The PowWow

"Hold!"

The word hit that field like a hand closing around every throat in it at once. Every instrument stopped mid-motion, and I mean stopped — not slowed, not hesitated, simply ceased, the way a recording stops when someone lifts the needle, and in the sudden absence of forty bodies still trying to finish us, I heard my own ragged breathing for what felt like the first time all night. Then the despair washed over me and I knew who and what it was. Control over my bladder became a real battle.

He came up out of the fog itself, or the fog came out of him — I have turned that sentence over a hundred times since and I still don't know which direction the causality actually ran. Not a voice from a cold room this time. Not a presence you had to take Naomi's blood work or a grave's disturbed dirt on faith to believe in. Present. Physical. Tall in a way that made the word tall feel insufficient the instant I tried to apply it, and lit from somewhere that wasn't the moon, wasn't any fire we'd brought, a light that had no source I could locate and no warmth in it whatsoever, the specific cold brilliance of something that used to stand in an actual throne room and has spent longer than human history learning how to counterfeit the memory of it. I thought, absurdly, of a verse Jeremiah used to quote about even Satan disguising himself as an angel of light, and understood, looking at Suriel for the first time with my own two eyes instead of through years of secondhand consequence, that I was looking at the disguise and the thing wearing it in the same instant, and neither one of them was lying about being beautiful.

"Look," he said, and gestured, almost gently, toward the far edge of the field, and the crescent of instruments parted like a curtain being drawn.

They were all there. Jeremiah. Rebecca. Roiya. Rachel. Mara. Curtis. Naomi, David still held tight against her. Bruised, all of them, in one way or another — Rachel favoring a leg, Curtis's shirt dark down one side, Roiya's face doing something I couldn't read from that distance and didn't want to guess at — but upright. Standing. And on every single face I could make out in that impossible light, something that was not fear.

Suriel's expression did something complicated when he saw it too. He had wanted us to see them broken, I understood, in the same instant I understood everything else about that field — had built this entire theater expecting to break something in us by revealing them intact and terrified, and instead he'd delivered seven people who looked like they'd already decided, independently of each other, that whatever happened next, it was not going to be surrender.

"Defiant," he said, and the word came out of him like something he'd bitten down on. "After everything. Still."

Nathanial Lim stood over Jacob and me where we still lay in the mud, close enough that I could have reached his ankle if either of us had had one working limb left between us to try it with, and he was shaking — actual, visible tremor, fists working, a rage with nowhere to go and no permission to go there. He never said a word. Not one, the entire time, and I noted it even flat on my back with my knee screaming and half my attention on the thing towering over the whole field — noted that even now, even furious, even standing that close to finishing what he'd apparently been sent here to finish, Nathanial Lim did not speak, because there was still, as there had always been, no one left inside him with anything of his own left to say.

"You have lost," Suriel said, to us, conversationally, almost kindly, the way you'd explain something to a child you didn't especially want to hurt but intended to anyway. "I could end them from here. All seven, in the time it takes you to draw one more breath. I am telling you this not as a threat but as an accounting of the actual balance of what is currently true."

Something came up in me that I did not plan and could not have manufactured if I'd tried — not courage exactly, something steadier than courage, something that felt less like my own and more like a hand had been placed under it. "Then they'll be with the Lord," I said, and my voice didn't shake, which surprised me more than it seemed to surprise him. "That's not the threat you think it is. You've spent your whole existence learning how to make people afraid of losing what they love. You cannot make me afraid of them going somewhere I already believe is better than here."

I watched it cost him something. Not the words — the fact that the words were true, and that he had known, somewhere underneath the theater, that they might be, and had brought us here anyway hoping we hadn't finished believing it yet.

His face changed. "The child, then," he said, and something in his voice had gone from theater to something worse, something with real appetite in it. "He has not chosen anything. He has no faith to stand on, no verse to hide behind, no years of being taught what to believe when a monster asks him to stop believing it. He is simply a body I can end, the same as any of the others out there in that grass, and you have no theology ready for that one, do you, Levi. Not yet. Not really."

I felt Jacob go still beside me in a way that had nothing to do with his injuries.

