The Kiss of Angels (Divine Vampires Book 2) (2 page)

Humans have gotten Cupid all wrong, from the very beginning.  Cupid wasn’t a chubby, diaper-wearing toddler with less control over his arrows than he had over his own bladder.  In fact, Cupid wasn’t a cherub—or even one guy—at all.  And, yes, okay, so we did fly, and yes, we carried arrows, if you wanted to call them that, but the whole idea that love was blind, and Cupid was a bumbling idiot?

Ridiculous.  Love was my job, and I took it seriously. 

“It’s time, Muriel.” My partner-in-crime, Jariel, nudged me on my perch atop the giant red heart hanging in the candy aisle.  I was using it like a swing.  Humans glanced up occasionally, thinking the air vent in the ceiling was causing the paper heart to twist and twirl, but it was just me, making myself dizzy, wondering all the while—
is this what love feels like?

“How can they get it so wrong?” I complained, slinging my quiver over my shoulder as we hovered together, heading toward the front of the store.  From this angle, I could see the entire row of pink and red Valentine’s Day decorations.  “Look at all this stuff.”

“Who cares?” Jari shrugged as we went out the automatic front doors, hovering above the snow.  A woman pushing a cart frowned as the doors opened, seemingly all on their own.  “They don’t need to know, right?” 

“I suppose.” I sighed, flying a little higher to avoid the woman with the cart.  There was a commotion at the back of the store and I hesitated, glancing over.  Someone, a man, had collapsed. 

“Come on!” Jari insisted.  “We’ve got to go.”

She was right, of course.  We had a deadline. 

I didn’t know why it bothered me that humans made fun of Cupid.  Maybe it was because I took my job so seriously.  All the angels, from the guardians all the way up to the archangels, took their jobs seriously.  Even the little feys of fate—humans mistakenly called them “fairies,” when they called them anything at all—took their jobs pretty seriously. 

And love, above all, was serious business.  Humans with their flowers and chocolates and Hallmark holidays had reduced love to its platitudes, but the fact was, every time love happened, it happened for a reason.  The word Cherubim came from the Hebrew word “kerub,” meaning “one who intercedes,” and that’s exactly what we did. 

“I wonder how long this one will last.” Jari slowed her pace as we neared the car with a single mother and three kids inside. 

Now it was my turn to shrug.  It was a good question, but not one I could answer.  When
The Maker
told us to pull an arrow, we did what we were asked to do, knowing
The Maker
never did anything without a reason—but we rarely ever knew what it was.

I studied the woman in her Studebaker—her name was Rachel—gathering up her kids.  Her husband had died two years ago in the war.  We had brought those two together when they were practically just kids themselves.  A tragic ending to a very great romance—I liked to keep tabs, if I could, over the years, although it wasn’t always possible—but it wouldn’t be her last.  She thought it would be, of course.  She was content with her popcorn-nights watching the $64,000 Question and an occasional night out with her girlfriends. 

But she was about to meet him. 

He drove a red pickup truck and wore a baseball cap to cover the grease in his hair.  He had a pipe burst in his ceiling that morning—February was bitter cold in Michigan—and had been back to the hardware store twice for another part.  We’d been watching, waiting for her to herd the kids into the car and head to the store.  The grocery and the hardware store were neighbors. 

The timing of these things was crucial, and there were so many factors at play, no human’s mind could ever conceive of everything that came together to make it all happen.  Even I couldn’t imagine how
The Maker
kept track of it all.  People fell in and out of love constantly.  When you thought about the statistics—in the United States alone, there were 4.2 marriages per minute—it was staggering.  Thankfully, we existed outside of time.  Our job was simply to join two souls, for however long
The Maker
needed them to be connected. 

“You ready?” Jari adjusted her bow, wings quivering. 

Mine were too, although I think I was excited for different reasons.  Jari lived to shoot.  Even target practice thrilled her.  I liked it too, but my affinity for shooting extended to my target.  After all, these weren’t regular arrows.  These were keen instruments, carefully directed, and the result was exhilarating.  Our arrows cut through everything else.  There was no running or hiding from us.  We brought love, with all its promise of joy and pleasure, and of course, its inevitable pain and loss. 

That was the part that interested me the most.  Love—the soft pierce of my arrow and the explosion of emotion that followed—conquered all.  Love was inherently risky, supremely dangerous.  Love left humans at their most vulnerable, open to the worst kind of pain in the world.  But love was also the very best of human emotion, and it was the golden tip of my arrow that completed the circle once again, bringing humans back to their center, closer to
The Maker
and everything divine. 

How I longed for that experience. 

Jari chided me when I spoke of it, reminding me that angels were already love.  We existed
as
love, all angels, all fey.  We were connected to
The Maker
all the time, a constant, calming presence.  And that was true. 

