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Evie started watching me again as I redressed her wounds. They were healing but slowly. I wished I could transfer to her my ability to heal. Maybe I could, but I hadn’t tried it before. However, that would raise questions I couldn’t answer.
“You made a joke before,” she said as I finished dressing her in fresh clothes and laid her back in bed.
My eyebrow shot up before I could keep my expression blank. “Not sure why you’re so surprised. I’m not made of stone.”
She beamed at me, a soft look, lips only—the expression showed those cheekbones in all their glory, even with the remaining swelling. “You’ve been a blank slate. You could’ve been made of stone.” When I said nothing, Evie tilted her head. “Why don’t you smile?”
Sitting on the edge of the bed, I watched her hands, folded so neatly on her lap over the blanket. When I raised my eyes to hers, she wasn’t grinning anymore, simply watching me with curiosity. I couldn’t help the frown that presented itself as I watched her lips, waiting for that lift, that brightness again, wanting to be the one who brought it to her. Wanting to kiss her. A very deep thought I was trying harder with every passing hour to keep buried. She brought out the weakness in me.
“I promise you I’m not made of stone.”
I don’t know if she understood.
If I could smile for her, I would, and if I could find it within me to forget the darkness outside this room, only for a moment, I’d do that too. I was starting to believe if anyone could bring that out in me, it was her. But my heart was as scarred as her skin.
Everything people did to each other hurt me.
And everything she did was a sweet pain.
Leaving her with the television remote, I heard her flicking through the channels until she settled on some daytime drama and relaxed back against the pillows. I paced the apartment through the living room, making sure to keep out of her sight.
Why don’t I smile?
I think a more pressing question is what do I have to smile about?
There’s a lot of darkness in this world and this city. This end of the city is one of the places where the darkness is concentrated and all the worst of the worst come, and all those desperate come when they have nowhere else to go. The weak and vulnerable, those with a false sense of power and authority, all congregate here and create the fucked-up cycle that keeps this place running.
Drugs, prostitution, gambling, crime, violence.
And all the things about humanity I can’t stand.
But that’s why I’m here. Because these people, most of them are innocent with nowhere else to go, they deserve some light in their lives just as much as anyone else does. There’s not a great deal I can do, although sometimes I’m tempted to hit Frank up for some money, tell him he needs to put something back into the community he can so conveniently forget exists while he lounges in his penthouse apartment.
So, mostly I do small things. I keep the bad people away from the good, help those out of this place when I can, and when I can’t, I try to make them more comfortable. There are many here who volunteer their time and money to help those with less, and those moments ignite the flame in my chest I thought had been extinguished long ago by all the darkness.
But still, I stay.
Because for every one person I can’t help, I must try harder to help ten more.
I don’t smile because, as a human, this place is depressing, but as an angel, it’s excruciating.
Because I feel all their suffering and pain, I feel it as though it were my own. Where I can’t take the pain away, the least I can do is offer them warmth and light that only an angel can. Even if they don’t understand it, they don’t need to. Sometimes, people simply need to know they aren’t alone.
But Evie, she’s the pinnacle of everything I’m trying to fix.
An innocent pushed to this place without choice or option with nowhere else to go. Abused, used, and rejected for most, if not all, of her life. Born into the wrong place at the wrong time and suffering because of it.
She wasmypain,mysuffering, and sometimes it felt like I could reignite that spark within me.
If I could only saveher.
It sounds selfish, I know. But I also blamed myself for her being in a position where she got so badly beaten in the first place. What if I had saved her after that man hit her those weeks ago? Then she’d never have been in a spot where she was in so much danger.
I was getting personally involved, which was dangerous.
Beyond all of that, she wasbeautiful.
And I mean more than just her body. I mean her eyes, her face, her soul. Evie took the beating to protect someone, and in a horrible place where that was even a necessity, it was an incredibly brave act.
