“Take them all!” she screamed. “You must take them all!”
The water around the woman calmed and softened, and she walked over to Darling, fish scurrying away from her every step. Celestial watched from her rock, tears coursing down her small face.
“I think not,” the woman said. “How would you know what you lost if you didn’t remember that the loss had happened? That’s hardly a sacrifice, Darling Kincaid, and you know that’s not how bargains work.”
Darling screamed and dropped to her knees, sobbing wildly.
The woman looked at her without pity. “Do you want this child or not?” she asked.
Celestial slid off her rock and waded over, then held out her little arms. “To me,” she said. “Give.”
The woman glanced at an inconsolable Darling, then shrugged again and handed the bloody newborn over to Celestial. “She’s your problem now,” she said, and then she laughed. “What a glorious sin to have.”
Celestial cradled the baby carefully as she made her way to the bank of the creek, then wrapped her in a blanket. Both she and the baby were smudged with dirt, wet with creek water.
In the garden, tears filled Galilee’s eyes. She reached out to the present Celestial, and her cousin grabbed her hand, holding it tightly. Darling wiped her face as she watched her past self scream and sob in the creek as the woman watched, her arms hanging oddly by her sides now that she wasn’t holding the baby.
“I must leave,” the woman said. “But I will leave you with a warning at no cost.” Darling paid her no attention, consumed by her grief, but little Celestial nodded solemnly, and so the woman continued. “Tell her nothing of this, until the time comes when you will have no choice. If you tell her any sooner, I’ll come back myself and break her neck.”
Little Celestial flinched, and the woman smiled.
“Keep her safe, as the bargain states. I don’t need to tell you what happens if you break a bargain made here, by your kind.” She threw one last look at the weeping Darling, then shook her head and waded away, down and down the creek, until she was a speck of white, and then until she was nothing and nowhere.
In the garden, no one spoke as they watched the rest of the memoryscape play out. Celestial cradled the baby, singing softly to her, until Darling stopped sobbing and climbed out of the creek. She kissed Celestial and took the baby, wiping the blood off her face. “Let’s go home,” she said, and little Celestial put her hand in her grandmother’s, and Darling Kincaid walked out of the woods with a creek deal in her arms.
The memoryscape ended. Collette was crying quietly, as were most of the other Kincaids. Darling folded her hands in her lap, even as she was reeling from the pain of memory and the lack of it. “I took you home and gave you to Collette. We named you Galilee and you became a Kincaid, and all we have done since then is try to keep up our end of the bargain, to keep you safe.”
Galilee was staring at her mother. “That’s what Ma told me when I asked.”
Darling reached out and caressed Collette’s cheek. “Kincaids don’t lie.”
“I wish you had told us all of it,” Collette said, her eyes dark with grief. “You suffered so much, and the only person who knew was Celestial?”
“I’m the only person who knows a lot of things,” Celestial quipped. “Don’t take it personally, Aunt Collette.”
Galilee let out a shaky breath, looking around the garden as if the memory would show itself again. “She never came back, did she?”
Darling shook her head. “For that, I’m grateful.”
The Devil’s jaw was tight, even as his hand made soothing circles on Galilee’s back. “But you don’t know anything more than what we saw? You don’t know what Galilee’s father was?”
Darling understood the question he was really asking, saw it mirrored in her granddaughter’s eyes.
“I’m so sorry,” she said to them. “I truly have no idea what Galilee is.”
18.
Here is the memory I took: Darling’s lover, a carpenter from St. Paradise named Bastien. His dark skin and pockmarked cheekbones, his keen eyes, his serrated smile. He died years ago, but I know every inch of his body as if my hands had been the ones that passed over his flesh, because these memories? They are allminenow. It’s why I felt so close to Darling—I owned some of the most precious moments of her life, and I walked through them like a ghost.
I thought it would help me understand something fundamental about being human, something I must have missed all those eons ago, when Lucifer argued that it was unthinkable to raise the water and kill them off the way we did, argued that they were whole beings, not one disposable experiment. He had dared to contradict the Most High, and then he’d been confused when all of Heaven recoiled.
“Should we not offer counsel?” he’d asked me. “Are our voices so irrelevant that my speaking creates such outrage?”
I had been shocked. “WeserveGod,” I’d hissed. “We serve and obey and nothing more, Lucifer. Nothing more!”
Sorrow had filled his eyes. “I want to be more than a pawn,” he’d replied softly. “Surely God will not fault me for that.”
Ihad absolutely faulted him for it, as had many other angels. I hadn’t understood then, why he would go to such lengths for the humans. Theybred so easily; they could be replicated, repopulated. They were nothing like us, nothing as special or irreplaceable.
