by Meg Collett
A rising.
A reckoning.
An ending.
* * *
Gabriel felt her die. He’d listened for her heartbeat, yet it took him a second to realize he hadn’t heard it beat it again. She was limp in his arms, pouring like water through his hold. Her burning blue eyes closed. Her eyelashes stood starkly black against her pale cheeks.
The sound he made wasn’t a scream or a yell or a shout. It was something ripping loose from deep inside him. It was a manifestation of all his fears. It was a prayer for his own end.
Later, Uriel would say Gabriel’s anguished cry was the sound the End of Days would have made had Michaela not stood strong against Abel. It tore through Uriel’s ears and shriveled her soul. It was a sound only an angel could make, because only an angel could know that kind of pain.
But Gabriel fell, his wings curling like a dying leaf in fall around his and Michaela’s body. He shielded them from the world and begged to be taken with her.
He didn’t feel anything anymore. The pain was so absolute, it consumed him. It consumed him and freed him.
He willed his heart to stop with all his might. He held his breath and commanded himself to die.
44
“What the hell is that?”
Clark looked at everyone sitting around the table. They’d been discussing possibilities for stitching the world back together when a terrible shrieking filled the air. Everyone looked around, confused.
Ophaniel and Zarachiel froze at the exact same second. They knew. Clark’s heart hammered. He knew. Iris gasped. She knew.
“Oh, shit.”
Clark’s words were lost in the scraping, scrambling race to the cabin’s door. They burst outside, clamoring down the steps. Four heads looked up. Horror filled their guts at the same moment.
A swarming black cloud descended upon them. But in front of that crowd was a screaming Uriel. She waved her arms and shouted like a banshee racing straight from Hell.
“What is she saying?” Clark asked.
The onslaught was still too far up in the sky to tell. Clark squinted his eyes at the other pair of angels flying down. He frowned. They weren’t flying; they were falling. Clark could just make out the streaming black hair, like a silken ribbon twisting in the wind.
Iris gasped and clenched his arm. Clark strung together a powerful set of curse words.
“She’s saying for you to stop them!” Ophaniel shouted, pointing up to the sky. She clung to Zarachiel’s arm.
Just then, Clark was able to hear Uriel, too, which meant the falling angels were too close.
“Catch them!” Uriel shrieked. “Stop them!”
Clark saw plainly now. Uriel was a fast flyer, but she couldn’t catch up to Gabriel and Michaela, who fell faster than any speed Clark had ever seen before. He swore again and flung up his hands.
Clark threw all his focus into stopping the angels. All his concentration went into buffering the air around them, gelling it to slow them down. Uriel’s screams became unintelligible as Clark lost himself to casting his magic.
The angels were perilously close to the ground now. Clark plainly saw Michaela’s limp form, the way her arm hung listlessly above her. Gabriel clung to her, like he could smash their bodies together. And above them both, reaching and straining and screaming, was Uriel.
Clark’s arms trembled. A bead of sweat rolled down his forehead like a creeping, tiny bug. It slipped down his nose and onto his cheek. He couldn’t tell if he was slowing Gabriel and Michaela enough.
All this happened in seconds that stretched into eternity for Clark. He watched as they were just above the tree line, crashing much too fast to the ground. Using every ounce of strength he had, Clark sent out another powerful wave. He yelled, his body vibrating with the energy.
Finally, he saw their bodies slow, but it wasn’t enough. He followed their path all the way down, slowing them as much as he could. When they hit the ground, it shook the earth like a mini earthquake. Those standing around Clark stumbled, but Clark fell to his knees, a splitting headache cracking open his skull.
Uriel hit the ground with a mighty crack. A crater tore into the earth out of which Uriel launched herself. Everyone rushed toward Michaela and Gabriel. Clark was the last to arrive.
They formed a tight circle above the entwined pair of angels. Neither moved, but only one breathed. Michaela’s stillness was absolute, her face peaceful and graceful. Only her hair drifted in the breeze, brushing against Gabriel’s face.
It was too late. Michaela was gone.
