by Holley Trent
She hurried down to lock it before she returned to the room, wondering what she’d see and with the Cougars on her heels.
Tarik was in the bed on his belly, covers pulled up to where his wing joints must have been. He looked a bit gray, but more or less human. “It’s fine,” he said softly. “Go to bed, Elizabeth. Rachel. There’ll be adventures tomorrow.”
“Why’d he run out like that?” Rachel asked.
“Because he saw what I wanted him to see. That’s all.”
“Well, okay. You all right?”
“Yes. Take your rest.”
The Cougars looked uncertain, but they filed out, tossing looks of concern over their shoulders as they went.
Lola padded to the edge of the bed, sensing something off about his energy. Being so warm-natured herself, it’d taken her a minute to notice that he’d cooled. He wasn’t putting off heat like the fiery meteor he usually was and that frightened her.
“Are you…in need of food?” she asked haltingly. Bending, she skimmed her hands just over where his wings should have been. Finding the tips of them, she nearly pulled away. Shockingly, he was like ice. “Would you like me to find something for you?”
“If it is no trouble.”
Odd that he didn’t refuse. He’d refused to partake with Lady Sophie, but apparently his appetite had changed.
Lola hurried downstairs to the kitchen. She put together a tray of whatever food odds and ends she could find and brewed a strong pot of coffee. She carried it to the bedroom and made space on the crowded table beside the bed.
His half-hooded eyes tracked her lazily. His lips were tight, jaw clenched with pain. Brown skin bereft of its usual heavenly undertones.
She pushed a hunk of bread at him and the shavings of ham she’d found. “Here. Eat that. Do you want sugar in your coffee, or—”
As she reached for the spoon, he grabbed her wrist.
His eyes closed. Throat labored with a swallow. “Don’t fret over me. I’ll eat. I’ll rest. I’ll recover.”
“What is wrong with you? You are cold.”
“I’ll recover.” He unhanded her and reached blindly for the meat. “It is not unusual. I suppose I can explain it by saying I burned up too much of what fuels me too quickly. I’m fine.”
“You lie.”
He laughed.
She didn’t. She didn’t see the humor in looking at that creature when he was in obvious distress. No matter how much he downplayed his condition, she knew what she sensed.
And she knew what she saw.
He was getting lazy at maintaining the glamor that shielded his wings. She caught the dark outline of them as he forced himself to eat. The tops protruding as high as the middle of his head. The bottoms skimming the back of his knees. Each as wide as his body at their widest part when folded.
They must have been incredibly heavy. She already knew he was strong. He’d ported them across the Atlantic and back and never let go unless their feet could softly touch the ground.
She wouldn’t have been able to do that. Her energy would have burned out ages ago.
She kept staring. Kept watching the transparence fade until the transition had ended. She no longer saw Tarik’s back and the bedsheet. Instead, there were ink black wings atop it all. The left one spasmed at the top, again and again.
He couldn’t pretend to be unbothered. He was too focused on his breathing and not his food.
“Go to your room, Butterfly. Taunt me tomorrow.”
“What did you do to it?”
“You don’t need to be concerned. I only caught a bit of…” He laughed. “Shrapnel, I suppose, during my fall from the heavens.”
“You jest. I see no humor in a creature of age having the sort of wound that would disrupt you…who knows how many centuries later.”
“It’s my lot in life. You play hard and fast, you fall hard and fast.” He pushed himself up onto his forearms and weakly pulled the coffee cup across the tray. “Go to bed. I won’t have you…” Another dry laugh. “Disrupting me.”
“Disrupting you? You—ugh.” Snarling, she yanked the wooden chair from the corner and set it at the bedside. She plopped into it, crossed her arms over her chest, and gave the bedside a frustrated kick. “I’ll show you disruption, bird man. All night. Every hour on the hour, I’ll show you. Perhaps more often. I don’t need sleep tonight.”
“I do.”
“So eat and then get it.” She did laugh, then, though she still found nothing amusing about the circumstances. Apparently, no one had ever been able to teach the angel a lesson, but she was going to succeed. Her suffering would be nothing compared to his.
She actually smiled at that.
He didn’t smile back.
Pity.
She’d just started getting used to that smile.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“You can renege on the threat, Butterfly,” Tarik muttered through his pillow after being kicked awake for the fourth hour in a row. “I won’t tell anyone.”
“Is something the matter, bird man? I thought you enjoyed disruption.”
He lifted the pillow and glared at her in the dark. He didn’t need very much light to see that she wore the same smile she had hours before. The wicked little woman looked positively serene. “I’ll have my revenge,” he said. “Be wary.”
“Yes, I am certain you will be as troublesome as always. I will cope as I always do.”
He groaned.
He just wanted to close his eyes and shut down for a few hours, at the very least, to give his body a chance to heal. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d tired himself in such a way.
“Does it always hurt that much?” she asked.
“Does what always hurt?”
“Your wing.”
“Oh.” He gave it a small reflexive stretch as he always did when he was conscious of the throb. “Mostly, I’m able to ignore it. The pain recedes into the background of my thoughts. It is when I’m unwell that the pain becomes more burdensome.”
