The other demon takes advantage of Canaan’s entanglement and darts past. Black talons reach again for me, for Ali. They reach for Helene, clawing at her face and neck. She aims her sword and plunges vigorously, losing her grip on the ledge but sinking her weapon deep into the chest of the demon.
And then we fall.
Don’t let go. Don’t let go.
That’s all I can think as we tumble, wing over broken wing, toward the ground. Wind beats my face, tearing my closed eyes open. The ground is dazzling as it closes in on us, all bright and shiny. But I don’t want to die. Not now, not today.
And then I stop.
In midair.
Canaan’s hands are beneath my arms, stopping my momentum. His wings hold us in place.
“You all right, Brielle?”
“Helene . . .”
She hangs against me, unconscious, my hold on her waist the only thing keeping us together. The child dangles from my left hand. I can’t see her face but hope with everything in me that she’s also unconscious.
“She’ll be all right.” Canaan wraps all of us in his enormous wings and launches into the sky.
I
topple from Canaan’s wings and slide to my knees on the slick corrugated roof.
“Brielle!” Jake cries, stumbling out behind me. “Are you hurt?”
“No,” I say. “I’m not hurt.”
Canaan kneels next to me in his human form. He cradles the child against his shoulder, and Helene lies next to me, still in her Celestial form. Her angelic flesh is torn, her wings shredded.
“You’re sure, Brielle? You’re okay?” Canaan asks.
Am I? I don’t know.
It’s a skin-deep question with an answer too buried to dig up right now. I keep my eyes on Helene. “She was . . . brilliant.”
“She’ll heal, Brielle. We angels aren’t quite so fragile as you.”
“Good,” I say, rubbing my hands against my stomach, willing my clenched muscles to relax. “That’s good.”
“Then you’re okay?” Jake says. “You’re sure?”
“Yes, I’m all right, I just didn’t expect—I mean, one minute I’m standing in a circle of kids, and the next . . .” I’m calming down, my breathing returning to normal. “Was that a light saber, Canaan?”
Canaan sputters. “No, it wasn’t a light saber.”
“Close enough, though,” Jake says, squeezing me against him. “You’re getting better at this fear stuff.”
He’s right. I am.
“The halo helps,” I say.
“Keep it on,” Canaan says, standing. “Maka didn’t pursue us after Helene fell, but he won’t have gone far. And there’s still Damien to account for.”
“Where are you going?” I ask.
“I’ll be back shortly. These two need somewhere to mend. Somewhere safe. And this,” he says, looking around, “doesn’t qualify.”
Canaan dives from the building, two bundles tucked in the safety of his wings. I watch him step into nothingness, banking to the right and circling the warehouse, his Celestial head moving to and fro. Eventually he shoots to the north, over the river, and disappears from sight.
There’s no break in the downpour. Even the bridge hanging over the warehouse can’t keep the storm from reaching us, and it beats down hard—glossy projectiles falling from the clouds above and soaking our very human forms. Jake and I sit facing one another on the rooftop. The rain falls angrily, and we pull our heads together in a tired attempt to keep it out.
Jake hasn’t stopped moving. He fumbles with my hoodie, my hat. He scratches mud from my jeans and pulls something from my hair. I place my hands, celestially hot, on either side of his face. Finally, he breathes deeply and lets his hands rest on my knees.
“What are you thinking?” I say.
He hastily wipes the rain from his eyes. “I’m wishing I’d been more careful with your ankle. That I hadn’t put everyone in danger.”
I stare at his face, so full of regret, and I wonder aloud, “But do you think we’d have found this place otherwise? All these children, Jake. How long have they been here? Your little ‘mistake’ led us to them.”
He nods, but there’s regret there. I wonder if he’ll be more discriminating with his gift. The thought makes me sad.
“And you,” he says. “What are you thinking?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Trying to make sense of everything, I guess, trying to make it all fit.”
“How’s that working out for you?”
“Not so well.”
“Yeah,” Jake says. “Angels and demons are hard to pencil in next to pointe class.”
“You know what pointe class is?”
“I Googled you.”
“You Googled me?”
“I was curious,” he says, the Celestial colors of his face blending into a blush. “Do you miss teaching?”
“It was just the younger girls at Miss Macy’s,” I say with a nod. “Just kids, but yeah, I miss it.”
“Like the kids down there,” he says. The wind shifts, and the rain slides sideways and then vertical again, sounding like tribal drums on the aluminum roof. “Don’t try to make all this fit into your world, okay? It won’t. Once you’ve seen the world like this, once it takes hold of you, you can’t ignore it and pretend it’s not there. Even without the halo, Elle, you’ll start to see fear and oppression. You’ll begin to see them for what they really are.”
“And what do I do with all of that?” I say, uncomfortable with the thought. “I have more than enough trouble managing my own emotions. How do I . . . cope . . . with everyone else’s fear? With
this
reality?”
Conviction hardens his face. “You fight it. Have you noticed— darkness can’t survive in a world of light? Eventually evil everywhere will burn, but until it does, the kingdom of light, God’s kingdom, needs warriors.”
I swallow against the turmoil sloshing around inside me. Jake tilts his head, waiting for me to speak.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that Canaan is good. That you are good. That Damien is evil. And I can see that God cares—even loves you, loves people—enough to send angels like Canaan to protect them.”
“Brielle, He’s done so much more than that.” Jake’s face is full of passion and fervor.
“I believe you, and I want to understand,” I say through a haze of tears. “It’s ridiculous to feel this way, because it’s so obvious I’m supposed to be here, that someone has been guiding this whole thing along, but . . . I just keep hitting a wall. I can’t figure out why a God who would do all of this for me, for you, would allow Ali to die—would take my mom without anything, even the smallest memory to comfort me.”
