by Cynthia Hand
He let go of my arm. “We can talk here. In private.”
“What did you do?” I asked, a shiver working its way down my spine, but I refused to let him see that he’d scared me.
“It’s not safe to reveal yourself the way you did,” he said, scolding me. “It was foolish.”
“Why?” I wanted to know. My voice sounded thin in this place, insubstantial.
“What if I’d been one of the fallen?”
“So it’s true? There are good angels and bad angels?” I knew the answer to this, of course. My biological father was definitely not a good angel. But I wanted to hear him define it for himself. I wanted to hear him say it.
“Yes. The sorrowful and the joyful,” he said.
“And which are you?” I teased, but I hoped I already knew the answer. Bad angels wouldn’t come to a church to talk to God.
He shrugged, a completely human gesture. “I’m neither. I’m ambivalent.”
It sounded like a joke. “Yes, well, I’ve had trouble with ambivalence myself,” I said.
He laughed. “What’s your name?”
“Angela.”
“Fitting,” he said.
“What’s yours?”
“Penamue. But you can call me Phen.”
“Phen,” I repeated, liking the sound of his name in my mouth. An angel’s name. “Where are we, Phen? Where have you taken me?”
“The same place we were,” he answered. “But a different dimension.”
My skin prickled with excitement at how cool this was, journeying to a different dimension with a full-blooded angel. Nothing this eventful had ever happened to me, not in the small Wyoming town where my mother had hidden me away for most of my life.
It was the start of something, I thought.
It was the start.
CLARA
You’d think I’d be used to surprises by now. My life is a series of announcements like, Guess what, Clara? You’re part angel. Guess what: that guy who you thought you were supposed to save, well, he’s an angel-blood, too. Surprise! Angel-bloods only live for one hundred and twenty years, which means your mother is going to die any day now. Ding dong! Guess who’s at the door? Your dad, who’s an archangel, which, by the way, makes you a Triplare, a three-quarter angel instead of the measly one-quarter angel you thought you were. And each of these times I basically have to reevaluate my entire life. You’d think that nothing could surprise me nowadays.
But once again, I’m floored.
A buzzer goes off in the kitchen. Phen excuses himself and slips out. I turn to Angela.
“Ange!” I exclaim, softly so Phen doesn’t hear me spazzing all over the place.
“I wanted to tell you, but it’s complicated,” she says.
“How complicated is it to say, Hey, FYI? This boy I like, he’s actually an angel?”
“I didn’t know I was going to see him this year.”
“And you’re like . . .” I lower my voice even more. “Spending the night with him?”
“It’s not like that,” she says, but clearly it is. She keeps looking at something in the corner of the room. I turn to see what it is—a stack of paintings leaning against the wall.
I get up.
“Don’t . . . ,” Angela says, but I’m already flipping through the canvases, until I hit one of Angela, sprawled across the green velvet sofa, half-wrapped in a blanket and nothing else, the sun falling across her hair in a way that makes it shine blue. It’s a beautiful painting. But that’s beside the point.
“Nice blanket,” is all I can get out.
Her jaw tightens. “I model for him sometimes. But mostly we hang out. We walk around the city. We talk.”
“You talk. About what?”
“About angel stuff, of course, but we also talk about music, and books we’ve read, and art. Poetry. He knows, like, everything.”
“Right, because he’s an angel.”
“Yes,” she says, with a defensive edge in her voice. “He’s an angel. So what?”
“I’m a hungry angel.” He appears in the doorway. “Dinner is served, ladies.”
This could be awkward.
“I thought you might be getting tired of Italian,” he says as we settle around a small table tucked into the back of the kitchen. The food smells wonderful, curry and lamb, something Indian. Phen pours three glasses of white wine. I dig right in, because it gives me something to do besides talk. I need some time to let this revelation settle in my brain.
“So, Clara,” Phen says after a while, “tell me about yourself.”
