Kingdom of Salt and Sirens

by J. A. Armitage

  It’s not like I’d committed a big sin. I didn’t murder anyone or steal anything, but if any transgression against divine law counted as sin, then yep, I was guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.

  I tapped my foot nervously on the marble tile. The steady sound of it echoed throughout the great hall, bouncing off the intricately frescoed ceilings and rattling the gilded candelabras. Beside the grand doorway to the inner court, the two guards eyed my drumming foot, then looked at each other with matching annoyed sneers, but I really didn’t care. Angels of my class weren’t often called before the court, so they needed to get over my anxiety. If only I could too.

  The bolt on the door banged as it unlocked, and the guards turned at attention, ready for whatever might come storming through. Instead, the door slowly creaked open, just enough for the court recorder, Malachi, to slip out.

  “Arianna,” he said. “Raguel would like to see you now.” His expression was flat and unreadable. Years of working as an officer had dulled his ability to emote and provide any glimpse of what lay before me beyond the doors.

  I gulped and stood up from the tiny marble bench. My legs shook, threatening to give out and leave me flailing on the cold stone floor. I closed my eyes and tried to slow my breathing, counting backward from ten as I straightened my gown and fluffed up my wings. If I had to go on trial, I should at least look my best. I doubted it would help, but I had few options left.

  The guards grabbed the iron door handles and pushed them inward to let me pass. I studied the intricate carvings in the wood panels, trying to avoid looking forward. Each tableau depicted justice being carried out, swift and heartless as was its way. Slaughtered felons and severed heads littered the artwork and I took a deep breath, hoping I wouldn’t one day join them. Especially not today.

  I’d barely taken a few steps into the court when the guards slammed the door shut with a thunderous boom, nearly nipping my heels. A few pure white feathers fell from my wings in the abrupt draft.

  “Arianna, please step forward.”

  Raguel stood at the end of the aisle, before the benches of the court, his arms stretched out toward me. Radiant light beamed off his azure robes, almost inviting, almost safe, unless you knew what you were walking into. Raguel, the high angel of justice. A gentle soul, but with the ability to bring the strongest men and divine to their knees. The angel who’d struck down armies in their boots. Without hesitation. Without remorse.

  Rows of angels sat along the edges of the aisle, sad eyes and shaking heads, here to see my fate. I avoided their heavy stares as I trudged farther into the court. Their condemnation weighed down upon my shoulders as I walked.

  “You are accused of breaking the cardinal rule of your kind. What say you?”

  I swallowed, carefully reviewing my words again in my head. I’d practiced them a thousand times, but now, standing in this place, they didn’t seem appropriate. Didn’t seem enough. I laced my hands behind my back and ran my fingertips along the downy softness of my feathers, hoping the familiar would bring me strength.

  “I think this has all been a big misunderstanding.”

  Raguel shook his head. His long platinum strands rippled in waves that flowed gently over his shoulders like a waterfall. Everything about him, from the top of his stunning head to the bottoms of his strong and sturdy feet, radiated with an unnatural beauty. A beauty that could swiftly turn lethal if crossed unprepared.

  “Did you not change the course of fate for one—” he turned toward the angels on the court and after hushed whispers turned back, “—Henry Tatum?”

  The moment spun in a loop in my brain. The carousel of misdeeds that a certain Henry Tatum had committed. Over and over he’d made the same bad decisions, affecting all those around him. For once, he needed to break the cycle of those bad decisions and pay penance for his ill-lived life. I could no longer let him destroy his family and those who loved him, unaware or unwilling to believe what he was capable of. In that moment, the one in which I intervened and punished Henry, my heart did not feel shame. It did not feel guilt. It seemed the exact right decision.

  “Yes and no.”

  Raguel smirked and crossed his arms over his chest. His gold-tipped wings shone in the light, making him appear even more holy, even more terrifying. “Explain.”

  “I’d been watching Mr. Tatum, and it was merely a matter of time before he received comeuppance for his misdeeds. I simply speeded up the process to avoid any further harm to anyone else.”

