The Watcher

Chapter Sixteen



I cried until nightfall. Lying in bed with the lights on, I tried not to think about Michael, but I couldn’t forget the taste of his lips. Or that look of shame in his eyes. I wanted to focus on reading my Gov/Econ homework, hoping to bore myself to sleep, to escape how repulsive and terrible I felt. I thought he wanted me. I thought it was safe to open up to him. We were meant to be together. But he’d pushed me away, and I couldn’t help but wonder Now what? Was he going to avoid me again, just when he’d finally let me in?

There was a faint tap on the window. Arielle was outside.

“I saw you were awake.”

“I’m not sure I want to talk.” I opened the window anyway and she leapt through it with the grace of a lioness. A light rain had been falling and the drops sat in her hair like jewels, as though she’d been sprinkled with it, not drenched. Her long blazer and T-shirt were mostly dry. When she turned, I noticed vents in the back of her jacket, but I was too nervous to ask where her wings were. She was that intimidating.

She paced my room, taking in the full bookshelf in the corner, the old Ikea armchair, my white dresser and desk. Having her there, I was suddenly glad I kept my room tidy. If she noticed Michael’s jacket next to me on the bed, she didn’t say anything. It smelled like him, and I didn’t want to talk about how that comforted me. I didn’t even want to think about it, in case she could read my mind. After all, if I could hear the angels’ thoughts, it only made sense they could listen to mine. Does that mean Michael can hear me as well?

Suddenly the light around her, which I assumed was her halo, shone, a ring of golden flame. Behind her was the same blue outline I’d seen on Michael the night he fought Damiel. But on Arielle, the outline was even more pronounced, a gossamer grid of blue light extending from above her shoulders to below her knees.

“Wings!” I said a little too loudly then covered my mouth, hoping my mother didn’t hear.

“You can see them?” she asked as she paced the confines of my room.

“I thought they’d have feathers,” I said, trying to not look too amazed as her wings shimmered and glistened like jeweled light behind her.

“They’re cloaked right now. I bring them out when I’m flying or if I need to deliver a message. When people see the white feathered wings, they know you mean business.” She peered back over her shoulder at me. “But I don’t need to do that with you, do I? You know what I am.”

“No, I mean, yes. I know what you are,” I said, still intimidated by her.

“Most people can’t see them when they’re cloaked,” she added. I could tell she was making an effort to put me at ease. “Have you always seen things?”

I remembered Bill telling me how I saw angels as a kid, and then the hellhound a few weeks ago, the flickering lights around Michael. Yet there had been nothing for all the years in between. “Once when I was a kid, maybe, but I think it’s more of a recent thing.”

She stopped pacing and turned to face me. “Around the time you first saw Michael?”

“I saw the hellhound first.”

“Michael was near. Given your connection, I’m not surprised.” Tilting her head, she closed her eyes and smiled. The gesture made her look pensive, connected to another world. “Sight is a gift that God gives people when He wants them to see the truth.”

I wondered exactly what kind of truth I was supposed to be seeing, when her manner changed. She stood up a little straighter, became more formal, courteous.

“I came to see how you’re doing,” she said.

“Fine,” I said, though I was anything but.

“I’m sorry you feel hurt by what happened.”

Something about her apologizing brought up all my sadness again. Did she know Michael had dumped me? Did he tell her? I tucked the duvet around my legs, though I wasn’t cold, and fought back the urge to start crying all over again.

Not wanting to get into it with her, I changed the subject, remembering something she’d said earlier. “What’s a sponsor?”

She sat beside me on the bed, and the shimmering gold light from her halo washed over me like a spring breeze. “When Michael came back, he needed help to rejoin the ranks of the Grigori again, so I was assigned to help him.”

“How do you help him?”

“However he needs me to, which is a pretty big job description.” She smiled. “Michael has a very difficult journey ahead of him. Lust was his weakness and he just came back from…a type of limbo, essentially. He’s lucky he didn’t fall further. We’ve never had a Grigori come back before, so Michael’s an experiment, a prototype. He’s the first angel in a real human form.”

“Don’t you have one?” I wanted to ask her how far Michael fell, how bad things really were, because I didn’t know anything about that part, but something stopped me. What if he’d done something so terrible I could never forgive him?

“My form,” she said, motioning to herself, “is made of light. I can make it solid at will. Michael doesn’t have the strength for that. Having a human body is new to him, to all of us. It may give him a type of strength, but it may also backfire and become a weakness.”

“I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”

“You will. In time.”

As though remembering something, she looked at me intently, her golden eyes fierce and beautiful as a big cat’s. As her halo flared slightly, I heard the sound of white noise in my ear.

“Did you hear anything?” she asked.

“Just static,” I replied.

“You can’t hear my thoughts anymore, which is good.” She relaxed and her face softened. “You are better.”

