by S. L. Naeole
He was right, and understanding swept through me as I realized that he’d been faithful to the angels, even if he had left his family behind. He couldn’t escape being an electus patronus anymore than I could escape being the daughter of one. Even if he wasn’t bound by a family vow sworn centuries ago, he was still be bound by his own vow, by his own conscience.
I hugged him. Fiercely, proudly, lovingly. He was my dad, he was the most firmly rooted part of me, and he was my hero.
“I love you.”
“Kiddo, I love you too.”
When I released him, he handed the bag over to me and I carefully pulled the removed the ring. It was identical to my mom’s ring; identical except for the etchings on the side. This one looked as though the etchings were moving, an illusion that was mesmerizing.
“Do you see that?” I breathed, holding the ring up to Dad’s eyes. The antiqued engraving on the face of the ring looked like waves, rolling and crashing against its edges. But these weren’t static waves, they pushed and pulled, flowing and licking at the surface like black water.
“Put the ring down, Grace,” dad ordered.
“What? But it’s just a ring-”
I gasped in shock when dad’s hand slashed through the air, slapping the silver circle from my fingers. The sound of it skating across the wooden floor tailed my surprise, and I stared at dad with incredulous eyes.
“That ring…it isn’t just a ring.”
I opened my mouth to object but dad’s eyes narrowed, his furious expression undoing whatever decision I had to. “That ring is a curse.”
“A curse?”
“I told you, Grace…remember? I told you that being one of us has its price. This ring belonged to an EP. It’s a claim of ownership, a brand that can only be removed upon death. I have one, too.” He held up his hand and I saw the pinky ring on his right hand as if for the first time. “You know where that ring came from, don’t you?”
I knew. Of course I knew. Images, memories of a scarred tree that had been burned into the chest and belly of my teacher filled my vision. “Yes.”
“It came from your teacher, didn’t it?”
I nodded. “I didn’t know until last night—she told me…she told me what Mom’s call was.”
I had hoped that Dad knew what I’d learned. I had hoped that he’d be able to deny it or confirm it, something. Instead, he looked at me with baited breath, waiting.
“You don’t know, do you?”
When his head shook, when his eyes were as clear as day and held no dishonesty in them, I suddenly felt alone. I couldn’t tell Dad that he had been married to Death—not after his reaction to learning about Robert. Dad’s faith in my mother had already been shaken and I couldn’t destroy what was left. My memories might now be tainted, but his didn’t need to be.
“I can’t tell you, Dad. I can’t tell you what Mel told me. I don’t know if I can believe what she said, and now I can’t question her, which means it doesn’t matter what she told me.”
“Grace, if this ring was hers then the angel whom she was bound to—her charge—is a dark one, and she was probably lying to you.”
“I realize that now. She told me she had been part of a family like yours—serving the dark ones—but she chose to swear her loyalty to others. Now I see that she was lying.”
I felt disgusted.
“Grace, I need to get back to Matthew—I left him with the Kims-”
“The Kims?” Another shock.
“Yes. Mr. and Mrs. Kim were at the house. They were clearing out some of Stacy’s things and had brought over a box for you when the police called. They offered to take Matthew with them while I stayed at the hospital with you. I told them that I’d pick him up tonight so that we could be with Janice—I’m already late.”
I looked towards the stairs, wondering if Stacy had heard what he’d said, and then returned my gaze to his, not wanting him to grow suspicious. “I guess you’d better go then.”
“I don’t want to leave you here, Grace.”
“I’ll be fine, Dad.”
He shook his head and reached for my hand. “No, you won’t. I’m not upset that you left with Robert, but I am upset that after removing you from the safety of the hospital, he left you alone again. You’re not safe here—not alone.”
“She’s not alone.”
Dad’s head rose, and I turned, silently groaning at the voice that spoke behind me. “Lem. I wasn’t aware that you were here.”
“Me either,” I muttered under my breath.
“I apologize for that. Actually, I apologize for a lot of things. I should have been there with you, Grace. If I had, you would not have been injured, and your teacher would still be alive.”
“You nearly cost me my daughter,” Dad seethed. “Why should I trust that you’ll keep her safe this time? Why should I trust you when it was your son who tried to kill me, who killed my wife and our baby? Your negligence nearly cost me Grace. You don’t deserve my trust.”
“Dad-”
Lem’s hand rose to stop me, and he looked at Dad with a pitying expression on his face. “James, I know you do not hold me in high esteem, and I do not blame you for it. Humans tend to take out their frustrations by blaming anyone and anything else, but let me remind you that you chose to marry Avi and have children with her, and doing so demands consequences that you cannot deny you were aware of.
“If it hadn’t been Samael, it would have been someone else—we cannot shirk our obligations to our call and to our own laws. It doesn’t mean we agree with them—or like them—but what you fail to realize is that as much as it was my son who harmed Grace, he was also Avi’s son, and she accepted the price she had to pay for loving you.”
