by Meg Collett
Clark’s body radiated energy; he barely stood still. She didn’t know if he was excited to start their little adventure, or if he was excited to leave one behind.
“With what?” Clark asked. Michaela never responded. He looked over his shoulder. “What?”
“Stop avoiding my question by asking another question. It’s annoying.”
Clark leaned against the car. “My father kicked me out.”
“Why?”
“Why do you need to know so badly?” Clark smirked. He raised the bottle to his lips for another shot. Instead of going down his throat, it went across his face as Michaela yanked the bottle from his grasp. He opened his mouth to protest.
“I think you’ve had enough. You are a fugitive, and the Descendants are probably hunting you down as we speak. So yeah, I need to know why your father kicked you out.”
“Oh, that’s ripe coming from the actual fugitive who killed an angel,” Clark shot back.
Michaela’s face went blank. Behind her flat, empty eyes staring off toward the woods, she only saw Molloch’s face. Her insides clenched violently. For a moment, she’d forgotten she had killed someone.
“Come on, let’s go,” Clark said, looking at the ground.
Michaela took a long drink from the bottle as Clark walked to the car. He pretended not to notice. A moment later, she settled quietly into the seat next to him as he eased the engine over.
“So what ab—” Clark cut off abruptly when Michaela reached toward his stereo dials.
His hand jerked out and clasped hers. The hairs on his arm stood on end before he quickly released her. She stared at him, eyebrow cocked.
“Okay, we need to go over the rules. First rule: never touch a man’s radio. That’s a 322 watt, thirteen speaker surround sound with a twelve inch subwoofer in the trunk. Second rule: there’s no—hey!”
Michaela hit the power then started twisting different knobs, looking for the radio tuner. There were too many buttons to know what to do with. “Calm down. How do I change the station?” she asked.
Michaela met his glare. Their stare down lasted until the car wrenched into a pothole. Clark cursed and straightened the wheel.
“Use this knob. Just don’t touch any of the settings, okay?”
Clark navigated the twisting service road while Michaela floated from station to station until she finally settled on a local classic rock channel. After twisting the volume down, she settled back into her seat. He reached over and turned it back up.
“I don’t like silence,” he said at her questioning glance.
“Fine. Where are we?”
Michaela rolled down her window so the warm breeze cooled her face as they drove. If she looked close enough, she caught glimpses of a stream through the dense trees. The air smelled clean and fresh beneath the warm summer sun.
“Near Olympia State Forest in Kentucky. It’s close to Lexington. And it’s way outside your fall radius.”
Michaela refused to think about her fall even as the fresh wounds on her back tingled at the memory. She tilted her head back to watch the patches of sky flash through the treetops. A few minutes passed until she realized she daydreamed of flying. With a jerk, she sat upright.
“So what’s your problem with the Descendants?” she asked quickly.
“What makes you think I have a problem with them?”
“Your eyes get hard when you talk about them even though you try to cover it up with a misplaced bad boy attitude.”
“Misplaced? What?” Michaela raised her eyebrows at him, clearly indicating he had not convinced her. Clark stammered on. “Well, uh, I guess it’s just not for me.”
“What is the motto? Duty, honor, and…?”
“Blood. Duty, honor, and blood.” Clark coughed and shifted in his seat.
“It doesn’t sound that bad,” Michaela said.
“You know, it’s not easy being a human in an angel’s war. We try to fly below the fallen’s radar. We don’t interfere or engage them. We just clean up the messes. But it’s still a war. People die. My mom died in a car accident. She was driving my dad’s car when a fallen mistook her for him and ran her off a bridge. The car burned to just a smudge of metal. They didn’t have enough left of her to identify. They had to use her teeth.”
Michaela studied him. She hadn’t expected that. Before, she thought of him as a spoiled Keeper’s kid, trying to prove a point. Clearly she was way off base. She warmed to him some more.
“It sounds like you should hate the fallen, not the Descendants,” she said.