“I knew I would be,” I said.

“Do you mind if I show you something?” she said. “I don’t know if it will work, but I’m curious and I thought it might be worth a try.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked nervously.

“Take you down our communications network and show you what Michael does.”

“Your what?”

“As you discovered earlier today, we communicate telepathically. But it’s more than that. We’re linked into each other like a network, so we can see what’s going on with each other when we need to.”

So that was how she had found us earlier. “You mean you can see…” Michael and me kissing?

“Only when he’s working,” she replied quickly, as if she’d read my mind.

Can she hear my thoughts? I stared at her intently. Is she listening now?

If she was, she didn’t let on. “The network’s in place so we can back each other up. It’s how we communicate. If an angel on duty disconnects from that network, the way Michael did today, we have to check on each other, in case of injury. It’s for our safety. Any number of things could attack us when we drop our connection.” She turned to face me. “I didn’t know what I’d see.”

“Oh.” Her explanation didn’t make the idea of her being able to see us any easier, but at least she couldn’t read my mind. “How do we do this?”

Still sitting beside me on the bed, she took both my hands in hers. “You relax and look into my eyes. I don’t know exactly how it will appear to you. It could appear as a vision, but it may seem like you’re there.”

I looked into her beautiful golden eyes, and a light flashed behind them, like sunlight through amber. I had the sensation of being pulled in, as though I was falling into her. I gasped.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “Just breathe and let me do all the rest.”

I kept staring into her eyes as my bedroom disappeared around me and I was speeding down a wide tunnel of misty, silvery light. I flew through it as it bent and twisted several times and then opened into a room—a dirty, rundown apartment with cracked paint and water stains on the walls. It was so realistic, as if I was actually there, and yet I knew I wasn’t. Arielle’s presence blazed behind me as I took everything in.

There was no furniture—even the sink had been torn from the wall—and the carpet was stained with blood, vomit, and God knows what other bodily fluids. On the floor, amidst tattered clothes and broken glass, lay a sandy-haired guy in his early twenties, not much older than Bill. His eyes were glazed, haunted, and slightly open, and it seemed as though he hadn’t showered or eaten in days. Beside him, pieces of tinfoil were scattered among a filthy-looking needle, a dirty ashtray, and a threadbare red bandana.

Most notably, on—or rather through—his chest sat something fuzzy and black, half the size of a man. It looked like lint, if lint could be animated, and it had hollows for eyes. Something about seeing it made my stomach churn, my chest tighten like the skin of a drum.

“You see it, don’t you? I wasn’t sure if you would.”

“Oh my God,” I said. Realizing I was cursing in front of an angel, I covered my mouth. “What is that thing?”

“A lesser demon. I guess you’d call it a minion of sorts. It’s feeding on his addiction and despair.” Her hand touched my shoulder. “They’re parasites. They stir up negative emotions so they can feed off of them.”

The thing writhed silently on the guy’s chest and, suddenly agitated, the guy staggered to get up and reach for the tinfoil beside him, what I assumed were his drugs.

“How did it get on him?” I asked Arielle.

“They attack people and make them do horrible things, but nobody knows they’re there. People think they’re doing these things to themselves, but really they’re feeding a parasite.”

“So when people say ‘a monkey on your back,’ it’s almost true.” I shuddered at how it was more through than on him. I thought of Fiona, how she’d said she wasn’t the one who hurt herself. “Do they attack everyone?”

“All the time, but it’s about the choices people make. If someone chooses to hurt themselves or someone else, these things get in. If someone is happy and loving, it sours the milk and they leave.”

“What about my friend Fiona?” I asked. “She wouldn’t hurt herself, and yet…”

Arielle put a hand on my shoulder. “Fiona is insecure about her attractiveness. Damiel used that vulnerability to get in.”

“She didn’t do anything to deserve that.”

A note of sadness crossed Arielle’s face. “People seldom do.”

I was trying to get my mind around this strange reality she was showing me when Michael appeared in the room. My chest tightened until it ached.

Despite the filth around him, his expression was serene, as though he were untouched by the grime. He was bathed in a golden light that made him awesome to behold, but the guy didn’t even see him. Instead, with clumsy shaking hands, he fumbled to open the folded tinfoil.

Michael crouched behind the young man and whispered in his ear. Though I thought I’d seen Michael work before with Fiona at school, I couldn’t ever hear what he’d said. This time I could. Arielle must have made it possible.

“Dear One, I bring you a message. Will you hear it?” He spoke in tones so beautiful my own heart leapt in response.

Tears filled my eyes as the man emptied the contents of the tinfoil into a spoon, preparing his next fix. The beast on the man’s chest writhed and snarled. Michael spoke to him again, touching his shoulder and addressing him by name.

“Steven. You must stop this. This dose will kill you.”

