by S. L. Naeole
I won’t show you that. I won’t show you your death. No one will.
My jaw locked and my eyelids lowered as I felt the anger in me begin to rise. “What’s on that ring is important to me. I need to see what’s on it.”
“No you don’t,” Robert insisted.
“Yes I do. God, why can’t you see that this is my life? Everyone keeps telling me what I am, what I’m supposed to be, what I’m supposed to do, when and how I’m supposed to die. I’m through with it. I’m taking control of my life. Now show me what the hell is on that ring.”
Lark shook her head and then evaporated into a cloud of white.
“Coward!” I shouted.
“Why can’t she see what’s on that ring?” Stacy demanded to know.
“Yeah,” Graham agreed.
“Because she’ll try and change what happens and she can’t do that anymore.”
“Why? Why can’t I?”
Robert looked at me and his eyes watered as he answered, “Because it’s your fate. It’s the same thing I see when I look at you. I told you, I’ve seen your death. I’ve seen it and now I know that I’m not the only one. This isn’t something you can change, Grace.”
“The hell it’s not,” Graham barked. “We just gotta know the time and the place and we’ll avoid it.”
Robert laughed. “You really think it’s that simple?”
“Yeah, I think it’s that simple. If she’s supposed to die on a Tuesday in a mall, we stay at home. What’s so difficult about that? You know when it’s supposed to happen so why not?”
“Because I’m Death, and I am unavoidable,” Robert said simply. “Grace’s death, the one she’s meant to have, will happen no matter where she’s at when it’s the right time. You can’t run from that. You can’t hide from that. No one can. And trying to will only make things worse for everyone around.”
I began to walk away from them, their words sounding more and more like the death sentence I’d rid myself of just days ago. I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to hear them confirm that I was going to die.
“Grace, wait.” Stacy fell into step with me, her footsteps quiet while mine dragged like bricks against the pavement.
“I don’t care what’s on that ring, Stacy,” I told her fiercely. “I don’t care what anyone has to say about it; I’m not dying. Not by their rules, anyway.”
“Of course you won’t. You’re too stubborn to do things the way they’re supposed to be done,” she said casually.
I stopped walking and turned to look at her. “God, Stacy, do you realize what’s going on? Robert and Lark’s grandfather has been trying to kill me.”
“A lot of freaking angels are trying to kill you, Grace. A lot of them.”
“Yeah, but none of them succeeded. Someone has always been in the way. My mother, Lem, Robert, Mrs. Deovolente… And it was always someone else, someone expendable, someone to doubt that did it. No one would ever doubt him; no one would ever suspect him-”
I looked over at Robert and my eyes grew wide with a revelation. “He could come and go as he pleased and no one would think anything of it. He could leave notes and no one would think anything of it. He could enter a family’s sanctuary with someone else and leave them there to try and escape and no one would suspect anything.
“Did Lem have a call, Robert?”
“Yes. Yes, he did,” Robert answered, taking quick steps towards me.
“Tell me what it is.”
“Grace, you know-”
“Tell me what his call is. This isn’t the time to be anal about the rules. Right now, there are no rules. What is Lem’s call?”
Robert stopped in front of me, the struggle he had playing out in the tiny twitches in his lips, his eyes, even the curves of his nose.
“He’s makes people fall in love.”
“How?”
“By making them see people the way they need to. Why does any of this matter, Grace?”
I nodded, moving towards him and taking a hold of his face. “Because Lem wanted me to love him, and he could have done that by making me think that he was you, but he didn’t. If I’d known that, I would have never believed that he was the one who’d hurt Stacy.
“Your grandfather knew that you wouldn’t tell me. He knew; that’s why he could blame everything on Lem. He knew I’d be stupid enough to believe him.”
“You weren’t stupid to believe it, Grace. We all believed it.”
Robert’s voice was clear and echoed in the cement garage as he spoke, but from behind me I could hear something, a sound that didn’t fit. I looked at Stacy and saw that she heard it, too. My hands dropped from Robert’s face and I turned, instinctively shoving him out of the way as a blur of red and white charged towards us.
Stacy’s snarl and Robert’s grunt didn’t mask the whirring sound that preceded the crashing of bodies. I saw white eyes with red pinpoints before I felt myself being slammed onto the ground, hot and cold breaths covering my face.
Bright red hair glowed almost orange in the yellow light, and I caught a glimpse of a scarred face before hands that felt more like claws began to scratch at my neck and my abdomen. My hands flew up to protect me while my legs kicked reflexively.
Stacy flashed by, her hands scratching at my attacker whose breath came out in an ascending wail as she threw the person off of me. “Get up,” she said before turning her back to me.
I jumped to my feet somewhat unsteadily and felt more hands grab at me. I spun around, my hands clenching into balls to attack and yelped when I saw Robert’s face. “Come on,” he said before pulling me away.
“Wait! What about Graham!” I shouted, turning my head around and looking for him and finding nothing.
“Either get her the hell out of here or help me out,” Stacy complained loudly from a dark corner before rolling towards us, a ball of white, red, and black. I jumped back as a claw lashed out at my feet.