“Certainly, there is a way to repair it.”
“Many have tried.”
“And?”
He sat up a bit and rooted through the food remnants on the tray. He suddenly had an appetite. “It never works. The energy is not right, or the magic not compatible.”
“So you’ve had others like you try, then? Other fallen ones?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps an angel who has retained their station could assist.”
“An angel who has retained their station wouldn’t come within fifty miles of me, Butterfly, and certainly not in a capacity of assistance.” He rolled onto his side with the small apple he found on the tray and gave her a searching look. At some point during her incessant chanting in one of the Aztec tongues and her energetic kicks of the bedside, she’d let her hair down from its bun. Long and heavy and black, it hung around her face like a curtain, shadowing her fine features and obscuring her small size. She wasn’t frail, but he could imagine that most who couldn’t taste her energy would believe she was.
The high back of the chair she sat in dwarfed and further shadowed her. In the faint light, she looked both impossibly ancient because of the seen-all eyes and too young to know better.
“Do you ever go home, Butterfly?” he asked, genuinely curious. She shared so little about herself. It was as though the idea of anyone knowing she had a personality at all disturbed her. “Do you go to the places you roamed when you were newly hatched on this spinning rock?”
“I—No. You try to distract me. I am the disrupter tonight. Remember?”
She’d been about to tell him. She couldn’t pretend to be apathetic.
“You will not indulge my curiosity?” he wheedled with a grin.
“No.”
“How about for a fair trade, then?”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning you indulge me, I indulge you. Tit for tat. I believe that’s a bargain not even you could find fault in.”
&nb
sp; “I find no flaw in the bargain. The flaw is in the expectation that I will consent to participate at any cost.”
“Don’t you get tired of keeping all of your words to yourself? Of burying all your feelings and pretending you never have any?”
“You are impertinent.” Her skirts rustled and swished as she made her way to the small window across the room. She lifted the sash and leaned out, breathing in deeply.
Creatures like them didn’t belong indoors for so long.
“I was…given this name,” he offered as he sat up and tossed the apple core onto the tray, “I was given it by a blind man. He was dying. He’d been crushed by the stones from a decrepit building that collapsed during an earthquake near Mecca.”
She didn’t look his way, but he could tell she was listening. Her gaze had flitted slightly rightward to where he was.
“There was nothing I could do for him. I have many gifts, but I am not a healer. I fetched him from the rubble and gave my sincere apologies to his family. He wouldn’t allow me to leave. He said he could see me and that I was clear in his mind.” Tarik shrugged his good shoulder. “Perhaps he could. I did not question him. He called me Tarik because in his mind, I was light. No dark stains. No sooty smudges in the place where a soul should be. I reveled in that. It was the assessment I craved at the time, and the name has become me. I have scrubbed from my mind what I was called before that. I have been Tarik since that day, and I will always be known as this.”
He’d never told anyone else that tale, except for Tamatsu and Gulielmus. They’d chosen their own names after they’d fallen. Tarik had been unable to. None of the words in any of the languages he’d learned until that one had seemed fit for claiming until that moment.
“So you would have me tell you a secret now?” she whispered. “Whether I want to or not?”
“You can have your silence, Butterfly. I spoke because I needed to. Now that I have, I will refrain from saying more. I will rest.” He felt lighter, having said what he had—having hinted at his trust of her without an inelegant proclamation of the fact. He did trust her, but he also understood that she didn’t know how to trust him. He’d have to teach her how to.
He settled down into the niche his body had carved out in the mattress, eyelids drifting downward. Rarely did he feel safe enough to rest in such a manner. His kind of solitude precluded his ability to have a lack of awareness for any long stretch of time.
Intractable though she was, Tarik knew Lola wouldn’t purposefully allow any harm to come to him. She was in rare company in that classification.
He was halfway between the realm of slumber and icy reality when the bed shook again.
“Hmm?” He lifted the lid of the eye that wasn’t pressed to the mattress.
Lola perched on the edge of the bed and stared across the room. “You have been…everywhere?”
“Everywhere? No. Many places, but not everywhere. Why?”
“How do you choose where to go?”
“I go where needs drive me. I don’t have explorer tendencies like some of my kind. I tend to be more purposeful in my movements.”
“And you rarely tire.”
“Not usually. No.” He smiled. “I once had an endless fount of energy to draw on. There was no limit to how far I went, how much I carried, or how many times I changed my physical form. I wouldn’t have been drained from this evening’s exciting endeavors.”
“You have limits now.”
“Yes, though I can’t remember the last time I tested them. I regret nothing.”
“You are in pain.”
“Are you gloating, goddess?”
“No. I am simply curious.”
“Do you not know pain?” He certainly hadn’t until the day he’d been banished from the heavens and cast to the earth and he’d spent many weeks raging over the fact such a cruel thing even existed. He’d come to understand, though, that pain—like pleasure—had its purposes.
