Falling From Grace (Grace Series)

by S. L. Naeole

  Her voice was so soft, I could barely make out what she was saying, and I wanted to ask why she was saying them at all but the answer was already there. She couldn’t think them, because he wasn’t there. He would not receive her thoughts. He wouldn’t receive any of our thoughts anymore.

  “But I thought angels didn’t die,” I murmured, mainly to myself because I knew differently—other angels died, but not mine. “You’re not supposed to die.”

  I felt a pulse of emotion start to softly beat within me as I stared at my beautiful angel lying prone on the ground, his strong and sarcastic sister broken and crying on his chest. Ameila, beautiful even in her sorrow, stood stony, her arms at her sides, as though she accepted this, accepted the fate that had befallen her son. The slow beating within me grew. It grew bold, and loud, and strong, and fierce. It pushed me, jerked me around like a rag doll in the hands of an unruly child. It grew hot inside of me, and it leaked out in scorching tears that ran down my face.

  “No!”

  The shout echoed around the hallway, the final crack in my heart, the fissure now too large to stem the overflow of emotion. It was angry, fire drenched, and vengeful. “No! No, no, no!” I leaped onto Robert’s still form, my intense reaction somehow enough to shock Lark away. I began to beat on his chest, his shoulders. I grabbed his head and looked at his face, perfect and exquisite, even in death, and shook it. “No, you’re not supposed to be the one to die, damn you!”

  I slapped him. I don’t know why, and I’ll always question myself later what compelled me to do it, but at that moment, it was the only thing that seemed reasonable. My hand began to throb; I forgot how hard and unforgiving their skin was. Unlike the punch that I had given to Lark, this was supposed to cause pain. This was supposed to bring with it hurt and contempt to the abused, and instead I was the one feeling the bite of it. But I didn’t care. Pain was better than falling numb again because if I accepted the numbness then that would mean that I accepted Robert’s death, and I couldn’t accept that. I wouldn’t accept that. Instead, I slapped him again.

  “You’re not dead. You can’t tell me you love me and then leave me. You’re not dead, do you hear me? You’re not, you’re not!”

  For every crack that lined my heart, for every single tear that I had shed, I hit him. I hit him for things he had had nothing to do with. I hit him for every plan that might have been made but now wouldn’t. I hit him for every dashed away hope, for every crushed dream, for every single moment that now stretched out before me, empty and without reason. I hit him for every single time I doubted myself, doubted him. And, mostly, I hit him because if I stopped, if I thought about stopping, I feared I wouldn’t know what else there was left for me to do in this world.

  A hand grabbed my aching wrist as it rose once more, stopping it before I could cause more damage to my hand. I looked at it, strong, determined, and followed the lines of the wrist, to the arm…to its owner.

  Two liquid pools of mercury stared up from beneath me.

  Reason would have demanded that I pass out from shock. But there wasn’t room for reason in my world anymore. There never had been. There was only room for drowning in those eyes that held mine locked onto them. Oh, I was in shock; the fact that I couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe was proof enough of that. But I also couldn’t blink, afraid that if I did so, those glimmering orbs would disappear when my lids rose. I couldn’t let the sight of something so beautiful disappear. I desperately fought the human instinct to close my eyes.

  “Grace.”

  And I blinked. Because apparently shocking one’s ears coincides with the need to blink.

  “Grace, please stop hitting me.”

  I shook my head at the absurdity of it. I must be hallucinating, because the dead didn’t speak. They didn’t gaze up into my eyes and say innocuous things that made me feel like I could leap off the very edge of the sky and never touch ground. I shook my head because forget reason, forget logic, this miracle couldn’t possibly be mine.

  And yet, the gasps behind me—of a mother’s joy, a sister’s hope—weren’t absurd. They were the confirmation that I wasn’t in the midst of a mental breakdown. “You’re here,” was all I could form by way of recognition. He was alive, he was here, he was holding onto my wrist and that contact was mending my battered hand as surely as it was the other parts of me that I believed had died right along with him.

