Table of Contents
Prologue
Epilogue
Foreword
Trauma
Shadow
Effort
Visit
Family
Myths
Pact
Difficult
Coffee
Artist
Torn
Replacement
The Guard
Temptation
Meditation
Wounds
Dark Half
Ice-Cold
Captive
Interconnected
Traces
Visitor
Memories
Speculations
Bloodline
Sacrifice
About the Author
Also by Angelina J. Steffort
Black
Angelina J. Steffort
MK
Black
The Wings Trilogy
First published 2017
Copyright © by Angelina J. Steffort 2017
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
ISBN 978-3-9504418-3-3
MK
www.ajsteffort.com
Contents
Foreword
Prologue
1. Trauma
2. Shadow
3. Effort
4. Visit
5. Family
6. Myths
7. Pact
8. Difficult
9. Coffee
10. Artist
11. Torn
12. Replacement
13. The Guard
14. Temptation
15. Meditation
16. Wounds
17. Dark Half
18. Ice-Cold
19. Captive
20. Interconnected
21. Traces
22. Visitor
23. Memories
24. Speculations
25. Bloodline
26. Sacrifice
Epilogue
About the Author
Also by Angelina J. Steffort
I love good and pleasure, I hate evil and pain, I want to be happy and I am not mistaken in believing, that people, angels and even demons have those same inclinations.
Nicolas Malebranche
Prologue
Jaden
What are nineteen years compared to the eternity of a millennium? I asked myself as I looked at her tormented face. She seemed older than she was when comprehension was written all heavy on her face like that.
I felt her pain in my own body. It was almost unbearable. How did this fragile form stand that all-consuming ache?
I had felt many fosterlings’ pain. Too many times I had suffered with them. It was my duty as their guardian angel. It was a burden. It made me feel incomplete—human. I hated to be bound to feel with them—I couldn’t live without it; it was my destiny. As long as I shall live I was going to suffer over and over again.
But this girl was different. I hated that I was willingly suffering with her. I would suffer for her now if that was possible. She wasn’t mine to look after, not any more. Still, I couldn’t help caring about her—more than was good for one ancient supernatural such as me.
Her mouth twitched as she rolled over to one side. I sat still, motionless, glad that she had finally fallen asleep. I wanted to give her as much time to rest, to escape, as possible. I owed her that.
My hand lay on hers. The contact they made comforted me. It made it feel more real that she was still there. When I had seen her crouching on the roof I thought that I had lost her, that she was going to disappear into the darkness like her angel.
She hadn’t. Instead, she was lying here with me, pale and breakable.
“Adam,” her weak whisper touched my ears. “Adam…Adam,” over and over again.
He wasn’t the one to suffer with her, the one to be here, anytime, to look after her. He was dead. And still it was his name that was escaping her lips, not mine…
It wasn’t just an eternity of suffering, it was an eternity of inequity, too.
I squeezed her hand softly one last time before I left her to her fate and took off to follow my other duties…
Trauma
Claire
The room looked the same as always, except for the feathers which were floating midair. They were a shiny white. They looked soft and strong at the same time.
I lifted my eyes to the ceiling, half-expecting to find strings holding the feathers in place. Instead of strings and a ceiling, I found cloudless, blue skies. A light breeze was playing with my hair, drawing strands of it upwards, letting them float like Medusa’s snaky curls. The feathers hung motionless. They seemed to not be affected by the soft stream of air at all.
Above me a shadow circled in the sky. It had a human shape with two large wings spreading left and right from his shoulders.
“Adam,” I called to the shadow. “How can you stay up in the air when the feathers of your wings are down here?”
I watched him circle for a while before he answered.
“Yes—,” He looked down at his wings. “I suppose you—re right,” he simply said, and then, without further warning, he plunged from the sky. With a loud noise, he crashed to the ground.
“Adam!” I knelt down beside him, cautiously, on the wooden floor of my room. He was hunched under the window. The shine of a million stars was lighting the space around him.
“Are you alright, Adam?”
With a feeling of utter terror creeping through my body, I took in the sight. His wings weren’t the same as I remembered them. Instead of white feathers covering the surface, there was thin air filling the gaps between forks of pale bone...
I woke up with a scream stuck in my throat. I had stopped letting the screams escape after a few days. The dreams kept returning and there was nothing I could do about it. Even if I could, nothing would change—he would still be gone forever, rotting in a coffin somewhere beneath the cold ground.
