Chapter 33
DEZ FALLS ON HER BED and runs the evening over in her mind. She can’t make sense of anything. She aches inside and out.
Rafe told her he’d been at the hospital with her brother and that Mo had watched her film inside his mind. He said Mo was at peace when he died. Dez wants to believe it. She wishes she could.
But Dez is not an angel. She doesn’t have the perspective on death that Rafe and Yael have. She doesn’t understand how any of this works, only that she seems to have fallen into the strangest secret world at a moment of chaos and danger.
And her heart is broken.
She has a memory of Mo in his room, lying in bed on a Saturday morning, staring at the desert sky through the window above his headboard. Her brother wasn’t often at peace these past few years, but when she’d seen him like that, watching the clouds, he had been.
Maybe it’s possible, what Rafe said. Maybe her film helped him.
On her bedroom floor, she finds the jeans she’d slipped out of before the party, a lifetime ago. She reaches into their pocket and takes out the pill bottle with the eye. All month, she’s kept it close, but she wonders if she needs it anymore.
Mo is gone. It’s not like she can ever go home.
And now that her brother is dead, she can’t bear to have the eye so close to her. But still, she can’t throw it away. She pushes the pill bottle under her mattress.
A soft knock startles her, but it’s not coming from her door.
She hears it again. At her window. Her tenth-story window. She rushes over to pull back the curtains—and gasps when she sees Rafe hovering in darkness outside.
She scrambles to open the casement. She doesn’t even know how it works. When she finally turns the lever enough to hinge open the glass, he’s laughing at her.
“What if you fell?” she demands, grabbing him by the lapels of his tuxedo jacket. How strange to feel him hovering in thin air. She pulls him inside.
“I thought you might need more proof,” he says, easing himself through her window and dusting the snow off his shoulders. His presence fills the space and charges the air.
If Mo were still alive, Dez would be thrilled by Rafe’s late-night visit. An angel flew to see her. But all she feels is numb.
“Where are your wings?” she asks. She doesn’t see them, but she notices Rafe isn’t wearing his golden scarf.
He glances over his shoulder. “They’re imperceptible inside the barbelo. It’s for your safety, so first-years don’t see our true natures before they’re ready to.”
Dez wants to see them. Despite herself, her acute agony, she’s curious about Rafe’s divinity. She doesn’t just want to see his wings. She wants to touch them, to run her hands over them. She wants to lose herself in them so completely she forgets her broken heart.
And wanting this, it makes her skin flush and the room feel hot, even though the window’s open and she’s wearing just a black silk slip dress.
“I wondered,” Rafe says, “whether seeing me fly would freak you out or turn you on.” His mouth turns up at one corner. “I have a guess.”
Dez clears her throat and steps away from him. She can’t do this tonight. Can’t give in to her body’s yearnings. Even if it would take her mind off her pain. “Yael said some things earlier, about the search for a new Angel of Death. She mentioned a Crimson Pinion and a war?”
Rafe’s jaw tenses. “What else did Yael say?”
That I should stay here and give you what you deserve. And she hadn’t made it sound like a good thing for Rafe.
“She said you could explain it,” Dez says.
“I can try.” Rafe exhales. “I should tell you that I’m the obvious choice to replace Samael.”
“Why?”
“Because Sam was my mentor.”
“The Angel of Death was your mentor?” Dez repeats, remembering a conversation they’d once had in the Vault, about their wounds.
The way Rafe said his wound was that his mentor abandoned him made Dez think at first they’d been in love.
She hears it differently now, how terribly consequential this abandonment had been. For Rafe. For everyone.
“Why can’t he just tell you where the Crimson Pinion is?”
“Because,” Rafe says quietly. “I have to earn it.”
“And how do you do that?”
“Do you remember what you saw in the kinetoscope your first day here?” he asks, and Dez senses him changing the subject.
“The film with the man running.” Dez sees it again in her mind. “That glass wall around the garden. The diamond sword and the fire …”
“That was Sam’s first film.” Rafe pauses. “He made it for Eve.”
Dez clasps a hand to her mouth. “What I saw that day was … the Garden of Eden?”
“Zeke and I think so, yes. None of us have ever seen it. Sam kept his films closely guarded. But the line that connected Sam to me and now to you—it’s strong.
Your mind’s eye was granted remarkable access that day.
For a mortal woman to get to see what you saw?
” He shakes his head. “Sam was right about you.”
“Sam doesn’t know me.”
“He was the Angel of Death for thousands of years, Dez. He knows a few things.” Rafe sits down at the edge of her bed. “Do you remember that napkin I gave you the first night we met? With the sketch?”
Dez stares at him. Of course she does.
“Sam drew it.”
“What?” Dez whispers.
“The last time I saw him,” Rafe says. “We met for coffee. He told me he was leaving. Then he told me to find you. He thought you might have a role to play in what’s coming.”
Dez’s chest tightens. She’d thrown the napkin away with her Dairy Barn apron when her brother was in the ICU. Its existence felt too unnerving with everything else going on. But now she fears repercussions of that careless act.
For the Angel of Death to have noticed her, singled her out, sketched her …
“I don’t want to be part of a war,” she says.
“No. Of course not.”
“I don’t even understand who’ll be fighting.”
“Some are old friends, some are old enemies,” Rafe says quietly. “Some don’t know each other at all.”
“What do you mean?”
“When Sam left, unintentionally, he kicked off an epidemic among the angels. For a while, only the rare angel was abdicating Heaven for love, but Sam showed you could do it for adventure, too. Others followed after him.”
“How many have left?”
“Every last-year at Acheron lost their mentor in the last six weeks.”
Dez feels stunned, thinking of the upperclassmen at this school. Are they all as broken and abandoned as Rafe?
“That must have been tremendously hard,” she says.
“We are shadows of our former selves without them,” he says quietly.
“Meanwhile, people are still dying every day. Our work is no less essential, but still, we can’t keep up.
Every one of us has had to become a mentor ourselves if we want to survive.
If we want death as the world knows it to survive.
But the old systems have crumbled. Structures we took for granted are gone. All bets are off.”
“Why would anyone want to stop being an angel?”
“It takes a certain kind of soul to survive eternity. You have to be able to take it as it comes.”
“I guess it also takes a certain kind of soul to survive mortality,” Dez says, thinking of her brother’s insatiable spirit, his quenchless thirst.
Rafe looks at her like he knows precisely what she means. “What I’m trying to tell you, Dez, is that Heaven is running out of angels.”
“Running out of angels?”
He nods. “That’s where you come in.”
“What does that possibly have to do with me?”
“You weren’t chosen to come to Acheron this term because you make great films.”
“But I thought you said Acheron’s scouts saw Glimpse,” Dez says. “That they saw promise in it?”
“Sure, but that’s not why you’re here.” He bites his lip, choosing his words. “This is a crisis of unprecedented proportions. We need the help of mighty souls. Like you.”
“What do you need me for?”
“To help us replenish our ranks—”
“Stop—”
“So that we can ensure the right next Angel of Death takes Sam’s place,” he says, reaching for her hand. “You were brought here, Dez, to ascend.”