But I don't want to think about that—I don't know how to think about that—so I shove it down into that dark, overstuffed place in my mind that's threatening to burst any moment now.
When I come out of the bathroom, Raffe looks freshly showered and dressed in his black pants with boots. His bandages are gone. His wet hair swings in front of his eyes as he kneels on the hardwood floor in front of the open blanket. On it, his wings are laid out.
He combs through the feathers, fluffing out the ones that are crushed and plucking out the broken ones. In a way, I suppose he's preening. His touch is gentle and reverent, although his expression is hard and unreadable as stone. The jagged ends of the wing that I chopped look ugly and abused.
I have the absurd impulse to apologize. What, exactly, am I sorry for? That his people have attacked our world and destroyed it? That they are so brutal as to cut off the wings of one of their own and leave him to be torn apart by the native savages? If we are such savages, it is only because they have made us so. So I am not sorry, I remind myself. Crushing one of the enemy’s wings in a moth-eaten blanket is nothing to be sorry about.
But somehow, I still hang my head and walk softly as though I am sorry, even if I won't say it.
I walk around him so he won't see my apologetic stance, and his naked back comes into full view. It has stopped bleeding. The rest of him looks perfectly healthy now—no bruises, no swelling or cuts, except where his wings used to be.
The wounds are a couple of streaks of raw hamburger running down his back. They follow the ragged flesh where the knife sawed through the tendons and muscles. I don't like to think about it, but I suppose the other angel sawed through joints, severing bones away from the rest of him. I suppose I should have sewn the wounds shut, but I had assumed he'd die.
“Should I, like, try to sew your wounds shut?” I ask, hoping the answer will be no. I'm a pretty tough girl, but sewing chunks of flesh together pushes the limits of my comfort zone, to say the least.
“No,” he says without looking up from his work. “It'll eventually heal on its own.”
“Why hasn’t it healed already? I mean, the rest of you healed in no time.”
“Angel sword wounds take a long time to heal. If you’re ever going to kill an angel, slice him up with an angel sword.”
“You’re lying. Why would you tell me that?”
“Maybe I’m not afraid of you.”
“Maybe you should be.”
“My sword would never hurt me. And my sword is the only one you can wield.” He gently plucks out another broken feather and lays it on the blanket.
“How’s that?”
“You need permission to use an angel sword. It’ll weigh a ton if you try to lift it without permission.”
“But you never gave me permission.”
“You don’t get permission from the angel. You get it from the sword. And some swords get grouchy just for asking.”
“Yeah, right.”
He runs his hand over the feathers, feeling for broken ones. Why doesn’t he look like he’s kidding?
“I never asked permission and I managed to lift the sword no problem.”
“That’s because you wanted to throw it to me so I could defend myself. Apparently, she took that as permission asked and given.”
“What, it read my mind?”
“Your intentions, at least. She does that sometimes.”
“O-kay. Right.” I let it go. I’ve heard plenty of wacky things in my time and you just have to learn to roll with them without directly challenging the person spewing the weirdness. Challenging weirdness is a pointless and sometimes dangerous exercise. At least, it is with my mom. I must say, though, that Raffe is even more inventive than my mother.
“So...you want me to bandage your back?”
“Why?”
“To try to keep infection out,” I say, rummaging through my pack for the first aid kit.
“Infection shouldn't be a problem.”
“You can't be infected?”
“I should be resistant to your germs.”
The words “should” and “your” catches my attention. We know next to nothing about the angels. Any information might give us an advantage. Once we organize again, that is.
It occurs to me that I might be in the unprecedented position of being able to glean some intelligence on them. Despite what the gang leaders would have the rest of us believe, angel parts are always taken from dead or dying angels, I’m sure of it. What I would do with angel intel, I don’t know. But it can’t hurt to gain a little knowledge.
Tell that to Adam and Eve.
I ignore the cautionary voice in my head. “So…are you immunized or something?” I try to make my voice casual as though the answer means nothing to me.
“It's probably a good idea to bandage me up anyway,” he says, sending me a clear signal that he knows that I'm fishing for information. “I can probably pass for human so long as my wounds are covered.” He pulls out a broken feather, putting it reluctantly into a growing pile.