Clark snorted. “I don’t care about the Descendants. I hate my father. He wasn’t even fazed when she died. I was twelve when I lost her, and he told me that many people had lost their lives for this cause. The asshole said it was an honorable way to die.”
“There is no such thing as an honorable death to a twelve-year-old kid.”
“Well, if my father thought it was such a good way to die then he should have been in that car,” Clark said.
“You don’t mean that.”
“Trust me. I do.” Clark took a deep breath.
“It doesn’t seem fair,” Michaela said. She caught Clark’s confused glance, so she continued. “It doesn’t seem fair that you were forced to keep fighting for a cause you had lost faith in just because you were born into it.” She paused then said, “Even the angels get a choice.”
“Hand me the bottle?” He gestured toward the whiskey at Michaela’s feet.
“No, you don’t need it. Is she why you drink so much? I can always smell it in your blood. It never leaves.”
“Some things never do,” Clark answered. “What did you mean when you said there was a darkness in you now?” Clark turned his attention back to the road as he merged onto the highway. “It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it.”
Michaela stared at her hands for a long moment before she spoke. “I see Molloch’s face every time I close my eyes. It’s like he’s always sitting right next to me. I can hear his voice in our conversations. His laughter rings in my ear. I can feel his breath on my skin. He’s a part of me now. A darkness settled in my soul the moment I killed him. I felt it…” Once again Michaela looked back out the window. Her mind was on the snake inside her, and it answered with a rattle of its tail. She shivered.
“Do you think his spirit is like ‘with’ you now?” Clark took a hand off of the wheel to make air quotes.
“Something from him settled in me. But it wasn’t his spirit. He’s gone.”
“To die and haunt the living seems like just another impossible burden,” Clark said mostly to himself.
They drove in silence for a long time. Clark pulled off only once to get food. Hours could have passed, but they didn’t pay attention to the time. The afternoon sun was hot and high in the sky when Clark hit traffic. The cars around him slowed, stop and go, for a few miles and then completely came to an idling halt.
“Wow, this sucks,” Clark said.
“What?” Michaela looked over at Clark.
“Car accident, maybe?” Clark rolled down his window and shouted at the next car over, “Hey, dude. What’s going on?”
A man with a handlebar mustache and a sasquatch hunter hat looked over at Clark. “Greyhound bus turned over. It’s pretty bad. Could be here a while.”
“Thanks, man.” Clark waved. “Gotta love southern hospitality,” he said to Michaela.
“Did he say a bus had overturned?” she asked, perking up. She stuck her head out the air and sniffed. Immediately, she recoiled.
“What did you smell?”
“Death.”
“Ugh,” Clark said, shifting away from his open window.
From what Michaela had smelled out the window, the accident was horrible. She imagined the number of souls that would be carried to their judgment.
“Well, doesn’t look like we’re going anywhere anytime soon.” Michaela ignored him. Her mind settled on one thought alone.
Souls.
A piece of the puzzle settled into place.
The humans will win this war. They will be my army.
Lucifer said it even though it was a preposterous thing to say. The war would be won as wars are won: with blood, apathy, bitter victories, brutal losses, and now—death. Clark was right, there was no place for humans among the angels’ war.
Yet Lucifer wouldn’t have spoken the words if they hadn’t meant something to him. His words had sat in Michaela’s mind, waiting for her to truly hear them. Finally, she did. Realizing Lucifer might be using the holy angel’s unrest to take advantage of the souls made Michaela instantly sick. He had said he would take Earth and Heaven from her. He was planning something. She struggled to breathe.
Lucifer had been baiting her. He knew if the fallen had involved the souls in one of their plans then she would have to do something. He was probably enjoying a good laugh thinking about her running around on holy angel errands when she clearly wasn’t holy anymore.
“How far away is it?” Michaela glanced at Clark, chewing her lip.
“The accident?” Michaela nodded. “It’s hard to say. Maybe a couple miles?”
“We need to go there.”
