And every night, she cried. I’d come to learn the tears of the clairvoyant—the death sentence cast upon anyone cursed to see beyond the veil in a world that didn’t accept it.
When she asked to see my face, I obliged, though as far from her as I could be in the small room. She insisted I was a guardian angel, even when I refuted the title. And when she made the mistake of telling her mother of her angel, the torment of evangelical exorcisms returned.
Tonight, as she cried, her prayers had taken on a different nature. There was a bottle of orange pills in her mother’s medicine cabinet, and she wanted so badly for the pain to end, that she begged for her angel to take her hands and give her a sign.
There was church language for such things. It wasn’t meant to be literal. It had been six months since she’d seen my face for the first time, and given the revelation’s religiously disastrous end, I was reticent to reappear.
But for fuck’s sake, she could not die because of her mother’s relentless cruelty.
The wooden spoon, the leather belt, the forms of physical, emotional, and psychological abuse, quickly added Lisbeth to a list of enemies that had, until this moment, only been populated by war deities and succubi.
On the far side of the bed, I slipped my hands over hers and spoke.
“I’ll protect you,” I promised. “Please, trust me.”
She opened her eyes just enough to see that I was there, then shut them again. Choking sobs filled the tiny space. She closed her eyes tighter. “Why did you give me an angel, God? Why would you give me one if I would only be punished for having one?”
I squeezed her hands inside my own.
I pushed down the urge to murder her mother. Love—Marlow—my human, prayed for her parents’ safety on a nightly basis, much to my chagrin. Besides ignoring Marlow’s autonomous wishes, Lisbeth’s untimely death would solve little. Marlow was a minor with no relatives, and unlike when the world had only a few thousand humans and a king here or there, I couldn’t orchestrate her rise to a better life with ease in a world of red tape. The best I could do until she turned eighteen and could get her the hell away from her mother—when I could finally inflate her salaries, fill her cupboards with food, have every call from her mom mysteriously go to voicemail—was just to keep her alive.
“Love, listen.” I began the sentence without knowing how it might end. “I want to tell you that your mother loves you, but I can’t see her heart. I can only see her actions, and what I see is this: she’s scared. You don’t deserve to be punished. You deserve love. You deserve to be heard. To be understood. To share your stories without fear.”
Dry tears choked her through a stream of silent prayers.
She waited until she could take full, deep breaths before she opened her eyes to look at me.
“I’m sinful,” she said.
I could have thrown the frame against the room and watched it shatter. I restrained myself, shaking my head. “No.No. Love, I?—”
“You shouldn’t be my angel,” she said.
“Don’t say that.”
“Please, go,” she said.
And her fae blood had a second, horrid effect. She could see me before she was ready. She could also banish me before I was ready.
Love would graduate college in three days.
She was a complicated, strange, beautiful disaster. She’d given me a new name. A Shakespearean one. In this life, I was Caliban. I quite liked the moniker, though I wasn’t sure if she could fully appreciate what it did to me to have a name.
I avoided her seeing my face as diligently as possible until she was in college. Even then, I wanted her to see me as a fox, and to save her as a guardian angel, but with her combination of fae blood and religious trauma, I had no idea how to respect her autonomy while balancing on the razor’s edge of impossible situations.
She crashed into the door of her shitty basement apartment in a bandage dress, one heel broken, makeup smeared down her face. If I hadn’t been playing a lifelong role in the shadows, I would have assumed the worst, given her state.
Instead, the worst was the depths of her unhappiness.
This wasn’t the first time she’d come home too drunk to see, but each time, I pressed a healing hand into her back, disappeared behind the veil, and helped her to bed without her knowing.
Unless, of course, she commanded it.
Being summoned on command was unfamiliar and uncomfortable. I was never her prisoner, but I didn’t have the option of giving her space when she called out to me. Thecombination of her bloodline and our soul tie shifted the power dynamic.
I’d always wanted her to be in control.
I’d just never imagined it would be in a lifetime of pain.