I have watched my brother make hard decisions for the whole of both our lives. I watched him make the hardest one I have ever seen a man make in the two full seconds it took him to answer, and I want to be honest that there was no performance in it, no speech prepared in advance, nothing that looked like the version of this scene you'd write if you were writing it instead of living it. He simply looked at Suriel, and past him, at the shape of David in Naomi's arms, and said, in a voice with no theater in it at all, "Then take him."

I have never heard four worse words in my life, and I have never been more certain, hearing them, that I was listening to actual faith instead of a decent impression of it.

"He is not mine to keep," Jacob said, and his voice broke exactly once, on mine, and kept going anyway. "He was never mine to keep. I was only ever asked to raise him, for however long I was given to do it, and if this is the night that ends, then it ends, and I will not buy him back with the one thing that was never for sale. The Lord told Abraham to offer Isaac, and provided the sacrifice Himself. The Lord will deliver my son." His hands were shaking and he was almost snarling at the Fallen. I want that on the record too. Faith like that does not arrive without a cost, and I watched my brother pay it in real time, in front of both of us, with nothing waiting on the other side of it yet that either of us could see. No angel. No ram in a thicket. Just a man on his knees in the mud, meaning every word of a sentence that should have been impossible to mean.

Suriel's mouth curved. He raised one hand, slow, almost reverent, the way you'd raise a hand over something you'd waited a long time to finally be allowed to touch.

That was when Nathanial Lim moved.

I don't know, even now, whether there was enough of him left to call it losing patience, or whether it was simply Suriel's own hunger arriving a half-second ahead of Suriel's own intention, wearing Lim's body the way it had worn everything else that night. Whatever it was, he lunged — past us, past his own instructions, straight at Jacob, hands already shaped for something neither of us had time to name.

Suriel didn't even look at him. He simply turned one hand, almost bored, and Nathanial Lim left the ground entirely, thrown the length of the field in a single motion that made no sound I could describe as human, and came down against the stone gazebo hard enough that I felt it in the ground under my own back. He did not get up. He did not move again at all, and something about the sheer, casual disposability of it — a man Suriel had raised, used, and discarded in under two seconds because he'd moved half a beat out of turn — told me more about what we were actually facing than anything else that entire night had managed to.

"Enough," Suriel said, and turned back to us, and whatever had almost been reverent in his face a moment before was gone, replaced by something colder and far more final. "Here is what happens now. Worship me — plainly, on your knees, in front of all of them, so that they understand exactly what bought their lives — or I finish what began in that hospital parking lot two weeks ago, all of it, all of them, and then what's left of my creations finish the two of you at their leisure."

Jacob looked at me. I looked at him.

"This is a Judges moment," Jacob said, quietly, like he was confirming something he'd already worked out days ago and was only now getting to say out loud.

"We must worship Him," I said back. "It's the only way."

Suriel's face broke into something I can only call triumph, immediate and total, the look of a being who has spent this entire book building toward exactly this outcome and has just watched it arrive precisely on schedule. He began to laugh — not politely, not theatrically anymore, but with the specific, ugly abandon of something that believes it has finally, after every failed patient decade, actually won.

We moved to our knees in the mud. I do not think, watching from where he stood, that he could tell the difference between that and surrender, because from the outside they must have looked identical, and he was laughing too loudly by then to notice that neither of us was looking at him.

Rachel was shaking her head negatively and Roiya’s face showed rage, but directed at us. Only Jeremiah and Rebecca remained resigned, though Rebecca turned her head into Jeremiah’s shoulder and visibly wept.

"Our Father," Jacob said, and his voice didn't waver, "which art in Heaven."

I don't think Suriel heard it. I have gone back over that moment more times than I can count, and I believe, as certainly as I believe anything, that he was crowing loudly enough over his own victory that the four words that should have told him everything simply didn't reach him in time to matter.

"Hallowed be Thy name," I said, and felt Jacob's shoulder against mine, both of us still on our knees, both of us still bleeding, both of us saying something now that had nothing to do with the thing standing over us and everything to do with the One who wasn't standing anywhere we could see, and had never needed to be seen to be present.

