by C. L. Wilson
A day—maybe two—of being stuck here in this apartment with the angel unless she agreed to perform the task he’d come here to help her do. Kat had given up trying to convince herself he wasn’t real. Josie had seen him. Kat had touched him. And she’d seen his bleeping wings, for crying out loud. If she truly was crazy, she would just have to wait until the roads cleared to confirm it. Until then, she was going to play along with the gorgeous hallucination.
“So, you’re here to help me strengthen some sort of mystical Seals. I hope your ‘help’ includes telling me what to do, because I haven’t got a clue.”
Micah leaned back in her cream suede loveseat and brought one leg up to cross casually over the other. Kat’s mouth went dry. There was nothing angelic about him. Nothing rosy, sweet, or innocent. He was pure, masculine power packaged in the perfect, golden body of a God. He was Man, but inhumanly so. So different, he was his own flipping species.
And he was hardwired straight into her previously non-existent libido.
A fact that terrified her to no end.
Micah coughed and crossed his jeans-clad legs again, snapping her out of her lustful, mesmerized daze. There were flags of color high on his cheeks, and she could see the pulse beating rapidly in his tanned throat. He wouldn’t meet her eyes.
A hot blush flooded her cheeks. Oh, God, he could read her mind. He’d just heard every shamefully lustful thought she’d been thinking. About him. An angel, for God’s sake.
But all he said was, “You sing.”
“What?”
“The Seal. To renew its strength, you sing to it.”
Sing? That cut through her embarrassment like a razor. Every lustful thought in her head winked out in an instant—and so did all thought of humoring the angel and going along with his plans.
Kat rose stiffly to her feet, hands fisted at her side. In a voice that crackled with cold, hard, unyielding finality, she said, “Then your cause is doomed, angel. Because I don’t sing. Ever.”
And with that, she walked into her bedroom and closed the door. The metallic snap of the lock clicking into place reverberated through the utter stillness of the apartment.
###
Kat lay on her bed with her eyes closed and her noise-cancelling headphones on, listening to the sound of crashing waves and the bi-aural tones of her favorite meditation tracks. Trying desperately to keep the old, painful memories away.
But even her favorite meditations weren’t strong enough hold to back this particular flood.
The angel had unwittingly ripped open one of Kat’s oldest and most painful wounds. Now a decade’s worth of long-trapped poison was spilling out of her soul. Gangrenous guilt that had fastened itself to her bones in childhood and eaten away at her ever since.
Kat opened her eyes to glare at the closed bedroom door. With a huff, she switched to a meditation track designed to promote inner peace, and thumped the back of her head against the pillows, trying to find a comfortable spot. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to focus on the soothing voice leading her through the guided meditation, but it was impossible to silence her mind and feel warm sunlight moving through her body when memories had her tied up in knots.
Eventually, after half a dozen false starts and a lot of deep, measured breathing, Kat relaxed enough to sink into the meditation. But instead of following the meditation guide down a path through a tranquil, forested hill beside a lake, her mind took a path of its own. A path that led her back to the early years of her childhood, the happier years, when both her parents had been alive and she hadn’t known monsters like her grandparents even existed.
She’d had a strange, frequently uprooted childhood. They never lived one place long enough to set down roots or make friends. But she’d had her parents, and she’d had their love, and those first seven years of her life had been happy in their own crazy, constantly changing way.
Back then, music had been like sunlight to her. Beaming, radiant, joyful. Impossible to resist. When music played, her soul drank it in, and song danced on her lips in answer. Even in silence, she’d always heard the music. That Katrina—the happy child, so blissfully ignorant of the evils prevalent in the world—would sing to herself as she played.
You are my sunshine. My only sunshine.
Mama sang with her, too, sometimes. And when she did, her rare, beautiful smiles would spread across her face, chasing away the sadness that lived in her eyes.
You make me happy, when skies are gray.
Katrina could picture it in her mind. A cramped room in some squalid little tenement. A clean blanket spread across the floor. Young Katrina sitting on the blanket with a handful of precious toys scattered around. A section of fine, silky golden hair pulled up on the top of her head, the rest left to fall around her plump toddler shoulders. Mama lying on the floor beside her, propped up on one elbow, smiling as her own, low, smoky voice joined the childish sweetness of Katrina’s.
You’ll never know dear, how much I love you.
Pretty, pretty Mama, with her too-thin body, masses of white-blond hair, and huge Nordic blue eyes that were too old and too sad for a woman who was barely more than a child herself. But when they sang together, she looked happy. Young. So young and happy that the scars on her body and the worse ones on her soul faded away, leaving only a radiant, shining spirit, so fragile, yet so beautiful. As beautiful as the song that lived in Katrina’s soul and sang to her every minute of the day.
Please don’t take my sunshine away.
Daddy never liked it when they sang. It always made him cross. And frightened.
“I could hear you, on the steps when I was coming up,” he would say. “And if I could hear you, others can too. How many times do I have to tell you? You can’t let her sing. Not where others can hear!”
And they would have to move again. Silently, swiftly, running in the middle of the night with little more than the clothes on their backs and whatever few possessions they could stuff in a small duffle.
