Dark Before Dawn

by Monica McGurk

  He rubbed his tired eyes and stood up. “I know, Hope. We’ll have to beat the bushes, walk the neighborhood, and see who we can get to talk. I’ll stay on the case like you asked.” He looked over his shoulder, back at my mother’s room. “I know Mona would want me to.”

  With that, he stretched and yawned. “I’ll see you tomorrow, kiddo. Keep me posted on your mom. I’ll call you if I hear anything new.”

  I watched the elevator doors whoosh closed, whisking him away and leaving me alone.

  Alone.

  Where were the angels who were sworn to protect my sister? And most of all, where was Michael? I picked up my phone: no messages. I scanned the news sites for anything unusual, any breaking world crisis that would explain his absence, but there was nothing.

  I didn’t have time to wallow in dejection. I heaved myself up out of the chair and headed back in to check on my mom.

  A nurse was holding a clipboard, writing notes of my mother’s vital signs.

  “How is she?” I ventured.

  The nurse mustered a smile. “She’s hanging in there. Stable, for now. We really need to get her in for surgery as soon as we can. If she manages to keep breathing through the night, the surgeon will most likely take her in first thing in the morning.”

  “And if she doesn’t?” I braced myself for whatever bad news the nurse would deliver.

  “If she can’t keep breathing on her own, we’ll intubate her. It will probably mean a day’s delay, just to be certain.” Her face darkened momentarily. “But if her other vitals worsen, we’ll have to take our chances and take her in, regardless.”

  I slumped down in the chair, disheartened.

  The nurse squeezed my shoulder. “The doctor will explain all your options when she comes by. For now, you should try to get some rest.”

  She gave one last look at the machine readouts and swept out of the room.

  My eyelids were heavy, and I realized the nurse was right. I did my best to curl up in the chair, draping a thin blanket around my shoulders, until my exhaustion got the best of me and I fell into a fitful sleep.

  In my dreams, I kept one ear listening for the steady beeping of the monitors.

  “Hope, wake up.”

  A hand gripped my shoulder, startling me. I bolted upright, awake in an instant, peering into blue-gray eyes filled with concern.

  “Michael!”

  I resisted the urge to throw myself into his arms, the overwhelming desire to bury my face in his neck, letting his familiar waves of heat comfort me. But I couldn’t stop myself, out of habit, from scanning his face for new cuts and bruises, making sure that he was whole. I gathered his hands in mine, turning them over to look for the stains and scrapes of battle I’d come to recognize so well.

  There were no scars. No marks. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing at all to excuse his failure to show up when I needed him.

  “Where were you?” My voice was cold, even to my own ears.

  He pressed his lips into a grim line, and he dropped my hands, his own balling up into fists as he stood up. He was worked up—far more tense than I’d expected him to be. But before I could press him further, he turned to look at my mother.

  “Your mother. What happened? How is she doing?”

  “Not great,” I said. “Stable, I guess. If she can keep breathing on her own, they’ll operate on her tomorrow morning. They think she has a lot of internal injuries, Michael. She was pretty severely beaten.” My voice cracked.

  He nodded, taking in all the tubes and wires.

  “It was Lucas, Michael. I’m sure of it. He was posing as a trafficker and lured Rorie’s friend, Macey, by pretending to be her boyfriend. I’m not sure what he was planning after that, but he went after us when Rorie intervened and we got the GBI into the picture. I think his forces overwhelmed Arthur,” I added, remembering the sooty slashes of swordplay that had marked our dining room walls. “He did this,” I spat, gesturing to my mother where she lay motionless in bed. “He killed Macey’s foster parents. And now he has Macey and Rorie.”

  He sucked in a sharp breath. “You’re sure?”

  “As sure as I can be,” I answered, my face getting hot. “Michael, where were all the angels who were sworn to protect Rorie? Why weren’t they there to help her? Why weren’t you there? And what are we going to do?”

  Michael began to pace, his stride taking him in circles inside the tiny room.

  “Answer me,” I said angrily.

