Black Halo (Grace Series)

by S. L. Naeole

  “I’m ready to die. I’m ready to die to keep the people I love safe, so don’t tell me that I’m not ready for whatever the hell this is.” I snapped.

  “Grace,” she said to me, her tone disapproving. “You don’t understand. Sacrificing yourself for love takes courage of the heart and the mind—something that I’ve always known you had in abundance—but hearing the truth about something you never wanted to know can kill your very soul. Trust me when I tell you that you’re not ready to hear the entire truth.”

  Somewhere deep inside of me, I could hear the doors inside of my chest locking, the clanging of solid metal shutting out forgiveness and understanding and leaving room for only the truth and the resentment that I could feel building within me.

  “You’ve known this whole time. About my dad, my mom…Sam,” I accused.

  “Yes, Grace. I know everything.”

  The air around me felt incredibly warm as a cold chill ran through my veins when a suspicion began to form inside of me. “And Robert? Does he know? Does he know about this, too?”

  She shook her head in fervent denial. “No. He doesn’t know anything.”

  “Grace, I know that this is a lot to deal with, but there’s so much you don’t know—about Robert, and Ameila,” I heard Dad try to explain, but Graham’s biting reply prevented me from responding.

  “She already knows about them being angels, Mr. Shelley. Unlike you, Robert at least trusted Grace enough to tell her the truth. I can’t believe you’d sell out your own wife like that and leave Grace to grow up without a mom, especially to bad dude like Sam.

  “Man, I thought my dad was bad, but he’s only like that when he’s on the bottle. You’ve got no excuse.” He turned his back to my father, his arms crossed in front of him as he shook his head in disgust.

  “Is this all true?”

  The small voice that finally spoke up was timid, the obvious disbelief at what was being revealed, mixed with the tacit offense was like a firecracker going off in the middle of a funeral.

  “Janice, I’m sorry that you’ve been dragged into the middle of all of this. I vowed to leave this life behind me after Abigail’s death and raise Grace the way she deserved.” Dad crawled on his hands and knees to reach his wife, who stood shivering in the chilly night air. He raised his hands to her in supplication but she pulled hers behind her, unwilling to accept him.

  “You’re telling me that there are angels, real, live angels living in Heath—and that your daughter is dating one of them—and that you…you let one of them kill your wife?”

  She was angry. And that anger was turning the wheels in her head as she looked over the players that stood before her, seeing that she was the only one there who had been completely ignorant of everything. “Is this why Katie died? Did her death have something to do with this?”

  “No!” came Dad’s denial.

  “Yes,” Sam confirmed.

  Janice’s hand flew to her mouth to stifle a dismayed cry. “Why?”

  I pushed myself up and struggled to my feet, my good arm unable to support my weight due to my wounded hand. Instead, I relied on the strength of my legs and stubbornness alone.

  “He thought that it was me. He meant to kill me, not Katie. Her death was a mistake,” I answered her softly.

  Dad’s head whipped around, a garbled response lodged in his throat. Janice’s other hand came to meet its twin at the shock of this new truth.

  “You bastard!” Dad shouted before scrambling to his feet and lunging towards us. Ameila’s hand stopped him cold, his chest bouncing off of her still upraised hand, sending him flying backwards.

  Recovering quickly, his hand flew up, pointing an accusatory finger at Sam and looking at Ameila with anger and shock forming a torrent of emotions within him. “He tried to kill my daughter—”

  “Oh, I’ve done more than that,” Sam said casually, staring at the jet black nails on his equally dark hand as though the entire affair was simply too dull to pay attention to.

  This only further infuriated my father. “This wasn’t part of the deal—this wasn’t part of the damn deal! He broke the laws of your kind, Ameila—you know what that means!”

  “Shut up, James,” Ameila silenced him. “Despite being electus, you do not know everything about us, and you lost the privilege of that knowledge when you abandoned your family, when you broke your rules.”