It wasn’t that Daddy didn’t like her singing at all. He did. Nothing made him happier, in fact, but only when she sang in the windowless confines of his angel room, with the candle lit and circling them in a ring of golden light. When she sang then, her father’s fear and madness would fall away—just like the shadowy pain fell away from the children she whispered—and for that time, he would be happy and smiling, and his arms would hold her and Mama so tight it seemed like he would never let them go.
Sometimes he would even sing with her.
Katrina could still remember his voice. There were hardly words to describe it. The rich baritone that soared with otherworldly beauty. Her father had a voice that could have mesmerized millions. When he sang, it was as if love and light and everything good in the world came pouring out of him. Katrina, when she sang, could make him happy and chase away his pain. But he…he could make her feel like her soul had soared straight to heaven.
When Daddy sang, it was like witnessing the first light ever to warm a cold, dark universe.
He could have been a millionaire many times over as a recording artist. The whole world would have paid to hear him sing. But Jon Bentsen had never sung outside his angel room.
“If I sang out there, they would find me,” he told her more than once.
“Who would find you, Daddy?”
“The bad things, Katie. And if they find me, they’ll find you. We can’t let that happen. That’s why you must never sing outside the angel room either.” His hands tightened around hers. “Promise me.”
“Ow! You’re hurting me, Daddy.”
His grip loosened, but his eyes scared her. Dark, intense. Shining as if lit from some inner fire. His eyes looked the same way they did when he couldn’t stop seeing the bad things. Crazy eyes. There was no reasoning with her father when he had crazy eyes. No calming him either.
“Promise me, Katie Rose.” He gave her a shake. “Promise me you’ll never sing outside the angel room.”
She remembered now how
scared she’d been. How she’d been willing to promise anything to make him stop looking at her with those crazy eyes.
“I p-promise, Daddy,” she’d vowed.
Looking back, that was a promise she should have kept.
###
It was mid-afternoon before Kat finally emerged from her bedroom. The angel was standing by the window, looking out at the ice and snow. He didn’t turn, but she could feel his awareness, like a thousand strands of spider silk binding them together, tracking her with unerring accuracy as she walked to the kitchen and warmed a saucepan of milk for hot chocolate. She stirred the milk with a wooden spoon as it heated.
“What happened to your parents isn’t your fault, Katrina. You aren’t responsible for their deaths.”
Kat’s hand froze in mid-stir. He knew about that?
In a calm and matter-of-fact voice, she said, “It was my fault. I broke the rule, and my parents paid the price.”
“You were just a child. Barely seven.”
“I was old enough to know better.” The milk was steaming. She added cocoa and sugar and kept stirring. “Daddy warned me hundreds of times, but I did it anyway. I sang. In public—”
“You sang in your first grade Christmas pageant with the rest of your classmates.”
Kat squeezed her eyes shut, bending her head against remembered pain. First grade. Her first time in school with other children. Wearing an angel costume with wings and a shiny golden halo in her very first Christmas pageant with her classmates.
“Daddy told me just to mouth the words.” Her fingers clenched around the wooden spoon. “But I wanted to sing. I wanted the other children to hear me. I wanted them to like me and think I was special.”
She could still remember the look on her father’s face. The other parents were beaming with pride, faces wreathed in smiles, their video cameras trained on the stage. Not Kat’s father.
She’d opened her mouth, sung with all her defiant exuberance and joy, the smile on her father’s face had turned to a look of betrayal, then terror.
Her parents were waiting the moment she stepped off the stage. Daddy snatched her up and they ran. But it was too late.
“Because I sang, the bad things came. And my parents died.”
Warm hands closed around her shoulders. Micah leaned over to switch off the stove burner and turned her around to face him.
“Your parents died in a car crash, Katrina.”
“Because we were running from the bad things! Because I sang and I wasn’t supposed to! I’d promised I wouldn’t!”
The dogs had been howling that night, too. Terrible, frightening howls, baying from every direction while young Katrina lay trapped in the wreckage of her family’s overturned car, watching the blood drip from her father’s lifeless body and the light fade from her mother’s eyes.
“It wasn’t your fault.” Micah’s palms slid up her neck to cradle her head. “Look at me. You can’t keep carrying that weight. It isn’t yours to carry.”
Her lips trembled. She wanted to believe him, but how could she? She’d watched her parents die.
“Your father had a Guardian. After her light was extinguished, he could have prayed for another, but he didn’t. Instead, he chose to live his life running from the Darkseekers instead of fighting them. He chose to make himself vulnerable that way—and to make you vulnerable, too, by refusing to summon the Guardian he knew he needed and by keeping you ignorant of the truth about who and what you are. Let the guilt go, Katrina.”
“My father’s Guardian died? But Guardians are angels. How can angels die?”
Micah made an impatient noise and answered briskly. “She broke the law of Free Will, and lost her link to the archangel because of it. Her power couldn’t renew, so when it ran out, she was extinguished.” He waved an impatient hand. “That’s not important right now. What is important is the point I’m trying to make about your father. He is responsible for the decisions he made, not you. He knows that. He wants you to know it, too. Why do you think he came to you and urged you to pray for angelic protection?”
