by Cynthia Hand
I try to smile, but my heart’s breaking all over again. Because I know that I can’t stay here.
“What do you think I’m supposed to do now?” he asks.
I peer over my shoulder at the mountains. On earth the sun would be on the other side of them as it rises, to the east, but here the light is behind them. Always growing. It’s always sunrise in heaven, the way that hell is in perpetual sunset, never breaking into the full light of day, but there’s the promise of it, soon, maybe.
“Go into the light,” I say, and scoff at how cliché it sounds.
He snorts. “Get out of town.”
“No, seriously. You’re supposed to go that way.”
“And you know this because …?”
“I’ve been here before,” I say.
“Oh.” He didn’t know that. “So you can come and go? You could come back?”
“No, Tucker. I don’t think so. Not where you’re going. I don’t belong here.”
“Hmm.” He stares off at the lake again. “Well, I’m glad you found a way this time.”
“Yeah. Me too.”
He reaches for my hand, takes it in both of his, strokes my palm. “I love you, you know.”
“I love you, too,” I say. I would cry, but I don’t think I have a tear left in me. “I’m so sorry this happened. You had this beautiful life in front of you, and now it’s gone.” It’s good to be here with him, to see him safe and sound, but my heart hurts when I think of Wendy and his parents, the way his death is going to open a big black gaping hole in their lives, a wound that won’t ever fully heal.
I hurt when I think of spending my whole long life on earth without seeing him again.
He tilts my chin up. “Hey, it’s okay.”
“If I’d just left you alone …”
“Don’t do that,” he says. “Don’t regret us. I don’t. I won’t, ever.”
We sit there together like that for I don’t know how long, our hands tangled, my head against his shoulder. He tells me about all the things I missed this year, how he took up bull riding at the rodeo, for the adrenaline of it, he says, because he wanted something to make him feel alive when he was otherwise feeling pretty low.
“You’re lucky you didn’t break your neck,” I say.
He grins. Shrugs.
“Okay, not so lucky.”
“I missed you every minute. I wanted to drive out to California and grab you by that pesky hair of yours and drag you back to Wyoming and make you see sense. Then I thought, well, if I can’t bring her to me, I’ll go to her.”
“So you applied to UC Santa Clara.”
“Wendy told you about that?” he asks, surprised. I nod. “What a tattletale.” He sighs, thinking of her. Sobers. “You sure we can’t stay here forever?” he asks wistfully.
“No. You’re supposed to move on.”
“You too, I guess. Can’t hang out with a dead guy all your life.”
“I wish I could.”
“Prescott’s a good egg,” he says, his voice strained. “He’ll take care of you.”
I don’t know what to say. He stands up, brushes the nonexistent heavenly dirt off his pants out of sheer force of habit. “Well, I should let you go, I think. I’ve got a hike ahead of me.”
He pulls me into his arms. We’ve had some good-byes, Tucker and me, off and on again, but nothing like this. I cling to him, breathing in his smell, his cologne and horse sweat and hay, a hint of Oreo cookies, feeling the solidness of his arms, knowing this is the last time I’ll feel that, and I look up at him all desperate and heartbroken, and then we’re kissing. I hang on to him for dear life, kissing him like the world’s about to end, and I guess in a way it is. I kiss him like I probably should be embarrassed to do in a place like heaven, which feels like church, a place where God is looking right at you, but I don’t stop. I give him my whole heart through my lips. I love him. I open up my mind and show him how much I love him. He gives a startled, agonized laugh, and breaks away, breathing hard.
“I can’t leave you,” he says hoarsely.
“I can’t leave you either,” I say, shaking my head. “I can’t.”
“Then don’t,” he says, and grabs me behind the neck and kisses me again, and the world is tilting, tilting, and everything goes black.
22
THE PROPHET
I wake up in my room in Jackson. For a minute I consider whether or not it was all a bad dream. It feels like one. But then reality settles over me. I groan and turn onto my side, curling into the fetal position, pressing my hands to my forehead until it hurts, rocking, rocking, because I know that Tucker is gone.
