There But For The Grace (34 page)

“I’ll stay here until they get back. Just leave the guns on the bed. Nothing’s gonna get you here.”

I nodded, sort of at a loss for anything to say. Even Iaoel was disarmed by the cuteness… disarmed, and like me, thoroughly creeped the fuck out. This was weird as shit.

I stripped off my outer layer and put it on the bed neatly, fishing clean stuff out of the bottom of my pack. I went into the bathroom, shut the door and sighed out. Flipping on the light, I stared at the girl in the mirror. She looked back, startled at the transformation.

I was thinner, hair longer and hanging loose and a bit dirty. Where before all of this I had been a skinny-girl-jeans-wearing kind of hot, I now looked toned, my physique honed and muscular to the point that I almost appeared… capable, and I guess I was. Still, there was a tightness to my face, the small smile I attempted didn’t come easy, and my dark blue eyes carried a somewhat haunted sheen.

There was this photo series on the internet of soldiers before, during, and after war and I could see the same qualities in myself as those ‘after’ pics of the soldiers. It was disconcerting, to say the least, but Iaoel, surprisingly enough, was the one to give me a boost.

She replayed Tab, in bed with me that morning, the vision ghosting up in front of my eyes.
“I meant it. I love you, Addy.”
His soft gray eyes searched my face, a bit of something undefined in their depths, a holding back, a…

“Was he afraid? Afraid that I didn’t love him too?” I murmured to my reflection. A single spark leaping out of a fire… once for yes, twice for no. I took a deep breath and thought about what he’d said about Iaoel’s and my coming to a truce.

“It’s gotta be tough for you, doesn’t it?” I asked. “Being a woman, and seeing another chick with your ex is one thing… but being trapped in my head while it’s happening… I’m sorry for that.” I really was. I didn’t want her in my head, but sometimes it liked to slip my mind that for all intents and purposes, she was a prisoner there.

I sighed and sat down on the closed lid of the toilet and made an attempt at a truce, starting with a thank-you.

“Thank you for helping out and keeping both our asses alive down in Hell.”

Nothing. Well, nothing except for the distinct impression of total mistrust on her end, not that I could blame her. She sent me the image of shower water beating down on a pair of shoulders. Likely mine.

I nodded, “Yeah, I bet you wouldn’t mind keeping our body clean either. I’ve just been a little preoccupied… Bottom of the priority list and all.”

Nothing, but I didn’t waste any time. I got up and got the shower going, stripped down, and got in. I spent an inordinate amount of time washing my hair. It took three tries and a buttload of conditioner to detangle it, but finally, I was so clean I squeaked when I walked.

I got out, threw my hair up into a towel, and dried the rest of the way off with another. I dressed in a pair of yoga pants and a clean oversized tee before opening the door and stepping out into a room devoid of anyone but Tab. I froze, heart leaping in my chest and pretty much had to admit then and there, that yes. I had loved Tab for a long time. As infuriating as he could be, as awful as he sometimes had made me feel, I loved him too. Of course, I already knew that… I’d gone into Hell after him without a second thought. If that wasn’t love, then what was?

“Hi,” popped out of my mouth before I could stop it, and I blushed, feeling extra special lame for it.

“Hi,” he echoed back and graced me with that shy smile that I could never get enough of. Iaoel seemed to withdraw, and I got the sense she was trying to give me as much privacy as possible, a peace offering of sorts, like I’d tried to make towards her.

This wasn’t easy… any of it… but I’d take what I could get with the time I had left.

Thanks…
I thought at her. I set my stuff down by the bathroom door on the floor. I smoothed my hands over the tops of my thighs and laughed a little nervously.

“Why does this feel so awkward all of a sudden?”

Tab chuckled, “We have never made things easy on one another.”

“True, I suppose not.”

I went to him, and his hands found my hips when I stepped into his space. My breath caught when he looked down at me curiously. I shot a small apology to Iaoel, went onto my tiptoes, and kissed Tab the way it was meant to be done.

I touched my lips softly to his, inquisitively, and he sighed out, accepting, whereas I had been nervous and clumsy in the kisses we’d shared before. I closed my eyes as he drew me into the safety and circle of his arms, and he kissed me back, tenderly, the way I had always wished a man would kiss me back before all of this had happened.