“Depends on the sort you mean. Pain is written into the blueprint of what I am,” she said. Her nimble fingers tugged and twirled a bit of loose string hanging off the covers. She snapped it off and stared at the dark thread wrapped around her digit. “There is pain and suffering in my attachment to the people I am supposed to be patron and provider for. Less now, perhaps. They have dispersed so much. Been absorbed into other groups. Forgotten about me.” She shrugged. “I do not care. I will continue to exist although my purpose is no longer what it was.”
“Do you ever try to find new purpose?” he asked.
“I ponder that frequently.” She flicked the bit of thread onto the floor and settled her back against the bony protrusion at the side of his wing.
His quiet exhalation of pain didn’t go unnoticed by her. She quickly stood and turned, staring down at him with wide eyes.
“Just a jostle,” he said. “I wasn’t prepared, but I am fine.”
“That is the one…that is untended.”
He patted the edge of the bed she’d abandoned. He preferred her to be closer, keeping his fire stoked with her own.
“You favor it,” she said. “Perhaps others do not pay attention, but pain is easy for me to see.”
“Sit. There is a draft.”
“I will close the window.”
“Leave the window as it is. Sit with me. If you’ve assigned yourself to be the foot soldier guarding me from the demon that is sleep, then why not do it from a closer station?”
“You are much too full of yourself.” She sat, though, being exceedingly careful at avoiding the widest part of his left wing.
Her scent was usually redolent of spice and smoke, but he was coming to discern nuances in it when her moods changed. Her mood changes were subtle ones. He didn’t know if that was the way she’d always been or if that was a circumstance she’d painstakingly trained herself into. Many beings of their age became dispassionate by choice. They overcompensated and stripped away their passions—stifled what they were truly capable of.
Became weaker.
She carried the same faint hint of fire, but the blend of spices was different. Less incendiary. Less challenging to digest.
“I do not have the imagination to wander as some do,” she admitted, picking up the thread of conversation from before. He held his breath and would have put his body between her and the grinding gears of time just to have her keep talking. “I do not know for certain, but I wonder at times if I was born with a tether. I can be…self-limiting and incurious. When I spent my years walking the ocean’s edge, I never thought to try to see what could be on the other side of the water.”
“You are connected to the place, perhaps, as well as the people.”
“I was made for the place, maybe.” She traced slowly around the edge of his wing, skimming the air without touching him. Still managing to make the tiny, downy feathers prickle and rise. He craved her touch. He wondered how his old body would respond should she actually place her hand on him. Very rarely did he extend permission for anyone to invade his space in such a way, much less see the parts of him that made him an aberration compared to other creatures on two legs.
He edged his wing into the millimeter of airspace she was carefully avoiding and drew in a breath of pleasure when her fingertips skated over the rim.
“The cheek of you,” she whispered. She didn’t stop touching, though. Her hand moved slowly, lightly along the curved shape. Up and down. Lifting feathers and smoothing them. Petting him, in a way. That usually annoyed him, but he didn’t mind that so much with her. He liked her being curious. He liked her to shake off the thoughts she had of herself being tethered so that she could explore. So that she could see the world and decide what her new place in it was.
“I will not posture myself as being shy and retiring when I am not,” he said. “We would both know I was being disingenuous.”
“Are all creatures of your ilk so boastful?”
“No.”
“Thank goodness for that.”
He laug
hed. “Say something kind to me, Butterfly.”
She was quiet as her fingers wriggled beneath the shingled layers of his longest feathers. Swiping the flesh between. Fondling, really, as she kept her gaze locked ahead.
“Anything,” he whispered. “Is that truly so difficult? Are you not capable of flattery?”
“No. I do not flatter.”
“Not even your son?”
The muscles of the side of her face twitched and she stilled her hand. Her scent was thicker. There were more notes of ash and char. Less sweet smoke.
Her son—her Yaotl—perhaps one of the very few things she couldn’t completely suppress her fire about.
“I won’t tell anyone,” he urged. “Confide in me. So many secrets, all bottled up, become poison after so long held within.”
“I do not believe that,” she said. Yet her fingers were skillfully massaging, enticing. She wasn’t touching him like she found him burdensome. His brain invited the enticement.
His body needed little encouragement.
Just looking at her with her hair down and her regal perch beside him made his cock ache beneath him. Like with other kinds of distractions, he could usually ignore the urges to sheathe himself deep and thrust until his unrivaled endurance gave out.
His past distractions had never been anything like her, however. They hadn’t had her adversarial and yet somehow complementary energy. They hadn’t had her earthy, ancient sort of beauty that was so unrivaled in its magnetism. The same sort of magnetism that made people stare at sunsets, and waterfalls, and eclipses. Natural things, but frightening in their might because they were difficult to fathom. They were hard to explain and understand and yet people tried anyway.
She was like that for him.
“Yaotl is…perhaps my exception,” she said softly as she withdrew her hand from him. She entwined her fingers atop her lap and turned microscopically toward him. “But you must understand the conflict I feel about allowing myself pride over him and yet knowing the circumstances of his birth were tainted with disgust and derision.”
“Of him?”
“No. He was—and is—much wanted. He is the most important thing on this earth to me, and even my purpose now, perhaps.” She put her hand back where it had been, and he didn’t think she’d even noticed. The petting seemed to have become a compulsion.
