Page 124 of Breathe Like Hell

My eyes drifted over to trace his side profile.

He was beautiful. Ridiculously so. If I’d been asked to picture an angel before actually knowing two of them, he was what I would’ve imagined.

Neither of us spoke again until he parked the truck at the entrance to the same forest he’d taken me to before—the one with the cliff. I knew there was a significance to this place, but he’d been vague about it last time. He’d told me it represented something he’d never be able to undo, reminded him of his past choices, reminded him to be careful with his future ones. It was vague—though almost honest.

But that was before he knew I was also fucking Mason.

He didn’t find out until later that night.

I wondered if he regretted telling me anything at all then.

Micah shut the engine off then stepped out of the truck before walking around the hood to help me do the same.

We stepped together into the forest, heavy branches swaying over our heads, damp earth beneath our feet. Everything was green. A mirage of life, the ground speckled with pine needles and swathed in shadow, moss dripping over logs and ferns growing in the gaps, breaths of fog sweeping around tree trunks like ghosts. It was quiet, all sounds swallowed by the forest’s unbroken silence.

The soles of my boots squished down dead foliage on the trail, crunching over branches, avoiding rocks. Even surrounded by the scent of real coniferous trees towering over me, I could still sense the underlying thread of Micah’s kapnos as he walked at my side. It was different, so much more complex than pine and moss and fern.

It was him. Layered and dark and addictive.

We approached the gap in trees where the sky went wide over the ocean, everything else falling away into one of the most beautiful views I’d ever seen.

Wind swept up over the cliffside, blowing my hair off my face as I stared out at the waves tumbling in a net of constant motion. Micah sat down on the same large rock as before, and I joined him, but I didn’t speak. We sat together in silence, feeling the dampness in the air on our faces, tasting the salt of the Pacific, the looming forest at our backs.

Micah was taking deep breaths, like he needed as much air in his lungs as possible, and it made me think about the low neon content in the air on Earth.

“You said Heaven has more neon in the air,” I started quietly.

“It does.”

“How much?”

“Enough that my skin constantly glowed when I lived there.” He looked down at his forearms propped on his knees, and I could see all the tension in his shoulders. I wondered if the neon research he’d done for his dissertation had anything to do with himself. It had to.

“That’s called ultraneon, right?”

“Yeah.”

“What do Sigeians do in Heaven?”

He turned his head so his stare connected with mine. “I didn’t come out here because I wanted to talk about myself. I came out here to be alone, in the quiet.”

I frowned, my gaze falling away to linger on my fingers twisting together.

Every bone in my body ached to be closer to him, closer than humanly possible, to live safely under his skin as a part of him. All I wanted was to belong to him and be so close that his ribs protected my heart, too. But he wasn’t even touching me.

“But,” he continued, making my heart lift. “The main job of a Sigeian is to help humans get to Nepenthe. All of our powers are designed around that, around making people comfortable as they pass to the afterlife. Most people are nervous, or combative, or scared, or confused, and everything about a Sigeian is supposed to help remedy these things.”

He paused. I didn’t prompt him to continue, though. He could go at his own pace.

Micah took a deep breath.

“I can remove people’s memories of myself if that isn’t the perception of Heaven they want. Nepenthe itself is very nebulous, and it can be anything, but the journey there is not. I can remove senses and emotions that are distressing. I can even make myself invisible if my presence is too disorienting.”

I listened in awe as he reframed everything I already knew about him. I’d always wondered the purpose of his aspect, and now it made complete sense. He was a guide, a leader, an angel capable of helping humans make the toughest transition of their life.

“So Sigeians in Heaven don’t do what I do,” he continued. “They don’t usually take anything from other angels.”

“And Aiglens?” I questioned tentatively. “What do they do?”