I take a sip of wine, which I know should taste good but instead tastes sour and strange. “I, uh . . .” How much has Angela told him about me, I wonder? “Well, I recently graduated from high school. I’m going to Stanford in the fall.”
“With Angela. You’re a couple of geniuses, you two,” he says. “What do you plan to study?”
“I don’t have a plan, exactly. I guess I’m hoping that I’ll try out a bunch of stuff and find something I like.”
“Do you have any hobbies? Talents?” he asks.
Suddenly I feel like I’m at a job interview.
“Uh—” I don’t know what to say. I used to be a ballet dancer, but that feels like a million years ago. I’m not into sports like Jeffrey, or poetry like Angela, or music like Christian. Fishing, maybe? I like fishing. But fishing was all about Tucker. Hiking, boating, swimming in rivers, white-water rafting—I can’t separate any of those things from Tucker.
I need a hobby.
“Clara’s an empath,” Angela supplies for me.
I half choke on my bite of meat.
“Interesting,” Phen says as I cough like crazy. Finally my lungs calm down a bit. I take a drink of wine and wish it were water.
“What’s your story, Phen? Angela really hasn’t told me very much about you,” I say, eager to change the subject. “You’re an Intangere?”
“Yes, I think we’ve established that,” he says wryly.
“And what do you do?”
“Are you asking if I flit around from cloud to cloud, sing in a heavenly choir?”
I take a bite, chew for a minute, shrug. “I guess I don’t know what it is that angels actually do.”
He takes a long drink of his wine. “You’re direct,” he says. “I like that.”
I smile and wait for him to answer my question.
“We do angel business,” he says after a minute. Smirks. “You mere mortals wouldn’t understand.”
“Angel business, like helping the souls of the dead find their way to heaven or hell?” I glance over at Angela, who gives me a warning look. She’s been superquiet this entire time. For once I’m the one asking all the questions.
“Yes, some angels handle the souls of the dead,” he says.
I remember my mother telling me once that more than a hundred people on this planet die every minute. That’s a lot of angels. “So is that what you do? Look after the dead, guide them toward the light, that kind of thing?”
“No,” he says. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m what you would call a muse.”
Angela looks surprised. “A muse?”
“I inspire people,” he says, like it’s something ordinary people do as a vocation: professional inspirer.
“You never told me that,” she says. “Have you ever inspired me?”
He raises his eyebrows, laughs when she gasps.
“I thought I was your muse,” she says with a flicker of disappointment. “Can you put an idea directly into my head?”
“I can give you an image, a line of music, a word, anything I want. But most of the time I don’t have to. I simply provide a brief moment of clarity. You fill in the rest.”
“That’s amazing,” she says, and I can almost see her mentally going over the stuff she’s done around him, the poems she’s written or the music she’s played on her violin for him, trying to understand how he might have inspired her.
“Yeah,�
� I agree, if only to be agreeable. “It is. Very cool.” Truthfully, though, the idea of an angel who’s able to plant ideas in my head without me knowing about it doesn’t sound like good news to me. Who knows what else he could plant there? It’s a little bit Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in my opinion. I make a silent note to keep my mental barrier up around him, the way my mom taught me, so he won’t be able to read my mind. Or stick stuff in it.
“It’s a small gift, compared to what others can do,” he says modestly, but I can tell he’s flattered. I guess he doesn’t get to take credit for what he does that often. And I don’t for a second believe that being a muse is all this guy can do.
“So give us an example,” Angela says. “Something you inspired.”
“Oh, I don’t know. ‘Once upon a time,’” he says. “I came up with that.”
Angela’s eyes widen. “You came up with the phrase ‘once upon a time’?”
“It was a long time ago.” He eats a bite of food while we stare at him. “Humans are brilliant in their own right. And quick to learn, I’ve found.”
“So you’re a teacher? Officially, I mean?” she asks, her voice a little more high-pitched than normal, maybe because she wants him to teach her more “officially.”
“It was my duty, once upon a time, to teach humans,” he says.
“What did you teach them?” I ask.