  He sat up, his grip around my wrist loosening, and then made motions to stand while I moved away, making way for his family to embrace him in a way that I couldn’t. His mother’s arms, strong and firm, gripped him tightly to her chest, his sister wrapped around his neck, the three of them lost in the joy of their reunion. They were silent, their heads pressed together, sharing their thoughts.

  It was such a private moment I almost felt like I was intruding. Almost. I had questions of my own that needed to be answered. But, more than anything else, I needed to hear him say those words again. I needed to hear them, to reassure myself that I hadn’t imagined them, that it hadn’t been a figment of my imagination brought on by shock. I needed them because I had stopped breathing when he had opened his eyes, and without them, I don’t think I’d be able to remember how to start again.

  Slowly, Lark lowered her arms from around Robert’s neck. Ameila gently released him, but held onto his hand. I stood silent as they moved to his side. He was looking directly at me, a concerned expression on his face. He reached a hand out to me but started to pull it back when I looked at it skeptically, hesitantly. Seeing what he was doing, what he had interpreted in my thoughts, I rushed forward to grab it. I knew what chances I had were few, and I wasn’t about to miss out on any of them. I held his hand clasped in mine, and looked into his eyes.

  “I’m okay,” he said softly, and pushed a piece of my hair away from my eyes with the hand that I was holding onto tightly. “I’m better than okay. You’re still here. You didn’t leave me.”

  Nervous laughter poured out of me. Hadn’t I said the very same thing to him a few weeks ago? What was I supposed to say now? How does one deal with stuff like this? This reality that wasn’t…real? Broken hearts were one thing, but I had just watched him die. I watched as his dead body changed, watched as it grew wings—wings for goodness sake! And now, he was talking to me, as though everything was normal. Was there ever going to be a moment when I became comfortable with things like this?

  He pulled me closer, and I was hit with a sudden sense of shyness and fear. He sensed my hesitation and eased his hold on me. “I-I don’t know how to be with you,” I said softly, and I didn’t. He had turned my entire sense of self upside down in just a few hours. I didn’t understand anything that had happened, and I didn’t understand why I couldn’t have just walked away.

  “You couldn’t walk away because your heart knew where it belonged,” Ameila responded to my thoughts, which elicited a gasp from her children. She had not done this for such a long time—why now? She placed a hand at my back and turned my chin to face her. “There is so much you have yet to be told, little one. But let us not do it here. People are coming.”

  I didn’t have a chance to express my objections to leaving when I felt a sharp pull and found myself pressed up against Robert’s chest, my face in the small hollow of his neck. His arms were wrapped around me, clamping me to him like a vise. I didn’t know what was happening, only that the bite of a cold wind was stinging my back and shoulders. I wound my arms up around his neck, though I’m not exactly sure if it was to keep from falling, or just to be closer to him. I simply didn’t care at the moment.

  It took only minutes for Robert to finally place my feet back on solid ground. My knees had started to shake from the crush of emotions that were welling up inside of me. For the first time since we had met, Robert didn’t let me get used to it on my own. He picked me up again, one arm beneath the bend of my knees, the other around my back, and carried me into his home. This was where I would be told the truth.

  He carried me in
to the living room, but instead of setting me down onto a sofa or chair, he simply remained standing with me in his arms. “There is so much to tell you,” he murmured into my hair. “I don’t know where to begin.”

  Ameila appeared then, followed by Lark. I hadn’t realized that we had gotten there before the two of them. “Let me explain it, son. She still has feelings of distrust, and I do not blame her.” Ameila reached for my hand, and, with all three angels standing in the middle of their living room while I was cradled in Robert’s arms, she began to explain to me what it was that I had just endured.

  “Sam had misled Robert. He’s been mentoring him these past few decades—having him accompany him while he fulfills the duties of his call—and Robert had looked up to his wisdom and experience like any one would of a big brother, for that is what Sam’s role was intended to be. But Sam took that trust too far. He told Robert that his wings would come only while suffering a great pain.”

