Boundless (Unearthly) (39 page)

I stare at him. Try to swallow. “What about Asael? Is he going to come after us?”

“You’ve dealt with Asael quite efficiently,” he says, a touch of pride in his voice.

“Did I … kill him?”

“No,” he answers. “Asael’s returned to heaven. His wings are white once more.”

“I don’t understand.”

“A glory sword is not just a weapon. It is the power of God, and you thrust it right into the center of Asael’s being. You filled him with light, vanquished him with truth.”

Like maybe I am that Buffy-type chick.

“All I did was use a sword one time,” I say, embarrassed at the thought.

“Oh, is that all?” he asks lightly, like he’s teasing me, but I can’t be sure.

“What about the other Watchers? Will they come?”

“When Asael fell, leadership of the Watchers reverted back to Samjeeza. And for some mysterious reason, I don’t believe he’s going to attack you.”

That worked out well, I think. It all seems too good to be true, if I’m being honest. I’m supposed to keep my eye on Tucker. I’m safe from the Black Wings. I’m not, for once, in trouble. I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop any time now.

“You’re not safe from the Black Wings,” Uriel says a bit sadly. “The Watchers are only a small faction of the fallen, who will still be seeking out the Nephilim and pursuing their agenda all over the world.”

“And what is their agenda, exactly?”

“To win the war, my dear. We will need to be vigilant in our work against them, all of us, from the mightiest of the angels to the smallest of the angel-bloods. There is much work to be done. Many battles.”

“Is that what my purpose is? To fight?” I ask. I’m the daughter of the Smiter, after all.

Uriel sits back. “Is that what you think it is?”

That’s my mom’s best trick: answer a question with a question. Which, frankly, I’m getting sick of. I think about the sizzling noise the glory sword made when I pushed it into Asael’s chest, his scream of anguish, his gray face. Revulsion ripples through me. “No. I don’t think I’m a fighter. But what am I, then? What is my purpose?” I lift my eyes to Uriel’s, and he gives me a sympathetic, close-lipped smile. I sigh. “Oh, that’s right. You’re not going to tell me.”

“I can’t tell you,” he says, which startles me. “You are the only one who can decide what your purpose is, Clara.”

I decide? Now he says
I
decide? Hello, news flash. “But the visions—”

“The visions show you forks in the path along becoming who you are meant to be.”

I shake my head. “Wait. So which turn in the road am I supposed to go down? I mean, which is it: I decide or it’s meant to be?”

“Both,” he says.

Okay, so that’s an infuriating answer.

“What is your purpose, Clara?” Uriel asks me gently.

Christian, I think immediately. In every vision, there’s Christian. He’s present, anyway, at every fork in my path. But does that mean he is my purpose? Can a person be a purpose?

My purpose is you,
my mother told me once. But what did she mean by that? Was she being literal? Or was she, too, talking about some kind of decision?

Every answer leads me to five more questions. It’s not fair.

“I don’t know,” I admit. “I want to be good. I want to do good things. I want to help.”

He nods. “Then you must decide what will allow you to do that.”

“Will there be more visions?” Somehow, even before he answers, I think the answer is yes.

“Do you think there will be more forks in your path?” Uriel asks, another question for a question. He has familiar eyes, knowing, blue with tiny lights in them.

I know those eyes.

“Are you …?” I start to sit up again, to get a better look at his face.

His hands gently push my shoulders back down. He draws the covers up over me.

“No,” he says. “Sleep, my dear. That’s enough for now. You need to rest.”

And before I can argue, before I can ask him who he really is, he puts his hand at my temple, and I fade back into a deep and dreamless sleep.

I open my eyes to Christian’s face hovering over mine.

“Hi,” he whispers. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine.” I look around for Uriel, but there’s no sign of him. Christian gives me room to sit up. I put my hand to my forehead. I feel better now, more like myself. Or maybe it’s only because Christian’s here. “How long have I been out?”

“Oh, you know. A few days,” he answers cheerfully. “Like, three.”

Whoa, three days? “Well, a girl has to get her beauty sleep,” I say.

He laughs. “I’m kidding. Maybe like eight hours. Not that long.”

“Where’s Tucker?” I ask immediately. “Is he okay?”

There’s a shade of loss in his smile, a resignation that makes something twist inside me.

