by L. Penelope
“I do not have one to give him,” I say. "Neither angels nor angelborn do."
“Do I?” Desi asks.
Wren and I look at her in shock.
“Yes,” Helix replies. "All born of human mothers do."
“Can I?” Desi’s eyes are on me, but I’m speechless.
Again, Helix responds. “It is your soul. You may do with it what you wish.”
Desi turns to Wren before either of us can speak. “I bind my soul to yours for all eternity.”
A light flashes from within Desi, a tiny spark of whitish blue transfers from her chest to his. Wren rubs the spot on his chest where it hit him.
“It is done,” Helix says. “You have your soul, halfling. And now, our bargain.” He turns to Desi. “Are you ready?”
“Now?”
“Time is of the essence.”
She squares her shoulders, then nods. Helix approaches and takes her hand. At that moment, a golden portal shimmers open right beside us.
Cynnix steps out, tipping his top hat at me.
My time is up.
Chapter Thirty-Two
The portal remains open, giving a glimpse of the bright walls of some room in Euphoria. Cynnix runs his cold gaze across the scene. With a snap of his fingers, all of the gawking humans around us turn and move away, their eyes glazed over. Thumbs hover over phones, deleting photos and videos. Only Lyrix, Desi, Helix and I remain.
“It is done, then, I see,” Cynnix says to Lyrix. “Your halfling has a soul.” His lip curls up at this and I clench my jaw. He turns to her as if I’m worthy of no further contemplation. “The Adjustment begins shortly.”
I grab Lyrix’s hand. She tries to pull away, but I hold on tight.
“I have to go, Wren. It’s my duty.”
I understand, but cannot accept it. She will become what she hates—she was never meant to be a Seraph. I know this with my heart and my new soul. It just isn’t right.
“What’s happening now?” Desi asks, staring in amazement at the glimmering portal and at Cynnix.
The angel pins her with his icy gaze. “Your ancestor here must now return and take her place as leader of our people.”
Desi gasps. Lyrix’s face crumples. “It’s true,” she says. “I’m needed by our kind. The source of our power is weakening, and as the youngest, strongest angel, I must try and find a solution. They’ve waited for me for a long time; now I have to leave.”
Desi starts to cry. “No, it’s not fair.” She wraps her arms around Lyrix. I’m surprised by her sudden display of emotion, and I wonder what she’s feeling. As an empath, the pain of our impending separation, after just having found one another, must be very intense.
Helix frowns and moves closer to Desi and Lyrix. “And what if there were an even younger and more powerful angel available?” Everyone turns to stare at him. Desi sniffs and wipes her nose on her sleeve.
“There have been no emergences since Lyrix,” Cynnix says with a scoff.
“That is true,” Helix concedes. He executes an exaggerated shrug of his shoulders. “Desiree, I believe that I have kept my end of our bargain.” He waggles his eyebrows excessively.
She sniffs again and frowns. “You want me to do it right now?”
“If you do not mind.” His voice is low and he gives a little bow. She wipes her hands on her jeans and holds them out to him. Fear slithers down my spine when his palms meet hers. I desperately hope that what he has in mind does not hurt her.
Cynnix clears his throat impatiently, but we ignore him, watching Desi in action.
“With Gran, the things she forgot always felt soft and light, like they were encased in cotton,” she says, uneasily. "I'm not exactly sure if it will be the same for you or not." Helix closes his eyes and his body begins to glow a soft yellow. He does not respond out loud, but perhaps he directs her mentally to the memories he wants her to restore. Her face scrunches in concentration before she abruptly stumbles backward, breaking their contact. I lurch forward to catch her if she falls.
“Desi?” Lyrix says, panic lacing her voice.
“I’m okay, I think,” she says. She holds her head with one hand and squeezes her eyes shut.
Helix’s eyes are closed as well. When he opens them, they flash an eerily bright yellow, before settling back to brown.
“What did you do?” I ask through clenched teeth. Lyrix holds Desi, who seems disoriented and is having trouble standing. I round on Helix, grabbing the lapels of his expensive shirt in my hands.
He chuckles. “Shared my memories with her.” I turn back to Desi to see that she’s fallen to her knees, with Lyrix trying to prop her up.
“Which ones?” I choke out.
“All of them.”
Desi falls flat on the ground and begins to convulse. My grip on Helix tightens, and the ground shakes subtly with Lyrix’s anger. She looks up, her own eyes flashing as she struggles to control her swelling emotions. Cynnix is alarmed and takes a step towards Lyrix, but I stop him with a glare. “Don’t touch her!” He freezes mid-motion.
I’m caught between wanting to pummel Helix for harming Desi and wanting to calm Lyrix before she loses control.
“Look at her,” Helix says into my ear.
I shift my attention to Desi, who has begun to glow. A multicolored light radiates from her, growing slowly until it covers her entire body. Lyrix relaxes and backs away as Desi floats into the air, still horizontal. She rotates until she’s upright and opens her eyes.
