by Cynthia Hand
“Good night, Mom,” I say, turning the volume back up. I flip to the news. Weather report. Hot and dry. Some high winds. Fire weather. Storms likely later in the week, where a single lightning strike could set the entire area ablaze. Fun times ahead.
“Clara,” says Mom slowly, obviously not finished with her confession.
“I get it,” I snap. “You feel bad. Now I should get some sleep, in case I have to fulfill my destiny tomorrow.”
I shut off the television and chuck the remote down on the couch, then get up and push past her to the stairs.
“I’m sorry, baby,” she says, so low I don’t know if she means for me to hear her. “You have no idea how sorry I am.”
I stop in the middle of the stairs and turn back.
“Then tell me,” I say. “If you’re sorry, tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“Everything. Everything you know. Starting with your purpose. That’d be nice, don’t you think, if the two of us could sit down over a cup of tea and discuss our purpose?”
“I can’t,” she says. Her eyes darken, the pupils dilating like my words are causing her physical pain. Then it’s like she closes a door between us, her expression emptying out. My chest gets tight, partly because it makes me so furious that she can do that, that she’s so effectively shutting me out, but also because it just occurred to me that the only reason she’d work so hard to keep me in the dark is if she doesn’t believe I can handle the truth.
And that must mean the truth is pretty bad.
Either that, or, in spite of all her supportive motherly talk, she really doesn’t have any faith in me at all.
The next day’s a red alert day. That morning I stand in the front hallway, trying to decide whether or not to wear the purple jacket. If I don’t wear it, will the fire still happen? Could it be as simple as that? My entire fate resting on a simple fashion decision?
I decide not to test it. Anyway, at this point, I’m not trying to avoid the fire. I want it over with. And it gets cold up there in the clouds. I put the jacket on and head out.
I’m halfway through my patrol when the wave of sadness hits me.
It’s not the usual sadness. It isn’t about Tucker or Christian or my parents. It’s not pity or teenage malaise. This is pure, unfiltered grief, like everyone I’ve ever loved has suddenly died. It rages through my head until my vision blurs. It chokes me. I can’t breathe. My lightness disappears. I start to fall, grabbing at the air. I’m so heavy I drop like a stone.
Thankfully I hit a tree and don’t splat right against the rocks and die. Instead I strike the top branches at an angle. My right arm and wing catch a branch. There’s a snapping sound, followed by the worst pain I’ve ever felt, high in my shoulder. I scream as the ground rushes up at me. I put my working arm in front of my face, getting whipped and stung and scratched all the way down. Then I come to rest about twenty feet off the ground, my wings tangled in the branches, my body hanging.
I know there’s a Black Wing. In my panic and pain I’ve still been able to make that small deduction. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Which means that I have to get out of here, fast. So I bite my lip and try to free myself from the tree. My wings are really stuck, and I’m pretty sure the right one’s broken. It takes me a minute to remember that I can retract them, and then I tumble out of the tree the rest of the way.
I hit the ground hard. I scream again, wildly. The pain from my shoulder is so intense from the jolt against the ground that I come close to passing out. I can’t get air into my lungs. I can’t think clearly. My head’s so clouded with the sadness. If anything, it’s getting worse, more intense by the second, until I think my heart will explode with the pain of it.
That means he’s getting closer.
I struggle to sit up and find that I can’t move my arm. It hangs off my shoulder at a weird angle. I’ve never been this hurt before. Where’s my amazing healing power when I need it? I pull myself gingerly to my feet. The side of my face feels wet. I lift a hand to touch my cheek and come away with blood.
Never mind that, I think. Walk. Now.
Every move I make jolts my shoulder, sending a shock wave of pain all through my body. In that moment I feel like I could literally die. There’s no hope, no light, no prayer on my lips. I’m so done. I’m tempted to just lie down and let him have me.
No, I tell myself. That’s the Black Wing you’re feeling. Keep walking. Put one foot in front of the other. Get out of here.