  He looked at me, his eyes full of misery. Confused, I began to speak, but I hadn’t even managed to get a word out when I was interrupted by a noise from across the room.

  “Michael?”

  Startled, we both turned toward the bed. It was a faint, almost croaking sound, but there was no mistaking it in the quiet of the hospital room. My mother had awakened and called for Michael.

  “Oh.” The word slipped from Michael’s lips, and I watched him sag, defeated. “Oh, no.”

  He swung back to me, his eyes grieving. “I didn’t know, Hope. I’m so sorry.”

  “Sorry? Of course you should be sorry. You left us in a lurch, with no explanation—”

  He shook his head, cutting me off. “You don’t understand. I’m not here for you, Hope. I’m here for her.”

  He didn’t give me a chance to ask what he meant, simply giving my shoulder a squeeze before moving swiftly to my mother’s bedside.

  “I’m here, Mona,” he answered, gripping her hand in his. Her paleness stood out even more against his sun-worn skin. “I’m here.”

  Her eyes fluttered open at the sound of his voice.

  “I’m so glad,” she whispered.

  Her gaze moved beyond him to me. “Hope,” she began, before spluttering off into a hacking cough.

  “Shhhh,” I cautioned her as I moved next to her bed. “You’ve been through a lot. No sense wearing yourself out.”

  The coughing fit passed, and my mother let her eyes drift closed before speaking again with visible effort.

  “Arthur tried to hold them off,” she began. “But they were too much for him. He just seemed to melt into a flurry of sparks. And Rorie …” She strained at the sheets, pushing through the wires and tubes, trying to rise up as if to save them.

  “Shhhh,” Michael soothed, easing her back down onto the bed. “Arthur will be okay. He’s just resting. And Rorie will be okay, too.” A shadow of guilt crept across his face at having to lie, but it passed quickly, his attention focused on keeping my mother calm.

  She closed her eyes, the relief on her face palpable. After a few moments, her breath ragged and labored, she opened her eyes wide.

  “They were angels,” she repeated, her head turning to focus on Michael. “Like you.” She paused, panting for air.

  I caught my breath, not believing what I was hearing. “What is she trying to say, Michael? How could she—?”

  Michael simply shook his head.

  When she’d gotten control of her breathing again, she continued. “I can see you now, Michael. The real you.”

  Michael wrapped his free hand around my mother’s. Tears were forming in the corner of his eyes. I gasped, stunned, as the edges of his body began to blur and glow, a pixelated light swirling around him until his wings spread out behind him.

  He was revealing himself to my mother. It was beautiful to watch, and heartbreaking, for I realized now what he’d meant when he’d said he was here for her.

  He’d been sent to take her home—to escort her through death, another of his pre-ordained duties as one of God’s archangels.

  “I can see you,” she repeated, smiling through her pain. “You’re beautiful.” She shifted, looking at the empty space at the end of the bed. “I see Don, too. Funny, isn’t it? He was right all along. And now you are here for me. Both of you.”

  She turned her head so she could take in the both of us. “Take care of each other,” she whispered in a hoarse voice. “You belong to each other.”

  With effort, she r
eached out with her other hand, gesturing toward me. I clasped her hand, and she drew it to Michael’s, pressing our hands together.

  The machines began a frantic beeping.

  “No!” I screamed. I stabbed at the call button and then ran to the door, flinging it wide. “Somebody, get in here! My mother is crashing!”

  Michael didn’t move. He hung onto my mother’s hand, a bittersweet smile on his face, as his image began to flicker in and out.

  The alarms and beeps crescendoed as a rush of personnel swarmed the room, surrounding my mother.

  “Clear!”

  I heard the thump of their attempt to restart her failing heart.

  “Clear!”

  But in the next instant, everything stopped, and all the noises fell away except for the doctor’s call for another charge.

  “Clear!”

  I stood by, helpless, as they tried again and again to draw my mother back from the edge of death. When they stepped away from her bedside, defeated, I shoved my knuckles against my teeth to stifle my cry.