  “How can you defend him? Your son is in love with Grace—how can you defend this monster who tried to take her away, who tried to kill my daughter?”

  A low, mocking laugh rang out, and Sam doubled over, his blackened hands on his knees, completely amused by what was taking place before him.

  “She does it because she knows that there’s nothing she can do to prevent me from taking Grace’s life right here, right now—isn’t that right, Ameila?”

  When Ameila gave a stiff, defiant nod, Sam rewarded her with a sickeningly gleeful grin. “You see James, Ameila can’t do anything about any of this because Grace shouldn’t exist.”

  He rose above the ground several inches and floated towards Ameila, who looked at him with utter disgust written plainly on her face. He ignored this and moved past her towards my father. He circled my dad, and taunted him with his melodic words.

  “I should have taken your wife as I had planned that night. It would have prevented all of this, but I made a foolish error in judgment and the consequences now stand before me. That all ends tonight, however, and then you can go on and live your life with your new wife and child. How convenient, don’t you think, that everything that I’ve taken—and will take—from you, you’ve somehow managed to replace?”

  His smile grew as he floated away, returning to me like a lion guarding its prey. The sinister curl of his lips left no doubt in my mind that Graham’s words were true: Sam was a bad dude. He had no intention of letting Dad and Janice go. He had no intention of letting any of us go—I was just the only one besides him who knew it.

  From the corner of my eye, I witnessed that Sam’s pleasure at the way things were unfolding had triggered mirroring smiles to form on Erica and Mr. Branke’s faces, as though someone had pulled some invisible string. And yet despite this, they showed no other emotion; their eyes were flat and nearly colorless, their bodies shivering in reaction to the outside influences of the cold, but nothing else.

  “What did you do to them,” I wanted to know as I looked at their blank faces with those zombie-like smiles plastered on their mouths, counterfeits of the genuine smiles I had seen them form before.

  “You’re not a very good listener, are you?” Sam clucked. “I told you, I can’t mess with a conscious mind. But, now that you mention it, the one who did probably has no further use for them seeing as how things are falling into place so nicely. The blonde girl was an easy choice—you naturally disliked her and her dislike for you had already been proven. And the teacher, well…he also provided a great distraction, didn’t he?

  “Well, now that we’ve gotten all of that out of the way, it’s quite clear that they’ve outlived their purpose.” As his words hung in the air, I looked at his face, saw the forbidding gleam in his eye …

  “No!” I ran towards my former nemesis, knowing that I would be too late. For a fraction of a second, recognition passed over her face, and then I watched the blonde beauty with the crystal blue eyes fall to the ground, limp and lifeless beside my former teacher.

  “Why?” I heard myself sob as I pressed a swollen hand against the warm face of Erica Hamilton—her eyes were still open, unseeing and without the peace that they should have held.

  “Oh, don’t worry—they weren’t really alive to begin with. But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

  My mind flashed back to the parking garage at the hospital—seeing Mr. Branke, dead in his car, and then not. And even further back, when Robert had peered into Erica’s mind and had seen nothing; we were left confused by that, thrown off by the fact that she had not been in a comatose state like Stacy,
but animated and hell bent on destroying any sense of normalcy I’d managed to scrape up for myself.

  I looked at their bodies, their faces blank, even in death, and realized that my anger towards Erica had been misplaced. She might not have liked me, she might have even deserved her reputation at school, but she did not deserve to be used as a puppet for the sick schemes of two mad angels.

  “Why did you use them? They were innocent people who did nothing to deserve this—any of this.” I looked at my dad and, no matter how angry I was with him for what he did, how betrayed I felt at him keeping all of this from me, I knew that I didn’t want this for him. Hadn’t all of this been so that he would be safe, so that they’d all be safe? I shook my head at the hopelessness of it all.

  “I told you, Grace; this isn’t about you. This is about N’Uriel,” Sam said with an almost insolent air before turning his head to the sky and licking his teeth, his lips curling over them in a vicious snarl. “And speaking of which, it’s about time you showed up, brother. Now the pieces are all set. Let’s play.”

