by S. L. Naeole
I was.
FOR SHADOW
The small house we stood in front of was charming, perfect. It had a dark red front door, cream siding, and white shutters around white trimmed windows. It was surrounded by a green lawn that was immaculately kept, and a white, picket fence that blended in with the rest of the idyllic scenery that surrounded it.
This was what I imagined heaven to look like.
“This is Ambrose’s home,” Robert informed me before turning the knob and opening the red door.
“Ambrose? Dr. Bro?”
“Yes.”
“This is where you were going to take me before Lem kidnapped me.”
“Yes.”
“Why Ambrose?”
Robert closed the door behind us as we entered a parlor that was bright and cheerful, the walls glistening with gold and cream striped wallpaper. “Because he knows his kind, and his wife knows everything else.”
“I’ve never met his wife, although I guess I am curious to know what kind of woman marries an erlking,” I said, looking around. The furniture that filled the room was antique looking, with floral fabric covering the seats and dark, polished wood curving and bowing to make graceful arches where arms would rest and backs would lean. “I’m going to guess she did the decorating.”
“What makes you say that?”
I pointed to the furniture. “Because Dr. Bro wouldn’t choose sofas like that.”
He laughed and then led me into the dining room and finally what I assumed was the family room. This room was cozy, with large tan sofas and ottomans spread around. There was no television, no stereo, but a piano did sit in a far corner while a harp stood beside it.
“There you are. I was wondering when you’d get here. I hope everything went alright with your visit. Are you hungry? I just made a nice pot of chicken and dumplings from scratch.”
My lower jaw hung down in shock. The woman who stood before us wore a beaming smile in her plump face, her bright eyes twinkling with an obvious joy at seeing me.
“Oh you poor thing, you’ve got holes in your clothes. Well, it’s a good thing we’ve got your bag of things upstairs. Come on; let’s get you changed before you eat supper.”
I stuttered looking at her, my words wanting to come out, but unable to.
Robert did his best to make up for it. “Thank you, Vanessa, for your hospitality.”
“Oh please,” she said with a wave of her hand. “I’ve known about Grace for years. She’s always been a good girl, just like her mother; what kind of registrar would I be if I didn’t want to help her?”
“You-I…I…” I watched as she headed towards a small staircase, Robert picking me up since my feet weren’t moving on their own.
“Stacy told me that you would react this way,” Robert chuckled. “I didn’t believe her. I owe her about a million dollars now.”
“She knew? Wait, of course she knew; she’s been staying here. Did Graham know?”
Robert nodded as he reached the top of the landing, setting me down and taking my hand, half-dragging me down the hallway. “He only found out after you were taken. He took it about the same way you did.”
“She’s Mrs. Mayhew! She’s the registrar! What is she doing being married to an erlking?” I hissed.
“You can tell her,” Mrs. Mayhew said, stopping in front of the last door at the end of the hallway. “I have no secrets. Avi’s ring looks lovely on you, by the way.”
I choked.
“Grace, Vanessa isn’t just the registrar. She’s also your mother’s wing-bringer.”
“No she isn’t.”
“Oh yes I am,” the woman said stubbornly while opening the door.
I walked into the small room that held only a bed, a chest of drawers, and a nightstand. “I don’t believe you,” I told her as I sat on the edge of the bed, the coverlet downy and soft beneath me.
“Believe it or not, I knew your mother before she became what she was. I saw her birth.”
“Well I saw her death,” I said acidly.
“And that is how it was supposed to be.”
“Wha-”
She came forward towards me and touched my hand, sitting beside me. This alone was enough to quiet me, because her smile faded as she did so. “You know what your mother was. You know who she was. And so you know how important she was to all of our worlds.
“When she was born, she came out of the light, like night falling out of a star. She wasn’t a child when she appeared; she was a grown woman with awareness of everything: every second of history, ever word ever spoken, every language ever given to the world’s people was hers.
“I was there, with my two young children, searching for roots to eat. We watched her, heard her speak. It was like a gift that could not be taken away, it traveled so deeply into my head and my heart.
“And then Avi looked at me. She saw me, saw my children, and with the most beautiful smile I’d ever seen, she came to me and my children. She opened her arms to them and my children went with no fear.”
She paused, her breath fumbling in her throat. She touched her eyes with shaky hands and then exhaled. There was a struggle within her, I could feel it, sense it, but I didn’t want to search her thoughts to try to understand what it was. She was going to explain it when she was ready; I had to be patient. Her head lifted and she looked at me curiously. I blushed when I realized that while I hadn’t gone searching through her thoughts, I didn’t exactly stop from sharing mine.
She sighed. “It’s alright. I appreciate your patience, but I will finish. It’s just…been a while since I spoke about this.”
Her lower lip jutted forward and her face expression grew more pinched as she continued. “In her arms my babies, my sweet, innocent children died; my son was only three…my daughter, one. Your mother seemed stunned at what had happened, unaware that she could kill so easily, or that her first deaths would be of those too young to be guilty of any sin.
