Guardian (30 page)

“But then… he died. And you met Matthias. And had the car accident,” I said quietly, hoping I wasn’t prying too deeply.

Rachel focused her gaze on me again and smiled sadly. “Correct. On all accounts. His name was Dominic, he came to America when he was three from the Philippines. He had a very sudden, very unexpected heart attack at his office, and he died almost instantly. That was three years ago. And then, just last summer, I met Matthias.” She shrugged helplessly. “He was just… different. I don’t think there are any words to explain it. The moment I set eyes on him, it just struck something within me.”

“I think I know just what you mean,” I said, thinking of the first few times I had met Rafael.

Rachel gently covered my hand with hers. “Yes. I expect you would. Anyway, just three days spent with him, and I never wanted him to leave again, even though I knew he and his mysterious friends wouldn’t be staying very long. And then we had the car crash. I can remember most of it, even though I probably shouldn’t. We were on a two-lane road, and someone coming from the opposite direction swerved to avoid hitting a deer. They crashed right into us. We flew, just literally flew right off the road. Matthias told me he was on his way back, because he didn’t want to just leave me. He found us, got Naomi out of the car, and she was all right, being in her car seat in the back saved her. But I had been blindsided, my door got one side of my body and all the airbags hit me in the front. We slammed into a tree and somehow a branch got through a window and hit me too. It sounds incredibly gruesome, but I’m not sure everything was attached the way it should have been.”

I couldn’t keep a grimace off my face. “It’s stories like that which make me wish I’d stayed ignorant of how to drive.”

Rachel chuckled. “I’ll admit, it took me a few months to get back behind the wheel of a car, as indestructible as I am.”

“So Matthias saved you too, along with Naomi.”

“Yes. That part is a little more blurry, but he managed to rip off the car door and get to me. He told me he could save me, if I only wanted to be with him and serve God forever – we’d had some pretty deep conversations about our faith in those three days, it was one of the reasons I was able to say yes, without any hesitation at all. And so he changed me into a Fallen, right there.”

I felt odd asking, but I had to know. “And you’ve never regretted that decision? Even though you made it so quickly, in the heat of the moment? Maybe just because you were dying?”

Instantly Rachel shook her head. “No. Not once have I ever thought I made the wrong choice, following Matthias and the others. I was making a difference in the world with my work at the clinic, I really was, but now God has given me an opportunity to see a broader spectrum, to help and protect more people. My greatest moment of triumph was when I stood outside the clinic, while we were waiting for Naomi to recuperate and I was saying my own farewell, and I fought off a demon that almost got a young pregnant girl who had been trying for weeks to gather the courage to seek help from us. If I hadn’t been there to help, who knows what the demon might have persuaded her to do? In that moment I knew I would never regret the choice I had made. Naomi is an unsolved problem and I worry about her every day, but I know God will provide a solution, He’ll just do it in his own time.”

Rachel’s story only made me want to change Rafael’s mind all the more. I
wanted
, so badly to be able to help people the way she could, to have eternity to serve God, and to do it all with Rafael at my side.

“Rafael refuses to even contemplate giving me his light,” I said quietly. “When he told me your story, he seemed, well-”

“As though he didn’t like me very much?” Rachel supplied with a knowing look.

“Yes,” I said, relieved she had said it for me.

“That’s because he doesn’t. Rafael doesn’t believe that any Fallen should give their light to any human, ever.”

“But
why
?”

“I would say, up until about two hundred years ago, Rafael didn’t believe in giving his light to anyone. He doesn’t think being a Fallen is a good existence when someone can be human, but his mind could probably have been swayed. If he had met you back then, I’m sure you would already be one of us. But really, the reason he is so reluctant is because of Sadie and Abram.”

“Damian told me about the hierarchy and that they were powers,” I said. “But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there? If it was just that, I don’t see why Rafael wouldn’t explain it all to me.”

