“Damiel did what?” I scowled at him.
“I stopped him.”
“Michael. Tell me what’s going on!”
Sighing, he blew the flames until one of the logs caught. The light from the fire cast an orange shine in his hair. “I’ve been given another chance.”
“Another chance for what?”
The air around us grew still and cold and the fire gave off too little heat. I shivered.
Michael got up and sat on the couch beside me. Resting his elbows on his knees, he tented his fingertips together; they were gray from the newsprint.
“I’d been sent to watch,” he said. “I saw many things over the years and at first I thought all there was to this world was sickness, brutality, and death.”
His skin drew a little tighter to the bone and filled with golden light, as though he shone from within. “But one day I saw you…and you were the most beautiful thing…” Heat rushed through my chest: he’d called me beautiful. “I became obsessed, neglecting my duties to watch you each day…preparing food, gathering flowers to make dyes for the fabric you wove.”
Goose bumps formed on my arms and tickled the back of my neck as he spoke. What he was saying had to be true. I’d never told him about the loom. How else could he have known?
“I wanted to be with you. Wanted you to see me,” he continued. “Even though so many of the others had fallen before me, I thought this was different, that I was different. That letting you see me would be enough…”
An image of a meadow came to me. Yellow sunlight streamed through bright spring leaves, bathing everything in dappled light. Michael stood there, wearing the robes I’d seen him in before.
“One day, I appeared. You weren’t much older than you are now.”
I stayed with the image. Behind Michael were wings—actual wings—the same ones I’d dreamt of. Had I been dreaming of him? As the goose bumps on my arms spread all the way down to my feet, I remembered how peaceful, how good being near him felt—much as it did now.
“You had wings.”
“Your mother had died. You asked me to stay in the meadow to keep you company. An angel’s duties.”
“You’re an…” I couldn’t say the word. But it explained so many things: the flashes of light that day in the woods, the way he seemed to glow, his unearthly beauty.
“It was forbidden for us to mate with humans.”
A tendril of sadness wove itself around my heart. What we felt was forbidden?
“Other Watchers started to see I was in trouble, told me to get reassigned. I should have left you alone… Instead, I came to you often.”
I remembered returning to the meadow to wait for him, the late afternoon sun dancing through the leaves.
“Even this lifetime, when I first saw you…It’s like I’m being forced to choose again, between Heaven and being with you.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t be,” he snapped, then quickly composed himself. “Being with you back then made this world bearable for me.”
I could hardly believe what I was hearing. Happy tears welled behind my eyes. I blinked them back, smiling at him.
“Don’t look at me that way,” he said, frowning at me. “You wanted an angel’s presence. I was consumed by lust. What I became, what I did…”
Memories sped through my mind faster than I could catch them, dizzying me—one of Michael kneeling on the sun-baked grass, holding and kissing my hands. I gasped from the force of the memory. “You loved me.”
He took both my hands in his now, gripping them as a palpable anger flashed through him. “No, I became obsessed. What I did was wrong.” Sighing, his grip lightened as he let my hands go. “But you loved me anyway, believing for the rest of your life that you had seduced an angel. When it was all along the angel who had seduced you.”
Not sure what to say, I didn’t speak, taking it all in. All I could remember was the love.
“I can’t do that again,” he said, standing.
“You won’t.”
He knelt in front of the fireplace. One of the logs had fallen in the fire he’d built, its embers glowing beneath the flames. Poker in hand, he stabbed at it and clusters of hot, angry sparks gasped up the chimney. “You don’t know—”
“You asked me to trust you.” I couldn’t understand why he was warning me against him, after everything he’d done to help. “And I do.”
“That’s different.”
Was it? I didn’t see how. As crazy as it all sounded, I believed everything he was telling me. I even remembered some of it, and the memories I had were good ones. Though I was curious about everything—how we lived, what it was like, and especially what he’d done—I couldn’t bring myself to ask. Not yet. It didn’t seem right to mistrust him for something he did thousands of years ago, in a different life. Something I didn’t even remember. How was it relevant?
“It was a long time ago,” I said.
Putting down the fire poker, he closed the screen. “I hurt you.”
I joined him by the spitting fire and knelt beside him. “That doesn’t mean you will again.”
Exhaling sharply, he leaned his head into one of his hands and covered his eyes. As I watched him struggle with his conscience over his past, a tightness gripped my chest. Without thinking, I touched the back of his head, stroking his hair, and it felt natural, as though I’d done it many times before. He sighed as his shoulders visibly relaxed. Squeezing my hand, he moved it to his lips and kissed it, palm up, before taking it in his.
The heat of his mouth lingered on my hand. When he looked up at me, his eyes were soft and unfocused.
“Thank you,” he said, and a sense of peace washed over the room.
Chapter Fourteen
Once the fire died down, Michael admitted he was starving and we headed out in his car for a bite. When he turned on the ignition, a loud, moody guitar riff blared through the speakers. I recognized the melody, the steady beat. It was by a local indie band, but their name escaped me. The song itself was about love.
Noticing my smirk, he asked, “What?”
“This is the kind of music angels listen to? I always wondered.”
He laughed, a warm inviting sound that curled itself around my insides. “Expecting harp music? No, wait. Gregorian chants.”
“Yeah. Something like that.” I laughed too, happy for the distraction. “But this is way better.”
I leaned back and let the music flow through me as he drove along the tree-lined side streets. Lights from the houses and streetlamps flickered through the leaves, so bright they hurt my eyes. I took a deep breath to relax, but my mind was sprinting. Even as a kid, I’d wanted to become an archaeologist so I could discover ancient civilizations, and here I was remembering one. Instead of artifacts, I had memories, fragments of a story. I could have just as easily been remembering a dream.
“Have you been alive all this time? You know, since…?” I tried to fathom the idea of being immortal.
He glanced at me before returning his attention to the road. “No. I was born into this body, but it wasn’t until the accident that I got a chance to come back.”
“How does that work? Is it like being possessed?”
“Possession implies there’s no choice, an invasion by something evil.” He pulled the car onto the West Seattle Bridge, overlooking downtown and the Port of Seattle where cranes, lit like sentinels, watched over shipyards below. “This is different. When I came into this life, I thought I was human. The best way to describe it would be to say my soul was some kind of sleeper soul. It wasn’t until I had the accident and died that I was reactivated, returned to duty.”