“She apologized, begged me for my forgiveness but I wasn’t about to forgive her for taking what mattered the most in this world from me. I attacked her. I tried to kill her like one could kill an animal. When that failed, I tried to kill myself now that I knew that death was possible for us.
“And then she began to scream. She was looking at me, looking at the pain in my heart and my eagerness to die alongside my children and she began to change. She grew wings, like a bird hatching from an egg, and they were black as my heart was for her right then.
“Four others appeared like storm clouds at the sound of her screams. They surrounded her, protected her like brothers, or fathers would. The one named Gabriel told me that my children’s deaths were a blessing for me. He was cruel with his words, telling me to be grateful that my children were gone. I spat in his face. I cursed him with the same fate he would wish upon his worst enemy.
“But then the one named Raphael approached me and said that because of my loss, because of this noble sacrifice that I had been forced to make, I would be rewarded handsomely. And what was my reward? Eternal life; forever spent mourning my children, as if never dying, never being able to join them was a gift.”
She sighed, her sadness weighing the bed down even more than her body did. “I hated them; I hated them all. But I hated Avi more than the others. I begged her to kill me like she did my children. I begged her to end my suffering, to let me leave this world so that I did not have to endure it without my children, but she refused. So I tried to do it myself.
“I slit my throat in the same way one would an animal. I consumed the poison the farmers would leave to kill the rats. I leapt from cliffs to drown in rivers below like the sickly sheep would do. I set myself on fire in front of her, because she would not do allow me my one wish. She was Death, and so she would be my end. And do you know what she told me? She said that death isn’t always the end. She told me that one day, death would be my-”
“Savior,” I finished for her. “She said the same thing to me before she died.”
She nodded. “She was right. My children died quickly, peacefully. In six months, my village was overrun with a plague. I watched children suffer and mothers grieve. In a dozen years, I watched fires destroy what was left. Everything that had ever existed in my world was gone.
“Centuries passed and I learned, finally, the meaning of time as around me things changed. I watched angels and mankind fight for power. I watched the earth become swallowed by water. I watched disease and war and religion and evil wash over the earth and destroy civilization over and over again.
“But I survived. I survived everything and I kept record of it all. It is what I’m meant to do. I keep the names of those who would have been forgotten from being lost. If not for that, you would have never heard about my son Andru or my daughter Alle. Through me, they survive. Through me, their existence will never be doubted.
“That is how it’s supposed to be; just as it is with you. The harshness of this world is what strengthens us; it’s what makes us who we are. I was nothing but the wife of a poor butcher before your mother arrived. It was a life I would have accepted because I didn’t know any better.
“You were also headed for an ordinary existence, a life that you would have accepted because you didn’t know anything different. But those lives weren’t for us. My life, the one I live with Ambrose, where every child that passes through the doors at Heath is mine—that’s what I’m meant for.”
“And me? What am I meant for?”
Her effervescent smile returned at my question. “You’re meant to have the one thing your mother could not, being what she was.”
“And that is…”
“Life.”
“She had a life. She had a life with me and my dad. And that completely goes against the whole me-dying part.”
“You don’t get it right now, but you will. In the end, you will. Your mother was right.”
She stood up and took the four steps between the bed and the door. She looked at Robert and then turned to look back at me. “Come down when you’re ready for dinner. Don’t worry about any of those toilet angels coming to bother you here. They know better.”
“Toilet angels?” I asked, confused.
“Well, they like to call themselves thrones, but after several thousand years of knowing them, the only thrones they resemble are the ones you sit on after a bad bowl of chili. Speaking of which, we’re having that for dinner tomorrow.” She left, and I grunted in response.
My eyes moved to focus on Robert, whose shoulders were bouncing up and down with muted laughter. “Why won’t the thrones bother us here?”
“Because when Vanessa was turned, that’s when our history’s human documentation started. She took record of every angel, every human, every creature ever created. You know how EPs have their family tree that follows them everywhere?”
He waited for my nod. “She is our family tree. She’s a living record showing the roots, the branches, the leaves and the fruit. Without her, we are orphans to our own history.”
While I processed this, he came to sit beside me on the bed. “I trust Vanessa to keep you safe; at least for now. When my grandfather decides to stop using others to attack you and come for you himself, you won’t be safe anywhere; and no one will be safe with you.”
I already knew that. I didn’t need him or anyone else telling me that I was a threat to everyone I ever cared about…and now to everyone, period.
“We’ll stay the night. I don’t want to be here longer than that; Mrs. Mayhew and Dr. Bro don’t need me destroying the life they’ve built together.”
“Grace, they’re helping because they want to.”
“I know, but helping me, being friends with me, caring for me…loving me means putting everyone in danger. I don’t know what your grandfather wants with me. I don’t know if he wants me dead or alive, but I know he doesn’t care who he has to get rid of to get to me.
“That’s why I’m not running away from this. I just want some time with the people I love…I want one more day.”
“Grace-”
I pressed my fingers against his lips and shook my head. I’m not giving up. I promise you, I have more to live for now than I ever did before, and I’m not going to lose any of that for anyone. I just want one day without worrying about it, without thinking about it. I want to be around my friends, my family, and you.
