Fallen in Love (14 page)

T
he barn was empty.

The sun had set.

The only light besides a cold sliver of Tuscan moon shining through the open door came from Arriane’s wings. They cast a soft, opalescent glow on the animals, which were not sleeping: The horses whinnied and the chickens clucked restlessly in their pens; the cows lay in the musky hay, their udders swollen with milk.

They sensed something, too.

Arriane grew frantic—where was Tess? She paced the barn, searching for clues, finding only the evidence of their fight. The toppled milk pails. The scuffed patch of muddy hay where they had tussled. If she closed her eyes, she could still see Tess the way she wanted to, smiling, the bright flush in her cheeks.

Arriane’s breath made clouds before her face. She watched them vanish into the frosty air. She wanted to scream, to stop every disappearing thing.

The premonition was so strong that Arriane wrung her hands, retracing her steps around the stables before she’d stormed off into the sky, remembering the angry words they had spat at each other, regretting everything she’d ever said or done to Tess that did not come from a place of utter love.

There.

She froze as her wing tip dragged across a mound of damp hay.

What was that?

Arriane dropped to her knees. Her wings glowed white, illuminating the terrified animals, which were backed into the corners of their stalls.

There was blood on the hay—a shiny, red pool.

“Tessriel!”

Arriane soared upward, scanning the ground madly for another trace of her love’s blood. She flew in a
panicked circle, scouring every inch of the barn, darting like a skylark this way and that, finding nothing.

Until she let her wings carry her outside, to the far side of the barn.

There, just beyond the open doorway, she spied a small well of blood seeping into the grass. She moved closer, hovering over it. She wanted to touch it, but—

No. She stopped herself.

Stretching away from the pool of blood, dark-red beaded drops formed a string several inches long, leading in the direction of the North Star.

Tess was on the move. But what had happened to her?

Arriane flew low to the ground, seeking small signs. At various points she would see spots of blood on blades of tall grass, but then she would lose the trail again. At one point, having crossed a creek bed, the trail disappeared completely, and Arriane wailed, feeling all was lost.

But then, near a weeping willow tree, she picked up her lover’s path again.

Blood streamed for twenty yards—the trail widened and had splashed far, as if a fresh wound had been inflicted. Was an enemy hunting Tess, wounding her as she fled? Arriane sped up, desperate to come between Tess and whatever evil would dare harm her.

Only one being could have hunted down a fully empowered
demon. In her darkest imaginings, Arriane could see Lucifer, the layers of cataracts on his eyes, his tremendous wings sprawling with rank black hairs.

But would Lucifer have come here, to wrestle Tess back to Hell? Arriane had never seen her love face to face with her master, though visions of it haunted her. If she discovered Lucifer in the act of harming Tess, Arriane didn’t know what she would do. She could barely fly through the rage that was building inside.

Love like this was fatal, even for an angel.

“Tessriel!” she bellowed again into the endless fields of green. But she heard nothing.

In the west, storm clouds formed a dirty screen across the sky. Arriane hoped that Tess hadn’t traveled in that direction. Everything about the rain—its scent, its effect on the terrain, its purifying quality—would throw Arriane off the trail.

But maybe Tess was counting on that very thing.

So the heart of the tempest was where she would go.

Arriane flattened her wings. She focused on picking up velocity. Turbulence shook her. Her body rocked from left to right, up and down, until she was soaked and shivering and spitting rain.

That was when she saw Tess, lying on her back at the edge of a stony promontory in the foothills of the Dolomites, not far from where Arriane had first sensed that something was terribly wrong.

Tess looked like she was
dying
—but angels did not die. Her wings flailed out unnaturally on either side of her. Blood streamed from them, pooling on a flat rock beneath her. She was alone.

She was
alone
.

Arriane was a hundred feet above her in the air, but the dull silver gleam in Tess’s hand was unmistakable.

But why would Tess possess a starshot?

Arriane dipped down so quickly the wind roared in her ears. She landed on a light-gray boulder a few feet in front of Tess. Her wings cast a circle of light in front of her, enfolding Tess’s body in a cool halo of illumination. It was easy to see now: The starshot had lacerated the demon’s left wing. It wasn’t completely severed, but the formerly powerful copper wing now hung by the thinnest strand of empyreal fibers.

Rage flashed through Arriane—she would murder whoever had done this. Then she looked at Tess’s ashen face, eyes barely open, gazing up at her.

And she understood.

There was no one else to blame. This harshest of all wounds was self-inflicted.

Only hours earlier, Arriane had been thinking about the purity of an angel’s skin, how nothing ever left a mark. But it wasn’t absolutely true—some things left permanent scars.

Lucifer could do it with the ink of his tattoos.

A starshot wound could do it—if it did not kill the angel.

The mingling of—

“Tessriel, no!”

The demon held the starshot in her right hand and drew it near the wound again, as if intent on amputating the gilded wing from her body. But her fingers trembled so badly that the starshot sliced into other sections of the wing, spewing blood from its muscle-thick center. Only then did she seem to register Arriane’s presence.

“You’ve come back.” Her voice was as thin as the mountain air.

“Oh, Tessriel.” Arriane’s hands covered her heart. “They will never heal from this.”