Get a grip, I told myself although I knew it wouldn’t help. I shook out of the quilt and reluctantly got to my feet. The floor was filled with shadows which drew dark lines and shapes across the room starting under the window. Through the glass I could see countless stars in the dark winter sky. Half-expecting to find Adam hunching on the floor beneath, my gaze shot back down even though I knew what I would see there. Nothing but bare wood.
Relax, I told myself. I was sure it wouldn’t help. The distress of the former weeks crushed down on me with full weight. I saw images—images I’d rather lock up in the darkest corner of my mind. Images of a perfect creature being smashed by the force of evil. Images of Adam being killed by demons.
The fact that I’d been in love with a man who had turned out to be an angel was growing more irrelevant by the hour, and so was the fact that he had been killed. The only fact relevant now was that he had been killed because of me, to protect me, that it was entirely my fault that he was dead. And he had taken a piece of my soul with him because I was the one who had made him spread his wings for the very first time—I was his catalyst, his mark. Our souls had been interlinked, twined forever—or as long as both of us lived. The moment one of us died, the other would suffer forever with the pain of losing the othe
r—or go insane.
I wondered if I would be able to recognize insanity if I went mad. It surely felt like I had. Hardly an hour passed without my mind brimming with images of Adam. Every moment, waking or sleeping, he was there, filling my thoughts.
No matter how many times my sister Sophie and her boyfriend Ian had tried to talk to me and make me feel better, it seemed I was resistant to any type of better. All I knew was the constant dark cloud obscuring my vision and my feelings, the ache inside my heart that felt like someone was wrapping it up with barbed wire, the desperate wish to evade this feeling of utter inchoateness for even a fraction of a second.
I turned on the spot, and without bothering to switch a light on, made my way out of the room and down the hall to the bathroom. The door swung open willingly under the pressure of my fingers. Behind it, darkness stretched. I found the darkness welcome. It was a perfect match for my inner being. My hands searched the room for the basin and twisted the handle of the tap for cold water.
The melodic sound of cool liquid trickling from metal to ceramic ceased the continuous flow of thoughts, and calmed my mind for a moment. I held my hands out to wet them, then pressed the palms to my face. I barely felt them. My body was still numb with the shock of the past events. I sat down on the edge of the bathtub and decided to just stay there and listen.
The water reminded me of Adam. I could almost hear the pattering of the rain on that day we’d sat in Noel’s coffee shop. The barbed wire tore through my heart afresh as images of the two of us were stealing their way into my mind—Adam and I, sitting inside, talking, kissing, while outside tons of water pouring from the sky were covering the ground with a ruffled film of wet.
Unable to stand the sound—and the memories it brought up—I got back to my feet after a minute or two and turned off the tap with a groan. I sank to the floor in shame and pain and buried my face in my hands, not wanting to believe that once again I was destroyed and adrift. After I had lost my parents in a car accident a few years ago, I had never wanted to see myself grieve like that over anything again. I had been determined to be strong and live my life with my sister, who was my only living relative. But all the quiet of my small, but well-structured, existence had been whirled around by the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. Adam. I had fallen in love with an angel who had brought me back to life, given me a reason to smile and be happy again, and had made me more confident and courageous than I had ever thought I could be.
And here I was—back to mourning, back to pain—torn and broken like I had never been before. I heard my quiet sobs reflecting off the bathroom walls as I tried to stifle them in my forearms. Still sobs continued to shake me until another sound mixed with them: footsteps coming from the corridor.
“Claire?” It was my sister’s voice.
The door swung open and I lifted my head to look at her as she entered the room.
“What’s the matter, Claire?” Sophie’s voice was cautious as she crouched beside me without touching. I could sense how frightened and uncertain she was about how to handle this little drama in the middle of the night, and I loved her for trying, not just now but ever since that awful phone call to tell her Adam was dead.
We both knew that I wasn’t stable right now. I hadn’t been in a while. I was happy enough to live through the endless seeming days and cold and dark nights. Sophie didn’t ask too many questions. Instead, she acknowledged my loss as a valid reason for my tormented mood, and I was grateful. I couldn’t stand another minute explaining why I was feeling like my heart had been ripped from my chest—the true reason would never be spoken between us. Sophie couldn’t know the truth about Adam, and that left me helpless and alone in my misery.
“Can’t sleep,” I lied without hesitation. I didn’t want her to know that I was still being haunted by the ghosts of the tragedy. I wanted to appear stable to the rest of the world. It helped me stay coherent, at least for a while, when I acted like everything was fine; but usually my mind didn’t let me trick myself into believing that was the case for too long. After a very short phase of numbness, the pain returned—always. How I wished it wouldn’t.