I want to laugh and sing. I want to dance and eat. I want to smile and kiss you until I can’t breathe.
Robert grabbed my wrist and pulled my hand down. His eyes grew wet, hot, and he leaned in, his intent clear and his motives obvious. And I wanted everything he was going to give, everything he was going to share.
PRIVATE UNIVERSE
His kiss was sweet and soft initially. The warmth in his lips was soothing, like the morning sun after a storm. I let it wash through me, erasing so much of the hard edge that I had felt forming around me from the moment I’d learned about what I was.
I didn’t close my eyes. I wasn’t going to close my eyes anymore, I realized. Looking at him was like a revelation, a cure for every ache. He smiled at my thoughts and touched my face with the back of his hand, grazing my skin so gently I had to question whether his hand was even there. Or, maybe it was the other way around; maybe I wasn’t really there, just the ghost of me.
With his free hand, he waved at the door, which closed obediently. His fingers trailed down my throat and skimmed my pulse before he let his lips tattoo a warm line from my jaw to my shoulder. I couldn’t help but smile at that one simple act.
“I think it’s time we got rid of this shirt,” he said, looking at the singed and stained garment that covered me. I looked down and felt my cheeks redden when I realized just how badly the attack in the car had damaged my clothes.
There were holes of varying sizes on my chest revealing the shirt that lay beneath it. Parts of the shirt were charred beneath my armpit. I could feel the hard edges on my back and after inhaling, I could smell the burned cotton. “I didn’t realize the car had gotten that hot. I’m surprised I didn’t get burned, too.”
Robert said nothing at that, his hands finding the edge of my shirt and lifting, my arms rising to allow him to lift the top over my head. Beneath it was a simple white tank top, the same thing I’d been wearing to bed since I could remember. He looked at it and smiled.
“When we’ve spent a hundred years together, I will still find this to be the most charming thing I’ve ever seen.”
“And what happens after a hundred and one years?” I asked lazily as his fingertips ran up and down my bare arms, sending miniature waves of sensation pulsing to my stomach.
“You’ll wear my shirts for the next hundred. And then nothing at all.”
“Nothing?” I gulped.
He lowered his head and licked the inside of my arm and the crease of my elbow. “Yes. I figure it’ll take at least three centuries before you feel comfortable enough to sleep naked with me.”
“That’s an optimistic number,” I said, half-laughing, half-gasping.
“It is, isn’t it? But I have faith in you, Grace.”
He stopped doing what he was doing to straighten, taking my face in his hands and holding me still, his eyes clear and sparkling, his voice steady and firm. “I have faith in you, Grace. I don’t know if I’ve ever told you that. I always thought it, I always felt it, but I want you to hear it.
“I have faith in you. I believe in you.”
I blinked back tears that had no source; they just appeared. His face blurred, his features warping and expanding in exaggerated shapes, and I hiccupped at the effect. How could he do that to me? How could he just say something as simple has that he had faith in me and turn me into a fountain?
And I knew why.
“No one’s ever said that to me before. Ever.”
His mouth made a funny curl in my vision as he smiled, his thumb brushing against my eyes to wipe away the tears that clung desperately to my lashes. “That’s because we’re all i
diots, every last one of us. Having faith in you is the most natural thing in the world.”
I shook my head in disagreement. “No. No, loving you is the most natural thing in the world.”
He chuckled, taking a stray strip of my hair between his fingers and rubbing it. “That’s funny. You seemed to find it much easier to get mad at me in the beginning. I still remember you yelling at me on the side of the road, like a little terror.”
“Well, you’d just dumped chili all over me,” I told him, my hand diving into his hair and rubbing back and forth, causing the slight curls to tighten.
He leaned back, his mouth popping open in mock shock. “I did not! You bumped into me!”
“Wrong again! I was pushed,” I laughed.
“Sure,” he laughed back. “You don’t have to lie; you can be honest and admit that you were so drawn to my angelic charm that you couldn’t help yourself.”
“Oh!” I scoffed. “Angelic charm? You couldn’t say anything but ‘so we meet again’, like those were the only words in your head!”
“There were other words in my head, but you would have probably punched me if I’d said them. Or eaten me. Now that I think about it, I probably should have said them…you eating me sounds rather exciting.”
I shoved his shoulder playfully, and gasped when his sleeve separated from his shoulder. “Oh no! I’m sorry!” I tugged on the torn seams, trying fruitlessly to put them back together.
He looked at the damage I’d caused, inspecting the seam to see just how bad the repair job would be and then, without a word tore the sleeve off completely. He turned to the other side and repeated the action, throwing both sleeves onto the floor and smiling at the result. “There. Even.”
I laughed. I’d never seen him look that way before. He’d always tried to look the part that he played: perfect and contained, calm and cool, handsome in ways that could only come from something divine. But here he was, his hair tousled, threads poking out and hanging from his torn shirt, his eyes wild with amusement, and his mouth half-open in a crooked, less than perfect smile.