I stagger forward another few feet and lean against a tree, panting, trying to gather my strength. Then I hear a man’s voice behind me, drifting toward me through the trees like it’s carried on the wind. Definitely not human.
“Hello, little bird,” he says.
I freeze.
“That was quite a fall. Are you all right?”
Chapter 20
Hurt Like Hell
Really, really slowly, I turn. The man’s standing not ten feet away, regarding me with curious eyes.
He’s insanely attractive. I can’t believe I didn’t notice that day at the mall. I guess all full-blooded angels are supposed to be drop-dead gorgeous, but I didn’t understand that they are literally drop-dead gorgeous. If there is a mold for the perfect male form, this guy was cast from it.
He’s so not what he seems. He’s not young or old, his skin without even the smallest wrinkle or flaw, his hair coal-black and gleaming. But I know he’s old as the rocks under my feet. He holds himself supernaturally still. The sadness I feel shooting through my every nerve doesn’t show on his face. His lips are even slightly turned up in what’s supposed to be a sympathetic smile. If I didn’t know better I would think that his voice is kind and that he genuinely wants to help me. Like he isn’t some big bad angel who could kill me with his pinkie finger. Like he’s merely a concerned passerby.
I can’t run. There’s no way. I can’t fly. The grief takes all my lightness away, like a shadow blocking the sun. I’m probably going to die. I want to cry out for my mother. I try to remind myself, through the Black Wing’s despair, which lays on me heavy as a wet blanket, that on the other side of a thin veil there’s heaven, and this man, this impostor of a man, can kill my body but he can’t touch my soul.
I didn’t know I truly believed that until now. The thought makes me momentarily brave. I try not to think about Tucker and Jeffrey and all the other people I’ll be leaving behind if this guy kills me now. I struggle to stand up straight and look him in the eye.
“Who are you?” I demand.
He raises an eyebrow at me.
“You’re a courageous little one,” he says, taking a step closer. When he moves there’s a kind of blurring in the air around him that settles when he stops. The more I look at him, the less human he appears, like the body standing in front of me is just a suit he put on this morning and there’s some other creature underneath, pulsing with grief and fury, barely restraining itself from breaking free. He takes another step toward me.
I take a step back. He gives a tiny, soft laugh, a chuckle, but the noise causes fear to shudder through me from head to toe.
“I am Sam,” he says. He has a slight accent, but I can’t place it. He speaks in a low, lilting voice, trying to soothe me.
I think this is a pretty ridiculous name for this creature with cold, dark power radiating off him in waves in some kind of anti-glory. I almost laugh. I don’t know if it’s the terrible pain from my shoulder or the weight of his emotional baggage, but I feel like I’m losing all sense of reality. I’m cracking already and the torture hasn’t even started. I start to numb everything out, like my body can’t handle it and is shutting down piece by piece. It’s a huge relief.
“Who are you?” he asks pointedly.
“Clara.”
“Clara,” he repeats like he’s tasting my name on his tongue and likes it. “Appropriate, I think. What level are you?”
For once my mother’s practice of keeping me in the dark about every
thing pays off. I have no idea what he means. I guess I look about as clueless as I feel.
“Who are your parents?” he asks.
I bite my lip until I taste blood. I can feel a strange pressure in my head, like he’s prodding my brain for the information he wants. It will be deadly for everybody I know if he finds out. I see a flash of Mom’s face, then try desperately to think about something else. Anything else.
Go with polar bears, I say to myself. Polar bears at the North Pole. Baby polar bears scooting along after their mothers in the snow. Polar bears drinking Coca-Cola.
He’s staring at me.
Polar bears pushing through the ice to get to baby seals. Long, sharp, polar bear teeth. Polar bears with pink muzzles and paws.
“I could make you tell me,” says the angel. “It will be more pleasant if you volunteer.”
Polar bears starving to death. Polar bears swimming and swimming, looking for dry land. Polar bears drowning, their bodies bobbing in the water. Their eyes glazed and dead. Poor, dead polar bears.
