"That wasn't God's decision," he said. "It was the angelic host who decided that. And just for the record, regular mortals aren't trapped in limbo, at least not this kind of limbo."
He reached out and touched my shoulder. It was the merest, the smallest whisper of a touch, but it sent jolts of electricity all the way down to my toes.
"Only fallen angels end up like he did," he said. "But we can discuss that another time. What's before us now is your initiation."
I held my hands up in front of me. "No," I said. "Oh no. Just no. I don't care what you think you are or what you think this is, but I'm not getting involved."
I pushed to my feet and ran my hands along the backs of the pews to guide myself to the aisle. I was out of there. I didn't care what my hallucinating mind thought was happening. I planned to wake up in a few hours in my own bed and pretend that this was just a nightmare.
He appeared in front of me as though he had simply always been there and ran a hand over his silver hair, making it glitter much the same as the cloud I had witnessed earlier. It shivered for a moment and then turned into a long mane of lush black hair. He shook his head and it turned silver again.
"You seem to think you have a choice, when you already made it. Ages ago. Like it or not," he said. "You knew the risk of coming back with no memory, and now there's nothing you can do about what's happened. You're a fallen angel who has completed several hundred human incarnations. He was a fallen angel with all that to his credit and more. You killed him. Whether it was a conscious choice in this lifetime to do so or not, you are now a Nathelium. Simple."
"Doesn't sound so simple to me."
"I am oversimplifying a tad," he said. "It's not every fallen angel who gets the chance. Only after millennia of incarnations can you manage to even get to a grim reaper level. But it just so happens that you did spend a millennium reaping human souls. You just choose not to remember."
"Then why don't I have my god damn wings?" It wasn't just an accusation, it was a threat. I was about ready to collapse from shock and fury and none of this was making any sense. If it didn't make sense soon, I was going to turn all Dean Winchester on him.
He gave me a sad smile.
"You might have earned your wings," he said, looking back over his shoulder at the empty space where the dead man used to be. "But you failed just like he did. You had to start over. You would have remembered all of this if you had chosen to come back this time with your memories. But you always were stubborn. Just like you're refusing to believe now, you refused to do what was good for you then."
That was enough. Without thinking, I threw a punch, as hard a punch as I'd ever thrown. Rather than landing on anything, it simply thrust me forward and I fell onto the floor between the pews. I was scrabbling to find my balance and fell again. A ball of dust rolled onto my tongue and I coughed. Instead of dislodging it, all I ended up doing was inhaling more and I had to lie there for several minutes, trying to catch my breath and choke down dry dirt caked with old hair.
At one point, I looked up to see him peering over my head at me. His hair hung forward, tickling the tip of my nose.
"All better," he said.
I nodded, but I didn't feel all better. In fact, I felt all the worse, but I told myself that if he had come here to kill me, he would've done so by now. Killing me. The words rang like a bell on the back of my head.
"That maniac came here to reap me," I said and forced my gaze to his.
He cocked that silver eyebrow again. "Yes. I already told you so."
"That means I was supposed to die."
He smiled a knowing smile. "But you didn't."
"He said if I died, I'd come back as a human."
"Like I said: You might have if he had collected you. But he didn't."
I managed to roll over onto my side and he stepped to the left, leaning over the back of the pew to give me the space to get up. I squeezed my eyes closed. Like it or not, this was happening. And if it wasn't, then maybe the best thing was for me to just go along with it long enough to get out of there.
"Okay," I said. "You win."
He sighed. "This isn't a game," he said. "I assure you it's very real. Ozriel, the fallen one you just executed, was a Virtue before his fall. We all have certain roles, certain powers. Because you collected him, what was his is yours. To some degree, at least."
He inspected the tips of his nails and I got the feeling he wasn't telling me everything.
"What's the catch?"
He flicked his gaze to mine. "You always were astute, Ayla."
"Just tell me."
"You can't go back to human reality," he said. "You look human, you breathe as a human. Your heart will beat the same as a human mortal's does. But at the end of your span, you will either have earned your wings and returned home, or you will come to me."
"Like my friend there," I said, guessing that the euphemism he used meant I would end up in the top of his cane as some glittering particles until the end of time. He didn't even bother to nod in agreement, but I knew I was right.
I thought of the poor maniac running me down like some robot with no choice and only one duty. Filled with tattoos that would have been agonizingly painful each time he was branded. I thought of the things he would've had to do, the creatures he would have had to face to get to this point. It seemed like a terrible penance. It seemed futile. I had the feeling the recovery of heavenly wings was a carrot being stretched out by a sanctimonious host who knew they had coated the bait in arsenic.
I set my jaw, bracing my back with my shoulders squared.
"Well I refuse," I said. "I don't care what you say or what you think is happening, but I have a choice. And I refuse."
"Angels don't have a choice," he said with a note of sympathy. "Only mortals do. That kind of thinking is what got you in trouble in the first place."
"I'll be sure to keep it in mind," I said. I was done with this conversation. It was time this entire night finished.
A slow smile threaded itself onto his mouth and for a moment he looked so staggeringly beautiful, I could barely take my eyes off him. He transformed again from an old man to a porcelain-skinned brunette with a glow around the edges of his body that for a second made it look like a large bonfire burned directly behind him and that he was only blocking a small bit of its light.
