Therefore I wasn’t surprised, the day before the headmistress’s return, to find him pacing on the rooftop, deep in thought. I had continued to visit him every night, and we had shared a great deal of laughter in between the moments we slept and the moments we made love. But I could feel him pulling away, and I knew, when he turned to me so eagerly, what he was about to say.
“Moriah, I have something very important to discuss with you,” he said, taking my hands and clasping them against his chest. The gibbous moon made a skewed halo behind his head.
Once again, I was glad he was blind and couldn’t read the heartache on my face. Now the trick was to keep it from my voice. “What could it possibly be?” I asked in a voice of exaggerated breathlessness.
He laughed. “You think you know, but you don’t,” he informed me.
“Let me guess. Your triumph a few days ago has led you to realize that even though you can’t see, you’re still an angel. You can still carry out all the tasks the god set aside for you. And you’ve realized you can’t perform these tasks while you’re hiding away in some musty old mansion. You need to return to an angel hold—the Eyrie, at a guess.”
“You’re wrong,” he said, a little smug.
I lifted my eyebrows. “Cedar Hills, then.”
He shook his head. “I thought about both of them, but neither one will do. Because you won’t come with me if I go to an angel hold.”
I stared at him in wordless astonishment.
“See, I did surprise you. You’re right that I realize it’s time to leave the Gabriel School. But I don’t want to go by myself.”
“Corban—”
He raised his voice to drown mine out. “And now you’re going to tell me that I don’t really know what I want. You’re going to tell me not to confuse gratitude with love. You’re going to say, ‘You think you can’t function without me, but once you’re back in the world you know, you’ll find me an inconvenience or an embarrassment. You need to go on to your new life without me.’”
I had nothing to say; he had got it right, almost to the word.
“But I know what I want, and who I want, and what I need to go forward from this point,” he said in a persuasive tone. “I know you won’t lie to me. I know you won’t let me lie to myself. I know you won’t fail me, no matter how hard things get. I know I love you.” He still had my hands wrapped in his, but now he overlapped his wings behind me and with their insistent pressure drew me closer to his body. “And I believe you love me.”
I tried to keep my arms stiff against his chest, resisting as much as I could, though we were only inches apart. “Well, I’ve tried not to love you,” I said in a mutinous voice. “Everybody falls in love with angels, and I wanted to be different.”
“But you didn’t succeed.”
I sighed and stopped pushing myself away from him. Instantly his wings brought me closer, and he dropped a kiss on my mouth. “I didn’t succeed,” I admitted.
“And you have no particular reason to stay here at the Gabriel School.”
I knew he could feel the movement as I shook my head. “I told myself no more running—I had found a good place here and I should be grateful—but I knew I wouldn’t be able to stay once you had gone. It would be too dull. And there would be too many memories.”
“So where did you think you might go?” he prompted.
“Someplace I could find work. Maybe start my own business. Now that I know the angels—and the Manadavvi—aren’t looking for me, I thought I could go to one of the bigger cities. Semorrah or Castelana.”
He shook his head. He was smiling. “That’s not where you want to live.”
I laughed up at him. When had all the stars come out? The night sky was dense with gaudy sparkles, like a tradesman’s wife overdressed for a fine occasion. “What city do you think I’d choose?”
“The most beautiful place in all of Samaria,” he said. “A city where I can write music—and perform it—a city where every merchant prospers and every artist flourishes. Both of us can do what we like and be happy there.”
There was only one place like that. “Luminaux.”
“Yes.”
“But Corban—”
Again he kissed me, just to make me stop talking, I think. “Yes, I’m sure,” he said. “I don’t want to go back to the holds. I don’t want to take up that old life. I am not yet ready to forgive Jovah for what he did to me. But I do want to go somewhere an angel is appreciated and where a musician can hone his craft. So the only question I have left is—”
“Will I come with you?” I interjected. If he could speak for me, I could speak for him.
“Yes. Will you?”
It was a risk. He might think he loved me unconditionally, he might believe he would never tire of me, but two people had a tendency to wear on each other, and I was more wearing than most. But I could bear it if he left me, as long as he left me in Luminaux, I thought. And maybe he wouldn’t leave me. I guessed I wouldn’t know unless I made the experiment.
“Yes,” I said. “Just let me get my coat.”
