by Kate Hall
I tilt my head up and put my hands around Desireé’s neck, using the chain to pull her face toward me and press my lips desperately to hers. If this is our last chance together, then I am going to take advantage of every moment we have. She hesitates, then kisses me back with a ferocity I’ve never known.
We kiss for what could be seconds but feels like hours, clinging to each other for our lives. There’s nothing else we can do. We’ve exhausted all our options. There are so many spells on our cell that an army couldn’t help us at this point, let alone my three friends.
I wish I could apologize for putting them in danger, but that’s obviously never going to happen. So, for the time being, I just don’t think about it. Thinking is pointless. I’ll have an eternity to just think about things. For now, I need to feel.
Chapter Sixteen
It’s a long time before anyone comes to get us, days maybe, but it’s not nearly long enough. I grip Desireé’s hand in mine, holding on as tight as I can. When the door opens, a short, portly woman with straight black hair, dark skin, and a kind smile is standing there.
“Hello, darlings,” she says, her voice upbeat. “I’m Michael. I’m here to take you to your trial.”
This is absolutely not what I was expecting the most famous Archangel to look like, but I don’t question it. Not when she could kill us at any moment. She doesn’t comment on our tangled fingers and state of disarray, and we follow her up through the dungeons and out.
While the dungeon hadn’t been dark, per-se, the light when we get upstairs is blinding. I gasp at the fresh air, sucking it all in like I’ve been suffocating.
We walk through the open-air walkways. We could just fly away, but Michael is the most dangerous creature in the entire universe, other than the Creator, of course. We can’t risk it, not when there’s the tiniest chance that we won’t be slaughtered.
Unsurprisingly, we’re led to the hospital wing, the first place I ever saw after my death. This is where Azrael explained that I was an angel, where I was sent when Desireé was first caught in my room. I half expect there to be a whole trial room set up, like something out of a movie, but there’s not. It’s just a small gathering of people, some of which have their backs turned.
Cain, though, is staring right at me. I would recognize Death anywhere, and my eyes lock on hers. Her expression is impossible to read, but I can’t look away.
Azrael and Gabriel are here as well, and I can’t place the final person.
When he turns around and extends his wings, it’s like all the air is sucked from the room all over again. He’s the most beautiful being I’ve ever seen, with skin as dark as the night sky and wings to match. His face looks like it was chiseled by the Creator herself, and tears prick at my eyes and my knees go weak. Looking at him feels a lot like heartbreak.
“Lucifer, how nice to see you again!” Michael says cheerfully.
Yeah, we’re definitely going to die if the devil himself is here, consorting with angels. I tear my eyes away from his face. I may die today, but it absolutely will not be from looking at the devil.
“Michael,” he says, his voice husky and tired, “I’d like to go ahead and get started, if that’s alright with everyone else.”
The Archangels mumble their agreement, and Azrael says, “You may both take a knee.”
I stumble down to my knees, the position humiliating yet helpful. At this height, it’s so much easier to avoid looking directly at Lucifer. Instead, I stare at his shoes, which are a plain pair of black Doc Martins.
Throughout all of this, Desireé’s hand hasn’t left mine. She squeezes, and I squeeze back.
“I love you,” she breathes, and my heart beats just a little harder.
“I love you, too,” I reply.
There’s a ninety-nine percent chance that we’ll be dead in five minutes.
Chapter Seventeen
We are not given the chance to defend ourselves. Instead, Gabriel lists our crimes from one of those crystal phones, scrolling through them. I expect him to be pleased with himself. He’s always seemed to hate me, but he just seems grim.
“Invasion of Theaa Academy, consorting with Angels, abandonment of post, murder of a fellow demon,” he says, reading off everything Desireé has done. It’s an absurdly long list, and several sets of eyes burn holes in my face. Still, I don’t make eye contact with any of them. He keeps reading things, things I didn’t know about. Apparently she gets into a lot of fights in Hell.
Azrael goes next, reading a list from her own device. These are my crimes, although the list is much shorter. “Consorting with a demon, treason, evading arrest, reckless endangerment of fellow angels,” she says. The list doesn’t go on like Desireé’s had, though. I swallow. What if they kill Desireé in front of me and then just sentence me to imprisonment? Or torture in Hell?
When she’s done with the list, the Archangels, Cain, and Lucifer all talk amongst themselves. I strain to hear their words, but they’re so quiet that I can’t understand them.
“What are they saying?” I mumble.
Desireé just shrugs, and her hand tightens on mine. My knees are getting sore from kneeling on the marble floor. It’s not something I should be thinking about, but when I notice it, it’s all that I can think about.
We sit there for hours while our jurors deliberate between themselves, discussing our crimes.
As the light outside begins to turn gold, Cain speaks up. “Alright,” she says, “It is time.”
Time for what? Our punishment?
She clears her throat, then walks toward us. When she stops mere steps away, I look up and into the depths of her eternal eyes.
“I will be speaking with the Creator to determine your guilt. If you are found guilty, Azrael will determine your punishment.”
I nod the tiniest bit, and this seems to satisfy her.
