by Cynthia Hand
“No. I’ll be all right,” he says, and for a moment there’s the shimmer of tears in his eyes. He turns away, then pauses and turns back. He smiles in a sad way and gazes straight into my eyes. “This is going to sound weird and inappropriate, probably … but will you go out with me, Clara?”
“Out where?” I ask stupidly.
“On a date,” he says.
“What, you mean now?”
He laughs like he’s embarrassed. “God,” he says, then covers his face with his hands. “I’m going home.” He uncovers his face and smiles at me sheepishly. “But maybe when we get back to school. I mean it. An official date.”
A date. I flash back to prom two years ago, the way it felt to stand in the circle of Christian’s arms while we danced, enveloped by his smell, his warmth, gazing up into his eyes and feeling like I’d finally broken through with him, that he was finally seeing me.
Of course, that was before Kay had a meltdown and Christian opted to take her home instead of me.
He sighs. “I’m never going to live that down, am I?”
“Probably not.”
“So that’s a no, then?”
“No.”
“No?”
“I mean no, it’s not a no. It’s a yes. I will go out with you.” I don’t even need to think about it. With us it’s always been forest fires and formal dances and funerals. Don’t we deserve something normal for once? And it’s been more than six months since I broke up with Tucker. It’s time, I decide, to give this thing with Christian a shot.
“I’m thinking dinner and a movie,” he says.
“I’d love to go to dinner and a movie.”
And now we suddenly don’t know what to say to each other, and my heart is beating fast, and the men are shoveling the last layer of earth over Walter Prescott.
“I’m going to—” I point up the hill toward my own mother’s grave, a simple marble headstone under the aspens.
He nods, then shoves his hands in his pockets and makes his way down toward his truck. I watch him drive away. When he’s gone, I climb the hill, pausing on the concrete stairs that I saw so often in my vision last year. The cemetery seems different to me now, in the snow: uglier, colder, a gray, deserted place.
I stand for a few minutes, looking at my mother’s grave. There’s a smudge of dirt on the top corner of the headstone, and I rub at it with my gloved hand, but I can’t get it to come clean.
Some people go to cemeteries to talk to the person who died. I wish I could do that, but the minute the words Hi, Mom come out of my mouth, I feel stupid. She’s not here. Her body, maybe, but I don’t really want to think about her body here, under the earth and snow. I know where she is now. I saw her in that place, walking into the sunrise, making her way from the outer edge of heaven. She’s not here, in that box, under the ground.
I wonder if, when I die, I’ll be buried here, too.
I walk to the chain-link fence at the edge of the graveyard, stare past it into the snow-filled forest beyond. I feel something then, a familiar sadness, and I know who has joined me.
“Come out,” I call. “I know you’re there.”
There is a moment of silence before I hear footsteps in the snow. Samjeeza emerges from the trees. He stops a few feet from the fence, and a sense of déjà vu washes over me. I throw up a mental wall between us, blocking him from my mind. We stare at each other.
“Why are you here, Sam?” I ask. “What do you want?”
He makes a small noise in the back of his throat. He has one hand in the pocket of his long leather coat, and I wonder if he’s fingering the bracelet I gave him, my mother’s bracelet, the only thing he has left of her.
“Why did you give it to me?” he asks after a long moment. “Did she ask you to?”
“She told me to wear it to the cemetery.”
He bows his head. “The first time was in France,” he says. “Did she ever tell you?” He smiles and glances up, something alive in his eyes. “She was working at a hospital. The moment I saw her, I knew she was something special. She had the divine handprint all over her.”
So that’s it, I think. He wants to tell me about my mother. I should stop him, tell him I’m not interested, but I don’t. I’m curious to know what happened.