“That is the idea. I needed something to remember you by.”

“Don’t say that.” Arriane dropped to her knees, crawling to where Tess lay upon the ground. “What were you even doing with a starshot? Bartering with Azazel? That isn’t done!”

“It is done when the need is great enough. If I cannot have you, I do not want anything at all.” Tess grimaced as she thrust the starshot in a downward slicing motion across her mutilated wing. It made a sound like flesh being ripped apart, but it did not sever the wing completely. “It is harder than you think.”

“Stop it!” Arriane yelled, shooting out her hand to grab the starshot from Tess.

In a flash, Tess turned the starshot on her. “Stay back,” she said weakly. “You know what will happen if you touch me.”

Arriane studied the fallen angel she loved, covered in the blood that—if she touched it—would work like poison against her.

But even knowing that didn’t stop Arriane. She needed Tess to know that she was not alone, that she was loved.

The memory of Tess laughing echoed in her ears and warmed her insides; the image of Tess, dear, sweet, beautiful Tess, played across Arriane’s eyes as she did the unthinkable:

She lunged toward Tessriel, throwing herself on top of the demon, grabbing for the starshot, crying out in anguish as Tessriel’s blood seared her. It was the singular pain of demon blood on angel flesh, like a thousand dull swords driving into her soul.

Blood on blood was even worse.

Arriane gritted her teeth, nearly going mad with the pain as she wrested the starshot from Tess’s hand.

“Let me go!” Tess’s fingernails tore at Arriane’s throat until they broke the skin and Arriane’s own blood began to flow. An animalistic howl left Arriane’s lips.

Her blood actually boiled as it met Tessriel’s, turning
to acid on her body and singeing off her skin. Wherever their blood commingled, bubbles rose up on the left side of her body, ugly scars knotting up her leg and torso and neck.

Still Arriane did not let go.

“Now see what you’ve done.” Tess’s lips were blue from losing so much blood. Sadistic laughter punctuated her anguish. “Even my blood is anathema to yours, and yours to mine. Just like”—here her voice faltered and her eyes began to drift—“just like they always said.”

“Stay still!” Arriane tried to focus beyond the acidic burning; the only thing that mattered was stanching the flow of Tess’s blood. She weighed the two limp wings in her hands, not knowing what to do.

“You’re making it worse!” Tess shrieked.

“Stop! You’ve lost too much blood already.”

Tess was convulsing, but she steadied one hand on the rock and raised her head just enough to stare deep into Arriane’s eyes. “You have broken my heart, Arriane. You cannot be the one who heals me.”

Arriane’s lip quivered. “I can. I will.”

She tore at the skirt of her dairymaid’s gown, using her teeth to rip the flimsy fabric into shreds.
It will never work
, she thought as she wove and stretched the fabric into a clumsy sling, draping it carefully around Tess’s gushing left wing.

She quickly wove another sling, working until her
fingers were numb with cold and fear. Tess’s body continued to seize, but her eyes were closed, and she did not respond to Arriane’s admonitions to wake up.

These slings would not do. Tess’s wounds needed celestial intervention. That would require Gabbe’s help, and Gabbe would be furious—but she was Gabbe, so she would help anyway. Tess’s wings would never be the same, but maybe someday she could fly.

It was only after Arriane had bandaged Tess’s wings as best she could manage that she looked down at her own body. It was a miserable tableau.

Her neck blazed with pain. Her dress had fallen to pieces along the left side. Her skin was mottled with swirling blood and silver pus and flaking angel tissue. She had nothing to dress her wounds. She had used all of the cloth for Tess.

She fell across the demon’s lap and sobbed. She needed help but could not carry Tess in her burned and battered state. What good would it do, anyway?

Maybe Tess was right: When one lover suffered from a broken heart, no matter how badly the other wanted to help, she couldn’t be the one to heal it.

As far as possible, Arriane realized, each soul had to be content alone before plunging into love, because one never knew when the other would move out of that love. It was the greatest paradox: Souls need each other, but they also need to not need each other.

“I have to go,” she whispered to Tess, whose breath was shallow, labored. “I will send help for you. Someone will come to take care of you.

“I love you and will never love another. The best way I can honor that is to go now and fight for the kind of love we shared, the kind of love I believe in. I hope someday you find what you are looking for.” A tear slid down Arriane’s cheek. “Happy Valentine’s Day, my one and only.”

A shooting star danced in a bright arc across the sky. North—just the direction Arriane would need to fly to find Daniel and Lucinda. Her neck throbbed when she rose from the rock, but despite her injuries, her wings felt powerful and pristine. She spread them wide and flew away.

L
uce found herself at the far end of a narrow alley under a slit of sun-bleached sky.

“Bill?” she whispered.

No reply.

She’d come out of the Announcer groggy and disoriented. Where was she now? There was a bustling brightness at the other end of the alley, some sort of busy market where Luce caught flashes of fruit and fowl changing hands.

A biting winter wind had frozen the puddles in the
alley into slush, but Luce was sweating in the black ball gown she wore … where had she first put on this tattered gown? The king’s ball at Versailles. She’d found this dress in some princess’s armoire. And then she’d kept it on when she stepped through to the performance of
Henry VIII
in London.