Wings of the Wicked

23





THE NEXT MORNING WAS COLD, SUNLESS, AND misty, and I was tense with frustration after last night’s unsuccessful hunt for Bastian and his goons. I went for a run with Will and took a hot shower as soon as we returned. When I came downstairs, I caught a glimpse of something large through the sliding glass doors in the kitchen.

Wings.

My breath caught in my throat, and I opened the door and stepped out onto the porch. After a moment, I recognized that it was the back of a shirtless Nathaniel, but I’d never before seen his wings, which gleamed a coppery sheen in the sunlight. They stretched as wide as they could go before relaxing and folding to his back, but they didn’t vanish. His shirt was sitting on the swing bench a few yards away.

I approached him cautiously. “Hey, Nathaniel.”

He turned his head to me as I stopped right beside him, and he smiled warmly at me. “Ellie.”

I marveled at his wings, at how they seemed two shades at once. When the sun caught his feathers, the color matched his eyes. “What are you up to?”

“Stretching,” he replied.

Prying my eyes away from his feathers was difficult. I didn’t often see reaper wings up close unless I was in a fight, and on those occasions I couldn’t stop to admire the view. Even Will was shy about his wings, and I could count on one hand how many times I’d seen them. “Will ought to do that once in a while,” I suggested with a grin. “He probably wouldn’t be so grumpy then.”

Nathaniel laughed softly, and his wings folded into his back and disappeared. “Perhaps, but I’m afraid he may be a lost cause.” He tugged his shirt back over his head. “It’s going to rain today.”

Sure enough, a dark cloud was rolling in from the west.

He sat down gracefully on the swing and patted the spot next to him. “Come sit with me.”

“I’m sad it’s so much colder today than yesterday,” I said, hugging my arms to my chest against the chill and lowering myself onto the seat.

“Temperature fluctuations are to be expected.” He pushed the swing back and forth slowly with his boot on the mushy, slippery ground. “It’s been wonderful having you here, Ellie. Reapers love being around you. It goes beyond how close Will and I are with you, how well Marcus knows you. We feel better when you’re around.”

“Better?” I asked. “Knowing that you’re able to protect me?”

“Yes,” Nathaniel said. “But it’s so much more than that. There is something about you that draws reapers. It must be your divine origins that we can sense. You feel warm … good. It’s impossible to describe. We crave your presence. It makes you even more beautiful to some of us. Others resent that you have some sort of control over them. The angelic aren’t the only ones who feel like this, but the demonic react to you in a different way. The angelic instinctively want to protect you, while the demonic … they crave you like nothing else. They just want to know what you taste like.”

Everything he said completely unsettled me. I didn’t want anything to be drawn to me the way he described. It made me wonder also if there was more to Will’s love for me, if this was what he meant by feeling innately protective. He always seemed to want to touch me and be physically close, like he couldn’t help it, and it was a struggle for him to stay away from me. The way Nathaniel described my effect on the demonic made me a little afraid, too. But Cadan’s affection was never malicious or felt wrong in any way. He touched me the way Will touched me, though he didn’t make me feel the same need in return. But did Cadan only think he was in love with me because of this innate attraction?

Nathaniel stared out onto the lake. “Your past Guardians were said to have been very devoted to you, but none of them ever served you nearly as long as Will has. A few decades. A hundred years. Though I never knew any of your past Guardians, from what I understand, you’ve never had a bond with any of them the way you do with Will. He’s stronger than any angelic reaper I’ve ever met, and at the same time, he’s darker. I don’t know why.”

That word, “darker,” stabbed like a needle in my arm, bolting me awake. “What do you mean by darker?”

Nathaniel paused, lost in thought. “It’s something in his energy, something that feels different from others of our kind. I noticed it about him the day I met him, and others feel it too—angelic and demonic alike. He’s a legend among us. His power is unmatched by any angelic reaper.”

I’d seen Will do things in battle that both terrified and amazed me, things that reminded me of the demonic, but it was impossible for him to be anything other than angelic. My angelfire had proved that on many occasions. But still … in my bones, I knew Nathaniel was right. Something about Will was dark—darker than Nathaniel, darker even than Ava.

Nathaniel leaned back into the swing and sighed. “It’s all very curious. I wish I fully understood the bond between you.”

Nathaniel’s words sparked a memory of Will’s lips on mine, a memory so vivid that I could feel his heat as if he was touching me that very moment. I closed my eyes, swallowed, and forced myself to say something, anything to draw me from that thought. “Is the bond dangerous?” I asked.