"Think what you will, Ayla," he said. "You can live out this allotted human life without reaping another supernatural soul, but at the end of it you will have no more incarnations, no more chances. This is it."
He pinned his gaze to mine, staring deep into my eyes as though he were looking straight through me to the back wall. I lifted my chin, defiant.
"Screw you," I said.
That full and soft looking mouth twitched and I got the feeling he was struggling to decide what words would come from it. I dared him with a cocked brow and he tossed me my cell phone. While I was busy grappling for the phone in midair, his gaze flicked upward and it wasn't until I had the thing securely between my hands I could follow his gaze.
"It seems the veil is lifting," he said, and I thought I heard the crackling of dry wood.
Oh horror of horrors, the gallery was still burning. All this time. Still burning.
Sweat trickled down my temple. I coughed on the thick fingers of smoke that plunged down my throat.
I looked over at him, thinking to plead with him to at least stop the flames until I could get to the door, but he was gone.
And heaven help me if the fire he left was far stronger than the one he had shut down.
I pitched forward, throwing myself at the door, and in one single step, everything went black. I felt myself falling and even as I clutched for support, I thought it was too late.
Way too late.
CHAPTER 4
Someone was banging on a door somewhere. Glass shattered with a tinkling sound that seemed discordant in the echoes of the room. I heard several voices all at once and I believed for a second, I had somehow fou
nd my way into a crowded party where someone had the heat turned on too high and had burned whatever snacks they had stuck in the oven. It wasn't until I felt firm hands on my shoulders, shaking me that I remembered a person didn't go to a party and lie down on the floor for a nap unless there was something wrong. I remembered where I was when a set of gloved fingers peeled open my eyelids.
The cathedral. Fire.
I startled and tried to get up, but there were strong arms beneath my knees, preventing me from getting to my feet.
"I've got you," someone said. Someone used to being obeyed without question, obviously, because it had a stern quality of expectation to it. All the same, the voice might as well have been coming through water, it was so muffled. I fought him without meaning to. What if he was just some weirdo, trying to wrestle me into submission? I fired off a kick and contacted something hard. A shin maybe. He swore under his breath, but I heard it just the same.
"Relax." A command. Irritated this time, not happy to be ramrodded in the leg, probably, but trying to keep his temper. "This'll be easier if you let go."
"Screw you," I said because something about submitting made me both angry and terrified. I went limp anyway because the kick had taken everything out of me. I felt dizzy.
"I must be dead" I mumbled, and then I panicked because something else tried to worm its way through my mind. Something creepy. "Am I dead? Please God, tell me I'm still alive."
A quick image of a silver tipped cane flashed through my memory as I tried to slap his hands away.
"Which answer do you want?" he said, and his tone was brusque. Not sympathetic at all.
"Either, I guess," I mumbled, feeling stung. I was able to gauge the answer anyway, and they were both the same.
"You're one damn lucky girl," he said.
I tried to peer up at him as he crouched over me, but all I could make out was the blurry outline of a helmet. I blinked hard to rid my eyes of smoke and as my vision started to clear, I could make out the definite shape of a man. Yellowish helmet. Face Guard. Reflective tape pasted across the forehead.
Recognizing a fellow human being did not stop me from fighting his hands as they wrestled to cradle me against him. I had my pride, after all.
"I don't need saving," I complained and managed to roll from his arms onto my knees. I sagged back onto the floor and my cheek struck cold, dusty, smokey stone tiles. Grit embedded itself into my cheek. I think I sobbed in frustration.
He sighed, resigned.
"Okay, then," he said and tugged me onto my feet. He looked up at me through the visor as he crouched beside me. He still had a hold of my legs.
"You good?" He sounded as though he expected me to say no.
I nodded, still trying to blink my way to full awareness. When he let me go, I managed to stand perfectly still for all of three seconds before I started to crumple.
His snort said I told you so, and he caught me again before I fell. I ended up with my knees hanging from his elbow and my shoulders sagging against his arm.
I could see him shaking his head as he muttered something about me being like trying to save a drowning woman with a pocket full of rocks.
"I thought you all were supposed to be heroic, not nasty," I muttered and he hefted me into his arms a little too forcefully for my taste. Payback for my remark, I supposed.
I felt myself lifted into the air, high into the air because the thing that cradled me against its broad chest was a giant. I fancied I could feel his heart thrumming against my rib cage and it made something in my chest hurt.
"Get me out of here," I said.
He hitched me up higher still and my temple pressed into the soft part of his neck that was free of his gear. I thought I felt his pulse against my skin as he adjusted me in his arms, then I was moving in great strides down the aisle. There was a sort of safety in his arms that no doubt came from the relief of the stress I'd undergone. I snuggled in, content to let him carry me despite my earlier protests I didn't need saving.
The flurry of activity around me sort of parted like the Red Sea for Moses and I realized it was comprised of firemen fighting the blaze, doing their best to save what was left of the landmark church even if it was a derelict. No doubt they worried for the buildings around it and the squat bungalows that housed families who had lived in Dyre for generations. I gave a brief thought to them as well, but it wasn't quite as nice. I wanted to know why none of them had come to my aid while I'd been staggering around in there, choking on smoke and hallucinating psychopaths and murder by glass shards.
