by Meg Collett
Gabriel took his time showing his love for her. Every part of her body felt him as he rocked inside her. There was a buildup, a growing, a gasping. And then it was flying. It was wind in her imagined feathers and bursts of light across her vision and more tears streaming down her face for Gabriel to kiss away.
It was heaven. And home.
18
It was the night of the fight.
The fallen didn’t make it far in their ascent of the sky before Uriel carried Michaela farther away to hide in the misty bank of clouds. The holy angel legion—thousands and thousands of angels—swooped down from the sky a few miles away from where Michaela and Uriel hovered.
Michaela wondered if the holy angels saw Gabriel with his massive fallen army and knew Lucifer was dead. They might have been stunned by the development, but Michaela knew they wouldn’t pause. Trumpets belted across the sky signaling the readiness of both sides as was customary for angel warfare. The two armies sent their first wave of soldiers to meet with a clang of metal and swords in the air, swarming like a horde of hornets caught in a net. The night was too dark to make out individual soldiers.
Michaela had sworn she wouldn’t leave Gabriel’s side, but already the promise was broken. She watched the battle from far, far away. She was supposed to wait until the fallen and the Archangels had broken through the holy angels’ ranks, and then she would meet them in Heaven at the gates. There, she would open them and let the enemy in once again.
Uriel held Michaela aloft. The Archangel kept as much distance as possible without letting Michaela fall. Her grasp was tight and cold, her face set in stone as they both strained to see the battle below them. The night was too thick this high in the sky to see how their fighters were faring.
It had been an odd choice to pick Uriel to carry her, but Michaela had suggested it. No one had spoken after she offered Uriel up for the duty. They’d thought it was a challenge or maybe a punishment. But to Michaela and Uriel, it was a peace offering.
“Will you take me?” Michaela had asked hours earlier in the cabin, but in her mind, Michaela was asking for Uriel to forgive her, to take her on the most important mission of Michaela’s existence. Uriel was the only one who Michaela wanted for the task. Uriel understood weakness and broken strength. Only in Uriel’s arms would Michaela not feel ashamed. Michaela remembered her vow to make sure Zarachiel was okay. For him to heal, he needed Uriel to deal with her anger. Asking Uriel to take her was Michaela’s form of an olive branch, an act to repair their friendship for the sake of Zarachiel.
And so it was decided. Uriel had given Michaela a tight nod, but not before Michaela saw the frosty bite of Uriel’s brown eyes soften marginally. The look was quickly iced back over. It was a brittle shield, but it was their armor, and it could not fall for even a second. Zarachiel had been right; Uriel and Michaela were a lot more alike than they realized.
“The fight is spreading out,” Uriel observed.
Michaela pulled herself out of her thoughts and looked down. Uriel was right. After a couple hours of fighting, the battle had spilled across the sky below them, sweeping out as the fallen worked to flank the holy angels by sending in new waves of fighters one after another. It was a good strategy, one they’d thought up earlier that day. The angels met each other, body to body, sword to sword, in a thick swarm with no side gaining an inch of sky.
“We should go higher.”
Michaela nodded at Uriel’s suggestion. They were supposed to stay completely out of sight, far above and far to the side of the battle. If Michaela was discovered, it was all over. They couldn’t get into Heaven without the key to the gates.
Uriel swept her sharp eyes across the expanse before them, searching for scouting angels. She eased them up through a bank of dense, moist clouds, where the air was cold and electric. When they broke free of the clouds, they looked down. Their vision was wiped out by the clouds; the sight of the battle was lost. They were completely blind.
Michaela’s skin tingled as drops of water beaded on her arm. Goose bumps cascaded down her arms. How many times had she flown this expanse of sky? She couldn’t even remember what it had felt like. She felt only Uriel’s tight grip and the fear of falling, like a burnt taste sticking to the roof of her mouth.
“We’ll just listen for the fight,” Uriel said in a whisper. With her free hand, she pulled the long, slender sword from the sheath at her back. The murmur of metal on leather sounded like voices in the dense clouds. Michaela nodded in agreement, not wanting to break the Archangel’s concentration.
