Chapter 70 #2
It almost freaked me out, in a way, because what if my mom had never gone to the post office that day? Or Micah hadn’t been magically standing behind her? Or I hadn’t been screaming my head off while everyone did nothing but watch? There were a million ways this might’ve never happened.
But it did happen.
Micah was the one to mark me as an infant, and then the one to save my life as an adult, transforming me into the angel I was now.
“What are the odds of that?” I questioned, almost incredulously.
The words left my mouth before I realized they didn’t quite fit the situation. Odds belonged to coincidence. This didn’t feel like coincidence.
Micah just stared at me, his eyes arctic and infinite.
I felt him in my bones.
Neither of us spoke in that moment, but we were thinking the same thing.
It wasn’t about the hypothetical odds of two unlikely things happening to me. The answer wasn’t some mathematical probability I could solve. It was something that had been weaving itself through my life long before I’d ever actually known Micah.
I was trying to measure our lives like separate lines that had happened to cross.
But they were never separate.
They’d been threaded together all along.
“Should I tell Mason?” I dared to whisper.
“I’ll tell him.”
The gravity of this continued to magnify, my whole understanding of the world and my own life shifting while I sat on Micah’s roof.
Micah created me. He kept Mason safe.
For the two decades of his absence, Mason had been kept alive by Micah’s inadvertent touch, by me.
Micah had been loving Mason through me for my entire life, though none of us knew it.
We’d been walking toward each other from the very beginning.
A forest, beckoning. A tide, reaching. Shark teeth on the beach and the flick of a white tail disappearing into shadow.
Every single part of my life had been touched by this.
“I love you,” I said, quiet tears slipping down my face. “I can’t believe you’ve been with me for so long.”
“I wish I actually was with you earlier. More than just like this,” Micah responded, his face solemn. His eyebrows were furrowed and his lips set in a line.
“Oh. It’s okay,” I whispered.
“It’s not okay. Every day I think about it, and I know I’ll think about it even more now. I should’ve found you earlier, saved you from the hell you went through.”
“Well, you’d have a few more moral issues to overcome if that was the case.” I gave a short, dry laugh, wiping my tears a bit. “Fourteen is not legal.”
“I wouldn’t have fucked you, Dakota. I just wish I could’ve helped you. It’s really hard to know that I’ve been here all this time—that I marked you as an infant—and I still didn’t protect you at all during your childhood.”
“You know there’s no possible way you could’ve known that, right?”
“My brain is irrational when it comes to you. Completely irrational.” He grabbed me around the waist, pulling me back onto his lap, nuzzling his face against the side of my throat, his lips grazing my pulse.
I smiled. “Well, you have me now. And I actually blocked Anthony’s number this past summer, so there’s that.”
“You did?”
“He sent me a guilt-tripping text about not going to his wedding, and that was my final straw. I became a really terrible person after you died, you know. Pretty much anything could piss me off or send me over the edge. It was like my tolerance for any sort of hardship had decreased to zero.”
“I’m sorry.”
The wind rustled through the trees at my back, lifting strands of hair around my shoulders. Micah brushed them away when they started blowing in his face.
There wasn’t much to say about it.
Micah died. That was the truth. I had to live with the grief and guilt of that for nine months without him.
There would always be that small gap in our memories of each other, this place where neither of us existed for the other.
He’d had nothing of me, and I’d had only past memories of him.
I wasn’t sure I knew how to navigate that.
But he was back now, we had our second chance, and I was going to fight for him.
And fight for Mason.
They deserved to be together just as much as I deserved to be with either one of them.
“Anyway,” I said, breaking our silence.
“I think I would’ve come to this realization sooner had I not just been risen from the dead,” Micah commented. “Or I would’ve suspected it. This is the only thing that makes sense—the only conceivable way I could’ve been brought back from the void after death.”
“So, since you were the one to mark me, I am able to bring you back to life at the place you fell to Earth with my ichor?”
“It would’ve worked if I was alive, too.
Angelakia spilling ichor at the point where their creator first touched the Earth will bring them back to that point.
It shows that the transformation has been completed,” he explained.
“You could’ve actually brought me back to Heaven, too.