  My mother was gone.

  And as I looked around the room, I realized that so was Michael.

  twelve

  LUCAS

  The girls were huddled together in the backseat. I’d snatched Rorie away so quickly that she hadn’t had time to change into street clothes. We’d been delayed by the presence of the angel, Arthur, and Rorie’s mother—much more than I’d expected. I hadn’t anticipated they could put up such a fight—not without the other angels to help them. That my sword sent Arthur to purgatory, to wait out his rebirth, was a gift—one fewer of Michael’s goon squad to worry about. But Mona …

  Mona I hadn’t intended to hurt. She’d simply gotten in the way when she’d tried to intervene. The memory of how my own rage had gotten the best of me replayed itself in my brain, over and over, an itch that demanded to be scratched. It had been an unfortunate lapse. Perhaps she would survive her injuries, I told myself. I found myself rooting for her, hoping she would.

  I shook my head, trying to rid my mind of the image of her crawling across the floor, trying to reach her daughter, to protect her.

  Was I going soft?

  No. Not soft. After all, the most delicious part of a kidnapping is the worried parent left behind, imagination run amok as she considers the torture and degradation being inflicted on the missing child. There was a part of me that wanted—no, needed—to know that Mona would be experiencing that anguish. She needed to be alive.

  But there was another part of me, I admit—a begrudging part, but real—that respected how she never gave up. Even when confronted by something so obviously beyond the grasp of her feeble human understanding—the majesty of God’s angels, flying in the face of her rigid adherence to science—she never wavered in her efforts to save her child, no matter the cost to herself.

  No, it wasn’t Mona’s spirit that was flawed—just the imperfect flesh with which God saw fit to enrobe it.

  She proved a stark contrast to Macey’s foster parents, the Jacksons. Even as my Fallen and I faced them in our full regalia, they turned their horror of the situation on their child. “Oh, Macey, what have you done?” they’d asked, wringing their hands as we bore down on them. Their rejection of her was just what I needed: it wounded Macey, it proved to her that I’d been right all along, and at the same time it gave me an excuse to wipe them from the Earth.

  As if I needed any further excuse.

  I yawned, thinking of it, a great, exhausted gaping hole of a yawn, yet another proof of how inferior this frail-bodied race really was. But it served me, for the time being, to hide within this human shell. A slightly different human shell, of course: I had put away my angels’ wings and dropped the guise of Luke temporarily, instead posing as a much older man, a mere go-between dispatched to deliver the girls to their ultimate destination. After endless muttering to herself, questioning what she’d really seen, Rorie seemed to have written off what she’d witnessed—the flaming swords, the armored angels—as a trick of her own mind, making it easy for her to accept me as what I appeared: a mere human, just a nameless link in the chain of hopelessness by which she was now bound. Both she and Macey assumed I didn’t even know English, for that matter—and so they grew incautious, gifting me with a full window into their insipid teenage minds.

  We’d driven all night from Atlanta and then stopped for a break at a cheap motel off the interstate. I’d cuffed the girls to the bed while I disappeared, just to make sure Rorie, in particular, didn’t get the bright idea to escape. Now, after hours on the road, it was again beginning to get dark. When we’d started off, I’d thrown them in the backseat, one of my men ordering them to keep their heads covered with the thin blankets we’d tossed in after them. Disorientation and dislocation were all part of the plan.

  Once we were safely out of Georgia, I grew lax, letting them poke their heads out of their blankets, even letting them begin to talk. It was probably a mistake to put them together, but it was too late to do anything about it now.

  And in a way, letting them bond would serve my purposes later.

  I smiled to myself, humming a little as we drove past the shorn, desolate cornfields of winter, headed toward Minneapolis.

  Rorie wore what passed for pajamas these days: flannel bottoms and a T-shirt. Macey, on the other hand, was still decked out in the clothes I’d made her change into at the Bluff—a lacy camisole that draped suggestively over her bare shoulder, revealing a delicate cotton bra strap and tiny denim shorts. Neither had a jacket. That they were ill prepared for a northern climate was obvious and put them even more at my mercy.

