Page 189
“He already belongs to him,” he says, and before I can ask what the fuck that means, his body flickers, the human shape around him breaking apart until he disappears completely.
Silence rushes back into the alley as the angel’s knees finally give out.
I move without thinking, catching the angel before his shoulder can crack against the pavement, and the instant my hands close around him, everything he’s carrying crashes into me at once.
His fall.
His guilt.
Centuries of quiet certainty that whatever punishment found him, he’d earned every second of it.
It nearly drops me to the ground beside him.
I gasp, staring down into a face carved from exhaustion, disbelief, and the only word that makes it past my throat is, “No.”
His breath shudders. “No?”
I shake my head, tears blurring the edges of him. “You’ have believed a lie about yourself for a very long time.”
He goes still beneath my hands before something shifts across his face, small enough I almost miss it, and for a second, he just stares at me.
When a slow clap cuts through the alley…
Once.
Twice.
Three times.
We both turn to see a man standing beneath the streetlight across the road. Black suit, white shirt, polished shoes. His hands come together in one last lazy clap before dropping to his sides.
He looks completely out of place standing on a quiet New Hampshire street this early in the afternoon. Too well-dressed, too calm, and not a single hair out of place while the two of us are covered in blood.
Then he lifts his head, and his red eyes meet mine.
Every instinct I have fucking screams, so I take a step back.
The fallen angel beside me does the opposite. His arm shoots across my body, shoving me behind him despite the fact that he can barely stand. “Stay behind me.”
I grab his arm. “Who is that?”
He doesn’t answer. His whole body goes stiff beneath my hand as his black wings spread wider, one sweeping behind me until I’m almost completely blocked from the stranger’s view, while silver light erupts through the feathers.
It’s brighter than anything I’ve seen from him yet, flashing from the base of his wings all the way to the tips before spilling beneath his skin. Silver burns along his arms and across his chest, pulsing brighter as he shifts himself fully between the man across the road and me.
He was barely holding himself upright a second ago. Now power pours off him hard enough to raise the hair along my arms.
The stranger smiles. Not big. Barely there.
Somehow that makes it worse.
His attention moves straight past the fallen angel and lands on me. He looks me over slowly, like finding me here just changed something.
The angel feels it too. “Don’t fucking look at her!”
The man’s smile deepens. “Interesting.”
One word, that’s all he gives us.
