Angel said, “My thought was that I would live among the humans and other creatures I had thrown away, and if they were deserving of the empathy you said they were, then surely I would develop it.”
“It would infuse my empty half, filling that space,” said Sam. “If, however, the mortals of this realm were nothing more than the refuse I had always considered them to be, then I would remain the same, empty and strong. And upon reuniting with my other half, I would learn that I was right.”
“In a use of power that nearly drained my resources completely, I then erased my own memory,” said Angel. “And filled my own mind with the story that I had woven.”
Sam said, “I set it down that once I found my other half and reunited with it, I would remember everything that had transpired.”
“In effect,” said Angel with that soft smile, “creating a true Culmination after all.”
“Until then, we would all believe the same lies,” said Sam. “And the test could commence.”
Now Sam looked down at the ground in quiet shame. Softly, he said, “I had no idea how wrong I would be proven. And how right you truly were, Michael.”
“For I have learned,” said Angel. “And I am different.”
There was a pause as the Old Man grew quiet, and in that grand pause, the angels remembered the lives they’d lived before. They remembered the truth.
“However,” said Angel softly, breaking that encompassing silence. “It would seem that I had caused more strife among my angels than even I was aware.”
“My sins were great,” said Sam. “And here on Earth, I would have to pay for them.” He looked to the Adarians, who stood just beyond the Four Favored and their archesses. Michael and the others turned to regard them as well.
“You are among the imperfect that I sent into this realm so long ago,” said Angel. “And because there was more dissent in the angel realm than I believed, word of what I had done leaked from our realm and into this one.”
“You learned of the archesses,” said Sam. “You never learned the true details; my magic ensured that no one would do that until the time was right. But you learned enough.”
“And your need for revenge drove you to betrayal,” said Angel. There was no reprimand in her voice, however, no acid. She simply sounded sad. “I cannot tell you how sorry I am that you were brought to such desperation.”
“And in amends, I am now promising you that should you be worthy, you needn’t be alone,” said Sam.
Angel nodded, just once. “I have created mates for you. They await you in the angel realm.”
A ripple of shock went through the Adarians. They looked at one another, their eyes wide, unasked questions on their lips. They… had
mates
? They would be allowed back in the angel realm?
As if Sam and Angel had heard their questions loud and clear, the they nodded, both heads lowering and raising at the same time. “You have earned that much and more,” they said together.
“You may return to the angel realm whenever you wish. I have opened the door for your passage. I must warn you, however,” said Sam. “Your mates are
women
.”
“Above all else,” said Angel, with a broad smile.
“And as such, they are souls in their own right, with their own minds, and may either accept you or reject you,” said Sam.
“As is their right,” Angel added.
Sam smiled down at his other half. “I know this now. Nothing floats more free than a hummingbird.”
Angel grinned at him and gently cupped his cheek. He placed his hand over hers lovingly. Then she turned to Abraxos. “So you’d best be charming,” she told the Adarian. Then, in a soft whisper only Sam heard, she added, “You’d best be sweet as honey.”
He chuckled, sharing the inside joke. “And be grateful,” he added, for the Adarians’ benefit again. “It isn’t easy to create a woman. It takes a hell of a lot more work than it does to create a man.”
Angel laughed, and the sound filled the field with audible happiness.
Chapter Fifty-One
There was no better feeling than the satisfaction one experienced after a job well done. The pleasure was amplified if that job had been a long and trying one, difficult in the extreme at times, and at others so hard that it was easy to contemplate giving up.
That deep satisfaction was the sort that embraced the people in the dandelion field that afternoon. It was an overwhelming sense of peace, as if their collective breaths had been held for two millennia, and now, finally, they could exhale. They embraced one another like they hadn’t seen each other in as long. They remembered who they were, and with those memories came embarrassment and forgiveness and laughter.
The fight the Four Favored and their archesses had left behind was long over now. Time moved differently here in this field. It was a small pocket of space the Old Man had set aside for this moment. Only those of the angel realm could enter.
The dragons who had come to the forest to aid the archangels had won the battle and gone, and Azrael’s vampires came that night to clean up the mess. The Brazilian Rainforest had unfortunately experienced yet another forest fire, but this one had been small, and easily contained.
And that was all history would ever know.
Angel felt a small sadness for the house she’d lost, but it passed. It had only been a house. She would build another. And there was still the Nautilus….
Now, in the field, the Four Favored held their archesses tight, and Angel knew they were feeling lucky. They’d been given the choice to return to the angel realm or to remain on Earth and aid humanity as they had for the last two millennia. It came as no surprise to Angel at all that they’d chosen to remain. They had lives here, and they were doing good. As Gabriel put it, “Earth needs its heroes.”
She knew as she looked upon them now that they felt blessed, fortunate beyond words that they were alive and not alone.
Loneliness was a terrible thing. In the end, it was perhaps the
worst
thing.
Angel knew that now. Having lived among the mortals for so long had taught her a great deal. In fact, she –
Angel
– was the culmination of that knowledge, of those lessons learned. Her half of the being she’d once been was composed solely of the empathy she had gained by experiencing life in a mortal world. The senseless agony and heartache the human heart was capable of feeling was undeniably one of the most powerful forces of the universe.
If that pain couldn’t teach someone something, then nothing could.
The other most powerful force in that universe was love. It was an overused word, “love.” It rolled off the tongue for everything from chocolate chip muffins, to new shoes, to the color purple. But it was the
heart
of it, it was the core of what love
truly
was, that was strong enough to make a mother die for her child. Without a second thought.
It was love, and love only, that could bring about the sacrifice of one precious, irreplaceable life for another.
For all her power, for all the things she had made, formed in the molds of her mind, and set down upon the ground of existence, she’d done so without understanding this, this most important of all lessons, this strongest of all emotions.