But Michaela couldn’t have spoken if she wanted to. Her throat was tight and then tighter still. Her stomach sank down into the heels of her boots in a wave of nausea. A clammy sweat slicked across her skin so that Uriel had to adjust her grip a few times. Dizziness overcame her, making her tilt in Uriel’s arms.
“What’s wrong?” Uriel asked, hissing the question. Frowning, she glanced around, clearly worried that Michaela had given away their vulnerable position.
Michaela weakly motioned that she was okay, but Uriel looked skeptical. “I want to get us higher out of these clouds.”
She didn’t wait for an answer; she just swept them up higher.
Michaela felt every foot of the ascent with an added ton of pressure on her chest. She was gasping for breath when Uriel stopped again.
“Quiet!” Uriel said, scanning the sky around them. There were no stars to guide their position, only the shifting clouds below them. They could have been on the sea, lost in a fog, if not for the constant beat of Uriel’s wings. Michaela struggled to breathe. Her throat closed in on itself. She barely kept her eyes open as she trembled, chills working their way up her spine and clattering her teeth.
“What’s wrong?” Uriel whispered too loudly. She focused fully on Michaela now, her expression horrified. Michaela must look as bad as she felt.
The trembling built into full spasms wracking her body. Uriel struggled to hold on, her grip slipping on Michaela’s slick skin. Michaela’s body seized and locked up, her breath a loud gasp. Uriel couldn’t hold on.
Michaela fell.
Through her sickness, Michaela recalled Iris’s vision and knew for certain she was about to die.
But her arm snapped out of its socket, the joint ripping apart to a symphony of elastic snaps. The muscles and tendons ripped as Uriel caught her and wrenched her back up. But the pain was merely a tiny reflection of the sickness tearing through Michaela’s body.
“Michaela! What’s happening?” Uriel said, shaking Michaela slightly. She was frantic as she searched for signs of the battle below them or angels hunting them.
“Something’s wrong.” Michaela tried to speak, but the words were only gurgles. More spasms flared through Michaela’s body, and once again Uriel struggled to hold on.
The Archangel swore. “Screw this,” she said and dove down.
Not even when Michaela had been taken from Heaven in Molloch’s arms that fateful day had she ever moved so fast. Uriel flew, diving through the air like a falling star. They were right above the battle and streaking even closer, but Michaela was too sick to care. She barely noticed as they plummeted straight through the fighting mass. The flash of steel and armor burned Michaela’s eyes; the wind tore through her body as she chilled hot then cold. She groaned.
Uriel said something that Michaela didn’t quite hear, but sounded like, “Almost there.”
“Almost there” turned into “there” quickly. Uriel lofted out her wings, catching them like a parachute. She settled gently onto the ground, cradling Michaela in her arms. Iris and Clark rushed out of the cabin.
“What the hell has happened now?” Clark asked. Michaela felt hands rushing over her body.
The ground rattled and crumpled behind them. “What’s wrong with her?” She couldn’t mistake Gabriel’s voice, fueled by battle and adrenaline. He sounded powerful, like a dragon at her back. He probably looked astounding in his armor, but Michaela couldn’t open her eyes.
She couldn’t feel her body.
And then she was just darkness.
* * *
Michaela moaned.
The sound formed itself in her mouth. She didn’t even realize she was conscious until suddenly, painfully, she was. A crippling soreness enveloped her muscles. Her guts felt as though they’d been torn apart and crudely stitched back together. Finally, the true agony of her torn, dislocated shoulder presented itself in its full glory. She shifted on the cot, trying to find a place that didn’t send screams of pain down her arm.
She cried out when the movement sent wrenching floods of misery throughout her body.
“Michaela, don’t move.”
Ophaniel’s voice opened her eyes. She blinked, bringing the cabin’s bedroom into focus. The room was lit by lanterns, the windows revealing nighttime. The faces that hovered above her, angel, Nephil and half-Nephil, were worried and afraid.