“No,” Ophaniel sobbed, falling to her knees. Her featherlike hair covered Michaela’s hand as Ophaniel bent over it, kissing the skin.
Iris stood, her face in her hands, quietly crying. Zarachiel pulled Uriel into his arms as he watched the scene before them.
Gabriel sat up from the ground. His face held a blankness that only sheer, cataclysmic devastation could cause. Clark thought him dead, but seeing him now as he cradled Michaela’s body like he was the one dying, Clark regretted Gabriel hadn’t been. Death would have spared him this awful, consuming pain.
Clark pressed through the angels and sank down across from Gabriel. Their knees touched, Michaela filling the space between them. Gabriel lifted his eyes to meet Clark’s.
“Heal her,” Gabriel begged, his voice a twisted, ruined shadow. It was the sound of falling deep into a black pit and never meeting the ground. That whoosh of falling, plummeting, endlessly falling. “Save her.”
Clark tore his gaze away from Gabriel. His hand trembled as he reached out to touch Michaela’s skin. It was icy cold, icy death. Clark pinched his eyes closed and swallowed his cry. He pressed her shoulder up and looked at her back.
It was a ruined pit. They’d hacked open her skin down to her bones. For once, the gruesome sight didn’t make Clark gag. It made him step into the bottomless black pit behind Gabriel. Flecks of gold caught the fading light. The gold was everywhere, coating every surface along her cracked bones and torn muscles.
“Please,” Gabriel said again, his voice a whisper in the shifting breeze. Only Clark heard his plea.
He looked back up at the broken angel still alive before him. “Gabe,” Clark said, using Michaela’s name for him. “She’s gone.”
“No,” Gabriel mewed. He buried his head in the crook of Michaela’s neck and sobbed. It was the song of the brokenhearted, the ruined hearted, the nevermore and never again hearted.
Clark couldn’t hold it back anymore. The strength wasn’t there. The tears slipped down his cheeks.
The fallen angels gathered around the group, creating a circle. They lined up in the thousands upon thousands, spreading deep into the trees and far beyond. They dropped to one knee, the sound a unified soft thump against the hard ground. Thousands of heads bowed to the clink of armor.
Gabriel whispered something Clark didn’t understand, and he didn’t try. The words were a private, loving token not meant to be heard by anyone else. It sounded like goodbye.
Michaela was dead.
Clark worked on convincing himself of the fact with the sound of wings filled the air above him. It wasn’t numerous wings, but one giant, massive, thundering pair of wings. The feathers glinted and fractured the light, sending prisms of bright pinpricks across the ground, catching Clark’s attention before he looked upward.
“Loki,” someone whispered.
The Angel of Death had come to take Michaela’s soul.
Clark shook his head. No, that wasn’t right. Nothing happened to angels after they died. Their souls dissipated into the air. If the angel had wings, if they were whole. Michaela wasn’t.
Loki settled on the ground between the fallen and the group gathered around Michaela. His wings stretched nearly twenty feet on either side, and he was a tiny blip in between, a shrunken afterthought. Clark never would have recognized his sallow, wan form if not for the announcement of his arrival.
“Loki,” Iris said, her voice shaken. “What are you
doing here?”
Loki ignored them all. He crouched beside Gabriel. “Give her to me.”
Gabriel didn’t hear. He didn’t look up or even move. He continued whispering into Michaela’s ear.
“Give her to me, Gabriel,” Loki said. He sounded like a crack of thunder across the skies. Gabriel looked up, startled.
“No.” Gabriel’s grip tightened around Michaela.
“What are you going to do?” Ophaniel asked Loki, her eyes wide and terrified. “Why isn’t she turning to feathers?”
“Because,” Loki said, his voice returning to normal, “She isn’t an angel like you anymore. She is the in-between. She is the thing none of you are strong enough to be. She is more than a death of vanishing feathers.”
“What is she?” Zarachiel asked, stepping forward. Uriel clung to his arms, looking wasted and spent. Her eyes were flooded with tears as she stared at Michaela.