He takes another slow, deliberate step toward me. I watch helplessly. My body won’t respond to my urgent order to run away.
“Who are your parents?” he asks patiently.
I’m out of polar bears. The pressure in my head intensifies. I close my eyes.
“My dad’s human. My mom’s Dimidius,” I say quickly, hoping that will satisfy him.
My head lightens. I open my eyes.
“You’re strong for having such weak blood,” he says.
I shrug. I’m just relieved that he’s not still trying to hijack my brain. Somewhere deep inside me, though, I know he’ll try again. He’ll get the names. Where we live. Everything. I wish there was some way to warn my mom.
Then I remember my phone.
“Yeah, I’m not worth much to you. Why not let me go?” As I say the words, I slide my hand into my jacket pocket. Good thing my cell is in the left pocket, because I can’t seem to get my right arm to work. I feel for the number two and press it, inwardly cringing at the tiny beep it makes. It starts to ring. I pray that the Black Wing isn’t close enough to hear it. I clamp my fingers around the speaker.
“I simply want to speak with you,” he says gently. He talks like my mom, sounding completely normal and contemporary one moment, and the next, old-fashioned, like he’s stepped straight out of the pages of a Victorian novel.
“Hello?” says my mother.
“Don’t be afraid,” he says. He moves closer. “I wouldn’t dream of hurting you.”
“Clara?” says my mother quietly. “Is that you?”
I have to get the message through to her. Not to come save me, because I know there isn’t a way that she could fight an angel and win. But to save herself.
“I just want to get out of here,” I say as loudly and clearly as I can without drawing the angel’s suspicion. “Get out of here and never come back.”
He takes another step toward me and suddenly I’m inside the radius of his dark glory. The numbness evaporates. I feel the full brunt of the sadness, an ache so deep and raw it hits me like a two-by-four in the chest.
What was it that Mom said? That angels were designed to please God and when they go against that, it causes them all this emotional and physical pain?
This guy’s in some serious pain. He’s up to no good.
“Your shoulder’s dislocated,” he says. “Hold still.”
His cold, rock-hard fingers curl around my wrist before I have time to register anything else and then there’s a loud pop and I scream and scream until my voice fails. A wall of gray pushes in on my vision. The angel’s arms fold around me. He pulls me to his chest as I collapse.
“There now,” he says, smoothing my hair.
I let the gray take me.
When I come to I slowly become aware of two things. First, the pain in my arm is almost completely gone. And second, I’m basically hugging a Black Wing. My face is pressed right against his chest. His body feels immovable and hard as a statue’s. And he’s touching me, feeling my skin, one hand moving against the back of my neck, stroking, the other resting at the small of my back. Under my shirt. His fingers are as cold as a corpse. My skin crawls.
The worst part is that I can feel his mind like I’m swimming in the icy pool of his consciousness. I feel his rising interest in me. He thinks I’m a lovely child, pity that I have such diluted blood. I remind him of someone. I smell pleasant to him, like lavender shampoo and blood and a hint of cloud. And goodness. He can smell the goodness on me, and he wants it. He wants me. He will take me. One more, he thinks, the rage bursting through the lust. How simple it is.
I stiffen in his arms.
“Don’t be afraid,” he says again.
“No.” I put my hands on his brick wall of a chest and push with all my strength. I don’t even budge him.
He responds by lowering me to the rocky ground.
I beat at him uselessly with my fists. I scream. My mind races. I’ll pee on him. Puke, bite, scratch. Sure, I’ll lose, but if he’s going to mark me I am going to mark him too, if such a thing is possible.
“It’s no use, little bird.”
His lips brush my neck. I feel his thoughts. He is utterly alone. He’s cut off. He can never go back.
I scream in his ear. He gives a regretful sigh and clamps one hand over my mouth, while the other gathers up my wrists and pulls my hands up over my head, pinning me. His fingers are like cold metal digging into my flesh.
He tastes like ash.
My brave thoughts of heaven fade in the reality of that moment.
“Stop,” commands a voice.