He nodded. “What Will has told you is likely true. You are the mortal archangel, and he is your Guardian. Neither of you is permitted to love the other. You are both bound to your purposes first.”

“I can’t remember why I chose this,” I said in frustration. “Why would I have ever wanted to give up my wings and become human?”

“Ellie,” Nathaniel began carefully. “That’s what you need to understand. There’s no way you, Gabriel, did this by your own will. Angels don’t have free will.”

I stared at him in shock, letting what he’d just said settle heavily on my shoulders and thoughts. “I was forced to become human?”

“Most likely your orders came from God. Angels only obey. It’s your nature—how you were designed.”

“But I make my own choices every day. I can do whatever I want.”

“You’re human now. Only in Heaven are you Gabriel, who must obey without question. Here on Earth, you have the soul and free will of a human girl.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

His gaze was intense, boring into my own. “Because I want you to know that you have a choice now. You will always have a choice, because you are human.”

I shook my head. “But my Guardians—and Will—they all obey me, but they can also choose to not obey me.” The memory of Will refusing me the night he rescued me from Brian came to mind. He had struggled to say no to me but he did choose to walk away.

“That is because your Guardian is never an angel,” Nathaniel replied. “Reapers have free will, which is why they must accept the role of relic guardian. They can’t be forced. But this is the beauty of it: In Heaven you are bound to obey without question, and there you are forbidden to feel any emotion, even love for God. You’re not in Heaven anymore.”

“Are you saying I’m allowed to love anyone, then?” I asked carefully, trying to decipher his cryptic words. “Will?”

He smiled. “Theoretically. But Will, on the other hand, having chosen his duty and the terms, is still forbidden to do anything but protect you. While you may get off on a technicality, he must still obey Michael, and I can’t imagine your brother being very pleased with his divine sister and an Earthbound reaper.”

“Would Michael really execute Will?” I asked fearfully.

Nathaniel’s smile faded. “By law, he would have every right to.”

Ice rushed through my veins, nearly paralyzing me. “Then why would you tell Will to love me if you know that?”

“I didn’t,” he answered. “When he and I had our … discussion about you two, I told him that Michael would come for him. I also told him that I wanted him—and you—to be happy, and that when it comes to love, rules were made to be broken. I told Will he needed to make a choice, and he chose loving you.”

“I won’t let Michael kill him,” I promised. “I need Will. How can anyone be killed for love?”

Nathaniel gazed thoughtfully out onto the lake. “Acting on love is forbidden with the divine. Angelic reapers are descended from Fallen angels, the Grigori, and because of that they are no better than worms in the eyes of many angels, especially some archangels. After you had forgotten that you were Gabriel, you’d married human men in your past lives and had children. But even I know most angels believe the offspring of the fallen Grigori to be the vilest of vile, no matter that we aren’t demonic. We’re unnatural to them. Unnatural, but useful.”

Every word hit me hard, one after the other. Once I got past the idea that angels would kill Will for touching me, I was struck completely dumb by that last bombshell: I’d had children. A baby. Babies. When he said it, I remembered them, but I couldn’t remember the faces of the men I had loved before Will.

“Where are they?” I asked blearily. “My children.”

“Their descendants still live,” Nathaniel said. “You haven’t had a child in at least three hundred years. I don’t keep track of them as well as I used to, but there is one bloodline in America that I know of.”

“Why do you keep track of them?”

“The mortal scions, your children and their descendants, have always possessed some sort of power that manifests in different forms. They are stronger than any psychic, and much of what they can do resembles a bit of your own abilities, though much more diluted and, of course, no angelfire. A handful of angelic reapers have been selected to watch the scions, in case they become dangerous. Anything with great power is potentially dangerous.”

As I wondered what it would be like to know them, I was brought back to thoughts of myself loving someone other than Will. He told me he’d always loved me, and that meant that he had loved me even when I loved someone else. It broke my heart. If I had been with other men in my past lives, how could I think it was wrong for Will to have been with other girls?

“Ellie,” Nathaniel said suddenly. “Are you all right?”

I realized I’d been staring at the ground, and my hand was clamped tightly on the arm of the sofa. I let go and blinked at Nathaniel. “Yeah. It’s just a lot to digest.”

He rested a hand on mine reassuringly. “I don’t mean to wear you out. You should be resting.”