“He’s fine. He’s downstairs in your mom’s room. He’s been asking about you, too.”

“What happened? At the lake, I mean.”

“You healed him,” he says. “You healed him until you passed out, until you stopped breathing yourself for a few seconds, and then Jeffrey thumped him on the chest a few times, gave him a couple of puffs that I’m sure neither of them will ever want to talk about again, and he came back. He coughed out about a gallon of lake water, but he came back.” Christian looks me in the eyes. “You saved him.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” he says with a smirk. “You’re a little bit of a show-off. First you get us out of hell. And then you defeat like the biggest, baddest Watcher on the books, and then you go on a high-speed, very high-altitude chase, and then you resuscitate the dead. Are you done? Because seriously, I don’t know if I can take any more excitement.”

I look away, pressing my lips together to keep from smiling. “I think so.” Then I tell him about Uriel’s visit.

“Why Uriel?” Christian asks when I’m done. “Why send him?”

“I think he’s my grandfather,” I say slowly. “He didn’t tell me that, but I kind of got the impression that he thought of me as family.”

“Your mom’s father?”

“Yeah.” I relate what Uriel said about Asael and Samjeeza, and Christian looks even more relieved, and oddly troubled, like this is not all good news to him. “So maybe we can go back to Stanford?” I say. “We’re free to live a normal life for a while. No angel-blood protection program. Good, right?”

He bites his lip. “I’m going to take some time off from school, I think.”

“Why?” I ask.

He brushes his hair out of his eyes and looks a bit sheepish. “I don’t think that I went to Stanford for the right reasons. I don’t know if I belong there.”

He doesn’t want to be around me is what I get from that answer.

“So you’re taking off.”

“I might travel around with Angela and Web, find a place to lie low for a while. Angela needs some rest.”

“How come you never told me that she’s your sister?” I ask.

He shrugs. “I was still getting used to the idea. I read in her journal about her father being a collector, she called him, and I connected the dots. But it didn’t feel real until—”

Until he saw Asael face-to-face.

“So Web’s your nephew,” I say.

He nods, happy at the thought. “Yeah. He is.”

They’re a family. I feel a flash of something like envy mixed with loss. There won’t be any more days with Christian and Web and me. But it’s for the best. I imagine them walking along the sand on some deserted beach, like in that place Dad liked to train us, Web squishing the sand between his chubby fingers, laughing at the surf.

“I’ve always liked the beach,” he says.

“When?” I ask.

“Nowish. I only wanted to say good-bye.” He sees my stricken expression. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep in touch.”

He gets up. He smiles like everything’s peachy, but I can feel that this is killing him. Leaving me goes against all his instincts, all that his heart is telling him.

“I meant it, what I said in hell,” he says. “You’re my glory sword, you know that? My truth.”

“Christian—”

He holds his hand up like,
Let me finish.
“I saw the look on your face when he died. I saw what was in your heart, and it’s real. All this time I kept telling myself that it was a crush, and you’d get over it, and then you’d be free to be with me. But it’s not a passing phase, or this stubborn refusal to accept what you think is your destiny. You’re not going to get over it. I know that. You belong with him now.” He swallows. “I was wrong to kiss you that day in the cemetery.”

There are tears in my eyes. I wipe at them. “You’re my best friend,” I whisper.

He looks down. “You know I’m always going to want to be more than that.”

“I know.”

An awkward silence stretches between us. Then he shrugs and gives me his devil-may-care smile, rakes his hand through his wavy brown hair. “Well, you know, that Tucker guy’s not going to be around forever. Maybe I’ll catch up with you in a hundred years or so.”

My breath hitches. Does he mean it, or is he being flippant to save face? I swing my legs over the side of the bed and stand up, carefully, in case I’m still weak. But I feel surprisingly fine—refreshed, even. I look at him solemnly. I think about the word
longevity
. “Don’t wait around for me, Christian. That’s not what I want. I can’t promise you—”

He smirks. “I won’t call it waiting,” he says. “I have to go.”

“Wait. Don’t go yet.”

He stops, something in his expression that doesn’t quite dare to be hope. I cross the room to him and pull up his shirt. For a second he looks totally confused, but then I put my hand on the long gash in his side, which still hasn’t healed. I clear my head as much as I can, then call the glory to my fingers. And it comes.

