"You know exactly what I'm talking about."
"Do I?" He pushed himself to his feet with his cane and moved near enough to me that I could smell the candy floss on him. The sky blue of his eyes shifted to an almost purple iridescence and I could make out the shifting images of clouds and sky and Earth and wings in them as he looked at me.
For a moment, my mind fed me an image of him in a beautifully gilded room. He was reaching out to me with a sad smile. I had the feeling that I wanted to lay my cheek against his chest, and feel his palm against my hair. Then as quickly as the image came, it evaporated. I was left staring into those simple, but beautiful, blue eyes again.
If he had any idea what had just run through my mind, he gave no indication. He just tapped his cane once on the floor to get my attention.
"Do you have any idea how many supernatural things," he said, "actually, how much power, is in this little town of yours?"
I shook my head.
"An entire choir of angels fell here eons ago. That in and of itself gives the ground a powerful energy, but it's the other things attracted to that energy that make this town what it is. It's why your little necromancer chose this town to hide in."
He turned away from me to stroll across the room. He ran his fingers over the items on my grandfather's bureau when he stopped in front of it. Several pictures, propped in their frames, sat clustered together. I recognized my mother in one of the frames. She looked beautiful. Red hair like mine, the bright blue eyes of a pre-teen. Freckles dotted the top of her nose and in the spot between her eyebrows. I felt the familiar clenching of my stomach when I looked at her. As usual, the feeling made me uncomfortable enough that the sting behind my eyelids forced me to blink. I yanked my gaze away from it.
I faced him with defiance.
"So you're telling me this is the perfect place for me to collect all of those things you keep in the top of your cane."
He looked at me, disappointed. "I told you only the fallen ones return to me. I'm sure you remember that. You're stubborn, but you're not stupid."
I crossed my arms over my chest. "Whatever," I said. "You've done your little chore. I've got my brand. You can go now."
He had the grace to look hurt.
"I wish it was as simple as that, Ayla."
"I'm not going to hurt Sarah," I said. "For pity's sake, I only managed to kill that thing in the crypt by some lucky strike. The least you could've done was given me some sort of mad skills to make it easier."
"If it was easy and without risk, then every fallen one would scramble to do what you're doing."
I crossed my arms over my chest and snorted. "This wasn't exactly something I scrambled to sign up for."
"Maybe not consciously as a human," he said. "But there was that part of you that remembers your origin and wanted to return to it. Can you honestly say that when you were with your reaper in the cathedral that things didn't feel familiar? That you didn't sense something that felt right?"
I thought back to those moments, felt again the recollection of familiar words, the sense of déjà vu.
"Even so," I said, stubborn. "You've given me no information. Cryptic remarks that barely help me. If you want me to do this thing, why can't you give me the information I need to know? Why can't you tell me what weapons to use? Why do I have to figure it out on my own?"
There was a moment when it looked as though he was chewing his lip, uncertain. But when he spoke, it was with all the confidence of before.
"It was the angelic host that petitioned the Divine One for this penance," he said. "We felt betrayed. The Divine One wanted to gather you back, but we asked for your punishment. You were from our host. We wanted to be sure that when you returned, you returned only because you truly wanted to. Each of us, even the fallen ones agreed that the task was difficult enough, it would only encourage the truly repentant."
"I don't remember any of that," I said feeling as though none of this was fair. I hadn't exactly been happy as a mortal, but at least I was ignorant. Ignorance had its own stubborn bliss. "And I certainly didn't ask for this."
He stepped closer, wafting that sugar smell over me again. "Which makes it even more urgent, Ayla," he said. "It puts you at more risk. You will be tested. Your mettle will be tried most heartily."
"I've never been good at tests," I said. I meant it to come across a shade defiant, but as I said it, it almost sounded like defeat.
He chose to ignore that and instead lifted the picture of my mother from the bureau. He gave it slow, careful inspection, tracing her face with the tip of his finger before he put it back down on the bureau, face down.
"While you think you have been given a bad lot, I assure you, you'll thank me at the end of it."
Suspicion whispered its way up my spine. I took an unsteady step toward Azrael, testing the strength of my legs, hoping to find they were strong enough to kick him in the shins. I managed to get close enough to him to smell that cotton candy scent again, the one that made me think of pink cumulus clouds and down feathers.
"You knew this would all happen, didn't you?" I said. "You planned it."
"To be truthful," he said. "I hadn't expected things to turn out quite as well as they did."
The way he said it, as though it had been a plan he had carefully concocted and carried out with finite perfection, I realized the breadth of his involvement and what it meant to my traumatic time in the cathedral. What it meant to what was happening now.
"Oh my God," I said, realizing the breadth of what he was saying. "You set me up. It was you."
My fingers jabbed into his chest. "I've been trying to work out why that thing was in the cathedral at the same time I was. How did it know I was there? How did it know what I was?"
