by S. L. Naeole
“Were you expecting someone else?” she grumbled, turning the tables on me and pulling me towards her, hugging me the way I should have been able to hug her. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say it was an act that was filled with a sense of desperation.
“Well, yeah. You’ve been gone—it’s just been Robert and me in this house. What are you doing here? When did you get back? Does Robert know you’re here? What about Graham? Did you see him? Why didn’t you tell me about you turning him?”
“Whoa—chill. I’m an angel but even I can’t answer all of those questions all at once.” She stood up and walked over to the dresser, returning with a shirt and a pair of jeans that she had removed from my bags, the action so quick, I didn’t even see it. “Put these on and I’ll try to explain while you do.”
I grabbed the clothes from her hands and did as she told, waiting only until she began to speak.
“I’m here to bring you home, Grace. And yes, Robert knows I’m here. He nearly took my head off when I showed up—he’s on edge right now.” She looked at me, seeing that I had paused, one leg in my jeans, the other hanging out. “Don’t stop, keep dressing otherwise I’m going to dress you myself.
“As for Graham, he’s part of the reason why I’m here.”
I slipped the t-shirt on and pulled my hair into a quick ponytail, my attention now all hers. “What’s going on? What’s wrong with Graham?”
“There’s been an accident, Grace.”
“What do you mean? What’s happened? What’s happened to him?” I felt panic begin to flood my chest as I ran towards Lark’s bedroom door, flinging it open to see Robert standing there, his dark hair standing on end, his eyes half-crazed.
“What’s going on?” My breath was short and I felt the blood in my hands turn to ice as I saw his eyes turn just as cold.
“Someone died in your house tonight, Grace.”
You know how in the movies, when the female character is told something shocking, her hand flies to her mouth to cover a scream, a gasp, whatever? This doesn’t happen in real life. No. Instead, your hands go to the part of you that starts to hurt first. Mine flew to my stomach and my heart, each one simultaneously convulsing in pain.
“Who?”
Robert looked at Lark, and my gaze followed his, just in time to see a flicker in her eyes that spoke volumes in silent communication. I let out a sigh of relief because in that split second of silent dialogue I knew that it wasn’t Dad or Matthew. But Graham…
“Let’s go,” Lark ordered, her hands reaching towards me.
I stepped away and turned my gaze back to Robert, confusion taking hold when he stepped back, his face contorting in pain and an almost infinite sadness that I could not place.
“What’s going on?”
“I’ll explain on the way. Let’s go, no more stalling.” Lark grabbed a hold of my arm and pulled me towards the window, her movement effortless though I struggled against it, pleading with Robert to tell me what was going on even as he stood there, motionless.
And then we were outside, Lark holding on to me as though I were her child, cradling me in her arms while I stared behind us, the house growing smaller in the darkness of the midnight sky.
“Why are you taking me and not Robert? Why isn’t he coming?”
Lark did not answer me, and her silence did wonders to build up an acute and almost dangerous anger inside of me as we passed over rooftop after rooftop, the neighborhood slowly becoming familiar until I knew exactly what street we were over, and how much longer until we reached my house.
“You said you’d tell me what was going on. You’re not supposed to lie, remember? If you don’t tell me in the next minute, you’re going to be very sorry-”
“I’m supposed to protect you, Grace.” It was an answer with dangerous corners to it.
“Yeah, I kinda figured that part out when I started sleeping in your room.”
She shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut, her face looking pained. “My call—God, it’s like things just had to get more difficult, nothing can ever stay calm for just one damn minute. My call is to protect you, to keep you alive.”
“What does that have to do with Robert not taking me home?”
“Grace, I know he told you about his call, so you should see where the conflict lies here.”
“No, I don’t see. He doesn’t plan on killing me, Lark. I-I told him to do it—I…I want him to. He’s refused, so I don’t know why there’d be a conflict.”
As we neared my street I could see the flashing of lights, reds, blues, yellows—the universal sign that something bad happened—and once again the panic began to set in. I tamped it down, not wanting anything to distract me from what it was that Lark was telling me.
“Tell me what’s going on, Lark. I need to know what’s really going on here. Don’t let me go into this blind…”
She sighed, our bodies no longer sailing through the sky but rather drifting slowly downward, landing just a few yards away from my home in the darkness of an unlit yard. She looked at me, her expression almost pitiful, but the pity wasn’t for herself. No, this was all mine.
“Grace, Robert’s call as Death includes taking your life because your name is in the final manifest. It records each human’s birth and when they’re supposed to die. Your name’s listed there and there’s no erasing it—he’s a threat to you, whether he chooses to kill you or not. He’s going to continue on fighting against the call until it turns completely black and angry, eating away at who he is until there’s nothing left of him to keep him from hearing anything but anger and hate.
“If he doesn’t kill you, he’ll start hurting people, people he wasn’t meant to, and he’ll begin to rage. You know what that means.”
“He’ll kill himself,” I breathed, the words acting like a knife in my gut, the idea of Robert dying slicing me in two.
“He intends to destroy his soul to keep you safe, but when the rage finally hits him, whatever he wanted, whatever reason he had for rejecting his call will be forgotten. It’s your life or his..”
