Chapter Nineteen
“Watch it, asshole!” came the blare of a horn and an angry fist as a car swerved to avoid us.
Silas yanked me out of the street toward a stone wall, eyes wild. He barely noticed the car.
“What the hell happened?” I demanded.
He doubled over, hands on his knees as he drew in an unsteady breath. His shoulders moved with each rapid pant.
“Hey, hey, deep breaths…”
I recognized a panic attack when I saw it. He couldn’t breathe. My brow creased. I touched him lightly on the back. His wings hadn’t made the jump, leaving only a shimmer in their wake. “Hey, it’s okay. Let’s sit.”
Everything, from the grass between the cobblestones and the moss on the wall to the thick line of forest, was verdant.
We appeared to be across the street from a heavily wooded park of some sort, though I couldn’t ascertain much more.
Nothing looked familiar, aside from being vaguely European.
I had no idea where I’d taken us. It didn’t look like anywhere I’d been before.
I waited for a break in the traffic before guiding him toward a bench amidst the emerald plant life.
We sank onto the wooden planks as my hand continued moving over his back.
I felt like a doctor trying to get a baby to cry.
I didn’t know how to shake someone out of shock, or if that was even what was happening.
“What happened?” I asked again.
He shook his head mutely. A breeze stirred the trees, rubbing the leaves together with the burble of a freshwater stream. I looked again for a clue as to where I’d taken us but spied no writing, no signs, nothing but streets and parks and a never-ending stone wall.
“There was someone else there. You said you spotted other beings. There was a man in blue who had to have been a rebel. He helped us with security twice. But I could have sworn I saw…”
“Angels.” He breathed the word.
I nodded. Then I’d been right. They’d made good on their word.
“What does your tattoo say? What do they know?”
He unclipped the cuff from his wrist, but the inky script in tongues was gone.
“It’s not there anymore,” I prodded. “What does that mean? You’re officially cut off? …Silas?”
“I don’t feel any different. I don’t feel like I’ve fallen.”
I touched the skin of his wrist where the heavenly messaging system once had been, but he didn’t appear comforted by the gesture.
He shook my hand free as he patted his body, moving as if he was searching for wounds.
Strained, he continued, “What they did to me at the concert… It was a fail-safe. It’s the one thing angels can do when someone in their army steps out of line.
I was completely powerless. Marlow, I don’t think you can be around me.
You’re going to get hurt. My clock ran out, and they—”
I felt like he’d thrown water in my face. “You’ve defected. Angels do it all the time. Half of Hell is—”
“Half of Hell has fallen or been cast out,” he said, throat working. “I haven’t been given the luxury of leaving. Maybe they won’t let me fall.”
My heart quickened. “So, what? You’re still one of them? You still have to follow orders?”
“I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t do anything.”
I wanted to hit something. There didn’t appear to be other pedestrians in the park to judge me if I had a tantrum. “You’re an archangel! Who’s above you except your king? Who could do this?”
He rubbed his eyes. “They couldn’t hurt me. It took both of them to contain me. It’s why they didn’t have the juice to appear, or to stop Azrames.”
“Who, exactly?” I asked on a breath.
“Does it matter?”
I pressed my fingertip into my temple, closing my eyes as I struggled to make sense of the information.
“I can only assume they tracked me to get to you. You’re out of venom, with nowhere to hide, and I couldn’t have saved you, Marlow. If there had been three angels instead of two, you might be…”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m okay.”
“If Heaven didn’t know I’d defected before, they certainly do now.”
I nearly choked on panic as it lanced me through the chest. “Az! Would they have—”
“I’m sure of two things. The first is that he got the hell out of there the moment we jumped. The second is that my brothers ran back to report what went down.”
With a nervous chuckle, I said, “I grew up thinking God saw me masturbate. Now I’m finding out it takes a PR disaster with seventy thousand witnesses before something is worthy of his attention.”
The corner of his lip twitched, but there was no humor in it. “Angels aren’t omnipresent. We have to prioritize where we go and what we do. But Marlow, you’ve got to go. Jump back to Earth. I can’t go with you.”
I looked around the park-like village. “This isn’t on Earth?”
