The Tithe

by Elle Hill

  I was so angry, so scared. And it hurt in ways sometimes similar, sometimes nothing like, what I feel in my legs.

  Blue chuckled. Her head jerked upward, and her confused eyes scanned his face. He didn’t often laugh, true, but this time, it was his timing that surprised her.

  “A man who surprised you and used his size and standing position against you, and you still made him work every second. You’re too bright a blaze to be easily snuffed. He should have known.” Blue smiled at her.

  After a minute, she smiled very slightly back at him.

  They sat in the healing silence Josh had come to appreciate.

  “I’m sorry, Joshua,” Blue said finally.

  “It was awful,” she agreed.

  “Yes, it was. But I meant sorry I didn’t get there sooner.” His face looked as smooth as polished stone, but his shoulders and arms clenched.

  “You got there eventually. Thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me,” he said coolly. “I don’t deserve your kindness or your forgiveness.”

  “Okay.” She sighed. “Blue Lenwood, you’re wicked.” She paused. “Why were you delayed?”

  “Someone locked me in the bathroom.”

  Josh could have asked hundred of incisive questions. The one she chose was, “There are keys here?”

  “Apparently so.”

  “How’d you get out?”

  “I eventually broke the lock. It took far too long.”

  A sudden coldness wound from her core into her head and limbs. Josh gasped. “That man, he was already in the bathroom. That means . . .”

  “Yes,” Blue said.

  There were at least two of them. Two people had wanted her, Joshua Barstow, dead.

  “Can I have your hand?” she asked quietly. He gave it, and she clutched it tightly.

  Josh stared at the concrete wall, that rough, gray surface that seemed to soak up the yellow light of their room.

  “Who was it?” she asked after a long time.

  “Pallin.”

  Who was . . .? Oh. She remembered him, then: short, stout, face filled with repulsion as he knocked her to the ground a couple of weeks ago.

  “What happened to him?” she asked.

  “I killed him.”

  As she gazed on the patterns of light and dark on the wall, she nodded, once. “I warned him,” she said.

  The day wore itself out. As evening gave way to late night, Josh asked Blue to cuddle in bed with her. He snuggled up behind her in their usual fashion. Feeling his arms enfold her and draw her into his warmth, she breathed raggedly in relief. She hadn’t known what tension she held in her body until she could release it. Her body sagged against his.

  “How do you deal with the pain?” she asked him. They were the first words she’d spoken since asking him to come to bed.

  Time passed. She wondered if she’d spoken too quietly. Or perhaps she’d been too ambiguous in her phrasing.

  His dispassionate voice smoothed over her ears, washing them clean of that other man’s breath. “I learned from you.”

  “You stumble a lot?” she joked. Feeble, sure, but his answer made her feel squirmy. As Netta had said, she was no one’s role model. And besides, she didn’t think she handled her pain especially well.

  “I have been with you when your legs hurt so much you wept, and still you talked with someone who needed you. You sacrifice yourself every single day. No one who knows you could ever doubt you would give yourself to an angel to save others.”

  She shook her head. “You make me sound heroic.”

  “I touched you that night, and I knew you, or part of you. And then, being with you, I found you so strong. Your pain isn’t all of you, but it has helped you become stronger and more compassionate.”

  “Um, thank you.”

  He kissed the back of her head. It still thumped, but not as much as before her nap.

  “But how does that help you?”

  “Knowing how it’s shaped you into the woman I know, I think differently of it. I couldn’t have this life, and know you, without it. And there’s a poetry to pain: the ebb and flow, the joy of temporary release and the anticipation of change. I find it a unique and profound language.”

  “My pain doesn’t speak, let alone write poetry. It mostly moans and yells,” Josh snorted.

  The air turned stagnant, tangible. She could almost feel it pressing against her aching head. The lights didn’t so much as flicker. Blue’s arms tightened around her.

  The angel had come.

  Please spare Lynna, Garyn, and RJ, she prayed. She probably had less right than anyone else there. Yet still, she prayed.

  She lay still and safe in the circle of Blue’s arms. No angel would take her tonight. She ought to feel ashamed, but her body ached and throbbed too dully for her to focus too far beyond the boundaries of her warm, safe room.

  The heavy air coated her lips. It seemed to press against her.

  And then it left.

  “Who’s gone?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know,” Blue said.

  They clung to one another, silent and thoughtful.

  On Quinn’s orders, Josh spent the next day in bed. She groused, she grumbled, but part of her sighed in relief. Her head still ached, her arms felt weak and overused, and her nose still smarted. Even her back creaked.

