“Okay,” says Josiah in a soothing voice. “Let’s just take a time-out here and focus on what’s important.” Of all of them, he looks the most evil with his blood-red eyes and unnaturally white everything else. But looks aren’t everything. “Raffe needs his wings back. Now all we need to do is figure out what Beautiful Laylah can get out of this, and we’ll all be happy. That’s all that matters, right?”
He looks at each of us. I want to say I won’t be happy, but I’ve said enough.
“Great, so Laylah,” says Josiah. “What can we do to make you happy?”
Laylah’s lashes sweep down coyly over her eyes. “I’ll think of something.” I have no doubt that she already knows her price. Why be coy about it? “Come to my lab in an hour. It’ll take me that long to prepare. I’ll need the wings now.”
Raffe hesitates like a man about to sign a deal with the devil. Then he walks back into the bedroom, leaving me to be stared at by Laylah and Josiah.
The hell with it. I follow after Raffe. I find him in the bathroom, wrapping his wings in towels.
“I don’t trust her,” I say.
“They can hear you.”
“I don’t care.” I lean against the doorjamb.
“Got a better idea?”
“What if she just takes your wings?”
“Then I’ll worry about it then.” He puts one wing aside and begins wrapping the other in a matching towel that’s practically the size of a sheet.
“You’ll have no leverage then.”
“I have no leverage now.”
“You have your wings.”
“What should I do with them, Penryn? Mount them up on the wall? They’re useless to me unless I can get them sewn back on.” Raffe rubs his hand over the two folds of wings. He closes his eyes.
I feel like a jerk. No doubt this is difficult enough without me reinforcing his doubts.
He glides around me through the doorway. I stay in the bathroom until I hear the front door close behind the pair of angels.
CHAPTER 33
I stare at the dark windows overlooking the charred city. “Tell me about the Messenger.” This is the first chance I get to try to make sense of the earlier conversation with Josiah.
“God commands Gabriel. He’s the Messenger. Then Gabriel tells the rest of us what God wants.” Raffe takes in a heaping spoonful of his reheated mashed potatoes. “That’s the theory, anyway.”
“And God doesn’t talk to any of the other angels?”
“Certainly not to me.” Raffe slices into his rare steak. “But then again, I haven’t been real popular lately.”
“Has He ever talked to you?”
“No. And I doubt he ever will.”
“But from what Josiah said, it sounded like you could be the next Messenger.”
“Yeah, wouldn’t that be the biggest joke? Not impossible, though. I am technically in the succession pool.”
“Why would that be such a joke?”
“Because, Miss Nosy, I am agnostic.”
I’ve had a lot of surprises in the past couple of months. But this one nearly floors me.
“You’re…agnostic?” I look at him for signs of humor. “As in you’re not sure of the existence of God?” He’s dead serious. “How can that be? You’re an angel, for chrissake.”
“So?”
“So, you’re God’s creature. He created you.”
“He supposedly created you too. Aren’t some of you unsure of God’s existence?”
“Well, yeah, but he doesn’t talk to us. I mean, he doesn’t talk to me.” My mother comes to mind. “Okay, I admit there are people who claim that they talk to God or the other way around. But how am I supposed to know if that’s true?”
My mom doesn’t even talk to God in English. It’s some made-up language that only she understands. Her religious belief is fanatic. More accurately, her belief in the devil is fanatic.
Me? Even now, with angels and all, I still can’t believe in her God. Although I admit that late at night, I sort of fear her Devil. Overall, I guess that still makes me agnostic. For all anyone knows, these angels could just be an alien species from another world trying to trick us into giving up without much of a fight. I don’t know, and I expect I’ll never know about God, angels, or most of life’s questions. And I’ve accepted that.
But now, I’ve found an agnostic angel.
“You’re making my head hurt.” I sit down at the table.
“The Messenger’s word is accepted as the word of God. We act on it. Always have. Whether each of us believes it or not—whether even the Messenger believes it or not—is another story.”
“So if the next Messenger says to kill off all the remaining humans just because he feels like it, then the angels would do it?”
“Without question.” He bites into the last slice of rare steak.
I let that sink in while Raffe gets up to prepare to leave for his surgery.
He puts on his pack. It is wrapped with white towels to give the impression that wings are folded beneath the jacket.
I get up to help him adjust his jacket. “Won’t this look suspicious?”
“There won’t be many eyes where I’m going.”
He walks to the front door and pauses. “If I’m not back by dawn, find Josiah. He’ll help you get out of the aerie.”
Something tight and hard clenches inside my chest.
I don’t even know where he’s going. Probably to some back alley butcher working with filthy surgical tools under dim lights.