Chapter 47
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
MASON
“Have you ever heard of the Angelakia?” Micah asked, watching me walk into the kitchen as he sat at the table with his laptop, the screen casting a white glow on his face in the darkness. The moon beamed in through the slanted blinds over the windows, painting stripes along the floor.
“No. What, have you? Why?”
“That’s what Dakota is. One of them.” He lowered his voice a bit, probably so she wouldn’t overhear us, though she was supposed to still be in the shower now.
I hadn’t gotten much of a chance to speak with him since he got back yesterday afternoon.
I’d been caught up with my Thrausian responsibilities, which I’d been neglecting somewhat since Aamon’s death. “Nobody knows of it until it happens.”
“Elaborate,” I said as I sat down. There was a glass of aither next to his laptop, the bottle set in the middle of the table. I considered taking a drink of the clear liquid myself, but I wasn’t good at stopping once I started, so I didn’t.
“It’s exceedingly rare.”
“Obviously. She’s rare.”
“She can anchor you, can’t she?” His eyes scrutinized my face, the blue-gray skimming over my confusion and shock. I’d never told him that. I wondered if he could somehow feel that through my emotions.
“Why? Is that what Angelakia means?”
“No, it—It means touched by an angel. And she’s different because of it. She can smell our kapnos. She can anchor you. Obviously, she can become pregnant with an angelic child. There are other things to it, but that’s mostly what will affect her now.”
“Touched by an angel when? And what other things?”
“Well, she could become—” Micah cut himself off at the faint sound of his bedroom door opening. Dakota’s footsteps were quiet and light down the upstairs hallway, bare feet soft on the carpet. My chest tightened, pulse kicking harder in anticipation of seeing her. The shower was still on.
“Become what?”
“Stop talking.”
She appeared in the entrance to the kitchen, soaking wet and in a towel, her hair dripping all over the floor.
“My razor is broken,” she said.
“Do you want to use mine?” Micah asked, closing his laptop, his face more obscured by the darkness without its glow, navy blue shrouding the kitchen.
“Do you have any other kind of razor? Beside that one?” She shifted her weight from foot to foot, sucking her wet bottom lip into her mouth.
“No. But I could do it for you, if you want.”
Dakota contemplated this, shivering, more water dripping off her long hair onto the ground.
“Okay,” she agreed, then started back towards the steamy upstairs bathroom, both Micah and I trailing behind her. If he was going to see her in the shower, so was I.
In the bathroom, Dakota hung up her wet towel then hopped back into the shower, allowing the hot water to melt away her coldness. My cock twitched in my shorts, and I grabbed it over the fabric to adjust. Her skin was pinking up from the heat, glistening soft under the water.
She didn’t look different, but I suspected she would soon, if she remained pregnant.
I imagined it in my head, the way her body would change as she grew life inside of her.
Micah got his razor out, then began to unscrew the base so he could exchange the blade for a fresh one.
The silver metal glinted in the light, sharp between his fingertips.
I thought about cuts on his arms, on his thighs, on his stomach, blood dripping off his elbows, none of the scars ever staying.
In a way, I envied his relationship with pain. It felt cleaner than mine. Purposeful.
He methodically removed the old blade, then took a new one from the box in his drawer and replaced it. Dakota was nervously watching him through the glass.
If he accidentally cut her, she wouldn’t heal quickly.
I remembered the scar on the bottom of her foot, from when she’d stepped on glass on the beach running away from me.
When I’d held her under the water for the very first time, baptizing her in my darkness, showing her how addictive drowning could feel.
She’d pretended to hate me then, but that was never the truth.
Micah took off his clothes and opened the shower door, stepping in with her.
Okay, fuck that.
I undressed and joined them. Dakota seemed equally irritated by both of us, and the amount of breathing room in the steam-filled shower had decreased significantly.
“You know, neither of you needed to come in here. I could just stick my leg out of the shower,” she reasoned, her breathing getting a little quicker.
There wasn’t enough room in the small space for our bodies to not be touching her, so she was surrounded.
A mixture of my and Micah’s kapnos fogged the air, breathing darkness into the heat.
“It’ll be easier like this,” Micah reassured her, then lowered himself to one knee, motioning for her to put her leg up on his other one.