  GRIEVANCES

  “Robert!” I cried out as his feet landed before me. He held his arms out to me and I rushed into them, throwing my only working arm around him and feeling thankful for his presence, yet angry that he had returned.

  “I’m sorry,” he murmured into my hair as he lifted me against him in a painful embrace, my thoughts open to him, everything open to him. “I couldn’t leave you here to die. Not without me. I told you, Grace. You’re my life. Without you, there’s no purpose for me anymore.”

  “You should have stayed away,” I sobbed into the curve of his jaw. “You should have stayed away and saved yourself. He doesn’t plan on letting any of us live.”

  “There is no life without you.” He brushed his lips against my ear, and moved them along my jaw until he finally molded them against my own. The simple contact between them was like a burst of energy that renewed the vigor and strength that I didn’t know had been drained from me.

  There was a slow clapping behind us, the lazy rhythm almost luxurious in the tense air that surrounded us. Robert lifted his face from mine as his hand covered the back of my head and held it against his chest as he turned to face his former friend. I felt the anger within him, the way it made his body shake with the fire of it, the pure, raw rage that merely rippled, the simmer having not yet started as he glared at Sam.

  “Such a joyous and yet bittersweet reunion between two lovers; how touching. Hello, brother. Thank you for coming at last—we were beginning to wonder if you’d even show,” Sam commented. “A lot has happened in the short time you’ve been away. Shall I show you?”

  I felt Robert’s body stiffen, but I could not move my head—Robert’s hand held it firmly in place—to see his face. I heard a sharp intake of breath—Ameila’s as well as Robert’s—and I gasped when I realized what was going on.

  “Don’t! Stop it, Sam!”

  Secrets. Dark, painful secrets were being exposed in the silence that surrounded all of us, and for my father, Graham, Janice, and I, we were incapable of realizing the true depth of the thoughts that passed between the three angels with wordless abandon.

  But we felt it. The temperature in the air lowering degree by degree as the confessions and accusations were thrown, thought by merciless thought. Robert’s hand at the back of my head began to clench, his fingers digging into my skull and eliciting a cry of pain from my lips.

  “Grace?!” He pulled away from me, stunned and ashamed by what he had just done.

  I winced as the pain subsided, and only then did he realize the extent of the damage that had been done to me by Sam’s assault. He grabbed my hands and brought them to his mouth. I closed my eyes in anticipation of the relief that he’d provide with such a simple gesture but found they were jerked mercilessly open when Roberts’s hands were torn from mine.

  “Don’t!”

  Robert stared at me, and then turned to stare at his mother, who now stood between us.

  “What?”

  “Don’t, son. Don’t heal her. It won’t do her any good.”

  “You speak of good? You, who kept the truth about who she is, what she is from me? From her?” he snarled, and shoved her aside.

  “R-Robert?”

  My voice was shaky. He was angry, angrier than I had ever seen him before. “Robert, what’s going on?”

  “You’ve been deceived, Grace. We both have,” he replied stiffly as he stood in front of me protectively.

  “I know what she did, Robert. I know she kept the truth about my father from me, from you, but she’s still your mother. She-”

  “No!” he growled. “No, you don’t know what she did, Grace!”

  “Yes, she doesn’t know what your mother did, does she? But I know. And now so do you. How does it feel, N’Uriel, to be betrayed by a parent, too? Does it sting?”

  “What did she do?” I whispered, unable to fathom the actions that Ameila had taken to cause such a reaction from him.

  Robert shook his head, unwilling to accept what he’d just learned. He loved his mother—whatever it was that she did, he couldn’t believe it possible, and yet couldn’t prevent his anger that came as a result of its knowledge.

  Sam seized the opportunity to expand Robert’s pain. “Who do you think led me to your father, Grace?”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s true,” Ameila said. She was so matter-of-fact about it, almost clinical that I didn’t recognize her voice for a second. But then the emotions came, one after the other. They all rolled over me, crushing my will to comprehend any of it as she explained.