“She is Death.” Loki wrenched Michaela from Gabriel’s hold, which loosened in his surprise. He reared up, ready to fight, ready to kill, but Zarachiel surged forward with speed and strength, catching Gabriel around his throat and chest.
“Hold on, Gabriel,” Zarachiel whispered. “Let’s see what he’s going to do.”
Clark stepped after Loki, but he didn’t dare approach where the angel laid Michaela out on the ground like she was being presented at a funeral. Loki fanned her hair out across the earth and crossed her hands over her chest. Meticulously, he arranged her tattered, bloody clothes.
She looked like a saint. She needed a boat full of flowers and tokens and a large sea in front of her to float on. She needed an arrow lit with fire blazing across the night sky. She needed a death befitting her.
“Thank you,” Loki said, leaning over Michaela. He stroked her face. “You’ve done what only you could do. What needed to be done.”
Loki kissed her forehead, both her cheeks, and her mouth. It was reverent, a physical prayer across her skin. Zarachiel loosened his hold on Gabriel. Everyone watched in wonder.
Loki slid a medallion hidden beneath his dark clothes from his neck. It was a black medal hanging from a thin, gold chain. Clark was close enough to see the outline of a city skyline on the medal with a massive angel stretching its wings across the city. Clark knew that symbol.
“Thank you,” Loki said, placing the chain around Michaela’s head and settling the medallion perfectly in the center of her chest. “For setting me free.”
He laid a perfect, gleaming red petal above the medallion and bowed his head.
His feathers wiggled and rustled. Whispering filled the air. The fallen angels stepped back. Everyone shifted away as the feathers freed themselves from their bindings on Loki’s wings. Their soft plumes transformed into razor-sharp edges as they broke off. Like a shard broken from the blackest crystal, they spiraled up into the air. On and on it went, until Loki and Michaela were encased in crystalline webbing like a giant spider web.
It trembled, emitting a soft hum around their bodies. The other angels backed away even more, because the souls reached out to them, grasping their hearts in fists and squeezing. Clark was the only one who stayed close to the structure. He fell to his knees beneath the onslaught of the souls, which vibrated like wondrous, deadly chimes in the wind. Their humming grew loud enough to press painfully against his eardrums.
He was close enough to hear when Loki spoke.
“Life could never exist without Death, just as Light could never exist without Dark. There is only Holy because Fallen exist.” Loki pressed his hand against the medallion on Michaela’s chest. Beneath the strength of his hand, the medallion tore through Michaela’s chest, bowing the bones until they cracked and snapped.
“Many have their fates and their sides. Many are only Light or only Dark. Many will never be the Only.”
The black crystals reached a piercing hum, forcing Clark to cover his ears. A trickle of blood ran from his nose. Just when he thought he couldn’t bear it anymore, the humming stopped abruptly. A second later, the crystals shattered into a million pieces, completely hiding Loki and Michaela. Gabriel jerked forward as the pieces of crystal catapulted to the ground, sinking straight through as if the frozen earth was air.
Clark uncovered his ears, wiping the blood off his face. Loki was gone, but Clark still heard his voice.
“I was the one in between since the creation of this world. It was my fate to never belong, to always walk the gray area. I did what many couldn’t, because it needed to be done. Because with Life is Death, and the Angel of Death was born of need.”
Michaela’s body started to hum, her fingers vibrating as if the earth under her was shaking.
“But I am not the only one anymore.” Clark could almost hear the smile in Loki’s voice as if the former Loki of jokes and sly grins was being reborn. “And lucky for you, Michaela, there only needs to be one.”
Michaela’s eyes flew open, her mouth gasping in a silent scream. Her eyes were a wild, electric blue, her skin luminescent. Clark shielded his face as Michaela struggled, fighting to free herself, as if the ground had a grip on her. Her arms and legs kicked and fought. Her body flickered in and out of existence, like an old movie reel skipping frames.
“You are the Angel of Death,” Loki whispered, his voice an echo.
Michaela screamed. The ground beneath her shoulders buckled and heaved. The ground itself groaned beneath her as she struggled and flailed. No one moved to help her; no one could shake their astonishment.