It was the way her voice wavered, the way her eyes grew moist before the divinity wicked away any human-like qualities of her tears that finally clued me in on where the conflict existed.
It wasn’t between Robert and Lark.
It was between Lark and me.
“You don’t want to protect me.”
She nodded, an angry laugh coming out of her mouth as she looked down the street. “This is all a big joke. It has to be, because it’s not a mistake—it can’t be. I’ve had that drilled into me from the very first moment I heard the call’s song in my head. I’m supposed to keep you safe, which means I have to help my brother die. How the hell am I supposed to want to protect you knowing that?”
“Then don’t,” I said simply.
“Don’t, she says,” Lark scoffed. “And then what? End up in the same boat as Robert? Isn’t it enough that one of us is going to die because of you—do you want both of us to die just so you can live a mediocre mortal life?”
“What? N-no! I don’t want anyone to die. I’m the one who should die. I’m the one who should be dead right now and not-”
I let my head turn to the commotion that took up the majority of the street ahead of me. I knew then.
“Katie,” I breathed. “She was sleeping in my room. Oh, God.”
My feet began to move on their own, falling one after the other in rapid succession as I ran towards the house. The scene that spread out in front of me was chaotic—neighbors were standing about in their pajamas, their hair going this way and that, some without shoes in the spring night air—chatter about who it was, what had happened mingled with the intermittent blaring of a police radio and a cell phone ringing.
And the overwhelming theme of everyone’s conversations was that another death had happened to the Shelley family.
One of the benefits of being socially invisible is that no one seemed to notice my arrival, and I used that to my
advantage as I walked around the side of the house, entering it from the kitchen door. Janice was seated at the small table that stood in the middle of the room, her back to me, her shoulders slouched with the weight of loss pulling her forward while pushing her down at the same time, making her seem smaller, almost child-like.
Dad was seated beside her, his head resting in his hands. A bustle of activity went on just beyond them as police officers and paramedics discussed amongst themselves what it was they had seen.
“Grace! How-when-how did you get here? I tried calling Stacy’s house but there was no answer and Graham said he couldn’t get in touch with you either.”
Dad’s voice was cracking, emotion drowning every single word as he stood up, the chair falling down loudly behind him.
“Does it matter how I got here? What happened?”
He didn’t answer me, simply grabbed me and nearly suffocated me in a hug that spoke of all his fears and his overwhelming relief. I could almost smell it just as much as I could feel it in every quiver of his trembling body.
“Dad, tell me what happened,” I tried once more. I wasn’t sure if he heard me since my mouth was lost in the folds of his thick robe, and my thoughts were too muddled by the aroma that lingered on the terrycloth to repeat myself.
“Matthew was crying. I went to check on him and he wasn’t in his crib, so I figured he was with Katie,” Janice said from behind me. “I went into your room; I didn’t turn on the light because I didn’t want to startle Matthew. I saw him lying next to Katie on the bed, and so I picked him up…”
Her voice trailed off before a sob was wrenched from her. Dad allowed me to pull away, if only to finish where Janice had left off, though it wasn’t any easier for him to tell it judging by the way his voice shook with every syllable.
“Janice wanted to thank Katie—she’s been very good with waking up with Matthew to change him and bring him to us for his feedings—and so she bent down to kiss her cheek. It was cold, ice cold. Janice called out to me and I came to see what was wrong. I didn’t think; I just turned on the lights-” Even he couldn’t finish.
But he didn’t need to. I could see the image in my mind, see the twisted body and the blackened face. I knew that what happened wasn’t caused by anything natural. More importantly, I knew that Katie had been tortured and killed because she had been in my bed instead of me.
“I’m so sorry, Janice,” my meager offering managed to get out before I heard the sounds of loud footsteps clomping down the stairs, a repetitious banging accompanying it as it grew louder, closer.
A man dressed in a dark blue jumpsuit emerged from the stairwell, his body facing in the opposite direction as his hands behind him held on to one end of a gurney. A black, vinyl bag lay on it, heavy with its contents. Katie.
Janice began to weep when she realized what was happening and moved forward with remarkable speed, her hands grasping at the edges of the gurney. Dad stopped her, holding her back with a strong arm, caressing her hair as she wailed with grief.
“Where’s Matthew?” I looked around the kitchen for some sign that he was here but saw nothing that indicated as such. “Where’s the baby?”
Dad’s finger pointed up, and I rushed around him, around the paramedic who made up the rear of the gurney, a police officer who tried to stop me from heading up the stairs, and launched myself towards Matthew’s room. The smell that hit me when I reached the landing was a combination of decay and destiny. I was rocked by it in a way that didn’t seem to affect anyone else who stood around my bedroom door, spectators to the grisly scene.
Quietly I made my way down the hall to the last room there. The door was closed and I opened it carefully, not sure who or what I’d find, but knowing that the sound of silence meant that Matthew was asleep.
Graham was standing in the middle of the room, the baby resting comfortably against his shoulder. He was being bounced ever so gently as Graham repeated a rather odd sounding nursery rhyme.
“…And when you get everything just right, when you’ve done everything just as you had practiced, you end up with quite possibly the best team of burger toppings you’ve ever seen.”