“How to write. Some have argued that was a bad thing, giving them the written word.” He smirks. “Leads to all kinds of trouble. But that was my job.”
I have a sudden flash of this guy scratching out the ABCs on a cave wall for a group of awestruck Neanderthals. Then it occurs to me. He’s an angel, but he doesn’t give off an angel vibe. No sorrow. No joy. Which means that I don’t know what side he’s on.
Which means I can’t trust him.
Once again I get the distinct feeling that something bad is going to happen, that someone’s-dancing-on-my-grave sensation.
“So you were a Watcher,” I say slowly, trying to keep my voice casual.
His eyes flash at the word.
“Clara,” Angela mutters. “Enough with the Spanish Inquisition.”
I meet Phen’s dark eyes, hold his gaze.
“What do you know about Watchers?” he asks.
“I’ve read The Book of Enoch.”
He sighs. “Inaccurate.”
“Okay, set the record straight. You were there, right?”
Silence. I wonder if I’ve gone too far, if I’ve foolishly cheesed off somebody who’s going to turn out to be a Black Wing and squish me like a grape.
“Originally it wasn’t a bad thing, to be a Watcher,” he says. “All the term means is that we were sent to watch over the humans, teach them. Some of us did more than watch, obviously.” He looks away. “Some of us fell in love with them.”
Angela shoots me a glare that would melt steel. I ignore her. “So you’re not evil, is that what you’re saying?”
He meets my eyes again. “I’m ambivalent. I refuse to fight on either side.”
“You’re neutral,” Angela pipes up. “Like Switzerland.”
“Yes.” He turns to her with an amused expression, pats her on the knee affectionately. “Exactly like Switzerland.”
“You were rude to him,” Angela says to me when we’re back in the spare room at Rosa’s house. She scowls into the mirror and takes off her necklace, starts brushing out her hair.
“I just asked him some questions, Ange. Relax.”
“You interrogated him.”
“I don’t know him.”
“Yeah, well, I do. I’ve known him for years. He’s not evil, Clara. I know there’s all that crap about him being an ambivalent, but that only means he doesn’t want to fight. He’s above that.”
I sit down on the bed, kick off my shoes. “Right. Above it.” I don’t understand how she could be okay with this when she’s so gung-ho about her own duty, her purpose, her bright white wings that mean that she’s so pure of heart, so committed to the side of good. Why wouldn’t she hold Phen to the same standard?
“He’s a good guy,” she says, grabbing a handful of hair and starting to braid it.
“He’s not a guy at all.”
“Look, I don’t need you to protect me, Clara,” she says. “I met him in a church, remember? Hallowed ground and all that? If he was evil he wouldn’t have been able to go in there, right?”
“Okay,” I admit grudgingly.
“So let’s drop it. I don’t want to fight.” She finishes braiding one side and starts braiding the other. I go to the sink to wash my face. I’m brushing my teeth when she appears in the mirror behind me.
“I thought you’d like him,” she says, and I don’t have to be an empath to know that she’s disappointed in my reaction. She likes Phen. More than likes him. She wants me to like him, too. She wants me to see what she sees in him.
I lean over and spit into the sink. “I didn’t say I don’t like him. I said I don’t know him.”
“Okay, so get to know him. Come hang out with us tomorrow. We’re going to Vatican City. Embrace the tourist thing, like you said.”
Her eyes meet mine in the mirror, hopeful.
I’m a softie. That, and I really do want to see St. Peter’s Basilica. “Okay, fine.”
“Really? You’ll come with us?”
“What, you want me to pinkie swear?”
“You’ll like him,” she says. “You’ll see.”
“All right. Hey, wait.” I catch her by the shoulders before she buzzes out of the room. “You haven’t told him about me, have you? About me being a . . . T-person. About my dad?”
“No,” she says, frowning. “We haven’t talked about that kind of thing much this time.”
“Well, don’t. I know you trust him or whatever, but that’s my private stuff, okay?”
