by S. L. Naeole
“Instead, it’s her, the one person who would turn down immortality because it goes against her whole ridiculous plan of being ‘normal’.”
Graham looked at my body and then at Robert, seeing the grief that was on his face as the truth of Lark’s words touched home. He looked back at Stacy, whose eyes had turned red with unshed tears, her face growing pale as she realized what she had lost. “What caused it—your wings to grow? Do you know?”
“Of course I do,” Lark replied, her eyes whipping around to glare at Robert, who growled angrily in response. “I saw what’s going to happen when Grace learns the truth about Robert, and her pain, her heartbreak at that betrayal is what triggered my change because I’m just as tied to her as he is.”
Graham and Stacy both threw accusing looks at Robert, whose lips were curled back as his growl grew deeper.
“You’ve said enough, Lark,” he hissed, and I fell to my knees, the pain cutting through my head like a torch.
“No, I haven’t, but I’m not going to be the one to tell her, Robert. You will,” Lark said firmly.
“What did he do? What did he do to Grace?” Graham asked, his hands clenched into angry fists at his side as he stalked towards Robert.
Lark and Stacy both grabbed him, Lark being more successful. “That’s not for me to tell.”
He tried to shake his arm free, but Lark’s steel grip minimized the motion so that all you could see was his shoulder twitching. He turned to stare at Lark, incredulity written on his face in deep lines. “You know this is going to hurt her, break her heart, and yet you won’t tell her? She’s my best friend!”
“I cannot break the laws of my kind,” Lark argued.
“But you can skirt around them?” Stacy asked, her eyes wary as she took in the gravity of the scene before her. “I know you’re not supposed to tell Graham and I what you are, but you did anyway. You broke all of those laws of your kind when you were with Luca, and now you decide that the rules can’t be broken or even bent a little because it involves Grace?”
Lark’s head began to shake in denial. “No, that’s not it at all. What I saw, these are visions of the future, things that I see only because I can see the thoughts of others who can, and I know that when they happen, Grace will be shattered.”
Lark’s words caused me to turn to face my mom once more, shock and anger coursing through me.
“This is what I needed to hear? That Robert’s betrayed me somehow?” When she nodded, I scoffed at the response. “Why?”
“Because the choices you make afterwards will affect not just yourself, but everyone else around you. What you decide once you wake up and hear the truth cannot be undone. Your decision will affect the generations to come. You must remember how much he means to you, how much you love him. Remember that; promise me, Grace.”
I looked away, unwilling to promise anything to anyone, not with the fissure that had opened up in my heart starting to groan under the weight of what it knew was coming.
I closed my eyes and pressed my fingers against their lids, the throbbing that had remained long after the shooting pains had gone only increasing as I did so. I could see in my mind the sadness that took over Graham’s face as he realized that his life would one day end, while Lark’s would go on. I could see Stacy’s understanding that she could have had a chance at beating her disease had it not been for me. I could see Lark, her pain from realizing this future loss so acute, it physically hurt to acknowledge it.
And I could see Robert. Stubbornly holding onto whatever secret he had hidden away amongst the other secrets that were kept from me, secrets that would break my heart, that would cause a pain so great, simply seeing it had been enough to cause Lark’s change to happen.
I opened my eyes, needing to ask Mom one more question, but instead, I saw the worry filled eyes of Robert staring down at me.
“Oh thank God you’re alright,” he breathed, his mouth bending down to press against my forehead, his cool hands and lips pressing against my skin.
I pulled away.
“Grace, what’s wrong?” he asked, concerned.
I looked at Lark, Stacy, and Graham, their faces expectant. Only Lark’s eyes held pity.
“Tell me,” I managed to whisper. “Tell me the truth.”
He pulled back suddenly, shock causing his body to turn stiff and hard, making my position in his lap uncomfortable, like I was sitting in a crevice made of sharp rocks.
“I can’t,” he said with finality.
“You mean you won’t,” Graham snapped, offering his hand to me.
I grabbed it and pulled myself up. “Tell me the truth, tell me what you’ve been keeping from me, what Lark saw,” I demanded, trying but failing to keep the minute vibrations in my hands from traveling up my arms.
He shook his head and looked away as he stood up, dusting the debris from his pants. “I can’t. I’ve seen what it’ll do to you. I cannot do that to you.”
“You’ve already done it,” I accused. “You owe me the truth now that it’s been done.”
He turned his face towards mine, the silver in his eyes nearly blocked out by the jet black of his widened pupils. “I promised not to hurt you.”
“You lied.”
THAT OLD FAMILIAR STING
“When I first saw you, when I first came in contact with you, it was like a bolt of lightning had struck me directly in my heart and set fire to everything I ever knew about what it meant to be what I was, what it meant to love someone. It seems cliché, especially among your kind, but I knew from the moment I saw you that you were the one, not just my wing-bringer, but the one person that I would love above all others, above myself.
“I saw in you something, something unlike anything else I had ever seen in another human being in all my fifteen hundred years.”
“You’re fifteen hundred years old? You cradle-robbing bastard!” Graham shouted, lunging once again toward Robert. Lark’s unnaturally quick hands managed to keep him at bay, her head shaking.
