Pastor Reed is not enlightened.

Sitting in the darkness of his unanswered prayer, he slowly realizes that that isn't entirely true.

He's good at ministry, is the thing; everyone says so. He can comfort the grieving, inspire a congregation, run a bible study. He can arrange a pancake breakfast with another church without anybody wanting to kill anybody, and if you think that's easy in small town New England go ahead and try it yourself.

But.

His thoughts are grinding slowly now, like a glacier.

He can quote scripture. At all the right times. Match the right verse to the right person. To the right moment. But he wasn't. Exactly. Taking it seriously. Was he. It was just. A game. He'd learned to play.

And now it's not.

When Zechariah saw the angel, he was startled and gripped with fear the Bible says, about John the Baptist's father. Reed can picture that, now. Something like that happened to him. Maybe the same thing, maybe not. But something, in a long morning of somethings.

What is it that's been happening in his town?

And what is he being called to do about it?

Once the storm calms down a little, once they've got the trees and downed power lines out of the road, Officer Pembrooke tells his boss he's going to catch a nap at home, and then goes and visits his partner again. The nurses all know who he is; he doubts he'll have any trouble getting in, even late at night.

Indeed not.

Raymond is too small a town to have strict partner assignments, the way he's heard it works in bigger cities. A lot of the time you go out alone, or with whoever happens to be least busy. That's how it has to go, in a town with only four officers.

Well, three, now.

They have preferences, is the point. Radley and Pembrooke, Slane and Mikalsson, that's how it breaks down when they have enough slack to make choices.

"Aaah. Ba - aga. Agh!"

The doctors didn't even pretend to understand what was wrong. Everyone thought drugs, at first, but his blood came back squeaky-clean. Physically he's as well as he ever was. Whatever's wrong is all in his brain.

He might recognize Pembrooke, a little. He looks at him when he talks, anyway, which is more than he gave any of the doctors.

He sees the shimmering seeping through the ceiling, and reaches for it. There's something up there he wants, if he could just find the right way to grab on and pull...but it slips away.

"Gragle!" he spits, frustrated.

They found him like this, just two days ago. Nobody's seriously tried to diagnose him yet, let alone treat him; all the other crises got in the way. But he's not much trouble, the nurses say, he just can't take care of himself. What they mean is, he can't feed himself and he wears a diaper. He ignored their little hint that he could help them with either of those jobs; there are some things a man just shouldn't do for another man. But he's not mad that they suggested it. Hell, they're even tireder than he is. They're taking good care of Radley, overall. Doing the best you could expect.

There was talk of bringing in experts from out of state, psychologists, neurologists, whatever, to figure out what happened. Pembrooke can't help with any of that; he's not a doctor, he's a cop. And that might turn out to matter, because he doesn't think Radley had a stroke, or a nervous collapse -- at the age of thirty-four! Get serious. This isn't something that happened to Radley, it's something someone did to him. It's just intuition, for now, but it fits. Way too much weird shit's been going on around Raymond recently. The Merrill boy vanished, and suddenly turned up again, rescued by an "angel". This weird, much-too-powerful storm. Radley's collapse. And Lane himself, and all the indescribably weird shit they found in his basement. It isn't that a bunch of weird things happened at the same time just by chance; that's not how the world works. They're all connected, even if Pembrooke can't see how or why yet, and that means each of them is a lead on all the others.

He started with Lane's papers. That's the other reason he keeps visiting the hospital: they have their own generator, and they leave the lights on at night. It's better for reading than a flashlight, and his wife's not around to bitch about it. Not a lot of Lane's stuff was in English, but there's some. Pembrooke took a few things home with him, Sunday morning, which you're not really supposed to do on an active crime scene, but Lane's basement is such a mess that he doubts anyone will notice. He skipped the books; they all have titles like "Notes on the Correspondence of Aleph and the Crown", or "The Qabalistic Tarot: a Textbook of Mystical Philosophy", which sounded too damned obscure to be useful. He's not trying to teach himself enough of...whatever this is...to fix Radley himself. He's trying to figure out where Lane went, or who he was talking to. Someone he could stick in Raymond's one and only jail cell, and sweat a little until they cough up some explanations. No progress yet.