Her eyes go from intense to blank in an instant. Is she able to communicate directly with the Creator? Is anyone else able to do that? What’s the Creator like? I have a million questions racing through my mind, and I will never have the chance to ask them. I’ll be too busy dying.
“Am I still needed?” Lucifer asks, clearly bored.
“No,” Azrael says, disdain clear in her tone. It makes sense that they wouldn’t like each other very much. He disappears, and the weight in the room becomes about a million times lighter than before.
We all wait for Cain, who stands stone-still. What’s happening in her head? What is the Creator saying to her?
When the sky outside finally changes to hues of blue and purple, filled with more stars than should logically exist, Cain moves. It’s just the slightest shift of her feet, but it’s there. It takes her a moment to get her bearings, then she turns away from Desireé and I.
“Guilty,” she says.
This whole time, I’ve thought that something, anything, might happen. That we’d be saved. But there’s nobody coming. Nothing is going to stop Azrael from punishing us. This is the end.
“Before you punish us,” Desireé says, surprising me, “Can I have one last moment with Avery?”
I look from Desireé’s demonic yet beautiful face to the Archangels. Azrael frowns.
“I don’t think that’s necessary.”
She’s going to kill us, and it doesn’t even matter to her. We’re no more than nuisances. I should have known that, as soon as I betrayed the angels by showing my love for a demon, they wouldn’t care about me anymore. I catch the tiniest flicker of what might be amusement in Gabriel’s stare, but it’s too quick for me to be sure. Of course he’s going to enjoy this.
I’m weirdly calm, though. Whatever happens know, I know, at the very least, that I did everything I could.
“Alright,” I say, swallowing down every emotion trying to escape and clamping them down. I will not cry. I will not beg.
It’s time to die.
Chapter Eighteen
Azrael sighs and looks at her crystal Heaven phone, reading a statement lik
e she’s been practicing it.
“For the crimes listed, the angel Avery and the demon known to Heaven as Desireé and to Hell as Avery shall be punished. They will both be stripped of their ranks and banished from Heaven and Hell for one thousand years. After such time has passed, they may be allowed to re-apply for entry into Heaven.”
Wait, what?
The words don’t make sense, jumbling themselves around and around in my head until I’m dizzy.
Banished? Is that a way of saying we’re being sent to purgatory?
She said something about a thousand years, though. Why would we be in purgatory for a thousand years? What does it even mean to re-apply for entry into Heaven?
I open my mouth, but no words come out. Just a tiny sound of protest. My body has been wound so tightly that I just can’t react. Tears leak out of my eyes, and Desireé breaks out into hysterical laughter.
I turn to her, and my eyes widen. She releases my hand and falls to the ground in a fit of giggles, tears streaming down her face.
What the hell is going on?
Gabriel rolls his eyes.
“See you in a millennium,” he says, then disappears without another word.
“I don’t understand,” I finally reply, my voice broken.
Azrael frowns. “I thought it was fairly clear.” She walks toward us, and I flinch, but she places her hands on each of us. “Have a good millennium.”
In an instant, everything goes black.
Chapter Nineteen
When I open my eyes again, I’m completely alone. I look around, and it’s far too dark for me to see what’s happening. Am I in purgatory? Has my thousand-year punishment begun? I suck in a breath, and the stale air chokes me.
I cough and hack at it, sitting up and leaning forward. I can’t breathe here. My hands grasp at anything they can, and I find the roughness of my comforter.
Wait.
Am I on Earth?
Again?
I stand and stumble, and my eyes adjust slowly to the dark room. I flip the light switch on, absorbing my bedroom. This is wrong. It feels like I just woke up from a weird fever dream.
Then, something makes a jingling sound. It hasn’t been long since I was here, but the phone’s ringing startles me into action. I go back to my bed and pick it up, but the number isn’t one that’s programmed in. That’s not too surprising, though, as this phone is new and only has five numbers in it. Anybody could be calling me.
I answer even though, based on the clock, it’s four in the morning. “Hello?” I say carefully.
“Avery,” the most perfect voice in the universe says with a sigh. It’s not just anybody.
I close my eyes and let myself fall down onto my bed. “Desireé,” I reply. It really is her. She’s speaking to me.
“I remembered your number,” she says. Then, after a pause and a male voice speaking in the background, she says, “Uh, can you come pick me up? I mean, I don’t know if you have a car, since, you know…But maybe your dad’s?”
I can’t come up with the words. I’m going to see her again? For real? She will be in my arms? I would drive across the country and then sail across the ocean to get her. Compared to defying Heaven and Hell, it would be easy. When she clears her throat, I say, “Of course. Where are you?”
As soon as she gives me the name of the place, I run right to my car and start it up, tearing out of the driveway without a second thought.
There’s a truck stop thirty minutes away, a dilapidated building with a gravel light and the permanent scent of cigarette smoke. My hands shake on the steering wheel, and I check the address on my phone once again. I hope she’d gotten it right. Then, a girl exits the building, silhouetted against the golden light inside. Still, I’d know her anywhere. Her gate is unsure as she approaches my car, so I leap out and run to her, gathering her in my arms, clinging to her for dear life.