“Ah, now,” says a voice. “Don’t cry.”
There’s an angel sitting on the edge of my bed. I can feel that he loves me. He’s thankful that I’m all right. Home. I can feel his relief that I’m safe.
I turn over to look at him. “Dad?”
It isn’t Dad. It’s a man with clean-cut auburn hair, eyes the color of the sky after the sun’s gone down, when the light has almost left it. He smiles.
“Michael couldn’t come this time, I’m afraid, but he sends his love,” he says. “I am Uriel.”
Uriel. I’ve seen him before. Somewhere in my brain I’m storing an image of him standing next to Dad, looking all fierce and regal, but I don’t know where that comes from. I sit up and am instantly flooded with weakness, a hollowness in my stomach, like I haven’t slept in days. Uriel nods sympathetically as I sink back onto the pillows.
“You’ve had quite the adventure, haven’t you?” he says. “You did well. You did what you were meant to do. And perhaps more than you were meant to do.”
But not well enough, I think, because Tucker’s dead. I’ll never see him again.
Uriel shakes his head. “The boy is fine. He’s more than fine, as a matter of fact. That’s why I’ve come to talk to you.”
It’s like my whole body goes limp with relief. “He’s alive?”
“He’s alive.”
“So I’m in trouble?” I ask. “Was I not supposed to save him?”
Uriel gives a little laugh. “You’re not in trouble. But what you did for him, the way you poured yourself into him, it saved him, yes, but it will also have changed him. You need to understand.”
“It changed him?” I repeat, dread uncurling in my gut. “How?”
He sighs. “In the old days we called a person with so much glory, so much of the power of the divine inside them, a prophet.”
“What does that mean, a prophet?”
“He will be slightly more than human. The prophets of the past have sometimes been able to heal the sick, or conjure fire or storms, or see visions of the future. It affects the little things: their sensitivity to the part of the world humans don’t usually see, their awareness of good and evil, their strength in both body and spirit. Sometimes it also affects their longevity.”
I take a minute to digest this information. And wonder what the word longevity actually means in this case.
Uriel’s expression is almost mischievous. “You should keep an eye on him. Make sure he doesn’t get into trouble.”
I stare at him. Try to swallow. “What about Asael? Is he going to come after us?”
“You’ve dealt with Asael quite efficiently,” he says, a touch of pride in his voice.
“Did I … kill him?”
“No,” he answers. “Asael’s returned to heaven. His wings are white once more.”
“I don’t understand.”
“A glory sword is not just a weapon. It is the power of God, and you thrust it right into the center of Asael’s being. You filled him with light, vanquished him with truth.”
Like maybe I am that Buffy-type chick.
“All I did was use a sword one time,” I say, embarrassed at the thought.
“Oh, is that all?” he asks lightly, like he’s teasing me, but I can’t be sure.
“What about the other Watchers? Will they come?”
“When Asa
el fell, leadership of the Watchers reverted back to Samjeeza. And for some mysterious reason, I don’t believe he’s going to attack you.”
That worked out well, I think. It all seems too good to be true, if I’m being honest. I’m supposed to keep my eye on Tucker. I’m safe from the Black Wings. I’m not, for once, in trouble. I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop any time now.
“You’re not safe from the Black Wings,” Uriel says a bit sadly. “The Watchers are only a small faction of the fallen, who will still be seeking out the Nephilim and pursuing their agenda all over the world.”
“And what is their agenda, exactly?”
“To win the war, my dear. We will need to be vigilant in our work against them, all of us, from the mightiest of the angels to the smallest of the angel-bloods. There is much work to be done. Many battles.”
“Is that what my purpose is? To fight?” I ask. I’m the daughter of the Smiter, after all.
Uriel sits back. “Is that what you think it is?”