  “Did you, now? Or did you make things worse?”

  I scanned the faces on the court, each one hanging off his words, waiting for mine. Except I had none of my own to respond.

  “What if you hadn’t inserted yourself into Mr. Tatum’s life, and he moved on to make better decisions? His wife was pregnant. Did you know that? What if after the birth of the child he became a changed man?”

  “And what if he didn’t?” I blurted, immediately covering my mouth with my hand for talking out of line. These were the things that constantly kept me in trouble. Never knowing when enough was enough.

  He nodded for me to continue.

  I swallowed hard. “What if, instead, he continued down the same path and made the same awful decisions? Or worse—endangered his wife and his child?”

  “Do you not believe in the power of love as redemption?”

  I stopped and thought over my words. I couldn’t lie. Not before the court.

  “In this case, I don’t. I don’t believe that love could be strong enough to fix him. To change his path.”

  The collective gasped, and I clenched my eyes shut, knowing my mouth had run away with me again. “I think he would have destroyed everyone around him.”

  “But that would have been his choice. Humans were gifted free will—the ability to make their own decisions regardless of outcome. We are not meant to override those decisions or circumstances.”

  Raguel hung his head and began to pace in front of the court. My knees quivered beneath my gown, fighting the urge to run out of the room and never return. Maybe I could hide amongst the stars and disappear, or fly off to a distant planet where no one would ever find me. Except, they would. Heaven’s reach surpassed all limits of my potential fugitive imagination.

  “So, you stand here, doubting the gifts bestowed on humankind by our Lord—love and free will.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Silence,” Raguel shouted, raising his hand in the air. The entire room fell deathly quiet. “I no longer wish to hear argument. Even ignoring these facts, what is the single most important rule among the angels?”

  I stared down at the floor, my chin nearly hitting my chest. “Do not interfere with humankind.”

  “I didn’t hear you.”

  “Do not interfere with the humans,” I said louder, my hands clenched into fists at my side.

  “And did you interfere with humans?”

  “Yes.”

  “And is this the first time you’ve been warned about interfering?”

  I hung my head again as my shoulders rose. “No.”

  The room erupted in a flurry of accusations and chaos, but I kept my eyes locked on the veins of gray in the shiny marble floor. I tried to block out the voices, but each one wound my muscles tighter, bit by bit like harp strings being tuned, as my body begged to collapse in on itself. To implode. To vanish.

  “Enough,” Raguel yelled, and calm resumed.

  He walked toward me and placed his hands upon my cheeks, holding both my face and my stare. “I do not believe you intended harm, but divine law has been broken and you must receive punishment. If you doubt the gifts bestowed on humans, then maybe the best lesson would be to walk among them.”

  I squirmed in his grip, but he held firm. “You want me to go to Earth?”

  “Yes, but not as an angel. As a human. If you do not understand humanity, then it’s best you learn. Seven days. I give you seven days to discover the truth of humanity, or you shall not return to Heaven.”
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  “Understand humanity? What does that mean?”

  “That is for you to find out. It is not enough just to walk among them. You need to actually experience—be human. Feel as they feel, live as they live, learn as you need to.”

  “But what if I fail?”

  Raguel removed his hands and walked back to the front of the court. “I suggest you don’t. But if you do not succeed, you are no longer welcome here. So I have said, so shall it be done.”

  He clapped his hands twice and the room began to spin. I reached out, grasping for anything that would keep me still, but my fingers simply slipped through the empty air. A sharp searing pain scalded the top of my shoulder blades and tore across my back as the weight of my wings disappeared. The rest of my skin ignited, set afire with agony, raw and deep. I reached behind me. A sticky wetness coated my fingers and I pulled my hand forward again, dripping splotches of dark red blood. I screamed. Pain pulsed through my body, ripping every part of me and forcing it back together again. The light mixed with the dark, mixed with the nothing, and I lost my grip on the floor. My stomach rose into my throat as gravity took hold.

