“I am Tessriel, your former sister in Heaven.” The unfamiliar angel had bowed her head in deference. “Angel of the thunder that rolls across Eurasia.”
Tessriel was looking at Arriane, and something in a distant meadow of Arriane’s soul recalled this angel. Her sister. Yes. They hadn’t known each other well in Heaven—there had been a league of other angels between them, but there had always been a connection. That inexplicable mystery called attraction.
“I bring news of your brother Roland,” Tessriel said to Arriane, who had gasped at the sound of his name.
“Roland resides in Lucifer’s domain,” Gabbe said sharply. “You bring us news from Hell?”
“I bring you news—” Tessriel’s voice wavered and Arriane’s heart went out to her. She hadn’t seen Roland since the Fall and she missed him desperately. This angel had come with a message. Arriane scrambled forward, pressing up against Gabbe, who held her back with the white edge of her wing.
“Go now, leave us be,” Gabbe commanded. It was final.
Tessriel shook her head sadly as she turned to go. She looked back once at Arriane, briefly and with great sorrow. “Goodbye.”
“Goodbye!”
But it wasn’t goodbye. Years later, on her own, walking the shoals of a mortal river, she came upon the red-haired angel again.
“Tessriel?”
Tessriel looked up from the river, where she was bathing. She was naked, her pure-white wings skimming the surface of the water, and her long red hair trailing slickly down her back.
“Is it you?” Tessriel whispered. “I thought I’d never see you again.”
When the angel rose from the river, the sight of her mortal guise was too much for Arriane, who looked away, thrilled and embarrassed. She heard the ripple of wings leaving water, felt a brush of warm wind, and then, a second later, the sweetest lips pressed down on hers. Wet arms and wet wings engulfed her.
“What was that?” Arriane blinked in astonishment as Tessriel pulled away. Her lips tingled with unexpected desire.
“A kiss. I promised myself that if I did see you again, that’s what I would do.”
“And if I left right now and then came back,” Arriane wondered aloud, “would you kiss me like that again?”
Tessriel nodded, a vast smile on her face.
“Goodbye,” Arriane whispered, closing her eyes. When she opened them, she said, “Hello.”
And Tessriel kissed her again.
And again.
On a dark fjord north of Norway … on a ship setting sail for the Indies … on a dusty desert plateau in Persia … or in a rainstorm inside a rain forest—when the world was uncomplicated and young and neither fallen angel had yet turned in the direction each would ultimately turn in, Arriane and Tessriel were always saying goodbye to say hello again, always moving in or out of a kiss.
Now, feeling as far as she ever had from the lips of the demon she’d loved, Arriane passed a pair of herons in the sky. They were paired, but she had to be alone. Because of old allegiances neither would betray. It drove her mad with frustration. She needed to be someplace lonesome and remote, where her heart could ache in peace.
Tears blurred her vision as she climbed over the low-lying meadows of the valley below. She didn’t want to leave Tess; she couldn’t leave quickly enough. Soon, she had escaped the dairy in its little verdant vale, which she had grown to love.
Love. What was it, anyway?
Daniel and Lucinda seemed to know. There had been moments when Arriane thought she danced toward love’s awareness: tender, fleeting moments locked in a kiss with Tess, when both souls lost themselves completely. If only they could have stayed like that forever, lying to themselves in an extended state of bliss.
Maybe love was lying to yourself.
No. The world bore down on them, and in the broad, clear light of day, Arriane knew that what she felt for Tess both was and was not love. It was everything—and it was impossible.
It was why they had already been through this kind of goodbye, the ugly kind, once before.
It was a few hundred years after the Fall. Arriane had finally made her choice. She had been back to the plains of Heaven and, after some time, had made her peace with the Throne. Her wings shone a terrific iridescent silver—the mark that she was accepted once again—and Arriane was eager to show them off to her love. She found Tessriel under the Amazonian waterfall where they had agreed to meet.
“Look what I’ve done—”
“What have you done?”
Just as Arriane’s wings bore a brand-new silver shine, Tessriel’s wings were tainted—a glorious, gaudy gold.
“You never told me you were considering …” Arriane’s voice trailed off.
“You never told me, either.” Tess’s eyes welled up with tears, but as soon as she wiped them away, she looked angry.
“But why? Why would you side with him?”
“Isn’t your choice as arbitrary as mine? Your master is only the authority because you say he is.”
“At least he is good, unlike your master!”
“Good. Evil. They’re just words, Arriane. Who can trust them, anyway?”
“How—how can I love you now?” Arriane whispered.
“It’s simple,” Tess said with a sad shake of her head. “You can’t.”
It was Roland who brought them back together. Now Arriane almost wished he hadn’t. But at the time, she had needed Tess more than she ever would have admitted. Roland arranged for a stolen moment between the two in Jerusalem, after what was supposed to be Cam’s marriage to Lilith.
