—UNKNOWN AUTHOR
Were you there in the Garden of Shadows?
Were you there when the Father took wing . . .
Angela had given up her dreams.
That made this hallucination all the more precious. Her vision had blurred, and her body felt like its energy had drained through her wrists, her legs, her feet, her brain. She could very well have been dying. Yet in a resurrection of her old reckless self, she didn’t care. If dying meant that Israfel would always hold her like this, if it meant that she would always be cupped by the softness of his wings and stare into his sapphire eyes, she would welcome it with all her heart. They were falling together, the white clouds of his pinions slowing their descent, his song warming and seducing her back to life every time she threatened to close her eyes and sleep forever.
Did you sigh when the starlight outpoured us?
When the silver bright water could sing . . .
He rubbed something in the palm of her hand.
For a split second, his fingers dug at it painfully, eager to tear that part of Angela away.
Then he simply stared back at her, still blurry, but with a gentle twist to his lips suggesting pensiveness. He was trying to figure something out, perhaps thinking the answer hid in the curves of her hand. The wings that were his ears folded back in an elegant sweeping motion, vanishing inside pockets impossible for her to see. Then Israfel leaned in close, and his beautiful face drowned out all her other thoughts, all the agony trying desperately to end her life. He never had looked so much like a woman, with those long lashes, and that feathery hair.
Their kiss was hesitant but searching.
He was looking for a mystery inside of her and trying to figure it out simultaneously.
She barely felt him pull away as the world closed around her, his voice breaking through this new blackness and peace.
It sounded as petulant as he often looked.
“How . . . when you were never enchanted at all . . .”
Enchanted? No. She’d loved him too long for that. And she tried to tell him so before every sensation stopped.
Forty-two
The gun had misfired.
Angela tossed it onto the floor, cursing in the way her parents often cursed. Her head throbbed where the muzzle had jolted against her skull, but that was all she had to prove she’d even tried. That and the acrid smell filling her bedroom.
Once again, she’d been disappointed. Thwarted.
She crashed back into her bed, sobbing uncontrollably for half an hour, thoroughly wetting her ratty pillow sham. It wasn’t until the room had darkened and the moon gazed sympathetically through her window that she noticed a weight at the end of her bed.
She hadn’t heard a door open.
Angela lifted her head from her arms, astonished to see an angel with blood-red hair and blue eyes just like her own sitting down at the edge of her bed near her feet. Half his body was hidden in the shadows, but she could see the great red wings folded against his back, and the others topping his delicate ears, their arching curves lined with tiny white jewels.
They were like miniature stars, matching the stones set into his dark blue coat.
His face, at least what she could see of it, was gentle. Wise. But he had all the presence of a ghost.
“Why do you always stop me?” she whispered.
Somehow, she knew he was the One, and her bitterness felt like poison.
His voice was softer than she’d thought it would be. “Because I need you, Angela.”
“No one needs me.”
More bitterness.
“Oh,” the angel said as he smiled down at her, “but that’s not true. He needs you. That’s why you’re running from everything, isn’t it? To find him.” When she stared back at him, his voice became gentler. “This is your world, and you make the rules. Anything can be yours if you want it badly enough.”
“Are you talking about the angel with the bronze wings?”
He said nothing at first, and Angela realized he could have been talking about someone she hadn’t even met yet. Then the angel stood from her bed and he was tall and infinitely sad. “You must stay alive, Angela, whether you want to or not. And even if you forget this moment, remember this: a heart can bleed long after it’s been broken. I will be counting on you to mend that heart.”
She knew he was referring to the same person, but she could only stare more, confused and in pain.
At last Angela found her words again. “So you think I’ll forget about this?”
It seemed impossible. How could she forget this pain in her head, and this angel in her room? How could she ever forget, or think it was only a dream, when his red wings took up the world?
“Yes,” he answered her gently, “you will forget.”
A cloud covered the moon and he vanished. Now there was only her reflection in the cracked dresser mirror.