That’s my mom’s best trick: answer a question with a question. Which, frankly, I’m getting sick of. I think about the sizzling noise the glory sword made when I pushed it into Asael’s chest, his scream of anguish, his gray face. Revulsion ripples through me. “No. I don’t think I’m a fighter. But what am I, then? What is my purpose?” I lift my eyes to Uriel’s, and he gives me a sympathetic, close-lipped smile. I sigh. “Oh, that’s right. You’re not going to tell me.”
“I can’t tell you,” he says, which startles me. “You are the only one who can decide what your purpose is, Clara.”
I decide? Now he says I decide? Hello, news flash. “But the visions—”
“The visions show you forks in the path along becoming who you are meant to be.”
I shake my head. “Wait. So which turn in the road am I supposed to go down? I mean, which is it: I decide or it’s meant to be?”
“Both,” he says.
Okay, so that’s an infuriating answer.
“What is your purpose, Clara?” Uriel asks me gently.
Christian, I think immediately. In every vision, there’s Christian. He’s present, anyway, at every fork in my path. But does that mean he is my purpose? Can a person be a purpose?
My purpose is you, my mother told me once. But what did she mean by that? Was she being literal? Or was she, too, talking about some kind of decision?
Every answer leads me to five more questions. It’s not fair.
“I don’t know,” I admit. “I want to be good. I want to do good things. I want to help.”
He nods. “Then you must decide what will allow you to do that.”
“Will there be more visions?” Somehow, even before he answers, I think the answer is yes.
“Do you think there will be more forks in your path?” Uriel asks, another question for a question. He has familiar eyes, knowing, blue with tiny lights in them.
I know those eyes.
“Are you …?” I start to sit up again, to get a better look at his face.
His hands gently push my shoulders back down. He draws the covers up over me.
“No,” he says. “Sleep, my dear. That’s enough for now. You need to rest.”
And before I can argue, before I can ask him who he really is, he puts his hand at my temple, and I fade back into a deep and dreamless sleep.
I open my eyes to Christian’s face hovering over mine.
“Hi,” he whispers. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine.” I look around for Uriel, but there’s no sign of him. Christian gives me room to sit up. I put my hand to my forehead. I feel better now, more like myself. Or maybe it’s only because Christian’s here. “How long have I been out?”
“Oh, you know. A few days,” he answers cheerfully. “Like, three.”
Whoa, three days? “Well, a girl has to get her beauty sleep,” I say.
He laughs. “I’m kidding. Maybe like eight hours. Not that long.”
“Where’s Tucker?” I ask immediately. “Is he okay?”
There’s a shade of loss in his smile, a resignation that makes something twist inside me.
“He’s fine. He’s downstairs in your mom’s room. He’s been asking about you, too.”
“What happened? At the lake, I mean.”
“You healed him,” he says. “You healed him until you passed out, until you stopped breathing yourself for a few seconds, and then Jeffrey thumped him on the chest a few times, gave him a couple of puffs that I’m sure neither of them will ever want to talk about again, and he came back. He coughed out about a gallon of lake water, but he came back.” Christian looks me in the eyes. “You saved him.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah,” he says with a smirk. “You’re a little bit of a show-off. First you get us out of hell. And then you defeat like the biggest, baddest Watcher on the books, and then you go on a high-speed, very high-altitude chase, and then you resuscitate the dead. Are you done? Because seriously, I don’t know if I can take any more excitement.”
I look away, pressing my lips together to keep from smiling. “I think so.” Then I tell him about Uriel’s visit.
“Why Uriel?” Christian asks when I’m done. “Why send him?”
“I think he’s my grandfather,” I say slowly. “He didn’t tell me that, but I kind of got the impression that he thought of me as family.”
“Your mom’s father?”
“Yeah.” I relate what Uriel said about Asael and Samjeeza, and Christian looks even more relieved, and oddly troubled, like this is not all good news to him. “So maybe we can go back to Stanford?” I say. “We’re free to live a normal life for a while. No angel-blood protection program. Good, right?”
