No Angel (21 page)
D
arkness and laughter.
I was sinking, sinking into the Abyss. Blind. Wings burned to nothing with that last shock wave of power. Angelic eyes, all gone. Just human. Falling into nothing.
Well done, Mr. Angelos. Well done indeed.
The Headmistress coiled around me. I felt rather than heard her voice, as if she spoke directly into my bones. Her myriad eyes swam through the darkness, filled with a pale, cold light.
Look up, Mr. Angelos.
High above, light sparkled, like the surface of the sea seen from underwater. Just a firefly glimmer now, as she carried me into the depths.
The mortal world, Mr. Angelos.
The Headmistress shifted me in her tentacles, turning me away from that glimpse of warmth and light.
Bright again, our darkness dispelled. The world is like a pane of glass between Heaven and Hell, you see. Humans can polish it clean with virtue or smudge it with sin. We can only approach when so much cruelty and selfishness has accumulated that it blocks out the light from above. Many, many years carefully cultivating a grime of petty sins, Mr. Angelos, and you wipe it all away with one act of sacrifice. We are banished, thoroughly banished, for centuries to come.
Her satisfaction vibrated through my flesh.
I would write a special note of commendation on your end-of-year report, if you were going to have one.
“It really was all your plan. All along, you
were
trying to close the Hellgate.” Cold was spreading through my chest. I couldn’t feel my limbs anymore. “Why?”
You find merely attending school a torment? Try a thousand years of
running
one, Mr. Angelos. Centuries of squabbling, self-obsessed teenagers. Centuries of pretending interest in your numbingly banal existences, each and every one of you just like the next, all convinced of your own uniqueness. And that, Mr. Angelos,
that
is not even touching upon the horror of the paperwork.
A shudder ran through her titanic form at the mere thought.
I have been working to escape that place and return home for a very,
very
long time.
“You could . . . could have just left.”
Hellgates do not spontaneously appear, Mr. Angelos. They are grown. Few of my kind have the patience and skill for it. I am the very best. A thousand years of quietly influencing uncounted souls, turning a place of light into a place of darkness . . . no. I would never have been allowed to simply resign. The only way I would be permitted to leave was if there was no longer any reason for me to be here. So I set in motion a plan to undo all my own work.
“Me and Faith,” I whispered.
Yes, Mr. Angelos. I knew it would take heavenly light to cut through my dark barrier, but I could hardly enlist the help of the angels. Nephilim were the answer. Two nephil could between them produce enough light to dispel the Hellgate. And I had an excuse to create at least one. Beelzebub has long desired to walk the earth, and no mere human could ever contain a Prince of Hell’s power. . . . When I offered to bear a nephil for him to possess, he jumped at the chance. We demons rarely procreate, Mr. Angelos. Gestation is a remarkably tedious process.
“But you needed two . . .” Even as I spoke, the answer came to me. “My mother. You knew my mother. You
told
me so, the very first day of school.”
Yes, Mr. Angelos. She knew my plan. She went into the world to bear her own nephil child in secret. She was supposed to send you to me at the proper time.
Her arctic voice turned even colder, each word like ice in my mind.
But she betrayed me. After your birth, she decided my scheme was too risky, with too great a chance that the Princes of Hell would realize your true purpose here. She cut all contact with me, hiding you away. Fortunately, I always have a backup plan. I knew your name. I planted the summoning circle in my husband’s notebooks after his death, knowing that my daughter would find it and call you here. All I needed to do then was let nature take its course, even as I outwardly pretended to separate you two. It should have been a simple matter.
An edge of irritation crept into those slow, smug tones.
Perhaps I shall take up breeding giant pandas next. It would be a relaxing hobby compared to trying to orchestrate
your
love life, Mr. Angelos.
I was too tired to defend my masculinity. “My mother,” I mumbled. Everything was going vague and soft. Even breathing was starting to seem like too much work. “Is . . . is she down here? Are you taking me to her? I’d . . . I’d like to see her again.”
No, Mr. Angelos. She is not.
She paused, her tentacle bringing me level with one shifting, pulsing eye.
And you have already seen her recently, you know. Very recently. Demons are fallen angels, Mr. Angelos.
Did it never occur to you that perhaps the reverse might also be true?
The Headmistress was silent for a long moment, the only sound, the whisper of air over her black wings.
Even though we are on opposite sides for now, it seems she has not forgotten me. I thought she had abandoned me years ago, becoming my enemy . . . yet she helped me at the end. It served the purpose of her side, no doubt, but still, I find that I am pleased by that. We had a long history together. Perhaps we will yet be reunited. What falls may rise, and fall again. . . .
The rocking motion as the Headmistress flew steadily down was almost soothing. I could just fall asleep. . . . “What happens now?” I whispered, barely able to form the words.
Now, Mr. Angelos? Now you die. If it is any consolation, you will serve me one last time. Your limp corpse will make the perfect present with which to convince Beelzebub of my continued loyalty. It will prevent him from taking out his frustrations on me.
Her tentacle tightened around my chest, cutting off all air. That was okay. I didn’t feel like breathing anymore anyway.
