He takes another step toward me and suddenly I’m inside the radius of his dark glory. The numbness evaporates. I feel the full brunt of the sadness, an ache so deep and raw it hits me like a two-by-four in the chest.
What was it that Mom said? That angels were designed to please God and when they go against that, it causes them all this emotional and physical pain?
This guy’s in some serious pain. He’s up to no good.
“Your shoulder’s dislocated,” he says. “Hold still.”
His cold, rock-hard fingers curl around my wrist before I have time to register anything else and then there’s a loud pop and I scream and scream until my voice fails. A wall of gray pushes in on my vision. The angel’s arms fold around me. He pulls me to his chest as I collapse.
“There now,” he says, smoothing my hair.
I let the gray take me.
When I come to I slowly become aware of two things. First, the pain in my arm is almost completely gone. And second, I’m basically hugging a Black Wing. My face is pressed right against his chest. His body feels immovable and hard as a statue’s. And he’s touching me, feeling my skin, one hand moving against the back of my neck, stroking, the other resting at the small of my back. Under my shirt. His fingers are as cold as a corpse. My skin crawls.
The worst part is that I can feel his mind like I’m swimming in the icy pool of his consciousness. I feel his rising interest in me. He thinks I’m a lovely child, pity that I have such diluted blood. I remind him of someone. I smell pleasant to him, like lavender shampoo and blood and a hint of cloud. And goodness. He can smell the goodness on me, and he wants it. He wants me. He will take me. One more, he thinks, the rage bursting through the lust. How simple it is.
I stiffen in his arms.
“Don’t be afraid,” he says again.
“No.” I put my hands on his brick wall of a chest and push with all my strength. I don’t even budge him.
He responds by lowering me to the rocky ground.
I beat at him uselessly with my fists. I scream. My mind races. I’ll pee on him. Puke, bite, scratch. Sure, I’ll lose, but if he’s going to mark me I am going to mark him too, if such a thing is possible.
“It’s no use, little bird.”
His lips brush my neck. I feel his thoughts. He is utterly alone. He’s cut off. He can never go back.
I scream in his ear. He gives a regretful sigh and clamps one hand over my mouth, while the other gathers up my wrists and pulls my hands up over my head, pinning me. His fingers are like cold metal digging into my flesh.
He tastes like ash.
My brave thoughts of heaven fade in the reality of that moment.
“Stop,” commands a voice.
The Black Wing takes his hand off my mouth. Then he stands up in a quick, fluid movement and lifts me in his arms like a rag doll. Someone’s standing there. A woman with long red hair.
My mom.
“Hello, Meg,” he says, like she’s joining him for afternoon tea.
She stands under the trees about ten feet away, her feet planted shoulder-width apart like she’s bracing for impact. Her expression is so fierce she looks like a different person. I’ve never seen her eyes like that, blue like the hottest part of the fire, fixed on the face of the Black Wing.
“I was wondering what had become of you,” he says. He looks younger, all of a sudden. Boyish, even. “I thought I saw you not long ago. At a mall, of all places.”
“Hello, Samjeeza,” she says.
“I suppose this one is yours.” He glances down at me. I can still feel him in my head. His desire for me faded the moment he saw my mom. He thinks she’s truly beautiful. It’s her, he realizes, who I remind him of. Her sweet spirit. Her courage. So like her father.
“You surprise me, Meg,” he says in a friendly tone. “I would never have taken you for the mothering kind. And so late in life, too.”
“Take your hands off her now, Sam,” she says wearily, like he’s annoying the crap out of her.
His grip tightens. “Don’t be disrespectful.”
“She’s only a quarter, not worth your time. She’s little more than human.”
Her eyes flicker to mine for a second. She has a plan.
“No,” says Sam stiffly. “I want her. Unless you’d rather it was you?”
“Go to hell,” she snaps.
His anger feels like a rising mushroom cloud to me, although the expression on his face doesn’t change.
“All right,” he says.
He murmurs something in Angelic, a word that for once I don’t understand, and suddenly the air around us shimmers and splits. There’s a shrieking sound, a tearing. The ground under our feet jolts slightly, the way it feels when someone drops something heavy on the floor. Then the earth I know peels away into a gray world.
It’s like the forest we were in but diminished to a bleak and hopeless wasteland. The shape of the land is the same as the place we left, the side of a mountain with trees, but here the trees have no leaves or needles. They’re just bare, gray trunks and twisted branches against the grainy, rumbling sky. There’s no color or smell or sound beyond occasional thunder. No birds. The light is fading like the sun is setting, and black storm clouds roll over what had been, on earth, a perfectly blue sky.
I’ve always envisioned hell as all hot fire and brimstone, lakes of sulfur, demons with horns and glowing eyes torturing the souls of the damned. But here the air’s so cold I can see my breath. A slimy kind of mist passes over, chilling me to the bone. I’m shivering like crazy.
Mom is brighter than everything else, still in black and white but like the contrast on her has been turned way up. Her skin glows radiantly white. Her hair is inky black.
The Black Wing loosens his grip on my arm. We both know I have nowhere to run now. He looks way more relaxed. In hell he’s bigger, taller, and meatier, if that’s possible. More powerful. His eyes gleam. He closes them for a moment, inhales deeply like he’s enjoying the feel of the air, and then his wings appear behind him. They’re huge—much larger than Mom’s or mine—and an oily, absolute black, a dark hole opening up behind him, sucking all light into it.
He smiles, a sad smile. He’s proud of himself. The transition to hell from where we were is no easy thing. He wants to impress my mother.
“You’re a bigger fool than I thought,” Mom says bluntly. She doesn’t sound impressed. “You can’t keep us here.”
That’s good news to me.