A Trickster's Daughter

Chapter 50: The Not so Fluffy Reunion

March 27, 2009, Random Place, Random State, United States

Night

Gabriel

Blah, blah, blah, demons, blah, blah, must protect [insert random seal here], blah, blah, blah. It'd been the same over and over again for the last few months now.

Demons doing what they do; threatening a seal here, some chaos and bloodshed there.

Then Gabriel goes in for the win! You're welcome!

Yay, Heaven! Go team!

Please note the extreme sarcasm in that last sentence that Gabriel couldn't possibly express properly in written form.

He was all too aware of what was happening. No matter how many seals he helped save, Heaven was still dropping the ball. It wasn't because a lot of angel garrisons wanted the Apocalypse—the dodos he was with sure didn't—but it was those few, those small few that were in on the whole con with his older brothers and their subsequent ass kissers.

Gabriel was certain that that Douche-aria brown noser was undeniably one of them. That little power-hungry ladder climber! He twitched his shoulders at the spell one of those assholes had placed over 'Loki' almost a month ago.

The random angel he didn't get a chance to identify had sprung it on him the moment he arrived at an endangered seal and had to hold back a damn golem being controlled by a rabbi gone rogue.

Apparently, his pestering over being given leave to go see his child was annoying and had made the higher ups think he wasn't focused enough on the task at hand.

Saving seals.

But, unlike the assholes' subordinate angels, Gabriel had a 100% success rate so far concerning those seals.

Thank you, very much!

They had fired some spell at him while he was distracted keeping the golem restrained and dodging the rogue rabbi's own spells.

Gabriel hadn't thought the spell would really do anything to him. His archangel-ness would just shed it off, but it didn't latch on to the part of him that was the Archangel Gabriel. It latched onto the part of him that was masquerading as the pagan Trickster god 'Loki'. Attaching itself to the Trickster pagan magic he imbibed when he took over the role from the real Loki.

Over the millennia both powers that should've repelled each other had blended somewhat. Probably what helped him to stay hidden for so long, but the Trickster-ness wasn't just a mask anymore.

To be fair, however, he had always enjoyed a good trick/prank.

The spell addled his mind a bit. Gabriel could always feel the worry, but he couldn't always remember what it tried to keep him from remembering or what he knew he should be worrying about. Oh, he'd remember after another seal was saved, but it had kept his worries to a minimum.

But it also impeded his ability to hear his daughter's prayers.

Like her desperate prayer apologizing for her stubbornness and for something else that the spell had been able to garble. The prayer didn't have the power behind it to fully come through, but something inside him told him it was urgent. The spell forcefully quelled some of his worry telling him he didn't know what was going on. That it was probably nothing.