Black Halo (Grace Series)

by S. L. Naeole

  “Wait. She needs to…eat when she’s changing from human to-to…”

  “Erlking? Yes, unfortunately. The human body doesn’t do much of anything wisely or efficiently, to be honest with you. Dying is one of those things that never happens without the body expending far too much energy as it shuts down. Because of that, when a human is transforming from a mortal into anything else, it needs an alternative energy source.

  “Some horror writers might have had a clue about this small fact because they included descriptions of their vampire victims feeding off of their makers, but the truth is, Grace, that neither vampires nor my kind have blood in our veins, only venom. We’re walking infections. If I were to feed pure venom into a human, they wouldn’t just die, they’d self-destruct. It isn’t a pretty picture, so I’ll spare you the details.”

  “Oh sure, spare me the details now,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  He chuckled, an odd sound, one that felt as though it had been fermenting inside of him after being locked up for so long. “You know, the last time I had to explain any of this was to my wife, Vanessa. She was more accepting of my descriptions than you are.”

  I stared out at the street lights that glowed like orange fireflies all over the town, amused at the fact that I was having a conversation with an erlking about his wife. “Did you explain this to her before you changed her, too?”

  “Oh, I didn’t change her.”

  I turned to stare at him, wondering how it was possible for him to be married at all, much less to someone who wasn’t even one of his own. He seemed to know what exactly it was that I was thinking and grinned smugly.

  “We’ve a mixed marriage, you see. She’s neither erlking nor human. I’d tell you what she is but truth be told, I’m more afraid of her than I am of your Robert.”

  Laughter burst from my mouth and traveled over the balcony into the night as I shook my head at the innocent look that crossed over his face. “Oh, Dr. Ambrose, I’m going to need to meet your wife, if only so that I can form my own opinion because I’ve seen Robert angry and I’m very doubtful that any wife of yours could be as frightening as he is.”

  “So says the human child who’s never seen Death do what he was meant to,” he said in return, though his voice was less jovial, a dark edge tingeing it. His smile disappeared suddenly. “They’re coming.”

  The two statuesque figures that headed towards us were an incredible sight to behold. The white-gold halo of light that encircled them filled up the dark corridor as they approached and as always, I felt awed by how fluidly they moved, as though their feet never touched the ground and the air itself just floated them towards us.

  The door opened on its own, willed into its position by the power of a single thought. In the span of one blink, Robert was standing in front of me, a soothing hand gently caressing the cut on my face while the other held the small of my back securely, pulling me in as close as he dared.

  “I wanted to kill that bastard for what he did, what he was going to say-” Robert said in a fierce tone before he lifted my face and pressed soft lips against the tender skin around my wound. “I’m not leaving you alone again. Even in a hospital, you’re not safe.”

  “Thank you, Ambrose, for coming so quickly,” Lark said, taking the doctor’s hands into her own. “You gave me the time to find what it was that I was looking for.”

  This was what I had been waiting to hear. I turned my eyes to Lark, Robert still holding my head in his hands. “So you did find her, you found Stacy.”

  She gave me an impish smile and nodded. “Yes. She’s there and she’s whole.”

  “Did you tell her about your mother’s plan?”

  She bobbed her head down once more in confirmation and I nearly clapped with excitement until I realized that one of us wasn’t as thrilled as the rest of us were.

  “Robert—I know you don’t approve-”

  He pressed two fingers against my mouth, quieting my argument. “Shh. I know why you want this. I don’t like it, I don’t agree with it for my own reasons, but they’re my own. I will not let them keep Stacy from making her own decisions.”

  His eyes held nothing but truth, his mouth, though set in a thin line, still hinted at a soft smile that wanted to feel the same joy that I did, and so it did for its own reasons. I lifted myself onto the tips of my toes, removing my mouth from beneath his gentle fingertips, and let my lips fall onto that hint of a smile, kissing the tiny spark of joy that I knew he felt because of me.