“Graham?”
He turned around slowly and the instant I saw the foreign look on his face I felt my heart lurch in my chest. He looked older, worn. More than that, though, he looked changed. The world as he knew it was no longer his—he had turned; he would now have to witness those he knew, those he cared about die. He had discovered the dark side of immortality.
“No one else seemed to be worried about him—I thought if you were here, you’d want him to be with someone,” he said, his voice filled with the crags where disillusion had chipped away at him.
“Thank you, Graham. That means…this means so much to me,” I said encouragingly, wanting him to take heart in my words. “You’re his hero, my hero.”
“Your father said he was with her, that she was dead when Janice came in and got him. Who knows how long he was there, being held by a corpse. What do you think that does to a person, a baby?”
“Graham, he’s only a month old. I don’t think he’s going to be bothered by it as much as you think-”
I moved my arms out to take the baby from him, wanting him to be safely in his crib. Graham sighed and relented, allowing me to gently lift the baby from his chest and lay him down in his crib, pausing when he stirred.
When I was sure that Matthew had resumed his deep sleep, I replaced the warm emptiness in Graham’s arms with myself, holding him, comforting him.
A scratching sound came from the window as it creaked open. A willowy stream of smoke trailed in silently with the first push of air that flowed in. It swirled around the crib, lingering for a while over Matthew’s slumbering body before turning towards Graham, thickening, wisps of mist forming limbs and hair, clothing and eyes that were as dark as wet ash.
“Lark!” I exclaimed.
She turned away to look at Graham, her expression defiant and yet, at the same time saddened. I heard my intake of breath as Graham began to change, his face growing thin, looking almost gaunt, his hair darkening and lengthening in one swift movement. His height diminished and his frame grew smaller, feminine, his broad shoulders replaced with delicate bones, his wide chest now narrow with a pair of breasts that pushed through a dark silver gown that now covered his body.
No. Not his body.
“Ameila? What’s going on here—why are you pretending to be Graham? Where is he?”
“I’m sorry, Grace, but we had no choice.”
“No choice? What are you talking about?”
Ameila was rigid in her usual form, the casual looseness that was Graham now gone. “Things are happening now that could destroy the tenuous balance we’ve managed to hold here. Because of what has transpired between you and Sam, and now with Lark and Robert forced to wage an internal war against their own flesh and blood over you, a rift has formed amongst my kind; something that hasn’t happened since-”
“Since the Nephilim,” I finished for her.
I looked at the two of them, mother and daughter looking so similar it would have been difficult for most people to tell them apart. But I could.
I could see the anger in Lark’s eyes, sightless though they may be. They glittered with the same distaste they had held the first time I had seen them, and contrasted so greatly from the deep compassion and sorrow that lingered in Ameila’s darker ones.
“And so, because of this we’re back to being enemies, Lark?” I asked softly, not knowing what else to say.
Her voice was in my head, icy and stabbing into my thoughts like a million needles, each one looking for a specific point to target…and finding it.
My call tells me that I have to keep you safe, knowing that doing so will mean Robert dies. If I go against that, it means that I will die. But because of what happened here tonight, Sam has taken Graham. If I don’t go against my call and bring you to him, Sam will kill him. I am left with choosing between my c
all and my heart.
The feeling that had taken over me when I had first seen Graham’s face—actually, Ameila’s—returned with a vengeance, only this time it brought along its friends: despair and a clawing fear that growled from deep inside of me.
“We’ve got to save him,” I said to her, frantic, panicked. “We’ve got to get Robert and have him help get Graham back. He’ll know how, he’ll fix this.”
I sounded desperate, my faith so much like that of a little girl who believed her dad could do anything, and I didn’t care. I ignored the way Lark’s eyes shifted with rapid movements, her seeing my expression through her mother’s vision, knowing that she could hear my thoughts.
“Grace, there’s nothing Robert can do to stop any of this,” Ameila said to me with false calm.
“What do you mean there’s nothing Robert can do? He’s Death. If he can’t stop someone from dying, who can?”
“Sam is still an archangel of death. Despite this…mistake-”
“A mistake?” I ground out. “A mistake? You call murdering Katie in front of my baby brother a mistake?”
My outburst startled Matthew, who opened his mouth to let out a pitiful wail—until Ameila softly clucked at him, and his mouth closed, his body relaxing almost instantly as he drifted into an unnatural sleep.
She turned disappointed eyes towards me and sighed. “You must understand, despite what you have seen, what you have experienced, we cannot call what Sam did anything but unintentional. He intended to kill you tonight and instead he mistook your aunt for you. It was a mistake.”
I returned her disappointed gaze with an angry one as I scoffed at her explanation. “He didn’t kill Katie. He murdered her because she wasn’t me. This was no mistake and you know it. Angels don’t mistakes, Ameila.”
“I understand your frustration, Grace, but if you’d just listen-”
“No. No, I’m done with listening to this.” I turned around and looked at Lark, focusing on keeping my thoughts as simple and clear as I could. I didn’t need to hear any more explanations or arguments. I didn’t need any other persuasions because I know what needs to be done.