by S. L. Naeole
“Like you wouldn’t jump up and start licking your own boots if Lark Bellegarde was your girlfriend,” Dwayne countered.
“Oh, I would. I would do whatever she wanted to. And even I would say that I was whipped,” Chad returned, and the two of them began to snort.
Shawn rolled his eyes and then shrugged his shoulders as he caught the expression on my face. “Sometimes I wonder why I’m friends with those guys.”
I smiled at him. “Because without them, you’d never get to be the responsible one.”
“That’s true,” he laughed before grabbing his things and standing up. “Speaking of responsible, come on guys, we’ve got to get the audio visual equipment ready for cap and gown pick up.”
“Damn, that’s today?”
The other two stood up and said their goodbyes before rushing off. Alone, Robert pulled me out of my seat and into his lap. “Two more weeks until you’re officially free.”
“And then I disappear,” I murmured as the reality of it sank in. “Is that really necessary? I mean, my Dad and Janice get to stay here, but I don’t? Why?”
“Because you’re the one that Sam’s partner wants, Grace. If you’re with your family, even in hiding, you put them in danger; we’ve been over this already.”
Yes. We had been over it. Several times in fact.
After graduation, Graham would move to Florida with Lark as they had originally intended. Robert and I would remain in Heath while Dad, Janice, and Matthew would be moved somewhere safe.
The plan had received instant disapproval from Dad, who insisted that such a thing was improper, both for a young woman and an angel. His objection didn’t lessen when Sera, Llehmai, and Ameila appeared and casually announced that prior to the incident on the field, Robert had proposed to me and I had accepted.
“You did what?” Dad’s voice boomed.
“Dad—Dad please, he did it because he thought I was dying, and I only accepted because I thought I was going to die. It’s non-binding!” I argued, but when the room turned cold, with ice forming on the windows from Robert’s chilly reaction to my response, Dad pointed an accusatory finger at him.
“You! I trusted you with her. I trusted that you’d keep her safe and you go and ask her to marry you? She’s human!”
“She’s part-human,” Sera interjected, but Dad wouldn’t hear it.
“She’s human. She was born from a human woman and raised as a human child. Her mother was an angel—was.
“Angels only marry humans for one reason, and I refuse to let you do it. She will not become one of those, those monsters out there. You’re not going to turn my daughter!”
“How do you know that I haven’t been turned already?” I demanded to know.
“Because I’m your father; I know the signs, Grace. You can’t be turned. I won’t allow it.”
“She will be turned,” Robert vowed, but I shook my head, not appreciating his interruption.
“Dad, please, you’re making a scene. Look, I’m an adult now and I’ve been given the chance to do this; I plan on doing so after graduation. It won’t make me invincible, but it will at least help keep me alive long enough to finish this. Me being alive right now is a complete fluke, Dad. You gotta know that.”
A fluke. That was the only way I could describe it. It was unexplainable, what had happened to me that night. No one could tell me why I had not died in Bala’s tree, or why the curse of the Innominate had disappeared from my body.
Robert’s memory of what had happened was fragmented at best, and it was taking him a while to piece them back together again. He refused to speak about this to anyone else, but I believe that it’s because he didn’t want to discuss what I was with anyone for fear that the thought alone would be justification enough to kill me. Instead, he tried his best to figure out the answer to this mystery on his own.
I was human in every way save one, he said, and that was not enough to heal my wounds, wounds that were so terrible, Robert remembered feeling the fear of losing me burn inside of him despite the rage he felt boiling over. He could only tell me that when the time came to kill me, when his hand was around my throat, and my heart literally sat in his hand, he knew that he could not do it.
He could not accept my death, even in the blackness of his own agony, and so he left me there to die alone, and had only lingered around long enough to see that I was safe. Every step that we had taken to try to keep me safe, keep me alive had led up to that moment, and the fact that I hadn’t died was not to be taken lightly…by anyone.
I felt my eyes water as my father nodded to what I had just told him. “I know better than you what these angels are capable of and what they aren’t—mistakes are not something that they do. It’s why I’m so angry that you agree with this. I thought…I thought when you came home that night, when you walked in that door instead of Robert I thought that I had been given a gift, a second chance and that you had been spared and that you’d get to live a normal life.”
“But that’s just it, Dad. When will you realize that I’m not meant for a normal life?”
