Chapter 5
Zerachiel
Zera, stop, stop!” she cries, struggling to pull away from me.
I’m so confused that I have to concentrate on her face, eyes bulging at something over my shoulder.
I turn around for a second to glance into the forest and see nothing, but I obey her command, pulling myself out and gently guiding her back to the forest floor.
“Travis saw us.” She wrenches her clothes back on, eyes still searching the forest. In an instant, I pull my physical form away, disappearing into the air like a shadow.
Kate freezes against the tree, her face still flushed, her jacket barely covering her shoulders.
She looks so frightened and alone, so I step closer, a hand cupping her soft cheeks.
“I am here, sweet Kate,” I whisper. She seems to relax a bit.
We gather the backpack and make our way back to the trail.
Although we see no evidence of Travis, she keeps looking around us, her head on a swivel.
I feel defeated; the delicious picnic I made for us was ruined, and our special outing spoiled due to the man-child Travis.
???
AS WE ROUND THE corner to the bookstore, Kate seems to be relaxing a bit. We did not see Travis at all from our walk back, and now that we are here in town, the danger seems far behind us. I wonder what Travis will do, and how much he might have seen.
“Maybe he did not see that much.”
Her hand flutters behind her, as though shushing me. She is still paranoid, and I cannot blame her.
We are nearly at the back of the bookstore, where the stairs lead to Kate’s house. She stops abruptly, and we both see it at the same time. A sign has been taped to her door. Large black letters can be read clearly from the ground - “I SAW YOU.”
Kate is frozen and trembling. Closing my eyes to concentrate, I reach out with my senses into her house, searching for any sign that Travis might be hiding within. Finding nothing, I exhale.
I step behind Kate, my fingers gently brushing the back of her arm so she knows I am next to her. “Kate, he is not inside. It is safe. Come on, let’s go upstairs and we will talk.”
She jumps slightly at my presence, and I hate how scared she is, but all she does is nod. I see her take a deep breath, as though steeling herself for the possibility that I might be wrong and that Travis is lurking inside.
After we go upstairs, I am not sure what to do with myself, so I do what I have been doing these past two days and see to the food.
Starting with our backpack, I unpack everything we took with us: cold cuts of meat, cheese, and olives, along with crusty bread and sweet jams. I watch Kate out of the corner of my eye.
She has taken the sign down from her door and is staring at it, as though it might reach out and bite her.
“I have to go do some work.” She says suddenly.
I wish she would not go, but her energy is chaotic and dark. “Of course,” I say instead. She leaves me holding the special bottle of wine I was going to have us share, closing the door behind her with a snap, her footsteps echoing down the stairs.
The next few hours, I try to keep myself occupied with reading the books in her apartment and puttering around trying to find things to tidy. Like Kate, the need to keep busy is always gnawing at my brain; otherwise, the memories of my time bound to Sivora come racing back.
The book that Kate was reading when she accidentally summoned me catches my eye, and I end up sitting on the couch flipping through it.
Many demons and angels are in this text, and I am amused to see some inaccuracies flaunted as fact.
Soon, though, feelings of bitterness replace my amusement, and I set the book aside.
I pick up a photo album I had found the first night Kate summoned me, and I had decided to clean through the night to keep my thoughts away from Kate.
I flip through these now, noticing how in nearly every photo, whether child, teenager, or adult, she is near the back, or the very edge of the frame.
A small, timid smile adorns her face. The only true smile she ever wears is when she is next to the same woman with dark hair and green eyes, their ages growing and changing in tandem.
This must be Clara, Kate’s friend who was in the store yesterday and was whispering about her lover, Asterion.
Their happiness is shattered in my mind as a memory rips through my reality, sending me backward in time into Sivora’s dwelling. A man is bound in front of me, gagged and pleading through the cloth wrapped tightly around his mouth.
“Do it,” she says savagely, eyes gleaming. Her forehead shines with sweat, a wand gripped tightly in her hand.