“Come on,” Sophie held out her hand for me and waited for me to take it. “I’ll make you hot milk with honey.”
She smiled at me with this far too motherly expression in her eyes.
“Honestly, Sophie,” I said as I ignored her hand and scrambled to my feet on my own. “You don’t have to do this.”
“But I want to,” she said as we both walked barefoot, downstairs.
“You’ve dreamed of him again, haven’t you?” Sophie asked carefully, not taking her eyes off the mug of milk as she poured.
It didn’t take a word to let her know she was right—my silence gave away more than I intended.
“It will stop,” she placed the mug in the microwave. “It will stop. You’ll be better soon.”
The door of the microwave was startlingly loud as it snapped shut under her Sophie’s hand.
“—like with mom and dad, remember? You’ll be better.”
I snorted in reply.
“I know you think you won’t—but you will. You’ll see. In a few weeks or months...”
“Pfff”, I dismissed her assurances with a disdainful puff of breath.
“Or years or decades,” I finished her sentence sarcastically. “—how about maybe never?”
Sophie watched me for a few seconds. The ringing sound of the microwave announcing that the milk was ready made us both turn our heads. She fetched the mug out from behind the glass-door and spooned in some honey.
Immediately I was sorry when she merely pressed her lips together and handed me the mug.
“Drink,” she commanded gently, “you’ll be able to sleep.”
I took the mug from her hands and carried it up to my room. I heard her climbing the stairs behind me.
“Thanks,” I said over my shoulder, putting remorse in my voice and closing the door quietly behind me. I switched on the light and turned to my bed.
Clang! The mug hit the floor where it shattered to pieces, soaking the pair of jeans that lay beside my desk with milk.
I had stared at the bed for only a few seconds before I heard Sophie’s knock on my door.
“Are you alright, Claire?” Her voice sounded through the wood.
“Yes, I’m fine,” I said, trying to keep my voice casual. “Just bumped my knee.”
“Sure?”
I turned back and opened the door only a few inches, blocking the view of my room from her.
“I’m fine. I don’t know about the bed-frame, though.” I forced a smile.
Would she buy that? She smiled back at me with relief.
“Good night then,” Sophie said.
“Yeah, good night,” I repeated, the tone of my voice climbing up nervously.
Sophie turned and walked back to her room. I didn’t move until I heard the click of her bedroom door and then I whirled around furiously to face the bed.
“Sorry,” Jaden said before I could open my mouth to speak. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
I eyed the beautiful creature sitting on my bed for a while. His incredibly golden hair shifted a little as he tilted his head apologetically.
Disarmed, I could only sigh. Jaden, my guardian angel. He deserved an outburst from me, I thought.
After doing everything to keep me alive after Adam’s death, Jaden had eventually left me to myself. I had been expecting him to stay with me to ease my pain and help me through the darkest days of my life. To reassure me that all the supernatural forces I had felt with Adam’s coming into my life had not completely abandoned me after his death.
Instead he had disappeared, leaving me to figure it all out on my own—how to get up every morning from unrefreshing sleep, how to go to school and come home again, how to keep my friends as friends, and how not be a burden to my sister. How to want to go on living in the torture chamber of my life after Adam.
I was basicall
y alone now, all dependent on my self-motivation and ability to take good care of myself—an ability I appeared to have lost long ago, in another, unreal-seeming time that was only a hazy memory of happiness to me.
We looked at each other for a few seconds while I could feel my anger returning, and with it the desire to chastise him.
“So, where have you been?” I whispered, grimacing the words as if I was screaming them at him, and choosing to overlook the reality that I didn’t know the first thing about how angels worked. Or, for that matter, why. Which meant it was a stupid question.
After the countless times he had turned up out of thin air beside me, I shouldn’t be surprised he had done so yet again.
Jaden was my age today, a choice he usually made when we appeared together in public. In truth, he was nearly a thousand years old and could assume any age he pleased. I had seen him appear as a seventy-year-old man and a seven-year-old boy. His twenty-year-old self looked dazzling. In the back of my mind I wondered why he had chosen that appearance tonight since there was no one else around.
“I was unable to get in contact for a while,” Jaden said softly.
“Okay,” I responded sourly and bent down to mop up the spilled milk with a towel. “Do I get to know why?”
I wasn’t going to let him off the hook with just that.
“Claire, it’s complicated.” Jaden tried to excuse his absence.
“Try me,” I challenged. “I think I can keep up.”
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