The Stars Forbade Us

by Holly Wentz

  Now the nature of Angels is there is no need of a wife. They are the oldest and highest of all God’s creations and only God could end them. So as there is no need to procreate as mortals do, there is no real need to have a soul mate in their immortal form. But as it is in all of Life, nothing is truly black and white but all shades of every color. And while Ezi knew that the Fallen had gone about their courtships of human women mired in deceit and divine betrayal, he did not believe God would deny a pure love between two of His children. And he and Aliya and he had a pure love, her state as an Untouched not only ensured that her body was pure but her near secluded existence ensured that her soul had not been tainted by this fallen world.

  Unlike the Fallen, he would petition the Lord for her hand. He thought of presenting himself to her father after he gained God’s permission. He would confront the twisted human who would seclude his daughter under pain of death to be held in waiting for marriage to her own twin brothers. He would be humble and accommodating but firm in his “request” for Aliya’s hand. And he needed to hurry, the Punishment was now on the horizon and he wanted Aliya safely ensconced in Paradise before he began to mete out God’s Destruction along with his fellow angels.

  “She is an abomination. I cannot permit the Spawn of Betrayal, the Embodiment of Lust to reside in My House, moreover to allow one of My own to bond with her.”

  Ezi stood before the Lord in shock as the Seraphim at the Lord’s side gave credence to His brutal declaration. He listened as one of his brothers told him of all that Aliya had denied him. In some cases, she had outright lied to keep her secret safe from him. Ashamed and furious, he returned to the garden the night before her wedding and waited for the creature he, an immortal angel, had fallen in love with.

  Aliya ran to Ezi; her arms outstretched, her heart singing at the sight of her beloved. He had told her he was going to ask the Lord’s permission to take her away from all this debauched sin and the morally corrupt marriage that awaited her. More importantly, he was going to ask for permission to marry her himself.

  He explained how it was extremely rare, but with a love as pure as theirs, he was certain of the Lord’s blessings. She had been singing the Lord’s praise all day, well at least in her head, for she still lived in her father’s house and she intended to keep on living.

  She found her ascent into Ezi’s arms cut roughly short as he brought both arms out straight to stop her. His face was a mask of fury and there shone a dark light from him that almost blinded her with shadows.

  “You lied. You lied to me of who you are, of what you are!” his voice had begun a low seething whisper that ended in a roar. And her heart fell to the ground and shattered.

  “Please,” she began, her voice trembling, “please let me explain. I was going to….”

  “Enough!” he pushed away from her, the motion a violent shove that he inflicted on himself instead her. “Enough,” he repeated softly, “I cannot trust what I hear from you or what my heart says of you.”

  As he began to turn away she panicked. In a moment of utter desperation, she grabbed hold of his arm, throwing all her strength into trying to turn him.

  “Please!” she wailed, “I swear on all that is holy, on all that you taught me was holy, I did not mean to lie. I knew you would turn me away if you knew who my father was and, Ezi please, I could not, I cannot lose you. You are my heart, my soul. Please!”

  Pitifully she dropped to her knees, blindly reaching for him through her tears. Just as she thought he was truly gone he spoke from behind her, his voice infinitely sad and low to her ears.

  “I love you, my shining night blossom. If you had told me, I cannot say I would have turned you away. Your lie is the only thing you have done in my presence that makes you your father’s daughter.” She sobbed at his statement.

  Suddenly he was standing before her again, the sun rising behind him, making him appear to go in and out of her vision from the light of its ascent.

  “My only solace is that your marriage will be short,” he said as he truly began to fade. Just as he was to disappear, she heard his final words, “But this heartbreak, my beautiful dancer, this heartbreak will bring both our eternities to despair.”

  She filled her lungs to scream in pain when a hand clamped tightly over her mouth.

  “Silence before the guards hear you!” A deep voice snapped before the owner of it, a large intense man with a full beard and long braided hair moved around to squat before her kneeling form.

  He looked at her for a long moment before he said “I am Gabriel and you are damned by your very existence.” Removing his hand, raising his brow, silently asking if she would remain quiet. When she made no noise, he continued. “You were created in lust that was itself made from betrayal. You are an abomination and an insult to the Holy Father.”

  She winced as he spoke the cruel words, while her mind still reeled over Ezi’s departure. But what he said next stopped her reeling and sent her spiraling upward.

  “But God’s forgiveness is infinite, and His love is beyond even the greatest of imagination. And in the love that grew between Ezi and you, He sees what He made love to be. So I have come on behalf of Our Most Loving and Adoring God to offer you an opportunity of redemption. “

  She leaned forward in anticipation and did not miss how he leaned back just a little.

  “Your nature is of lust. It was how you were created, and your father imbued that essence in you when you were conceived. Because you have been Untouched you have not been fully tempted by that nature, but all will change on the morrow. Your wedding will go through.” She began to shake her head vigorously. He caught her head in his hands and leaned forward with a snarl,

  “Yes, it will.” He released her roughly.