If he heard him at all, the man named Steven did not acknowledge it. The beast grew larger, its writhing more animated, as it snarled at Michael.

“Why doesn’t he kill that thing?” I asked Arielle.

“He can’t. Not unless the man releases it. We must respect his free will,” she said. “Otherwise, another will just take its place.”

“What about Damiel? Michael fought him.”

“Demonic possession is different. If the host isn’t willing, we can dispel them. This man, Steven, has given his will to the parasite.”

Michael continued, “This is not the only way. You are loved. You are forgiven. Everything you have done is forgiven.”

The man filled and tapped his syringe, ignoring him. The scene shifted and blurred as Arielle pulled me out back through the tunnel. I felt dizzy and strange as my eyes grew accustomed to the soft incandescent lighting of my room. The bed beneath me was soft and warm. A stubborn lump formed in my throat and I swallowed it back before I could speak.

“That’s what he does?”

“Some of it.”

“He’s amazing!”

“He’d be even more amazing if he realized that the same forgiveness applied to him.” There was sadness in her voice that made me feel foolish for gushing. “How do you feel?” she asked, changing the subject.

“Fine,” I said. Actually, I was bright and awake and, for some reason, my mouth tasted of orange peels.

She did that thing with her halo again to see if I could hear her telepathically. “Well?”

“Just static,” I replied.

This seemed to satisfy her. “I wanted you to see that…I know you look at him and see an angel, and I know that’s astounding to you.” She stood and turned toward the window, as though checking the night, and when she turned back to me, her expression was filled with sadness and a quiet determination. “He has his choices to make, and I will respect them. But I really don’t want to see him go down again. Not when there’s so much at stake.”

She saw me as a threat to Michael’s well-being, even now that he’d chosen to push me away. Surely I wasn’t still a threat?

“He doesn’t want to be with me,” I said, hoping she couldn’t sense my shame. I’d been so caught up in my feelings about him that the fact he was a messenger of God hadn’t really sunk in. I never considered how wrong it might be for him, how wrong it always was.

She placed a hand on my shoulder. “You have nothing to be ashamed of. It’s natural for humans to be in awe of angels. That awe is part of who we are, what we do. For an angel to act on that is wrong in so many ways. It’s strictly forbidden.”

“Why is it forbidden?”

“Because of the impact we can have—that awe—it’s so easy for us to affect you. Being close to one of us can lead to a type of enthrallment, which you experienced earlier today. It becomes intoxicating for you, addictive, for both the human and the angel. We were never designed to be with you physically. That is considered perverse among our kind. It’s an abuse of our power, a line we’re not meant to cross. Those who do suffer immensely for it.” She got up and paced my room again, ruffling her wings, and specks of blue light danced around her.

“What happened to them?” I asked.

“Many became addicted to the enthrallment, as did the people they enthralled. Eventually, the fallen learned how to use it to manipulate and control. The further the angel fell, the more dark and self-serving the enthrallment became, where they drained the life force of their victims until there was nothing left.” Arielle turned to me. “You’ve seen Damiel do it. It’s what makes him so dangerous.”

I recalled the way I’d had a hard time breaking my date with Damiel, how tired he’d made me, and shivered. I was lucky Michael had come along when he did. Damiel had used that same charm on Fiona and look what happened to her.

I wanted to ask Arielle if Michael had done that with me but didn’t know how to ask. I searched my memories from both lives, old and new, but found nothing, nothing that seemed like I was being controlled. Instead, Michael shut himself down, trying to keep us apart, as if he had the right to choose for both of us.

“You said before it was a line you’re not meant to cross. Where—exactly—is it?” I asked. Michael had said he couldn’t be with me that way, but he’d kissed me. Had we already crossed it?

“It’s not easy to define, since it’s a matter of enthrallment and addiction. There are some alcoholics who can have a glass of wine and not go on a binge, while others can’t take even one sip,” she explained. “Our way has been to avoid human contact altogether, and Michael’s track record hasn’t been very good.”

It still didn’t answer my question. Was there something else she wasn’t telling me?

“I don’t know everything that happened between you and Michael,” she said. “But I do know it impacted you. Why else would you have been intrigued by ancient history for so long, and not only in this life?”

I’d been into ancient history before? In other lifetimes?

“Being near Michael brought forward some of your memories, but when Damiel tried to force them all to come in at once, it opened you right up,” she continued, “so even though your mind might not remember all the details—your soul does.”

The whole idea of my soul remembering things made my head hurt. I could sense more memories lurking in the back of my mind, threatening to reveal themselves, and I was suddenly tired. “Why did Michael come back? He said he’d been given another chance.”

Arielle put an arm around my shoulder, her presence as soothing as I imagined a sister’s would be. “I don’t know all of God’s plan. But I know one thing. You and Michael were brought together again for a reason.”