Black Wings

by Christina Henry

  The acid burned through me, making me feel weak and dizzy. I fought to stay awake. I didn’t want to be a comatose hors d’oeuvre during my last moments on Earth.

  “My mother . . . never begged . . . for anything,” I said. My tongue felt thick in my mouth.

  “Oh, yes, she did,” Ramuell said, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “She begged for her life and the life of her mewling brat. She begs for it even now. I can hear her, inside me, with the others.”

  And for a moment, I thought I could hear her, too, hear her soul crying out in anguish, trapped somewhere inside the nephilim’s body. The thought filled me with despair. I couldn’t even keep myself alive after my mother had sacrificed herself for me. Soon I would be one of the screaming souls imprisoned inside this monster.

  But even as I smelled the sulfur-and-burnt-cinnamon stink of Ramuell’s breath, felt its heat on my face as he opened his mouth to consume me, something in me cried out. I wasn’t going to let the nephilim destroy me, and as I thought it, a blast of white heat exploded inside me and pushed out through every inch of skin. I felt scorched by the force of it and closed my eyes as light exploded all around me. Ramuell screamed, a scream of pain and horror like I had never heard before. The nephilim dropped me to the ground and I opened my eyes.

  I saw it for only a second. The magic that blasted out of me had seared away the nephilim’s skin completely wherever he had touched me. His hands were little more than dangling slabs of meat, and when he locked eyes with me, I saw fear in the red depths.

  Then I saw—but I couldn’t have seen—a hole appear behind Ramuell, like the surface of reality had been rent open. The nephilim stepped back into the swirling darkness and was swallowed up, the hole closing neatly as if it had never been there.

  I had a moment to wonder what had happened to James Takahashi, and then the burning in my blood consumed me, and I closed my eyes.

  10

  WHEN SHE AWOKE SHE WAS AGAIN IN DARKNESS, IN the trap that they had enclosed her within. The memory of that beautiful voice speaking of the death of her Morningstar, the death of her children, was almost enough to make her fall away again. But she hardened herself, for she would need all of her wit to escape with her life and her children.

  She was not without power. When the Morningstar had planted his seed inside her, he had given her some of his own magic, to protect her and their children. Evangeline had not used this magic since she had blazed the path from her village to the Forbidden Lands and the arms of her lover. And the creatures that she would fight were not frail mortals, but angelic beings with powers of their own.

  Still, she must fight. If she was to return to Lucifer, she must fight.

  She lay in wait, tiny, still, like a mouse in a hole, until one of them came for her. She closed her eyes so that she would not be blinded by the creature’s light. She waited while it hauled her roughly through the door. Then she opened her eyes, and she saw its face, a face very lovely, a face very surprised when white flame burst from within her and burned it away.

  Evangeline did not take in her surroundings longer than to determine the way out. There were no other creatures in the room, and she hurried forward to the only door, the wings in her belly fluttering in delight. She felt the magic of her children bubbling up inside her, wanting to break free, and she knew that she had not long before they would be born.

  At the door she came to a long hallway, white and smooth and faced by a row of gilded windows, and there was only one way out and one way forward. Another of the creatures stepped into the hallway before her, and the white flame burst from her again, and not a trace of her captor remained.

  The Morningstar’s children bounced and fluttered, and Evangeline felt a pain in her side, and a wetness between her legs. She knew she had but little time. She stepped through the door, and into a large and airy room.

  A collection of the creatures was there, all gathered in perfect beauty, but Evangeline did not notice and she did not care. The Morningstar’s children were coming, and she had to return to him.

  The creatures turned, and all but one froze in surprise. She looked at Evangeline with great green eyes, and Evangeline saw knowledge in them, and saw the creature alight on downy white wings a moment before the flames burst from her for the last time.