Everything happened so quickly after that. I saw the thoughts in my dad’s eyes—it was as though I could read them there—and I moved, my body blocking the lunging attack that sent dad racing forward, his fist held back in a kinetic swing that I absorbed in the fleshy plank of my arm, the sound of his shocked and dismayed cry deafening my own.
“Grace! Why—why would you do that?” he asked as he cradled me, my arm lying limply across me while my chest rose up and down with erratic breathing, a lame attempt to control the pain.
“You would-you would have-broken-your-hand,” I panted. “You can’t just go on hitting angels, Dad. Trust me—I know.”
“I don’t care if he’s an angel—some guys need a good punch to the jaw,” Dad growled. “You weren’t good enough for Abby and you knew it.”
“It’s true,” Lem conceded with a nonchalant tip of his head. “But no matter how undeserving I might have been, I, at least, am an angel. Regardless of your family’s lineage, you were never worthy of being with her—Avi was a Seraph—pure in her existence and untainted by generation. You had no right to be with her, and you know it.”
I waited for Dad’s reply, but as Lem’s words sunk in, Dad’s shoulders just…sank. “You’re right,” he sighed sadly. “I had no right to be with her. Love can make you see past all of the wrong and fool you into believing that everything done in its name is right. If I had had the guts to refuse Sam, she’d be alive today. She would not have sacrificed another person to save her own life. She would not have done what I did.”
“Of course not—she was divine. You should feel thankful that no part of you exists in your daughter and that only Avi’s blood runs through her veins.”
“That’s a messed up thing to say,” I ground out, “He’s my dad—everything that I am is because of him.”
“Grace, everything that you are, you are because of Ameila and your mother. Your father has about as much to do with your existence as a fly does to a hurricane.”
I felt my mouth pull into a tight line. He was speaking biology, as though that were all that it took to raise a child. Biology could create, but without nurturing, without love, without a foundation, nothing could thrive.
I finally understood why Sam was the way he was. He had a father, he had
a mother, but there was nothing else for him. Not from Lem, anyway. Lying there in my father’s arms, staring at Lem’s stoic face, I found myself feeling sorry for my brother, and for his father. If only Sam had had a dad who could look at him as something more than an obligation. If only Lem had realized just how important being a part of your child’s life was.
“Dad, could you let me up?”
Easing me into a sitting position, dad braced me as I stood, my legs sturdy, even as the pain in my arm sent rockets of stabbing discomfort through me. “You told me you loved my mother. If you had loved her son half as much as you did her, he might have turned into a much better person.”
“You don’t understand, Grace—how we feel is how we’re supposed to feel. If we were meant to love our children, we would.”
My head swung from side-to-side in gentle denial. “You keep using that as an excuse to explain away your actions, your feelings, but I know different. You might have a call you have to follow, laws you have to obey, but there is no law that says you have to feel a certain way about anyone. If there were, I’d be forced to hate you because of who you are, but I don’t. I don’t hate you at all.”
“You’re human; that’s how you’re supposed to feel.”
“But you just said that my father had nothing to do with my existence,” I reminded him. “You can’t pick and choose what I am when it’s convenient to your needs, Lem. And being what I am, it gives me the ability to see that everything that angels believe about emotions is wrong.
“You don’t fall in love with who you’re supposed to—love just happens. It’s not a definite; it’s not something that you plan for, that you see up ahead. When it happens, it catches you by surprise and becomes a part of you, like scar. It might fade, but it never leaves you, and will remind you for the rest of your life just what caused it.”
Lem’s mouth surrounded itself in brackets, and he gazed down at me with an almost condescending stare. “What you forget, Grace, is that angels don’t scar.”
“Yes, you do,” I said in retort. “You do scar. You scar in the way most visible. Every time you talk about my mother, you prove it.”
An awkward silence took over, and I stood between these two men, two men who had both loved my mother, but only one had had the fortune to be loved back. If nothing else proved to me that love wasn’t a path you could deviate from, it was knowing that my mother had fallen in love with my father.
He was everything that she could not have, and yet she could do nothing but love him. Being with him had cost her life, something she sacrificed willingly. Angels could choose. My mother had chosen my father. Robert had chosen me.
“Grace, I want you to come home with me,” Dad said in a low voice behind me.
“I’m staying here, Dad. Robert will return soon. And…I trust Lem. I know you don’t—you don’t have a reason to—but I have no reason not to. I can’t blame him for Sam’s actions anymore than I can blame Mom. I blame her for a lot of things, but not that.”
“I don’t think this is a smart idea, Grace.”
“I know you don’t, but it’s my decision.”
With severe reluctance in his eyes, doubt still lingering in lines that puckered his forehead, he nodded. “If that’s what you want.”
“It is.”
“Your arm-”
“Will be fine,” I reassured him. “Robert will be back soon, like I said, and he’ll heal it.”
Dad’s eyes suddenly dropped to the floor, scanning the wooden surface quickly. “I need to find that ring.”
Lem’s head perked up then. “Ring?”
“Yes. It was found with Grace after her accident.” Dad made that last word sound like an expletive, and I winced at the connotation in it.
“Dad, don’t worry about. We’ll find it later. You go and get Matthew and see Janice.” I used my uninjured arm to turn Dad around, and walked with him outside.
