I sighed and put the toy back where I found it.
If I were going to wait all night, I needed to be comfortable. I slipped into a T-shirt and my flannel pajama bottoms. The soft fabric slid against my unmarred skin. I let my hands trail against my hands, my arms—the familiar ridges of smoothed skin, burned and scarred, were gone. A sudden panic seized me, and I ran into the bathroom. I pulled my hair away from my neck and strained into the mirror to see.
The Mark was still there, untouched. To be sure, I took out the hand mirror and checked it again, then a third time. Relief washed over me. If I was still Marked, I still belonged to him.
I put the mirror down and turned off the light. Then I slid under the covers of my bed to wait.
It felt odd.
It was an unfamiliar feeling. Emptiness. Anticipation. Even boredom, as I realized that for weeks I’d spent every waking moment working over the Prophecy, trying to figure out our next move, worrying about my safety, or trying to pick apart my complicated feelings for Michael.
But as the stars grew brighter and made their progress against the inky sky, marking the passage of the night, I fell increasingly under the competing grips of dread and hope.
He had to come back to me.
He just had to.
When there were a few hours left until dawn, I grew restless. I prowled about my room, looking for something to distract me. My eye fell upon the box where I’d stored my treasures, ever since I was a little girl. I picked it up and smiled at its childish simplicity. It was a shoebox, wrapped in tissue paper and decoupaged with pictures of the things that had once been important to me: puppies and rainbows and horses and hearts. Lots and lots of hearts.
I couldn’t believe my mom had kept it.
I pulled off its lid and began sorting through my memories, one by one. There, tucked under everything at the bottom of the box, was something more recent, something I hadn’t realized I’d been searching for.
A valentine.
I pulled it out of the box and slid the card out of the red envelope. The card had been crumpled in anger, and though I’d done my best to smooth it out, it still looked a little worn, the surface uneven under my fingertips. I looked at the lettered verse on the card. It was different now, knowing Michael had written it, and reading it with the benefit of hindsight.
I will keep you as the apple of the eye,
Hide you under the shadow of my wings.
It was a promise of protection. His promise. He’d proven true to his word, over and over again, even when I hadn’t believed him.
And it was a forever promise. You don’t break a forever promise.
Certainty flooded back to me. He couldn’t protect me if he wasn’t here, I reasoned with myself. He has to come back.
It was while clinging to this confidence that I drifted off to sleep, the card still in my hand.
As I slept, I dreamt I was at sea, alone in a tiny lifeboat. It was cold; my clothing was soaked through, and every breath I took made my lungs feel like sharp needles were stabbing them. From the debris floating around me, I could tell I had survived a shipwreck. Bobbing in the ocean were the other survivors. Some I couldn’t recognize, but among them were Michael and my father. They were on opposite sides of my boat, beyond the reach of my oars, struggling to keep their heads above the icy water.
“You must choose,” someone whispered in my ear.
How could I choose?
“If you don’t, they both will die,” the voice urged me on.
Picking up the oars, I hesitated. “Save yourself,” my father yelled across the water. “Forget about me.”
“There’s no point, Hope. I’m already as good as dead,” Michael called out from where he was treading water.
“No,” I shouted back, determination lighting a fire within me. “I’ll get you both.”
I dug my oars into the water. Each carving stroke felt like I was pulling through setting cement. It was so cold—too cold. I didn’t have the strength to get there fast enough.
They were slipping away, starting to sink under the surface. I pulled harder, faster, waiting to make my choice until the last minute. But I waited too long. A giant wave surged beneath my boat, casting me far, far away from both of them.
I threw myself against the side of the boat.
“Goodbye, Hope,” my father’s voice carried across the sea.
“Goodbye, Hope,” Michael echoed before he slid beneath the waves.
The swelling waves carried me farther and farther away from them until I woke up on the floor, my face pressed hard into the carpet, which was a soggy mess. I tasted salt; it took me a moment to realize it was from tears, not from seawater.
I rolled over, wincing. My entire body ached, reminders of the days of abuse to which I’d subjected it. Even my hands hurt, as if I’d really been gripping the oars I’d dreamt about. I let my eyes adjust to the light. The floor was dappled with sunlight as the early morning rays streamed through the leafy apple trees in my front yard, and I realized with a start that it was morning.
It was the morning of the third day.
I jumped to my feet and turned around, peering into the corners of my room. I expected to find him there, an amused look on his face as he waited for me to wake up.
But there was nothing.
I raced from my room, flinging myself down the stairs. He had to be here. Where else would he be?
I searched the far corners of our house.
Nothing.
I ran into the garage, thinking maybe he’d wait in my mother’s car.
Empty.
Had he awoken in France, alone and abandoned?
I moved to the computer station in the kitchen and called up the local news for Le Puy-en-Velay: article after article describing the destruction from the unexplained rioting that had gripped the region. A death count. And there, at the bottom of the death toll, the number of unidentified victims. Michael was sure to be among them … but was he still dead?
Frustrated, I kept refreshing the news, thinking surely there was some mistake.
Frantically, I started typing in the search bar.