“You’re here,” I say, breathing in her scent. She still smells a little sulfuric, but, mostly, she smells like she used to on Earth. She smells like home.
“So are you,” she mumbles into my neck. I laugh, and she responds in kind. This is all so unreal. Then, I remember what I did before I left.
“Want to go home?” I ask. “I left my dad a mysterious note, and I don’t think he’d want to wake up to it.”
She nods. “I’d like that. I’d like that a lot.”
Chapter Twenty
We sneak back in the house, and I remove the note and lottery ticket from the fridge. I’ll give the ticket to Dad when he’s up. For now, I just want to stay by Desireé’s side for as long as I can.
A thousand years. That’s what Azrael had said. I have a thousand years on Earth with Desireé.
I recline on the couch instead of going to my room, and Desireé crawls into my lap, resting her head on my chest. Her hair is back to its human red color, and her skin no longer has that Hellish pallor. There’s still magic coursing through me, though, so she must have the same.
“What are we gonna do for a thousand years?” she asks, her breath tickling my throat.
I tighten my arms around her and kiss the top of her head. “I don’t know,” I say honestly. I don’t have anything to compare that sort of time to. Where Desireé had spent years and years in Hell, I’d only experienced one year in Heaven. What’s it like for life to just keep on going for centuries?
“We could save the ocean,” she suggests, and I laugh. It makes sense that her first thought would be to help others. That’s just the kind of person she is.
“Or solve world hunger,” I reply. In reality, the possibilities are endless. An angel and a demon with a thousand years to do anything we want? We could truly do everything.
And, with our ability to time travel, we could even make it last longer if we wanted to. We could help everybody. These aren’t thoughts I would’ve had when I was alive, but I had done everything I could just to survive. Now that I have mystical powers, I don’t have to worry about that. I can just focus on doing the things I want to do. With Desireé’s enthusiasm for saving the world, I have a feeling that’s what I’ll want to do, too.
“I love you,” I say, kissing her on top of her head once again.
“I love you too,” she says.
“Forever?”
“Forever.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Desireé’s parents are ecstatic when they find out she’s alive. Since her body hadn’t been found, it had been easy to explain her disappearance as amnesia. She explains, honestly, that she doesn’t remember how she got out of the car. Or much about her life. After she gets checked out by a doctor—Dr. Lilith Nassar—she’s cleared to go back to her normal life.
We do all the normal stuff. We go to school. We attend prom. We go on dates. Dad buys a new house with the winning lottery ticket I’d given him, something modest and suburban. I encourage him to join us on weekends when we volunteer, and he seems to enjoy the work. After that, I convince him to go back to school so he can get a degree in social work.
College is long, but it’s bearable when I spend it with Desireé. It helps, of course, that we can spend weekends teleporting to Paris or Hawaii or basically anywhere else we want. We start a company that recycles plastic from the ocean and sells it for a profit, which we then use to sponsor research into climate change. If we’re going to be around for a thousand years, we need the planet to still exist by then. It’s easier since Desireé can use her telepathic powers to prompt politicians into voting in the correct direction, at least.
She makes sure we age properly, although we still look like our ageless selves in private. We buy a small house in a small town, using our days to take care of a sprawling garden and every animal that wanders our way.
One day, when I’m reading a book in the garden pergola, Desireé approaches me and wraps her arms around me from behind.
“I was thinking about curing cancer this week,” she says.
I tilt my head back and give her a small kiss. “That
sounds great. I’ll go ahead and get the research started twenty years ago, and you can gather funding.”
She smiles. “Perfect.”
Looking into her eyes, I realize that, yes, this is perfect.
And we still have nearly a thousand years left.
Epilogue
Cassandra
There’s a cottage up the lane. It’s small and ancient, but well tended. I grew up in this town my whole life, and I’ve spent plenty of time with the women who live there. Mom comments on how young they look for their age, although she never seems to sure as to what that age is, and Dad mumbles about me and my friends harassing them when we ride our bikes over.
“Don’t be bothering that nice couple,” he says. He’s always worried about what people might think of him, and I roll my eyes.
They don’t usually seem too bothered. They give us the freshest, fattest strawberries in the world from their garden, and they let Jimmy sit in the yard and play with their pack of dogs, who are all well-trained and polite. Better than my older sister’s terrier that eats my shoes when I visit, at least.
“I won’t,” I promise, but I ride my bike up the lane anyway.
The blonde woman is waiting for me, smiling while she strokes a fluffy orange cat that basks in the patch of sun across her lap.
“Nice to see you again, Cass,” she says. Her eyes wrinkle just a little at the corners when she grins.
“You too, Avery,” I say. I take off my backpack and lift it. “I brought that book I told Desireé about.”
Avery nods. “She’ll like that. She’s just at the store, but she’ll be back soon.” She stands and walks to the gate, opening it after commanding all the dogs to sit and wait. They always do, too.
“I have a question for you,” I say slowly. It’s not something I wanted to bring up, but everyone at school has been badgering me about it for basically forever.