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“You mean you won’t,” Jake said. “You could, but you won’t.”
“Okay, yes,” Asher said. “I could, but I won’t.”
The soul glowered at him. “Fine,” he said. “I’ll take my chances with a demon.”
“Jake, no—”
“I’m out of choices,” he said. “I can’t let her die, not like that.”
“She wouldn’t necessarily be damned.”
“Do you even hear yourself? You think I can take that chance?”
“Stop it!” For the first time ever, he longed to punch a mortal. “Just stop.” He couldn’t believe he was considering this. “I don’t know how this is going to go,” he said. “I don’t know how I’m going to feel or if I’ll be able to make her believe me. Seeing her dead husband might just scare her to death. That’s been known to happen.”
“It won’t,” Jake said. “Not Kelsey.” He reached through the bars and caught Asher’s arm. “Just try. That’s all I’m asking.”
“Yeah, that’s all.” He gave the soul’s arm a squeeze then turned back to the grave. “Just remember you asked.”
He crouched over the grave. Spreading his golden wings behind him like a shield, he plunged his hand into the dirt, digging, grasping, calling what he wanted upward through the broken coffin and the frozen earth until his hand closed around it. The pattern of the man was still written in his lifeless flesh, and the angel absorbed it into himself. Howling in agony, he fell on his face on the grave, his wings shuddering, shriveling, fading away.
From the shadows of another tomb, something else was watching. Lucifer’s imp had only come back to steal baubles, the little remembrances the mortal scum left behind for their dead. He watched the angel’s agony with glee, hardly believing his luck. As soon as he was sure what had been done, he scuttled quickly toward the broken portal, biting his own fist to hold back his laughter until he was safely in Hell.
The Visit
Kelsey locked the street door of the apartment building and started up the stairs. The motion sensor light finally shivered to life just as she reached the first landing, but she barely noticed. She hadn’t had the energy to be randomly scared in six months.
The radiator at the end of the hall was wheezing like an old man running fast, but at least it was warm. She unwound Jake’s scarf from around her face and neck and pulled off her hat, shaking snow on the floor. She fumbled in the deep pocket of Jake’s winter coat for her keys, still fumbling when she reached her door. So, she almost stepped in the middle of the plate of brownies someone had left on the floor. She took a stumbling step back and bent over in one clumsy motion to pick them up.
They were covered in clear plastic wrap, labeled with a sticky note. “Nate and I are so terribly sorry,” it read. “Sylvia, 4B.”
She dissolved into tears. She cried hard while she went inside and set the plate on the counter, while she fought her way out of the coat. She braced both hands on the edge of the sink and cried for several minutes, ugly, hiccupping, slobbering sobs that she kept expecting to taper off, but they didn’t. She cried as she was getting undressed and putting on her t-shirt, while she brushed her teeth and washed her face, tears cutting comical paths in the soapy foam. She cried as she turned off the lights and crawled into her ice-cold bed. She dragged the covers half over her head and wrapped her arms around the extra pillow, sobs becoming howls muffled against it. Sometime soon she cried herself to sleep.
She woke to footsteps in the apartment.
She listened as she slid out from under the covers to crouch beside the bed, silently fumbling into her boots. Someone was walking down the hall. She glanced at the clock—12:41. Her first thought had been Jason, but even if he’d had a key she didn’t know about, he wouldn’t have let himself in at this hour, no matter how angry or worried he might be. And Helen and Taylor’s plane would be almost back in Georgia by now.
r /> She reached under the bed for the baseball bat, the only weapon Jake had ever agreed they could have in the apartment. It rolled an inch under her hand, clattering on the wood floor, and she stifled a gasp as she froze. But the footsteps didn’t come closer; they kept moving past the bedroom door to the back of the apartment toward Jake’s studio. Maybe it was Jason after all.
She straightened up and crept to the door, holding the bat in one hand. The door squeaked as she opened it, and she swung the bat up fast, grabbing it in both hands. But the hallway was empty. All the lights were still out. The door to the studio was open, and she saw no sign of a flashlight. The footsteps had stopped.
I could run, she thought. She had a clear path to the front door; she could run straight out and down the hall—Nate and Sylvia, 4B, would let her in. But whoever was here was in Jake’s studio; whoever it was had Jake’s paintings. Flexing her grip on the bat, she started up the hall.
Asher drew breath into his human lungs. The painting before him was beautiful, but he barely noticed its beauty. He recognized it. He had painted it. He was still himself, still an angel, but he was something else as well, something he had never been before. He wore a newborn version of the body of Kelsey’s husband, living matter reanimated from the matter left behind. It held all the sense memory of the dead man, all the deepest impressions of the mind, reborn with the soul and consciousness of an angel. It was a trick many of his kind had done since the birth of humans, but he had never been tempted before. He had never realized what he was missing.
He touched the canvas. The oil paint still felt cold; it was still fresh. If he dug in his fingertips, he could scrape the image away. The smell was luscious, making him breathe faster. All of the smells of this place were familiar and precious, so much so he felt faint—another new sensation. Others had tried tell him about the violent intensity of mortal senses, the gorgeous ache of it. He had thought them fools, drunk on trifles. But he had been the fool.
The painting was half-obscured. The figure in the background had been rubbed out and restarted. It was little more than an outline, a tall, naked male torso with the bare outline of wings penciled in behind it. But the figure painted in the foreground was complete and shockingly realistic, a sad, beautiful woman with huge green eyes and long red hair.
“Kelsey,” he said softly in his mortal voice, recognizing her not as the woman from the cemetery or the writer of the letters but the wife she had been to this body he had stolen. “My beautiful Kelsey.”
Kelsey had frozen in the doorway, unable to move, certain she was hallucinating, that her mind had finally snapped. Then he spoke, and she dropped the baseball bat. She opened her mouth to say his name, but all she could force out was a strangled sigh. He turned so she could see his face, and she cried out for real, laughing and crying at once. Not real, her brain was warning. Cannot be real. But her body was already running. He moved forward, too, coming to meet her, crashing into her as she threw herself into his arms.
“Don’t cry,” he was saying, crying himself. “Please, Kelsey, please don’t cry.” He sounded strange, distant and precise with barely a hint of the lazy drawl she remembered so clearly. But this was Jake. She could smell him, feel him, feel the way he crushed her close and kissed her hair.
“You’re real.” She drew back and touched his cheek. “You’re really here.” He opened his mouth to answer, and she kissed him, wrapping her arms around his neck. If he were a dream, she didn’t want him to tell her. “I love you,” she whispered, breaking the kiss to nuzzle her cheek against his, feeling his rough beard against her skin. Tears spilled from her eyes, her heart breaking. “I love you so much.”
Asher kissed away her tears, tasting the salt, the smell of her hair and the feel of her body pressed to his driving him mad. Desire, he thought, pushing his hands up through her hair, letting it spill between his fingers. This was desire. She felt so fragile, her mortal flesh like fire in his arms, as hot and changeable as flame.