Jake doesn’t speak.
“It just seems wrong, you know? For a righteous God to allow injustice. It just seems wrong.” I wish I felt differently, but at least I have put words to the ache I’ve been stifling all day. “I’m sorry, Jake,” I apologize, feeling miserable for being disappointed in the God he so willingly follows. “I just have a problem with blind faith.”
Jake’s eyes snap to mine. Prismatic raindrops run down his cheeks and lips, but his smile is warm.
“You know, second to me—and maybe the apostle John— you’ve seen more of the true world than just about anyone. God doesn’t call us to blind faith, Brielle. Don’t let anyone tell you that. He just asks us to believe Him, to believe that what He said about Himself is true. Even when it doesn’t make sense. Even when it’s hard. I would give anything to understand God and why He does what He does.” Jake pulls my face closer to his. “But we’re
His
creation, Brielle. Not the other way around. We can’t make God into what we think He should be. With everything you’ve now seen, is it so hard to believe that
perhaps
the tragedy of your mother’s death—of Ali’s murder—that maybe these things were allowed to happen as part of some larger plan?”
The air seems too thin, and I can’t breathe in enough of it. The thought of their lives being thrown away to accommodate some divine arrangement stabs like a thousand knives. I pull away, trying to find more air.
“Why should their deaths be necessary? With everything He could have done, all the angels He could have sent, why didn’t they have a Shield? Wasn’t my mom worth it? Wasn’t Ali? Are you saying God wanted them to die?”
“Everyone dies,” Jake says, releasing me.
“But He could have stopped it?”
The silence buzzes. Waspish. Like me.
“Yes. He could’ve stopped it.”
The honesty of his words, the truth of it, tears at my heart, and I sob—the pain of loss worse than it’s been in days. “So He didn’t care, then? He just let them die!”
“Brielle, listen to me. It’s possible God’s greater plan includes the deaths of your mother and Ali, but that doesn’t say anything about their worth to Him. You
have
to believe that.
“It’s also possible their deaths were brought about by the very existence of evil. Look around you. We live in a world plagued by darkness. Every choice we make affects the balance of light here. You’ve seen how fear debilitates us. The only way bad things will stop happening to good people is for darkness to be completely eradicated, and that will only happen in God’s timing. But you can trust that God will somehow use their deaths, and your loss, to one day eliminate evil forever.”
“God’s plan or not, Jake, I hate death.”
“God does too.”
Those three little words are unfathomable to me. I’m still reeling when Jake continues.
“But let me ask you this: when Canaan cloaked you with his wings and you disappeared from the Terrestrial realm, did you just . . . stop existing?”
“Of course not,” I say, surprised by the question.
“It’s the same thing, Elle. Ali and your mother have been cloaked by death. You can’t see them, but they’re not gone. Not really. Our spirits will outlive our physical bodies, so it’s our spirits we have to take care of.”
Jake grabs the collar of my sweatshirt, and I let him pull me to him, leaning my forehead against his. The halo’s kept me warm, warmer even than Jake.
“Anybody ever told you how hot you are?” he asks.
My lips twitch. “You really want me to answer that question.”
He laughs.
“Do you think I’ll see them again, Jake? In heaven?”
“That’s between them and God,” he says, closing his eyes. Their white light is shut away, and still the Celestial shines. “And you and God. Belief is always a choice. And it’s a choice no one else can make for you.”
“It’s not that I don’t believe, Jake. I just want to understand.”
Jake breathes a small, gentle laugh. “It’s a journey, Elle. A process. There’s a proverb that says, ‘Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding.’ ”
“Lean not on your own understanding.” The words are melodic, fortune cookie-ish.
“In the past few days your eyes have been opened to an entirely different realm—one you didn’t even know existed. God’s creation is so vast it’d be crazy to think we could ever understand it all.”
I think of Dad. I can’t imagine explaining all this to him, but there’s a part of me that aches to. He’d never believe me without seeing it himself.
“That’s so hard for me,” I say.
“I know. But it starts with trusting that you don’t know everything. That God does. That His decisions are better than yours, even when they hurt. You do that for a while, and you realize that regardless of what He allows, God’s our best hope. Our only hope.”
Hope
.
The word trills inside me. Like the lyrics of a song I knew once but had forgotten. And now it’s here, suddenly.
Hope
on my tongue and in my heart. I cling to it, afraid of forgetting all over again.
Jake pulls the sopping beanie down tighter on my head, and the halo releases such a strong wave of heat my eyes quiver and almost close.
“And having seen the world through Celestial eyes, what do you think about the Terrestrial, about the world you’ve always known?”
I open my eyes wide and look around at the canvas of color, at the way things really are. I try to picture the world as I’d known it before, without the light and the rainbow hues shading everything, without the splotches of darkness.
“I think it’s a facade—like a puppet show, you know? We can only see what’s going on above the curtain. But with the halo on, it’s like the curtains have been removed and there’s a whole world of activity behind them. It makes me wonder if the world I thought I knew would even be possible without the Celestial.” I pause, turning over image after fascinating image. “In the Terrestrial, we can’t see people’s emotions or motives. We just see actions and outcomes, right? In the Celestial, everything is right in front of you: Fear and hatred, love, sadness. Angels, demons. Everything’s right there to be seen.” My eyes tear through the roof into the office below, splashed with the shocking red of violence, two men dead on the floor. “You can’t hide the truth.”
“I beg to differ.”
We jump to our feet, and Jake pushes himself in front of me. Over the side of the building comes a large hand, followed by another. The speaker heaves himself onto the roof and pulls himself up to his full height. In his hand he holds a dagger of sorts, blood glistening on its blade. He’s disheveled, but I have no trouble identifying the man in front of us as Damien.