  Lynna came to visit her, replacing Blue in the seat next to the bed. He stepped outside the room while the two women chatted.

  Lynna’s giant smile upon entering the room soon turned watery. “You look horrible,” she warbled.

  “I missed you, too,” Josh said.

  Lynna grinned and shooed away Josh’s words. “You know what I mean. You have a black eye, and you look so pale.”

  “I have a black eye?”

  Lynna traced along the left side of her nose and under her eye. “Are you okay, Josh?”

  Josh nodded, and her brain sloshed painfully in her skull. It felt like it, anyway. “Who was taken last night?” she asked.

  Lynna looked down. “Lira. You know her?”

  “Thin, short hair, spent most her time in bed?”

  “She was super sweet,” Lynna agreed. She paused. “Josh, what happened yesterday?”

  Josh told her. Lynna’s mouth slowly rounded into a horrified “O.” “RJ told me Blue broke the lock on the men’s bathroom to get to you.”

  “So I heard,” Josh said carefully.

  “Desperation makes us super strong. That’s what I say. Of course, people are whispering that you used your super angel powers to smite Pallin.” She rolled her greenish eyes.

  “It was all Blue,” Josh said wryly.

  “The whole thing is horrible. I’m so very sorry.”

  “Thanks,” Josh mumbled, looking away.

  “But it’s a little romantic at the end, right? Blue hears you yelling, breaks the lock, rescues you from Pallin.”

  Josh shuddered. “If that’s romance, I’d rather have an intimate dinner with poetry.”

  “Yeah, sorry. That was insensitive.”

  “Is Marcus or anyone going to punish Blue for . . . what he did to Pallin?”

  Lynna shook her head. “You know everyone’s philosophy: Why punish when we’re all going to be gone in a month? Besides, he saved you from a man who tried to . . . hurt . . . you two times. I’m not a proponent of violence, but Blue saved you. Pallin wouldn’t be gone if he hadn’t tried to harm you.”

  “He smelled the same,” Josh agreed.

  “Pardon?”

  “Pallin. He smelled like sweat, just as he did when he cut me with that knife. I knew it was him right away. Seems as though everyone else figured it out, too.” She remembered his beautiful, heavily fringed brown eyes that sparkled like gems under the yellow light.

  Lynna shook her head in wonder. “Why would anyone kill someone who could be taken any day?”

  “He said I was a sinner,” Josh remembered. His hand, wound so tightly in her hair, his voice like the sizzle
of hot oil . . .

  “Hey, let’s talk about something else,” Lynna blurted. “I happen to come bearing gossip.”

  The rest of the day passed, slowly and quietly. When Josh tackled Blue with her never-ending list of questions, he told her Quinn had ordered him to give Josh’s mind a rest as well. Convenient, she thought, and told him so, complete with narrowed eyes.

  “You know I don’t lie,” he said.

  She did, actually. “And why is that? Against the angel rules?”

  His silence stretched especially thin. She wondered briefly if she’d offended him, but when his words came slowly, she realized he picked through them with great care.

  “Modern humans live their existence as discrete entities—”

  “I don’t feel so dis . . . Oh, you mean ‘ete.’ Sorry. Please continue.”

  “As separate entities,” Blue clarified. “So they think their thoughts are theirs alone and have no real global consequences. Even speech, their public thoughts, they think of nothing more than breath and vibration. But words have very real consequences. Words and thoughts give reality its form.”

  “So lies hurt others?”

  “False words misshape the world.”

  No wonder Elovah forbade them.

  As the night progressed, Josh invited Blue into the bed with her. It was never physically comfortable to squish two people onto the narrow cot, but wrapped up in Blue, Josh never felt more peaceful.

  “I don’t want to die,” she whispered to him.

  “I know,” he said, and kissed the back of her head.

  “Sometimes it’s less scary than others. Sometimes it almost doesn’t seem real. But even if I let you keep me away from the angel, I’ll only be alive a little over a month.”

  “I dream every night of it,” Blue murmured against her hair. “The moment, the horrible moment, when the world no longer has you in it.”

  She raised his hand to her mouth and kissed it. He would continue living, she realized, without her. What would he do, now that he lived life as a, a mostly-human? Would he escape here? Stay here for the next seven years, shocking Erryl when he returned with the latest batch of Tithes?

  She asked him.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t much care.”

  “If there’s really a heaven, maybe you can come visit me?” she asked.

  Blue remained silent.

  “I imagine you can’t tell me, but is there a heaven?”

  “Perhaps,” Blue said after a time.

  She sighed.