  “You’re too good. Even for an angel,” I breathed against the rising curve of his mouth as the smile finally took shape.

  “I’ve got reason to be,” he allowed before pulling my face back to his, completing the connection between our lips and sending waves of raw feeling bubbling through my veins and directly into my heart, causing it to dip down and then rise back up sharply, as though it were riding its own rollercoaster within my chest.

  “Okay, you two. You’re not exactly alone here so could you put the face sucking away so that we can get back to why we’re here in the first place?”

  I found it odd then at just how annoying Lark’s voice had suddenly become. No longer musical, it instead had taken on an almost grating tone, similar to that of nails on a chalkboard set up in front of a feedback riddled microphone. Robert’s eyes widened in shock and then narrowed in amusement, the shimmering silver irises reflecting the yellow street lights back in a more muted yet brilliant sparkle as my thoughts became clear to him once again.

  “I agree with you wholeheartedly,” he whispered to me between soft bursts of laughter.

  An irritated cough and the tapping of feet unused to creating so much noise on the ground sobered Robert and I just long enough to hear what she and Dr. Ambrose had agreed to, their plan laid out in full now that Stacy’s thoughts and memories were confirmed to still exist.

  “Once the paperwork is signed, Stacy’s parents will probably be removing her off of life support sometime tomorrow evening,” Dr. Ambrose explained, looking directly at me and avoiding Robert’s hard gaze with a marked determination that pushed an almost impossible vein out on his marble-like forehead.

  “Lark will remove the tabs from her wires, disconnecting her from the machine and fooling it into thinking that she is physically dead four minutes after the process has begun. During this time, Stacy is at her most vulnerable. While Lark is capable of reaching Stacy within the locked confines of her inner mind, bringing her out is a different story altogether. If she doesn’t remember how to exist, she won’t be able to breathe on her own.”

  Lark spoke up then, taking up where Dr. Ambrose left off. “Stacy needs someone to help her imprint her memories back into her mind. I can help free them, but if I try to help her replace the memories that she’s lost, I might flood her mind with my own and that would undoubtedly kill her.”

  “So who’s going to do that?” I asked, turning to look at Robert and seeing that he wasn’t about to volunteer either. Of course he wasn’t, not after discovering what had happened to me.

  “Dr. Ambrose?”

  “I can’t, Grace. While I have helped her at home, I’m afraid that I’m not an oncologist. Stacy’s doctor will be the one in the room with her. Besides, I’ve got to prepare the morgue to receive her body.”

  “But won’t they notice that Stacy’s not exactly dead?”

  A conspiratorial smile crossed his lips and he nodded. “Of course, but they’ll be expecting that.”

  “Oh.”

  Lark placed a reassuring hand atop my shoulder and beamed a remarkably calm smile at me. “Everything’s going to be fine, Grace. You’re going to be in that room with Stacy tomorrow. You’re the one who’s going to help her imprint her memories and keep her alive long enough for Ambrose to do what he needs to do.”

  “Me?” I asked incredulously.

  The idea that Lark somehow thought that I was capable of doing such a thing was overshadowed by the fact that I was going to have to pretend that Stacy w
as dying in front of her parents. I looked at Robert with doubt clearly written on my face. He’d seen me in theater class—he knew that I was about as good at acting as I was at lying.

  “I don’t know if I can do that. Any of that,” I said to the three of them with panic clear in my voice. “What if they realize that I’m not exactly grieving? And how will I be able to pretend that I’m upset when I’m supposed to be helping Stacy out—how exactly am I supposed to do that anyway?”

  Robert and Lark both looked at each other and shared a conspiratorial smile. Robert’s intent gaze then shifted to mine and the smile faded slightly, making room for one of concern. “I’ll help you. I’ll act as your proxy, allowing you to enter Stacy’s mind and help her to reform her memories. You survived being exposed to the full extent of an angel’s mind, which makes you the only person capable of doing this. You can block out other’s thoughts, and protect your own. You can protect Stacy’s as well. There is no one more suited to save Stacy than you.”