The Black Wing takes his hand off my mouth. Then he stands up in a quick, fluid movement and lifts me in his arms like a rag doll. Someone’s standing there. A woman with long red hair.
My mom.
“Hello, Meg,” he says, like she’s joining him for afternoon tea.
She stands under the trees about ten feet away, her feet planted shoulder-width apart like she’s bracing for impact. Her expression is so fierce she looks like a different person. I’ve never seen her eyes like that, blue like the hottest part of the fire, fixed on the face of the Black Wing.
“I was wondering what had become of you,” he says. He looks younger, all of a sudden. Boyish, even. “I thought I saw you not long ago. At a mall, of all places.”
“Hello, Samjeeza,” she says.
“I suppose this one is yours.” He glances down at me. I can still feel him in my head. His desire for me faded the moment he saw my mom. He thinks she’s truly beautiful. It’s her, he realizes, who I remind him of. Her sweet spirit. Her courage. So like her father.
“You surprise me, Meg,” he says in a friendly tone. “I would never have taken you for the mothering kind. And so late in life, too.”
“Take your hands off her now, Sam,” she says wearily, like he’s annoying the crap out of her.
His grip tightens. “Don’t be disrespectful.”
“She’s only a quarter, not worth your time. She’s little more than human.”
Her eyes flicker to mine for a second. She has a plan.
“No,” says Sam stiffly. “I want her. Unless you’d rather it was you?”
“Go to hell,” she snaps.
His anger feels like a rising mushroom cloud to me, although the expression on his face doesn’t change.
“All right,” he says.
He murmurs something in Angelic, a word that for once I don’t understand, and suddenly the air around us shimmers and splits. There’s a shrieking sound, a tearing. The ground under our feet jolts slightly, the way it feels when someone drops something heavy on the floor. Then the earth I know peels away into a gray world.
It’s like the forest we were in but diminished to a bleak and hopeless wasteland. The shape of the land is the same as the place we left, the side of a mountain with trees, but here the trees have no leaves or needles. They’re just bare, gray trunks and twisted branches ag
ainst the grainy, rumbling sky. There’s no color or smell or sound beyond occasional thunder. No birds. The light is fading like the sun is setting, and black storm clouds roll over what had been, on earth, a perfectly blue sky.
I’ve always envisioned hell as all hot fire and brimstone, lakes of sulfur, demons with horns and glowing eyes torturing the souls of the damned. But here the air’s so cold I can see my breath. A slimy kind of mist passes over, chilling me to the bone. I’m shivering like crazy.
Mom is brighter than everything else, still in black and white but like the contrast on her has been turned way up. Her skin glows radiantly white. Her hair is inky black.
The Black Wing loosens his grip on my arm. We both know I have nowhere to run now. He looks way more relaxed. In hell he’s bigger, taller, and meatier, if that’s possible. More powerful. His eyes gleam. He closes them for a moment, inhales deeply like he’s enjoying the feel of the air, and then his wings appear behind him. They’re huge—much larger than Mom’s or mine—and an oily, absolute black, a dark hole opening up behind him, sucking all light into it.
He smiles, a sad smile. He’s proud of himself. The transition to hell from where we were is no easy thing. He wants to impress my mother.
“You’re a bigger fool than I thought,” Mom says bluntly. She doesn’t sound impressed. “You can’t keep us here.”
That’s good news to me.
“You forget who I am, Margaret.” He’s completely unruffled by her sass, charmed by it even. He’s being so patient. He prides himself on his patience. He knows she’s afraid. He’s waiting to see the cracks appear in her calm.
“No,” answers my mother softly. “You forget who I am, Watcher.”
I feel the fear stab through him, immediate and sharp. He’s not frightened of my mom, exactly, but someone else. Two people. I can see them vaguely in his mind, standing in the distance. Two men with snowy white wings. One with bright red hair and blazing blue eyes. The other, blond and golden-skinned and fierce, even though I can’t make out the particulars of his face.
But he’s holding a flaming sword.
“Who are they?” I whisper before I can stop myself.