  “I guess if I only have a month at most left, I should use my actions and words to, you know, shape the world the right way, the way that brings the most good.”

  “You do that every day.”

  “You’re biased,” she said, smiling. “But the changes I’ve seen since I’ve been here, not just in me but in everyone, they’re scary sometimes. Sometimes I feel like . . . as if the world is so vast, so full of people, and I’ll burst if I love them all. But I don’t ever burst.

  “I loved a lot of people before I came here, but always in the abstract. Here . . .” She breathed, in and out, for a while. “It’s not abstract. I don’t love them because we share humanity. I love them for their beauty, their pettiness, their fears and their kindness.

  “You said my pain makes me the person I am. How bizarre is it that my pain, my incapacity, and my imminent death have brought me all this? It’s the greatest, most horrible gift I’ve ever received. You know?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I’d like to say I’m strong enough that I’d do this all over again—become an unworkable and a Tithe—if given the choice, but I don’t know if that’s true. I’m scared.”

  He held her tightly against him.

  “I love you, Blue,” she whispered, and her heart pounded.

  He stilled completely against her.

  “Not as a friend. Well, yes, as the very best friend. But also as my love, as the person I’d like to spend . . . Hey, I guess I am spending the rest of my life with you.”

  He remained, still and breathless, behind her.

  “Did I offend you?” she whispered.

  “No,” he said immediately. “I want to remember every bit of this moment. I will carry the memory with me for the rest of my existence.”

  Josh tucked her chin into her chest. “You had to know,” she murmured.

  “Your act cemented this for both of us,” he said. “Your words shake the boundaries of being, Joshua.”

  She didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded nice.

  Later, when the angel came, Josh pressed her face against his chest and he tightened his arms around her. As the ponderous air pressed her into the mattress, she wondered if he could still hear them whispering her name.

  Her neck, arms, back, and head crackled with pain the next morning, but she barely noticed. Josh began the day with kisses. She pondered briefly the beauty of biochemistry, and then her thoughts turned, as they often did, to the debate between the ethics of unmarital sex.

  Sex with an angel. Would that make Elovah less or more angry? When Josh pulled away and breathlessly posed the question to Blue, he answered with his usual, cryptic “It doesn’t work that way.” She gritted her teeth.

  When Quinn arrived to see how Josh fared, Blue left the room to grab breakfast for the both of them. Apparently, he trusted the healer.

  “Can I leave the room today?” Josh asked.

  Quinn frowned. “If you promise to take it easy.”

  “As opposed to my usual gymnastic existence,” Josh said wryly.

  Quinn shook her head.

  They chatted until Blue came back, his arms laden with plates and a water glass. As soon as Quinn left, Josh pulled on her boots. “I can leave the room today,” she said.

  Blue’s brow furrowed. “I don’t know . . .”

  “Quinn said it was okay, as long as I nap if I need to.”

  Blue placed the plates on the tiny bedside table. “I feel better when I can watch over you all the time.”

  “I know,” Josh said, “but you can’t keep me in here forever.”

  Judging from his silence, he felt pretty certain he not only could, but should.

  They left the room soon after. Blue followed her into the bathroom, which she didn’t enjoy but agreed might be smart, considering.

  She found out angels do, indeed, pee.

  Garyn greeted her with the biggest grin she’d ever seen on a small face. Lynna’s face shone like a sun, her hair radiating from it in fiery waves. RJ even threw her a nod and a grin. Her friends.

  “You look sick,” Garyn said.

  “I feel even better,” Josh said, smiling. She found out quickly Taro, the young man Josh had found huddling against the wall some time ago, had been taken the night before.

  “That makes thirty-one,” Lynna said in a low voice. “Almost half.”

  “That’s only twenty-seven by my . . . Oh.” Adding the four people who had died, by their own hand or other non-angelic means, did make thirty-one.

  Blue Lenwood—the original Blue—made thirty-two. And she, Josh Barstow, could have been number thirty. Should have been number one.

  The day wore on, noteworthy only in its blandness. Toward the end of the afternoon, Josh’s eyes grew gritty. Yawning, she leaned against Blue, who tucked her under his arm.

  “Did you ever meet the Twelves?” she mumbled sleepily. No one was around.

  “Yes,” Blue said.

  “Really?” she exclaimed, eyes popping open.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you . . . kill them?”

  “Yes.”

  She breathed in and out through her gaping mouth. “You knew the Twelves? What were they like?”

  Blue smoothed his hand over her hair. Her eyelids drooped again, but she still waited for his reply.

  “They’re you, all of you, before everything changed.”