In my human form, like most other humans, I cannot see an angel’s angelic form. But Desi isn’t entirely human; she isn’t angel or angelborn either. She bears the rainbow colors of the unaffiliated, and the form she takes is decidedly angelic, though not as bright as an angelborn or full angel. I don’t know what she is.
“Desi?” Lyrix’s voice calls out.
Desi turns her head but focuses on Cynnix. His face is aghast as he stares up at her. “What is this?” he whispers.
Helix pulls out of my grasp and floats nearer to Desi. He tilts his head, considering her. “A new angel.”
“Impossible,” Cynnix says.
“She is more than half angel. Her angelic form just needed to be unlocked,” Helix says.
“You knew this would happen?” I ask.
His gaze darts to me, then back to Desi. “I had a theory.”
The anger is present, but it battles with the wonder. Desi holds her arms in front of her, turning them over as if she’s never seen them before.
“She is connected to the Eternal Flame through both her human and angel parentage," Helix says. "She bears the mark not only of the last Nascent, but of at least three other angels in her lineage. Her father, grandfather and great-grandmother were all humanborn. She is something entirely unique.”
Desi’s glow gets progressively stronger—the Flame must be charging her, running through her strongly now.
“I can see it.” Her voice is a version of her human voice, but with an additional harmony to it. “The Resurrection’s memories are complete. He remembers what others have forgotten. He remembers what broke the Flame in the first place.”
Cynnix stares up at her, all derision gone from his face, replaced with pure awe. “What broke it?”
Desi flashes suddenly. In the blink of an eye, she’s nose to nose with Cynnix. He tries to lean back away from her gaze, but has nowhere to go. “And I see what you have done as well. You instructed an Angel of War to influence a human to kill Wren. That is against angelic law.”
Everything inside me goes cold. Lyrix’s mouth falls open. Cynnix sputters, looking around, trying to avoid Desi’s intense glare. “I—I…” His mouth opens and closes, but he can’t give voice to the lie. “Helix could not know that.”
Helix grins and crosses his arms in front of him. “And yet I do.”
I go to Lyrix, who is still on her knees on the ground. All of the emotions running through the bond are too intense to process. She is rigid in my arms.
&nbs
p; Cynnix straightens his shoulders. “I serve the Flame. She needed to come home. The halfling was a distraction.”
“Did the Seraphim order you to have me killed?” My voice is strangely even. I’m still trying to process everything that’s happening.
“They did not. I took that initiative. It was what was best for the Flame.”
Desi flares even brighter. “Go back and tell them what you’ve done. And tell them that I can help them fix their precious Flame, but only if Lyrix is spared the transformation.”
“You know how to fix it?” Cynnix’s voice is breathless.
Desi appears to grow brighter and brighter, until all of us have to shade our eyes.
“I—I will tell them. I believe they will be amenable to whatever best serves the Flame.” Cynnix stumbles backward and practically runs through the portal, shifting to his angel form at the last possible moment.
When the portal disappears, the street corner where we stand is silent. No cars drive by. No people walk. Streetlights and building lights pale in comparison to Desi’s beautiful glow, now quickly dimming. She looks different than Lyrix, different than any other unaffiliated angel. Her colors swirl and mix like a twisting kaleidoscope, never settling or stopping. They grow more vivid, then fade, only to spark into brightness again. It’s mesmerizing to watch.
“How do I…? How can I…?” she asks, a note of panic tingeing her melodic voice.
“You want to change back?” Lyrix asks. “Let me help you.”
Lyrix rises to whisper into Desi’s ear, guiding her through the process of shifting back to human. It takes several minutes for her to get the hang of it, but soon, the short, brown-skinned girl is back where something angelic was a moment ago.
I’m locked in place, overwhelmed by emotion. When Desi looks up to me, the whites of her eyes still swirl with subtle colors, until they fade away completely.
Helix watches this all impassively, his arms crossed in front of him.
“You could have said something,” I say to him.
“And you would have believed me? Besides, I was not certain. It was merely a theory.”
I shake my head. “So you have your memories back?”
“Yes, and now I know why they were locked away in the first place.” The tone of his voice makes the hair stand up on my arms. “Saving the Flame will not be easy.” He shakes his head and gives a dry chuckle. “I believe the expression is, ‘be careful what you wish for.’”
Helix rises into the sky, a humorless smile on his face. Desi pulls away from Lyrix. “Where are you going?” she asks.
“I have no use for tearful reunions. When the Seraphim call for you, I will return. I fear they will not believe what you have to say.”
Desi purses her lips and nods at him, watching as he arcs across the night sky, then quickly fades from sight.
“Is it over?” I ask. Lyrix looks from me to Desi and back.
“I’ll only help them if they let you two stay together,” Desi says.
Lyrix smiles tearfully. “I’m certain they will make that bargain.”
We all stand there staring at each other, barely keeping our mouths from hanging open.
“Well, it’s been swell, but I’d better go find Jessye. Make sure that angel didn’t wipe her brain or anything. Catch you later.” Desi waggles her fingers at us and takes off running down the street.