Ascension
Meljean Brook
CHAPTER 1
A demon had moved into Riverbend.
Judging by the amount of anger and despair that Marc Revoire could sense ravaging this community, the demon intended to rot the small Illinois town from the inside. A lot of work, a lot of whispers, a lot of doubts to sow. The demon might gain the pleasure of watching a few humans die in the process—but from Marc’s vantage point, it seemed easier to wait for a cold snap and watch the male half of Riverbend’s teenaged population freeze to death instead.
Though a good four inches of snow had fallen since noon, most of the boys coming out of Riverbend’s high school and into the parking lot wore T-shirts and cargo shorts. Some had the sense to pull on a stocking cap and a long-sleeved shirt, but they still shivered and hunched while scraping the snow from their windshields. Apparently, the girls had less to prove. Bundled in coats and scarves, only a few wearing short skirts bared their legs to the cold.
Marc expected the foolish clothing. He also wasn’t surprised that they completely ignored his presence, as if a man in a dark suit and with a badge tucked into his belt waited at the building’s rear exit every day. After fifty years of watching over the Midwestern states, he’d become accustomed to seeing all kinds of teen behavior, from shy to rebellious, ignorant to insightful, clever to outright stupid.
He was less accustomed to watching a bunch of kids leave school on a Friday afternoon, and not a one of them projecting relief or anticipation for the coming weekend. Instead, Marc sensed resignation, dread. Where those emotions hadn’t taken hold, a heavy dose of apathy resided.
Demons usually didn’t bother with kids. Teenagers didn’t have much power and rarely possessed any money—and though some demons destroyed human souls simply for the pleasure of it, most preferred to gain influence or wealth on the side. If the emotional rot in Riverbend had trickled down to these high schoolers, the bastard had gotten his claws in deep.
As a Guardian, Marc was on a mission to rip those claws out. As a man who’d seen too many lives ruined by too many demons, he’d enjoy every second of it.
One and a half centuries ago, a demon had destroyed the community where he’d lived, too. Sixteen years old and human, Marc hadn’t been able to psychically detect the festering seeds the demon had sown, but he hadn’t needed to—he’d seen the hate and distrust tearing everyone apart, splitting the community into factions. At the demon’s urging, resentment had eventually erupted into violence, and Marc had died after taking a bullet meant for his father. Later, he’d learned that his death had shocked the community so deeply that they’d all taken a step back, tried to untangle all of the lies the demon had been spreading. Not every rift had healed, but they’d begun to move forward again.
Marc had gone on, too. His sacrifice gave him a chance to become a Guardian, a warrior given angelic powers, and it was a chance that he’d taken. After a hundred years of training in Caelum, the Guardians’ heavenly city, he’d returned to Earth and begun hunting demons. Some were easier to find than others, their arrogance shining like a psychic beacon through a town—but this demon was proving to be the clever, hidden variety.
Eventually the demon would reveal itself. They always did, but Marc didn’t plan to wait that long . . . and maybe he wouldn’t have to.
One hundred and fifty years of combined training and hunting demons had taught Marc to listen to his instincts, and right now they were telling him that something had just changed. Something he was seeing, hearing, or smelling wasn’t as it should be, but his brain hadn’t figured out what his senses had already noted.
Tense now, expectant, he cocked his head. No unusual scents floated on the air. He could account for every footstep he heard, every voice, every heartbeat. He glanced up at the roof, the school windows, scanned the parking lot again. Everything appeared all right, no one moving too fast and everyone breathing, unlike a demon who might have forgotten himself. His gaze skimmed the snow, slipping over the drifts, and stopped.
The play of darkness and light was wrong. Cloud-diffused sunlight cast a faint, long shadow of the school building over the parking lot, but the long edge didn’t match the straight lines of the roof. Marc looked up.
No one. But now he saw the depression in the snow at the roof’s edge, as if someone had recently crouched there. Perhaps he’d heard the snow crunch—and even as he watched, the depression deepened slightly, as if shifting beneath someone’s weight.
As if someone was still crouching there. Tricky as demons were, they didn’t possess any powers of invisibility, and Marc only knew of one person who could project such a powerful illusion.
Though that person was also a Guardian, his tension didn’t ease. Of the few people in the world who might seek him out, Radha was the last woman he expected to see.