She wondered whether a good, long stay amongst the mortals they created should be compulsory for
all
angel realm leaders. Sort of a mandatory training exercise, as humans would put it. She laughed internally. Her own had been a real eye opener.
Michael’s objections to the Old Man’s behavior had not only been right, they had been an understatement.
But at least there’s that
, she thought now.
At least I was good enough to make something else that could feel empathy.
She’d made Michael, after all. She’d made the archangels and their archesses. She’d made humans and animals. And they certainly understood compassion. It was her one triumph. In all of their so-called “imperfections,” she had created life that was capable of love, not only in the angel realm, but on Earth.
Of course, that life was also capable of a lot more. There was badness in the world. There was evil. But as long as there was also love, then there was hope. And as long as life had hope, it was redeemable.
“I guess we didn’t completely screw up then, huh?” asked Sam beside her. He had been in her thoughts, of course. In that respect, they were one now.
“No,” she agreed. “Not completely.” She grinned broadly.
But then her smile slipped. Her brow furrowed. She placed her hand above her eyes to shield them from the sun.
Out on the horizon was a line of black. It had not been there before. “What is that?” she asked.
Thunder rolled over the immense field of dandelions – thunder out of a clear blue sky.
The archangels, archesses, and Adarians stopped talking. They stopped laughing. They looked up, and in confusion, they also looked around. Eventually they, too, saw the line of black in the far distance.
It rolled closer, and above it, as if it were kicking up massive clouds of dust, the sky grew darker. They stared, all twenty-three of them, at the oncoming disaster. A sense of foreboding rode near, smothering in its approaching doom.
She felt as if they were gazing at a tornado or a tidal wave.
“It shouldn’t be here,” Sam said. Nothing should have made it past the bubble’s walls. It was a time and space that had been set aside, that was separate from the mortal realm and the angel realm. It was in-between. Who could possibly have known it was there?
What
could have known it was there? And what in the realms was powerful enough to breach it? And
why
?
Comprehension dawned on Angel like sickening black ink over a beautiful painting. She knew Sam realized it as well.
“It’s Gregori,” they said.
They’d forgotten. In their haste to celebrate, in their relief that this two thousand years was finally at a close, in their happiness that they remembered and had learned, and had lived to tell about it – they’d forgotten about Gregori.
How could I have?
Angel asked herself. How could she have forgotten about the man they’d left behind?
But we’ve done so before
, Sam said in her mind. It was true. They’d forgotten about men and women countless times. And those mistakes did not just go away, and apparently learning your lesson did not preclude you from continuing to mess up.
“We continue to make mistakes,” Angel said softly. Hopefully, one day, they would get the hang of it. But that day was not today.
As the darkness rode closer, they could begin to make out forms and figures within it. Riders on mounts of nightmarish proportions, fangs and hooves and burning eyes. Winged creatures from the imagined pits of Hell, soldiers in an army of absolute hatred.
“And it seems we will continue to learn from those mistakes,” said Sam.
“You can say that again,” came a new voice.
It was deep and it seethed with loathing, and when Sam turned around to meet the speaker, there was nothing there.
Even Angel was gone.
In the space where she’d been standing, the dandelions began to turn black. Sam watched in horrified fascination as that blackness spread, enveloping each white petal one after another. It painted the flowers the color of night inch by inch, foot by foot, until every bloom in the field had turned as black as the dandelion irises of Gregori’s eyes.
The black flowers stretched clear to the horizon, where Gregori’s army continued to advance like a bad dream.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Angel felt Gregori’s hand slide over her mouth a split second before she would have inhaled to call out. Her hands went to his to try to pry it off, but to no avail. So rather than use her mouth, she tried to use her mind. She cried out in her head, using her internal voice to reach for Samael.
But as if a massive hand were muffling her mind as well, there was no response. Her call was met with quiet, pure and deep.
She felt slightly queasy as the world turned around her. The lightness of the dandelions her eyes had grown accustomed to was shadowed by a graying haze. It grew darker, murkier, and she closed her eyes against the wrongness of it.
When they at last stopped moving, and she felt something solid beneath her feet, Gregori removed his hand and released her. Angel stumbled forward. She opened her eyes to a world of black.
It was not dimensionless, however. The ground was smooth black stone, perhaps polished marble or granite. It stretched into a square room around twenty by twenty feet, and was bordered by three walls. The walls were the same black polished stone, and torches of black-purple flame shed light from sconces spaced throughout. On the fourth side, the ground fell off into a wide set of stairs. Those stairs led to another square platform below.
From that platform sprouted no fewer than a dozen other sets of stairs, each one leading to a room just like the one they stood in right now. There were no walls on either side of the stairwells. There was just nothingness; it was deep, immense space. She wondered what would happen if she tried to jump off. The separate rooms at the ends of these separate stairwells rose from the center room of the structure at varying levels of height, and the entire thing reminded Angel of an architectural flower.
A black flower.
She watched as Gregori stepped around her, his shoes echoing in the darkness. For once, he wasn’t wearing white. Instead, his clothing nearly matched his surroundings, dark and featureless, not quite gray, not quite black. He turned to face her, and she swallowed hard.
She felt powerless here. In this place without hope.
“Why have you brought me here, Gregori?”
He frowned, glaring. “Must you really ask?” he asked, his tone laced with malice. “Do you seriously not know why, or are you have you chosen to mock me as usual?”
“Okay, that’s fair enough,” Angel admitted. She swallowed hard and took a step back out of self preservation. After all, she did have a fairly good idea as to why he’d abducted her. Clearly, he’d learned that she and Sam were the Old Man. He wanted revenge on her for what had happened with Amara, and what better way to exact that revenge than kidnap her, force Sam to worry, then kill them off one at a time, destroying them slowly?