Chapter 32
BACK IN THEIR SUITE, SIMON folds Dez in his arms.
“What can I do?” he asks.
Dez answers by holding him tighter. She doesn’t have any tears left, but her friend’s embrace comforts her. She lets her body relax into his.
It’s after midnight, and the evening left her hollow. She feels like someone could blow on her and she’d shatter. She wishes it would happen, for all her pieces to scatter in the wind.
She’s still holding on to Simon when Yael joins them in the common room, wrapping her arms around them both. She’d never taken Yael to be one for physical affection, and Dez can’t help feeling moved. After a while, Yael presses something into Dez’s hand.
It’s Yael’s phone.
“Take it,” she says. “Call your mom.”
Dez stares at the device. She’s gotten used to life without being attached to hers. It feels strange to hold one now. She collapses heavily to the couch.
“I don’t know if she’ll want to talk to me,” Dez says. “I don’t know if I’d want to talk to me.”
“She’s your mom, Dez. Try,” Simon says, sinking onto the cushion next to her, hugging his knees to his chest.
Dez’s fingers quake as she dials her mother’s number, holding Yael’s phone to her ear. Her heart pounds. She doesn’t know, can’t even imagine, what she’ll say. To her own mother. Not a single word comes to mind.
It rings. And rings. And finally, when the call goes to voicemail, Dez holds her breath, hanging on her mom’s familiar, years-old, sunny voicemail recording. She doesn’t leave a message. She puts the phone down, tears in her eyes. She doesn’t know if she’s devastated or relieved.
But she feels like she’s mourning the loss of two people tonight, not one.
“I’m making my famous mourning martinis,” Yael calls from the kitchen.
“How are they different from your regular martinis?” Simon asks.
“They’re bigger.” Yael appears with a cocktail shaker, an ice bucket, and three glasses crooked between her fingers. She sets everything down on the coffee table in front of Dez, adds ice to the tumbler, and shakes. “I know the state of shock is real in here, but as your elder—”
“Yeah, how old are you?” Simon says.
“I stopped counting after six thousand.” Yael smiles, brushing fingertips across her cheekbones.
“Angel genes,” Dez says, hearing her voice distantly.
Both her roommates look at her like they didn’t know she could talk.
“That’s right, Dez,” Yael says cheerfully, “and as your resident immortal, I’m obliged to take a temperature check.
A lot of shit went down tonight. So if anyone needs to freak out”—she strains the martinis into the glasses, adds a twist, and hands the first one to Dez—“let’s at least do it plastered. ”
Dez takes a long, cold sip of lemon-scented gin. She swirls the twist around the glass with her finger.
“You wanna go first?” Simon asks Dez.
She closes her eyes. “I used to imagine him dying. I’ve grieved my brother so many times over the years. He was an addict, so I felt like I was always just waiting for the call. A knock on the door in the middle of the night. I never thought, when he finally went, that it would be my fault.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Yael says.
“It was.” She swallows. “I never told you. I burned him. I killed my brother.”
“What?” Simon asks. “How?”
“Dez,” Yael says, her voice so grounded Dez opens her eyes to stare at her. “I know—without a shadow of a doubt—that your brother’s death was not your fault. Eventually, you’ll know that, too.”
“I wish that were true,” Dez says.
“It’s a simple fact,” Yael says. “Or a complicated one, depending on your point of view. The point is, if you stay here, you’ll come to learn things. Your entire relationship with death will change. You’ll grow to love it, to need it. With a devotion that borders on obsession.”
“So, your kink is death?” Simon asks Yael.
Yael ignores him. “I didn’t know your brother, Dez, but I watched your film. And it’s clear you loved him during his life and that you gave him what he needed at the end—”
“Does he exist?” Dez asks. “As Mo? Will I see him again?”
“Once you open your mind as wide as your heart, you’ll see him everywhere,” Yael says.
“Goddamned ambiguous angels,” Dez says, and looks away.
“I’m staying at Acheron,” Simon announces. “I’ve decided.”
“I thought you wanted to go back to Oklahoma,” Dez says.
“That was before tonight.” Simon takes a deep glug of his martini. “Esther and I are both staying.”
“Have you fucked her already?” Yael asks. “The window’s closing.”
