by Nour Zikra
“What matters is bringing Reed back.”
“You’re being irrational here.”
I spun around and pointed a finger at him. “No. That would be you. Doing nothing is irrational.”
He closed his eyes. “I can’t help you if you refuse to be helped.”
“Then tell me, Mr. Bigshot.” My finger was still gunned at him. When he came closer, it almost touched his chest. “What is your big plan?”
Adriel didn’t get the chance to speak. Before he even opened his mouth, soft feathery wings twice my size encircled me, and I screamed.
“Melodramatic, are we?” a voice said.
The wings moved away, letting light back into my vision. Beside me stood an angel with a man’s face, but I didn’t see a hint of facial hair anywhere. Long, thick locks of brown hair covered the angel’s head, reaching all the way down past his shoulders.
“Hello, Adelaide,” he said, bowing with his wings outstretched on either side of him. “My name is Madadel. I am Reed’s guardian.”
At the mention of my brother’s name, I jumped forward. “You’re Reed’s angel?”
“Yes.”
I looked at Adriel, who had started pacing around the parking lot, seeming confused.
“Adriel?” I called out, but he ignored me.
“He cannot see or hear you.” Madadel lifted his hands into the air and let them hover over something that flickered.
Upon a closer look, I noticed the translucent shield around the two of us, like a tent made of thin saran wrap that was so clear, it was almost as if it wasn’t even there. I tried to poke it, but the shield moved with my finger, growing wider.
Madadel smiled. “Nice trick, huh?”
Taking my hand away from the shield, I glared at the angel.
“Why are you frowning, beautiful Adelaide?”
“You let my brother get kidnapped by a demon.”
Madadel’s wings ruffled in the breeze. “I did no such thing. I was not allowed to interfere.”
Raising an eyebrow, I reminded him that he was interfering now by standing here in front of a human.
“No such thing,” he repeated. “You have the devil’s blood in you. You are not fully human.”
“But I am a human, nonetheless.”
“Still, you know of angels and demons. Besides, that is not what I meant at all. I simply could not go after Reed once he was taken to hell.”
Adriel stood near us but had no clue we were there. He looked right through the shield, searching for me.
“Do you know him?” I asked Madadel.
Madadel smiled. “Of course! Adriel was my brother.”
“Good.” I reached out, making the shield stretch, and wound my hand around Adriel’s. He jolted and looked down at his hand. I pulled him in. His worried eyes softened when he saw us.
“It’s you,” he said, looking at Madadel.
“It is me.”
Music blared from the club. Under the rhythm, the shield pulsated the way water speakers leap up and down to a tune. I placed my hand against the thin wall of the shield and felt the beat pass through my arm and drift off across my body.
“Addy,” Adriel said. “What’s going on?”
I glanced between him and the angel, whom I scowled at. “He’s Reed’s guardian angel. He let him get taken to hell.”
Adriel stared at Madadel’s wings with awe, looking as if he might grab the soft feathers and run his fingers through them. He caught himself and shifted his gaze back to the angel, his fingers twitching at his side. “Madadel, what exactly are you doing here?”
“I came to warn Adelaide about her actions.” Madadel wrapped his wings around himself and looked at me. “She is aiding Lucifer in raising an army, which makes it our job—the angels’ job—to stop her.”
My hands fisted, and I advanced on him. “You let my brother get taken to hell, you piece of—”
“Addy.” Adriel cut me off with a hard stare of disapproval before focusing on Madadel again. “She is right. An innocent boy is imprisoned in hell. We need to get him out.”
It was Madadel’s turn to frown. He glanced between the two of us. “I am afraid you cannot do anything. We, the angels, are doing everything in our power to figure out a way to get Reed back into this world.” His wings extended, flapping like he was about to take off. “Take my word, I will not stop until Reed, my charge, is safe. But you, Adelaide, have to stay put.”
“What about me?” Adriel moved closer to the angel. He looked into Madadel’s eyes with fear in his own. In that moment, he seemed like a little child, unsure of himself in so many ways. “Why was I sent here?”
Madadel placed his hand on Adriel’s shoulder and smiled. “Brother, you were given a second chance. Take it and do better.”
“But why?”
“God has a plan for you.”
Madadel pulled back and took off into the air. As he did, his shield collapsed around us, turning him invisible and bringing us out of hiding. I glanced around the nightclub’s parking lot. Either no one had noticed us appear out of nowhere or they just didn’t care enough to make a fuss about the crazy spectacle they had just seen.
Adriel and I exchanged looks, not knowing what to do next.
H
After stirring in bed for hours thinking about what Madadel had said, I turned the lamp on, got up, and walked around the room with bare feet, feeling the cold tiled floor underneath me.
“Stay put,” the angel had said. I should have told him to stick it where the sun don’t shine. He was Reed’s angel and hadn’t done a thing when the demon came and kidnapped him. It had been me fighting to pull my brother back, to keep him safe. Where had he been? Just watching from the sidelines like it was all a game?
I was not allowed to interfere. Such bullshit.