“I think Sadie and Abram scared Rafael. I can only tell you what Matthias has shared with me. None of this came from Rafael, but I can see the connection and make an educated guess about him. Abram was a member of the flock, though from what I understand, he was a very new Fallen. He came to our side sometime during the American Revolutionary War. During the 1860s, the flock was helping out with the Civil War relief, taking care of the wounded. Then, it was only Rafael, Abram, Matthias, Damian, and Sara. I guess one man asked Abram to take a rosary back to his sister, who had gone out West. It took them a few years to track her down, only having her and her brother’s first names, but eventually they found her in Oregon. That girl’s name was Sadie.”

“So Sadie was human once,” I clarified.

Rachel nodded. “Abram fell in love with her. I don’t know all the details, but from what I understand Sadie’s faith no longer played an important part in her life, and the flock stayed in Oregon for several months while Abram slowly worked to try and bring her back. After all, he couldn’t exactly ask her to become a Fallen when she wasn’t steady on what she believed. Eventually, he must have won her over and restored her faith, because she became a Fallen, a power, just as Abram was. But something went wrong, since twenty years later, in 1889, the two of them turned. Abram went back to Satan, and Sadie along with him.”

The real reasons behind Rafael’s absolute reluctance were finally becoming clearer, and I found I didn’t like them much.

“I don’t know who made the first step back toward Lucifer, but I think the point is, Sadie wouldn’t have had the temptation or even the option if she hadn’t been made a Fallen,” Rachel said gently. “And the whole ordeal only cemented what Rafael had always believed: turning humans into Fallen is a bad idea. You know how Rafael is so quick to always take responsibility for all those around him, and how rigidly he tries to follow God’s word. I think he took Abram’s betrayal very personally, or at least felt he somehow failed him as a leader. As the oldest, Rafael, Damian, and Matthias have always led their flock.”

“He feels responsible for everyone’s actions, all the time,” I sighed. “Now I know why he’s so afraid to give me his light. He’s afraid the same thing will happen to us. That he’ll lead me to Lucifer, or I’ll go of my own accord. I just don’t know how to make him believe in his own goodness, and the strength of our combined faith.”

Rachel put a warm, comforting hand over mine on the scarred wooden table. “Time will help,” she told me. “Time and patience. Rafael probably thinks he can leave you, for your own good, of course, when the time comes for the Fallen to move on, but I’m sure you’ll find that he realizes that he’s wrong. Matthias told me after he met me, he tried to leave with the rest of the flock. But he came back. He was coming back to ask me to join them when my car crashed, because he found that he couldn’t just walk away from me.”

Rachel’s words filled me with a hope that I hadn’t allowed myself to feel before. That maybe it was possible Rafael’s love for me would eventually be strong enough to overcome his doubts.

“Thank you,” I told her sincerely. “Thank you so much for telling me all of this and giving me hope and taking the time to relate to me. I tried to talk to my mom about some of it, but, well, I obviously couldn’t tell her the whole story.”

Rachel grimaced. “I would never advocate lying to your mother, but in this one case, for our sake, I would beg for your silence.”

We both laughed a little, and then settled into silence, sipping our coffee and watching the three children play. It was nice, I realized, to be able to relax with someone who
knew
. Someone I didn’t have to guard my words around, and worry about spilling Rafael’s secret or would try to take Colton and Grace away from me when they found out how bad our situation really was at times. It was nice to have a real friend, especially someone as calm and wise as Rachel. Even so, I had to know…

I cleared my throat. “Maybe this is too personal, but I was just curious… and you don’t have to answer, but… are you ever tempted? Tempted to change your mind and side with Satan? You haven’t been there in hell like the other Fallen have, is it as tempting to you as it is to them?”
Rachel absently turned her cup round and round between her hands, thinking. “I can’t say exactly whether it’s the same or not, because I think it’s different for all of us, how we’re tempted,
what
we’re tempted by. But just once, I really thought about it. And it was right after Matthias turned me, when Naomi was in the hospital. I was alone in her room, and
he
visited me. Satan. Lucifer.”

My eyes widened. “He just, appeared? There? To you?”