  “Your wedding and its consummation will go through as planned, and with it the full curse of your nature will descend upon you. This world is about to end and those like you will be bound to the hell realms connected to this mortal existence. But there will be opportunities for you to reenter it as a mortal. If you can spend one mortal lifetime in virtue, one mortal lifetime where you do not succumb to your sinful nature, you will be found worthy of entering Paradise.”

  She leapt to her feet, beaming at this obvious angel, and said gleefully, “And then Ezi and I can be together.”

  He smirked at that and said wryly, “That will be between you and Ezi.”

  Then he took a night jasmine whose blossom had almost closed completely. Cupping it in one hand, he covered it with the other then relifted the hand. The blossom had turned gold with a gold chain running out of it to make a necklace.

  “This is your key to pass through the First Gate.” He handed it to her.

  Taking it she asked, “What is the First Gate?”

  Already walking away he called over his shoulder, “You’ll see.”

  Holding it by its chain she gazed at the beautiful golden blossom and said softly to herself, “All I need do is live one virtuous mortal life. I have been virtuous in the eyes of the Lord all my life in this sinful world, how hard will it be to be virtuous in the next?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Really freaking hard apparently, Aliya thought bitterly as she dumped the softened and drained noodles into two bowls and ladled the sauce over them. Erech raised his brows as she slammed the bowls down on her tiny round dining table and then plopped down in the chair across from his own seat. With a sigh she gripped her hands together, bringing them to her forehead and bowed her head.

  “Blessed Father, we give Thanks for the food before us and the company we keep. May we find ourselves in Your Glorious Light In Your Heavenly Name we pray Forgiveness and Praise. Amen.”

  Erech chuckled softly, shaking his head as he began twisting noodles onto his fork. “You crack me up doing that. Do you honestly think God hears you, hears anyone, here? I mean you’re sitting in a crappy one-bedroom dive in Hell praying over undercooked spaghetti.”

  “God hears all and knows all,” she
replies irritably, scowling as Erech mouths the words as she says them. Okay, so it was her go-to response whenever anyone questioned her devotional stance. But it was a response she believed with all her being. She knew with absolute certainty that God believed in her redemption, and that was why the Agreement had been offered to her.

  “Regardless of how bad my surroundings are or,” she smirked, gesturing to him with her fork, “my company is, I know God hears me and knows the Truth.”

  Erech’s eyes had narrowed at the insult then widening at her last words, “And what, exactly, is the Truth?” he asked.

  “The Truth,” she said as she gathered their dirty dishes and placed them in the sink to soak, “is that no matter how sinful our nature is, we are always capable of salvation.”

  Prepared for a caustic remark, she turned and was surprised to find Erech silent, a look of deep thought on his handsome face as he stared at the table’s surface.

  Unaccustomed to a serious mood from him, she made her way to the bedroom, separated from the main room by two screens she ran from opposite walls leaving a gap in the middle. The “bedroom” door was a beaded curtain she strung across the gap.

  “I feel a headache coming on. Make yourself at home on the couch if you like, but I’m going to bed,” she said as she pulled back the beads.

  From behind Erech asked, sounding a little shocked, “Alone?”

  Turning back towards him, she made a half snarl half smile reminiscent of La’sha and said, “Alone, Man!”

  She could hear Erech rummaging around the front room as she readied for bed. She knew he would probably leave soon, to go carousing. But she also knew he would stay close by and either slake his needs where he found them to return and sleep on the couch or bring his night’s conquest back here to finish in privacy. If that was the case, she only hoped she’d be fast asleep before his return.

  As she settled in her bed, her mind continued to go back to the last night with Ezi. He had said he loved her and he had spoken of heartbreak, of their heartbreak.

  There had been moments over the countless years where she wondered if he had forgotten about her, forgotten about the love they had so briefly shared. After all, that form of love was not natural to angels, and at times she wondered if it had been some kind of phase he had been going through. Then she would remind herself that the very fact he still consumed her thoughts was reason enough to believe he still thought of her. Because if a demon-spawn like her could still hold on to this love after all these centuries, surely someone as pure as an angel would be able.

  She smiled softly as she closed her eyes and drifted off into a peaceful sleep filled with dancing in Ezi’s arms in a moonlit garden.

  PART TWO

  THE UNJUDGED

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Jack! Are you home? You will not believe what I found on eBay! Jack!?” Marcy called out from the foyer of Jack’s home, clutching her package and nearly bouncing on her toes. She had found the perfect present for him on eBay a week ago and, after a vicious bidding war and sacrifice of her savings, she now had it in her possession. And she could not wait to see Jack’s face when he opened the box.

  Walking farther into the house, she looked into the dining area that opened on her right and the living room area to her left. Jack’s parents were well off as they both worked in banking, his father a wealth management advisor and his mother being in the anti-fraud department. Their large three-story home was nestled in the wealthy development of Grey Manor and Marcy loved it.

  She marveled at how the floor’s smooth tile always shined and the furniture’s dark heavy wood always had an oiled sheen. It wasn’t as though her own home was filthy; it wasn’t. Her parents kept their home hygienically clean, with every Saturday a declared “house cleaning day.” But the brown carpet was worn and the peel-and-stick tiles did not shine; she honestly didn’t know if peel-and-stick tiles could shine. And any wood furniture was long ago scuffed and chipped, and no amount of Pledge would ever give it an oil-rubbed sheen. These were just a few of the reasons she liked Jack’s house so much. But mostly, she just liked Jack.

