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I bit down on my tongue as the pain in my arms deepened. They were tearing out of their sockets.
And then, through the fear and panic, I heard Patch’s voice. Block him out. Keep climbing. The ladder’s intact.
“I can’t,” I sobbed. “I’ll fall!”
Block him out. Close your eyes. Listen to my voice.
Swallowing, I forced my eyes shut. I clung to Patch’s voice and felt a sturdy surface take shape beneath me. My feet were no longer hanging in air. I felt one of the ladder rungs digging into the balls of my feet. Focusing with resolve on Patch’s voice, I waited until the world crept back into place. Patch was right. I was on the ladder. It was upright, secured to the wall. I regained a measure of determination and continued climbing.
At the top I eased myself precariously onto the closest rafter. I got my arms around it, then swung my right leg up and over. I was facing the wall, with my back to the air shaft, but there was nothing I could do now. Very carefully, I rose up on my knees. Using all my concentration, I starting inching backward across the expanse of the gym.
But it was too late.
Jules had climbed quickly, and was now less than fifteen feet away from me. He climbed onto the rafter.
Hand over hand, he dragged himself toward me. A dark slash on the inside of his wrist caught my eye.
It intersected his veins at a ninetydegree angle and was nearly black in color. To anyone else, it might have looked like a scar. To me, it meant so much more. The family connection was obvious. We shared the same blood, and it showed in our identical marks.
We were both straddling the rafter, sitting facetoface, ten feet apart.
“Any last words?” Jules said.
I looked down, even though it made me dizzy. Patch was far below on the gym floor, still as death.
Right then, I wanted to go back in time and relive every moment with him. One more secret smile, one more shared laugh. One more electric kiss. Finding him was like finding someone I didn’t know I was searching for. He’d come into my life too late, and now was leaving too soon. I remembered him telling me he’d give up everything for me. He already had. He’d given up a human body of his own so I could live.
I wobbled accidentally, and instinctively dropped lower to balance myself.
Jules’s laughter carried like a cold whisper. “It makes no difference to me whether I shoot you or you fall to your death. ”
“It does make a difference,” I said, my voice small but confident. “You and I share the same blood. ” I lifted my hand precariously, showing him my birthmark. “I’m your descendant. If I sacrifice my blood, Patch will become human and you’ll die. It’s written in The Book of Enoch. ”
Jules’s eyes were devoid of light. They were trained on me, absorbing every word I spoke. I could tell by his expression that he was weighing my words. A flush rose in his face, and I knew he believed me.
“You—,” he sputtered.
He slid toward me with frantic speed, simultaneously reaching into his waistband to draw the gun.
Tears stung my eyes. With no time for second thoughts, I threw myself off the rafter.
CHAPTER 30
A DOOR OPENED AND CLOSED. I WAITED TO HEAR footsteps approach, but the only sound came from the ticking of a clock: a rhythmic, steady pounding through the silence.
The sound began to fade, winding down. I wondered if I would hear it stop completely. I suddenly feared that moment, unsure of what came after.
A much more vibrant sound eclipsed the clock. It was a reassuring, ethereal sound, a melodic dance on air. Wings, I thought. Coming to take me away.
I held my breath, waiting, waiting, waiting. And then the clock began to go in reverse. Instead of slowing, the beat became more certain. A spirallike liquid formed inside me, coiling deeper and deeper. I felt myself pulled into the current. I was sliding down through myself, into a dark, warm place.
My eyes flickered open to familiar oak paneling on the sloped ceiling above me. My bedroom. A sense of reassurance flooded over me, and then I remembered where I’d been. In the gym with Jules.
A shiver slid over my skin.
“Patch?” I said, my voice hoarse from disuse. I tried to sit up, then gave a muffled cry. Something was wrong with my body. Every muscle, bone, cell was sore. I felt like one giant bruise.
There was movement near the doorway. Patch leaned against the doorjamb. His mouthed was pressed tight and lacked its usual twinge of humor. His eyes held more depth than I’d ever seen before. They were sharpened by a protective edge.
“That was a good fight back in the gym,” he said. “But I think you could benefit from a few more boxing lessons. ”
On a wave, everything came back to me. Tears rolled up from deep inside me. “What happened? Where is Jules? How did I get here?” My voice cracked with panic. “I threw myself off the rafter. ”
“That took a lot of courage. ” Patch’s voice turned husky, and he stepped all the way inside my bedroom.
He closed the door behind him, and I knew it was his way of trying to lock out all the bad. He was putting a divide between me and everything that had happened.
He walked over and sat on the bed beside me. “What else do you remember?”
I tried to piece my memories together, working backward. I remembered the beating wings I’d heard shortly after I flung myself off the rafter. Without any doubt, I knew I’d died. I knew an angel had come to carry my soul away.
“I’m dead, aren’t I?” I said quietly, reeling with fright. “Am I a ghost?”