Robert let me go and reached down with a strong hand, taking the red-haired assailant by its head and rising, floating above the ground. I saw that my attacker was a woman with a mouth that was so riddled with scars it looked like she’d been doused in wax and left to harden. Her teeth weren’t smooth and straight; they weren’t even fangs. They were jagged, like a saw, with no breaks between them. It was like one long tooth on her top and bottom jaw.
She screamed an awful, grating sound that felt like scratches in my head. “Let me go black one!”
“Not a chance. Who sent you?”
“No one sent me. I only know that she has to die!”
“Why are you asking it questions? Kill it!” Stacy spat.
“Demon,” my attacker spat back.
“Demon? I’ll show you demon, you period-headed b-”
“Stacy, that’s enough,” Robert said calmly.
“No it isn’t! She just attacked Grace! Either kill it or let me eat it.”
The rumbling sound of an engine, coupled with the squeal of tires silenced the argument as Graham arrived, his car’s newly rebuilt engine roaring hungrily. “Get in,” he ordered to me.
“Go,” Robert agreed, with Stacy nodding beside him.
I jumped into the passenger seat and held on as he tore through the garage, the scene between the angel, the erlking, and the…I don’t know what, faded behind us. Graham turned the wheel, the car moving on to the lower floors, repeating this until we were out onto the street.
I didn’t know what time it was. The sky was still bright, but traffic was scarce. I didn’t even know what day it was. I looked at Graham, his eyes almost glued open in a shocked expression, and I frowned.
“I don’t know where we’re going,” he mumbled.
“Just drive,” I said before turning to look back out of the window. “It doesn’t matter where we go. This is gonna follow us.”
“So it really wasn’t Lem…it really is Lark’s grandfather that’s trying to kill you.”
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “Who knows; it might be all of
them.”
“I should have taken care of that red-headed jerkface when I had the chance.”
“What the hell do you think you would’ve been able to do, Graham? You’re not an angel. You’re not even one of those things that get made when you’re turned without permission. You don’t have the kind of strength or skill that you need to fight an angel.
“But even if you did, he’s one of the first angels to exist. How are you supposed to get rid of one of the most powerful and important angels in not only our world but theirs?”
The car hurtled to a stop, tired screeching behind us and horns honking as angry drivers tried to avoid hitting us. “Dammit, Grace, I already feel inadequate and useless. I don’t need you reminding me that I’m not as good at anything that you are, or that Robert is, or, hell, even Stacy is. I’m not fast, I’m not strong, I’m not even smart.”
“You’re smart, Graham!”
He slammed his hands against the steering wheel angrily. “Don’t patronize me. Don’t tell me I’m something when you know I’m not. You didn’t like it when I did it to you.”
I sighed and reached over, covering his tightened grip on the wheel with my own hand. “I think you’re one of the smartest people I know. You don’t have to know how to complete complex math sequences of speak French fluently to be intelligent. Lark wouldn’t have fallen in love with an idiot.”
I watched him, watched his head lower, his shoulders sink, and then felt his forehead touch the back of my hand. “What if she made a mistake?”
“She didn’t make a mistake. She knew that you were the one for her the moment she met you. It’s one of those things that are a given, like lightning in a storm or…or cheese in a burger.”
“Heh,” he snorted. “Cheese in a burger.”
“It’s true. I knew when we first met that I would love you for the rest of my life. How could anyone not love you? You’re cute, you’re funny, you’re heroic. Loving you is the most expected thing in the world.”
“So’s loving you, you know.”
I shook my head. “It defies logic to love me. Look at everything that’s happened because of me. Look at what I do at the first sign of trouble. People get hurt, people die, and I run.”
“You’re not running, Grace. You’re trying to survive. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“There’s everything wrong with it if surviving means someone else doesn’t. We need to go back. We need to go back and help Stacy and Robert.”
“We don’t need to go back. They can take care of themselves.”
“Yes, and so can I,” I insisted.
“Not yet you can’t. Lark told me that you’re changing, your body is remembering what it’s supposed to be, but your mind is still human and you-”
He was cut off when the car began to rock, shifting and swaying from side to side. We both turned to look out of our windows and he bit out a curse while I inhaled as we both realized that we weren’t on the street anymore.
I rolled down the window and stuck my head outside, gasping when I saw the creature that held us suspended in the air. It looked like an angel on steroids, muscles rippling and bulging beneath tight skin. There were no veins pulsing anywhere—of course there weren’t—but you could see sheer power almost vibrating through him, like heat shimmering over hot asphalt. He looked down at me and smiled evilly, the stoniness of his face almost cracking, the fascinatingly terrifying features looking so much like a gargoyle that I was certain that’s what he was.
And then he let go.
A voice shouted, “Grace!”
I felt myself being yanked, my head slamming into something soft and yielding before the roof caved in and the bottom of the car gave out.
It was almost comforting, the sound of crunching metal and shattering glass. I’d heard it so many times by now that it was almost like an old friend.