I twined my arms around his neck and felt suffused with a golden glow, happy, euphoric almost, and I felt like it spread to Tab. A feeling that was all but confirmed when he groaned against my mouth and gathered me tighter against his body. He touched his tongue to my bottom lip, and I welcomed him with a glad cry. Before I knew it, I was up, legs twining around his hips as he supported my thighs with his hands. He walked us backwards until he could sit on the edge of the bed, and the kiss…it went on for a good long while until we pulled back from each other, almost drunk from it.

I stared into Tab’s eyes from a short distance away, and he smiled at me. It was one of the most genuine things I had ever seen, so beautiful and perfect, and the stricture around my heart eased a bit. He rested his forehead against mine, and we held each other like that for a while.

“A better kiss than Gabriel’s, I suspect?”

“Yeah, well, you know… wait, is that a hint of jealousy I detect?”

He chuckled. “It was meant to break the lock,” he mused.

“What lock? The one that was keeping you from flying or transporting or whatever?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. Now I know why he was so insistent about it.”

“Mm, ulterior motives upon ulterior motives…”

“When isn’t it, when it comes to one of you guys?” I asked.

“True enough. I suspect he had a notion about mutual feelings for one another. Gabriel always did have a certain finesse about forcing certain issues.”

I smiled a bit wryly and let my gaze roam his face.

“Can…” I hesitated, “Can we do that one more time?” I asked, licking my lower lip.

“I would like that,” he said softly, and we were kissing gently, breath mingling, and it was still so new and so foreign.

He twisted, with me still in his lap, and laid me gently onto my back. My blood heated, spiked with just how intimate a position we were in, doubled with the fact that Tab was happy to be there and was clearly male. I guess that answered the age-old question on whether Angels were genderless or not. I swallowed hard and let my eyes slip shut as his hand dipped beneath the hem of my shirt to caress along my ribs.

“God, I never saw this coming…” I moaned, and Tab smiled.

“Neither did I.” he looked down at me, uncertainty clouding his eyes, and I touched the side of his face. He turned into the light touch, placing a reverent kiss on my palm, and I bit my lower lip.

Confessing my feelings had always been a difficult thing for me, because reasons… Reasons mostly having to do with how I was raised and having them pretty much discounted or blown off at every turn. I swallowed hard and looked up into Tab’s beautiful face and choking up with those very emotions, took a flying leap and told him the God’s honest truth:

“I never in a million years thought I would ever love someone so much that I would go into literal Hell to save them. I didn’t think that kind of love really existed.”

He paused and turned his lips from my hand so that his gaze could kiss mine across the short distance that separated us. I felt vulnerable as hell with my admission, and I was afraid, but of what exactly I couldn’t tell you. We stared at each other for a long time, and finally, he smiled at me, once the marvel of what I’d said to him finished sinking in.

“I promise you, Adelaide, I will find a way. I won’t let you go without a fight, as ever…”

“It’s okay if you can’t, you know? I get it. This is real life and the really real world, and it doesn’t always work out the way you want it to. Just… just promise to love me for whatever time I’ve got left right now; long or short, just be there.”

“I swear my most solemn vow: I’m here and I am not prepared to let you go.”

He rested his forehead against mine before my lips sought out his again. It felt so good, so safe, and so warm lying there in the protective cage of his arms. He felt solid, warm, and alive beneath my touch and gave no indication whatsoever that he’d ever been injured.

Our kissing became more fervent, the touching more extreme, and I lost myself in him. I couldn’t help it. I don’t think he could either. After coming so close, so many times, to death, doom, and destruction, I think both of us were in need of a declaration of life. Both of us needed to feel something good, something that made our blood sing with more than just adrenaline and fear. At least, that was the way it was for me.

I held him to me, and even went so far as to twine my legs around his hips, pulling his body into mine to the point he lay atop me. I knew I should tone it down, that I was past the point of impolite and probably sailing right over the line into outrageous where Iaoel was concerned, but for once I wanted something so fiercely that I wasn’t willing to pump the brakes; not yet at least.

