The Multitude
voice. Or if she had, He’d spoken too long ago for her to remember. But she wouldn’t give up. She’d been searching the shadows for heavenly signs all her life. Anything out of the ordinary could be a message, anything mathematics failed to explain.A flash incinerated the butterflies, the garden, and the amazing Asura, bright and alive one moment only to melt into a shadow on her stone bench the next.
“Nooooooo!” The blast overwhelmed even Gabriella, its flames scorching her lungs and its winds twirling her into their mighty vortex.
Other screams lifted above the roar. Ninety thousand strong. A collective wail surely piercing the collective subconscious of every living thing.
Then silence.
Gabriella gasped for breath from the top of the mushroom cloud.
This couldn’t be happening. She shut her eyes tight, reopened them…closed them again.
How to reconcile such a horror? Yes, mankind’s long, twisting road out of Eden had been pitted by war and brutality. But she’d seen it repaved numerous times, through inventions, brilliant works of art, the births of major religions, the spread of civilization around the planet.
All leading to this?
Impossible.
Hiroshima lay in burning ruins far below. An entire city. What had been the point of Abraham? Or Noah, Moses, Jesus? Why had prophet after prophet, and even a messiah, failed to steer man from the gates of Armageddon?
Because they’d been false prophets?
She tried to think past the rage boiling in her veins. Those incredible butterflies had delivered a message. God had spoken through them. He wanted her to set a new course.
Or…
Inspiration flashed through her, brighter than the atomic bomb.
God wanted Gabriella to reset the old course. She’d travel back in time to create a butterfly effect so far-reaching the modern world wouldn’t bear the slightest resemblance to the one burning below.
Gabriella stormed away to do what needed doing.
CHAPTER 2
Whoosh! From Hiroshima to the Judean Desert, two weeks after the birth of Christ
Gabriella gazed across the sunburned plains from her position atop a cliff. Behind her lurked the castle of King Herod. A leader reviled by history.
Heat rose from the desert in shimmering waves, interrupted only rarely by reluctant wisps of a breeze. The Dead Sea teased her by scenting the air with the illusion of rain, but when she lifted her head, she found only dry sun. No blessed showers to wash away the stains of her angry tears.
Enough with the crying. She needed to focus on her mission. Hiroshima wouldn’t happen for almost two thousand years. She’d left that horror behind for the moment. Or ahead?
No. Not anymore.
She’d traveled backward through the World of Mortal Dreams—the shared, timeless dimension all humans visit in their sleep. A place where dreams linger even after their hosts have awakened. She’d skipped from one such dream to another, leaping from place to place, era to era, until she found a dreamer at the proper coordinates, in Herod’s front yard. Gabriella had stepped back into the waking world at that point.
Only a few gifted mortals had the ability to use the World of Mortal Dreams like a cosmic subway ride, but angels could do it with ease. Of course, they weren’t allowed to change the past. Gabriella knew such an act to be a mortal sin. Yet, God had spoken to her, had he not? She’d seen and heard His Word through the choreographed butterfly dance in the garden gateway and Asura’s odd question about a boulder falling into the pond.
Gabriella knew just which boulder might work, but she trembled at the implications. Suppose she’d misinterpreted, allowing her rage, her grief, and the image of Asura’s burnt shadow to cloud her judgment?
No way.
The magnificent burst of logic bringing her to Judea had been inspired by the heavens above, not from any turmoil within her soul. God had sent her to reverse many centuries of madness.
The world’s greatest religions had long been magnets for violence. If she could nip one in the bud by eliminating its founder, perhaps the clock would spin in a peaceful direction, avoiding crusades, jihads, inquisitions, pogroms, the development of advanced weaponry…the destruction of Hiroshima. She choked back a sob.
Enough! She’d left her emotions behind. The path she now followed was a righteous one. And if she’d turned at the wrong fork here in Judea, she could travel further back, to Moses. Or perhaps forward a bit. She’d try over and over again, because she was…
Playing God?
No. No. No. No. No.
Following God’s direction.
She turned to the scene behind her.
Deep within a mighty palace, King Herod the Great rolled over and continued his nap in the peace and contentment of a protected man. The mile-long wall protecting his palace stood tall enough to discourage the fiercest army. The masonry rose twenty feet above the ground, and sentry towers soared three times as high.
Fiercest army be damned. Breaching the fortification would be mere child’s play.
Gabriella hypnotized the guards into opening the gate and then rendered them asleep, along with everyone in the palace who hadn’t already settled down for a midafternoon nap.
She stepped into Herod’s dream.
History and legend tell many tales about kings heeding messages received in their sleep, but Herod had an inkling of his madness and never trusted his dreams. Therefore, Gabriella settled on a different strategy for communicating with the man. Since he claimed to be a Jew but hedged his bets by harboring a secret belief in mythology, best to have him perceive her as a goddess visiting his waking life from the heavens. He didn’t need to know he was sleeping, now did he?
She set the king into a sleep walk.
Herod slipped into a white tunic and threw a silk robe over his shoulders. He fitted an emerald-studded leather band around his head. Then he stepped to a marble table and preened in the reflection of a washbasin. Advancing years and desert sun had bleached the man’s beard, sideburns, and hair but spared his brows their darkness. They enhanced the brooding madness in his eyes.
Gabriella led the king out of his bedchamber,