Alarmed at her nonchalance, I go to call for her, when Lyrix holds me back. “I think she needs time by herself to process this. There will be an opportunity for questions and answers, but she may just need some normalcy right now. Jessye is probably the perfect person for her to be with.”
I nod reluctantly, staring at our descendent as she jogs away. Lyrix turns my face to hers gently and takes my hands. I stare at her, drinking in her features, for the first time without the crushing fear that this may be the last time I can do so.
“Is this real?” I whisper.
“I hope so.” She looks around at the quiet street.
“What do we do now?”
She shrugs. “What do a fallen angel and a resurrected angelborn do to stay out of trouble in this town?”
The answer is obvious—I kiss her. Drinking her in, the way she smells, the way she tastes. Everything assaults me as the fear and strain of the past weeks melt away. Finally, after all this time I get to hold her in my arms, without worrying about how long it will last, or when it will end.
She is mine and I’m hers, and no one can tear us apart.
Epilogue
2400 Cycles Later
The baby’s cries echo down the hall of the hospital. The mother and father look on in wonder at the tiny creature. Black hair is plastered on his head; his eyes glitter like diamonds.
The parents smile brightly at the newborn, and I fade into the background. The baby opens his eyes and looks straight at me, though I am invisible to the other humans present.
He recognizes me, even now, even new to this body and this life.
Then his eyes shift to the angel next to me. Beetrix is in her angelic form, witnessing the second birth of her son. Or the third, if you count his resurrection. She sparkles a little, her way of saying goodbye, and then disappears through a portal overhead.
She has to get back to Euphoria—those pearls won’t catalog themselves.
I take one last look at him before turning away. Now the waiting begins. In a few hundred cycles, close to two decades or so, I will return to find Wren.
The time will pass in the blink of an eye.
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Excerpt: ANGELBORN
MAIA
A groan escapes my throat as I enter my dorm room. He is here again. The strange one with the haunted eyes. There’s just no way to win, is there?
My first year at Douglass University, my social worker, Rosie, pulled some strings and got me into the newest dorm, a building new enough that no one had died in it yet. And I had a single. For all of freshman year, my home was my sanctuary, but this year is different. I have a roommate, Genna. And she’s got a dead guy haunting her.
If he were alive, most girls would call him hot. Light brown eyes, café au lait skin, close-cropped hair. He probably could have modeled in life. He looks about our age, but there’s no way to tell how old he was when he died. The dead appear the way they remember themselves — it’s not always how they looked at the end.
But this one is weird. He’s kind of a failed hipster, all wannabe thrift-store chic in weird jeans and goofy T-shirts, but it totally doesn’t work for him. And he floats, usually near the ceiling. That’s pretty rare. I’ve seen a couple others who did stuff like that, but they’re most often the really angry ones, like Natasha. The murder victims who are about to lose control. This guy seems calm. Harmless, even. He might actually be friendly, but I’m not planning on finding out. And he’s completely obsessed with Genna. He hovers there, staring at her for hours. He’s been here every day for the past week, since right after we moved in.
Rosie told me she’d checked Genna out. Both of her parents and all four of her grandparents are still alive, and she didn’t seem to have any crazy exes in her past, certainly none who had died violently. No stalker types. She’s lived a charmed life so far. She’s
a pretty girl, in a benign, friendly sort of way, and she’s actually gone out of her way to be nice to me. Lord knows I haven’t made it easy. Why she’s being haunted, I have no idea, but it pisses me off.
When I walk in, Ghost Boy is, uncharacteristically, sitting at her desk. Genna is rifling through her dresser, looking for something. She’s usually pretty neat — I guess Rosie checked that out about her too. I still organize her stuff when she’s not around, but she hasn’t said anything about it so far. It used to piss off Cadence, my roommate at the group home, but that never stopped me.
I drop onto my bed and am about to put in my headphones when Genna turns around.
“Caleb, meet Maia. Maia, Caleb.” She points back and forth between me and her desk, then goes back to her dresser. Ghost Boy is staring right at me, but I avoid his eyes and look at Genna’s back. I don’t engage the dead anymore. Ignoring them has been working really well so far. And I know Genna can’t see him, she never has before, so I have no idea what she’s talking about. She slams her drawer shut, turns around, and smiles.
“She’s kind of shy,” she says.
I’m looking at her like she’s crazy. Who the hell is she talking to? Her phone is on her desk, and she doesn’t have a Bluetooth. Something about brain cancer.
Ghost Boy stands up directly in front of me, blocking my view, and holds out his hand like he expects me to shake it. Genna comes up beside him and lays a hand on his outstretched arm. I shoot off the bed, unable to peel my eyes away from her fingers brushing his arm. She’s touching him. His skin looks normal. Golden hairs dust his forearm. His hand is still stretched out to me; I reach for it tentatively, brushing my fingers across warm human flesh before pulling my hand back as if stung.
I feel like I have been stung. Shocked by a cattle prod is more like it. I look back and forth from him to her, disbelief cutting off my airways. What. The. Fuck?