Angel

Page 63

 

  Then there was kissing him, touching him, being touched by him. Simply being near Alex was enough to make my pulse shoot up. It was funny, because all of that made me feel so totally human: Alex’s hands warm on my skin, the heat of our mouths together, so that I was plummeting, soaring — what could be more human than that? But that moment in the desert when the truth finally hit me had blasted away any tiny thoughts I might have had about this angel thing being a mistake. No matter how human I felt when I was with Alex, I wasn’t. It wasn’t a boy with a girl; it was a boy with something half human.

  The thought made me feel so wistful sometimes, like gazing out through a rain-streaked window. It was if something I had never fully appreciated before was now gone forever. Knowing that I was only half human meant that I couldn’t even wonder about a future with Alex, not really. For whatever this thing was inside of me, it meant that I might be the one to destroy the angels . . . and that they wanted me dead. How much time did either Alex or I actually have?

  I hated thinking about all of this; I wanted it just to go away, forever. Alex seemed to sense that it wasn’t my favorite subject. Mostly we didn’t talk about it very much; we just savored being together. We went for long walks; we spent a whole afternoon having leaf-boat races in the stream; another one checking out the prospector’s device behind the cabin. It worked by dumping silt from the stream into a cradle and then filtering it out — you could still see where whoever had originally lived there had dug big chunks out of the bank in places, searching for gold.

  “I wonder if he ever found any,” I mused, touching one of the cradle’s legs. It was half rotting, its wood a soft gray.

  Alex was crouched on his haunches, examining the rusty screen that the silt sifted through. “It’d really be too bad if he didn’t, after going to so much trouble. ” Then he glanced up at me, raising an eyebrow. “Hey, how come we’re both calling him ‘he’? It could have been a girl prospector. ”

  I laughed. “I guess you’re right. God, I never thought I’d be sexist. ”

  He shook his head. “You’d better be careful about that. They’ll kick you out of the girl mechanics’ club if they find out. ”

  “You won’t tell them, will you?”

  “Hmm, let me see. . . . ” Standing up, Alex brushed his hands off on his jeans, shooting me a considering glance. “How much is my silence worth to you?”

  I twined my arms around his neck, pulling him down so I could peck his cheek. “There, is that enough?” I asked innocently.

  “Ha. In your dreams. ” He drew me back to him with a grin. As his lips met mine, I could hear the trickling of the stream and the faint, faraway cry of a hawk. When we finally pulled apart, he looked at the cradle and laughed. “You know, it was probably some grizzled old guy with a beard who chewed tobacco and smelled bad. ”

  I had my arms around his waist, smiling as I looked up at him. Being with Alex made me so completely happy, in an easy, uncomplicated way that I hadn’t felt since I was a small child. “I love you,” I said. In the five days we’d been there, it was the first time I’d said the words to him in English; they just slipped out.

  Alex’s expression went very still as he looked down at me, his dark hair stirred by the slight breeze. I picked up a sudden wave of his emotions, and they almost brought tears to my eyes. Gently, he took my face in his hands and kissed me.

  “I love you, too,” he said against my lips.

  JONAH GLANCED AROUND HIM nervously as he entered the café in Denver’s Lower Downtown district. He didn’t go into Denver much, spending most of his time at the cathedral, and had never been to LoDo, with its Victorian houses and art galleries, at all. It had taken him several wrong turns to even find the café, much less somewhere to park. More than once he had been tempted, strongly, to just forget the whole thing and go back to his apartment at the cathedral.

  But somehow he hadn’t.

  Now, as he ordered a cappuccino at the counter, he heard someone say his name. “Jonah Fisk?”

  He turned and saw a tall man with broad shoulders and blond hair standing there. He had the same intense eyes as Raziel. Jonah licked his lips. “Yes, that’s me. ”

  The angel held out his hand. “Nate Anderson. Thanks for coming. ”

  Jonah nodded, still unsure whether he should have done so. When he’d gotten his coffee, he followed the angel to a table at the rear of the café, half hidden by a large ficus tree. A woman of about thirty with shoulder-length brown hair was already sitting there, wearing a tailored suit. She half rose as Jonah approached.

  “Hi. Sophie Kinney,” she said, offering her hand. Her brown eyes weren’t angel intense, but they were still pretty intense. Jonah shook her hand, then sat down hesitantly, suddenly feeling as awkward as he’d felt back at college.

  “Well, first of all, thanks for the tip-off,” said the angel. There was a half-drunk coffee in front of him; he took a sip. “I thought Sophie and I had gotten out in time; I didn’t realize that they were on to me. ”

  “That’s OK,” said Jonah, his voice faint. It hadn’t really been his intention to tip the angel off that the others were aware of his traitorous activities; he had just needed to talk to him. But of course in doing so, the effect had been the same. Already, just by doubting the angels, he may have caused irreparable harm to them. His stomach clenched at the thought.

  Gazing down, he stirred his cappuccino. “Look, I’m not sure I should be here. I mean, I just wonder if all of this is a mistake. The angels helped me; they really did. ”

  “You’ve seen one?” asked Nate. “In its divine form, I mean?”

  “Yes, it changed my life. ” Jonah described the encounter.

  As he finished, Nate sat back in his seat, a look of surprised pleasure crossing his handsome face. “One of the marshalers,” he said to Sophie. “How about that for luck, with the Second Wave about to come — that Jonah ended up as Raziel’s right-hand man?”

  “Um . . . what?” said Jonah.

  Sophie leaned toward him. “Listen, it’s not a mistake, I’m afraid,” she said crisply. “Angels are here because their own world is dying; they’re feeding off humans. They cause death, disease, mental illness. We’ve been trying to fight them covertly, but now that the department’s been taken over —” She sighed.

  “What about the angel I saw, though?” said Jonah. “She was . . . ” He trailed off. The angel who had come to him was one of his most cherished memories; he didn’t want anything to change that.

  “She was on our side,” said Nate. “Not all of us believe that angels have the right to destroy humanity; a few of us are trying to stop it. She didn’t feed from you; she was doing something called marshaling — placing a small amount of psychic resistance in your aura to make you unpalatable to other angels. It can sometimes be passed from human to human, too, in the right conditions, through auric contact — it’s our hope that if we do enough of this, it might start to make a difference. ”

  Unpalatable to other angels. Jonah froze in his seat. His words stumbling over themselves, he said, “I — I’ve seen other angels in their divine form since then, at the cathedral, but — they never touch me for more than a second. I just sort of get glimpses of them, and then they’re gone. ” Dizzily, he remembered the woman in the corridor, the long moments she’d spent smiling upward. The angel touching her had clearly been taking its time doing it.