A deal

Neph's answer seemed to please Amon. The King of Angel before her curled his lips in delight, rose to his feet, and said matter-of-factly, "All right, I have to get back to work."

"W-work?" Neph froze for a moment.

It was surprising at first glance, but perfectly reasonable on reflection. Once Amon's avatars had finished attending to other matters, of course they would go about their lives like ordinary people, or ordinary rats, ravens, flies-or any number of other strange things.

Wait, if one of his avatars was a maggot, would he actually eat-

Amon's movements paused. He glanced at Neph and asked, "What are you thinking?"

Neph blinked.

It made sense for spiritual intuition to warn someone about such unwholesome thoughts, especially when she was right in front of Amon. If she had thoughts like that in front of Adam-uh, wait?

Neph paused, realizing that she had, in fact, entertained some strange thoughts in Adam's presence. The subject had been the True Creator, but that hardly made it any better.

-Surely he couldn't hear my thoughts?

He said he couldn't, but-

Forget it. If he didn't say anything, I'll assume he couldn't hear them. The Lord doesn't care anyway-

Neph raised a hand and traced an inverted cross over her chest again.

Amon studied her, then asked as though something had occurred to him, "Wait, you aren't thinking about my father and me-hmm, what you humans would call a scandal?"

"-No, no." Neph shook her head. "I just suddenly remembered that I-uh, I had some inappropriate thoughts in front of your other half-father."

She paused, then asked sincerely, "Would he know what I was thinking?"

"Not necessarily," Amon answered vaguely. "Even I'm not entirely sure what state he's in now. But since he didn't say anything, you can assume