by Jaya Moon
The bat cut through the air with a whooh when Abriel swung. It connected with Ray’s head, his skull crunching as it smashed in, sounding like gravel underfoot. Before Ray began to collapse, Abriel swung again. The bat connected with the other Fallen—Peter’s—head, and in silence he folded to the floor.
Abriel could have stopped then. They hadn’t seen what had hit them or who’d wielded the weapon, and they weren’t going to wake up for a while if they woke up at all. But now they were prone on the floor at his mercy, he would show them none. If he could he would kill every one of the Fallen for what they had done at his brother’s bidding.
Abriel lifted the bat again. He pounded and pulverized the bodies lying at his feet, heaving breaths with the force of how hard he hit. The spray of blood was warm on his face, the sound of his violence ungodly.
And then Meghan appeared in front of him. She had somehow gotten into his swinging range and he almost hit her. He only pulled the bat up at the last moment. An inch closer and he would have slammed her into oblivion.
She stared. Not at him or what he had done. She wasn’t looking at anything, as though past her eyes she was gone.
Abriel lowered the bat. What had he done?
“Meghan?”
Her eyes remained wide open—not one blink. In the gray light, her face had splatters of black, and glistening clumps of wetness hung from her hair and covered her clothes. Abriel didn’t need to see himself to know he, too, was covered in blood and flesh, brain and bone.
“Where’s Tallow and Mox?”
She didn’t respond.
He called out their names. The house remained silent. “What are you doing here alone?” Berron had said to meet Meghan at the safe house. He’d assumed Tallow and Mox would be with her.
She lifted a hand slowly and pulled it across her face, so slowly it was as if she wanted to draw out each excruciating moment so Abriel had to watch her reaction to what she’d witnessed play out in intricate detail. Smudging blood, she held out her hand and stared at it before lifting her other hand and doing the same, until both were extended between them, like she was showing him something she needed him to explain.
“Meghan.” He couldn’t say he regretted what he had done. He didn’t. He only felt sorry she’d had to witness what humans, or at least angels, could do to each other. “You’re safe now. You’re safe.” Would she believe him, having seen what he was capable of?
Meghan kept her hands raised. He wanted her to look at him to assess the damage he’d done. He said her name slowly. When she didn’t react, he continued, “We can’t stay here.” He didn’t know where to take her. Somewhere they could hide while he tried to contact Tallow and Mox to get their help. She wasn’t in any state to discuss plans about Heaven’s Gate, Savannah, or anything he knew Dore and Berron wanted from her. “Meghan?”
He stepped through the violence on the floor and half expected her to flinch at his proximity. When she didn’t, he put one arm around her back and looped the other behind her legs and picked her up.
She remained motionless and didn’t speak as he took her outside. He carried her down the driveway toward the car he’d stolen hours earlier and left parked on the main road when he’d arrived at the safe house.
After he placed her gently in the back seat, he considered going back to move Ray’s car, hiding it around the back of the house to buy himself time if more Fallen came looking, but that would mean finding the keys in the mess he’d left behind inside. It would be better to get moving.
Climbing into the driver’s seat, he glanced in the rearview mirror. The sun had begun to rise and the whites of Meghan’s unblinking eyes stared out from the red smears across her face.
He would drive for an hour or two, find a motel in the middle of nowhere, and try to get through to her; he’d find a phone close by and try to contact Mox and Tallow. There were no phones at the Eyrie, but they’d have noticed she was missing by now and be searching for her, wouldn’t they?
He started the car and began down the road.
He thought about talking to her as he drove. He didn’t know what to say. The only thing that sat on his tongue were words of regret for what he’d done to her. She had paid for his all-consuming hate, and he knew she wasn’t the only one.
When he saw a rest stop without another car, he pulled over and took off his blood-stained hooded jacket before washing his face and hair to remove as much of the blood and bits coating him as possible. His pants were black and clearly stained, but he hoped if anyone noticed they wouldn’t recognize the truth of what they saw. He pulled off his t-shirt, saturated it with water and returned to the car. He cleaned the blood from Meghan’s face and hair as best he could, wiped over her hands, concentrating on each finger individually until the stains were gone apart from the bloody cresent moon shapes beneath her fingernails. All the while she stared into the distance.
After he’d cleaned his tshirt as best as he could, he started to drive again.
Two hours later he found a motel on the outskirts of a town. The receptionist looked him up and down, but her eyes didn’t seem to rest for too long on the stains on his pants. He smiled, exchanged pleasantries enough not to raise her suspicion, and took the key, wishing her a nice day.
Back in the parking lot, he moved the car and parked it out in front of the room. He unlocked the room door and opened it, then made sure no one was watching before he lifted Meghan out of the back seat. Heavy in his arms, he carried her to the room and kicked the door shut behind them with his foot once they were inside.
Safe for who knew how long, hopefully hours, he found himself standing in the center of the room. He looked down at Meghan and then held her tighter than he needed to as he rested his face against the top of her head. Beyond the scent of blood, he caught hints of sweetness—of shampoo and conditioner, of the normal things his brethren had taken from her. That he had taken from her hours before.