“I’m sorry, Grace. I tried to keep you from this world of theirs but I failed, and now everything that your mother and I did, everything that we did wrong is affecting you, and you’re paying the price. But that doesn’t mean that you have to marry Robert. He’s a billion years older than you are, with far more experience in life and in…life! And how do you know that he loves you enough to deserve you?”
“I know that Robert loves me because if he didn’t, I wouldn’t be here right now, arguing with you about this, Dad. None of us would be here. You’d be standing beside another grave—my grave. Besides, I just told you that I’m not going to marry Robert! Don’t you see how ridiculous it would be for me to marry him now? I’m eighteen!”
And you won’t live to see nineteen. Lem’s voice invaded my thoughts ominously from his corner of our cramped living room, looking like an homage to everything that was perfect in the male form.
The call that demands you sacrifice yourself for Robert has, for some reason, been muted. What happened to N’Uriel has also muted his call, but it will return, and when it does it will be angrier, needier, and there will be nothing either of you can do to stop it or postpone it. If you are married, you will be able to enjoy your last days, weeks, perhaps even months together. But, if you are not, you will simply remain as you are, together but not, and bound by the laws that keep your society as well as mine from turning into chaos.
“That isn’t fair!” I sounded like a whiny three year-old, but it was exactly how I felt. “I’m going to die, to save his life, and I can’t get a pass?”
You might, but N’Uriel won’t. You speak of fairness, but how fair is it that you, a silly human girl would be spared while one of our own, one whose calling is of the highest nature, would not? You say you love N’Uriel, and you are willing to sacrifice your life to save him, but you balk at a marriage being offered to you by him, someone who risked his soul to keep you alive? Is that not also unfair?
I was left incapable of arguing. Everything that Lem said was the truth.
And so it was decided that after graduation and before everyone left, a small civil ceremony would be held, and Robert and I would get married.
What no one had discussed, however, was where Stacy fit into all of this. Only a few of us knew what had truly happened to her, and I was the only person she was willing to talk to. She had completely written Lark off after that night, and if Lark wasn’t a part of her life than neither was Graham. He still had no idea that she was alive—telling him that she was dead had fallen onto me and I hated myself for lying to him.
As for Robert, Stacy knew the animosity he felt for those of her kind—her kind, how strange it was to think such a thing about Stacy. So, we met in private as often as we could, which wasn’t as often as either of us liked, but we managed. After a while it began to feel normal…which neither of us particularly enjoyed.
“So you’re gett
ing married, huh?” she asked one night while Robert was away.
I groaned into my hands. “Yeah. It’s supposed to happen a couple of days after graduation. It’s gonna be really private. I don’t think anyone’s gonna be there but us. What do you think, Stacy? Is this bad? Do you think I’m rushing into this? Because if you do then-”
“No, Grace. No, I don’t think it’s bad. You don’t have the same options that I had to live. You have to die; there’s no coming back from where you’re going so you have to take what you can get now, before your time runs out. And you love Robert, right? Isn’t that the best reason to get married? Besides, if you were willing to risk your life for him, I don’t see how you can think that you’re rushing into anything by getting married to him. What—are you having second thoughts?”
I shook my head. “Not really. I guess I do sometimes, and then other times I think about what being married means for the two of us, the freedom it’ll allow us that we’d never been able to have before. And anyway, it’s not like he’s not getting any younger.”
“That’s true. It’s about time you made an honest angel out of him—a dozen centuries is too long to be running around all single and stuff,” she laughed, the sound of her voice a strange echo of what it used to be. It was now tainted greatly by a deeper, almost soulful hint of the darkness that had prevented her death—her true death.
She left shortly after that conversation and that was the last time I saw her. She said she’d be back for the wedding, but I didn’t know how to tell her that there really wasn’t going to be one, or that neither Graham, nor Dad or Janice knew that she wasn’t dead. Well, dead in the not walking around and talking sense.
And now, sitting in the cafeteria before fourth period, I knew that I was having more than second thoughts. I was having third, fourth, and even fifth thoughts.
“I still don’t think we have to get married,” I grumbled. “That smoky noster nostri stuff isn’t against your laws, and that was very…satisfying.”
Robert’s hand covered mine and I shivered from the contact. He had returned to me whole, not a single hair or feather out of place, but believing that he had died for the second time had only doubled my reaction to him, every single touch feeling like a firestorm had gone off inside of me.
It might be satisfying, but it doesn’t begin to describe what can be between us, Grace.
My eyes grew wide as the intrigue of what he was saying sunk their hooks in to me. “Like what?”