Really, do you expect there to be coverage on CNN? Coming to you live from the second resurrection? Really, Hope. I thought better of you.
It wasn’t Henri. It was the Replacement.
“Go. Away.” I demanded between clenched teeth. “I don’t even know who you are, and I really don’t have time for this right now.” My fingers fumbled their typing while I cursed.
Don’t be so juvenile. You won’t find it there. You won’t find it anywhere. There’s nothing to find, Hope.
I scanned the news site, then another. Then another. Everywhere the world was still caught in fits of chaos. Everywhere, it seemed man was turning against man. But it couldn’t be. Michael’s death was supposed to free the Fallen—not set them loose to destroy the Earth. Something was wrong.
He’s gone.
I hovered over the keyboard.
“Gone.” My voice broke as I repeated the word.
Gone, the Replacement said gently. You never had any chance to save him. It was meant to be.
“But, the green men and the phoenix on the chapel … all the symbols of rebirth …” My voice trailed off.
Perhaps they were a coincidence.
My heart hardened to his words. It couldn’t be.
“He promised he would watch over me! I can’t lose him now! I can’t!” I blurted into the air, as tears flooded my eyes.
He belonged to mankind and to the angels. He was never yours to lose.
My father and Michael, both slipping away under the waves. Away. Forever.
“No!” I screamed. My arms swept the keyboard and mouse away. I pushed the computer off the edge of the desk. “No!” Frantic with denial, I fought against my invisible foe, the messenger whom I would never forgive, never accept.
“No!” It was a howl now, ripped from my soul as I cast about the room, railing against anything tha
t I found in my path.
“Hope!” My mother had rushed to my side and was calling me, trying to break through, but I was too far gone. I fought against her, pummeling her with my fists, until, exhausted, I collapsed into her lap, where she held me and crooned as if I were an infant all over again.
“I know, baby. I know,” she whispered against my hair.
But she had no way of knowing what I was going through. She would never know—she couldn’t know—that my grief was doubled by the loss of Michael.
I gave myself over to her ministrations; to the cool washcloth against my forehead, the tightly tucked covers of my bed, and the doctor’s pill, now speeding me on to my own fitful sleep.
Gone.
The word haunted my mother and me. It defined our days and kept us awake at night.
We took turns giving in to our grief, living out our days and nights like zombies, unable to feel, unable to engage with anyone else.
My mother resigned from her firm. She typed her letter and emailed it in, not deigning to even talk to anyone else before she did so. And no one tried to stop her. In celebration, she dumped her closet-full of elegant black suits into a garbage bag and left them at the curb for someone to scavenge.
“That life is over now,” she murmured, her lips set in a hard line as she turned on the last vestige of her career.
She kept me home with her, staring down the truancy officer who visited our house, daring him to defy her when she said it was too soon for me to return. She turned Tabby away at the door, demurring that I was too weak to see visitors yet. She ignored the calls from the social worker and psychologist who’d been referred to our case. She was a tigress protecting her cub, defending me to the death.
Until it became too much for her to bear. Then I cared for her.
With nothing to root us—no routine, no relationships—we floated through our days, only our own desperate acts marking one day from the next. I gave full reign to my obsession with the news, tracking the petering out of the global rioting, then giving myself over to observing the minutiae of every war crime, plane crash, boat sinking, or natural disaster that took place, anywhere in the world. I searched unceasingly for any reports of strange sightings of angels, of unexplainable phenomena that could only be accounted for as miracles. I tore stories out of newspapers and magazines, printed out articles from the Internet, taping them carefully on my bedroom walls, believing that if I just studied them long enough, the pattern would emerge, and I would finally understand where Michael was, and why he was there, and not here with me.
But there was nothing.
My sleep was haunted by nightmares—wild images of bloody battles, brutal angels eviscerating one another without mercy. And Michael was there, on the front lines, urging on his army and taking the brunt of the violence. Every night I woke, panting and sweating, having seen what I was sure was the blow that would prove fatal to him—a second death, a heavenly death that would keep him from me forever. I would wake from one nightmare to the reality of a world without him and feel the loss all the more keenly.
We continued on like that for months, our only interruption the daily visits Arthur unfailingly made, until one day, my mother announced over the scalding cup of black coffee that had become her routine breakfast, “I’m moving your father’s remains.”
I looked at her, not knowing what to say.
She was clear-eyed and even a little excited. She looked at me, and a flash of recognition, followed by concern, went through her eyes.
“You cut your hair,” she murmured, drawing her eyebrows together into a sharp point.
I pulled my fingers defensively through the short fringe of my bangs. I’d taken scissors to it a few days earlier. I was tired of hiding behind it. And there was no point covering up my Mark any more. Let the whole world see it; I didn’t care. In fact, I wanted to show it like a badge, proof of what I’d been through, proof that I still belonged to Michael. It was the only thing I had left. So I’d defiantly hacked away the long tresses, leaving them in a heap on the floor of my bathroom. Nervously, I fingered my neckline, afraid of what she would say next.
“I like it,” she announced, ending all discussion on the topic.