My birthplace. Angelakia can use ichor to summon their creators—not their transformers—at their creator’s birthplace or the place they fell to Earth. ”
“In Heaven, they actually asked me about that,” I said, slightly awestruck. “But I had no clue what they were talking about, and I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was get back to Earth. I guess I’m shocked most angels don’t know about this.”
“Heaven likes its secrets,” Micah said, almost under his breath.
I knew his opinion of Heaven, just like I knew Mason’s opinion.
It wasn’t the idyllic place I’d been led to believe it was.
Corruption, sin, malice. Those things all hid within the crimson flames there, just as they did on Earth.
A governing body keeping secrets from its people was one of the oldest truths in the world.
Even if Micah sometimes regretted falling, I knew it wasn’t because he preferred Heaven to Earth. But maybe he’d been less alone there. I didn’t want him to feel alone now, or ever again.
Eventually, we got off the roof and went back inside. The door to the guest bedroom was closed, so neither of us spoke to Mason again for the rest of the night.
━━━━━
Mila opened the door to her apartment with her hair thrown up in a messy bun and her lips pulled up in a tentative smile.
I’d never actually told her that someone died, and I was grateful for that now—even if I’d been very distant because of it.
It was strange to think that Eric knew, and my best friend did not, but it’d been a strange terrible period of my life.
My decisions didn’t make a lot of sense.
I had yet to fully discuss the logistics of Sigeian memory erasure with Micah and didn’t know how it would work with him no longer dead.
Sometimes I wondered if I’d told Eric it was Micah who’d died that he would’ve forgotten it.
Everything was very much a mystery to me.
It didn’t matter now, though.
“Hug?” Mila asked, arms extended.
“Yes.” I wrapped my arms around her, breathing in the scent of her body mist and laundry detergent, doing my very best to keep from tearing up. Genuinely all I ever seemed to do was cry these days, and I had to try putting a stop to it now. “I’m sorry,” I said, my voice mumbling and quiet.
She rubbed her palm up and down my back, and I could feel her shaking her head. “It’s okay. I know sometimes shit gets tough.”
We’d still hung out a few times over the months Micah had been dead, but it was never the same.
Not even close. I was aware at some point she’d probably have to be informed I was no longer human, but I wasn’t sure when that day would come.
She’d yet to see my scars, and that was probably the biggest physical indicator.
Even then, I could alter her memory to make her forget if I wanted to.
But I didn’t particularly want to.
I wanted my best friend to know me fully. All of me. This new version that’d been through much more than she could even suspect.
Later, I would tell her. Somehow.
For now, we had some normal catching up to do.
I’d actually brought some snacks this time instead of only stealing all of her food, and Mila could hardly contain her excitement about it.
I considered getting more peach rings, but I was fairly certain she was still recovering from her previous giant bag, so I brought sour gummy worms instead. And baby Goldfish.
Mila dragged me with her into the bedroom, where she had several dresses laid out on the bed. Ivan and Ekaterina were getting married in his parents’ backyard over the weekend—it was just a very small family ceremony, but I was invited—and I’d decided now that I did want to go.
“If we could bring a date, I would ask Eric,” she said, laughing.
“Are you serious? I’m honestly unsure these days. It’s been a while since you’ve seen him.” I couldn’t stop myself from giggling with her.
“Oh, you know.” She waved her hand. “He’s like my celebrity crush. Never goes away.”
“He’s not a celebrity, though, Mils. He might be willing to have dinner with you,” I said, then actually considered it.
Would Eric want to get dinner with Mila?
Maybe. But I wasn’t entirely convinced he’d want it to be a date.
While Mila might be into the age gap thing, I didn’t know if he was. Perhaps I could ask him.
“I don’t want dinner. I just want to fuck,” she informed me.
“I thought you wanted to go bowling with him.”
“Okay, whatever. I don’t know what I want.” She sighed and flopped on the bed. “Do you want to wear any of these dresses? The one I’m wearing is hanging there.” Mila pointed to a dress hanging on the back of her closet door.
“I’m sure any of them will be fine.” I joined her on the bed, being careful not to lay on any of the dresses and rumple them. “You pick for me.”
“Well, I always like you in black, but I don’t think you should wear that to an outdoor summer wedding. Right? That’s a thing. So, this? Blue?”
Mila pointed to a muted blue dress, not too fancy.
“I like it.”