I stand rigid before the man, heart racing. This man would make the twentieth I have killed for Sivora in just as many days since she summoned me, her hatred of the town and its people sending them all into hiding as she kidnapped them one by one.
“I will not.” My voice trembles before her.
“You will obey me!” She shrieks, jabbing her wand into my side with every word, sending shockwaves of pain into my heart.
“I will not!” I cry back, the pain intensifying with my resistance.
“You are truly worthless.” She spits. “I summoned you to do my bidding, not to hold on to your Watcher angel ideals. You’ve already fallen.” She rakes her hands through my hair, shoving my head. “Horns are already sprouting. You’ll be a full demon before the full moon is risen.”
Hot tears spill down my cheeks as I watch the man writhe on the dusty floor, trying to escape his bonds.
Sivora is right, I am fallen. She summoned me for evil, and I had no choice but to obey, and now I am stuck.
I think to the future, being bound by evil for as long as this witch lives, the thought shattering me into a thousand pieces, causing my physical body to begin to flicker.
“What are you doing?!” She sounds panicked.
She tries to jab me again with her wand, but misses when I flicker into vapor and back again.
I cannot, I cannot, I cannot. A mantra repeated in my head, with Sivora shrieking curses at me, I look toward the heavens and plead with whomever might be listening. Save me.
And I flickered one last time and was thrust back into my realm, but as I waited for my physical form to return, a small part of me wanted to just be, and so I stayed a wraith, alone and floating in the aether until Kate summoned me, thrusting me forward in time, back into my body.
A tear drops onto a picture of teenage Kate and Clara, arms thrown around each other, heads thrown back with laughter, capturing their joy. I smile at them before my reverie is broken by a scream downstairs in the store.
“Zera!” Kate shrieks, hysteria in her voice.
With a blink, I dissolve through matter like ink floating in a glass, before emerging next to a bookshelf in the store.
She is crouched behind the counter in terror, one of the glass doors is shattered, and her wrists are in Travis’s grasp.
I can see her hand turning white with the effort to pull herself away from him.
In the next instant, I am next to Travis, one of my wings shoving him into the counter with such force that his head bounces off the edge, and he falls to the floor in a heap.
Prising her hands out of his grasp, I gradually rematerialize in front of her.
Kate’s mouth is open in shock, pupils dilated, causing them to have a glassy look I recognize as shock.
“Kate.” Shaking her gently, my wings come around her, blocking Travis from view.
Her head swivels to me suddenly as though just seeing me. “Zera, he…he broke in. I didn’t even see him; he was just there. I was doing the totals for the drawer, and I wasn’t even paying attention. I should have -” She is babbling now.
“Shhh, shh, I’m here now. Come on, let me help you up.”
She starts to get up and then stops, looking at me as though fully seeing me. “You have to go back upstairs.”
“No, Kate, he could wake up at any moment! It is not safe for me to leave you alone like this.”
“Zera, I have to call the police. I have to report this, and they’re going to have a lot of questions.
I can’t have you down here while all that is happening.
I have to call right now, in fact, they’ll know if I wait too long.
” She brings the small device from her pocket and starts tapping on the front.
“If you want me to go back upstairs, I will, but I wish to stay here, even if I am only invisible and tucked away in a corner. Just in case.” I can’t tell her that my own heart is in my throat, that I want to walk over to where Travis is lying and pull his limbs from his body.
Intuitively, I know saying these things will not help. My hands are gripped in fists.
“Zera.” There is a tone of warning in her voice, and I notice she is looking down at my hands. She pulls me over to a nearby recliner. “Sit. Do not move, and stay invisible.”
“I will obey,” I say solemnly to her. She looks at me oddly, but turns her attention to the device that she holds up to her ear. A soothing feeling comes over me, and I am content to be able to stay near her but to obey.
“I will always obey,” I whisper, as red and blue flashing lights bounce off the black asphalt from the street, two beige cars pulling in out front.