  Ameila’s voice grew soft then as she looked at her son. “But what is there in an angel’s life that can cause us true pain other than to betray our hearts?”

  I looked at her in confusion. “I thought that the only way your kind felt pain was when you lied?”

  She nodded her head. “Yes. But you see, it is in our hearts to be honest. We cannot be who we are, fulfill the roles in this world that we’re meant to play, if we are not honest with those that we are born to protect, born to care for, and…born to love. You, my dear Grace, are the truth that is my son’s heart, and when he denied you that, when he denied himself that truth by lying to you and saying that he did not love you, it caused him a pain so great, it k-” Ameila’s voice caught in her throat as she struggled with the words “-killed him. You see, foolish boy that my son is, he was doing this not only for himself, but for you as well. He thought—he believed that if he could receive his wings, he’d receive the call, and then he’d be able to let you go.

  “He thought this would make it easier for you to have the normal life that you craved, and he assumed that you understood he’d have to leave one day when this happened. However, he and Sam forgot that our wings do not come because we will them to, or because we want them to. You cannot tell a lie so blatant and expect the pain of dying to be enough to trigger the change.

  “But Sam told Robert that lying to you, the pain that he’d feel through you, coupled with the punishment our bodies dole out when we break one of our own rules would do just that. And Robert paid the price for it. Our wings…they are tied to our emotions as angels. It takes a great catalyst of feeling to bring them forth. Love, hate, anger, jealousy, sadness, compassion…it takes a combination of so many emotions to spark our body’s physical change, but one emotion, far more significant than all of the others, always stands out—the trigger to it all.”

  I felt Robert pull me in closer to him, his cheek resting solidly on the top of my head. I rested my face against the cool material of his shirt, and searched for the soft wooshing of his heartbeat, needing its steady beat to comfort me as my mind fought to sort out all of this new information. His chest was silent.

  “Ahh, yes. There is an issue that was confusing me at first, but I understand now why that is. You hear no heart in his chest.”

  I turned my head to look at her, nodding unnecessarily while swallowing down the fear that was slowly creeping up within me.

  “Grace, you know how Robert came into existence—how different he is, even among us. His birth was not like Lark’s, in that he was born from a corpse. Do you understand what that means? It means that he has always been on the cusp between life and death, owing his soul to both. Death won out tonight when his body could take no more, but you—you came back for him, and you allowed him his last bit of peace. He knew he was dying, and so to make peace, he could finally tell you the truth. He would see you with a normal life. But, none of us, especially not Robert, knew what would happen as a result.

  “You are his salvation, Grace. His love for you brought his wings, and your love for him brought him life. And, to be given life through death, not once, but twice…it must exact a cost, even if only in a minor way. His price was that of the part that makes him the most human—the most human like you.”

  I turned my head to look up at Robert, whose gaze was pointed down towards me, his eyes focused and intense. I knew it in my own beating heart that it wasn’t what made me human. The literal heart could beat forever, but the figurative heart, the romantic heart was what kept love alive. His heart was still there. I could feel it in me, even if I couldn’t hear it in him.

  “You understand,” Ameila smiled. “I am glad for it. But, you must question why his wings are that color…”

  I looked at Ameila and she knew that I honestly had not until that moment. “I was always under the impression that angels’ wings are supposed to be white.”

  She nodded her head, and then took a step away from us, her head lowered, and I watched in amazed horror as arm like limbs started to jut out from behind her, tearing through her blouse and lengthened, branching out like Robert’s had done, but far more smoothly. The branches splintered and grew outward, each end bisecting multiple times, finally blooming into a pair of immense wings that were a white that reminded me of cotton balls and baby powder—pure and innocent.

  “My wings are like all of the others. They do not alter in color or shape. Only in size do our wings differ. But no one—absolutely no one else has black wings. Robert is the first of our kind. Our history has never had such an occurrence before, and I do not know what this could mean for him—or for us. I will have to discuss this with the others, but for right now, it is a blessing that he is here.”