With a mighty heave, she wrenched herself from the earth. It tore, cracking and tumbling beneath her as two giant wings emerged. Dirt spilled off the gleaming, pure gold feathers. Her legs were no longer weak beneath her, her eyes no longer haunted by darkness. Michaela marveled at her restored body as if she was waking up for the first time. She spread her wings wide and stretched out each feather, her eyes fluttering closed at the sensation.
She looked up, her eyes a blinding, pure blue. A smile twisted across her lips.
The Angel of Death.
45
Six months later, Clark grunted and swatted away the feathers tickling his nose. The alarm clock blared next to him, searing his brain and ruining any hopes of becoming a morning person. He slammed his hand onto the snooze button, sending the clock crashing to the floor.
Camille didn’t even stir as Clark shoved her wing off him and rose from the bed. The sheet was bunched around her legs, exposing her bare ass and smooth, porcelain skin. She was beautiful, but annoying as hell. Clark raked his hand over his face and through his hair with a heavy sigh.
He was hung over, because some things never change. His Mohawk was still pink, and he still dressed like a poor rocker. But he liked to think he’d matured since coming back to the Descendants’ compound to be the leader of the Nephilim. Liam was still the Keeper of the Descendants, but Clark kept an office and residence on the premises since the Nephilim communities and Descendants had come together to help the humans.
He crossed the small apartment that had once been his father’s and turned on the coffee pot in the kitchen. As he waited for it to brew, he looked out the wide picture window. It was winter now, and the fields were dead, but next spring they’d bloom with renewed life, bearing the seeds Clark had spent countless hours shipping in from France. The Descendants and Nephilim had built greenhouses and irrigation systems for next year’s farming. The little Kentucky town had become a refugee camp and the nation’s capital all in one. Thousands of survivors flocked to the compound, begging for food and refuge.
It was long hours and brutal work to create a life for the refugees, but Clark was proud of it. He’d found his missing piece, and it wasn’t Michaela. The work he did here satisfied him, and he found that he loved helping people. Whether he liked it or not, his powers helped. More and more he learned how to wield them in new ways. It was a slow process, but Clark was trying.
He hadn’t seen Michaela since the day she’d become of the Angel of Death. Her life was differen
t now, her time devoted to the souls. He tried not to think about her too much, but what she’d said to him before she left was always on his mind. Before she’d returned to Heaven, she’d made him promise to save himself and to find his happiness and his love.
The coffee finished brewing, and he poured himself a cup before he went into the dining room. The large table was covered in books and papers. A map of the town was held down in the corners by half-full tumblers of whiskey. He and Zarachiel had been up late last night plotting plans for new fields and buildings.
He sat in a chair and kicked his legs up on the table as he wondered if he’d kept his promise to Michaela. His happiness was this place, this land. He loved restoring the people and showing them how his magic and the angels could help them instead of hurt them. He was renewing an old way of life that made him proud. He could think of his father and know Isaac would have loved to see his son now.
There was also a unique contentment in being surrounded by the people he loved, like Iris and Zarachiel, who was a great farmer and Clark’s best friend. The Archangel had his own demons like Clark; Uriel had left Zarachiel months ago, choosing to return to Heaven instead of begging Zarachiel to restore his wings.
Sometimes, as they worked together, a heavy silence would fall over them. Clark never asked, but their thoughts likely returned to a similar place. There, Clark saw her with her long black hair and blazing blue eyes. Zarachiel probably thought of wings and flying and glittering spires.
Clark finished his coffee with another gulp. He sat the cup on the table, instantly forgetting about it. Camille turned on the shower in the bathroom, causing the ancient pipes to vibrate and squeal within the walls. That was his cue. Clark hurried into the bedroom and dressed before she came back out.
He was out the door in a leather jacket and motorcycle boots before the water even turned off. It’s not that he didn’t like Camille; he truly enjoyed her and their nights together. She was hateful and terrified the humans who walked the compound’s halls, but Clark like being around her.