“I still don’t like this, Grace,” he warned. “And after what happened between you two, I would think Robert wouldn’t like it either.”
I understood his concern—I had to admit that I shared them—but I knew that Dad wouldn’t be able to contain his dislike for Lem, just as Lem wouldn’t be able to keep himself from being brutally honest with Dad, and there had already been too much violence between our families.
“It’ll be alright,” I assured him. “Call me when you get Matthew. And kiss him for me.”
Always the father, he found the little girl in me and wrapped me up in his arms, his embrace feeling every bit as strong and protective as I had remembered it all those years ago when he told me that Mom had died. “I will. I love you, kiddo. It doesn’t matter what anyone else says—you’re my little girl, and I love you.”
“I love you too, Dad. Everything inside of me that’s good, I got from you—I don’t care what anyone else says either.”
He let me go, a reluctant and far too beleaguered release, and then walked away, entering his car with a heavy weight bearing down on him that made his leaving much more difficult to bear than anything he’d probably ever done. I could hear his thoughts, as if he were saying them to me out loud.
Dear God, let her live so that I may see her one last time. Let me be able to say goodbye.
I swiped away a lone tear as he pulled away. Truth was, I didn’t want to say goodbye. I didn’t want to see him one last time. I wasn’t an angel—I wasn’t a human being either—so why did I have to follow either’s rules?
DEPARTURE
I returned to the house to see Lem still standing where I had left him. He gave me the same look he always did, the one that told me how deeply perplexed he was that he couldn’t read my thoughts the way Robert could. I closed the door behind me and headed towards the stairs.
“Stacy,” I called. “You can come down now; my dad’s gone.”
“She’s not here,” Lem informed me casually. “She left as soon as she heard what your father said about her parents. She’ll be back though. She didn’t realize that the police and your father would be gone so soon.”
I bit my lip and frowned. Lem saw this, and immediately knew the reason for my reaction. “You only told your father that you were fine being with me because you thought your friend was here.”
My cheeks went scarlet from embarrassment, the truth not needing me to validate it in any way. He smiled and shook his head. “I’m sorry for what happened between us, Grace. It was my fault.”
I wanted to let him take the blame for it, but I couldn’t. He hadn’t really done anything wrong. Not really. “It wasn’t entirely your fault. I could’ve stopped you—I should’ve stopped you—but I didn’t, and the blame lies mostly with me.”
“You’re wrong on that part,” he said softly, his eyes taking on a kinder, gentler light. “You couldn’t have stopped me. I was acting on foolish impulse. I did not stop to think about the consequences that you’d be faced with; the guilt that you’d feel over it.”
“I’ve faced my guilt, and I told Robert about what happened.”
He nodded. “I know. He was very…charitable about everything.”
His tone seemed mocking, and I felt annoyed by this. “He was very understanding, and he even tried to take the blame for it, but I wouldn’t let him. He’s too good of a person to accept the responsibility of actions he had nothing to do with. And that’s not charity, Lem. That’s loving someone so much that you want to take the hurt away from them, no matter what it means.”
“You’re so adorable when you’re naïve,” he smiled. “He loves you; that is not in dispute. But why he accepted the blame for what we did, and what you felt, had nothing to do with love, and everything to do with trying to keep the peace. Starting a battle with me because I kissed his human girlfriend is no way to keep his life, Grace. Or have you forgotten that he has yet to be handed down a punishment for killing your brother?”
My intake of breath was sharp—razor sharp. “You would hold that over his head?”
“
No. I would never do such a thing, but N’Uriel is young, and has been around man for much longer than he’s been around his own kind, and the poisonous seeds of man’s doubt can stain his intentions with the worst sort of meaning.”
“He’s over fifteen-hundred years old,” I snorted. “You’re acting like he just met us or something.”
With a grace and elegance that was completely foreign to me, Lem walked towards me and tilted my chin up with a long, lean finger. “And I’m over ten-thousand years old. I’ve seen the birth of civilizations, and watched them burn into ashes. I’ve seen the creation of species that have given man dreams and nightmares, and seen the extinction of others that have caused much guilt and strife amongst mankind. Your perception of time is localized by your experience and your mortality. My perception travels beyond just years. It travels through light, and sound, and darkness.”
He turned away and headed towards the kitchen. I followed him, though I don’t know why. I simply felt my feet moving in time with his, shuffling in an ungainly way until I was standing at the kitchen counter with my hands placed atop of it, my palms flat, my fingers splayed. He began to assemble a plate of food in front of me, his movements nimble in ways that I simply could never be.
“Eat,” he commanded, just as my stomach began to grumble.
Listening not to him, but to the gurgling deep inside of me, I sat down on one of the stools and picked up a piece of melon he’d wrapped in slice of ham with my uninjured hand. It tasted…otherworldly.
“You think I’m the devil, don’t you?” he asked while he watched me eat.
I shook my head, my mouth too full and too occupied to allow anything else but a guttural murmur. This brought out a chuckle from him, and I smiled, even as I continued chewing.