“Please be very careful,” she warned, trembling slightly.
“I’ll be very careful.”
Dakota leaned back against me to stabilize herself as she set her foot on Micah’s knee, then handed him her vanilla-scented shaving cream.
He was careful, dragging the razor up the side of her calf, intently focused on the movement of the blade. His fingers wrapped around her ankle, holding her steady as he shaved one leg, then the other.
“Done?” Dakota asked, looking down at him.
“Sort of.”
Micah slung her leg over his shoulder, kneeling beneath her, dragging his mouth up her wet inner thigh until he got to her pussy.
Dakota gasped and tossed her head back, fully using my body to keep herself upright as Micah buried his face between her thighs.
Water streamed down the front of Dakota’s body, over her soft tits and her stomach, dripping down to shine on Micah’s muscular back. His scars stretched and moved with the flex of his muscles, water glistening on his skin.
I ducked my head to suck on the side of Dakota’s neck, cupping her breast with one hand and stabilizing her waist with the other. Micah kept licking her, adjusting to shove two fingers inside her pussy, bringing her to orgasm in my arms, hot water pouring over all three of us.
━━━━━
The next few days were relatively uneventful. Dakota was on winter break, and Micah was less busy without lectures and labs. He had some meetings coming up, and a few quick calls in preparation of the new year, none of them causing too much of a disturbance in the tentative peace.
But it still felt like all three of us were holding our breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for the inevitable.
Dakota had not made up her mind on whether she wanted an abortion or not, and panicked any time it was brought up. But it was ultimately her decision, even if we were getting consistently closer to the time when that decision might be made much more difficult.
There wasn’t much research to be found on Angelakia. I didn’t know how to feel.
Honestly, it pissed me off.
I was of course infinitely grateful that Dakota could one day become an angel, once I was able to work immorally with Micah to arrange such a sacrifice, but the secrecy pissed me off. Angels were never informed about this, and that was on purpose.
Fallen angels fell from their home for a reason and typically had no desire to create more potential angels for Heaven—which was what they did if they accidentally marked a human infant. They’d create a human capable of certain things, able to transform in certain ways.
Dakota herself was more alluring to me because of this—because she was meant to find an angel willing to figure out how to turn her into one, too.
It made me uneasy.
Heaven wanted more angels, and everything about Dakota was designed for that.
Her soul had been tugging on the back of my mind since she’d been touched by whatever angel touched her, and that was probably the only reason I was alive now.
It was certainly the reason this area of Washington had several living Thrausians.
She kept us alive by existing, by being a small well of control, something alluring and precious.
If another angel met her, they’d probably feel the same way. Drawn to her.
It only made me want to hide her away even more.
Once she became an angel, though, she wouldn’t have this effect anymore—assuming she was agreeable to letting the transformation happen. She’d become a regular Sigeian, and all the Thrausians who’d been living here would succumb to their darkness without knowing why.
I rolled over in bed—Micah’s bed.
All three of us had slept in here last night, per Dakota’s request. He had a king size bed, so the size hadn’t been much of an issue. Dakota slept in the middle. It was still early, the house still dark, but I heard him slip out of bed and go downstairs.
He returned with Dakota’s water bottle, fresh ice clinking against the metal, then pulled back the covers to climb into bed—and froze.
My stomach dropped before I even had the lucidity to know why.
I quickly pushed myself to sit up, carefully moving the comforter down.
We didn’t say anything for a long minute, both of us staring silently at the blood on the sheets.
More than blood. Blood and ichor. A light mist of sweat had accumulated on Dakota’s forehead, and she was curled up in a ball, arms tucked around herself, soft noises of pain escaping her slumbering form.
I looked back at Micah.
His face was a hardened mask, lips pressed in a line, jaw tight. Stoic, unfeeling. But he couldn’t hide the pain in his eyes. That haunted, hollow look of losing something he’d been afraid to even let himself want in the first place.
“Micah—”
He turned and left the room without another word.
I heard him leave the house a minute later.
Dakota stirred with his absence, her eyebrows furrowed and her lips slightly parted, fingers grasping for something to hold.
I crawled over to her and grabbed her small hand, feeling her weak grip as she started to wake up.
Her eyelids blinked open, her eyes already welling with tears and her body curling further inward.