The Watcher

Chapter Thirteen



Michael went outside to split some logs while I paced the living room, trying to collect my thoughts. Damiel was a demon. If I hadn’t seen that black smoke around him attack me like something out of a horror movie, I never would have believed it. And what were those weird images? They came in too quickly to make any sense.

Fiona used to say that she would love it if a guy fought for her, but having just been in that position, I could honestly say it was terrifying. Michael could have been hurt. He tried to warn me, but I didn’t listen.

Michael came in with an armful of logs and placed them in front of our old brick fireplace. Crouching on the floor beside them, he grabbed a piece of newspaper and crumpled it in his smooth, strong hands.

I knew his hands when they were callused. How could I know that? Mom told me once that people who experienced psychotic breaks saw things that weren’t really there. Was that what was happening to me?

The light was suddenly too bright. I rubbed my eyes, pressing with my fingers. I didn’t even know where to begin. “This is crazy. Am I hallucinating?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

I kept pacing, the heels of my boots noisy on the oak parquet floors. My thoughts—like a tongue to a broken tooth—kept returning to that small mud-plaster house. Pinkish yellow morning sun filtered through the open doorway. Michael was outside, wearing robes of some kind. He was so tall he had to stoop to come in.

“Why do I keep seeing things? It feels as if I know you, but not from now. Everything’s…” I realized I couldn’t bring myself to explain the way things looked. Nothing made sense. “Different.”

Raking a hand through his hair, he glanced down the hallway to see if my mother was within earshot. Her door was closed, but I could hear the water running for her bath.

“Those are memories,” he said.

Memories? It was one thing to have hallucinations, but to have them confirmed was something else. Visions of him flashed before me, too numerous to track. Darkness and light. Some were present-day—fighting with Damiel. Others seemed to come from another time.

I shook my head, as if I could shake them away. “It’s too unreal.”

His back toward me, he stacked small logs around the paper in the fireplace, making a teepee. “Reality isn’t what you think.”

“I don’t know what to believe. It seems like a different life.”

“It was a long time ago,” he said.

“What do you mean a long time ago? How long?” I pressed.

Michael struck a match and held it to the paper. Flames licked yesterday’s front-page news, consuming a scrunched color photo of the Space Needle. “You tell me.”

I closed my eyes to hold onto what I was seeing. It was before the Roman Empire, before the Chinese Dynasties, even before Mesopotamia, but try as I might I couldn’t register how long ago it was. My mind spun. I’d been fascinated with ancient cultures most of my life, only to find out that I’d lived in one. I had been there.

Buzzing like I’d had too much coffee, I collapsed on the couch. “How can that be? Both of us remembering that far back? It’s impossible.”

“No, not impossible,” he said. “Improbable. There’s nothing left of that time, no artifacts, no written records. Everything it once was has washed into the sea. People can’t remember their past lives that far back. If Damiel hadn’t tried to dislodge your memory from this life and throw it back into that one—”

“Damiel did what?” I scowled at him.

“I stopped him.”

“Michael. Tell me what’s going on!”

Sighing, he blew the flames until one of the logs caught. The light from the fire cast an orange shine in his hair. “I’ve been given another chance.”

“Another chance for what?”

The air around us grew still and cold and the fire gave off too little heat. I shivered.

Michael got up and sat on the couch beside me. Resting his elbows on his knees, he tented his fingertips together; they were gray from the newsprint.

“I’d been sent to watch,” he said. “I saw many things over the years and at first I thought all there was to this world was sickness, brutality, and death.”

His skin drew a little tighter to the bone and filled with golden light, as though he shone from within. “But one day I saw you…and you were the most beautiful thing…” Heat rushed through my chest: he’d called me beautiful. “I became obsessed, neglecting my duties to watch you each day…preparing food, gathering flowers to make dyes for the fabric you wove.”

Goose bumps formed on my arms and tickled the back of my neck as he spoke. What he was saying had to be true. I’d never told him about the loom. How else could he have known?

“I wanted to be with you. Wanted you to see me,” he continued. “Even though so many of the others had fallen before me, I thought this was different, that I was different. That letting you see me would be enough…”

An image of a meadow came to me. Yellow sunlight streamed through bright spring leaves, bathing everything in dappled light. Michael stood there, wearing the robes I’d seen him in before.

“One day, I appeared. You weren’t much older than you are now.”

I stayed with the image. Behind Michael were wings—actual wings—the same ones I’d dreamt of. Had I been dreaming of him? As the goose bumps on my arms spread all the way down to my feet, I remembered how peaceful, how good being near him felt—much as it did now.

“You had wings.”

“Your mother had died. You asked me to stay in the meadow to keep you company. An angel’s duties.”

“You’re an…” I couldn’t say the word. But it explained so many things: the flashes of light that day in the woods, the way he seemed to glow, his unearthly beauty.

“It was forbidden for us to mate with humans.”

A tendril of sadness wove itself around my heart. What we felt was forbidden?

“Other Watchers started to see I was in trouble, told me to get reassigned. I should have left you alone… Instead, I came to you often.”

I remembered returning to the meadow to wait for him, the late afternoon sun dancing through the leaves.

“Even this lifetime, when I first saw you…It’s like I’m being forced to choose again, between Heaven and being with you.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be,” he snapped, then quickly composed himself. “Being with you back then made this world bearable for me.”

I could hardly believe what I was hearing. Happy tears welled behind my eyes. I blinked them back, smiling at him.

“Don’t look at me that way,” he said, frowning at me. “You wanted an angel’s presence. I was consumed by lust. What I became, what I did…”

Memories sped through my mind faster than I could catch them, dizzying me—one of Michael kneeling on the sun-baked grass, holding and kissing my hands. I gasped from the force of the memory. “You loved me.”

He took both my hands in his now, gripping them as a palpable anger flashed through him. “No, I became obsessed. What I did was wrong.” Sighing, his grip lightened as he let my hands go. “But you loved me anyway, believing for the rest of your life that you had seduced an angel. When it was all along the angel who had seduced you.”

Not sure what to say, I didn’t speak, taking it all in. All I could remember was the love.

“I can’t do that again,” he said, standing.

“You won’t.”

He knelt in front of the fireplace. One of the logs had fallen in the fire he’d built, its embers glowing beneath the flames. Poker in hand, he stabbed at it and clusters of hot, angry sparks gasped up the chimney. “You don’t know—”

“You asked me to trust you.” I couldn’t understand why he was warning me against him, after everything he’d done to help. “And I do.”

“That’s different.”

Was it? I didn’t see how. As crazy as it all sounded, I believed everything he was telling me. I even remembered some of it, and the memories I had were good ones. Though I was curious about everything—how we lived, what it was like, and especially what he’d done—I couldn’t bring myself to ask. Not yet. It didn’t seem right to mistrust him for something he did thousands of years ago, in a different life. Something I didn’t even remember. How was it relevant?

“It was a long time ago,” I said.

Putting down the fire poker, he closed the screen. “I hurt you.”

I joined him by the spitting fire and knelt beside him. “That doesn’t mean you will again.”

Exhaling sharply, he leaned his head into one of his hands and covered his eyes. As I watched him struggle with his conscience over his past, a tightness gripped my chest. Without thinking, I touched the back of his head, stroking his hair, and it felt natural, as though I’d done it many times before. He sighed as his shoulders visibly relaxed. Squeezing my hand, he moved it to his lips and kissed it, palm up, before taking it in his.

The heat of his mouth lingered on my hand. When he looked up at me, his eyes were soft and unfocused.

“Thank you,” he said, and a sense of peace washed over the room.