“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?”
