arm of the couch that morning. "What do you remember of your surroundings? Was it cold? What types of trees were nearby?"

"It was spring, but still cold. I — or rather Sariel could see snow-capped mountain peaks when they came out of the cave. Two peaks, almost identical." Elias tapped his fingers against the coffee table. "You said Sariel erected this shield two thousand years ago. Is that precisely two thousand?"

"The count is now closer to two thousand and fifty."

Abigail pulled her laptop towards her and lifted the lid. "That's good news. If I remember my HSC Ancient History right, at that time the Roman Empire wasn't at its biggest size and heaps of its territories were newly conquered. And how old was Yasara when she died? We backtrack to her age and we can narrow the area we are looking for."

"She was old. More than seventy I'd guess," Elias replied.

"Let's start in Italy then. The oldest territory and there are a lot of mountains there."

"Can I have the laptop then?" Elias said. "I'm the only one who knows what we are looking for."

Within the first minutes, he realised that he had overestimated the degree of knowledge he had gained from his Italian classes. He had thought they had been quite thorough in covering Italian history and geography. His teacher had talked at some length about the Alps and the Apennines. Yet she had neglected to mention the Dolomites at all or to explain that both the Alps and Apennines were in fact subdivided into a number of different mountain ranges.

Elias gave up on reading the names after the first ten minutes. He flicked through photograph after photograph of snow-capped mountains against cloudless skies and grimaced. Whether it was an image from Sicily or Lombardy, they all began to look identical.

In the end, after a fruitless hour, he tiredly typed in "twin mountains in Italy". The moment the page loaded, he burst out laughing. A smarter person would've tried this first.

"Castor and Pollux in the Pennine Alps. You could hardly ask for more Roman names than these," he said as he clicked through to the map of the area.

"Is me or does Sariel have a knack for choosing places no one wants to live in even in this century?" Abigail said as she peered over Elias' shoulder. "This is a hundred kilometres past Woop Woop and there are seven billion of us fighting for liveable space these days."

Elias turned the laptop so Ramiel could see and pointed to the two peaks. "Sariel's mountains are these two, so the cave must be in a valley nearby."

"I can carry you with me," said Ramiel. "May I look at the map?"

Elias handed the laptop to Ramiel so that the angel could get a closer look. He had no idea how angelic teleportation worked, but he had no desire to end up in Tanzania when they were heading for the Italian-Swiss border.

"I'll just clean up then since we have a minute," Abigail said.

"Hold on," Elias said. "I think Ramiel and I can do this on our own. This is really in the middle of nowhere and the summits of these mountains are four-thousand metres above sea-level. This means the valley is probably at about three-thousand. I bet even if it's nearly summer over there, it'll still be freezing. No need for us both to have to suffer it. Besides, don't you have work tomorrow?"

Abigail sighed as she gathered up the remnants of their dinner and headed towards the kitchen. "I do."

"Ramiel and I won't be long, don't worry."

"You have no way of knowing that."

Elias followed his sister into the kitchen. "Ok, fair point —"

"I get it, Eli," Abigail pulled Elias towards her and hissed into his ear. "I understand why you don't want me around. To him, I'm disposable goods and you don't trust him not to try the same thing he did the other day. But I don't trust him to look after your best interests either."

She had a valid point. Elias could tell her that Ramiel still needed Elias' visions or that the angel's contrition about threatening Abigail seemed genuine, but he was no more convinced by these arguments than Abigail would be.

"I have a feeling things will go smoother if you stayed away from Italy," he said.

"A feeling? What the Hell does that mean?"

"I don't know. Maybe an after-effect of his blood?"

It was nothing of the sort, but Elias had to be responsible and keep his sister out of trouble. If a little lie was what it took, so be it.

Abigail raised an eyebrow. "You'd better not be making that up."

"I'm not."

"All right. If you're not back in twenty-four hours, I'll call the police," Abigail said and turned on the kitchen tap. "I'll call the Italian police too. How do you think angel wings fare against an assault rifle?"

Elias gave Abigail a quick hug and slunk to his bedroom to change before he or Abigail had the courage to acknowledge that the police wouldn't help. They'd never believe her.