I drilled him with my gaze. "It was you all along, wasn't it?"
I might have thought plenty of nasty things about him in this penance that had been thrust upon me, but I hadn't expected a betrayal this deep. It had been happenstance. I had accepted my lot because I thought it was coincidence, that I had been thrust into it as a result of an accidental meeting. Now that I realized it had been carefully plotted out, I was furious.
"You led it to me," I choked out, realizing the breadth of what had really happened and felt such desolation that I could barely manage the rest of the words. "You sent it to kill me."
He almost looked as though he was sagging in front of me. Everything in his posture pulled inward and his voice went strangely soft.
"Never," he said and there was a strange longing in his voice that confused me. "I would never have done that to you."
"Are you saying it wasn't you who told that thing where I was?"
"I did," he confessed. "But not because I wanted it to kill you. Mind you, it might have been easier if I had bothered to consider your innate obstinance. If I had, I might have encouraged him to kill you. At least then you could have returned after your human death to the pool of incarnation and I might have coerced you into returning with your full memory. I wouldn't have had to trick you then."
His face looked so earnest; the note of regret in his tone so authentic, I couldn't help but believe him. And I struggled with all the possibilities, trying to work my way through the fog that settled over me as I looked at him. There was only one conclusion I could come to. The truth of it hit me like a sledgehammer in the chest.
"You wanted me to become a reaper."
"Yes," he nearly hissed. The admission was more vehement than nasty. He stepped closer to me, too close. There was nothing but a breath between us, one that sizzled with tension. If I had thought he was magnificent looking before, in the moment he touched me, everything in the room lit up. He was like cotton candy and crystallized maple syrup and light winking through the crests of a wave on a sunny day. I went dizzy with longing, but I had no idea what that longing was for.
"Come home," he said. "Do these things and come home to me, finally."
For a second, I felt as though something soft and fluf
fy had encircled me, pulled me close and brushed against my cheek.
"It's time, Ayla," he said. "You've been away for too long. This is your chance to come back to the host. Be yourself again."
Home. To him. To a place I didn't remember and that meant nothing to me. When all I knew was here and where everything that mattered to me wore human skin and was fueled by mortal hearts. I shook my head, trying to work out why I would even want to succumb to the life of a reaper. The fear of his cane wasn't enough to replace the sense of loss that would consume me if I ended up putting the people I loved in harm's way, as I had just done. Callum, Sarah, my grandfather: all of them had a brush with death. Because of me.
I shook my head, trying to work through everything he was saying. He mistook the confusion for refusal.
"You're telling me you would rather stay here," he said and there was a bitter note to his voice that I didn't think an angel could possibly feel. It confused me enough, made me feel sorry for him enough, that I reached out and without thinking lay my palm against his cheek. It seemed to encourage him enough to put his hand over top of mine.
"You'd rather stay here with that abomination when you should be reaping him and sending him to oblivion. Him and that necromancer."
"Tully," I said. "His name is Tully." I hadn't used my grandfather's name in so many years, it sounded strange. So strange, even Azrael cocked his head at me, bewildered.
I pulled my hand from his and he tugged at his cuffs, squaring his shoulders. Businesslike again.
"Whatever you choose to call him," he said. "You're too far in now, Ayla. There's no hiding anymore. That creature your friend roused..."
"Roused?" I echoed, catching onto that one word because it sounded decidedly dire. "I killed the thing. I have this damned brand to prove it."
"You killed the doppelgänger," he said carefully. "But the thing your necromancer roused with her magics, is far worse than what you executed."
"Whatever we roused," I said, defensive and argumentative. "Is someone else's problem." I jabbed him in the chest again. "It's your problem."
"Not mine," he said. "You're the one wearing the tattoos. It will come for you because it believes you are a threat. "
"I only have these tattoos because the people I loved were in danger."
"Well you can trust that it will use those you love if it needs to. Imagine what could happen to that abomination who loves you."
"Is that a threat?" I said, the anger rising. "Because my grandfather is not an abomination."
"Not your grandfather," he said and cocked his head at me. "You don't know, do you? The boy. The one who is falling in love you."
Falling in love with me. Callum. Had to be. There was no one else in my life that it could be. I almost didn't dare hope, but I knew it had to be true. I pulled my arms around my midriff and squeezed. The euphoria was almost too much to contain. Loved. Callum loved me.
I wanted to sag onto the bed and revel in the knowledge, but the beastly angel kept talking. The trouble was, if any of the words had meaning, I didn't register them. I could only think of those four words. I repeated them in my mind until I felt the cane tap against my calf and looked up to see Azrael staring at me.
"Love makes us vulnerable," he said. "And those things with evil intent have no problem using that vulnerability to their own ends." He eyed me speculatively, as though waiting for me to agree when he knew full well I wouldn't. In the end, he gave up waiting and sighed.