"Thy kingdom come." Jacob's voice, steadier now, gathering something I could feel more than hear.

And Jacob said the next line with me. Both of us, together, on the last four words, my brother's voice — the wordless one, the one who has spent this entire family's history letting his hands do what his mouth never had to — joining mine at the exact moment silence would have cost the least and speech cost the most, because some things are only worth saying out loud when saying them costs you something.

"Thy. Will. Be. Done."

Suriel stopped laughing.

I saw it land on him a full half-second too late to matter — the understanding, arriving all at once, that the two men on their knees in front of him had never once been bowing to him at all.

"NO!"

I don't have good words for what happened after that word left him, because nothing that happened next moved like anything human, or anything Suriel-shaped, or anything I have language ready for even now, this far past it. The field simply — cleared. Not fought over. Not won inch by inch the way we'd spent an entire night failing to win it. Cleared, all at once, the way a held breath leaves a body, forty-some instruments and one fallen thing wearing borrowed light simply ceasing to be present tense, gone in the space between one heartbeat and the next with no human hand anywhere near having done it.

The fog went with him. So did the moon's wrongness — I looked up, still on my knees, and it was just a moon again, ordinary, distant, doing nothing but what moons do, and the grass under my hands was just grass, wet with real dew instead of whatever that field had been wearing all night instead of dew.

Jeremiah reached us first. I don't know how a man who'd been missing for two weeks crossed that entire field faster than anyone else standing in it, and I have stopped trying to work out an explanation for every single thing that happened in that clearing, because some nights you're simply meant to receive rather than dissect. He got a hand under each of our arms, one at a time, the same words he'd used on both of us more times than either of us could count across our whole lives, and for once neither Jacob nor I needed to be told twice to let him.

"It's finished," he said, and there was something in his voice I hadn't heard from him in longer than I wanted to admit — not relief exactly, something with more weight to it than relief, the gravity of a man who has just watched a promise get kept in front of him rather than merely believed it would be. He looked around at the empty field, at the untouched grass where forty bodies had stood a minute before, and nodded slowly, like a man confirming something against a page he'd read a long time ago. "Bound,” he said. “I think. Scripture speaks of his kind being kept for judgment. Wherever he was taken, he isn't reaching back from it. It is where such things have always ultimately gone, whether we're given to see it happen or not. We were simply given to see it, tonight."

I didn't ask him how he knew. I have stopped needing every answer explained to me in this family. Some of them you're simply handed, the way you're handed a hand to help you up off wet grass, and you take them, and you say thank you, and you let the rest of it be someone else's to fully understand.

We gathered in the middle of that trampled field — all of us, alive, upright, arms around each other in combinations that didn't sort neatly by who belonged to whom anymore, because by that point in the night none of us much cared about sorting it. Naomi found Jacob before he'd even gotten fully to his feet, David between them, and I watched my brother hold his son with both hands shaking, the same hands that had just been willing, entirely and without performance, to let him go.

Jeremiah had Rebecca tucked against his side, and she held him just as tightly, but her eyes were already moving over the rest of us, counting heads, checking faces, making sure every one of her children was actually there. Rebecca had always been our rock that way. Even shaken, she checked everyone else first.

I saw Curtis with his arms around Roiya, her head against his chest, one hand knotted into the back of his shirt as if neither of them intended to test distance again anytime soon. She said, “I’ve never been so grateful for Levi’s need for sneakiness.”

Rachel found me the way she always finds me, which is to say she didn't wait for me to stand first. She was in my arms and her lips were on mine. God bless that woman.

Eleven years, I thought, standing in the middle of that ruined, ordinary grass, eleven years of this, every single one of them leading to a field at midnight where all of our God-given talents led us and finally the one thing we'd been taught to do since before either of us could have explained why it mattered. God will deliver them, we'd said, twice, in two different parking lots, at two different times, not knowing yet what it would cost to mean it.

He had. Past tense, finally, instead of a hope we were still waiting to find out the truth of.

The family stood whole again in the wreckage of that field, changed by every single thing that had been asked of them to get there, and none of us said very much for a while, because there are some nights a family is simply meant to stand quietly inside of, together, done.