“Why?” Clark asked.
“To see Loki,” Michaela answered quietly.
Deciding to turn herself in hadn’t felt like betraying her promise to Gabe, but this did. He wouldn’t want her even going and talking to Loki. But Loki was the only angel who would know if Lucifer was taking advantage of the souls.
“So why are we going to see the Angel of Death?”
18
Twenty-seven minutes later, Clark and Michaela were still stuck in traffic and no closer to the accident. Michaela was growing impatient, but traffic was stopped on either side of the interstate as far as Clark could see. From the looks of the people reclined in their seats with their cars turned off, no one was going anywhere anytime soon. Clark turned off the Chevelle.
“So tell me again why you think Lucifer is taking souls or whatever.”
“He said something to me in the cave. It’s just a hunch, but I need to check it out before we go to the Descendants,” Michaela said.
“Well, we can probably hoof it from here.”
Michaela grabbed a UK baseball cap out of his backseat. She pulled it low on her head and put on his extra pair of sunglasses.
“Very stealthy. Uh, what are you doing?”
Michaela had upturned the bottle of whiskey, letting the amber liquid pool in her hand. She dabbed it around her throat and on the backs of her wrists. Then she ran her fingers through her hair.
“There might be a lot of angels around, and I don’t want anyone to smell me,” she answered as she got out of the car.
“Oh, they’re gonna smell you all right,” Clark said, putting on a hat too just in case. He caught up to her, and they joined the trickling stream of rubberneckers walking farther up the road to get a better view of the carnage.
“Why a car accident?” Clark asked.
“Anything where a large amount of people are injured or dying,” Michaela answered.
Clark cringed. “That’s kind of twisted.”
“Wherever there are souls, Loki will be there.”
“Do you not like him?”
“How did you know?” Michaela glanced at Clark.
“Your eyes get hard when you talk about him.” Michaela’s eyes were hidden behind her sunglasses, but Clark could still tell she narrowed them at him. He smirked.
“He just worries me. As the Angel of Death, he’s neither a holy nor fallen angel, because he takes all the souls. He has no allegiance, and that seems dangerous to me. He’s just stuck in the middle,” Michaela said.
“Sounds normal to me.” At Michaela’s bewildered expression, he continued. “Think about it. You’re kind of stuck in the middle right now too. I’m in between for sure. We might get along better with him than you think.”
Michaela frowned, and Clark thought she didn’t want to consider getting along with the Angel of Death.
A mile and a half later, Clark was deeply resenting the Kentucky heat when he caught sight of the flashing lights. Cops barricaded the road against the people and reporters who craned their necks in an attempt to see blood and crumpled metal. Ambulances and fire trucks lined the median and shoulder. The smell of spilled fuel and fire burned Clark’s nose. An uneasy quiver upset his stomach at being so close to death.
Michaela didn’t notice the chaos beyond the barricades as she scanned the crowds for Loki. Clark joined in on the search just for something to do other than think about why none of the ambulances were racing off toward a hospital. He had no idea what Loki looked like, so it surprised him when he caught sight of a very out-of-place angel wandering through the edges of destruction around the wreck.
He nudged Michaela. “Is that him?”
Clark nodded toward the tall, disconcertingly skinny angel amongst the police and firemen. Michaela followed his gaze and looked surprised when she recognized the angel too.
“How can you see him?” she asked, failing to hide her shock, which Clark took slight offense to.
“With my eyes.”
She stared at him a moment longer, searching his face. “Humans aren’t supposed to see the Angel of Death,” she said before she leaned in and sniffed him.
He recoiled, but she had already walked off toward the edge of the crowd. He lifted an arm and smelled his armpit before following her, feeling assured he didn’t smell that bad.
Clark reached Michaela right as she whistled so loud his eardrum popped. The people closest to them cringed and shot Michaela nasty glares. Clark massaged his ear and swore.