  But what about Sam? What he had done had caused Robert so much unnecessary pain, and I couldn’t get around just how much I wanted to cause him that exact same pain. If there was any justice in this world…or his…

  “What he did caused both of you great pain, Grace,” Ameila said, interrupting my thoughts. “It was misguided and it was a foolish mistake that no one who has lived for as long as Sam has should have made, but it is done, and though the two of you were hurt, the results are much better than I believe any of us could have hoped for.”

  “Oh please, Mother. Sam did this deliberately to hurt Grace,” Lark bristled. She was pacing, her hands curled into tight fists at her side. “He didn’t forget what triggers our wings to appear. He just didn’t want Robert’s to come the same way his did.”

  Ameila hissed at Lark to which Lark responded with a throaty growl, “I won’t keep quiet about this. Sam’s stupidity and selfishness nearly cost you your son! Stop defending him!”

  The unspoken arguments from Ameila would not be answered silently, as Lark once again shouted, “No, I won’t stop talking about it. If Sam has such a problem with me talking about him, let him show up and tell me himself.”

  Robert’s hold on me grew tighter, and I felt the tension in his body as he listened to the exchange between his mother and sister. I locked my fingers together around his neck, not wanting to let go. His face seemed distressed by the direction that the conversation had taken. No longer about explanations, it was all about laying blame, and he wasn’t about to allow it to happen.

  “This discussion ends now!”

  His directive wasn’t shouted, but it still rattled the walls and windows with its finality. I had hid my face as the booming sound flowed through my bones and caused my teeth to ache. “The only person to blame here is me, not Sam. I made the decision to hurt Grace, and myself. The blame rests with me. Now, if you two will excuse me, Grace and I have a lot of talking to do. We will be in my room.”

  Ameila made a motion to stop him. “Do you think that’s wise, son?”

  Robert’s body stiffened and he lowered me so that my feet were once again touching the ground. “Yes, I do think that is wise, but I think it would be in Grace’s best interest if she makes the decision herself to come with me.”

  I looked at the two of them, one with
a warning in her eyes, the other with a soft plea in his. I didn’t know what the warning was for, but I knew what the pleading was about, and I went with what I know. It’s far safer that way.

  “Let’s talk, Robert.”

  He held his hand out to me again, and shyly, I took it, following him as he pulled me towards a room at the back of the house. It was past the kitchen, the room I had been in the last time I was here. I didn’t want to think about what my foolishness had nearly cost me then, so I simply watched as Robert pulled me through a dark door and into a room that was painted a bright white. The dark hallway that led to the room reminded me of all that had happened at the school, and I could feel it all start to boil up inside of me again. I could feel the sob climbing up my throat, ready to leap out, dragging all of my fear and heartbreak behind it.

  “Shh, it’s okay,” Robert said soothingly, wrapping his arms around me yet holding me back far enough so that he could still look at me while talking. “I’m so-so sorry, Grace. I have so much to apologize to you for. I promised to never hurt you, and I’ve broken that promise twice now. I’m sorry for being so cold to you…for being so cruel and hurtful. I’m sorry, Grace, for lying to you.”

  He lifted a hand to my face and smoothed out my eyebrow with his fingertip, the small movement igniting a pilot light within me that I could have sworn had been dampened by the tears I had shed tonight. “I know that this is no excuse, but when I saw you with Graham, it seemed like it was the right time; you were so happy, you were so carefree, and I could see that there would be hope for you after I had left, and that you’d be able to have the normal life that you said you wanted. I used the anger and jealousy I felt, used it to hurt you, and I will never forgive myself for as long as I exist.”

  His eyes were glossy, and I watched in amazement as two silver tears rolled down his face and landed on the wooden floor beneath our feet with large thuds. I bent down to inspect them and gasped in shock. Not tears. Teardrop shaped crystal. I touched them, feeling their warmth and smiled. “These are just like the ones at the wedding.”