Unforgiven (2 page)

F
OR
D
REAMERS

Serpents in my mind

Trying to forgive your crimes

Everyone changes in time

I hope he changes this time

—
S
HARON
V
AN
E
TTEN
,
“
Serpents
”

C
am's boots touched down on the eaves of the old church beneath a cold and starry sky. He drew his wings close and gazed out at the landscape. Spanish moss, white in the moonlight, hung like icicles from antebellum trees. Cinder-block buildings framed a weedy field and a pair of splintery bleachers. Wind rustled in from the sea.

Winter break at Sword & Cross Reform School. Not a soul on campus. What was he doing here?

It was minutes after midnight, and he'd just flown in from Troy. He'd made the journey in a haze, an unknown force guiding his wings. He found himself humming a tune he hadn't let himself remember for several thousand years. Maybe he'd come back here because this was where the fallen angels had met Luce in her last, cursed life. It had been her three hundred and twenty-fourth incarnation—and the three hundred and twenty-fourth time the fallen angels had flocked together to see how the curse would play out.

The curse was broken now. Luce and Daniel were free.

And dammit if Cam wasn't jealous.

His gaze swept across the cemetery. He would never have guessed he'd feel nostalgic for this junkyard, but there had been something thrilling about those early days at Sword & Cross. Lucinda's spark had been brighter, keeping the angels guessing when they'd once believed they knew what to expect.

For six millennia, each time she turned seventeen, they'd staged a variation of the same performance: the demons—Cam, Roland, and Molly—tried everything to sway Luce's alliances to Lucifer, while the angels—Arriane and Gabbe and sometimes Annabelle—worked to usher Luce back into Heaven's fold. Neither side had ever come close to winning her over.

For every time Luce met Daniel—and she always met Daniel—nothing mattered as much as their love. Time and again, they fell for each other, and time and again, Luce died in a blaze of fire.

Then, one night at Sword & Cross, everything changed. Daniel kissed Lucinda, and she lived. They all knew it then. Luce was finally going to be allowed to choose.

A few weeks later they all flew to the site of their original fall, to Troy, where Lucinda chose her destiny. She and Daniel again refused to side with Heaven or with Hell. Instead, they chose each other. They gave up their immortality to spend one mortal lifetime together.

Luce and Daniel were gone now, but they were still on Cam's mind. Their triumphant love made him yearn for something he dared not put into words.

He was humming again. That song. Even after all this time, he remembered it….

He closed his eyes and saw its singer: the back of her red hair woven loosely in a braid, her long fingers caressing the strings of a lyre as she leaned against a tree.

He hadn't let himself think of her in thousands of years. Why now?

“This can's busted,” a familiar voice said. “Toss me another?”

Cam spun around. No one was there.

He noticed a flicker of movement through the shattered stained-glass window on the roof. He edged forward and peered down through it, into the chapel Sophia Bliss had used as her office when she was the Sword & Cross librarian.

Inside the chapel, Arriane's iridescent wings flexed as she shook a can of spray paint and rose off the ground, aiming the nozzle at the wall.

Her mural featured a girl in a glowing blue forest. She wore a tiered black dress and looked up at a blond boy who held out a white peony.
Luce and Daniel 4ever
Arriane sprayed in gothic silver letters over the bell of the girl's skirt.

Behind Arriane, a dark-skinned demon with dreadlocks was lighting a tall glass candle showing Santa Muerte, the goddess of death. Roland was making a shrine at the site where Sophia had murdered Luce's friend Penn.

Fallen angels couldn't enter sanctuaries of God. As soon as they crossed the threshold, the whole place would go up in flames, incinerating every mortal inside. But this chapel had been desanctified when Miss Sophia had moved in.

Cam spread his wings and dropped through the broken window, landing behind Arriane.

“Cam.” Roland embraced his friend.

“Take it easy,” Cam said, but he didn't pull away.

Roland tilted his head. “Quite a coincidence, finding you here.”

“Is it?” Cam asked.

“Not if you like
carnitas,
” Arriane said, tossing Cam a small foil-wrapped package. “Remember the taco truck on Lovington? I've been craving these ever since we fled this swamp.” She opened her own foil package and devoured her taco in two bites. “Delish.”

“What are you doing here?” Roland asked Cam.

Cam leaned against a cold marble pillar and shrugged. “I left my Les Paul in the dorm.”