He buried his face in his hands, rubbing his temples with his thumbs as he did so.
I leaned away to look at him fully. The idea of being separated squeezed the air from my lungs. Abandonment colored my words as I asked, “You’re going to leave me alone? Isn’t that exactly what everyone has been trying to avoid?”
“Yes, because of Heaven. If they can control me—”
“But they could have done that to anyone. Their little freezing can’t mean you haven’t fully defected. They could have frozen Az, or me, or Vexa. Right? You’re making it seem like they flipped a switch in your angel brain to keep you from acting out!”
“It’s not that simple.”
“This was your prophecy,” I seethed. “Did you fulfill it and defect, or didn’t you?”
His eyes burned into mine. He clamped a hand on my shoulder, squeezing it as he said, “I can’t put you at risk until I know what happened, or this was all for nothing. You have to go.”
My fingers clenched the air in front of me. “Go where!”
He looked left and right as if taking stock of his surroundings for the first time. “Ah, shit. Yeah, you need to get out of here. We’re in a dryad forest, and I’m not prepared to deal with these fuckers right now.”
The entire exchange was a fever dream. My head ached from the whiplash.
“Dryads have cars?” I muttered as I looked up and down the road, noticing a vine growing toward us between the cobblestones that I was pretty sure hadn’t been there before.
I watched the encroaching green rope as Silas said, “I’m sure Az will meet you back at your place.
” He looked over his shoulder in time to see the way the branches bowed toward us.
“I know your warding allowed him to come and go, so he’ll be safe there.
You’re out of venom and down an ally. Don’t let Az out of your sight. ”
“What do you mean, ‘down an ally’?” My fingertips fluttered to the broach digging into my skin. “Wait, Silas, I don’t know how to jump on my own.”
He sighed. “I’ll come find you as soon as I know it’s safe, okay? For now, Dorothy: Think of home.”
And without giving me time to react to that, he pushed me through time and space.
***
Sickening, melting, whirling, colorful blackness.
The light winked out all around me.
It took two hands to count how many times I’d jumped realms, and that was before tallying the leaps on mortal land.
I’d expected it to start getting easier.
Moss and emerald and stone melted into a swirl of colors as strong hands shoved me backward, spinning my stomach and throwing me off my feet.
The weight of his hands disappeared as I shot through time and space.
My head spun as I skidded across the floor.
I scrunched my eyes against the merry-go-round, moaning as I planted a stabilizing hand on the cool surface.
I frowned against the texture and opened my eyes, looking down at my palm.
White. At least, white filtered through the dim, overcast lighting of either sunup or sundown. We’d only been with the dryads for a few minutes, but I knew time had no correlation between realms.
Still, this wasn’t right. My floor wasn’t white.
I should have landed on sparkling, black marble.
I was in a kitchen, all right, but it wasn’t my kitchen.
Tilting, disorienting confusion blurred the unfamiliar shapes and colors together.
My heart thudded as the wave of bleach and window cleaner hit me.
I looked up slowly, a new fear trickling through me as I followed the sound of a television.
My lips parted in silent panic as I watched a man and a woman on a morning show.
The conservative anchor cut away from the “blasphemous display of magic,” as he called it, before addressing the audience directly.
A screengrab of Dorian gesturing to an audience popped over their shoulder.
A clip of Poppy waving her hands as she spoke was next.
They’d done it. Poppy and Dorian had gone public on the news and revealed themselves to the humans.
The angry news anchors began to yell about what this heresy meant for our country.
But it wasn’t my TV.
I would never have turned to this channel. But I knew someone who would…
A new sound. Rhythmic. Slow.
One, two, three, four…
My confusion began to take shape. The scent of bleach. The angry television. And that god-awful sound.
The hair on the back of my neck rose as I placed the sound of feet. I recognized the cadence of the steps. I’d heard the weight of these shoes on floors for years and years once, then buried the sound in the deepest, most repressed parts of my memory.
Suddenly, I understood what wires had gotten crossed when I’d thought of home.
Step, step, step, until she came to a halt above me.
I swallowed as I turned to see my mother, hands on her hips, staring down at me.
And then I emptied the contents of my stomach onto her feet.