But watching humans fall in love, it was a question that haunted me.  What was it like, to experience love as an act, an action, the difference between a verb and a noun? I didn’t want to
be
love, I wished to
be loved
. 

That’s why, for me, this was the best part of our job by far.  All the hours of practice, all the waiting around for a call from
The Maker,
culminated in moments like these, and it was even better when it was someone we’d targeted in the past.  We were about to give this woman a second chance at love.  How amazing was that? To fall in love, not just once, but twice!

Humans seemed to think that love was frivolous or random, but love was just what it was supposed to be, every time.  We knew exactly what we were doing when we took aim, and we never missed.  Ever.  People who fell in love and thought it was the worst mistake of their lives?

It wasn’t. 

“Here we go.” Jari readied her bow. 

The single mother got the kids out of the car.  Her oldest son, almost sixteen now, helped with the younger two, ages eight and six.  The guy with the baseball cap—he was called John—zipped his coat, not paying attention at all to where he was going.  The fey had already played their parts—they positioned the humans, pushing them this way and that, at
The Maker’s
request—and now it was time to play ours. 

They didn’t look like arrows, not the way humans were used to them, but they were arrows nonetheless.  They resembled beams of light more than anything else.  If they could see them, humans probably wouldn’t recognize our arrows.  The word “arrow” was uncommon even in human language until the fourteenth century.  Before that, the Slavic word “strael” was used, which meant
flash
or
streak
.  That’s what I pulled from my quiver.  It hummed as I strung my bow and took aim.

Rachel already had that look on her face.  Something about the man had already piqued her interest.  I swear, something in humans knew when we were close.  It was like they could feel the tension when we pulled our bows like this and took aim.

Jari moved across the way, opposite me.  It was like a dance.  We’d done these steps an infinite amount of times.  We both drew our bows, eyes locked, completely connected in the moment, mirroring what was about to happen.  If humans could see us, I’m sure they’d wonder why in the world we were aiming at each other, but we were taking aim at something humans couldn’t see. 

Sometimes I thought, if all humans could see those glowing orbs above each other’s heads, they might be kinder to one another.  It was like wearing your heart outside your body.  Very few people could see auras—that’s what humans called them, auras—and even when they could, they didn’t fully understand what they were seeing. 

Those weren’t “auras.” The orb I aimed at was the human soul, the life force that connected humans with
The Maker
, that connected them to everything divine.  The children clamoring around their mother, they had them too, but they were small and perfectly round.  They glowed brighter, golden balls, compared to the adults.  The grown-ups had a space in the center of their souls, as if they’d been stretched out over time, creating a target.

They all started out small, dense, golden, and perfect, but then they changed.  Some turned silver, some white.  Some, like Rachel’s, deepened to red, if a soul had experienced great pain.  Some even turned dark, bruised, to navy or purple.  I’d never seen a completely black soul before, although Jari swore they existed.  Maybe that was because black souls didn’t ever fall in love?

It’s time.  It’s really time. 

My wings sang. 

Our arrows were limitless, exact and razor sharp. 

I set my sights, took aim, and let loose. 

Now!

Perfect hit.  Bullseye.

Jari’s arrow met mine in the middle, two bright flashes, streaking across the gray day, and two souls exploded.  It was like fireworks.  I saw it over the top of his Red Wings cap and the white knitted hat she wore.  Rachel looked up into John’s scruffy face, at his lopsided smile when he ran right into her, apologizing.  That sudden interest in his eyes? That was us. 

The two new soul mates parted, going their separate ways. 

It didn’t happen like in a romance novel.  No insta-love at first sight.  No, but we’d done our job.  They were connected.  Even as they turned and walked away from each other I could see it, the line of light stretching, like a thread between them.  That was love, right there.  It was thin, but it would weave together, the more time passed. 

Love was intentional, and it was time that made it strong.  I had watched it happen over the eons.  There were couples I’d joined together who were still loving each other into their old age.  Humans didn’t live very long, poor creatures.  But the interesting thing about them was how much they felt in a lifetime.  Feelings interested me, more than anything.  Especially love.  The one feeling I handed out was something I could never experience on my own, at least, not as a human might. 

I think that’s why I liked looking in on couples I’d joined, on occasion.  That’s why I so enjoyed it when I could give another opportunity at love to someone I’d run into before.  I never knew, when I shot my arrow and pierced a human soul, how long love might last.  There were couples whose threads were woven so thick they seemed unbreakable, but they could still be cut short, sometimes suddenly, as in Rachel’s case.  Sometimes the unraveling happened slowly, until all that held a couple together was a thin, gossamer thread.  Then, one day, it snapped. 

I didn’t understand the rhyme or reason behind
The Maker’s
instructions, why some couples loved for a lifetime and others only for a day, and as Jari was quick to point out, I didn’t need to know.