I shook my head. “I have to go after Bastian and make sure he pays for what he did to my parents.”

He beamed at me. “I have to run to the library to check up on a few leads. I may have figured out where my copy of the grimoire is. One of your more active scions is quite the collector of divine artifacts. If I can get it back, we can look into restoring you to your archangel form.”

“Do you think it’s possible?” I asked.

He smiled and stood. “Anything’s possible.” Then he was gone, leaving me to my thoughts.

The house was quiet and sure enough, it began to rain, just as Nathaniel had predicted. After my conversation with him, I retreated to the study to read. I’d come to love curling up in the window seat of the big bay window in that room.

Later in the afternoon, I was a little lonely, so I set my book down. I would run out of my last change of clothes tomorrow and would have to do laundry, unless I went back to Nana’s. But I wasn’t quite ready to rejoin the human world yet.

I crept into the kitchen to make myself a turkey sandwich for dinner, wondering where Will was. I hadn’t seen him since we had returned from our run, and I decided to look for him. The house was quiet, but then I heard the delicate strings of Will’s acoustic guitar. I followed the sound, up the stairs and toward his bedroom. The door was ajar and I pushed it open. He was sitting at the end of his bed, strumming away. He glanced at me as I walked in.

I moved toward the bed and sat down, leaning my back against his as he played flawlessly, and I rested my head against him. My eyes closed, and I listened to the soft, sweet music filling my head. His shoulders and arms moved with perfect rhythm, lulling me. I didn’t recognize the song, but it was beautiful and gentle, something that could sing me to sleep in the middle of a battlefield.

“What song is this?” I asked. “I don’t know it.”

“I wrote it for you.”

I leaned deeper against his back and smiled, feeling a rush of warmth. I turned my head and his hair brushed my cheek. “I love it.”

I melted away from reality, captured by this delicate song he had created for me. We sat like this for so long, back to back on his bed, every tiny, sinuous movement in him pulling at all my senses. I forgot about everything but him. I let myself forget about my parents, Nana, my friends, the Enshi, Bastian, Merodach and Kelaeno, Cadan … none of that mattered in this moment. The only thing that mattered was the song Will played for me.

When the song ended, I climbed off the bed and he looked up at me. The silence closed in on my skull, heavy, like the pressure would feel on my body if I was sinking through deep water.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

I shrugged and gave him a weak smile for reassurance. “I’m just tired. I think I’ll go back downstairs and finish the book I was reading.”

He nodded and as I left his room, I didn’t hear the guitar again. I returned to the study, pushing the door open gently, exhausted all of a sudden. Instead of picking my book back up, I sat on the window seat, pulled my knees to my chest, and gazed out onto the dark lake raging in the rain.

I was cold everywhere and I imagined my mom wrapping her arms around me and pulling me close. In my memory, her hands petted my hair, winding the unruly dark red waves into braided pigtails. I wished I hadn’t lied to her so many times or skipped out on hanging with her because I wanted to be with my friends. People always say that when you lose someone you love, you’re consumed with regret. Regret for what you did or didn’t do, regret for not doing enough. I felt all those things so heavily in my heart that it was hard to move or breathe. I felt ashamed that I couldn’t remember the last moment I saw her, or the very last thing she said to me. I remembered the way she smelled, her perfume, but I couldn’t quite imagine the precise color of her brown eyes. It was like with every hour that passed without her alive, my memories of her melted away. It was the most terrible thought, that I could forget her. I didn’t want to forget her, and I wanted revenge against those who had taken her from me.

I sensed Will near me, and out of the corner of my eye I saw him appear in the doorway. When I looked at him, his shoulders slumped.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “Please talk to me, Ellie.”

My mother’s face flashed across my memory, and I sniffed harshly, forcing back a sob. I curled my limbs close to my body and leaned against the window. “I miss my mom.”

He sucked in his upper lip for a thoughtful moment, and he came over and sat down on the other side of the window. “I know.”

The sob broke free, and before I knew what was happening, tears were pouring down my cheeks, and my lips and hands were shaking. I shuddered, choking on air as suffocating despair filled me up like a flood, filling my lungs and windpipe until I was crying so hard that I couldn’t breathe. He pulled me close, wrapping me in his arms as my own hung weakly around him. I buried my face in his chest as I cried, and his warm, familiar scent and hands caressing my hair were soothing. He murmured softly to me, but the words didn’t matter. I just needed to feel him around me.

