Guardian (33 page)

“Why did they leave?” Grace wanted to know.

“To talk, I suppose,” I said lightly, though I knew they were probably going to a bar. “Mommy and Daddy love each other, but to stay in love they had to spend time together. They went out to make that time special.”

Grace sucked on her thumb for a moment and then asked, “Like you and Rafael?”

I froze, staring at the two of them as they looked innocently back up at me. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“You and Rafael are always together. I heard Natalie tell her mommy that he probably wanted to marry you, because you’re good and beautiful and nice and he knew you were the best girl ever. Are you gonna marry Rafael? Do you love him?”

I drew in a deep breath before answering. Was this what single parents felt like when they’d been caught dating by their kids? “I love Rafael very much,” I told them. “But he wouldn’t ask me to marry him for a really long time, years and years. I’m still just a kid, remember? I’m still in school.” Though these day I felt less and less as though I was a young teenager. I took another deep breath. “Rafael loves all of us too, but there may come a time when he has to leave again, like he did once before, remember? And he may not come back. But no matter what, you’ll always have me, okay? I will
always
be here for you.”

“We know,” Colton said simply. They jumped down from the couch and hugged me before wandering off.

It was so nonchalantly said that anyone else may have thought they were brushing me off, but I knew better. The fact that they so readily knew I would always be around meant they
really knew
I would always be around. No doubts, no need for further assurance. It was moments like this that I actually felt I wasn’t failing them, that I could do this job and actually
feel
that God had His hand on my shoulder.

We all settled at the kitchen table a little while later to begin our homework. After about half an hour, Colton and Grace drifted away, their simple assignments finished while I stayed behind to struggle through finishing my AP Literature essay, since it was due the next day. It was on Dante’s
Divine Comedy
, and I wasn’t exactly having the time of my life when it happened
again
.

“Dante.
Ugh
. Did he ever abuse the knowledge he was given by Athalia.”

I jumped about a foot in the air and knocked my chair back another few feet. Damian stood in the kitchen, my copy of the book in question in his hands.

Heart in my throat, I put a hand to my chest and stared at him. He flicked a cursory look at me and then grinned. “Sorry if I scared you.”

“A little warning would be appreciated,” I grumbled, sitting back down. I really wanted to forget about the essay and save it for later, but English was my second class of the day and so there was no ‘later’ to fall back on. “That’s the fourth time today I’ve nearly had a heart attack and two of them were caused by you.”

“Relax and you wouldn’t be so jumpy,” Damian advised, sliding into a seat at the table across from me. He picked up my biology textbook and thumbed through it, stopping at a page showing the big bang theory of creation and shook his head. “Fools,” he muttered.

I watched him closely, though I would have found a fly buzzing on the wall interesting at the moment, I was so bored with my homework and still bothered by not having any contact with Rafael. “Who is Athalia? Do you mean she told Dante about the Fallen, and that’s why he wrote this book? Is it all
true
?”

Damian gave a secretive grin, his dark eyes flashing. “That would be telling. I don’t want to spoil anything, and there are certain secrets I am not at liberty to share. You wouldn’t be able to handle most of them, anyway. For the first part, however, yes, Athalia did tell Dante about the Fallen. She was one of the seven First.”

“One of the First,” I echoed, “with you and Rafael and Matthias.” My brow creased. “Who exactly
are
the First? Who else came with you?”

Damian ticked off on his fingers. “Me, Matthias, Rafael, Michael, Athalia, Rizpah, and Zipporah. We were the first flock, too, back when we all stuck together. For the first one hundred and seven years, it was just the seven of us, trying to catch our bearings and just learn how to
exist
. Even after more Fallen came into the world, we stuck together for about six hundred years, in one flock. Those were the glory days.” A faraway look entered Damian’s eyes as he stared at the wall behind me, rocking onto the back legs of his chair.

I couldn’t help but snort with laughter. “The glory days?” I asked, teasing. “Careful, old man, your age is beginning to show.”

Damian snapped back to attention and grinned at me. “Silence, infant, or I’ll have to lecture you about how I used to walk five miles to school in the snow and sleet!” he threatened, and I laughed again.

“What were the glory days really like?” I asked. “What made them so glorious?”

Damian shrugged. “For starters, it was the seven of us, all together and banded for a common cause. That first century bonded all of us. It’s rare, extremely rare, for one flock to stay together as long as we did. Members are constantly leaving and coming, changing and evolving. And in the early days, it’s easy to be full of hope and faith in God’s promise; that if we are good, He’ll take us back with Him when He comes again. But as time goes on, and He doesn’t come, and you begin to feel more and more abandoned, well, it’s harder to go on feeling so strong and full of burning passion to fight His battles for Him.”

“You begin to lose hope,” I surmised. “But you must have seen some amazing things in those first six hundred years.”

“Astounding things. Corrupt things. Unspeakable evil. Unjustness. The lives of saints unfold. Yes, I did see many things, the other Fallen and I, before we split up.”

I rested my chin in my hand, anxious now to hear about the history I hadn’t even realized must have existed. The Fallen had been around since Jesus had been crucified, the turning point as Rafael had once told me, and I had never thought to ask Rafael to share some of it with me. “Why did you all split up, with this bond between you?”

“By that time, the number of Fallen was growing rapidly, but we had also witnessed some of the first angels who had gone back to Lucifer. So Michael and Rafael agreed that perhaps we should each go on our own and lead a flock for a while, since we were the First and had been there the longest. Show the other Fallen all we had learned: essentially, that it was better to try and blend in among the humans whenever possible and fight the demons there, than remain invisible and try to keep everything under wraps and starve yourself for companionship. Thus ended our grand escapades. The seven of us were so powerful together, we could have defeated greater demons and accomplish much more than pithy demon hunting and aiding the poor.”