That night in Lucien’s apartment he’d made a choice to protect her, always. Could he say he’d followed through when she now lay comatose in his arms?
He held her even tighter and muttered, “I’m sorry,” into her hair. Sorry for the evil of his brethren. Sorry for what he had become. Sorry she knew who he truly was. Of all three, the last was his greatest regret.
Eventually he took her to the bathroom, and set her in the bath.
With the water running from the showerhead, he got in with her. Although there seemed to be nothing behind her eyes and she didn’t react as he unbuttoned her shirt and eased it off her, when he told her to lift her arms she did. He pulled off the cami she wore.
“Meghan, come back to me.” The water streamed down his face and caught in his mouth as he spoke. He rubbed her arms with his hands in soothing strokes. “If you knew why I wanted them dead…”
She blinked and lowered her eyes toward the bottom of the bath with its bloody water moving toward the plughole before she looked at him. “I want them dead too.”
19
The weight of my confession made the words heavy in my mouth.
From the moment I’d watched Abriel kill those two Fallen until he’d put me in the bath I’d been drowning in thoughts I’d never let myself have and couldn’t find a way out.
Abriel’s eyes held confusion. He believed I’d been consumed by what he’d done, but it wasn’t the death of those two Fallen. It was seeing what angels were capable of doing that consumed me because it made me think of my parents and Ginny and I couldn’t pull myself free from the grip of the truths I didn’t know.
“They killed my family.”
Abriel’s hands stopped their gentle soothing motion up and down my arms. “Who?”
“The Fallen. Dore and Berron told me.”
Abriel shook his head still confused. “They did?”
“Yes.” I didn’t have the strength to explain everything I’d learned since I’d last seen him, but I said the word in a way that made him know I spoke the truth.
Memories I thought I’d erased came back to me. The overpowering scent of disinfectant first, then a tumble of images: a room with white tiles, steel sinks, and a floor that seemed to dip ever so slightly at the center to a drainage hole. Like you’d see in the base of a shower. I glanced down at the water that ran off me, stained red, snaking away, and my hands began to tremble.
“Talk to me,” Abriel said.
I knew he feared I was going back into that place I’d been where his words hardly reached me, and maybe he was right. I felt the vacuous pull of things I could imagine but didn’t want to.
Abriel went back to stroking my arms, trying to get my attention. “What is it?”
My eyes met his. “I identified my parents’ and sister’s bodies. In the back of the sheriff's car, as they drove me to the morgue, I was terrified about what I’d see; what they’d look like. But…” They’d covered them in white sheets on steel gurneys. Three mounds that could have been anything. “They only showed me their faces. My dad looked like he was sleeping. His eyes were closed and his mouth relaxed, but his hair was different. Usually it was all wavy and crazy.” A little like Tallow’s hair. “Instead it looked like he’d made an effort to make it neat. Combed it. Other than that, he just looked like my dad, nothing wrong with him. Not a scratch on his face, not a bruise. Nothing. My mom was the same, not a scratch, and so peaceful. I remember wanting to shake them both because I didn’t believe they were dead. Then Ginny.” My mouth tightened and my face screwed up, a reaction like I was about to sob, but there was nothing there. “We shared a room all our lives. She always slept restlessly. Would thrash around and knot herself in the sheets, then wake up yelling because she thought she’d been trapped by something.” I rubbed my forehead hard with the heel of my hand. “When they showed me her face and I saw how peaceful and still she was, that’s when it hit me they really were dead.”
Abriel had been so quiet, if it weren’t for his touch I wouldn’t have known he still sat with me beneath the streaming water, but when he spoke he grasped my arms as though he wanted to emphasize what he said. “I’m so sorry.”
I didn’t want his sorrow. I needed an answer to the one thing I didn’t know.
“I didn’t ask how exactly they’d died. If a bear had attacked them, you’d expect a scratch on one of their faces or worse, wouldn’t you?”
Abriel gave me a crooked smile, one full of empathy. “Yes, it’s likely. But in such circumstances not many would think clearly. And what reason would you have to believe they lied to you?”
He didn’t understand what I was asking. “How would the Fallen have killed them?” That’s the question I needed to ask because the possibilities after I’d watched what Abriel did to his brethren had consumed me. I hadn’t heard a gun. I hadn’t heard anything except screaming and Berron’s roared warning. My parents hadn’t been beaten to death, so what had laid hidden beneath those sheets? What violence?
Abriel froze. “I don’t know how they died. I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”
“I need to know.”
“No, you don’t. It will haunt you, knowing the truth.”
“It haunts me not knowing. You don’t understand.”
He grasped my arms tightly. “I do. I’ve seen people I love die. Stood there. Watched.”
“Eloise?” I hadn’t meant to say her name aloud.
His hands dropped from my arms as though defeated by life. “They told you?”
I didn’t want him to think his friends had betrayed him. “Mox only said you tried to save one of the kin. I kind of worked out the rest myself.”