  “Where do you think we’re going?” Rorie wondered aloud. She pressed her face to the window. “I don’t recognize anything.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Macey responded in a despondent tone. “As long as Luke is there when we get there.”

  Rorie snorted and turned back to her friend. “Wake up, Macey. Luke isn’t going to be there. Luke wasn’t your boyfriend. He was using you.”

  “Was not!” Macey shouted back, her face red. “He loves me. He told me so.”

  “If he loved you, would he have done this?” She turned over Macey’s bare arm, revealing a trail of round burns from the cigarette I’d pressed into her flesh when she’d been particularly uncooperative. They were starting to heal, but the memory was fresh enough that Macey shuddered. She yanked her arm out of Rorie’s reach.

  “You’re just jealous,” Macey retorted, playing back one of the poisonous beliefs I’d planted in her feeble brain. “You don’t like him because he picked me, not you.”

  Rorie rolled her eyes. “Yeah, that’s it. I really wish I had a boyfriend that beat me up, got me hooked on heroin, and forced me to take nudie pictures.” Her eyes narrowed. “What else did he make you do, Macey?”

  Macey turned bright red before scooting across the seat, as far away from Rorie as she could get. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Rorie shot a look to me where I sat behind the steering wheel, as if making sure I was not listening. My face—a sliver of it visible in the rear view mirror—was a blank mask of indifference. She moved closer to Macey and put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Macey. Listen to me. I don’t know what he did to you. But you have to believe me. You deserve better. Someone who loves you would never hurt you. Not knowingly. Not in the way I think he was hurting you.”

  I frowned. This was not going in a helpful direction.

  Macey leaned her head against the side of the car. “How do you know what I deserve?”

  Before Rorie could answer, I swerved the car hard, horns blaring as I cut across three lanes of traffic to get onto the exit ramp.

  The girls careened into each other and screamed.

  So much for their little chat.

  After a while, I spied a truck stop. We needed fuel. As I slowed to turn in, Rorie pushed herself back against the window, squinting into the headlights of the oncoming traffic while sh
e scanned the collage of road signs.

  “I don’t recognize any of the roads,” she whispered.

  I pulled into the pumping station and got out, locking the doors behind me. I surveyed the area—no police. While the car refueled, I went inside and bought some chips and bottled water.

  Back at the car, I unceremoniously tossed my purchases into the backseat. I pulled the car around to the parking tarmac and watched as the girls tore into the junk food like a pack of slavering dogs.

  They were done within minutes. I watched, amused, as Macey looked longingly into the empty chip bag, tipping it upside down to be sure it was really empty before proceeding to lick the orange flavor coating off of her fingers.

  “Time for you to earn your keep,” I stated. The girls looked up at me, startled to realize that I’d been able to understand everything they’d been saying. It was the first time they had heard me speak in this body. I stepped out of the car and jerked open the rear door next to Macey. “Out. Now.”

  When she didn’t immediately respond, I snaked an arm in and gripped her hard, pulling until I’d dumped her out on the asphalt. Before Rorie could do anything, I slammed the door shut and locked it behind me. Rorie flung herself against the window, shouting and pounding on the glass.

  I darted a glance around the lot, making sure nobody was around to intervene over Miss Queen Bee’s fit. Satisfied, I turned my attention to Macey.

  “Get up,” I ordered.

  Macey looked around. There was no one to help her, nobody to argue on her behalf. Slowly, she stumbled back to her feet.

  “Walk.” I gave her a little shove.

  She began walking toward the parked trucks, trailing one last look over her bare shoulder to where Rorie continued to press herself up against the window. Defeated, Macey slumped her shoulders, tugging her camisole up and wrapping her arms around her waist for warmth before shuffling ahead, her eyes glued to the asphalt.

  The trucks were lined up, engines still running. Dim lights shone from a few of the cabs. Most were dark. It was a little early for this, but I was sure I would find a taker.