Good-bye, Mr. Angelo—
“Mother! Don’t you dare!”
I must be dying. An angel had come to collect me.
“Let him go! Let him go right now!” Bright wings in the dark, beating at the Headmistress like a butterfly attacking a whale. The squeezing tentacle paused. “Or I’ll—I’ll
hate
you! Forever!”
Without a further word, the Headmistress released me. The last thing I saw of her was her titanic bulk, studded with eyes, suspended under six, wide, motionless wings as she spiraled silently down into the dark.
Just for an instant, the black feathers gleamed with a flash of silver light.
Hands, human hands, grabbed me under the arms. Wings filled my vision. We shot up like a cork released underwater. The shining surface of the world hurtled nearer, nearer, until it broke across my face—
“I got him! I got him! Raffi, can you hear me?”
“Oh my God, the blood—you idiot, Michaela!”
“He
told
me to stab him! He didn’t say how hard! Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, he’s not breathing.”
“Well, hurry up and heal him! You two are the ones with angelic powers!”
Something jolted into my chest, seizing hold of my muscles like an electric shock. Distantly, I felt the convulsions, but they seemed to be happening to someone a long way away. Delicious warmth spread over my skin. I was sinking into a soft pile of feathers, a cloud of wings wrapping protectively around me as all the noise and confusion started to swirl away into nothing. . . .
“
Faith!
Setting him on fire is
not helping
!”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know how to do anything else!”
“Sancte Michael Archangele
—”
“Exorcising him won’t help either! Oh, for the love of—both of you get out of my way! Raf, don’t you dare die on me, don’t you dare!”
Air searing my raw throat. Someone pounding on my chest. Pain roared back as I opened my eyes. I was being alternately hit and kissed. I kind of preferred the latter. Despite the fact that my body felt like one big battered block of ice, I kissed back.
After a moment, Krystal pulled away. “I’m
resuscitating
you, you moron.”
“Oh. Sorry.” I had to stop for a fit of coughing. I lay back in Krystal’s arms, limp as a gutted fish. Faith and Michaela were tearing up their ball gowns into makeshift bandages. The sky beyond their heads was an orange glow, thick with smoke. Girls swarmed all around, screaming about fire and ambulances and dead teachers, too panicked to even notice the four of us.
Everything seemed okay. So I passed out.
FIRE TRAGEDY CLOSES SCHOOL
Questions mount as teachers’ bodies are recovered from site.
St. Mary’s Boarding School for Girls and Boys will close for an indefinite period as police investigate the cause of the mysterious fire that broke out during the school’s traditional Masked Ball three nights ago, claiming the lives of the entire staff. It is not yet known how so many teachers could have perished in the blaze, which appears to have been contained to the school chapel. Eyewitness accounts state that many members of staff safely evacuated the building before the fire took hold, and appeared to be completely fine before abruptly collapsing.
“It was like Ms. Hellebore had a stroke,” said Deborah Hall, 16, a student at St. Mary’s who was attending the Ball on the fateful night. “One minute she was shouting at me, trying to get me to go back in, the next she was lying dead on the grass.”
Mysteries also remain concerning the identities and whereabouts of an unknown number of young men who were present at the Ball as dance partners. Despite multiple accounts from students that the girls’ “dates” remained inside the hall regardless of attempts to get them to leave, no bodies matching their descriptions have been found by police. The Headmaster of Winchester Boys’ School has now confirmed that none of his pupils are missing, and further stated that his school has never been in contact with St. Mary’s.
The majority of the girls attending the Ball escaped unharmed, although a few were taken to the hospital with . . .
I let the newspaper fall onto the starched sheets. “I should have stayed in Hell. My dad is going to kill me.”
“Relax,” Krystal said, scanning through another paper from her seat at the side of my bed. “There’s nothing here that suggests the police have any clue as to how the fire started.”
“Did I ever tell you why I got thrown out of my last school? Believe me, my dad is never going to believe that I didn’t do it.”
“Well, you did,” Krystal pointed out, folding the paper up. She stretched, giving me an evil grin. “And I know you did. I should demand hush money.”
“Whatever happened to being the big hero?” I said plaintively to the world in general.
“Hey, that was practically last week. What have you done for us recently?” Krystal ducked as I tossed a pillow at her. “You must be feeling better after all.”
“Yeah. Though the doctors are still puzzled as to how someone could be dragged out of a fire suffering from hypothermia
.
” I scratched absently at the fresh bandages wrapping my torso. “Still, at least it distracted them from the stab wounds. I told them part of the chandelier fell on me.”
“That idiot Michaela,” Krystal muttered darkly. She looked down at her hands, fidgeting with the newspaper. “Has she done that trance thing again for you yet?”
“Yeah, I persuaded her to do it this morning.” I was never going to be Michaela’s favorite person, but even she’d had to admit that the Order of Dante owed me. I’d traded in the favor. “The trance didn’t last long, but I was able to talk through her to . . . to the angel. It was . . . kind of a weird conversation.”