  And then, I fell.

  2

  All Raguel had left me was pain. Pain and darkness.

  My head ached. At the back of my skull and in the space just behind my eyes, pressure built like my brain might explode. Fortunately, I’d stayed still long enough for the fiery sting across my shoulder blades to finally be extinguished, but it had now been replaced by an irritating itch, deep within my flesh and impossible to scratch. I stretched out my limbs, fighting against the burning and throbbing in my joints that made every movement more awful than the last. If this was humanity, it sucked.

  I eased my eyes open. The world lay still, bathed in dark with only the speckles of stars in the sky. Except these weren’t the majestic inspiring beacons that stars should be. Just unrecognizable blobs breaking up the infinite night. How sad. I sat up, the motion ripping through my human veins, unnatural and unyielding. I reached my hand behind my back and concentrated, waiting for my silken feathers to brush against my fingers, but they didn’t. My stomach hollowed. This is real now.

  I struggled to my feet, my knees quaking, threatening to toss me back down to the dirty ground. Death surrounded me. Scorch marks stretched across the ground from where I stood, exploded out like a firework. All life—every blade of grass—crunched beneath my feet, charred to a dark crisp. Just beyond the touchdown point, the world continued again. Fields, maybe a meadow with green grass and purple asters, drooped in the night, waiting for the radiant sun to wake them again.

  “Must’ve been some trip.”

  I spun around to follow the voice, a deep cadence with an edge of a chuckle. I’ll teach them to laugh at my predicament. But my head kept spinning after my feet stopped and I buckled over, grabbing my knees, hoping for the world to stay still. The voice—a man—rushed over and tossed a thin blanket across my back as he threw my arm over his shoulder, taking my full weight.

  “Easy now. It’s going to take a little while to get adjusted. Humans are complicated, but I’m sure you’ll figure that out.”

  We walked over the singed earth. The fire that happened here seared through the bottoms of my feet, sparking every nerve up through the back of my spine. I leaned into the man. The evening breeze rustled through his grayed hair. Whispers of peppermint and orange rolled off his skin and helped calm the thoughts flooding through my brain, all of them moving too fast to focus on any in particular.

  Soon the fresh life of the meadow bent under my footsteps. The cool dew eased the pain, although every step still seemed detached from my body. Foreign. Unfamiliar. Human.

  Ahead, a dirt road rose out of the field. A green car with its lights shining off into the distance sat with the doors open, waiting. I charged toward the car, the lights propelling me forward, teasing out my last bit of strength. The man by my side struggled to keep up but held firm to my shoulder, not letting my will overpower my ability. As we approached, an older woman stepped out of the passenger seat with her arms full of clothes and a broad smile across her face.

  “In you go.”

  I settled into the back seat as the man wrenched his shoulder back in a circle, stretching out the strain. The burden of holding me up. The woman patted him on the cheek and he kissed her forehead. A gentle glow surrounded the two of them for a moment before it disappeared into the dark.

  “Here you are, love. I hope they fit. Been a while since I’ve had to shop for an angel on such short notice.” She leaned into the car door and rested the pile of clothes on my lap. Her smile stretched wider, revealing cracks of concern around the edges that echoed in her eyes. “And there’s some food in the basket on the seat. Make sure to drink the water. Even the strongest get dehydrated after a fall like that.”

  “Who . . . who are you?” The words tripped up my throat and rolled out, unrefined and blunt.

  “Margaret and James Danley. Pleased to meet you.” She stuck her hand in front of me, and I took it. A warm tingle flowed from her soft skin, easing my defenses.

  “And—”

  “Earth, dear. Just outside Faraway. Iowa. The Hawkeye State.”

  Iowa? Where in the world was Iowa?

  Margaret retrieved her hand and closed the door with a thunk, then took a seat in the front of the car. James settled behind the steering wheel and turned on the engine. A lilting melody and a powerful female voice exploded from the radio as the car moved down the road. I slid into the borrowed baggy pants and hooded sweatshirt, the rough cotton itchy against my raw skin.