The hiss of water and foam striking flames came to me through the murk of sound and I thought I could hear breathing apparatus sucking for smoke-filled atmosphere and filtering it into clean air.
I squeezed my eyelids closed again, reveling in the feel of the tears that cleared my eyes of smoke. I was alive. I never thought I would enjoy so much the feel of cold air striking my cheeks as my savior scuffed out onto the stone steps. I sucked in fresh air and immediately coughed up half a lung.
"Just stay calm," he said. "We'll get you oxygen. That will make it easier to breathe."
I heard each steady step as he ran down the stone staircase to the asphalt. Red lights blinked into the darkness around me. It felt as though there was a throng of people pressing in, peering over his shoulder to look at me. I saw several faces, mouths working as though in pity. Swallowing felt like glass was digging into my throat. I wondered which face, if any, was my grandfather's. Then I realized something else, something that made me struggle against the mask that was pressing to my nose.
I had come to save Sarah and had ended up stuck inside the burning building. Hallucinating until I finally passed out as I tried to escape the flames.
"Sarah," I blurted out, swiping at his hand. "She's still in there."
The roughness of his glove then as he pressed his hand onto mine, holding the mask in place, was nothing compared to the way he shoved me onto the stretcher on my back. He still had hold of my head as he cradled it in one hand and the mask pressed to my face with the other. There was a growl in his voice when he spoke.
"You mean there's someone else in there?"
I nodded as best I could with the back of my head pinned against his palm and my nose stuffed into a plastic mask. I thought I heard him curse, but he was already yanking his hand out from beneath my head. I grappled for his cuff. For some reason, I didn't want him to leave me. Even if Sarah was still in there. I had an irrational fear that Azrael would return, and I'd be swimming beneath all of that fear again.
He turned to me with something like compassion in his eyes and the contrast of it to earlier made my eyes water.
"You'll be okay," he said through the breathing apparatus. His voice sounded hollow and I tried to yank him closer, to keep him from leaving me.
"Really," he said, peeling my hands from his collar. "You're in good hands." He whirled around, and I heard him hollering that there was someone else inside.
I was left to the ministrations of a paramedic who checked my vitals and peered beneath my eyelids. A blood pressure cuff got wrapped around my bicep and someone threw a silvery blanket over me. I knew there was only one ambulance in all of Dyre so I doubted it would take off without Sarah if they found her. I just had to wait. I'd done what I could for her.
The kindly paramedic didn't ask me too many questions that didn't have anything to do with how I felt. Thankfully, he didn't care what had brought me to the cathedral and he didn't care whether or not I believed I had seen angels, ghosts, or demons in there. He just cared my heart rate was normal for someone under a great deal of stress and that there was plenty of oxygen in my lungs. Eventually, he let me sit up on the back of the ambulance step, wrapped in the silver blanket because he couldn't find anything terribly wrong with me that rest and warmth wouldn't fix.
I almost laughed at that. I had my doubts whether either one of them would fix my fear that I hadn't been hallucinating at all. I didn't dare touch my calf, for fe
ar it would confirm my suspicions. I elected instead to watch the firefighters get control of the blaze that was all too real. They made noises that I understood. They yelled to each other. The bystanders milled about, whispering about tearing the building down. The stink of smoke made sense. So, too, did the swiftly decreasing licks of flame that had begun to chew away at the rooftop.
Through it all, I waited anxiously to see my rescuer carrying out a second form, and it took what seemed like forever before he exited. The fire seemed to be under control by then, if not out, and as he trotted out onto the stone steps, he pulled his helmet from his head, shaking free a mat of tar-coloured hair. He was indeed tall, at least six foot four, perhaps three years or so older than me. His gloves went beneath his armpits, and he raked his fingers over his scalp, making the hair stand on end. He looked sooty and sweaty and confused.
But he was not carrying anyone else.
"Looks like they didn't find anyone else," the paramedic said to me. "Are you sure there was someone in there?"
I chewed my lip. What could I say except the truth. "Not really." I fumbled for my cell phone, hoping that before I'd fallen unconscious, I'd thought to ram it in my pocket. I groaned out loud when I realized it was probably still in there on the floor somewhere because it was not on me anywhere.
"I had a text from a friend," I mumbled. "She said she was here."
He made a noncommittal sound and bent to check the blot of blood on my pant leg where I'd cut myself with the glass. I twitched my leg away.
"It's nothing," I said because I didn't want to even see what might be beneath my pants. He shrugged and by that time my fireman had strode over to the ambulance. He was holding out something in his clenched fist.
"This yours?" he said.
"My cell phone," I said, relieved. "See?" I said to the paramedic. "I'll show you."
"Whatever it is," the fireman said. "It can wait. There's more pressing things right now."
I lifted my gaze to a set of piercing eyes that must have been the colour of jade in the light of day. I shook my cell phone at him, assuming he'd understand by my obvious sense of urgency that I grasped the direness of the situation.
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