“Dude, you look like shit.” Michaela’s eyes found Clark, his expression tight and drawn. Looking into his ocean blue eyes, she saw a deeper fear, a remembered fear. She understood it. It hadn’t been long ago when she’d lain on this same cot, torn and broken and barely alive. Like that night, Michaela wondered how close she’d been to dying today. She didn’t want herself to hope that she’d somehow changed Iris’s vision.
“This feels familiar.” Michaela tried to make a joke, but her raspy voice caught and choked her. She coughed and grimaced when the pain rattled loose inside her again. She felt the bone-deep ache, the wrenching tightness in her back—in the place where her scars stretched, barely healed, over the empty hollows of her wings.
All her other aches paled in comparison.
“Michaela, what happened up there?”
Michaela turned at the sound of Gabriel’s voice. He crouched beside her, his hands hovering above her body like he didn’t know where to touch her. Michaela’s eyes found Uriel, who stood slightly apart from the others. Gabriel saw where she looked, anger rearing into his eyes.
“What did you do?” Gabriel growled. He stood halfway up, shielding Michaela with his body. “What did you do?”
Everyone looked at Uriel. From their expressions, Gabriel wasn’t the only one who blamed her. Uriel’s face hardened, her mouth an angry slant.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“She didn’t.” Michaela coughed, drawing everyone’s attention. She took a shallow breath. “It wasn’t Uriel. Something else happened….” Michaela took another breath. Even the slight motion made her grimace. “As we went higher…it made me sick.”
She found Gabriel’s hand. Instantly, he sagged back to the floor beside her and held tightly, almost painfully tightly, to her hand as he stroked her forehead. She looked into his black eyes and said, “My wings hurt.”
Everyone tensed. Gabriel didn’t look away from her, but out of the corner of her eye she saw the others glance at one another. Iris crouched down beside her and took her other hand.
“Michaela, your wings are gone,” Iris said, softly and sweetly.
“I know,” Michaela said, her voice growing weaker. “But in my back…where my wings were torn…hurts.”
“What does this mean?” Raphael asked. Gabriel finally looked up at the others. Michaela closed her eyes, too exhausted to hold them open anymore, but she listened and kept her hold on Gabriel and Iris.
“Is it the transition?” Ophaniel wondered.
“Did you get that high?” Iris must have asked Uriel.
“I was making sure we stayed above the battle. I wasn’t paying attention to how high we were, but we could have been close enough to start changing. It wasn’t enough for me to notice a difference,” Uriel answered. Her words were clipped, but they lacked the normal malice.
“Uriel,” Gabriel said, his voice apologetic and sincere. “I didn’t mean to blame you. I overreacted.”
Uriel likely shrugged in answer, because the silence stretched out. Finally, she said, “I’m taking Zarachiel outside.” Michaela heard her leave. She regretted not telling them sooner that it wasn’t Uriel’s fault.
The front door closed, and Clark asked, “Could her wings have made her sick? Since she doesn’t, like, have them?”
Michaela rolled her eyes, but the effect was lost since they were closed. Instead, she whispered, “Thanks, Clark.”
“Hey, I’m just saying.”
“No. He might be right.” Gabriel’s brow furrowed in thought. “Without her wings, she wouldn’t be able to have a complete transition into her angelic form. It must have made her sick instead.”
“There’s no way we can know that for sure,” Raphael said. “Not unless we try again.”
“We have to try again. How can we get into Heaven without her?” Simiel asked.
“We can’t take her back up there if it makes her sick,” Ophaniel said, her voice chastising. “What if we take Obil to Heaven to open the gates?”
Everyone thought about that for a moment. It was an option. Finally, Gabriel spoke. “He’s too heavy to hold in the air that long, and he couldn’t fly himself with those useless, weak wings.”
“I need…to be there,” Michaela said, keeping her eyes closed.
“She’s right,” Gabriel said. “We’ll use Obil as an absolute last resort.”
“Maybe it’s not her wings. Maybe she has the flu or something,” Simiel said.
Raphael sighed heavily. “Well, the only angel we could have asked is dead.”
Gabriel tightened his hold on her hand again. “What?”