Work projects lay on my desk. I studied what I had so far. Photos of furniture and home décor along with my own creative sketches of interior designs—full of artistic details right down to custom wall shelves and unique ceiling lampshades—were piled up next to a folder filled with interior shots of the house I was in charge of remodeling and designing with my team. It had been days since I’d touched the project, days since I’d even thought about it. I had to do it at some point if I wanted to keep my job, but for the life of me, I just could not think straight.
She is aiding Lucifer in raising an army. He’d made it sound like I wanted to help Lucifer destroy the world, like I’d volunteered to be his evildoer.
My throat felt dry. I left the room and tiptoed to the kitchen. Adriel lay on the couch, surprisingly on his back, in nothing but pajama bottoms, possibly Nate’s. The room was dim except for the salt-crystal lamp, which no one had bothered to turn off. The light illuminated Adriel’s face with an orange-red glow and gave me a clear view of his thick, long lashes resting against the lines of his cheeks. And just down yonder, a strong chest led a trail to hard abs and perfect lust handles, which dipped at the edge of his pants. I watched him for a second like a teenager gawking at a picture of a hot actor before scurrying to the fridge and grabbing a water bottle.
When I turned back toward the living room, Adriel was sitting up and watching me.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hi.”
“Can’t sleep, either?”
I shook my head. We both didn’t move for a moment, just looked at one another. He ran a hand through his hair, the muscles in his chest contracting, and swept a few strands behind his ear.
“Are you comfortable on the couch?” I said at last.
He shrugged. “It’s not too bad.”
I glanced toward my room and dug my fingers into the soft plastic of the bottle, making a crinkling sound. A span of approximately twenty feet separated Adriel from my room. All I had to do was say the words, and he’d be in there.
As I opened my mouth, I told myself I would probably regret the decision later. “Come on,” I told him, alre
ady moving in the direction of my room. “We can share a bed.”
If he felt hesitation, he didn’t show it. Jumping to his feet, he hurried after me.
In my room, I lay on my side nearest to the window, which a full moon shone through, while Adriel sat on the edge of the bed and stared around the room. He rested his elbows on his thighs, giving me a clear view of his arched back and the long set of notches in his spine. Around his shoulder blades, the scars had almost vanished.
“I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.” Turning halfway, his eyes darted toward me. “The bed isn’t that big. I don’t want to take too much space.”
Reaching out, I placed the tips of my fingers over his rough scars and felt the tautness of his skin. His eyes closed. A breath escaped his mouth.
“Your scars are practically gone.”
He opened his eyes and slid under the covers beside me, turning on his side so that he faced me. The moonlight struck his face. Between us, a third, small person could have fit while barely touching either of us.
From a very short distance away, Adriel’s eyes rested on mine. “Is this okay?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Do you . . .” His dark irises were on my face, searching for something. “Do you want to talk about what happened tonight?”
I shrugged. “That angel had no right. He let my brother get hurt.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
I remembered Adriel standing in the back of the club, watchful. He had reacted to my presence so fast, like he’d been anticipating me all along. Like he was waiting.
“How did you even get there all by yourself?” I placed my right hand underneath the pillow and my left between the two of us, near my torso. “You were there before me, weren’t you?”
He didn’t deny it. “I had your friend drop me off. I knew you would come, and I needed to stop you.”
“But you didn’t. I turned one guy.”
The muscle in his jaw clenched. “By the time I saw you, it was too late. I’m sorry.”
I smiled. “You’re sorry? I’m making your life a living hell, and you’re sorry?”
“It’s my job to protect.” The corner of his mouth pulled into a smirk. “I’ve been failing a lot at that.”
After he had shut his eyes and fallen asleep, his chest rising and falling with the covers draped across him, I wondered if Lizzy was in the adjacent room, or if she had stayed at Nate’s tonight. I wondered what Devin was doing that second, whether he was in his apartment or out with Lucifer’s demons. I wondered if Reed was all right.
I wondered if the man beside me was actually a man, one with human emotions and desires. I wondered if things would work out.
And then I fell asleep.
Chapter Twelve
ADRIEL
The light of early dawn washed the room with a creamy hue and revealed natural reddish strands in Addy’s dark-brown hair; they stuck out like individual red roses in a field of leaves. Addy lay on her back with her face tilted in my direction, fast asleep, her full lips parted.
How could a human look so beautiful, so angelic, and yet have the devil’s blood? Lying on the plush mattress with the soft cotton bedsheets, I wanted to lean in and stroke her hair, maybe even coil a strand around my finger. Never before had I been this physically close to a human. A yearning bigger than anything else made me want to feel the texture of her soft curls, move my fingers down their long lengths, brush the skin of her shoulder, and glide my thumb across her hand, in the curve of her palm where the skin looked the softest.
I wanted to feel her in all her humanness.
I drew myself away from her and sat up, my heart pounding against my chest, my hands clammy.
Stop. Madadel had said Father was giving me a second chance, that I needed to do better. Why he had chosen me, of all the fallen angels, to be human, to have a beating heart and a new beginning, I didn’t know. But if I had to do better, that meant I needed to stop acting out of line. Stop feeling.