Truthfully, it was a little bit of a treat to watch Tab lose himself so completely. He was always so in control. I liked it, but I also knew we had to stop. It wasn’t right, not by a long shot, to subject Iaoel, an unwilling participant, to watch her very-ex-boyfriend with his new woman… It was even worse that she may be feeling some of this, being that she was stuck inhabiting my body.

I pulled back first, as much as I didn’t want to and asked softly, “So what’s supposed to happen now?”

Tab opened his mouth to answer but quickly frowned, “Adelaide...?” he reached one hand from beside my face and touched my upper lip. I blinked and drew back, pressing into the mattress to look at his fingertips, which were stained with blood.

I wrapped my fingers around his, hiding the blood from my sight and sighed softly. “It’s just a…”

A roaring woosh filled my ears, and it was as if the colors of the room—the gray of Tab’s eyes, his raven-dark hair with blueish highlights, the crimson of the bed’s canopy behind him—all swirled and ran together.

I heard him cry out, “Adelaide!” as I tipped back and fell from his grasp, falling and falling and falling, from such an impossible height, wondering when, if ever I was going to hit the floor… I mean the floor was only a few feet away, right? Had I fallen off the bed? I shouldn’t be falling so long and so far. I had been laying down, so I shouldn’t be falling at all… right?

The colors whirled but remained the colors of the room, not like when we traveled through space and time, until they narrowed down, as if swirling down some vast drain, and all the rest was deepest blackest night and silence.

I stood, breath suddenly loud in the solid quiet left behind. The silence was so absolute that I could hear the blood rushing in my own ears, whooshing past my eardrums between the steady ticks of my heart which thumped just a little too fast. I swallowed hard, throat clicking, and, chest squeezed down with panic, opened my eyes. The words ‘Tab I’m all right. It’s okay,’ died before they could even make it past my lips.

White.

It was so incredibly white out here… the snow and ice coating everything. It was beautiful, haunting, and very confusing. I wracked my brain and tried to decide where I could possibly be. The trees bowed to the ground with ice, and I looked down at myself, wondering why I wasn’t cold. I wore boots, jeans, a white tee and my leather jacket.

Hadad’s Hell rock was still chained around my neck, Piorre’s rosary still dangled from my wrist, and the holsters for War’s forty-fives rode along the outside of my thighs. So did the sheath for Tab’s knife. The problem was that they were devoid of the weapons that were supposed to ride in them. I patted down my pockets—no lighter, but Famine’s gloves were on my hands. I was also missing my messenger bag and God’s canteen.

What in the absolute fuck?

The sky boomed with Tab’s voice, which cried out,
“Adelaide! Addy, no! Not yet, not now… RAPHAEL!”

“Tab!” I screamed out, voice echoing back at me from the stark, light gray sky, “Tab, I’m okay!” I tried, but my voice simply echoed back down at me uselessly.

I twisted this way and that, to attempt to get my bearings, but there were none to be had. I swallowed hard and pushed down my mounting anger and panic at the situation, seeing as it wasn’t going to do shit for me. I closed my eyes and took deep, even, breaths in through my nose and out through my mouth until I was calm enough to deal with what was in front of me rationally.

Okay.

What did I know?

One, I didn’t know where I was, obviously… two, as icy and cold as it should have been here, I didn’t feel it. I looked at my fingers, which seemed normal in color, and my nose hadn’t started to run. While my boots did lightly crunch through the snow’s crust, my breath didn’t fog the air… but as soon as I thought it, it did.

I blew out a plume of vapored breath and began to shiver slightly. My nose started to run, and I cursed low and quiet under my breath. I tried to consider what that might mean and wondered briefly if I were in that circle of Hell where everything was frozen. The Ninth, I think that was the frozen one, but I didn’t have my tome of Dante to check it out for sure. I tried to remember what circle the Ninth represented and I wanted to believe it was treachery. I chewed my bottom lip, thoughtfully.

If I were dead and gone to Hell, the Ninth was for sure not where I would end up. Willful treachery wasn’t my sin. Not by a long shot.
So where the fuck was I?

I turned and looked in every direction, but I was ringed in by trees in a small, perfectly circular clearing. At one point, there were two iron, almost tiki-like torches thrust into the snow at a trailhead, leading deeper into the wood. I took stock of my options.