“I’m sorry you feel that way, Graham,” Robert said sadly, never taking his eyes off me. “I love Grace. And my age was never a problem with her; her opinion is the only one that matters.”
“I still say that’s pretty sick!”
Stacy grunted. “Lark’s over five hundred years old, Graham. What does that make you? A dinosaur hunter?”
Graham choked at Stacy’s words, and quickly initiated a quiet conversation with Lark while Stacy rolled her eyes, continuing to chuckle at the turn of events.
Robert walked towards me, his hands extended. I pulled mine away and hid them behind my back. He saw this and stopped, understanding what it meant and continued with his confession.
“I wanted everything to be perfect for us, I wanted things to feel more like a fairytale, but I didn’t understand that fairytales are impossible for humans—it’s why your kind dream about them so often. Instead of a fairytale, we fought—almost immediately—and I could see my future with you fading.
“When you were hit by Mr. Frey, I saw that as a second chance for me, saw that as an opportunity to brand myself into your soul. I told you, Grace, that I’ve been fighting to keep you alive, fighting against the very thing that makes me who I am to keep you here.
“On the night that you were hit, you were supposed to die; Sam…Sam was there to end your life. When I got there, we argued over you. He told me that allowing you to live was going against his call…and mine. I told him that it didn’t matter to me; you were my life, the call be damned.”
“What is your call anyway?” Stacy asked, curious.
“You know that I can’t-” Robert began.
“Tell me, yeah, I know,” Stacy sighed in defeat, cutting him off.
“Thank you,” Robert acknowledged. “I don’t think you’d like me much if you knew, though.”
“If what you’re going to tell Grace is as bad as Lark’s making it out to be, I don’t think it’ll make things any worse,” Stacy quipped before turning a
way.
Nodding, Robert returned to his explanation.
“Sam finally relented when he saw what I was going through for you, and he left you with me so that I could save you. I didn’t show you that part because you weren’t allowed to know who Sam was, or what he was to be more precise.”
“And yet you introduced me to him at Hannah’s wedding?” I asked, surprised.
“Of course. He was my mentor, Grace. Whatever he was supposed to do, I was the one who prevented it from happening. He was doing what he was meant to—I’m the one who went against the rules.”
I threw up my hands, unconvinced by his sudden defense of Sam. “He went against the rules, too, when he left you with me, didn’t he? You’re sticking up for him—why?”
“Because I cannot ignore the fact that by preventing him from taking your life, I also prevented him from fulfilling his call. You must understand how dangerous that is, not just for you, but for my family as well.”
I couldn’t argue with him about that. I had never put too much thought into the calls of the other angels, Robert’s being enough to deal with. But knowing how important it was to each and every individual angel, and how each one correlated with each other, I had no choice but to understand and appreciate how denying one angel what they were born to do for his own, personal reason could cause trouble for Robert, Lark, and Ameila as well.
“Does that erase what he tried to do?” Lark questioned, her voice tinged with anger.
“Tried to do what?” Stacy and Graham both asked, their heads turning back and forth between Robert, Lark, and I.
“A lot more has been going on than what you’ve been telling me,” Stacy announced, her tone miffed.
“Hey, I haven’t been told anything—what’s going on? And who is this Sam person you keep talking about?” Graham questioned.
“This is not the time for twenty-questions, Graham,” I muttered.
“How about just one? Who’s Sam?” he said in retort.
“Technically, that’s two,” Stacy said before repeating his question. “Who’s Sam?”
Knowing that neither Lark nor Robert would answer her, I sighed and told them with as few words as possible who exactly Sam was.
Graham, as expected, didn’t take this news too well. “Your mentor is the Archangel of Death? And you introduced him to Grace after he tried to kill her, like they’re supposed to become best buds or something?” he shouted angrily.
“He was doing what he was supposed to do—what he was born to do. I was the one in the wrong when I stopped him,” Robert argued. “I think I’ve explained that already.”
“So you were wrong to keep him from killing Grace?” Stacy asked, her arms folded across her chest, her foot tapping with growing annoyance.
“Yes—no. I was wrong by the rules that govern my kind. I was right by the rules that govern my heart. No matter which path I chose, I would have been wrong in someone’s eyes. I just chose what was right for me,” Robert sighed. “And why am I explaining myself to you? This isn’t about you; this is about Grace and me.”
He turned his back to my friends and grabbed my hands, holding them tightly between his own. “Grace, if what Lark has seen has to play out, if it is indeed the future, it is what I will deserve. I don’t want to keep anything from you anymore. I love you too much, need you too much to keep anything between us.”
I braced myself, taking a deep breath and exhaling slowly as his confession began once again.
“Whatever Sam had done or had been prevented from doing when I introduced you to him was nothing that could have been stopped beforehand, by me or anyone else, and could not be held against him by me because of that. He simply was what he was. But I did have a reason for him meeting you, him seeing and speaking to you. I wanted him to know who you were, see how much you meant to me—not just hear it—so that he could understand why I needed you to live, why I would risk everything to ensure your survival.