“What are you saying?” Clark asked Raphael, sounding defensive.
“Whoa,” Raphael said. Michaela imagined he probably held his hands up in surrender. “I just mean the only angel who went to Heaven without wings was Lucifer. And, well, he’s dead. No offense,” Raphael added for Clark.
The silence stretched out as everyone let those words sink in. Gabriel leaned closer to Michaela and asked, “Did Lucifer act sick when he was in Heaven?”
Michaela forced her thoughts back to the day she’d opened the gates with half the Archangels who would betray her. She’d flown across Purgatory and confronted Lucifer. He’d been sarcastic and cruel as usual, but she hadn’t noticed any illness. “It happened so fast…he was only there a moment…then he was gone…he didn’t seem sick when he spoke.”
Everyone was silent once again, their anxiety and worry permeating the air. Their plan would never work if she couldn’t open Heaven’s gates. No matter what, she had to get up there.
“I’m trying again,” she said. “Just let me…rest for a bit.”
Gabriel kissed her forehead, but he didn’t speak.
“While she heals, I want to go back to the ground beneath the battle and look for wounded,” Iris said.
They had already decided Iris would do this after each battle. She didn’t want any angel to suffer needlessly, and the others had agreed to let her try. Raphael and Uriel had been reluctant. They wanted the holy angels to pay for their allegiance to the Aethere by suffering on the battlefield. Michaela had settled the argument by giving her consent to Iris.
Now Gabriel said, “Okay, but take Simiel and Ophaniel to help. Raphael, you go and protect them.” He leaned over and whispered in Michaela’s ear, “I’ll be right back.”
He rose, and the Archangels walked out the door, talking in low tones. Clark settled on the floor beside Michaela’s cot, crossing his legs and looking comfortable. Iris cocked a brow. “Clark, you’re going, too. We’re taking your car.”
Clark snorted. “Oh, hell no. I’m not getting nasty angel blood on my leather.”
“Clark,” Iris said, her voice full of warning.
Clark sighed heavily and got off the floor. He squeezed Michaela’s hand before he walked away. The bedroom door shut quietly behind him.
When they were alone in the room, Iris picked up Michaela’s hand. Weakly, she opened her eyes to look at the Nephil. “You must have been terrified that was it,” Iris said, her voice full o
f sympathy.
In her weakness and muddy thoughts, it took Michaela a moment to realize Iris meant the vision. Her first thought as she fell out of Uriel’s grasp had been of the vision. Knowing she was going to try again, meaning another opportunity to fulfill the vision, terrified her. But she shook her head, not wanting to worry Iris more.
“That’s good,” Iris said, patting her hand. “I’m so sorry, Michaela. I wish I could see how to change that future.”
“I don’t….” Michaela struggled for breath. “Want to…change it…if we…get Heaven back.”
Iris looked torn. “I’m surprised Gabriel wanted to send you up there after you told him.”
“I haven’t….” Michaela breathed out.
She fell into the silence, letting the darkness envelope her and pull her under as Iris whispered, “Oh, no. Michaela....”
19
Clark stewed the entire drive. As Ophaniel sat in the passenger seat and guided him to the place below the battlefield in the sky, all he could think about was what he’d just overheard.
After leaving the room with the angels, he’d come back inside the cabin to ask Iris what all they needed to take with them. Walking to the bedroom door, he’d couldn’t help but hear the conversation between Michaela and his mother. As he drove through the darkness and half-heartedly listened to Ophaniel’s directions, one particular phrase his mother said kept replaying in his head.
I wish I could see how to change that future.
He didn’t want to ask his mom about it in front of Ophaniel, so he kept his mouth shut and sulked. When they arrived to the gorge, there was nothing but scraggly trees and dense underbrush. Clark sighed heavily. This wasn’t going to be fun.
“Let’s fan out and see what we find,” Iris suggested once they were outside and had collected their gear.
“I’ll stay in the sky to keep a lookout.” Raphael’s voice was reluctant, and Clark agreed with the Archangel’s sentiment that any injured holy angels should stay where they lay.