His argument sounded so sincere, so convincing. How often had she counseled children not to blame themselves for their parents’ actions? How often had she listened to Maya counseling their mothers to let go of their guilt, to forgive themselves for past choices and move forward? What a hypocrite Kat was for counseling others to do what she could not do herself.
She’d only been seven. Barely more than a baby.
“It wasn’t your fault, Katrina.” The angel took her by the shoulders and stared into her eyes. “You were just a child. You weren’t driving that car. You didn’t run that stoplight. You are not to blame for what happened.” His gaze bored into her, as if by the intensity of his look alone, he could make her believe.
She had to admit, it was working. Despite a lifetime of blaming herself and stubbornly clinging to the grievous guilt, she could feel her resistance crumbling. She had made a bad choice that day, but her father had made bad choices too. She’d never blamed him for any of them. Only herself. Exactly like the children she counseled.
She moistened her lips. “I haven’t sung since…that day. I don’t know if I even can sing anymore. Not the way my father did.”
The angel smiled. “I wouldn’t worry on that score, Katrina. You’ve been singing all your life. Your child-whispering,” he explained in response to her blank look. “Every time you talk a child free of his pain, you tap into your Lightkeeper’s power, healing damaged souls much the same way as I healed your body last night.”
“How can that be?” She pulled away and put some distance between them. It was hard to think when he was so close. “I’ve been child-whispering for years. I know my singing brings the bad things, but that hasn’t.”
“What you do isn’t as easy for them to detect as a full-voiced song, and the walls of the shelter are sound-proofed. Last night, however, when you used your voice to calm the man who broke into the shelter, the door was open. The Shadowhounds heard you then. That’s what put them on your trail.”
The howling dog in the distance. Remembering made the hairs on Kat’s arms stand up. As crazy as Micah’s claims sounded, she was beginning to believe him. He just knew too much, and once you got past the crazy, fantastical aspects of his claims, they all made a strange sort of sense.
“Are those Shadowhounds still on my trail?” She hadn’t heard any howling all day.
“I am shielding you from their senses.” He gave a charming half-grin that set her pulse on simmer. “It’s one of the benefits of keeping your Guardian close.”
Kat chewed on her lower lip. Then, remembering her now-cooling cocoa, she turned to pour one mug for herself and another for the angel. She popped five mini-marshmallows in each cup, handed one mug to him, then lifted the other to her lips.
Big decisions were best made over a cup of hot chocolate.
Kat sipped and let the warm, creamy flavors of the chocolate swirl across her tongue. She’d never considered herself a particularly heroic person. The idea of drawing the attention of those Shadowhounds again was more than enough to put her off…but if Micah really could shield her from their senses…
“Gloria, the security guard at my day job, said there’s been a huge spike in violent crime this month. Is that because the Seal is weakening?”
Micah nodded. “Yes.”
“And if I renew the Seal? Will that put an end to the violence?”
“That I cannot guarantee. Mankind possesses free will, and some men freely choose violence over peace. But I can promise that renewing the Seal will curb the dark influence that has been escalating the violence.”
“So at least some of the people who have been turning to violence lately will stop?” she pressed. “We should see fewer women and children coming to the shelter?”
“You should, yes.”
She blew on her cocoa, then took another, long sip, then another. After the third swallow, she set her mug down. “All right.”
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“All right, what?”
“All right, I’ll do it. Take me to this Seal and show me what to do.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Travelling by angel was a unique experience.
After changing into warm clothes, her thick, double-breasted winter coat, and the knitted pink cap, scarf and matching gloves Maya and her girls had given her last Christmas, Kat followed Micah to the rooftop of her apartment building.
“Your car’s in the shop and the roads are iced over,” he’d told her when she asked why he was taking her up instead of down to the parking lot. “That makes angel power our transportation du jour.”
The wind on the rooftop was brisk and chill, making Kat glad for her toasty mittens, scarf and cap. Micah accommodated for the weather with a brown leather duster that materialized from wherever all the rest of his clothes came from. The bottom of the duster swirled around his jean-clad calves and the brown leather cowboy boots he’d also mojo-ed up. His head and hands remained bare because, “Angels radiate heat naturally.” The veracity of that claim she was able to conclusively confirm shortly after they reached the rooftop and Micah said, “Embrace me.”
She stumbled over her own feet. “Excuse me?”
“So I can take you to the Seal.” He opened his arms in invitation. “I must carry you with me, so come put your arms around my waist and hold on.”
With no little trepidation, Kat stepped close to the angel and looped her arms tentatively around his waist.
He glanced down at her, his expression chiding. “That’s the best you can do?”
She scowled up at him, then braced herself and stepped closer, pressing her body against his and locking her arms tightly behind his back. Sure enough, warmth radiated from him like he was a flesh-and-blood space heater. His intoxicating sandalwood and patchouli scent filled her nostrils, dizzying her senses. She turned her head to one side. Her forehead fit into the hollow of his throat, and his heartbeat thumped in her ear.