They need to find Lane; they put out a BOLO Sunday morning, but of course the storm jammed that up. If Lane got out ahead of it he could be on Mars by now, but maybe the staties will come up with a lead. He should probably at least skim those stupid books, in case there's a section on practical hypnosis or something. And he needs to go upstairs talk to the Merrill kids, no matter how much that whole story pisses him off. If there's an angel running around saving people, how come she isn't here, in this room, huh? Yeah. He needs to get to the bottom of what happened there, find that so-called angel and make her explain what she knows.

It's harder detective work than Raymond usually offers. Frankly, Raymond doesn't usually offer mysteries of any kind, just the usual small-town tide of drunk teens and domestic disturbances. A few CPS cases, here and there. Difficult in its own way, but nothing you'd have to think hard about, which is usually something Pembrooke likes about the job.

The light is fading. He settles back in disappointment. "Pfeh."

Right. No room for self-pity here, or even for self-doubt. He has to get this right somehow, no matter what he has to do or how hard it is to do it.

It turns out that raw chicken legs are actually kinda gross? They tried cooking a few and that helped a little, but the supermarkets are doing something to this meat before it gets to the downstairs freezer that Otso does not like one bit.

"Sorry about that. I guess it makes sense that humans and bears would have different tastes."

"It's OK. There's still plenty to eat up on the Hill, I don't need to eat your food."

"What you need, buster, is to lie down and stay off that leg until it's better."

They've had this argument a few times already. At first she was pretty shy about pressing her point, since Otso could bite her throat out if she said the wrong thing, leg or no leg. But she's getting the sense that down underneath all the claws and fur Otso is basically just a well-behaved ten-year-old boy, so now she doesn't hesitate to wave a scolding finger under his nose. "That bone could be fractured! A fractured bone is serious! If you go out gallivanting on that hill right now you could be crippled for life! Is that what you want?"

_{"No ma'am."}

"That's right," she sniffs.

She has, with great difficulty, pulled out all the spare pillows and towels, dragged the cushions off of the couch, and made a reasonably comfortable Otso-nest in the living room. She's still not sure what her ultimate role in this whole imbroglio is supposed to be, but right now there's a clear need for bearsitting. His job is to lie there and not make things worse.

"If you're bored, how about you tell me another story."

He's already told all his stories about Sophie, is the thing. The only ones he has left are about growing up. With his dad.

And he kinda wants to stop thinking about Sophie for a while, only apparently he can't because he suddenly asks, "How do you know if you can trust someone?"

She'd rather hear more about magic, but, "Well, you have to look at what people do. It's easy to say things that sound good, but it's hard to follow through. Some people are just liars, and they'll tell you everything you want to hear while they rob you blind. Other people mean well, but can't do the things they say they want. Both types can get you into trouble, if you're not careful. The people you want to trust are the ones who are trying to keep their promises, and know enough about themselves that they can actually succeed."

"...what kind do you think Sophie is?"

"You've put your big hairy paw right on the main question." She chuckles, then sighs. "She means well, I'd bet my life on that. She'll try to figure out the right thing, and then she'll try to do it. She makes mistakes, I don't need to tell you that, but I think she can learn. Whether she can learn fast enough...I don't know. I don't know anything about this."

It's tempting to just call this a problem for the young folks, to opt out of all of it and tell them to call her when it's all settled. That is, no doubt, what Gillian's mother would have done. That thought stirs her to a better effort: "But I do know that we're in this together, whether we like it or not. Whether we can trust her isn't the only question. Before that you have to ask, what options do we have? It makes no sense to be alone in this thing, and that body-stealing alchemist did not leave a good impression on me, I don't mind telling you."

"I think the real answer is, we work with her but we don't follow her. You see what I mean?"

"We...try and figure things out on our own?"

"You've got it." Is it wrong to be proud of him?

That sounds EVEN HARDER than just figuring out who to trust!! Why are grown-up problems like this?