“When you jumped, the sacrifice killed Jules. Technically, when you came back, he should have too.
But since he didn’t have a soul, he had nothing to revive his body. ”
“I came back?” I said, hoping I wasn’t filling myself with false hope.
“I didn’t accept your sacrifice. I turned it down. ”
I felt a small Oh form at my mouth, but it never quite made it past my lips. “Are you saying you gave up getting a human body for me?”
He lifted my bandaged hand. Underneath all the gauze, my knuckles throbbed from punching Jules.
Patch kissed each finger, taking his time, keeping his eyes glued to mine. “What good is a body if I can’t have you?”
Heavier teardrops rolled down my cheeks, and Patch pulled me to him, tucking my head against his chest. Very slowly the panic edged away, and I knew it was all over. I was going to be all right.
Suddenly I pulled away. If Patch had turned down the sacrifice, then—
“You saved my life. Turn around,” I ordered solemnly.
Patch gave a sly smile and indulged my request. I rucked his Tshirt up to his shoulders. His back was smooth, defined muscle. The scars were gone.
“You can’t see my wings,” he said. “They’re made of spiritual matter. ”
“You’re a guardian angel now. ” I was still too much in awe to wrap my mind around it, but at the same time I felt amazement, curiosity … happiness.
“I’m your guardian angel,” he said.
“I get my very own guardian angel? What, exactly, is your job description?”
“Guard your body. ” His smile tipped higher. “I take my job seriously, which means I’m going to need to get acquainted with the subject matter on a personal level. ”
My stomach went all fluttery. “Does this mean you can feel now?”
Patch watched me in silence for a moment. “No, but it does mean I’m not blacklisted. ”
Downstairs, I heard the quiet rumble of the garage door gliding open.
“My mom!” I gasped. I found the clock on the nightstand. It was just after two in the morning. “They must have opened the bridge. How does this whole guardian angel business work? Am I the only person who can see you? I mean, are you invisible to everyone else?”
Patch stared at me like he hoped I wasn’t serious.
“You’re not invisible?” I squeake
d. “You have to get out of here!” I made a movement to push Patch off the bed but was cut short by a searing jab in my ribs. “She’ll kill me if she finds you in here. Can you climb trees? Tell me you can climb a tree!”
Patch grinned. “I can fly. ”
Oh. Right. Well, okay.
“The police and fire department were here earlier,” Patch said. “The master bedroom will need to be gutted, but they stopped the fire from spreading. The police will be back. They’re going to have a few questions. If I had to guess, they already tried reaching you on the cell you called 911 on. ”
“Jules took it. ”
He nodded. “I figured. I don’t care what you tell the police, but I’d appreciate it if you left me out of it. ”
He slid my bedroom window open. “Last thing. Vee got to the police in time. Paramedics saved Elliot.
He’s in the hospital, but he’ll be all right. ”
Down the hall, at the bottom of the stairs, I heard the house door shut. My mom was inside.
“Nora?” she called. She tossed her purse and keys on the entry table. Her high heels clicked across the wood floors, almost at a running pace. “Nora! There’s police tape on the front door! What is going on?”
I looked to the window. Patch was gone, but a single black feather was pressed to the outer pane, held in place by last night’s rain. Or angel magic.
Downstairs, my mom flicked on the hall light, a faint ray of it stretching all the way under the crack at the bottom of my door. I held my breath and counted seconds, assuming I had about two more before—
She shrieked. “Nora! What happened to the banister!”
Good thing she hadn’t seen her bedroom yet.
The sky was a perfect, rinsed blue. The sun was just starting to fan out across the horizon. It was Monday, a brandnew day, the horrors of the past twentyfour hours far behind. I had five hours of sleep under my belt, and other than the allover body pain that came from being sucked into death, then spat back out, I felt remarkably refreshed. I didn’t want to hang a black cloud over the moment by reminding myself that the police were expected to arrive any minute to take my statement on the night’s events. I still hadn’t made up my mind what I was going to tell them.
I padded to the bathroom in my nightshirt—mentally blocking the question of how I’d changed into it, since I’d presumably been wearing clothes when Patch brought me home—and sped through my morning routine. I splashed cold water on my face, scrubbed my teeth, and tamed my hair back into a rubber band. In my bedroom, I pulled on a clean shirt, clean jeans.
I called Vee.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
“Good. How are you?”
“Good. ”
Silence.
“Okay,” Vee said in a rush, “I am still totally freaked out. You?”
“Totally. ”
“Patch called me in the middle of the night. He said Jules roughed you up pretty bad, but that you were okay. ”
“Really? Patch called you?”
“He called from the Jeep. He said you were asleep in the backseat and he was driving you home. He said he just happened to be driving past the high school when he heard a scream. He said he found you in the gym, but that you’d fainted from pain. The next thing he knew, he looked up and saw Jules jump off the rafter. He said Jules must have snapped, a side effect from all the burdensome guilt he felt over terrorizing you. ”