“The rest? I’ll tell you the rest.” His eyes flamed and his tone was sharp. “We thought we were clever. Cunning. We weren’t. I didn’t know she’d been captured. When Lucien asked me to come for a drive I didn’t think twice. Our relationship was different back then. I trusted him more than anyone. He took me to a barn in the countryside. When I asked why we were there, he said he had something to show me. I’ll never forget, I was laughing at something he’d said as we went inside.” Abriel’s voice had started to soften, and if it weren’t for the water from the shower, I’d have sworn he’d begun to shed tears. “There were several Fallen inside. Michael was one of them—who you saved Tallow from. And someone I didn’t recognize at first.” He swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing. “Strung up. Bruised. Bloody.” He closed his eyes. “What they’d done to Eloise before I came and what they did after I arrived…” He shook his head as though trying to rid himself of the memory before his eyes flashed open. “Do you want to know what they did to her?”
I saw the immeasurable pain on his face, in his eyes, and the way his body slumped, and I understood the hidden message behind his question. I only had to look at him to know it was true: knowing exactly how my family had died would only haunt me.
“There are many ways to die.” His eyes flicked up to me. “My brethren had reason to torture Eloise, and a place to do it without anyone stumbling across them. And, being kin, few in the real world would ask questions if she disappeared.” He swallowed hard again. “Your family’s circumstances were different. They would be missed. People, like you, would ask questions, even if law enforcement, coroners and morticians are controlled by the Fallen. They gave you what you wanted to see—a way to identify your family members and know they were gone. Perhaps, beneath those sheets, there wasn’t much to see. Slow deaths, like Eloise’s, leave too many marks. Too many questions. You had none when you saw them, so their deaths were hopefully fast. Fast deaths,” he said quietly, “are by far kinder.”
“Fast deaths,” I muttered to myself, looking down at my legs. I could only hope he was right. If he wasn’t—
“Meghan.” Abriel moved his head so he could catch my gaze. “However they died, it is better to remember them alive. I try my best to remember Eloise that way.”
I don’t know if it was him comforting me or me comforting him that brought us into each other’s arms. He grasped me tightly and I held onto him, my face nuzzled to his neck and his head resting on the top of mine. As I stretched my fingertips to grasp onto him tighter, they connected with two bony lumps near his shoulder blades. Stumps, I realized, of where once had sprouted wings.
Abriel left me in the bathroom. I stripped out of my remaining clothes and soaped every inch of myself before I washed my hair. I wrapped a towel around my body, tucking one corner in at the top to keep it from falling off, and used another to make a turban around my wet hair. In the main room, I found Abriel standing in one corner dripping, the carpet damp around his feet. He acknowledged me with a nod before he disappeared into the bathroom.
The king-sized bed had a duvet that looked like it hadn’t been washed in a while and the type of pattern that hid stains. I peeled it down before climbing up onto the bed. Grabbing the remote on the bedside table, I flicked on the TV to a station with some soap opera. I wasn’t interested in it. I needed to work out where we went from here.
Maybe Abriel intended his confession to act as a deterrent. It was almost like he had said, “This is what they can do. This is what they could do to you.” I should have been frightened, but instead it only made me more determined to help the kin and pay back the Fallen for what they’d done to Eloise, and especially to my family. I’d do that by blowing apart their stupid rationale for killing kin. I couldn’t kill all of them, but I’d bring about an end to their war. I’d show them who the real demons of the world were.
And now I had even more reason to rescue Savannah. Was she a beacon of hope to Abriel? If there were angel kin, did that mean Eloise might be waiting for him in heaven? Was my father? My mother and Ginny?
When Abriel came out of the bathroom, shrouded in steam and a towel wrapped around his waist, I couldn’t get over how pale—pure—his skin seemed and how he—
“Why do you glow?”
His eyes widened. “Glow?”
“You didn’t use to. At least I don’t think you did. But since that night at Heaven’s Gate
when you rescued me…it’s odd. You kind of glow.”
Knocking at the door ended our conversation. We both froze.
Abriel raised an index finger to his lips. His bare chest betrayed his fear as it heaved up and down.
Another round of knocking came.
I eased myself off the bed. What if Tallow and Mox had magically found us? Abriel shook his head at me.
In the virtual silence, the sound of a key on the other side of the door was loud. Within seconds, Abriel stood beside me before he swept me back with an arm so I stood dead behind him.
The door opened slowly, the hinges creaking, and I almost sighed with relief as I saw over his shoulder a woman in a motel staff uniform.
“No housekeeping,” I said, almost laughing as we probably looked stupid and should have called out earlier.
The door opened farther, revealing Lucien and four of Heaven’s Gate’s security guards.
Abriel half shoved me and shouted, “Bathroom! Now!” as he lunged toward the door and his brother.
I ran, my towel dropping from my body, my mind racing as it tried to recall if the bathroom had a window and whether it was big enough for me to escape through. In the same moment I realized I couldn’t leave Abriel behind. Not after he’d rescued me twice. Not after what he’d told me about Eloise. Me being with him demonstrated he’d betrayed his brethren again. They’d kill him.
As my foot came down on one of the bathroom tiles, I tried to turn. I didn’t know what I intended to do, but I wouldn’t abandon him.
The bathroom floor had water all over it. My foot slid forward, and I came crashing down onto the tiles. My body first. My head second. It slammed against the tiles. Hard.
20