“Okay,” she says with a dismissive shake of her head.
“Promise me.” I look into her eyes.
She smirks. “What, do you want me to pinkie swear?”
“Yep.” I hold up my hand, pinkie raised. She grins and hooks my finger with hers. We shake.
“Seriously, though,” I say.
“Seriously. I won’t tell him.” She presses a hand over her heart. “Your secret’s safe with me.”
ANGELA
That first summer, Phen followed me back to Rome. He set a place and time for us to meet, always the same—a small café a short distance from my grandmother’s house, at nine o’clock in the morning on Tuesdays and Fridays—and when the sun began to sink below the horizon he’d bring me back to the café, and he’d say, “Thank you for the lovely day, Angela. See you next time.” That’s the way he kept it, in the beginning. Careful. Courteous. A temporary arrangement where he, the centuries-old angel, would instruct me, the naive little angel-blood schoolgirl.
We took a lot of walks. At first he was hesitant to tell me about the angels and the war between them, but he did let me in on the ways to tell the good from the bad. I thought that the wing-color thing was a bit cliché, really—white for good, black for bad; definitely not politically correct—but it wasn’t about color, he said. It was about light. Black is the absence of light. White is the gathering of it.
He showed me a secret Rome, one I’d never seen in all my touring and being dragged around by my relatives. Phen’s Rome was different: a Rome born out of his perfect memory, the way a grandfather could show you his hometown. Every place was a story, and Phen’s stories stretched back to the days when this sprawling, magnificent city had been a couple of primitive thatched huts. At the Coliseum, he told me about a brave man he once knew, a man who would never show up in the history books. He pointed out the exact spot where the man died. He showed me a house where the most powerful woman in Rome had lived in the year 1636. He told me that she’d invited him inside and boldly tried to seduce him, and I tried to act like the image of this jewel-bedecked Italian broad running her slutty hands all over him didn’t bother me
.
But it did bother me.
Because there was nothing grandfatherly about Phen. Most of the time I forgot about his age, or lack thereof. I knew he’d been around since before man had taken his first crawling steps on this planet, but in Rome he passed easily for a run-of-the-mill Italian man in his midtwenties. He wore the right clothes. He used the right slang. He wasn’t like those vampires you see on television who are so clearly old men stuck in young bodies, the way they talk like they’re still in Victorian times, their lips curling up in disgust at the idea of modern frivolities like electricity and gasoline-powered engines. Phen was part of the world; he embraced it. He loved it.
He made it easy to forget, sometimes, that he was more than the most remarkable guy I’d ever met. My heart leapt every time he touched me, even the most innocent, casual of brushes: his arm bumping mine as we walked together, his hand on my back as he guided me through a doorway.
I wasn’t a fool, though. I tried to talk myself out of falling for him. He’s an angel, I kept telling myself. You’re a teenager. Get real. You have almost nothing in common. It would never work. Don’t kid yourself. He probably thinks of you as a child.
“Why Italy?” I asked him one Friday afternoon as we sat down for a late lunch at a restaurant we’d found by following our noses. “Why stay here, out of all the places in the world you could go?”
“The food, of course,” he answered, taking a bite of his calzone.
“It’s a good thing angels don’t need to worry about high cholesterol,” I joked.
He laughed, and the sound warmed me. “Actually, it’s the language. I find Italian to be the most beautiful and expressive of all the human languages.”
I shifted into Italian immediately. “So, Phen,” I asked, “what do you do? When you’re not playing tour guide to American angel-bloods?”
“Many things. I write. I paint. I think about things. . . .” He leaned forward, caught me in his magnetic smile.
I blushed. I wanted him to like me so much.
“What do you do,” he asked, “when you’re not startling angels in churches?”
“I have a thing for horror movies. And I play the violin. And I read.” I skimmed over the part where I researched everything I could get my hands on about angels and the Nephilim and their ways. It sounded too nerdy. “I write some, too. Poetry. Not very good.”