He moves closer to the fence, and I hear the faint crackle of his gray electricity running through the metal. “One day she and the other nurses went to a pond at the edge of the town to swim in their undergarments. She was laughing at something one of the other girls said, and then she felt my eyes on her and looked up. The other girls saw me too, and made a dash for their clothing on the shore, but she stayed where she was. Her hair was brown then, because she dyed it, and short for a woman’s, just at the chin, but I loved the way it curled against her neck. She walked up to me. She smelled like cloud and roses, I remember. I was frozen there, staring, feeling so strange, and she smirked and reached into my front pocket, where I always kept a packet of cigarettes for the look of it more than anything, and she took one and put the package back and said, ‘Hey, Mister, make yourself useful and give me a light, will you?’ It took me a moment to realize that she wanted me to light her a cigarette, but of course I didn’t have a lighter, and I said so, and she said, ‘Well, a fat lot of good you are then, aren’t you?’ and turned and left me.”
He seems charmed by the memory, but I don’t like it. That isn’t the mother I know, this saucy cigarette-smoking brunette that he seems so enthralled with.
“It was a while before I could get her to talk to me again. And longer still before she let me kiss her—”
“Why do you think I would want to hear this?” I interrupt.
The corner of his mouth quirks up in a sly smile. “You’re very much like her, I find.”
A cold draft of air slips up my sleeves and along my arms, and I pull my coat tighter around me. I’m safe for the moment, on this side of the fence. Hallowed ground. But I will have to leave it sometime.
“Tell me a story about her,” he says. “Something small.” He gazes at me calmly with his gold eyes. “Something new.”
I take a nervous breath. “This is why you’re stalking me? For stories?”
“Tell me,” he says.
My thoughts scramble for something to offer him. Of course I have so many memories of my mother, random ones and stupid ones, times I was mad at her because she’d suddenly stopped being my best friend and turned into my mother, set boundaries for me, punished me when I crossed them, tender moments when I knew she loved me more than anything else in the world. But I don’t want to share any of these stories with him. Our stories don’t belong to him.
I shake my head. “I can’t think of anything.”
His gaze darkens.
He can’t hurt me here, I tell myself. He can’t get me. But I’m still trembling.
“All right,” he says, like I’m being selfish but it can’t be helped; I’m partially human, after all. His tone changes, becomes casual. “Maybe you’ll feel like it on another occasion.”
I seriously doubt it.
“Did you ever find out the secret? Whatever it was your mother was keeping from you?” he asks, like we’re talking about the weather.
I fight to keep my face neutral, to keep my mind carefully under wraps, my tone as casual as his as I say, “I don’t know what you mean.”
He smiles. “You did find out,” he says. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be trying so hard to keep me at bay.”
So he knows I’m blocking him. I wonder if he can read me anyway, if he can hear my heart’s crazy rhythm, the quick intake of my breath, my fear like a sour smell oozing from my pores.
I shake my head helplessly. This was a bad idea, talking to him. Why did I think that I could handle him?
I turn to leave.
“Wait,” he says before I make it more than a few steps. “You don’t need to be afraid of me, little bird,” he says, walking up behind me as closely as the fence will allow. “I won’t harm yo
u.”
I stop, my back to him. “You’re like the leader of the Watchers, right? Isn’t it your job to try to harm me?”
“Not anymore,” he says. “I was … demoted, if you will, from that title.”
“Why?” I ask.
“My brother and I, we had a difference of opinion,” he says carefully, “regarding your mother.”
“Your brother?”
“He’s the one you should truly fear.”
“Who is he?” I ask.
“Asael.”
The name sounds familiar. I think Billy mentioned him once.
“Asael seeks the Triplare,” Samjeeza continues. “He’s always fancied himself a collector, of beautiful women, of powerful men, of angel-bloods, especially those with a higher concentration of blood. He believes that whoever controls the Triplare will have the advantage in the coming war, and thus he is determined to have them all. If he finds out what you truly are, he won’t rest until you either submit to his will or he destroys you.”