"Mind you," he said, moving his finger through the air to connect dots I wasn't seeing. "It would be far more profitable for you to reap the three of them yourself than let them live with the risk of always being bait. At least that way you would be closer to coming home."
He tapped onto an invisible speck in front of my face and waited. He made a popping sound with his puckered mouth.
I thought of Sarah down the hall and of my grandfather in his hospital bed, Callum driving home in his beat up GTI, all the three people I cared about and wondered how much danger they were truly in. If not from me, from that creature we had roused. And if not from that creature, then from some other fallen angel seeking a way home. Then it hit me. I'd connected the dots he seemed to be so adamant that I draw lines to, but I had the feeling I hadn't come up with the same picture he had hoped for.
If the town of Dyre was so full of energy and of supernatural beings, how long would it be before others like me made their way here, looking for a crowded room to tap out a few stamps on their coupon card?
"Are you one of those things using them for your own ends?" I said, meeting his gaze and holding it. I put all the fire I felt in my chest, all the passion and fear of the last 72 hours in my voice as I spoke to him because I wanted him to understand completely my intentions. I didn't want there to be any doubt in his mind about where I stood.
I gripped him by the lapels.
"Because if you are, you need to know that if anything comes for them, whether it's you or something revoltingly evil or even another Nathelium out to win its wings, I will fight heaven and hell to protect them."
I let him go and he eased away with a smug look he only barely concealed with a short and timid smile. He tapped his cane on the floor and then used the tip of it to press into my solar plexus. Dozens of images swirled around behind my eyelids, but although none of them joined together to create one cohesive picture, I came away with one certain thought. Something was coming. And it would do anything to find its revenge.
"How long?" I said and when he didn't answer, I reached out again but instead of gripping his lapels, I lifted the hair of the back of his neck and coiled it around my fist. I wasn't going to let him go. He couldn't get out of there without telling me what I needed to know, and if he tried to leave, he was taking me with him.
"How long before something comes for Gramp or Sarah?" I asked him.
He gave a short shake of his head and my fingers passed through his hair as though they were nothing but feathers from a down pillow caught in his locks. He brushed my hands away ever so gently and crossed them at the wrists over my hips. His touch lingered a little too long on my skin and I felt the electricity of it winging its way up the nerve endings to the back of my shoulder blades.
"You're forgetting someone," he said. "The Nephilim."
"I don't even know what that is," I said. "Let alone who it is."
"Born of Angels," he said. "A half breed. An abomination that never should have existed. Pretty alluring bait to an entity in need of power."
I shook my head at him, confused. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"The boy," he hissed. "That awful abomination with the power of angels in his blood. Don't think your necromancer won't tap it to save herself. Don't think the beast you've roused won't use it for revenge. Don't think the druid won't use it to fuel a spell in a vain attempt to rescue you if he knows what you are."
I sagged onto my grandfather's bed and stared at the picture of my mother lying face down on his bureau. For the first time since the accident, I found myself longing for her embrace. I felt tears burning behind my eyelids as I thought about where she might be, what kind of eternity she was living through. I'd always told myself that someday I would see her again. Now I knew if I didn't do as Azrael bid, I never would.
I was spent. Exhausted. Afraid, even, but he wouldn't stop. Dear sweet heaven, he wouldn't stop.
"Reap them, Ayla," he said. "You can't let them put your eternity at risk."
Callum was Nephilim. An abomination. One more creature that Azrael would want me to reap in order to earn my wings. Three of them now. Gramp. Sarah. Callum. All people I cared about. People I would die for. People who cared about me. And in front of me, an eternity inside a grieving angel cane handle as a bit of glittering dust never to feel or love ever again.
I thought of Sarah down the hall and of my grandfather in his hospital bed, Callum driving home in his beat up GTI, and I realized that the small family I had left was worth every risk.
And if something came for them, including Azrael or any other Nathelium out to win its wings, I would tear whatever passed for a supernatural soul from their bodies with my teeth.
Azrael seemed to sense the shift even as I looked up at him. A small, sad smile moved across his mouth.
"I'm sorry, Ayla," he said. "I truly am."
Then he was gone and I was left to stare at the empty space where he had stood until the burning behind my eyelids turned to a flood of tears and I clenched at the bedspread with fisted hands.
I didn't move for long moments, not even when my cell phone blinked on from across the room. A text, no doubt. Probably from Sarah. Maybe from Callum.
And it was only by looking at the way it winked at me from across the room that I found the strength to push myself to my feet and shuffle across the room to pick it up. That one small action reminded me that it was little things like answering a text in the middle of the night, done for the right reasons, that could change a life.
At that moment, I knew my life would never be the same.
<<<>>>
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