Chapter 39 #2
And then, Dez thinks she understands. For months now, Rafe’s been telling her—promising her—that once she ascends, he can finally fuck her. She’ll be able to withstand his glory. Is it the same for Simon? After this, could he sleep with the other angels in this room?
Even though he’s committed to Esther. Even though angel sex probably won’t happen for him, at least not until Esther ascends. He would, at least, survive it.
And the angels’ bodies in this room know this. They want him. All of them. So badly the room’s become an orgy made of fire.
Dez reaches the doors of the crematorium. From within comes a strangled, gasping sound that stops Dez in her tracks. The sound of something being finished. Is Dez already too late?
All at once the roar of the fire silences, leaving a ringing in Dez’s ears. The doors swing open, and Simon and Jet stumble out, looking dazed.
Dez gasps as she notices Simon’s wings. No, the wings themselves are invisible, but behind both Jet and Simon the outline of towering, majestic, angel wings are visible through the thin layer of ash coating their surface. Despite everything, Dez can’t help but stare at them in wonder.
Moriah steps forward, whispers something to Jet, and hands him a small box. Jet turns to face Simon, tenderly brushing the ash off Simon’s shoulders.
Rafe slips an arm around Dez’s waist and holds her to him. “I think you’ll like this part.”
Now Jet hands Simon the box. With shaking hands, her roommate opens it, pulls out a large, bright golden ring.
“Is that—”
“Simon’s halo,” Rafe whispers. “Mortality is finished for him, extra questionum. So we have other uses for it.”
“It’s hot,” Simon says with pleasure.
In his hands, the halo shimmers. Briefly, Dez catches a glimpse of a scene inside it: Simon on horseback, riding across an open plain. Now the halo dips and bends, almost dissolving as it settles into something soft and pliant.
A golden scarf.
“He’ll wear it now,” Rafe explains, “in memoriam of who he was before.”
As Jet places the scarf over Simon’s shoulders, somebody pops a bottle of champagne.
Flutes are filled and passed around. Rafe hands Dez a glass, and she toasts, a little numbly, to her friend’s ascension.
She drinks with everyone else, but she’s watching Simon and his mentor leaning in for a strangely intimate embrace.
After the celebration, Dez finds Simon in their suite playing a strenuous song on the violin. Listening to his rapid scales and pizzicatos, watching his bow blur like a hummingbird, he looks possessed.
“Paganini’s Caprice Twenty-Four,” Yael tells Dez from her place on the couch. “Famously the most difficult violin piece ever composed.”
Dez kicks off her shoes and flops next to Yael.
A fire roars in the hearth as if it’s an ordinary night for three ordinary grad students.
It’s not. Dez is still shaking from the ascension ceremony, even though Simon’s golden scarf and increased musical proficiency are the only signs anything has changed.
“So, you’re a virtuoso now?” Dez asks, watching Simon break a sweat as he plays. Over the past few weeks, Dez has often wondered what she’d be like as an angel, what would change in her and what would remain the same.
“I think this is just postcoital bliss,” Yael says.
Dez studies Simon. His eyes are closed, fingers moving manically up and down the instrument’s neck. His serene expression does glow with the look of someone who just got fantastically laid.
“Is Esther here?” Dez asks, confused. “I didn’t think an angel and a mortal could—”
“Look who’s au courant on the interdimensional sexual taboos,” Yael teases. “God, it must suck to want to fuck Rafe so bad and still be that far behind on your films.”
Dez kicks Yael. “Once one learns that getting laid by an angel is lethal, one tends not to forget it.”
“Anyway,” Yael says. “It wasn’t Esther.”
Then who? Dez thinks of the host of turned-on angels surrounding Simon earlier. It’s hard to think back to the frightening ceremony. How Simon disappeared inside that crematorium. How Jet was in there with him. She thinks of the consuming fire. Of the sounds she heard.
“You fucked Jet?” Dez demands.
Finally Simon stops playing.
“It’s called apotheosis,” Yael explains, “the culmination of a mortal’s passage into immortality, where mentor and protégé fuse together in a congress that connects them forever.”
Dez thinks of Rafe promising to fuck her if she became an angel. And not a second later.
It wasn’t foreplay. It’s how she’ll become an angel.
“You’re saying every first-year fucks their mentor during ascension?” Dez asks, desire unlacing between her legs.
“Hot as shit, right?” Yael says.
Simon puts down his violin, comes to sit on the couch, and stares into Dez’s eyes with a new intensity. She’s a little bit afraid of him.
“I had no idea Jet could be so giving,” Simon says. “I am forever changed.”
“And that’s why we love to fuck you.” Yael sighs. Dez can’t tell if she’s wistful or bitter. “There’s really nothing like an untouched angel. Second only to mortal flesh, so I’m told.”
“I have questions,” Dez says.
“Tell her the whole story,” Yael tells Simon. “Leave nothing out.”
Simon sprawls back dreamily on the couch.
“One minute, I thought I was dying. Then Jet put his hands on me, and he—I think he brought me back to life. I don’t know whether I kissed him first, or whether he kissed me, but it felt like I was remembering something important and long forgotten.
Not like I’ve been with that many people, but nothing’s ever felt so right.
It’s like I’ve been eating sawdust all my life and suddenly someone handed me white truffles—”
“I think I get it,” Dez says.
Simon laughs. “Respectfully, no. Talk to me when you’ve had an angel up to the hilt in you. Owning your body and giving you theirs. Talk to me when you’ve felt glory on a nuclear level. Talk to me when you’ve come in every—”
“Please stop before our human friend explodes,” Yael says, unamused. There’s a darkness in Yael this evening, and Dez wonders if it has to do with Alice Quinn. Her protégé. Never to return to Acheron.
“One day you’ll get your angel shafting, too, Dez.” Yael sighs. “But don’t think it’s free.” She turns to Simon. “Jet got just as much out of you tonight as you got out of him.”
“Well, I hope it was okay for him,” Simon says. “It was my first time with a celestial being.”
“That’s not what I mean,” Yael says. “It’s deeper than the sex.”
“Hah!” Simon laughs.
“I’m serious,” Yael says. “You’re linked now. You’re bound by an everlasting cord.”
“Bound?” Dez repeats. “What does that mean?”
“There’s nothing Simon can do about being stuck with Jet forever now.”
“Other than, I don’t know, enjoy it?” Simon says.
“But, Dez,” Yael says. “Consider eternity.”
“I’d be bound—for eternity—to Rafe?”
Yael stares at her, says nothing.
“What about your mentors?” Dez asks. “The ones you had before they left Heaven? What about Rafe and Samael—are they still bound?”
“I’ve said too much,” Yael says, standing up. “Just … think about it.”
She heads to her room and closes her door just as a knock at the door startles Dez and Simon on the couch.
“Jet?” Simon whispers hopefully.
Dez looks at him with pity, even as she’d secretly been hoping it was Rafe. She gets up and goes to the door as Simon starts playing the opening notes of Caprice Twenty-Four again.
Through the peephole, Simon’s lovely, mortal girlfriend holds a potted orchid. Dez reaches to open the door, then stops.
“Si, it’s Esther.”
“Tell her I’m sleeping,” Simon says. He doesn’t stop playing.
“Really?” Dez says. “She brought flowers.”
Simon looks at Dez, wearing a remote expression she’s never seen on him before. “Until she’s an angel,” he says, “what’s the point?”