Loki turned at the sound, staring straight at Michaela, who lifted her chin in a slight greeting. Clark squinted at the Angel of Death, preparing a joke about how nerdy he looked, when Loki disappeared. Clark blinked, and Loki reappeared right in front of them with a cool smile and a glinting smirk in his green eyes.
Clark jerked in surprise, which caused the angel to acknowledge him.
“Loki, this is—”
Loki reached up, placing his hands on their shoulders, and suddenly they were in the woods. Clark could just make out the scene on the road, where he had just been standing through the thinner branches of the woods where they were now. His breakfast bubbled in his stomach, making him burp a little, but that was it, considering he’d just teleported.
“Well, Michaela, I can honestly say that I am pleasantly surprised to see you,” Loki said in a voice that perfectly suited his overall sketchiness in Clark’s opinion. Loki looked at Michaela like he felt something more than surprise at seeing her. Clark instantly didn’t like the angel.
“No one’s buying that Loki. As I was saying before, this is Clark. He recognized you,” Michaela said.
Clark didn’t know what the big deal was, but Loki looked at him quizzically, his mouth still twisting into a slightly naughtier version of a normal smile. “He saw me before I appeared in front of you?”
“Clear as day,” Clark said.
“Let me do the talking,” Michaela said to Clark before she added, “He’s a human.”
“Really? I thought he was a fairy with that hair.” Loki leaned over and sniffed Clark. “Are you the one who smells so bad? I detect whiskey. Jack Daniels, perhaps?”
Clark opened his mouth, but Michaela cut him off. “Loki, I need to ask you a question, and I need you to be straight with me.”
“Of course. Whatever you need. But first, I have to ask, how are you doing?”
Clark didn’t hear concern in Loki’s voice. The angel’s eyes drifted over Michaela’s shoulders where her wings should have been. He shook his head. The expression on his face was sad, but his eyes still gleamed with mischief.
“I’m fine,” Michaela said shortly. “What would you say if I said it will be the humans who will win this war for the fallen?”
“I would say that someone is definitely thinking outside the box. And if I
had to guess, I would say that someone is our dear friend, Lucifer.”
Michaela leaned forward. “What is he up to?”
“So you figured out you were set up then?” Loki asked with a wide grin.
“How would you know that?” Michaela asked, taken aback.
“It’s hard to get a lot by the Angel of Death.” Loki grinned, revealing sharp, blindingly white teeth. “Especially when it involves the souls. Things would go awry quickly if both the holy and fallen angels didn’t include me in their little plots.”
Michaela gritted her teeth. “I know Lucifer is up to something with the souls. I don’t know why he set me up.” She took a deep breath. “Please, just tell me. Why is Lucifer doing this?”
The grin slowly slipped from Loki’s face. Everything slid away until his features were nothing but a blank canvas. Suddenly, he burst out with a bark of laughter, making both Michaela and Clark jump. His grin was back, but this time it looked slightly wild. His eyes danced wolfishly.
“Oh, so you don’t know.” Loki shook his head at Michaela. “You still think it was the fallen who set you up.”
“What are you talking about, Loki?” Michaela’s words were careful, deliberately even.
“It wasn’t the fallen who framed you for the invasion of Heaven.” His smile stretched from ear to ear as he spoke, like he savored every word.
“Don’t play games with me.” Michaela’s words were hisses. “If it wasn’t the fallen who set me up then who did?”
Her question was too much for Loki. Clark watched, shocked, as the angel doubled over and his shoulders shook, his body vibrated. The angel threw back his head and howled with laughter.
“Don’t laugh at me.”
Loki was still laughing as he managed to speak. “Oh, Michaela. You’re a real peach, you know that?”
“What are you saying?” Michaela asked. Clark would have put his hand on her arm to reassure her if he didn’t think she would rip it off.
“What do you think I’m saying?” Loki asked when he finally leveled his gaze on her.
“Loki, you owe me,” Michaela said quietly. Clark heard the threat in the words. Nervously, he glanced back to Loki, who still looked to be in good humor.