I turn, the words if he finds out what you truly are resonating in my head. “This is all very interesting, Sam, but I have no clue what you’re talking about. My mother’s secret”—I force myself to look into his eyes—“was that she was dying. And that’s old news now.”
At the word dying he gives out a pulse of despair that I feel even through the emotional wall I’ve erected between us, but his demeanor doesn’t change. In fact, he smiles.
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive,” he says.
“Whatever.”
I’m in a bind now, I realize. I don’t have a ride. I rode here with Billy, and I intended to fly home, but he could always turn into a bird and come after me.
“I had my suspicions about you from the beginning, of course,” he continues smoothly, like I didn’t try to brush him off. “I couldn’t understand what had happened that day in the forest. You resisted me more than you should have. Somehow you made the jump back from hell to earth. You summoned glory. You bested me.” He shakes his head like I’m an impertinent but charming little girl.
“My mom did it,” I say, hoping he’ll believe it.
“Your mother was many things,” he says. “She was beautiful, she was strong, she was full of fire and life, but she was, for all that, a mere Dimidius. She could not cross between worlds. Only a Triplare would be capable of that.”
“You’re wrong.” I try but can’t quite keep the waver out of my voice.
“I’m not,” he says softly. “Michael is your father, isn’t he? That lucky bastard.”
He just keeps talking, and the more he babbles on, the more I risk giving everything away.
“Okay, well, this has been lovely, really it has, but it’s cold and I’ve got someplace else to be.” I turn my back on him one more time and move away from the fence, deeper into the cemetery.
“Where’s your brother now, Clara?” he calls after me. “Does he know about his proud lineage?”
“Don’t talk about my brother. Leave him alone. I swear—”
“You don’t have to swear, dear. I have no interest in the boy. But then, like I said, there are others who’d find his parentage fascinating.”
I think he’s trying to blackmail me. I stop.
“What do you want?” I glare at him over my shoulder.
“I want you to tell me a story.”
He’s crazy. I throw my hands up in frustration and stalk off through the snow.
“All right,” he says, chuckling. “Another time.”
I know without having to look back that he’s turned into a bird.
“Caw,” he says to me, mocking, testing me.
Crazy freaking angels! I’m suddenly so mad I’m on the edge of tears. I kick at the snow under my feet, uncover a patch of wet, black earth, pine needles, rotting leaves, dead grass, bits of gravel. I bend and pick up a small stone, smooth and dark, like it belongs at the bottom of a river somewhere. I turn it over in my hand.
“Caw,” says Samjeeza the crow.
I hurl the rock at him.
It’s a good throw, the kind that would get me on Stanford’s women’s softball team in a heartbeat. It’s more than human, that throw. It cuts through the air like a bullet, over the fence and straight at the meddlesome Black Wing. My aim is true.
But it doesn’t hit him.
The rock shoots past the branch, which is now empty, and falls silently into the snow on the forest floor. I’m alone again.
For now.
I’m looking forward to building a great big fire in the living room fireplace, making something to eat for Billy and me, and maybe putting up some Christmas decorations, calling Wendy to see if she wants to go to a movie or something. I need some normal time. But first I stop at the grocery store.
Which is where, in the middle of the baking aisle, I run into Tucker.
“Hi,” I breathe. I curse my stupid heart for how it leaps when I see him standing there in a white tee and holey jeans, holding a basket with green apples, a lemon, a package of butter, and a bag of white sugar in it. His mom must be making a pie.
He looks at me for a minute as if deciding whether or not to bother talking to me. “You’re awful dressed up,” he says finally, taking in my coat and the black dress and the knee-high black boots, the way my hair is done up in a loose chignon at the crown of my head. His mouth twists into a mocking smile. “Let me guess: you’re magically teleporting to some fancy Stanford party, and you lost your way?”
“I came from a funeral,” I say tightly. “At Aspen Hill.”
Right away his face sobers. “Whose?”
“Walter Prescott’s.”
