“All right,” I say. “Introduce me to Mystery Guy.”
We leave around sundown, ride the metro to the Spanish Steps. Angela keeps running her fingers through her hair, reapplying her lipstick. At the door of his flat, she turns to me and puts on her this-is-serious face. “Try to have an open mind,” she says.
She knocks. Somebody inside turns down the music, a slow and mournful kind of blues. Footsteps. Then the door opens and there he is again, the guy from the train, smiling broadly.
“Buongiorno,” he says. He leans over like he’s going to give Angela a brief kiss on the mouth, the kind a man might give his wife before heading off to the office, but she turns at the last second so his kiss glances off her cheek. She murmurs something I don’t quite catch. He looks at me. “Hi. Come in.”
We follow him into the apartment. It’s a small place, but cozy and well decorated. Right off it’s obvious that he’s some kind of artist or art collector. There are paintings everywhere, mostly in a type of impressionism, I think, although I don’t know much about art.
An artist, I think. How perfect that Angela would fall for an artist.
He leads us to the living room and a green velvet sofa.
“Have a seat,” he says, and we sit.
He reminds me of Orlando Bloom, I decide, slender and soulful-eyed, a relatively tidy mop of dark, curly hair, fine-boned face with distinctive crinkles around his eyes when he smiles. He’s older than I first thought, maybe even thirty. I wonder if that’s what Angela meant by me keeping an open mind.
An awkward minute passes where we all basically look each other over. Then Angela forces her gaze away from him, looks at me, clears her throat. “So. Um. This is Clara Gardner.”
“Good to finally meet you,” he says warmly. “Angela’s told me so much about you.”
That makes one of us, I think. He doesn’t have an Italian accent, which surprises me. There’s something foreign about it, soft r’s like he’s British, maybe faintly Middle Eastern, but definitely not Italian.
“Clara,” Angela says then, a nervous tremor in her voice. “Meet Phen.”
Wait.
I know that name.
I glance from him back to Angela. “I’m sorry. Did you say . . . ?”
“Phen,” he says, louder, like I’m hard of hearing. “It’s actually Penamue, but I go by Phen. With my friends, anyway.”
Right. Phen. As in, the guy who Angela met two years ago, who told her about the angel-bloods.
That Phen.
Angela’s in love with an angel.
ANGELA
I first met him in a church. I had a thing for churches back then; I suppose I still do. They’re so quiet most of the time, a quiet that’s different from anyplace else, cool and peaceful and contemplative in their very nature. I’m not religious, not the way my mother is, but I like churches. I go there to relax, to calm the inner voices of my everyday life, to think.
This church was located in a tiny, out-of-the-way corner of Milan, San Bernadino alle Ossa. I went there because I heard that there was a room decorated with human bones, and I found this horrible and fascinating. I was sixteen that summer, and I’d been going around Italy on my own private creeptastic tour, making a point to visit all the churches that housed the corpses of the saints, whose bodies were said to remain mostly fresh and pliable for hundreds of years after they’d died—incorruptible, is the term—that’s how good they were. It was morbid but fun, visiting these nuns in glass cases who all looked the same, dressed in white, their hands folded in prayer, sleeping eternally, like Snow White waiting for the prince’s kiss.
A room of bones was too good to pass up.
The room was in a side pocket of the church. There was a cross on the wall inside made from human skulls—in fact, the walls were almost entirely covered with bones, hundreds and hundreds of skulls and ribs and tiny bits I couldn’t identify. My mother would have had a heart attack if she’d been there. It gave me a wicked thrill, looking at all that macabre art, but it also kind of grossed me out. It was different from the bodies of the saints, so carefully laid out in order that people could come and be near someone holy, even in death. This seemed like a reminder—we all die, and it’s not so pretty—and I looked from one skull to another and thought about how each had once had a face. A life. It was a person who ate and drank and complained about the weather and tried to get by the best he could. Now on the wall of a church, gaped at by a morbid American tourist.
Right then I decided that it’s not polite to leer at the dead. I turned to go.
That’s when I saw him.
He was standing at the front of the church, directly under the dome, staring up at the fresco on the ceiling, angels and sky and people being borne up to heaven, I assumed. He seemed focused on one particular corner of the fresco, an angel in a pinkish robe, what a few hundred years ago might have been red, with gray, outstretched wings. He didn’t look like he was getting anything spiritual from the church, not praying or receiving any kind of divine inspiration. In fact he—the guy, not the angel—was almost scowling. Muttering to himself.
Then I noticed that he was also kind of glowing, a weak, almost unperceivable light flickering out of him.
I knew, in that instant, that he was one of them.
An angel.
Of course I had to introduce myself. I’d never met an angel before, not a real-life angel who existed outside the words in my books, the stories my mother told me. I smoothed my hair back—because, also, this guy was unbelievably attractive, perhaps the most ridiculously good-looking guy I’d ever seen—and applied a layer of lip gloss. I glanced around and saw that we were the only two in the sanctuary, and then I straightened my shoulders, walked up to him, and said, “Hello.”
Not in English, as it turned out.
In Angelic.
I’d never spoken Angelic aloud before that moment, and it surprised me as much as it did him—the way the word sounded, like two notes of music played simultaneously, like a feeling instead of a word.
Hello.
His gaze jerked down from the fresco on the ceiling and landed, red-hot, on me. Astonished. Then accusatory. Then curious.
I was all of those things, too. Because he and the fresco angel had the same face.
We stared at each other for like two minutes.
“What did you say?” he asked slowly in Italian, carefully, like he might have misheard—although there was no possible way that what I said sounded like anything else but what it was.