  Evangeline’s captors and her prison blasted away in an instant, leaving her alone in the glare of the sun, her feet in the sand, the jagged peaks of mountains all around her. She fell to her knees, crying out, and placed her hand over her belly. Little wings pushed beneath her skin, as she lay on the sand, her face in the sun, and waited for her children to come forth.

  I woke in my bed to find that for the second time in a week I had been cleaned and dressed in my pajamas. Again, Gabriel seemed partial to the only nightgown that I owned—a virginal white cotton lawn that made me look like a sacrifice about to be laid on an altar. I don’t know what had possessed me to buy it in the first place.

  My long hair had been neatly braided down my back, and that, more than the fact that he had seen me naked twice now while I slept, made me blush. I felt my face warm all the way to the tops of my ears. There was something disturbingly intimate about the thought of his hands carefully braiding my hair.

  The room was almost fully dark. A thin shaft of light pushed through the curtains from the streetlamp in the alley behind my building. The digital clock on my bedside table read 3:18 A.M. The window was slightly open and I smelled the cold Chicago fall night—a mixture of car exhaust, fallen leaves and a lingering whiff of smoke from someone’s fireplace.

  I saw Gabriel in the weak glare from the streetlamp, sitting in a hard-backed wooden chair pilfered from my kitchen. He’d moved the chair very close to my bed. I slept on my left side so when my eyes opened I faced him. I could brush his knees with my hand if I stretched my arm out. His head was tipped forward and rested on his chest, and he snored softly.

  It hadn’t occurred to me that he could be tired. He seemed so unearthly to me most of the time, so obviously a supernatural creature, that I hadn’t thought that he could ever be weary. But now that I looked closely, I could see the dark shadows underneath his closed lids, and the pallor in his cheeks. It was more than just the play of light and shadow in a darkened room. He looked exhausted and ill.

  And healing me time after time probably isn’t helping, I thought guiltily. I sat up, pulled my knees to my chest and watched the rise and fall of his chest for a few moments, wondering if I would be able to push his significantly taller form onto the bed without my waking him. He clearly needed to rest, and sleeping in a kitchen chair wasn’t going to do the trick. I wasn’t going to sleep any longer. Now that I was awake I felt jittery and slightly nauseous, like I’d had too much caffeine.

  I eased my legs out from under the blankets and started to scoot down the bed. Gabriel’s eyes snapped open immediately and his head came up. He pinned me with a glare.

  “Where do you think you are going?” he asked.

  I felt guilty, like I’d been caught doing something wrong. “I’m getting out of bed.”

  “You need to rest,” he said. He stood and grasped my shoulders, trying to push me back to the pillows. “You have been through an ordeal.”

  “You’re the one who needs to rest,” I snapped back, feeling a little annoyed at his peremptory attitude. I swiped at his hands and he released me. “You look like the walking dead.”

  “My health is no concern of yours. However, your health is of utmost concern to me. If you had suffered lasting harm today because of my inability to protect you ...” He trailed off, looking grim.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Lord Azazel’s rage would be a terrible thing to behold.”

  “And wouldn’t his rage be a terrible thing to behold if you managed to get yourself killed because you didn’t take proper care of yourself?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, and smiled briefly. “My life is nothing to him.”

  “Why
?” I asked.

  “Because of who I am,” Gabriel said.

  There was something in his eyes, and I knew that if I asked the question now, I would finally get my answer.

  I took a deep breath. “Who are you?”

  The words hung in the air between us like wisps of smoke. I could feel tension radiating from his body.

  “You promised me that you would tell me,” I reminded him.

  “I did.”

  “Are you a fallen angel, like Azazel?”

  He looked wary. “Why is it relevant?”

  “Because I want to know,” I said. “Because you’ve saved my life.”

  “I am . . . not exactly like your father,” Gabriel said.

  “Are you half-and-half, like me?” I pressed. “You’ve got starshine in your eyes, like I had when you showed me in the mirror.”