But this time, I knew something that the car did not, something that was now instinctual, a part of me. This time, I could protect myself. I grabbed onto Graham and wrapped my arms around him. His hands clasped around my back and together we curled into a ball as the doors, the roof, the front and the rear of the car curled around us like some kind of metal flower, the petals growing unbelievably hot from the friction.
Through the screeching and the scraping, I could hear the screams of people who watched, stunned, at what was happening. I could hear their thoughts, the incredulousness, the shock. What they were seeing happening in front of them couldn’t be real. They did not just see some winged giant pick up a car and then drop it from over a hundred feet. Things like that didn’t happen in Ohio.
“Are we dead?” Graham whispered.
“No,” I answered.
“We should be though, right?”
“I don’t know. God, I wish that thing would leave already! I don’t know how much longer I can do this.”
The pounding on the car stopped, the screams turning into exclamations of awe. “He’s gone.”
“Who’s gone?”
“The thing who did this.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because everyone outside said so,” I answered matter-of-factly.
“You can hear what the people outside are saying?”
“And thinking. He’s gone. Hold on.”
I loosened my grip of him, my arms only able to move millimeters away. Slowly, I pushed against the pressure on my back.
“Whoa,” Graham murmured as he heard the creaking of folded steel. “Are you doing that?”
“Shh. I need to concentrate.”
“Why? This isn’t origami!”
My fingers touched the still warm metal, feeling it, gauging it. And then, like I’d always known I could do it, I shoved roughly against it. An explosion of sound and sparks scattered around and onto us. From outside, the screams and the cries for help grew louder, more frantic. I could hear sirens.
“Whatever the hell it is you’re doing, you’d better do it faster; the police can’t see you alive,” Graham warned.
I shoved against the steel once more, this time cracks of light cutting through. One last push and a seam split in the metal, creating an opening that was just big enough for Graham to squeeze through.
“Uh-uh. You’re going,” he said, as if my thoughts had been spoken out loud.
“No, you first,” I insisted. “I don’t know if the car will collapse on you if I escape.”
“I’m indestructible, remember? You’re supposed to be dead. Dead people can’t be found alive in cars. Go. Get out of here and run, Grace. Please.”
In the little light we had, I saw the desperate expression on his face and my heart burned. “I can’t leave you.”
“You’re not. Trust me; I’ll be okay. Go.”
I hugged him, kissed his cheek, and then climbed out of the hole I’d created. In the dull light of the street, I could see people standing in a crowded circle around the car. They gasped when they saw me, and backed away when I jumped down and ran through them, not knowing where I was going but only that I was moving very fast.
I looked over my shoulder and saw the crowd converge on the car, shouts of encouragement and cheers following shortly afterward.
The flashes of red, blue, and white faded as the police arrived and I left. I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know where I was going. I only knew that I’d just abandoned my best friend.
I stopped moving.
“What am I doing? I can’t let Graham face this alone.”
I turned around and started to run back before I skidded to a halt, a wall appearing in front of me.
“Robert!”
Strong arms, strong, shaking arms grabbed a hold of me and clutched me tightly to a chest that would have been slammed from the inside if it could. “Come on, Graham will be fine. We need to get you out of the open.”
He scooped me up and leapt, my body once more rising into the sky only this time I wasn’t going to drop down. I wrapped my fingers around his neck and tr
ied to reassure myself that what he’d said was true; that Graham would be fine.
“Trust me, Grace. He will be fine.”
“Who was that? What was that?” I asked, my mind bringing up the image of the gigantic angel.
“That was Bane. He’s a throne.”
“A throne? But aren’t those the ones that give out the punishments?”
“Yes,” he answered gravely. “Their call is to follow the orders of the seraphim.”
“So one of the seraphim is trying to kill me now?” I asked almost hysterically.
“The angels of the first circle are Seraphim. They are everything.”
“And that…thing at the hospital; what was it?”
“Not a what, a who.”
“Okay, who was it?”
“That was Lamia. Think of her as a younger, more human, more alive Miki.”
“Alive… So Miki really is gone.”
Robert’s head fell once. “Yes.”
“Then that means that those…those vampires that killed Mrs. Lorimax came from her, from Lamia.”
He grew quiet and cold. I dared to ask why, and I dared him to answer.
“She’s infected dozens of people, created a small army to come after you.”
“But why? Did your grandfather do this, too?”
“No. This is something she did on her own.”
“Why?”
“Because she knows what’s happening, Grace. I told you, chaos is starting to take over. Every single creature that exists on this earth that doesn’t have the freedom to live the way they want to, that have had to hide who and what they are because humans have always been deemed more important know what’s going on. They know about you.”
“How? How do they know about me? How can they know about me when I don’t even know?”
We started to descend, and our feet touched the ground before he answered.
“They found out because they sense you. They sense you in a way that they never sensed me.”
His words were simple and yet…and yet they were the most complicated and most earth shattering words I’d ever heard because that meant only one thing.
Everything that Gabriel, Lem, Michael, Uriel, and even Raphael said was true. Robert wasn’t Death.