There was a great deal of condescension in Damian’s voice, and I came to the conclusion that he missed the glory days quite a bit, and I could easily see why. Whereas Rafael took great pleasure in doing hundreds of small deeds – helping the poor, donating money, aiding my family, and fighting the demon out of Austin – Damian enjoyed the big and the magnificent. He wanted to fight evil and do it with a bang, and for all the other Fallen to know about it. Once, he had been part of a famed group, and now he believed he had nothing.

“But eventually you, Matthias, and Rafael ended up together once more,” I reminded him. “What happened there? Where are the other First?”

“After a couple hundred years of leading other flocks, we all began to go off on our own lives, sink deeper and deeper underground, as the world began to get more modernized. Just like older people being overrun by the new, modern generation, it can be hard for us to adjust and learn all these new things of society. This generation, with the technology boom, has been particularly hard to swallow. None of us entertained the idea of getting cell phones before, until Rafael got his to help you, and we learned to use them and saw how useful they could be for scouting. Most of us still haven’t touched a computer.

“As for the other First, I hear rumors from time to time. Michael has turned into some kind of lone ranger; he no longer stays with a flock at all. But then, that’s easier for him to do because he’s a dominion. Rizpah spends most of her time in Europe. As time went on, we found there were certain angels who much preferred Europe to America. I’ve heard absolutely nothing from Zipporah for half a century, she’s completely fallen off the map somehow. Athalia is what we call a stationary angel.”

“By stationary, you mean she doesn’t move around all the time like the rest of you?”

“Yes. She lives in New York, and she went to Harvard law school. She basically helps all of us with our resources. Traveling around as we do, obviously we can’t really keep track of things like receiving mail and paying our credit card bills, and circulating bank accounts. Athalia helps with that. She also has a large house and will offer shelter to any Fallen who wants to stay in one place for awhile, in a house. Or to help new Fallen ease their first few months into the world. I’d almost go as far as to say it’s a halfway house. We haven’t seen her in a while, so probably after we leave Columbus we’ll go to visit her for a time.”

I tried to ignore the idea of the Fallen leaving Columbus, because with Rafael having just returned, the idea was unbearable. “I guess I never thought about all the other Fallen that must be out in the world,” I mused. “It’s weird to think that it’s possible I may have met one before Rafael, and not even realized it.”

“We keep to ourselves, mostly, as you can imagine.” Damian shrugged. “But sometimes, it’s very helpful to have a friend like St. James. We don’t always have the resources to know what’s going on all over the world, or understand it. People like St. James serve a great purpose in helping us catch up on any gaps of information we might have missed in our travels.”

I sagged dejectedly in my chair. “And I’m just kind of useless,” I said with a mock-heavy sigh. “I never even watch the news!”

Damian gave me a long, hard look. “I wouldn’t say that at all.”

I gave him a surprised look. “What do you mean?”

“I’ve never seen Rafael so… loose,” Damian explained. “You’ve done wonders for him. I never thought I would see the day when Rafael would fall for the one thing he was always so against. But Rachel is right; you’re already involved, because he couldn’t stay away. It’s quite amusing to watch him be so at war with himself, actually.”

This didn’t seem very Christian to me, but I let it go. “I don’t understand why it’s me, though,” I admitted. “Two thousand years is a long time to not find anyone else to share his light with.”

“Most of us have had our flings, but Rafael is just as stoic as ever,” Damian said, still slightly mocking. “There are seven First, but only two of them have shared their light. Some Fallen find people quickly, or maybe they’re just lonely. The ones who wait a long time are waiting to find the right one. Usually for us, there is
someone
out there for us. But once we really fall in love, it’s that one person for the rest of eternity. And as for why it’s you, well, even I can readily agree with Rafael that there are very few people like you in the world, Lyla. You have the essence of a saint about you. All of us can feel it.”

I snorted because this seemed utterly ridiculous. “I sincerely doubt that I could ever be a saint. Right now, I’d be perfectly happy to settle for just finishing this stupid essay.”

Damian slipped my notebook away from me and began reading what I had so far as he talked. “You greatly underestimate yourself. Standing next to someone like you reminds us of what it’s like to be in God’s presence once more.”

“I don’t know why,” I said, blushing ferociously at being the center of the conversation. “Colton and Grace both have strong faith for being so young.”

Damian vehemently shook his head as he picked up a pen and began to write more of my essay. “Not the same thing. Also, while it might be frowned upon for a two thousand -year-old man to fall in love with a seventeen year old girl-”

“Seventeen and eleven months,” I interjected tartly.

“-it would probably be even worse for him to fall in love with a
seven
year old girl,” he finished, still writing busily in my notebook. “Why? Why such a strong faith, with all the bad around you? You’re poor, your parents are never here and they abuse you when they are around. No one wants to help you, no magic relative shows up to whisk you away, and yet you turn to Him, every time. Doesn’t it make you angry that He refuses to let you catch a break?”

I frowned at him, puzzled by such a question. “Don’t you believe I’ll be rewarded for it in the end? That even though time and again He has thrown these things at me, I should be
proud
I still turn to Him? Besides, it’s not His fault. It’s Satan. Don’t you believe that God is always there, watching over us?”

“It’s hard to say,” Damian said coldly, “when you haven’t been able to set foot on His ground for thousands of years, when He ignores you so effectively that it feels futile to even pray to Him.”

I gaped. “You don’t
pray
anymore?”

Damian shrugged, a gesture I was becoming very familiar with. “It’s different for us,” he said in a lofty voice that said he was avoiding the issue. “We know Him more personally. And I think more than anyone, we have more reason to be doubtful of following Him.” Unbelievably, he wrote the apparent last word of my essay with a flourish, and finally faced me.