From that morning on, Mom focused almost exclusively on her project to move Dad’s body from the gravesite in which he’d been hastily deposited in Alabama. She wanted him closer. She wanted to be able to visit him whenever she wished, and she wanted me to keep his memory alive.
Besides, she’d reasoned, “Atlanta was always his home. His real home.”
The opportunity to tangle with lawyers again ignited a spark in her. Her eyes brightened, and she almost became cheerful. Soon, the whirlwind that had been my mother returned, sweeping away the stacks of unopened mail, returning the unanswered phone calls, and writing out thank-you notes in her careful, schoolbook-perfect cursive writing.
My father’s parents were long gone, his own parents having followed their desire to be cremated, their remains scattered at sea. But as far back as he could recall, my father’s people had all been buried in a tiny cemetery on the edges of Dunwoody, a simple garden that had been engulfed as suburban sprawl expanded the footprint of the little town. It was protected by a historic preservation society now, and nobody had been buried in it for over twenty-five years. Somehow my mother had negotiated her way to a little plot for my father, finally managing to bring him home.
New Hope Cemetery, it was called. Ironic.
My mother’s preparations sometimes took her out of the house as she sought licenses and allowances, and it was on one of those days that I found myself alone to answer the loon-like call of the dying doorbell.
I swung the door wide. “Tabby!”
My heart swelled as I saw her waiting, hand on one jutted hip, head-to-toe black despite the heat of the summer day. She shoved her cat-eye sunglasses up over her pink ombré hair, pinning me with a fixed stare under one perfectly arched eyebrow.
“Your mom is a pit bull when it comes to guarding you. Are you going to let me in, or what?”
I pulled her arm, dragging her into the foyer to envelop her in a hug. Her stiff standoffishness melted as she squeezed me back, hard.
“Honestly, girl, I have been so worried about you.” She stepped back, carefully apprising me, her mouth twisting into disapproval. “You can’t disappear. You can’t disappear into this house. And you can’t disappear into yourself,” she said, poking me in the ribs for emphasis. “What are you doing? Starving yourself?”
I wrapped my arm around my waist as if I could hide. “I’m not. I just haven’t been hungry.”
She pushed past me, the heavy soles of her combat boots beating a familiar stomp that made me grin like an idiot. “Tell it to someone who will listen. We’re eating breakfast, now.” I noticed the white paper bag swinging from her hand. “I wasn’t taking any chances.”
She folded herself into a kitchen chair, pointedly looking at the chair opposite her until I reluctantly sat down, too. Satisfied, she shoved the bag across the table to me.
“You promised me when you were in Vegas. So I thought I’d make it easy on you.”
Intrigued, I tore open the bag. Wright’s cupcakes. Strawberry pink, encased with loving care inside their plastic containers like engagement rings in blue Tiffany boxes.
I teared up, my fingers clutching the edge of the crumpled bag.
“I would have bought them. I didn’t forget, Tabby. I promise.”
She reached across the table to squeeze my hand. “I know, Hope. But I thought I needed to remind you that you’re not alone.”
I blinked back the tears and looked up at her. “You’re right. But it’s hard to explain. I don’t know if anybody could ever understand.”
She nodded as if my statement were imminently reasonable. “Of course not. Not if you’re keeping it to yourself.”
She pulled back her hand and crossed her arms, refusing to look away. “Unless, that is, you’re thinking only Michael co
uld understand.”
I stammered. “That’s not … I mean …”
I gave up, lamely, as her unspoken accusation sucked all the air out of the room.
“He’s not the only one who understands, Hope.”
“How do you know?” I whispered, looking down at the table, trying hard not to cry.
“I understand more than you realize,” she asserted. “Look at me, Hope.”
I dragged my eyes from the table. Her brown eyes swam with kindness. “He was with you the whole time, wasn’t he?”
I nodded, unable to lie any longer.
“Did he die? Did he die to save the Fallen Angels?”
The dam of ice that had been protecting my heart began to crack and burst. A sob tore itself from my throat.
Tabby sat back, a satisfied look on her face. “I knew it.”
I looked at her through my tears, confused by her callousness.
“Not that I’m happy,” she fumbled, rushing to explain herself. “I mean, I’m happy that the Fallen have the chance to return to grace. I just knew that had to be it. But that Michael was the one to do it … aw, Hope. And you were there, weren’t you? I bet you saw the whole thing. Poor girl.” She came around the table and wrapped her arms around me. I leaned into her, giving into the grief that seemed fresh all over again.
“I couldn’t stop it. I tried, but I couldn’t save him, Tabby. And he hasn’t come back.”
“Poor girl,” she whispered again, holding me even tighter as each violent sob shook my body.
When my tears were spent, she kissed the top of my head.
“Let me show you something,” I whispered, pulling away. I led her upstairs to my room. Nobody had seen what I was doing, not even—no, especially not—my mother. I paused as I cracked the door open.
“You promise you won’t judge me?” I looked at her, wavering.
She rolled her eyes. “When have I ever judged you? Besides, nothing would surprise me at this point. Bring it on.”
I strode through the door, pulling her behind me. I stood in the middle of the room, gesturing at the walls.
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