Deziel
Deziel
The porch of the Kincaid house was painted haint blue. Old oak trees cast long shadows around the mansion, and the woods whispered,
never far away. Galilee sat on the front steps, leaning against a post, while Darling Kincaid rocked slowly in a chair, dark
liquor lapping in a glass in her hand.
Her grandmother looked out into the sunset. “Where’s your Devil?” she asked. “And the other one?”
“Back in the city,” Galilee replied, her hair loose around her shoulders. “They’re moving my things into the new house.”
“Hah.” Darling’s silver braids shone in the light. “You weren’t sure they’d be welcome here. Coulda asked.”
Galilee shrugged with an easy smile. “After y’all found out the truth, shit, I wasn’t sure I’d be welcome here.”
Her grandmother hummed disapprovingly in the back of her throat. “You always welcome here. Don’t you dare doubt it.”
“Tell that to Sage and ’em.”
Darling scoffed. “Don’t worry about that. What don’t come out in the wash comes out into the rinse.”
Galilee frowned but let it go. She had returned fewer and fewer times, thanks to the suspicious glances from too many of her own family, creeping at her heels like bitter hounds.
She still had Darling, Collette, and Celestial, but when the Kincaids had found out who exactly her mother was, even Leah and Zélie had given her a wide berth.
Turned out that being unknown was less terrifying than the truth of what she was, but these were the costs paid for power.
Darling fixed her dark eyes on her granddaughter. “You gotta take your home back,” she said. “Can’t let them push you out,
little girl.”
“Fine,” Galilee replied. “Got any ideas on how to do that exactly?”
Darling rose to her feet as the last rays of the sun cast a golden stream on the porch. “Sure, I do,” she said. “You bring
your Devil and his prince to dinner, and they’ll sit and break bread with us.”
Galilee’s jaw dropped, and she twisted around on the steps as Darling opened up the screen door to go back inside. “You sure
about this, Nana Darling?”
Her grandmother gave her a stern look. “And why wouldn’t I be? They yours, right?”
Blood rushed to Galilee’s face. It was a claim but also a responsibility—anything they did on Kincaid land would fall on her
head. But the Morningstar and his prince were very much hers, just as she was theirs and they were each other’s.
“Yes, ma’am,” she said.
“Well then,” Nana Darling replied, “you and yours belong with us. Always have, always will.”
The creeks echoed in her voice, blood and dirt under her tongue. Galilee shuddered at the weight of what Nana Darling was
doing. If Galilee was a Kincaid, then her power was in service to the Kincaids. If the Devil and his prince were hers, then
that meant their power was in service to the Kincaids as well. It was an alliance no one would have ever thought Darling Kincaid would make.
“You sure, Nana Darling?”
Galilee was really asking about herself, but her grandmother simply smiled at her with equal parts love and cunning in her eyes. “You’re a Kincaid,” she said firmly. “You’re ours.”
The screen door closed behind her, and Galilee Kincaid stared out into the land for a long time. On the other side of the
forests, down in Salvation, her Devil and their prince were waiting for her in a little house that tasted of cacao and smoke.
She stood up from the steps, and the forests whispered a cool breeze around her legs, smelling of stones and water; of land
that would never leave her, no matter where her heart flew; of roots that would always be a map back.
Galilee Kincaid started walking home.
Darling Kincaid stepped into the parlor of the big house, where I was crouched by a window looking out to the porch, watching
my daughter leave.
“She’s gone now,” Darling said, as if I couldn’t see it for myself—everything that I had gambled and lost. The archangel’s
gift and curse, my precious weapon who turned out to be my undoing. My heart was fluttering madly in my chest.
I had a heart. I had a chest, a form I could no longer shift out of at will. Every cell I had now stank of Michael’s betrayal,
of his flaming sword burning paths down my back. The Morningstar had been right all along, and it galled me. I was reduced
to this, crawling on earth in a human shell, unremarkable and horrifyingly vulnerable. I longed to seek vengeance, but I was stripped
down to new bone, this fresh marrow, exhausted by my losses. I simply could not summon up the spite; I was trying too hard
to just hold myself together.
After my Fall, Michael had thrown me down outside of Salvation, a cruel and final gesture, a reminder of how I had failed.
I’d staggered my way to Kincaid land, weeping and bleeding, shocked by the flesh I was now trapped in.
Darling had found me in the woods, wearing the form Michael locked me in: the woman who had tricked and then killed Gifty Williams, the woman who had bargained with Darling herself, the woman from the creek.
My daughter’s grandmother should have killed me the moment she ran into me, but instead, Darling Kincaid had taken one look at me, sighed deeply, and lowered herself slowly onto a log.
“Go on then, angel,” she’d said. “Might as well tell me everything.”
I was panting, knifed in half from agony. “Kincaid . . .” I gasped, desperation coppery in my mouth. “Keep me safe . . .”
Darling had cocked her head, her eyes steady, not kind but not cruel. “You’ll owe me,” she said. “Sanctuary on Kincaid land
is no small thing.”
My ribs screamed. My back bled dark rivers from where my wings had been cut out. “Anything,” I panted. “You can have anything.”
Darling Kincaid smiled slowly. I felt the lock of an oath clanging around my neck.
“We have a deal,” she said, and a black bird screamed in the sky.