That marriage hadn’t happened.
But Arriane and Tessriel had. As soon as they saw each other, their argument dissolved into another unstoppable kiss.
“We must be free to each be ourselves independently,” Tessriel had told her, “but we shall never be as strong and solid as we are when we’re together.”
“Be careful,” Roland was always saying when she would sneak off to be with Tess. And Arriane was. Never once did they get caught. Never once did the angels suspect Arriane’s secret romance with one of Lucifer’s closest demons. She had been careful about so much—except the destiny of her heart.
She simply had never expected Tessriel to make her choose.
But now it had come to that, and there was only one choice.
This goodbye had to be forever.
Arriane couldn’t breathe. Tears streamed down her cheeks now as she gasped and blindly flew on, not knowing where she’d go.
Would she ever see her love again?
A sharp pain seemed to pierce her heart, an agony riddled its way into the fissures of her bones. What was happening? Then a dark premonition sapped at her soul, and Arriane cried out in fear.
She clutched her heart, but this wasn’t mere heartache.
Something was wrong.
Tess.
In the middle of her flight across the mountains of northern Italy, Arriane swooped around to reverse directions in the sky. Her wings shuddered and her heart stalled and the only thing she knew was that she had to get back to the dairy farm. It was a lover’s intuition, a slow consciousness spreading through her brain.…
Until she was absolutely certain …
Something had happened—
Something unspeakable.
THREE
LOVE TAKES WING
The barn was empty.
The sun had set.
The only light besides a cold sliver of Tuscan moon shining through the open door came from Arriane’s wings. They cast a soft, opalescent glow on the animals, which were not sleeping: The horses whinnied and the chickens clucked restlessly in their pens; the cows lay in the musky hay, their udders swollen with milk.
They sensed something, too.
Arriane grew frantic—where was Tess? She paced the barn, searching for clues, finding only the evidence of their fight. The toppled milk pails. The scuffed patch of muddy hay where they had tussled. If she closed her eyes, she could still see Tess the way she wanted to, smiling, the bright flush in her cheeks.
Arriane’s breath made clouds before her face. She watched them vanish into the frosty air. She wanted to scream, to stop every disappearing thing.
The premonition was so strong that Arriane wrung her hands, retracing her steps around the stables before she’d stormed off into the sky, remembering the angry words they had spat at each other, regretting everything she’d ever said or done to Tess that did not come from a place of utter love.
There.
She froze as her wing tip dragged across a mound of damp hay.
What was that?
Arriane dropped to her knees. Her wings glowed white, illuminating the terrified animals, which were backed into the corners of their stalls.
There was blood on the hay—a shiny, red pool.
“Tessriel!”
Arriane soared upward, scanning the ground madly for another trace of her love’s blood. She flew in a panicked circle, scouring every inch of the barn, darting like a skylark this way and that, finding nothing.
Until she let her wings carry her outside, to the far side of the barn.
There, just beyond the open doorway, she spied a small well of blood seeping into the grass. She moved closer, hovering over it. She wanted to touch it, but—
No. She stopped herself.
Stretching away from the pool of blood, dark-red beaded drops formed a string several inches long, leading in the direction of the North Star.
Tess was on the move. But what had happened to her?
Arriane flew low to the ground, seeking small signs. At various points she would see spots of blood on blades of tall grass, but then she would lose the trail again. At one point, having crossed a creek bed, the trail disappeared completely, and Arriane wailed, feeling all was lost.
But then, near a weeping willow tree, she picked up her lover’s path again.
Blood streamed for twenty yards—the trail widened and had splashed far, as if a fresh wound had been inflicted. Was an enemy hunting Tess, wounding her as she fled? Arriane sped up, desperate to come between Tess and whatever evil would dare harm her.
Only one being could have hunted down a fully empowered demon. In her darkest imaginings, Arriane could see Lucifer, the layers of cataracts on his eyes, his tremendous wings sprawling with rank black hairs.
But would Lucifer have come here, to wrestle Tess back to Hell? Arriane had never seen her love face to face with her master, though visions of it haunted her. If she discovered Lucifer in the act of harming Tess, Arriane didn’t know what she would do. She could barely fly through the rage that was building inside.
Love like this was fatal, even for an angel.
“Tessriel!” she bellowed again into the endless fields of green. But she heard nothing.
In the west, storm clouds formed a dirty screen across the sky. Arriane hoped that Tess hadn’t traveled in that direction. Everything about the rain—its scent, its effect on the terrain, its purifying quality—would throw Arriane off the trail.
But maybe Tess was counting on that very thing.
So the heart of the tempest was where she would go.
Arriane flattened her wings. She focused on picking up velocity. Turbulence shook her. Her body rocked from left to right, up and down, until she was soaked and shivering and spitting rain.