Give your wildest fantasy wings, Grace. Give it wings and let it fly.
I snorted. “All of them have wings, Robert. All. Of. Them.”
His voice was low, so low that I knew only I could hear it, and it turned my skin bumpy, every nerve within me sparking as he promised, “Well then, marry me and I’ll make your fantasies come true.”
I glanced down at my left hand and saw that he was twirling the little grass band that sat on my ring finger with casual ease. “I thought we had already agreed that that was the plan.”
“We agreed because that was what was forced upon us. I’m asking you, Grace. I’m asking you now, with neither of us dying now or tomorrow, to marry me and bless me with your love and your heart. I know that I neither deserve them nor warrant them, but if you give them to me freely, if you grace me with an answer of yes, I promise you that I will spend the rest of our days together doing everything in my power to make you happy.”
I watched as he slipped the ring off my finger and then return it. No, not it, but something like it. A silver, braided band with two small, teardrop-shaped stones sitting side by side, embedded into the metal, their pointed ends meeting together as the wider ends fanned out, forming a tiny, glimmering heart. I looked around us to see if anyone was watching, and then my head dipped down to get a closer inspection.
“Where’d you get this? These aren’t diamonds, are they?” I asked, panicked.
“I’ve had the ring for a while, actually. It was a gift, a sort of commemoration gift for receiving my wings. I didn’t think about it because I had a far better gift in you, but now that this is real, it seemed fitting that the person who gave me my wings wear it.
“And no, they’re not diamonds. They’re crystals, tears actually; one from you, and the other from me that I embedded after softening the metal a bit.”
My eyes watered at the sentiment and thought that he had put into this minor change. My fingers brushed the stones and I smiled as one felt cool while the other was warm to the touch.
“So, does this mean yes?”
My eyes rose to meet his and I nodded once, the motion so minute I was afraid that he had missed it and that he’d ask again. But I should have known better when he brought his lips to mine in the most light of kisses.
“Thank you.”
Again I nodded and then tucked my hand into my pocket, turning around to finish my lunch before anyone else noticed.
“It doesn’t matter if anyone noticed, Grace. What matters is that you’re happy, and that you look forward to a future with me, however short of one it might be.”
I looked at him with shock. Robert, I thought you were dead. For the second time in my life, I saw you die, and the repercussions of that have not fully sunk in yet, but I can tell you now that knowing that I even have just one more hour with you is more than I could have hoped or dreamed for. You came back to me. Twice. And I don’t plan on wasting any time with you on the off chance that there might be a third.
He grinned and pulled my hand out of my pocket, kissing my knuckles and laughing at the beet red blush that crept up to my face. “Promise me one thing, Grace.”
Cautiously, I nodded. His hand reached out to rub my cheek, his thumb gently going across the plain beneath my eye. “Don’t ever wear makeup that covers your freckles again.”
My laughter rang out in the crowded cafeteria as I nodded gleefully. “That I can promise!”
And this time, when he kissed me, it wasn’t a gentle kiss. It wasn’t even a moderately serious kiss that he saved for public places. This kiss was one that you only gave to someone you were in love with. Someone you were intimate with. Someone you were going to spend the rest of your life with—however short it might be. Someone you were going to marry.
Hoots and cat calls followed as the crowded cafeteria took in our little display and Robert pulled away, but I could sense the hesitation and reluctance there and I reveled in that. Perhaps being married wasn’t going to be so bad after all. My fingers touched the hot and cold stones on my ring once more and I smiled as Robert’s hand covered mine, keeping our secret just that: our secret.
“It’s not going to be bad at all.”
“I love you,” I mouthed.
“I love you, more.”
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My sincerest thanks go out to the most supportive, encouraging, and loving husband anyone could want. I appreciate you more than words can say.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
S.L. Naeole has always loved the smell of books, the feel of books, and the destination that a book is guaranteed to take you. She knew from an early age that she was meant to write, to create those very same books she loved so much and vowed that one day, she would.
Now, after getting married and starting a family, she has finally made her dream come true. As the author of Falling From Grace, she's found a venue with which to allow her dreams to become the reader's, and transport them to worlds and lives where fantasy and reality blend seamlessly. With several more books in the works, including two sequels to Falling From Grace, she's hoping to give to her fans the same desire and affection for the written word that she had as a child.
S.L. Naeole writes from her home in Hawai'i, with her husband, four children, and cat by her side cheering her on and providing endless amounts of inspiration.
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