“Let me make this clear,” Michael stared daggers at Colton from across the table, her voice reminding Colton of a Doberman’s bark, “You are no Saint yet. Bation be damned, you will train yourself to death, and then you will wake up and do it again and again and again until I decide you are good enough for the name we built protecting people like you who think they’re too good for people like us.”

Colton was stuck, wondering what had happened while he was asleep, and how long it had been since he officially met the child he had met on the couch.

It was like her personality had done a sudden 180 overnight, but no one else of the five seemed to notice the drastic change but him. All five of them sat around the table in varying degrees of casual wear. Three of them were talking about the patrol shifts for the day, who would be where, and what they had to do.

But Michael kept her gaze steadily trained on Colton, the daggers trained on his vitals like she was waiting for a specific answer to the question that she hadn’t asked. It was almost like she was waiting for him to piece together the puzzle that she hadn’t laid out for him to solve.

She had a plan, Michael apparently always had one, but he couldn’t know what part he was supposed to play or if he was even a player on the board for her yet. She seemed smart. Or at least she was careful in everything she did.

Maybe there was a part for him to play, maybe she already knew things about him that he didn’t. Maybe she believed some of what Bation said about them. Maybe she thought they were the angels and was mad that she ended up an underweight teenage girl from the windy city.

“Good thing I’m suicidal?” He mumbled, hoping to get her cold, dead stare off of him.

She gave a single nod and returned to her food as though that was somehow the correct answer to the riddle she hadn’t asked.

Colton breathed a sigh of relief as though escaping her glare freed his lungs from her taloned hands.

‘Breakfast’ was a small piece of fish and a sweet vegetable that seemed native to the island, as he hadn’t seen it before. It tasted fine, even with how weird he found having fish that early in the morning was. He didn’t know who made it, but he suspected Evan.

The meal was relatively quiet, with the other four whispering amongst themselves, moving on from patrols into what they thought they could do in their time off from patrol.

There was apparently a bakery that gladly gave Michael whatever wasn’t selling every time they saw her nearby. Auriel had a garden he needed to tend to as soon as he could. Raphael wanted to spend time at a beach far enough away from the docks that she couldn’t hear them complain about her. Gabriel was planning on seeing the merchants in the market about their shipments and goods.

But Colton didn’t have any of those plans. He didn’t know the island yet, and he wasn’t sure he was physically able to yet, even if the island was small.

After the plates were cleared, Sam gave out orders: “First shift is Gabriel and Raphael, the shift changes at noon, Auriel, go to your garden to figure out what’s wrong with it, Chamuel is coming with me until noon, when Auriel and I take over patrol until ten.” She gave him a stern stare, “And you will stay close, yes?”

He nodded, sudden, inexplicable fear coursing through his veins, “Yeah, can do.”

There was a hint of an amused smirk on her face as she stood from the table, Colton following close behind her, and the five broke off into their groups.

The first place Michael took him was their office space, which Ryan had pointed out to them the day before. In the center, there was a single row of seven desks facing each other, with a line of filing cabinets covering the walls behind the desks, and a large pinboard on the far wall in front of the door past the desks.

“With the little respect I care to give. I do not need another warrior. I do not want another warrior.” Michael walked down the line and pulled out a random chair for him, spinning it to face Chamuel, “Auriel tells me you’re a wannabe detective, prove your worth.”

He slowly walked over to the chair and sat, unsure of what that meant to her. She spun it and tucked him into the desk too closely for his comfort. “We have access to different kinds of files than the regular internet does, thanks to the Handler. I hope you’re able to figure out how to use them, because the internet sucks here.”

He turned on the computer, and it powered on, welcoming him as Chamuel while it loaded. “Even the tech, huh?”

“Colton does not exist here. You are Chamuel now to everyone.” Her voice was closed off, but he recognized pity when he saw it.

He nodded as he looked through the navigation of the one pre-loaded site that seemed to work, “Does it ever bother you? Being called Michael?”

She leaned against the wall behind him, her careful eyes watching him work, feeling like cooling embers of a fire that burned at his back. “Not as much as I thought it would. The scars bother me more.”

“How many do you have?” He asked, searching for things he already knew about, to learn the system. She didn’t respond for a while, and he didn’t think she ever would. He worried that the question was too personal to answer; each scar on her probably had a more horrifying story behind it than the jagged edges alone could tell. “I’m sorry, you don’t have to say. I just hate silence.”