  “Madeline, you must understand. I want to tell you. But I fear what you will do when you have the information. You need to trust me. I cannot fulfill the charge that Lord Azazel has placed on me if you do not trust me.”

  “And I do.” I didn’t think that there was anything Gabriel could say that would make me trust him less.

  “Before I tell you this, you must understand that Lord Azazel, your father, trusts me absolutely. He would not have put you in my care if he did not. There is nothing in all eternity that is more precious to him than you, his daughter.”

  I nodded slowly, and I was ashamed to feel tears prick at the backs of my eyes. I had never known my father. If I was so precious to him, why had he left me here all alone? Why had he chosen to leave rather than stay with my mother? If he had been with her, would she have been protected from Ramuell?

  “I understand,” I said.

  “My mother,” Gabriel said, “was an angel. Not fallen. She was still a child of paradise when she came to Earth to deliver a visitation upon a human. While she was here, a nephilim found her.”

  I could read between the lines without any further coaching. “She was raped.”

  “Yes,” he said without inflection. “Violently. Even as a divine being with divine powers, she barely survived. When it was discovered that she had gotten a child from the nephilim, she was cast out of Heaven. By this time the Grigori had also fallen, for the sin of coupling with human women. My lord Azazel sheltered my mother until I was born.”

  Why? I wondered. From everything I had heard about fallen angels so far, they weren’t exactly models of altruism. Azazel must have had some ulterior motive for sheltering Gabriel’s mother.

  “After my birth, my mother left. She wanted no truck with a thing born of such a monster. The Grigori would have had me destroyed—it is forbidden for the nephilim to reproduce—but Lord Azazel argued on my behalf. He swore that if I ever became a danger, he would destroy me himself. So Lucifer consented, and I was allowed to live as Lord Azazel’s thrall.”

  “My father kept you as a servant?” I said, a little offended. Why hadn’t he raised this lost half angel as his own?

  “Of course,” Gabriel said, surprised. “What else would I be? And I am grateful to him. He taught me to understand my powers. And now he has sent me to you, so that I could use those powers to protect you from Ramuell.”

  His face was braced, expectant. He thought that I was going to explode now that I knew he was part nephilim. But instead of being angry that he’d deceived me and hidden his identity from me, I could feel only pity. Pity for his mother, who lost Heaven through no fault of her own. Pity for this lost child, who was abandoned to death by his mother and lived as an outcast because his father’s magic was inside him.

  “So Ramuell is . . . what? Your cousin?” I asked.

  Gabriel’s face was very white in the darkness, and he seemed almost unable to speak. “He is my father.”

  The ground beneath me shifted a little. “Ah,” I said, feeling lame. “Your father.”

  I wasn’t really sure what else to say to that. This beautiful half angel sitting before me, this man who had already tangled up my feelings every which way from lust to fury since the moment I’d met him, was the son of the creature that had murdered my mother. But it did explain why Beezle insisted on calling him “the devil.” He was the grand-son of the one and only Morningstar himself.

  “My lord Azazel sent me to you because my father’s magic lives inside me, and only I have hope of containing him alone. When the Grigori first bound the nephilim to the Valley of Sorrows, it took the combined might of all of their magic to contain them. But now that I have reached maturity, my magic is enough to disable Ramuell until he can be bound again.”

  I remembered something then, something that I’d nearly forgotten in the revelations of the last day. “That first night, when I faced Ramuell at the overpass . . . I remember that I was half-conscious after I bolted him with nightfire. Somebody chased Ramuell from me, and then picked me up and carried me home.”

  Gabriel nodded his head in acknowledgment.

  “You also bathed me, and dressed me, and braided my hair, just like tonight,” I said thoughtfully. “That’s the part that I think I’m annoyed about.”

  He looked stunned for a moment, then let out a sharp bark of laughter. He seemed surprised that the noise had come out of his mouth. “I tell you that I am a monster, that I am kith and kin to the creature that wants to destroy you, and you are worried that I kept you from sleeping in the stench and filth of that overpass?”