He nods. “I heard about that. A stroke, wasn’t it?”
I don’t answer.
“Or not a stroke,” he surmises. “He was one of your people.”
My people. Nice. I start to walk away, because that’s the wise thing to do—just leave, don’t engage with him—but then I stop, turn back. I can’t help myself. “Don’t do that,” I say.
“Don’t do what?”
“I know you’re mad at me, and I understand why you would be, I get it, I do, but you don’t have to be like that. You’re like the kindest, sweetest, most decent guy that I know. Don’t be a jerk because of me.”
He looks at the floor, swallows hard. “Clara …”
“I’m sorry, Tuck. I know that might not be worth much, me saying it. But I’m sorry. For all of it.” I turn to walk away. “I’ll stay out of your way.”
“You didn’t call,” he says before I can flee.
I blink up at him, startled. “What?”
“This summer. When you got back from Italy, before you went to California. You were home for two weeks, right? And you didn’t call. Not once,” he says with accusation in his voice.
That’s what he picks to be mad about?
“I wanted to,” I say, which is true. Every day I thought about calling him. “I was busy,” I say, which is a lie.
He scoffs, but the anger fades from his face, becomes a kind of resigned frustration. “We could have hung out some, before you had to go.”
“I’m sorry,” I murmur again, because I don’t know what else to say.
“It’s just that … I thought maybe we could be …” His throat works for a minute before he gets the word out. “Friends.”
Tucker Avery wants to be my friend.
He looks so vulnerable right now, staring at his boots, his ears slightly red under his tan, his shoulders tight. I want to reach over and put my hand on his arm. I want to smile and say, Sure. Let’s be friends. I would love to be your friend.
But I have to be strong. I have to remember why we broke up in the first place: so that he could have a life where he wouldn’t be attacked by a fallen angel at the end of a date, where he could kiss his girlfriend without her literally lighting up like a sparkler on the Fourth of July, where he wouldn’t be constantly kept in the dark. He needs someone normal. Someone w
ho will age when he ages. Someone he can protect the way a man protects his woman, and not the other way around. Someone not me. I mean, five minutes ago I was being blackmailed by a Black Wing, for heaven’s sake. I’m being hunted by a fallen angel who means to “collect” me. I’m going to have to fight. Possibly die.
I take a deep breath. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
He looks up. “You don’t want to be friends.”
I try to meet his eyes. “No. I don’t.”
For once I’m glad he can’t read my mind the way Christian does. He’d see how much I think about him, how I dream about him, how even after all this time apart my heart still aches to see him, touch him, hear his voice. He’d see that we can’t be friends. He’d see that every minute I’m with him I want his arms around me. I remember his lips on mine. I’ll never, never, be able to see him as a friend.
It’s better this way, I repeat to myself. It’s better this way. It’s better this way. He has to live his life, and I have to live mine.
His jaw tightens. “All right,” he says. “I get it. We’re done. You’re moving on.”
Yes, I need to say to him. But I can’t make my lips form the word.
He nods, flexes his hands like he wants his cowboy hat to put on now, but he doesn’t have it. “I should go,” he says. “I have chores to do back at the ranch.”
He moves to the end of the aisle, then stops. There’s something else he wants to tell me. My breath hitches in my throat.
“Have a nice life, Clara,” he says. “You deserve to be happy.”
My hands clench into fists as I watch him walk away.
So do you, I think. So do you.
9
BACK, BACK, YOU FIEND
“You’re distracted, Clara,” Dad says. “You need to focus.”
I lower my part of the broom, panting. My shoulder smarts from where Christian just whacked me. We’ve been sparring in my backyard in Jackson in ankle-deep snow for the past half hour, and so far it’s been pretty even. I hit him; he hits me. Although that last hit was a doozy.
Christian looks at me with guilt in his gold-flecked eyes.
“Are you okay?” he asks quietly. “I’m sorry.”