“I don’t think anything’s closing,” Simon says. He sounds happy.
Dez wonders if she could be happy tonight with all she learned at the gala if Mo were still alive. It’s impossible to tell. But she takes Simon’s hand and squeezes. She’s glad for him.
He rests his head on her shoulder. “Stay too?”
Dez exhales. She doesn’t know.
“I’m not sure I have a home to go back to,” she says. “But I also don’t know if I can make it here. Even if I wasn’t grieving …”
“Grief is a condition of existence,” Yael offers. “And an asset for art.”
“What do you know about grief?” Simon asks. “You’re a fucking angel.”
“I wasn’t always an angel.”
“What did you used to be?” Dez asks.
“It doesn’t matter. Everything’s different since Samael left.”
“Samael? You mean the guy from the painting?” Simon says.
“He’s not just ‘a guy from a painting,’” Yael says. “He was our leader. He was—”
“The Angel of Death,” Dez says.
“Samael invented Death,” Yael says.
“No shit?” Simon says.
“He started with Adam and Eve. After they ate from the Tree of Knowledge, got themselves kicked out of the Garden, their suffering was inevitable. But death wasn’t.
Not yet. Sam pioneered the entire system.
The world’s been running on it ever since.
” Yael takes a large drink from her martini and touches her breast. “It still gets me excited.”
Dez and Simon look at each other.
“So Genesis,” Dez says, “is true?”
“True enough,” Yael says. “You can’t expect a thirdhand retelling to get every detail right. The Bible’s a big game of Telephone. And a lot of lame-ass patriarchal censors watered the best parts down. But the original truth still lingers between the lines.”
“And when you say Sam left …” Simon says.
“Here one day, gone the next,” Yael says, gazing down into her drink. “Apparently Rafe was the last one to see him.”
“That sounds ominous,” Simon says, glancing at Dez.
“I’m certain it was,” Yael says.
Dez sips her martini, feeling like a new knot has just been tied in the heavy net slung over her. “What happens now? To death? Is someone going to take Samael’s place?”
“Someone is,” Yael says, nodding slowly.
“How does a new Angel of Death get chosen?” Simon asks.
“They don’t get chosen. They win.”
“Win what?”
Yael sips her drink, meets Simon’s and then Dez’s eyes. “The Crimson Pinion.”
Dez and Simon share a glance.
“A red feather?” Simon says.
“It’s not just a red feather, asshole. It’s what makes the Angel of Death the Angel of Death. And ever since Sam left, none of us can find it. Which is why everyone here is competing, warring really, to get their hands on it.”
“What does this war look like?” Dez asks.
“Don’t worry, the last-years are handling it,” Yael says. “Not me, but the others.”
“Why not you?” Simon says.
“Because,” she says, exasperated, “I lost my protégé. And a mentor without their protégé, in these times? You might as well stick me on top of a Christmas tree.”
“That can’t be true,” Dez says. “What does a protégé have to do with it?”
Yael doesn’t answer, only polishes off the rest of her drink and gazes out the window at the snow.
Dez thinks of all this time she’s spent with Rafe this month.
Their mentor-protégé relationship. What she thought it was about.
What it’s really about. Yael says a war is coming, and Dez doesn’t understand who the armies are, what the fight’s about.
But earlier tonight, Rafe said things between him and Dez would change.
That tomorrow they’ll be on the same side.
If she decides to stay here, she can turn to him with these questions. She can count on him for answers.
She can trust him.
Simon clears his throat. “Esther wants to start a campaign to bring Alice back to Acheron.”
“Don’t bother,” Yael says, rising from the couch.
“Why not?” Dez says. “Now that we know the truth, there’s no reason she had to be expelled to cover up—”
“They’ll never bring her back,” Yael snaps.
“Yael,” Dez asks again, “what do the protégés have to do with this war, this Crimson Pinion—”
“I’ll leave that for your mentor to explain to you,” she says darkly, moving toward her bedroom. “If you stay.”
“Do you believe her?” Dez says to Simon.
“My brain exploded tonight, Dez,” Simon says, splayed out on the couch. “I don’t know what to believe.”
“For what it’s worth, Dez,” Yael calls from her bedroom, “I hope you’ll stay with us. If only to give Rafe what he deserves.”