“All this way for a guitar?” Roland nodded. “I suppose we've all got to find new ways to fill our endless days, now that Luce and Daniel are gone.”

Cam had always hated the force that pulled the fallen angels to the cursed lovers every seventeen years. He'd left battlefields and coronations. He'd left the arms of exquisite girls. Once he'd walked off a movie set. He'd dropped everything for Luce and Daniel. But now that the irresistible pull was gone, he missed it.

His eternity was open wide. What was he going to do with it?

“Did what happened in Troy give you, I don't know…” Roland trailed off.

“Hope?” Arriane grabbed Cam's uneaten taco and downed it. “If, after all these thousands of years, Luce and Daniel can stand up to the Throne and seize a happy ending, why can't anyone? Why can't
we
?”

Cam gazed through the shattered window. “Maybe I'm not that kind of guy.”

“We all carry pieces of our journeys within us,” Roland said. “We all learn from our mistakes. Who's to say we don't deserve happiness?”

“Listen to us.” Arriane touched the scars on her neck. “What do we three jaded birds of prey know about love?” She looked from Cam to Roland. “Right?”

“Love's not the exclusive property of Luce and Daniel,” Roland said. “We've all tasted it. Maybe we will again.”

Roland's optimism struck a dissonant chord with Cam. “Not me,” he said.

Arriane sighed, arching her back to spread her wings and rise a few feet off the ground. A fluttering sound filled the empty church. With deft slashes of her can of white spray paint, she added the subtlest hint of wings above Lucinda's shoulders.

Before the Fall, angels' wings were made of empyreal light, all of them perfect, one pair indistinguishable from the next. In the era since, their wings had become expressive of their personalities, their mistakes and impulses. The fallen angels who had given their allegiance to Lucifer bore golden wings. Those who had returned to the fold of Heaven bore the Throne's hint of silver throughout their fibers.

Lucinda's wings had been special. They had been purely, stunningly white. Unspoiled. Innocent of the choices the rest of them had made. The only other fallen angel who had preserved his white wings was Daniel.

Arriane crumpled the second taco wrapper. “Sometimes I wonder…”

“What?” Roland asked.

“If you guys could go back and not screw up so epically in the love department, would you?”

“What's the point of wondering?” Cam asked. “Rosaline is dead.” He saw Roland wince at the mention of his lost beloved. “Tess will never forgive you,” he added, looking at Arriane. “And Lilith—”

There. He'd said her name.

Lilith was the only girl Cam had ever loved. He'd asked her to marry him.

It hadn't worked out.

He heard her song again, throbbing in his soul, blinding him with regret.

“Are you humming?” Arriane narrowed her eyes at Cam. “Since when do you hum?”

“What
about
Lilith?” Roland said.

Lilith was dead, too. Though Cam had never known how she had lived out her days on earth after they parted, he knew she would have left this world and ascended to Heaven long ago. If Cam were a different kind of guy, it might have brought him peace to imagine her enfolded in joy and light. But Heaven was so painfully distant, he found it best not to think of her at all.

Roland seemed to be reading his mind. “You could do it your own way.”

“I do everything my own way,” Cam said. His wings pulsed silently behind him.

“It's one of your best traits,” Roland said, looking up at the stars through the ruined ceiling, then back at Cam again.

“What?” Cam asked.

Roland laughed softly. “I didn't say anything.”

“Allow me,” Arriane said. “Cam, this is totally when everyone expects you to make one of your dramatic exits into that pocket in the clouds.” She pointed to a rope of fog dangling from Orion's Belt.

“Cam.” Roland stared at Cam, alarmed. “Your wings.”

Near the tip of Cam's left wing was a single, tiny white filament.

Arriane gaped. “What does it mean?”

It was one white fleck amid a field of gold, but it forced Cam to remember the moment his wings had changed from white to gold. He had long ago accepted his destiny, but now, for the first time in millennia, he imagined something else.

Thanks to Luce and Daniel, Cam had a fresh start. And only one regret.

“I have to go.” He fully extended his wings, and brilliant golden light flooded the chapel as Roland and Arriane leaped out of the way. The candle tipped and shattered, its flame dwindling on the cold stone floor.

Cam shot into the sky, piercing the night, and headed toward the darkness that had been awaiting him since the moment he'd flown away from Lilith's love.