I pulled away from him at last, wiping at the wetness on my face with my sleeves. It took me a few moments to meet his eyes. I managed to get my breathing back under control and to stop my chest from heaving. I tucked my arms and legs close to my body again until I was no longer touching Will. He just sat there, unmoving and silent. We watched each other for some time, the stillness between us peaceful. I listened to the rain as it pounded hard against the house.

“I’m worried about you,” he said gently. He put his hand around my knee and then leaned forward to kiss it. An obvious request for peace between us. “And about how you’re feeling.”

“I’m fine. I feel better after crying a little.”

He smiled, his lips brushing my knee, but the smile faded as soon as it began. “No, you’re not. I’m worried that you won’t get better for a while.”

“I’m healing, Will. That takes time.” I tapped the backs of my fingers against the freezing-cold window glass, wishing he would do anything but continue our current conversation.

“I know,” he said, and sat back. “You smile sometimes, but I don’t think you’re happy.”

I shrugged and stopped tapping. “It’s hard to be happy.”

“I understand better than most,” he said. “I worry you’re shutting down on me. We hunt every night, but it feels like you’ve lost your spark, some of your light. You won’t tell me how you really feel, and I just want to help you.”

“I’m in a lot of pain,” I told him. “I want revenge, and we haven’t found Bastian yet. We have no idea what his next move will be, and I’m going crazy.”

He took my hand and rubbed it with both of his. “I need you to keep fighting. Don’t give up on me, okay?” He touched my hair and got up to leave.

“Will.” I called after him and followed him to the door. I wound my fingers around the bottom of his shirt. “I don’t mean to worry you. I’ve been so numb with grief since I lost my parents. You’re doing wonderfully, supporting me, and I appreciate that.”

“I just don’t know what to say to you or how to act.”

“You don’t have to say anything.” I pleaded, “Just be here … like you are now.”

He sighed and wrapped his arms around me. “I promise I’ll always be here for you.”

I felt new tears burning my eyes. “You can’t promise me that. I’ve already lost so much. I can’t lose you too, Will.”

He pulled back, and his thumbs wiped my tears. “It’s a promise I plan to keep, and I’ve never lied to you. I swear to you that I will be your Guardian forever and I’ll keep loving you forever.”

More tears rolled down my cheeks, and he kissed them away, his lips soft against my skin. I was so heartsick, so certain that if he died for me, I’d never survive that grief.

He tilted my chin up, his green eyes bright in the dimly lit room. “You believe me, don’t you?”

I nodded, my lips quivering. “I do.”

He kissed me tenderly and I kissed him back more fiercely, our first kiss since the night my mother died. It felt like years ago, decades, like I hadn’t taken a breath in far too long.

“Why don’t you get some sleep?” he offered, his hands spilling over my shoulders. “Take it easy tonight.”

“Are you going to patrol?”

“No,” he said. “I think I’ll go down by the lake for a while and get some fresh air. Let’s go upstairs and get you into bed.”

He took my hand and led me up to his room, where I settled into his bed, pulling my limbs close to my body.

“Will you stay with me?” I asked as I pulled the blankets up to my chin.

“I’ll be up in a while,” he promised. “Try to sleep, okay?”

I watched him leave the room and close the door behind him. Drifting off took forever, and I kept stirring in and out of sleep for what was likely hours. His bed was so warm and soft, but my heart hurt too much for me to settle into a deep sleep.

Suddenly a tremendous roar blasted my eardrums, and the house gave a violent shake. I thrashed in surprise and terror, unsure if I’d dreamed what I’d just experienced. When my senses returned to me, I threw off the blankets and leaped to my feet. I tore open the bedroom door and darted down the stairs into the settling dust. The overhead lights flickered, buzzed, and went out, cloaking the house in darkness, my ears ringing shrilly. I moved toward the front of the house where the sound had come from, stepping slowly and silently.

“Will?” I called. “Nathaniel?”

The foyer—what was left of it—came into view. The front door had been blasted through, the wall around it demolished. The dust billowing in the moonlight now poured across the foyer tile. I slipped into the Grim and gasped when I saw what had caused the damage. A massive form appeared in the light and dust, the silhouette a jagged and crude shape of a man. But he was no man.

“Preliator!” the deep, gravelly voice of Merodach boomed, shaking my body to the bone. “Come out and play!”

Behind him, another shape appeared: Kelaeno, trailed by five more vir reapers.

They had found me.