“I didn’t expect him to build such resentment towards me, or you for that matter. When he suggested that I lie to you about not loving you, I balked at the idea. I already loved you. If loving you wasn’t enough to bring my wings, then what would? The pain of the lie was what would do it, he told me, and of course I trusted him. I had no reason not to—he had never sought retribution from the Seraphim for my preventing your death—I felt he had only my best interest at heart if he had been willing to allow you to live.
“When I saw you with Graham that night, I made the decision to follow through with Sam’s plan. I knew that even if you didn’t forgive me the lie, you wouldn’t be alone and I took comfort in that, even though it caused such a strange pain in me to acknowledge it. When you asked me if I loved you and I told you “no”, it was the hardest thing for me to do—the pain had begun long before the question had even been asked—but that pain was not what hurt the most. It was seeing your face when I lied to you that killed me.
“If I had doubted that I loved you, even in an infinitesimal amount, that moment would have erased it all. And it’s remembering how I felt, watching you leave me that kept me from telling you the truth because there is only one thing in this world that frightens me, Grace, and that’s losing you.”
He paused, and I saw the trembling, felt it as he struggled with the words that were damming up behind his closed lips, his eyes closing, too, as if doing so could slow down the truth that he was so afraid to tell me.
He took a deep, needless breath, and sighed. His eyes opened, his face grim as he began to speak once more.
“Grace, when I first saw you, when I first met you, I could see your past, just as easily as I could see your present. I saw the events of the previous weeks, the previous months, and years. I saw everything that went on in your life before I had even breathed a single word to you.
“But what I saw most clearly was the most significant moment in your life, the moment that ensured just what type of person you would become.”
“You saw my mom’s death,” I acknowledged. Of course he had. He had even allowed me to revisit it, my own way of remembering and saying goodbye. I had thought it a gift.
“It wasn’t a gift, Grace. It was a lie.”
I felt my throat grow dry and my tongue grow fat at his words. “A…lie?”
He nodded slowly, his hands squeezing tightly around mine, preventing me from pulling away, even as I felt my body struggle to be as far away from him as possible. “Yes, though what I showed you was true, there were parts that I hid from you because I thought doing so would protect you, and in effect, protect us, the us I wanted to exist.”
“What could you have seen that I would need to be protected from?”
“Can you not guess? We’re talking about the day your mother died. Can you not figure out what it was that I saw that could pose such a danger to you?” he asked me, though I knew that he hadn’t exactly expected the answer he received.
“You saw Sam…”
“Yes.”
I felt my knees buckle at the implication, the impact of the omission causing me to stumble and fall, though I never touched the ground; Robert caught me before I had a chance to hit the soil.
“Tell me,” I whispered, my voice hoarse from the silent scream I was holding within me.
“Grace, I-”
“Tell me! For God’s sake, don’t talk to me about truth and honesty and then deny them to me! Not now, not about my mother!” I shouted.
Robert flinched at the harsh sting of my words, but didn’t hesitate to continue. “Sam’s call led him to the road you and your mother were traveling on that night. He had two names, two lives he had to end who would be in the car that would be coming down that road at just that moment—your mother’s car. He thought a crash would have been enough to have killed you both; he was so angry when you both survived, despite his knack for causing such…artful destruction. He took that as a sign that you were mocking him and he became enraged.
“He caused the car to explode, knowing
that whatever the damage, it would finish his task and he’d be allowed to move on. He did not know that you were not in that car when it exploded, Grace, otherwise you wouldn’t be here right now. For whatever reason, he thought you had died with your mother. Perhaps it was the rage that clouded his vision, or perhaps he simply underestimated the human spirit that resided in your mother, but whatever it was, he left you alone.
“I saw that you remembered very little of this, and you certainly didn’t remember Sam. His presence could only have been detected by someone like me, and so I made the decision then and there to never reveal any of this to you, or to Sam. It was the only way I could ensure your safety.
“When you were hit by Mr. Frey, I feared that Sam had recognized you, realized who you were and was simply trying to finish what he had started. Instead, you were just a number to him, just one of countless numbers on his list and Mr. Frey was unknowingly along for the ride. Had Sam known, had he realized who you were, he would have killed you on the spot, and no amount of pleading on my part would have prevented it. I thank God that he was ignorant about who you were.”
I scoffed at this last bit, and managed to pry myself away from him as my anger finally began to form the words that had been trapped inside of me, too jumbled and confused to do anything but stew in my own building resentment.
“And yet you felt it was perfectly okay to leave me alone with him at Hannah’s wedding. You knew, knew that he killed my mother, that he had tried to kill me—not once, but twice—and yet you didn’t stop to think about bringing me where you knew he would be. And then to introduce the two of us as though we’d somehow become friends!
“Was that what you were hoping? That he and I would hit it off and like each other so much that he’d simply forget the whole not-being-able-to-kill-me-twice thing?”
When he didn’t reply, I threw up my hands in frustration, fighting the urge to ball them into fists and beat him. “How could you do that to me? How could you risk my life like that? And when he told you that it would be a good idea to lie to me, you went along with it, knowing all along just how vindictive he could be, knowing how it would hurt me. You actually went along with it, like some stupid guy trying to fit in with the cool kids.
