Bird Song (68 page)

“Because I cannot ignore the fact that by preventing him from taking your life, I also prevented him from fulfilling his call.
 
You must understand how dangerous that is, not just for you, but for my family as well.”

I couldn’t argue with him about that.
 
I had never put too much thought into the calls of the other angels, Robert’s being enough to deal with.
 
But knowing how important it was to each and every individual angel, and how each one correlated with each other, I had no choice but to understand and appreciate how denying one angel what they were born to do for his own, personal reason could cause trouble for Robert, Lark, and
Ameila
as well.

“Does that erase what he tried to do?” Lark questioned, her voice tinged with anger.

“Tried to do what?” Stacy and Graham both asked, their heads turning back and forth between Robert, Lark, and I.

“A lot more has been going on than what you’ve been telling me,” Stacy announced, her tone miffed.

“Hey, I haven’t been told anything—what’s going on?
 
And who is this Sam person you keep talking about?” Graham questioned.

“This is not the time for twenty-questions, Graham,” I muttered.

“How about just one?
 
Who’s Sam?” he said in retort.

“Technically, that’s two,” Stacy said before repeating his question.
 
“Who’s Sam?”

Knowing that neither Lark nor Robert would answer her, I sighed and told them with as few words as possible who exactly Sam was.

Graham, as expected, didn’t take this news too well.
 
“Your mentor is the Archangel of Death?
 
And you introduced him to Grace after he tried to kill her, like they’re supposed to become best buds or something?” he shouted angrily.

“He was doing what he was supposed to do—what he was born to do.
 
I was the one in the wrong when I stopped him,” Robert argued.
 
“I think I’ve explained that already.”

“So you were wrong to keep him from killing Grace?” Stacy asked, her arms folded across her chest, her foot tapping with growing annoyance.

“Yes—no.
 
I was wrong by the rules that govern my kind.
 
I was right by the rules that govern my heart.
 
No matter which path I chose, I would have been wrong in someone’s eyes.
 
I just chose what was right for me,” Robert sighed.
 
“And why am I explaining myself to you?
 
This isn’t about you; this is about Grace and me.”

He turned his back to my friends and grabbed my hands, holding them tightly between his own.
 
“Grace, if what Lark has seen has to play out, if it is indeed the future, it is what I will deserve.
 
I don’t want to keep anything from you anymore.
 
I love you too much, need you too much to keep anything between us.”

I braced myself, taking a deep breath and exhaling slowly as his confession began once again.

“Whatever Sam had done or had been prevented from doing when I introduced you to him was nothing that could have been stopped beforehand, by me or anyone else, and could not be held against him by me because of that.
 
He simply was what he was.
 
But I did have a reason for him meeting you, him seeing and speaking to you.
 
I wanted him to know who you were, see how much you meant to me—not just hear it—so that he could understand why I needed you to live, why I would risk everything to ensure your survival.

“I didn’t expect him to build such resentment towards me, or you for that matter.
 
When he suggested that I lie to you about not loving you, I balked at the idea.
 
I already loved you.
 
If loving you wasn’t enough to bring my wings, then what would?
 
The pain of the lie was what would do it, he told me, and of course I trusted him.
 
I had no reason not to—he had never sought retribution from the Seraphim for my preventing your death—I felt he had only my best interest at heart if he had been willing to allow you to live.

“When I saw you with Graham that night, I made the decision to follow through with Sam’s plan.
 
I knew that even if you didn’t forgive me the lie, you wouldn’t be alone and I took comfort in that, even though it caused such a strange pain in me to acknowledge it.
 
When you asked me if I loved you and I told you “no”, it was the hardest thing for me to do—the pain had begun long before the question had even been asked—but that pain was not what hurt the most.
 
It was seeing your face when I lied to you that killed me.

“If I had doubted that I loved you, even in an infinitesimal amount, that moment would have erased it all.
 
And it’s remembering how I felt, watching you leave me that kept me from telling you the truth because there is only one thing in this world that frightens me, Grace, and that’s losing you.”

He paused, and I saw the trembling, felt it as he struggled with the words that were damming up behind his closed lips, his eyes closing, too, as if doing so could slow down the truth that he was so afraid to tell me.

He took a deep, needless breath, and sighed.
 
His eyes opened, his face grim as he began to speak once more.

“Grace, when I first saw you, when I first met you, I could see your past, just as easily as I could see your present.
 
I saw the events of the previous weeks, the previous months, and years.
 
I saw everything that went on in your life before I had even breathed a single word to you.

“But what I saw most clearly was the most significant moment in your life, the moment that ensured just what type of person you would become.”

“You saw my mom’s death,” I acknowledged.
 
Of course he had.
 
He had even allowed me to revisit it, my own way of remembering and saying goodbye.
 
I had thought it a gift.

“It wasn’t a gift, Grace.
 
It was a lie.”

I felt my throat grow dry and my tongue grow fat at his words.
 
“A…lie?”

He nodded slowly, his hands squeezing tightly around mine, preventing me from pulling away, even as I felt my body struggle to be as far away from him as possible.
 
“Yes, though what I showed you was true, there were parts that I hid from you because I thought doing so would protect you, and in effect, protect us, the us I wanted to exist.”