  That was a lot to take in. Sure, I might have survived Robert’s thoughts bombarding my mind, but I didn’t do it all on my own—Robert’s ability to heal had played a role in that—and I didn’t come out of it unscathed. To intentionally put myself through that again wasn’t exactly something that I was looking forward to, but the thought of losing Stacy was too great a factor to let my dread sway me.

  “So tomorrow then,” I heard myself say before Lark’s arms wound themselves around me.

  “You didn’t have to agree, you know,” she huffed into my ear, too overwhelmed with gratitude to control the tremor in her voice. “You could have said no. You could’ve said no to everything and we all would have understood. But you didn’t, and I can’t believe that you didn’t. Stupid, selfless human. Thank you.”

  I was in shock. A state of absolute, mind-blowing, speech-preventing shock. Lark had always kept herself distant from me in some form or another. Oh sure, she appeared as friendly and as concerned as Stacy and Graham had been, our friendship undeniable and unshakeable. But that didn’t erase the fact that I had yet to prove myself to her. As upset as she had been at Robert for his deception, she was also upset that I had left him, doubly so because she had seen it happen beforehand.

  The fact that she was now standing here, expressing her appreciation in a way that went beyond words…

  “I just remembered. We have school in a few hours,” she said, lifting her head from my shoulder. “How are you going to handle that?”

  Robert removed me from Lark’s embrace and swept me off of my feet, into his own arms. “She’s not going to school. There’s a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it.”

  Thankful for my reprieve, I gifted Robert with a smile that defied the sudden onset of exhaustion that overcame me; I knew more than anyone else that there was far too much left to do before my final confrontation with Sam.

  GREEN ISN’T EASY

  When I was a kid, I didn’t dream. I didn’t dream at all until Robert. But for one brief week after my mother died, I couldn’t escape the strange visions that burrowed into my mind shortly after I’d fall asleep. A white rabbit, the same one that tormented Alice as she traveled through that strange little land she had followed him in, would come into my room and ask me for directions to the post office; he wanted to mail a letter and didn’t have any stamps. I showed him the way, pointing out Heath’s landmarks as we passed each of them by. He said nothing to me until we reached the post office, and frowned when he saw that post office was closed.

  With a twitch of his pinkish-white nose, he would turn to me and say, “Thank you for your assistance. In payment for your help, I know of a really great recipe for carrot cake that I’d like to try. If you’re ever in the area, look me up and I’ll bake it for you.”

  I never understood what that meant, and never really thought of it again until I closed my eyes shortly after leaving Dr. Ambrose on that hospital balcony.

  It was as it had been all those years ago, though I was naturally older, and the streets had changed some since then. The rabbit, still pristine white with curious eyes, waited as we stood at the crosswalk, the red hand signal blinking at us like a mad eye.

  I asked question after question, the topics varying from the mundane to the obscure—for a rabbit, anyway—yet the rabbit remained silent, simply clutching onto his letter with a focused paw while his ears twittered left and right, taking in the sounds of traffic and activity around us.

  This time, however, the post office was open and bustling with people. We stood in line and waited patiently until a counter was free. The rabbit purchased his stamp with coins that he pulled from a coin purse that I had never noticed before, images of fruits and flowers embossed into the shiny exterior, and then affixed the stamp to the white square envelope before sending it on its way into the mail slot.

  I caught a quick glimpse of what was written on the envelope but saw that there were no words, no letters, just crude shapes and drawings. I don’t know why that surprised me—this was a rabbit, after all.

  Finished with his task, he turned to me and grinned, two large, white top teeth hooking over both the two smaller bottom ones and a tiny bottom lip.

  “Thank you for your assistance. In payment for your help, I know of a really great recipe for carrot cake that I’d like to try. If you’re ever in the area, look me up and I’ll bake it for you”

  Nothing had changed; everything had gone exactly as it had before, with the exception of the post office being open. I expected the rest of the routine to follow in the same vein as it always had. He’d invite me for cake and then disappear, after which I’d wake up feeling an odd hunger for carrot cake.

