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came alongside his father, he saw the reason for their trepidation: something very strange was happening below.
    A sort of aura had come over Reverend Jonas, a light that shone directly on his face but which lacked any discernible source. Jonas himself seemed oblivious to the effect, but an eerie hush had overcome the crowd, broken here and there by gasps and murmurs. As the aura brightened, the crowd’s agitation increased. Then, apparently prompted by their reaction, Reverend Jonas stopped speaking and held his hands in front of his face, observing the strange glow.
    Reverend Jonas at first seemed startled by the effect, but then a smile came over his face. “Beloved!” he exclaimed. “It is happening! The time has come at last!”
    “We made it!” Emily Jelonek gushed. “We made it in time!”
    Justin Jelonek nodded silently, his mouth open.
    Cheers and exultations went up from the crowd. Lucas and his parents stood in awe. Was it true? Lucas wondered. Had Reverend Jonas been right after all? Was this strange transfiguration a sign of the Messiah’s impending return?
    Reverend Jonas spread his hands, his palms facing the crowd, and the audience fell silent. By now he was glowing so brightly that Lucas had to shield his eyes. “What you are witnessing,” Reverend Jonas went on, “is the manifestization... the manifestisizing... mandifizing...” The brilliant figure of Jonas Bitters staggered across the plateau as he tried to regain his train of thought.
    “What is happening to him?” Justin Jelonek asked.
    Emily Jelonek shook her head.
    “What you are witlessing...” Reverend Jonas murmured, barely audible. Then he groaned and clutched his chest as if having a heart attack. Confused murmurs arose from the crowd, and Lucas’s parents exchanged frightened glances.
    An unpleasant but not unfamiliar sense of disappointment came over Lucas. For a moment, he had allowed himself to believe in Reverend Jonas, to think that this man really did have some sort of mystical connection to an unseen spiritual realm. But it was becoming very clear that Reverend Jonas had not foreseen whatever was happening to him and was helpless to control it. Lucas’s momentary disappointment, however, soon gave way to excitement and then morbid fascination. For although the so-called First Prophet had obviously not foreseen what was happening, something was happening. Something terrifying—and, Lucas thought, wonderful.
    Reverend Jonas was being torn in half.

Chapter Two
    Somewhere in a dungeon far below the Celestial City of Heaven; July 10, 2015
     
    “Just do it, you big pussy,” said Lucifer.
    “ You do it,” retorted Azrael. “Have you ever been run through with a flaming sword? It hurts like hell.”
    The two demons were conversing in the bowels of Heaven’s most secure prison, which was located in a football stadium-sized cavern several hundred feet underground. The cavern, dimly lit by lanterns suspended on long chains from the ceiling, was mostly empty; the two demons were in a roughly fifty-foot-square alcove off the main cavern, which was separated from the main cavern by a wall of thick steel bars. Other than tunneling through three hundred feet of solid rock, the only way out of the prison was to open the man-sized sliding gate in the middle of the wall of bars, traverse the main cavern, open a heavy steel door, climb a steep, winding staircase to the surface, and then open a steel hatch on the surface. The three doors were, of course, locked and could theoretically only be opened from the outside.
    These impediments were, however, mostly for show. The real barrier to escape was the coffee-cup-sized obsidian cube that rested on a pedestal twenty paces from the cage opening. Known as a Balderhaz Cube after its eccentric inventor, this device neutralized any attempts at harnessing interplanar energy to perform miraculous feats such as bending steel bars or supernaturally manipulating lock tumblers. So Lucifer and his