He gives a pained gasp as his flesh knits itself back together. When I take my hand away, the cut is completely healed, but there’s a long silver scar stretching down his ribs.

“Sorry about the scar,” I say.

“Wow,” he laughs. “That was just like
E.T.
Thank you.”

“It’s the least I could do.”

He moves to my window and pulls it open, bends to step out onto the eaves. Then he turns to me, the wind ruffling his hair, his green eyes full of sorrow and light, and he lifts his hand in a wave. I lift mine.

See you later,
he says in my mind, and summons his wings, and flies.

I take a bath. I scrub every part of my body, shave my legs, work the dirt from under my fingernails, until finally, at long last, I feel clean. Then I sit at my desk in my bathrobe and tackle the arduous task of combing the tangles out of my hair. I smooth moisturizer over my face, put on some lip balm on a hopeful whim. In my closet I stand for a while staring at a yellow sundress my mom once gave me for my birthday, which I wore the night Tucker first took me to Bubba’s, which was, in a backward way, our first date. I put it on, along with some strappy white sandals, and go downstairs.

My black hoodie, the one I was wearing all through this whole ordeal, is laid carefully across the back of the couch. I pick it up. It smells like lake water and blood. I walk to the laundry room to toss it in there, but first I check the pockets.

Inside the left pocket is a silver charm bracelet. I hold it in my palm, examining each charm. A horse, for when they took off across the countryside. A fish, for when they met. A heart. And now a new charm.

A tiny silver sparrow.

I put it on. It tinkles against the bones of my wrist as I walk down the hallway to Mom’s old room. My heart starts to beat fast, my breath quickens, but I don’t hesitate. I want to see him. I open the door.

The bed’s empty, the sheets pulled up in a messy way, like someone tried to straighten the covers in a hurry. No one’s here. I frown.

Maybe I took too long to come find him. Maybe he left.

I smell something burning.

I find Tucker in the kitchen, attempting and spectacularly failing to make scrambled eggs. He pushes at the blackened mess with a spatula, tries to flip it, burns himself, fights back a cuss word, and starts shaking his hand like he can get the pain off it. I laugh, and he whirls around, startled. His blue eyes widen.

“Clara!” he says.

My heart lifts looking at him. I walk up to him and take the spatula out of his hand.

“I thought you’d be hungry,” he says.

“Not for that.” I smile and grab a dish towel, pick up the frying pan, march it over to the trash can, and scrape the eggs into it. Then I go to the sink and rinse it out. “Let me,” I say.

He nods and pulls himself up onto one of the kitchen stools. He’s not wearing a shirt, just a pair of my brother’s old pajama pants. Even so he looks like Sunday morning, I think the expression goes. I try not to flat-out stare as I go to the refrigerator and get out a carton of eggs, crack them into a bowl, add milk, whisk it all together.

“How are you?” he asks. “Jeffrey told me you were sleeping.”

“You saw Jeffrey?”

“Yeah, he was here for a while. He seemed kind of distracted. He tried to give me an envelope full of money.”

“Uh, sorry?” I offer.

“You California yuppies think you can buy anything,” Tucker jokes.

And he is joking. He’s getting pretty fond of California yuppies.

“I’m good,” I say with a cough, to answer his initial question. “How are you?”

“Never felt better,” he says.

I stop whisking and look him over. He doesn’t seem changed, I think. He doesn’t look like any prophet I’ve ever heard of.

“What?” he asks. “Do I have egg on my face?”

“I’m not really hungry,” I say, pushing aside the eggs. “I need to talk to you.”

He swallows. “Please don’t let this be the part where you tell me what’s best for me again.”

I shake my head, laugh. “Why don’t you put on some clothes?”

“That’s a great idea,” he says. “But they seem to be missing. I guess they got thrashed beyond repair earlier. Maybe you could take me home real quick.”

“Sure.” I walk over to him and take his hand, draw him off the stool. He looks at me uncertainly.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“Do you trust me?”

“Of course.”

I delight in his quick intake of breath as I reach up and cover his eyes with both of my hands. I call the glory, a warm, pulsing circle of light around us. I close my eyes, smiling, and send us both to the Lazy Dog. To the barn. On purpose.