Thief by Greg Curtis

attachments. The inter-scapular and shoulder regions also ought to have their own anatomical mysteries.
     
    Yet if that was so he conjectured, they should show. Even through her gauzy, puffed out dress he should be able to see the bursa muscles, but there was nothing. She looked to his male eye, like feminine perfection, totally human, with wings attached. Her body defied the laws of bio-mechanics.
     
    Then there were the wings themselves, massive surely beyond use. Their twenty plus foot span could only be achieved by having each of them double jointed so that when she stood there was a three foot segment to the top arch, a seven foot drop almost to the ground, and then another three foot segment curving back up to the wing tip. Such wings couldn’t be designed by nature. They should weigh a ton, and be far too massive for any creature to flap. And yet he’d seen her fly with them. Not just fly but also hover, wings flapping gently and showing not the least sign of strain. What sort of muscle could support such a strain over such a wing span? Surely she couldn’t be mammalian. Yet her form argued otherwise.
     
    Also strangely, the wings didn’t weigh that much. He’d held her, carried her, and even then known that she was surprisingly light. Wings and all she’d be lucky to weigh a hundred pounds. Yet how could that be?
     
    Not an expert in anatomy and physiology, he still found her body structure fascinating. If only she hadn’t been wearing that white dress he cursed, he could have studied her better. And then he thought of what he’d asked for and crossed himself hastily, the distant memory of a Catholic upbringing rearing its ugly head even after so many years.
     
    Hastily he turned his attention to other things. Specifically, the databases. If he couldn’t discover anything that made sense from her, perhaps others might have. After all, angels had been spoken of for at least as long as recorded history.
     
    An avid reader, he’d taken the liberty of building his own library decades in the past, and then over the years had extended it and extended it again. Then finally he’d scanned it on to computer. As a result he had an extensive knowledge base, larger than most city libraries and it was completely searchable. It also should have considerable information on biblical things. After all, some of the treasures he’d stolen and returned to their rightful owners in the past, were religious artefacts. It was amazing how much gold and silver the churches had stashed away over the years.
     
    It occurred to him briefly that perhaps that was why she’d come. He’d returned the churches’ treasures all right, when he’d occasionally recovered them from the crooks, but he hadn’t returned the money. It had largely gone to charities rather than churches. Call it a philosophical difference of opinion he had with organized religion. Money should go to feed the poor on earth, not enrich their souls for the afterlife.
     
    Could she have come for it, a sort of heavenly debt collection agency? He shook his head and rejected the idea instinctively. Surely not. While nothing else made sense, it still seemed completely wrong.
     
    His initial search turned up over fifteen hundred references to angels, and he spent the next hour or so searching through them, picking out the morsels that related to his predicament, and discarding the rest as the ramblings of the insane and delusional. But each time he discarded some other piece of fantasy, he kept returning to the central knotty problem. How did he know they were fantasy? There was an angel in his garden. She was real. It was all fantasy. And quite possibly it was all real.
     
    While he learnt a lot about angels in general, always assuming any of it could be considered as accurate, he learnt little of the specific, and nothing directly related to his situation.
     
    Where did she come from? It was surely the first question he had to answer and it had an obvious