  As the car bumped along the highway, I dug into the basket on the seat beside me. The delicious smells of food blasted at my face as I opened the lid. My stomach curled and twisted, my body finally relaxing enough to let the hunger take hold. I opened the bottle of water and downed the contents in three single gulps, numbing the ash-covered desert that burned the inside of my throat. I filled my mouth with meat and cheese and fruit, every morsel seeming better and more decadent than the one before. James peeked back at me in the rearview mirror and chuckled to himself, likely never having seen a divine acting this savage before. But I didn’t care.

  “How did you know where to find me?” I settled back in my seat, the gluttonous feast landing in the bottom of my stomach, heavy but still satisfying.

  “Oh, it wasn’t that hard, you know, with the blazing blue streak plummeting out of the sky and all.” James gave a hearty laugh and Margaret placed a hand on his shoulder, shaking her head. “Plus, Margaret could see you.”

  “See me?” I gripped the edge of the seat, unsure who or what I’d simply let take me away.

  “Yes, dear. My eyesight hasn’t been fantastic for a long while, but the visions are still clear as a bell.” Margaret turned back to face me, the small white spots on her left eye now visible under the interior lights. “We are messengers. We see things regular mortals can’t, and then we help where we can. And before you ask, no, you aren’t our first angel.”

  I wiped my hand over my forehead. Margaret’s ability to predict my thoughts left me feeling exposed. Could she read my mind, or had she done this enough times to just know?

  “How old—I mean . . . how long have you been doing this?”

  James chuckled again. “I don’t know. What’s it been, Maggie? Six or seven hundred years?”

  She gave James a sweet smile, memories broadcasting across her face. “It’s been a while, let’s just put it that way. But enough about us, what brings you here?”

  I closed my eyes, pieces flooding back into my brain. The marble flooring. The judgments. The weightlessness as the ground beneath my feet shifted and the world I knew fell away. “I’m here to learn about humanity. If I don’t, I’ll lose my wings forever.”

  James emitted a high-pitched whistle through his teeth. “Well that’s quite the dilemma you have there. Must’ve been some crime for that type of punishment.”

  “Or maybe they were jus
t being too harsh?”

  “Or maybe you have a lot to learn, young lady?”

  I shuddered and looked out the window. Young lady? I’d been around longer than his human brain could even imagine. I propped my elbow on the door and rested my cheek on my fist. The highway changed from open fields to small houses flying past, dotted in perfect little lines. Soon the car slowed and pulled into the crooked drive of a narrow bungalow home, its sky-blue paint peeling and weathered around the windows and doors.

  “Where are we?”

  James adjusted the rearview mirror, his green eyes catching my face in the reflection.

  “Your new home.”

  3

  The car halted and James jumped out of the front seat, then scurried around the car to open my door. The residual hunger pangs in the bottom of my stomach twisted into something darker, more on edge. I stepped out, the gravel crunching beneath the ratty sandals Margaret had graciously provided. I looked at James and then the house and back again.

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “Oh, no. We don’t live here. Our job is just to help you on your way. The rest is up to you.” James opened the trunk of the car and struggled to retrieve a large burgundy suitcase. I rushed over to help, but he waved me off, his face glowing crimson in the dark as he lowered it to the ground.

  I glanced at the house again and a flash of black brushed past my face. I jumped back, banging my shoulder into the side of the car. Ow! I rubbed the sore spot and watched the black crow perch on the small garden fence that edged the driveway. It flapped its slick, pitch-dark feathers then cocked its little head to the side and stared at me with beady red eyes. I looked away, bunching the cuffs of the sweater into my hands. The crow made a shrill cawing sound. I straightened my stance and exhaled. How would I ever figure out humans if I could be this rattled by a common bird?

  James closed the trunk lid and rushed at the crow, flapping his arms in the air. “You get out of here, now,” he shouted, until the crow flew off, squawking at James as it ascended and disappeared into the dark night. He clearly wasn’t a big fan of birds either.