“It’s mainly done to spite Our Father,” Ivy said. “The corruption of His creations causes Him great anguish.”
“But I’m not even a real human!” I said.
“Exactly,” Gabriel replied. “What better prize than an angel in human form? Capturing one of us would be the ultimate victory.”
“Is Beth in danger?” Xavier moved closer to me.
“I think we may all be in danger,” said Gabriel. “Just have patience. Our Father will reveal our path to us in due course.”
I insisted that Xavier stay the night with us, and after Jake’s message, Ivy and Gabriel did not object. Although they didn’t say as much, I knew they were worried about Xavier’s safety. Jake was unpredictable, like a firework that could go off at any moment.
Xavier called his parents and told them he was staying the night at a friend’s place so they could finish studying for an exam the next day. There was no way his mother would have allowed him to stay if she’d known he was at my house — Bernie was far too conservative for that. She and Gabriel would have gotten along famously.
We said good night to Ivy and Gabriel and climbed the stairs to my bedroom. Xavier stood on the balcony while I took my shower and brushed my teeth. I didn’t ask what he was thinking or if he was as frightened as I was. I knew he would never admit it, at least not to me. To sleep, he stripped down to a pair of boxer shorts that said, “Don’t sweat it!” across the back and a white tank that he had on under his shirt. I put on a pair of leggings and a loose T-shirt.
We didn’t say much to each other that night. I lay still and listened to the sound of his steady breathing, felt the rise and fall of his chest. With his body curved around mine, his arms protectively wrapped around me, I felt safe and cocooned. Even though Xavier was only human, it seemed he could protect me from anything and everything. I wouldn’t have been worried if a fire-breathing dragon had torn off the roof, because I knew that Xavier was there. I wondered fleetingly if I was expecting too much of him but dismissed the idea.
I woke in the middle of the night, frightened by a dream I couldn’t remember. Xavier lay beside me. He looked so beautiful when he was asleep, his perfect lips slightly parted, his hair tousled on the pillow, his smooth, tanned chest rising and falling gently as he breathed. My anxiety got the better of me and I reached out to him. He woke easily, and his eyes were startlingly blue even in the moonlight.
“What’s that?” I whispered, suddenly aware of shadows. “Over there, do you see that?”
Leaving his arm around me, Xavier sat up and looked around the room. “Where?” he asked, his voice thick with sleep. I gestured toward the far right corner of the room. Xavier swung himself out of the bed and walked across to where I was pointing.
“Here?” he asked when he reached the spot. “I’m fairly sure this is a coatrack.” I nodded then remembered he couldn’t see me in the dark.
“I thought I saw someone standing there,” I said. “A man in a long coat and a hat.” Spoken aloud it sounded ridiculous.
“I think you’re seeing ghosts, babe.” Xavier yawned and prodded the coatrack with his foot. “Yep, definitely a coatrack.”
“Sorry,” I said when he came back to bed. I wrapped myself around his warmth.
“Don’t be scared,” he murmured. “Nobody can hurt you while I’m here.”
I trusted him and, after a while, let myself stop listening for noises and movements.
“Love you,” Xavier said just before he drifted back to sleep.
“Love you more,” I said playfully.
“Not a chance,” Xavier said, fully awake now. “I’m bigger, I can contain more love.”
“I’m smaller, therefore my love particles are more compressed, which means I can fit more in.”
Xavier laughed. “That argument makes no sense. Overruled.”
“I’m just basing it on how much I miss you when you’re not around,” I countered.
“How can you possibly know how much I miss you?” he said. “Have you got some sort of built-in miss-o-meter that can give us a reading?”
“I’m a girl; of course I have a built-in miss-o-meter.”
I drifted off to sleep reassured by the feel of his chest pressed against my back. I could feel his breath on the back of my neck. I traced the smooth skin on his arms, made golden by time outdoors. In the moonlight I could see every hair, every vein, every freckle, and I loved it all. That was my last thought before I fell asleep that night, and I found that fear had abandoned me completely.
29
A Friend in Need
Taylah haunted my dreams. I saw her as a faceless ghost with a pair of bloodstained white hands that grasped aimlessly at the air. Then I was inside her body, lying in a pool of sticky warm blood. I heard the dull dripping of the taps in the girls’ bathroom as she slipped into death. Then I felt the grief and overwhelming sorrow of her family. They were blaming themselves for not having noticed her depression, wondering if they could have prevented the outcome. Jake was there in the dream too, always at the edge of the frame, slightly out of focus and laughing softly.
In the morning I woke to find the covers rumpled and the place beside me empty. If I pressed my face into the pillow where his head had rested, I could still faintly catch Xavier’s scent. I rolled out of bed and opened the curtains to let golden sunlight pour into the room.
In the kitchen, it was Xavier and not Gabriel cooking breakfast. He had pulled on his jeans and T-shirt, and his hair was tousled. He looked fresh faced and beautiful as he carefully cracked eggs into the sizzling pan.
“I thought a decent breakfast was in order,” he said when he saw me.
Gabriel and Ivy were already seated at the dining table, plates heaped with scrambled eggs on sourdough toast in front of them.
“This is really good,” Ivy said between mouthfuls. “How did you learn to cook?”
“I had no choice, I had to learn,” Xavier said. “My whole family besides Mom are useless in the kitchen. When she works late at the clinic they order pizza or eat whatever they can find that says, ‘add water and stir.’ So I cook for them whenever Mom isn’t around.”
“Xavier’s a man of many skills,” I told Ivy and Gabe glowingly.
Xavier had stayed only one night yet I marveled at how easily he had become integrated into our little family. It didn’t feel like we had a guest in the house — he was just one of us now. Even Gabriel seemed to have accepted him, and found him a clean white shirt to wear to school.
I noticed we were all carefully avoiding the subject of what had happened the previous afternoon. I knew I was certainly trying to block out the memory.
“I know yesterday came as an awful shock to us all,” Ivy said eventually. “But we’re going to deal with this situation.”
“How?” I asked
“Our Father will show us the way.”
“I just hope He does it soon, before it’s too late,” Xavier muttered, but I was the only one who heard him.
A shock wave had torn through the school after the discovery of Taylah’s suicide. Although classes continued in an attempt at maintaining normality, everything seemed to be operating tentatively. Letters had gone out to parents offering grief counseling and encouraging families to support their children in any way they could. People walked around as if on eggshells, not wanting to be too loud or insensitive. Jake Thorn and his friends were notably absent.
An assembly was called mid-morning, and Dr. Chester explained to the students that the administration didn’t know exactly what had transpired, but they had placed the investigation in the hands of the police. Then his voice became less matter-of-fact.