“I have too many to count, some from here, some from missions, some from the life I wish I still had. Some are on top of each other, some still hurt, but I can’t wait until I can just talk about what happened to earn them without being hurt again.”

“I can’t wait for the collars to scar.” He said, with a small smile.

“They won’t, not until they’re off at least. You’ll just get used to the pain.” Michael said with a shrug.

“Well, that’s horrifying.”

“I mean, they’ll heal just like everything else, but any movement can reopen the wound, and when Bation decides we need to be disciplined, it's like being collared all over again. The other nine might heal fine for you, since you’re going to be spending more time in here than the rest of us do.”

“I want to help.”

“In the field?”

“Back home, I was training to help people, a lot like the four of you seem to.”

She was silent for a while again. He could feel the curiosity coming off her in waves. “Research everything you can on Bation. I’ll be back soon.” She didn’t give him enough time to respond before leaving the room.

He breathed a deep sigh before typing “Marcus Bation” into the search bar, wishing he had his home office back with his large wooden desk that had been passed down through his family since his great-grandfather made it in his twenties, and the plants that his mom had decorated the room with while it had been his father’s.

Colton wished to hear Rowan’s nagging when he was late for the car after he’d asked for it to be pulled around. He longed to hear his mother complain about his clothes and his father reminding him about ties he didn’t want to wear himself. He wanted to hear the Kings tell him all about their family drama like he was an honorary son of theirs who had to know every detail about their Aunt Margret, who was severely allergic to flowers but still insisted on having fresh petunias everywhere she went.

But research was something he knew well; it was among the few things he’d been able to bury himself in when Evan died in the warehouse and again after his parents passed after the accident.

There wasn’t much more in their records than what he’d been able to find on his own just before Bation and Auriel took him. He found the troubled teen clippings first, then the reformed missionary man being sent out to a remote island with no access to the mainland. Something told him that Michael wouldn’t accept the bare minimum she would have been able to find on her own.

There had to be something that he hadn’t thought of; no one goes from small town preacher to kidnapper and torturer with access to some kind of magic that he’d infused into the collars he bound his victims with. No one was born evil, no one reformed that quickly just to get worse.

But who would keep that information freely available in his library?

He sat back in his chair, letting his mind piece together a timeline that made sense. When does a troubled kid turn into a man on a mission to find reborn archangels?

Why does he?

He looked at Father Bation’s early years on the island. The years he would do the normal Christian things: acts of service through the church, prayer circles, building hope in the worst times for people, and distributing tithing where it would do the most for the community.

There was a shift, a month before Raphael was brought to the island, one that he couldn’t explain.

In the sermons that Bation kept in the archives, he went from reading out passages in the bible about loving thy neighbor to going on about the Archangels and their mission before the Savior could return to save us all again.

Colton wrote up the report as best he could, knowing that there was more that the archives didn’t have. He’d have to investigate outside of what Bation wanted them to know, starting with his victims.

Suddenly, Michael was leaning over his shoulder, reading the report as he wrote it. He stopped what he was writing, allowing her to catch up as he steadied his heart. He could hear her hum her disapproval in his ear.

“Nothing is truly born evil, are they?” She mumbled.

“It would be easier if it were that black and white.” He replied, “But it’s not, there’s always something that causes evil.”

“Not always, sometimes people just enjoy pain.” She stood back, folding her arms in front of her chest.

“Respectfully, you are just a kid.” He turned toward her glare; it wasn’t as menacing as the one she held on him at breakfast. It was curious, like she was waiting for the respect part of his statement.

“A child that has done a fuck ton more than you likely ever will, Chamuel.” Her voice was low, and her tone was controlled. But he could feel how much she hated her words.

He held up his hands, turning back to finish what he could of his report as she watched him closely. He didn’t know how long he’d been left alone, if she had already been to her shift and come back, or if he was going to be left alone again.

They stayed in near silence, the only sound between them being the echoing sounds of his keyboard clacking away as he wrote.

“There’s a lot of the story missing…” He trailed off as he began to finish what he had.

“Agreed.” She snipped behind him.

“I’ll need to go out to investigate more, if you want everything on Bation.” The silence dragged on again as his anxiety built up, worried that he would be shot down, that she only wanted to see his ability with the resources and would tell him to give up the search.

“Fine, we can field train you.” Colton looked back at her, with too much excitement for her liking, as she continued, “But you will only be field reserves; your primary objectives will be to investigate. Am I clear?”

Colton nodded, “Crystal,”