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“So, if they think we’re angels…real angels…what do they want from us?”
Her arms gently crossed over her chest, and she stared at the floor once again, her beautiful face tight in sadness. She rubbed one of her arms as if she was cold. “Forgiveness. They want us to forgive them…for their sins.”
There was no knock before the door opened.
A woman stepped inside my room with a tray in her hands, holding herself with a posture so rigid, she didn’t seem real.
I’d been sitting on the bed when she’d barged into my quarters. There were books around me because I wanted to understand why they’d left them in my room, to learn more about these strange people who thought I was literally from heaven. I jerked slightly at the sight of her and gripped one of the books in my hand, ready to slam it down on her skull if she came too close to me.
She was roughly my age, a blond woman with green eyes. There was a table against the wall with two chairs, so she set the wooden tray on the surface. She looked normal, a petite woman who didn’t cover her face with a skull. But if she were normal, she wouldn’t be in a place like this.
Whatever the fuck this place was.
She straightened then turned to me, her hands clasped in front of her waist. She stared for several seconds, regarding me with an absorbent gaze, taking in my features. She was in black jeans and a long-sleeved black shirt, dressed the way the rest of the men were. The longer she looked at me, the colder her stare became, her mouth even pressing together in a distinctive frown. Without asking me a single question or even hearing my voice, she’d decided she hated me.
Loathed me.
“You aren’t in white.”
I glanced down at my clothes, seeing the denim jeans and the long-sleeved purple sweater I’d been wearing when I was taken. There had also been a scarf, but that had disappeared. I had just been relieved to see I was still clothed when I woke up, that someone hadn’t touched me without my consent.
Her anger intensified. “Change.”
I looked at her again, my skin prickling at the command.
She took a step closer to me, her eyes fierce. “Discard your earthly form and embrace your ethereal truth.”
Total nutjob.
“You don’t need to hide your identity here. We know exactly who you are.” Her voice lowered, and not once in this standoff did she blink. As if she’d put numbing medication in her eyes, she didn’t need to close her eyes to fight the dryness. “Don’t be afraid.”
“Don’t be afraid?” I knew I should hold my tongue because I was at the mercy of this situation and it wasn’t smart to provoke anyone or anything, but her statement was absolutely ludicrous. “You’ve taken me from my home and locked me up in here—”
“Your home is heaven—which you left willingly.”
P-S-Y-C-H-O.
“And you aren’t locked in here. The door is unlocked—always.”
I hadn’t even checked. My head turned to the door, the slab of wood that no longer confined me to this place. Did Beatrice know the door was unlocked? “Then I can just leave?”
“Yes.”
What was I missing? “So, I can just…head back to where I came from?”
“Theoretically.”
There was a catch here. I just didn’t know what it was.
“Your immortality allows you to do things the rest of us can’t. None of us can leave—and survive.”
Yep…there was a catch.
“Put on your wings.” She moved to the divide in the room that led to Beatrice’s. Her hand slipped inside the wall, and she pulled two solid pieces of wood toward the middle and locked the door in place. She slipped the key into her pocket then turned back to me.
“Why?” I continued to grip the book in my hands so I could knock her out if she came too close.
“Because an angel needs her wings.”
“Bitch, I’m not an angel. I’m just a person that you kidnapped.”
That stiff expression never relaxed, her fingers interlocking firmly, her skin stretching because she gripped herself so tightly. “Don’t make me retrieve them. You won’t like what they will do to you. It hurts us all to hurt an angel…but sometimes, we must.”
“Who’s them?”
She stepped closer to me, her shoulders back and her head held high, like she was some kind of royalty in this godforsaken place. “The Malevolent.”
I pictured the men with the cattle skulls on their heads, faceless beings that did the grunt work for the man who grinned at me. They weren’t figments of my imagination, but real nightmares that crawled out of the darkness underneath your bed and grabbed you by the ankle. These monsters were real. Their slowness and their silence disturbed me. They didn’t seem to be from this world—and that terrified me. The threat was enough to quiet my fight.