  “See, when you put it that way, it sounds unreasonable. I’m just not sure how I feel about the fact that you performed such an intimate service when I don’t know you that well,” I said, and the air suddenly seemed charged with another kind of tension.

  I couldn’t read the expression on his face clearly. I was a little confused by his revelation, but there was something that I wanted him to know, and something that I had wanted to do from the moment I first saw him.

  I stood and approached him, stopping in front of where he sat in the chair. He looked up at me, his face revealed in the moonlight.

  He didn’t back away from me, but he watched me cautiously, unsure of what I would do. I wasn’t really sure what I would do, either.

  I stopped when there were just a few inches between us, close enough that I could feel the heat coming off his body. I laid my hands very gently on his cheeks, and looked into his starlit eyes. “But what I do know, what I can see, is that you are no monster.”

  He said nothing, but the muscles beneath my fingers jumped. His skin was hot, like he was running a temperature.

  “Why are you always so warm?” I wondered aloud.

  “Because angels, even fallen ones, are born of the sun, and we carry a tiny piece of it inside us. You do, too, but it is tempered by your humanity and your inexperience. When you come to the full maturity of your magic, you will not be as aware of the differences between us.”

  I had leaned closer to him without realizing it, mesmerized by his eyes and his voice. His breath was sweet, like cinnamon and cloves, and it brushed across my face, featherlight.

  My lips touched his, for an instant, and then I stepped away and smiled down at him. I wasn’t ready yet for whatever else might come, not ready to answer the tension I’d felt thrumming through his body. He watched me warily as I stepped away.

  I sat on the bed again, and we just watched each other for a few moments. I considered what Gabriel had said about being born of the sun, and it reminded me of my dream.

  The magic inside me surged up, warning me not to tell Gabriel. I wondered why my magic was so vociferously arguing against sharing the dreams with anyone else. It was almost like the power inside me was its own being.

  “Gabriel, do you remember when the nuvem attacked me?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “How could I possibly forget such a thing?”

  “Well, you asked me what happened when the nuvem was inside me.”

  “And you never answered me.”

  I gave him a dirty look. “I wasn’t the only one around here
keeping secrets.”

  He lifted his shoulder in acknowledgment and indicated that I should continue.

  “It was weird. I had a kind of vision, or a dream, about a girl named Evangeline,” I said. “It was like I was there, in her body. I saw her in love with a fallen angel, and she was pregnant.”

  “Evangeline,” Gabriel whispered, and he said it like her name was holy.

  “What about her? Is this something else I should know about before another demon shows up to kick my ass?”

  “She is the Lost Mother,” Gabriel said.

  “Refresh my memory?” I said, giving him an exasperated look. “Just because you’ve decided to let me into the club doesn’t mean I know all the secret passwords.”

  “She was Lucifer Morningstar’s bride,” Gabriel said. “Evangeline carried his children, the first he had successfully gotten upon a human woman.

  “But the Morningstar’s enemies stole her from him before the children were born, and he never found her again. It was as if her existence had never been,” Gabriel finished, and he looked troubled.

  “And the children?” I asked, and I thought I felt the fluttering of tiny wings inside my own body.

  “Also lost. How the Morningstar raged when she was taken from him,” Gabriel said. His eyes looked haunted. “The nuvem is just a minor demon. It should have tried to bind your magic or suffocate the life from you.”

  “Well, to be fair, I think it was probably doing that, too.”

  “I am disturbed by this vision of the Lost Mother,” Gabriel said.

  “As far as I’m concerned, it’s the least disturbing thing that’s happened to me all week.”

  “Tell me what you have seen, exactly, down to the last detail,” he demanded, and there was an urgency in his voice that hadn’t been there before.

  So I told him of Evangeline, and how she had loved Lucifer, and how she had escaped the house of her enemies and destroyed them, and given birth to her children.