My mistake with Jenna, my human charge, was that I’d let my emotions cloud my judgment when it came to deciding how her son lived his life. Falling for those foolish emotions again with Addy would ruin everything and probably cement my place in hell. That was what Madadel had meant.
Ignoring my beating heart and all the weird sensations that came with my human body, I left the bed and found the T-shirt Addy had given me the first day. It lay on the floor by her closet like an unwanted, forgotten friend. I threw the shirt over my naked chest and strode to the door, winding my hand around the knob.
Before I’d even left the room, shadows wrapped around my vision. I stumbled against the door, my hands stabilizing me, and stood still, waiting for whatever came next. The firefly returned, its body twinkling on and off like a flickering Christmas light, and just watched me.
“What is it now?” I asked. “What do you want me to do?”
The firefly’s light died out, vanishing from my sight for the second time in the past few days. I let my forehead bang once against the door.
“Adriel?” a soft, feminine voice called out from behind me. I moved my head in that direction but couldn’t see anything but darkness. “What’s going on?”
“Addy,” I said, “just wait.”
“Are you all right?”
I didn’t answer her. From the darkness came shapes, twisting and turning like a kaleidoscope until an entire world emerged before me. Addy came into view. She was inside a cave holding on to a young man who couldn’t keep his legs from bending and whose body slouched against her. I concentrated on the young man she clung to, finding an alive, pale Reed. He’d changed since the first vision I’d had of him. He hadn’t lost weight or anything—that was impossible in hell—but he looked worn down, like he had been neglected and left by himself without water in the center of a desert for days or weeks.
My vision shifted. I noticed a third person in the room standing near Addy and Reed. When I zoomed in on him, I almost laughed. Although I couldn’t hear the conversation, I watched myself talk to Addy.
“Adriel?” Addy spoke again from the real world. “You’re scaring me.”
The vision began to break, and I placed my hand in front of my face to block the shining rays coming from Addy’s bedroom window. In just a few seconds, the real world was visible again.
“What’s going on?” Addy sat on her knees at the end of the bed, the waves of her hair falling over her shoulders and back in a big, tousled mess. The bed cover had been pushed back with her and was twisted around her legs.
An idea struck me as I looked at her and thought of the vision, of Reed in her arms. We were clearly all in hell, which meant that we had somehow gone through and managed to get Reed.
“Hey,” I said, moving toward her. “We’re going to get Reed out. You hear me?”
She stared up at me, the red in her cheeks bright from sleep. “How?”
“I had a vision of us in hell. You and me. And your brother was there.”
Leaping off the bed, she rushed to me and clenched her fingers around the shirt I wore, just above the hem. “Tell me everything.”
H
Addy paced the room as I told her what I saw. When I finished relaying everything down to the smallest detail, she bit down on her bottom lip and looked out the window.
“If I saw us there,” I said, sitting with my back against the bed’s upholstered headboard, “that means we discover a way to go there, and soon. All my other visions came true almost right after I saw them in my head.”
Droplets of water dripped from the foggy window, indicating the cold weather outside. Still, the room radiated with light from the sunrays coming in. Weird combination, I thought. Hot and cold. I watched Addy’s inexpressive face and considered the human blood traveling through her veins, mingling with her demonic blood.
She drew the window open, letting cold air in, and moved toward the bed. “Are you sure
we were in hell?”
I reminded her how we were with Reed in a cave, just like the one he was dragged into in the first place.
She was silent for a moment. When she looked up, an idea twinkled in her eyes. “I think I know how we can get there.” She sat on the edge of the bed and tugged on a feather poking out of her pillow. “You’re a fallen angel, right? Can’t you go there like the rest of them?”
“I’m sorry, but I’m human now. The other fallen angels don’t exactly have blue veins or stubble.” I scratched at the shadow of hair across my jaw. “You’ve seen them with their permanently scarred backs. They’re not human; they’re demons. I’m the odd one. I can’t open the gateway.”
“Is that the thing I went through?”
I told her yes, and thought of the moment she had come back through the portal, how she had fallen on top of me. It had only been two days ago, but it felt like weeks had passed with all that had happened in that short time.
Once the feather—no more than the size of her little finger—came free from the pillow, Addy twiddled it between her thumb and index finger. “We can ask Madadel if he could get us in there.”
“No. Angels can’t go through the gateway unless a demon lets them.”
Addy held the small feather in both her hands and tore it apart, yanking the soft barbules from the quill. I looked away, the soft hair at the nape of my neck standing up. My visions hadn’t deceived me yet, so I knew for a fact we would make it to hell. Addy was looking at me when I glanced at the fallen, torn feather sprinkled on top of the bedsheets.
In a sense, Addy was fallen too. However, rather than choosing her own path, she was fallen by design, born with demonic blood she didn’t ask for. Was she the key to getting into hell?
“Addy, what if you could get us in? You have Lucifer’s blood.”
She shrugged. “How would I even do that?”
“I don’t know, but there has to be a way. And between the two of us, you’re the only one with some demonic blood.”
A gust of wind shot through the open window, causing the parted curtains to soar in our direction. I felt small prickles descend my arms. The sensation made me shiver.