  “I know you cannot appreciate why, but there are paths that you cannot walk down without them being laid out for you first. You had to make your deal with Sam; it’s how things had to be, James.”

  I was angry. No. I was enraged.

  “How things had to be? How things had to be? He’s a human being! You forced him to choose between himself and my mother! Why? Is it the free will thing again?” I yelled at her, walking around Robert, who stood mute, the betrayal striking him to the heart as deeply as it had me.

  “Grace, that’s not it. Please-”

  “No! All this time, all this time you’ve gone on and on about how angels are supposed to help humans, how you’re here to save us, but all I’ve learned so far is that your kind like to use us as puppets! We’re here for your amusement—watch what I can do to this human’s life, look at how I can make this stupid human trust me. If not for you, my mother would still be alive!”

  I was beside myself with hurt and anger and rage and fire and…it didn’t matter what else. I only knew that for the first time, I felt no fear when looking at Ameila. I felt no awe, no envy. I only saw the ugliness of what she had done to me, to my family.

  “Bravo, Grace!” Sam applauded.

  “Shut-up!” I spat at him. “You’re guiltier than she is. Why my mother? Why her? What did she do to you that could make you hate her so much? Why did you have to choose her?”

  “Don’t!” Ameila shouted, but Sam merely laughed and gave her a mocking bow before looking at me with such a deep satisfaction that I knew whatever he told me, it could very well be the last words I heard.

  “Because your mother is the bitch that killed the only person I ever loved!”

  I stopped breathing. Everything inside of me stopped. Everything except my heart, which tumbled inside of my chest with confusion and disruption. “It’s not true,” I breathed. The person who’d killed Miki had been Avi, an angel. My mother was Abigail Shelley. Human.

  “It is,” Sam contradicted. “Doubt me if you will, but Ameila can confirm that what I say is true. Over time, I admit that my anger towards her cooled, but I never truly stopped desiring that she suffer for what she did.

  “And then she fell in love with a human, and married him. And, because she did not turn him, they violated the laws of the Nephilim. I personally asked to mete out their punishment. Only one eld
er sided with me—can you guess who?”

  He laughed when my eyes as well as Robert’s turned to stare at Ameila, who continued to hold her head stubbornly high. Sam sneered.

  “Your father’s human nature made it too easy. When faced with living or dying, a human will always choose life, no matter what it costs them. And your father made his decision so quickly, I almost felt sorry for Avi.

  “But not enough to keep from killing her. Unfortunately I couldn’t do it. Only Thrones or Seraphim can punish an angel. For ten years I believed that she had been stripped of her divinity and both of them executed. And then I learned that in that time not only had neither of them been punished, but that their union had also produced a child. No, not a child; an abomination.”

  Half-breed.

  The word spun around in my head like the arrow of a compass desperate to find North in a world without it. I’d lived with the term my whole life; I’d accepted that that was what I was, what I’d been born. But this was different. This was something I’d never believed. Something I refused to believe.

  “It’s not true. I’m not one of them, I’m not a Nephilim,” I argued shakily.

  “She’s not. I’d have known,” Robert agreed. He came to stand beside me and I raised my eyes to cast a quick glance at him, biting back a sob when I saw that his pupils had dilated so greatly that there was only a thin strip of silver left surrounding the dark centers.

  “You’re too consumed by your lust for her to see the truth that’s been staring you in the face,” Sam guffawed. “If you don’t believe me, here’s your proof.”

  Sam’s hand raised and he tossed something small and glittery towards Robert, who caught it in his hand with ease. His fingers opened and he stared into his palm at its contents. His silence was unnerving.

  “What is it?” I asked, looking into his hand and seeing two tiny crystal droplets resting in his palm.

  Sam’s cackle grew louder as Robert held them to me so that I could see them better. “They’re your tears.”