He bites his lip. “I’m going to take some time off from school, I think.”
“Why?” I ask.
He brushes his hair out of his eyes and looks a bit sheepish. “I don’t think that I went to Stanford for the right reasons. I don’t know if I belong there.”
He doesn’t want to be around me is what I get from that answer.
“So you’re taking off.”
“I might travel around with Angela and Web, find a place to lie low for a while. Angela needs some rest.”
“How come you never told me that she’s your sister?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I was still getting used to the idea. I read in her journal about her father being a collector, she called him, and I connected the dots. But it didn’t feel real until—”
Until he saw Asael face-to-face.
“So Web’s your nephew,” I say.
He nods, happy at the thought. “Yeah. He is.”
They’re a family. I feel a flash of something like envy mixed with loss. There won’t be any more days with Christian and Web and me. But it’s for the best. I imagine them walking along the sand on some deserted beach, like in that place Dad liked to train us, Web squishing the sand between his chubby fingers, laughing at the surf.
“I’ve always liked the beach,” he says.
“When?” I ask.
“Nowish. I only wanted to say good-bye.” He sees my stricken expression. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep in touch.”
He gets up. He smiles like everything’s peachy, but I can feel that this is killing him. Leaving me goes against all his instincts, all that his heart is telling him.
“I meant it, what I said in hell,” he says. “You’re my glory sword, you know that? My truth.”
“Christian—”
He holds his hand up like, Let me finish. “I saw the look on your face when he died. I saw what was in your heart, and it’s real. All this time I kept telling myself that it was a crush, and you’d get over it, and then you’d be free to be with me. But it’s not a passing phase, or this stubborn refusal to accept what you think is your destiny. You’re not going to get over it. I know that. You belong with him now.” He swallows. “I was wrong to kiss you that day in the cemetery.”
There are tears in my eyes. I wip
e at them. “You’re my best friend,” I whisper.
He looks down. “You know I’m always going to want to be more than that.”
“I know.”
An awkward silence stretches between us. Then he shrugs and gives me his devil-may-care smile, rakes his hand through his wavy brown hair. “Well, you know, that Tucker guy’s not going to be around forever. Maybe I’ll catch up with you in a hundred years or so.”
My breath hitches. Does he mean it, or is he being flippant to save face? I swing my legs over the side of the bed and stand up, carefully, in case I’m still weak. But I feel surprisingly fine—refreshed, even. I look at him solemnly. I think about the word longevity. “Don’t wait around for me, Christian. That’s not what I want. I can’t promise you—”
He smirks. “I won’t call it waiting,” he says. “I have to go.”
“Wait. Don’t go yet.”
He stops, something in his expression that doesn’t quite dare to be hope. I cross the room to him and pull up his shirt. For a second he looks totally confused, but then I put my hand on the long gash in his side, which still hasn’t healed. I clear my head as much as I can, then call the glory to my fingers. And it comes.
He gives a pained gasp as his flesh knits itself back together. When I take my hand away, the cut is completely healed, but there’s a long silver scar stretching down his ribs.
“Sorry about the scar,” I say.
“Wow,” he laughs. “That was just like E.T. Thank you.”
“It’s the least I could do.”
He moves to my window and pulls it open, bends to step out onto the eaves. Then he turns to me, the wind ruffling his hair, his green eyes full of sorrow and light, and he lifts his hand in a wave. I lift mine.
See you later, he says in my mind, and summons his wings, and flies.
I take a bath. I scrub every part of my body, shave my legs, work the dirt from under my fingernails, until finally, at long last, I feel clean. Then I sit at my desk in my bathrobe and tackle the arduous task of combing the tangles out of my hair. I smooth moisturizer over my face, put on some lip balm on a hopeful whim. In my closet I stand for a while staring at a yellow sundress my mom once gave me for my birthday, which I wore the night Tucker first took me to Bubba’s, which was, in a backward way, our first date. I put it on, along with some strappy white sandals, and go downstairs.