“What could you have seen that I would need to be protected from?”

“Can you not guess?
 
We’re talking about the day your mother died.
 
Can you not figure out what it was that I saw that could pose such a danger to you?” he asked me, though I knew that he hadn’t exactly expected the answer he received.

“You saw Sam…”

“Yes.”

I felt my knees buckle at the implication, the impact of the omission causing me to stumble and fall, though I never touched the ground; Robert caught me before I had a chance to hit the soil.

“Tell me,” I whispered, my voice hoarse from the silent scream I was holding within me.

“Grace, I-”

“Tell me!
 
For God’s sake, don’t talk to me about truth and honesty and then deny them to me!
 
Not now, not about my mother!” I shouted.

Robert flinched at the harsh sting of my words, but didn’t hesitate to continue.
 
“Sam’s call led him to the road you and your mother were traveling on that night.
 
He had two names, two lives he had to end who would be in the car that would be coming down that road at just that moment—your mother’s car.
 
He thought a crash would have been enough to have killed you both; he was so angry when you both survived, despite his knack for causing such…artful destruction.
 
He took that as a sign that you were mocking him and he became enraged.

“He caused the car to explode, knowing that whatever the damage, it would finish his task and he’d be allowed to move on.
 
He did not know that you were not in that car when it exploded, Grace, otherwise you wouldn’t be here right now.
 
For whatever reason, he thought you had died with your mother.
 
Perhaps it was the rage that clouded his vision, or perhaps he simply underestimated the human spirit that resided in your mother, but whatever it was, he left you alone.

“I saw that you remembered very little of this, and you certainly didn’t remember Sam.
 
His presence could only have been detected by someone like me, and so I made the decision then and there to never reveal any of this to you, or to Sam.
 
It was the only way I could ensure your safety.

“When you were hit by Mr. Frey, I feared that Sam had recognized you, realized who you were and was simply trying to finish what he had started.
 
Instead, you were just a number to him, just one of countless numbers on his list and Mr. Frey was unknowingly along for the ride.
 
Had Sam known, had he realized who you were, he would have killed you on the spot, and no amount of pleading on my part would have prevented it.
 
I thank God that he was ignorant about who you were.”

I scoffed at this last bit, and managed to pry myself away from him as my anger finally began to form the words that had been trapped inside of me, too jumbled and confused to do anything but stew in my own building resentment.

“And yet you felt it was perfectly okay to leave me alone with him at Hannah’s wedding.
 
You knew,
knew
that he killed my mother, that he had tried to kill me—not once, but twice—and yet you didn’t stop to think about bringing me where you knew he would be.
 
And then to introduce the two of us as though we’d somehow become friends!

“Was that what you were hoping?
 
That he and I would hit it off and like each other so much that he’d simply forget the whole not-being-able-to-kill-me-twice thing?”

When he didn’t reply, I threw up my hands in frustration, fighting the urge to ball them into fists and beat him.
 
“How could you do that to me?
 
How could you risk my life like that?
 
And when he told you that it would be a good idea to lie to me, you went along with it, knowing all along just how vindictive he could be, knowing how it would hurt me.
 
You actually went along with it, like some stupid guy trying to fit in with the cool kids.

“After all that talk about loss and suffering, I was the one who suffered.
 
I was the one who had to listen to your lie and believe it.
 
It wasn’t your heart breaking that night, it was mine!
 
I was the one who watched you die, thinking I’d never see you, never hear you tell me that you loved me again.
 
I was the one who lost then, not you.
 
You don’t know anything about loss or suffering.
 
You’ve never lost a damn thing in your life!”

“Wait a second—dude, you’re…dead?” Graham asked, his voice a strange and unwelcome interruption.

“Now is
not
the time to start catching on, Graham,” I lashed out.

“Sorry.”

“Sam came after me, made up that stupid sob story about his precious Miki, who I find out later is the mother of all vampires, and he tells me it’s because if he’s not happy, you can’t be either, and like some stupid sap, I believed it all.
 
It’s like you guys lied about the lying; you lie all the time and don’t care who it hurts.
 
And now you tell me the real reason why he came after me was because he was simply trying to finish what he started eleven years ago.”

“Did you say vampires?”

“Shut-up, Graham,” four voices shouted simultaneously.

“Grace, you don’t know that he remembered who you were that night.
 
He was crazed, you saw that.
 
There were a lot of things going on with Sam that I have yet to understand, but I fully believe that our friendship meant enough to him to keep him from killing you solely to finish what he started,” Robert argued.

“But the fact remains that he did try to kill me, Robert.
 
He did try to finish what he started and he would have succeeded, too.
 
You made sure of that.”

Robert shook his head in denial, his voice steely and determined.
 
“No.
 
He wouldn’t have succeeded.
 
I wouldn’t have let him.”

“You put me on a silver platter for him when you introduced us at the wedding.
 
You left me alone, knowing who he was and what he had tried to do.
 
You weren’t there to stop him when he finally had me.
 
And then…after everything, you had Lark take me home so you could take care of Sam.
 
You could have left him there to rot after everything he’d done, not just to me but to you and your family as well, and instead you made the choice that you had been making from the moment we met.
 
You chose Sam.
 
You were more concerned with him, even after he tried to kill me, to kill us.”