It was hard to make sense of the angel’s cryptic messages, but from what Michaela and I had been able to piece together, what the Headmistress had told me was true. My mother had been one of the St. Mary’s demons, possessing the body of a former student. She’d been in on the Headmistress’s plan to close the Hellgate, and had left the school to secretly bear the other required nephil child . . . but after I’d been born, she’d changed. She cut her ties with the other demons, instead devoting herself to good. Her job as an “investigative journalist” had just been a cover story for her real work—finding and banishing demons from the mortal world.
Her final mission had been at Michaela’s old orphanage. Finding more demons there than she could handle alone, she’d anonymously called the Order of Dante. She’d stayed to help in the battle, even though she’d known that the Order, not knowing her true nature, would destroy her physical form too. That act of self-sacrifice allowed her to reascend as an angel. She’d attached herself to Michaela at the orphanage, thus bringing the young girl to the attention of the Dantes . . . and the rest was history.
“So Michaela’s angel really is your mum?” Krystal asked. At my nod, she blew out her breath. “Wow.” She gave me a strange, sidelong look. “Raf . . . that’s got to be tough, finding out about your mother right when you’ve lost your powers and can’t see her yourself anymore. Are you okay?”
I thought about it. “Yeah,” I said slowly. “Actually, I am.”
I’d asked her why she’d turned away from the other demons. She’d smiled at me, through Michaela’s face, and whispered one word before the trance broke.
Love
.
It was enough.
“I might kind of miss the wings,” I added. I shifted my shoulders, still feeling that strange, scarred emptiness where my angelic body parts had once been. “Flying was pretty cool. But the eyes were a bloody nightmare.” I leaned back against my remaining pillows. “Nah, I’m happy to be just an ordinary guy again.”
“Well, okay,” Krystal said, looking unconvinced. “But if you ever want to talk about it—why are you looking at me like that?”
“Just enjoying the view. Your skin is so . . .
opaque.
”
Krystal snorted. “Oh, you really know how to woo a girl, Raf. Take me now, you irresistible stud.”
I flipped her off. “I’m just relieved at being able to see things properly again. You know, without getting an eyeful of all the squidgy bits inside.” I cocked my head, something occurring to me as I studied her. It wasn’t just my newly regained ordinary vision that made Krystal look so much better than usual. Her usually bloodshot, watery eyes were clear and bright. “Nice glasses, by the way.”
“Raf!” Krystal threw my pillow back at me, her face going red. “I’m still waiting for my replacement contact lenses to arrive. My old ones got damaged by the smoke. So you can keep your comments to yourself.”
“It was a
compliment
, you idiot—” My retort was cut short by a soft knock on the door. “Come in!”
“Hello, Raffi.” Faith entered, Michaela behind her. “Can we talk for a moment?”
“Sure.” I shifted my legs to make room for Faith to perch on the bed. Michaela leaned in a corner, glowering at me, though I suspected it was mainly just force of habit. “What’s up?”
Faith’s face was pale and drawn, with dark circles under the eyes. She took a deep breath, as if having to steel herself to say what was on her mind. “I’ve got some bad news.”
I sat upright in bed, wincing as I jarred my bandages. “Is it the Hellgate? Is it reopening?”
“No. I’m afraid it’s worse than that.” Faith put one hand on mine, gripping my fingers as if to provide preemptive support. “I’ve decided to go back to Rome with Michaela. I’m going to become a Dante.”
I blinked at her. “But . . . that’s great! Why is that bad news?”
“Because you can’t come,” Michaela supplied from her corner.
My brow furrowed. “Why in hell do you think I want to become a Dante? No offense, but you guys are kind of weird. And I’ve had enough fighting demons for one lifetime.”
“You don’t get it.” Faith’s woeful blue eyes fixed on mine, begging me to understand. “Raffi, this means we won’t be able to see each other anymore. I’m really sorry. But it’s over between us.”
Oh.
I waited for the inevitable painful twist in my heart . . . which didn’t come. I stared at her, and she was as beautiful as always, but she didn’t shine anymore. The world didn’t shift to put her at the center of all things. She was just . . . there.
A relieved grin spread across my face. “It’s okay, Faith.” I really was an ordinary guy again. “You go and be happy. I’ll be fine.”
“Oh, Raffi. You don’t have to be brave. You can cry if you want.” Faith’s own eyes brimmed with tears. Krystal and Michaela were both studying the ceiling with identical expressions of acute embarrassment. “I feel so terrible about this, especially after everything you did for me. But . . . you lost your divinity and I didn’t. We can’t possibly be soul mates. You have to accept that.”
“I do! Seriously, I’m not upset.”
“In time, your pain will heal,” Faith assured me earnestly. “The right girl for you is out there somewhere. You’ll find her one day.”
I gave up. “Thanks, Faith.” Maybe she was right. And maybe the right girl would actually
listen
to me. Maybe she’d always have my back, rather than only ever demanding that I protect her. Maybe she’d be smart enough not to need me to solve all her problems. Maybe . . . she’d . . .
“What?” Krystal said warily. “Why are you staring at me again?”
“No reason!” I licked my suddenly dry lips. “Uh, Krystal? Where are
you
going next?”