  She had met him her first day at Carol Higgins High School, after moving right in the middle of her senior year. Her parents had been real estate agents in South Florida and they had done very well until the housing market crashed. Suddenly she went from having the newest iPhone and high-end clothing and real jewelry to Mom and Dad selling everything and shopping at Goodwill and eating at soup kitchens. Doing anything in a desperate attempt to keep the home they still ended up losing.

  The move was a desperate act of broken people. Her parents had lost everything—not only their home and credit, but also their confidence and self-worth. It would have ended in tragedy if not for a friend of her father. Mike had served with her dad on the same aircraft carrier during his four-year Navy stint. They had stayed close and her dad had chronicled their downfall over the two years after the Crash.

  Mike created computer programs, and though neither her father nor mother knew anything about computers, he offered them both a job and a chance. So Marcy had found herself in a new school in a new town in a new state wearing hand-me-down clothes and old work boots; the only other shoes she owned were thong-strap sandals and those didn’t work in snow.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Marcy slunk through the first half of her first day, mourning the loss of what would have been a great final year—cursing her parents, this school, and life in general. She had tried to put together a decent outfit, but all her nice clothes were too thin and short for these cold mountains. So here she was in a secondhand sweater with a small hole under the right arm and old khaki dungarees with an unidentifiable quarter-sized stain on the left thigh. The boots were a little small and pinched her big toes, which were not used to being so confined. When she had looked at herself in the mirror that morning, she hadn’t recognize the sad girl looking back at her with dull brown eyes and limp brown hair over a too pale face.

  She had been sitting at the far end of a long lunch table, head bent over her tray and shoulders hunched, when he had slid into the seat across from her, a big grin on his face. He ducked down and looked up from the tabletop, forcing her to look at him no matter how low she kept her gaze.

  “Want me to tell you your future?” he asked, his eyes sparkling.

  He was classically handsome with his blue eyes dark and his tan skin smooth, longish hair with a slight curl, too dark to be blonde too light to be brown. He was wearing a long-sleeved black shirt, black jeans, and black boots, all of which were a high quality she recognized as expensive.

  Wincing with realization that she was probably about to be the brunt of some joke, she looked up at the smiling boy and said, “What?”

  “Do you want me to tell your future?” he asked again and began to gently shuffle the large cards he had removed from a purple velvet bag.

  “Are those tarot cards?” she asked, slightly stunned. Really, what person had tarot cards in school? Better yet, what boy had tarot cards and carried them around in a little cloth bag that closed by drawstring?

  The boy looked up with a lopsided grin and winked. “Good eye. Now, think of what you want to know, pick ten cards from the deck, and I’ll tell your future.” He began to set the deck of cards face down between them on the table.

  “Okay … here.” She grabbed the top ten from the stack and handed them to him.

  “You didn’t really think about it,” he says with a scowl that suddenly brightens back into his original smile, “That’s perfect! Just opens you up, letting the Fates decide. I like that.” And he winks again and begins flipping the cards over and laying them out.

  Pointing at a card near the middle of the pattern that has a card lying over top it, he says, “You are in a place of loneliness … which isn’t always a bad thing. It means you are doing self-reflection,” he continued, moving his forefinger with a silver skull ring on it to the card lying sideways over the first, “But you’ve come to the e
nd of a chapter in your life, and…,” he looks up at her, “you’re not happy about that.”

  “The cards say all that?” Marcy says, intrigued by the rather accurate description of her current situation. “So which one tells my future?”

  “This one!” he exclaims, pointing at the one above all the others and to the far side, “It says you’re looking for something of value and it says you’ll find it.”

  “Like a treasure?” she asks.

  “Perhaps,” he shrugs, “I’m just reading the cards. Do you know what they are talking about?” She shakes her head but she’s smiling now. Even though he’s a little weird and some girls just walked behind him, laughing behind their hands at the two of them, she’s really glad he sat down across from her.

  By the end of the lunch period, he had read her tarot and started teaching her about the different cards’ meanings. As he placed the cards back in their cloth sack he says, “If you want, I have a different set at home, the Suit of Cups, and … if you want … I can show you how to lay them out and read them.”

  He shrugs and, to her surprise, blushes a little as though he is shy, which he certainly isn’t. She finds herself falling a little in like for this strange boy, with rings on every finger and two small loops pierced in his right eyebrow and, if she isn’t mistaken, his makeup-lined eyes.

  “I’d like that.” She smiles as she takes the piece of paper he had written his address and phone number on. Again, a show of his oddity as anyone else would have just told her to put it in her smart phone.

  “Can I have your number?” he asks, taking out an old flip phone. She couldn’t stop the laugh she gave at the sight of it.

  “Sure. By the way my name’s Marcy,” she says and gives her number.

  “Yeah, I know,” he states absently while staring intently at his phone as he slowly programs her number into it. “I asked Mrs. Perez.”