  But this time, the rabbit shook his small white head, dissatisfied with what he’d just said. He looked at me with pale yellow eyes, and smiled.

  “You know, I don’t know why I said that. I don’t even like carrots. Nevermind.”

  With a hop, he vanished, leaving me to wake to the bright light of midday shining on my face as it broke through the spaces between the leaves that hovered over my head. A cool, soothing hand rested on my forehead while the other held a wandering finger that ran a course up and down my arm as it lay draped across my chest.

  Did you sleep well?

  A pair of sterling eyes peered over my head through a curtain of black silk, a warm smile accompanying them on the most perfect face I knew I’d ever see.

  “I think so. I mean, I suppose. I had a strange dream, though.”

  “About…?”

  “A rabbit.” At his perplexed expression, I allowed him to see for himself what it was that I had seen in my subconscious, the amusement in his face once he had gone through the dreams, both childhood and present obviously quite humorous to him.

  “With everything that you have to worry about, I’m glad that you’ve found the ability to dream about anything but.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  I thought about that for a bit but my stomach answered before I could, the muffled growl that erupted from beneath my shirt eliciting a chuckle from Robert and a mortified gasp from me.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” he said as he helped me up. “Let’s see about getting you fed, shall we?”

  When we were in a more upright position, only then did I realize that we had been resting against Bala’s tree, its roots forming a rough chaise that allowed for Robert to lean back and afford me some comfort in my sleep. The lake that provided the nutrients that Bala needed was calm, the evidence of the events that had disturbed it less than twenty-four hours ago now gone.

  “Why are we here?”

  “Would you have rather we gone back to the house and listen to my mother and grandmère discuss the topic of Sam to death?”

  I shook my head with distaste at that idea, but wanting to know what exactly their purpose for meeting truly was.

  “The Seraphim are grouping, separately at first, but they’ll come together soon to discuss the tr
oubles that have been caused by Sam’s actions.”

  “As well as yours,” I added.

  “Yes, as well as mine.”

  “So your mother, your grandmother, and your…grandfather are meeting to discuss what to do?”

  Robert swept aside a mound of leaves and exposed a small cooler as he answered my question. “My mother and grandmère are at the house with Lem—who is not my grandfather—to discuss what punishment, if any, Sam will receive for killing Katie instead of you. His mistakes are atypical of one of my kind, which makes my mother believe that he’s intentionally failing. If that is the case, then that begs the question as to why. Lem is in disagreement with this and I’m inclined to agree with him. He knows Sam far better than anyone else.”

  “Why? Were they friends or something?”

  “Worse. Lem is Sam’s father.”

  “His f-father?”

  “Yes,” Robert replied, pulling a container of fruit and another of sandwiches out of the cooler, followed by a bottle of water.

  “But he looks so…young!”

  “Grace,” he laughed softly. “I’m over fifteen centuries old. He’s nearly three times that. If he looks young then I must resemble an infant in your eyes.”

  I choked on the grape I had placed in my mouth, coughing it back up and spitting it out into the napkin he offered. “You should know that that’s not true!”

  “Of course I do, but I also can’t ignore how your heart sped up when you met him. I know that you found him to be…attractive,” he remarked, that last word sounding almost strangled.

  I said nothing for a while, needing time to eat and digest what his words meant, the emotion that lay behind them. He was jealous. I knew that he could be, but I didn’t think it was possible to be jealous of another angel. I reached for another grape and paused, looking at him with my intent clear in my eyes as I bit into the crisp skin and soft flesh, the juice dripping onto my fingers and running down the side of my mouth.

  He leaned in and licked the juice off of my skin, a sly smile replacing the irritated expression that had marred his face just moments earlier. “Mmm. Much better than anything bottled.”