“I heard later from Rafael and Damian that he eventually comes to visit all the newly turned Fallen, sort of as a test, though honestly whether it’s God’s test or Lucifer’s, I couldn’t claim to know. It seems to lean either way on the scale. In the havoc of Naomi being hurt, Matthias forgot to warn me. But yes, he appeared there, and to be honest I thought he was a doctor at first. He looked so… normal. I asked him how Naomi was doing, if my little girl was going to recover, and he said if I wished, she could be healed instantly, and never get hurt ever again, become as indestructible as I had. Right then I knew he wasn’t, well, normal, shall we say?”

“He came to tempt you,” I suddenly realized. “Using Naomi’s safety.”

Rachel nodded. “Yes. Sometimes I wonder if that’s how he got Sadie and Abram. Sort of replayed an Adam and Eve scene. I think he tries it a lot with the newly turned Fallen, because it’s a timeless trick that has no doubt worked over and over again. But with me, he used Naomi, knowing it was currently my greatest weakness. I asked who he was and he introduced himself, as if it was the most casual thing in the world for Satan to be standing in a hospital in Tucson! Anyway, he said he’d come to welcome me, and that I had a long, hard road ahead of me, but he could make it easier and that he had something to show me. I said I didn’t want to see it, of course, but I couldn’t exactly stop him.

“And then, it was like a movie playing out in my head or a vision. I saw everything I’d ever wanted in the world, Lyla.
Everything
. Naomi as a Fallen, safe with her own wings and fighting off men who were trying to harm her. I saw the big house I’d always lusted after, and somehow, Matthias and Dominic and Naomi and me all living there together, all in love. Bigamy in other words, I’m sure you can guess and as I realized later. Not just material things, other personal things.”

Rachel’s voice grew softer, she got that achy, tortured look in her eyes that I always saw in Rafael when he talked about heaven and hell, and her hands trembled slightly. “I saw the rest of my life, saw things most people can’t even dream. I got prettier, had better clothes, saw things that maybe a week or two earlier, before Matthias, I might have actually traded my soul for. It was
so
hard
to say no. I probably had my mouth ready to say yes, and then I realized, in this whole wonderful life Satan had envisioned for me, I wasn’t
helping
anyone. The whole thing was about
me
, not anyone else. And that was what I had loved, had been my whole mission all my life, was helping others. And I realized I couldn’t live a life that was so selfish. And even though it was the hardest thing I’d ever done, sacrificing Naomi’s safety over getting everything I’d ever, and I do mean
ever,
wanted, I told him no. And it was, always will be, the greatest moment of my life.”

Rachel sat up straighter with her last words, her shoulders tall and upright, her head proud and the look in her eyes more fierce, and suddenly I felt small sitting so close to her. I had always thought my faith was strong, that I trusted God in times of adversity, that I didn’t care anything for the material possessions of this world, but would I be able to resist the same kind of temptation?

I thought of all the things I wanted, just at that particular moment: my parents back to normal, so Colton and Grace could be safe and we could be a family once again, going places together and feeling loved, not abandoned. A house better than the ramshackle one we owned, one where I could finally have my own room and a small amount of privacy. Leisure time and books to read and being able to go to college anywhere I wanted and major in anything I wanted and – and
Rafael
. Rafael, what I wanted most in the world and what I seemed the least likely to get. Would I really be strong enough to turn all of that down and live a life where God would essentially ignore me as a Fallen?

“I like to think, most of the time, I would be able to make the same choice,” I whispered down to the tabletop. “But when you put it like that, when I imagine Satan himself right in front of me extending his hand, well, I have a lot of doubts in myself. I don’t know if I would be able to do it.”

Rachel leaned forward over the table to get my attention so I would look at her. “I
know
you would, Lyla. I don’t doubt you at all, and I don’t think Rafael does either. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder if his biggest problem is that he thinks your faith is stronger than his and that
he
will be the one to fail you.”

“But we’re supposed to work together!” I protested. “If there is anything to pull me through that kind of temptation, it would be that I would have him at my side if I was able to turn it all down.”

“You
will
be able to turn it all down,” Rachel said with complete conviction. “And let me be the first to warn you of Satan’s treachery, Lyla. He may not appear to you as soon as he did to me. He will bide his time, maybe even waiting a decade, until you are at your weakest point. But I know you’ll be able to resist him.”