Page 6

Angelic Cons equences, I Guess

Her cries of ecstasy stuttered into cries of shock, just as he came inside her, unable to stop what had already begun. Under his fingers, her skin felt uncomfortably strange. In reaction, his hands flinched away, but the feeling persisted around his waist and genitals, tingling sensations that had nothing to do with the acts that had just ta ken place.

Further startled by his reaction, Helena tried to get off him, but he bucked at the same time, throwing her off onto the bed. Thankfully, she got one of her new wings out of the way before she crushed it. She continued to scramble like she thought she could still escape the alien things now attach ed to her.

Rafferty leapt to the other side, his toes grinding into the carpet as he stared wide-eyed at the being that had replaced h is Helena.

She looked very much like Helena, but now her skin had a golden-white sheen to it like gold-dusted porcelain. Ethereal was the only word that came to mind. On top of her head were a pair of horns. They were golden in color. Not metallic gold, but the creamy gold that some rams would have. And they curved together in a circle over her head, the tips imperceptibly touching. Like… like a halo . She looked at him straight on where she stood, holding her hands before her. Her nails were golden as his had once been black, her eyes wide. All of it seemed to make her rose-gold hair shine even brighter.

He knew what he was seeing, but he shook his head as if that would be enough t o deny it.

“Rafferty…” she asked in the smallest voice possible. “What’s happeni ng to me?”

To him, she looked like a demon, but the most beautiful demon he had ever seen.

“I…” He stared at her, his mind completely blank as to wh at to say.

It was the wrong reaction to have because Helena only panicked harder. Clambering over the bed, she bolted past him to go into the bathroom, her feathers scraping against the door as she forced her way through. The light flipped on automatically as she stood in front of the wall of mirrors behind the pair of sinks, staring a t herself.

“Oh my God,” she breathed, her eyes wide as saucers. “Is this real? Is th is real!?”

She tried to run her hands over her head and immediately encountered the horns. Gripping them, she pulled. All she accomplished was to wrench her head back and forth as her p anic rose.

“Don’t!” Rafferty cried, snapping into action, finally. Seizing her hands, he pulled them away from her new appendages. “Don’t hurt yourself.”

Then Helena’s legs went out from under her. She stumbled back into the shower space, landing to sit on a small bench in the middle attached to the wall.

“Ow!” she cried as her winged back hit the wall.

“Helena!” Rafferty bolted forw ard again.

Yet she kept thrashing, her mind struggling to understand the wings shifting and slapping against the walls of th e showers.

“Stop. Stop. Stay still,” he urged, holding his hands out to her pl acatingly.

She looked up at him with wide, truly frightened eyes. “Am I demon?” she asked.“Rafferty! Please tell me!”

He shook his head violently. “No, absolutely not. Never, ” he lied.

Gently he took her hands, and the same strange feeling skittered up his arms. He felt a pressing urge to let go but willed himself to hold on. “Something is going on, yes. But… but…” He raked his eyes over her, trying to find something he could latch onto. And then he did. “Feathers. Look. You have feathers.”

“Feathers?” she repeated, then looked, her eyes wide and innocent a s a child.

“You’re… you’re an angel.” He cursed himself. He had known other demons with feathered wings, though none as beautifu l as hers.

“An angel?” she stammered. She struggled to stand up again, which caused her to whap her wings against the wall as she battled for equilibrium. “Angels don’t lo ok like…”

But this time, she stopped and stayed completely still, really looking at her reflection in the mirror across from the shower. “I’ve never seen pictures of angels that look … like…”

She tugged on her wavy, rose-gold hair, streaming around the horns. Her wings drooped a little, then she lifted them again, fluffing them out, as if she could finally see the white-gray feathers instead of the bat-like membranes Rafferty once had. He found himself as enthralled as he had been shocked. Gently, he ran his hands over them, feeling the sof t pinions.

Helena continued examining herself in the mirror, the worry line deep between her brows. “How do I undo it? I mean, how do I return t o normal?”

He almost said, “This is your normal now,” but caught himself in time when he met her reflected scared eyes. He couldn’t.

“Whenever I wanted to… shift…” He blinked, trying to recall the memory, except… he couldn’t. He remembered it happened as a fact, but not the experience of it. “I don’t know… I just… understood that I could and then did. It was more like… I would focus to dampen my demonic aura and not only appear as human but feel huma n to you.”

“Focus on what?”

“I don’t know,” he repeated, em barrassed.

“Okay, great,” she said dryly. “That was very helpful.” Her wings flexed, twitching off his probing hands. “And stop it!”

“Sorry, ” he said.

She looked at herself again. “So… so that means… demons and angels… they’re not very differe nt, then.”

“I…” But Rafferty had no idea what to say. As far as he knew angels didn’t exist. At least, he had never met one. They had always been demons pretending or misnamed by the mortals they were serving. “I do n’t know.”

“I think I know why this has happened,” she said, cal ming down.

As she calmed, Helena returned to herself. Rafferty didn’t know how else to explain it. One second, she was this beautiful, ethereal creature, and the next, she was the very human woman he had known and fallen in love with. The wings and horns gone, her skin and eyes were back to their norm al shades.

“You’re right,” she said with detachment, “I just knew how to do it.” Then she gave a serene litt le giggle.

Her serenity disturbed him the most. He felt so disjointed. Even though she looked normal, to him she still felt a little uncanny and untouc hable now.

Maybe it had been his eternity of paranoia, but he couldn’t help feeling there was something more she wasn’t tell him. Some agenda he didn’t understand but could see the negative space of.

Demons played tricks on each other all the time . Even as he thought that he forced those thou ghts away.

This w as Helena.

She wasn’ t a demon.

She co uldn’t be!

And he was human.

Have we switched places? he thought, the question breaking over him on a wave of new fear.

“I would say this situation is both our doing, so it makes sense we’re going to have to fix it together,” she had said only yesterday.

Helena kept her arms wrapped around herself, and the urge to do something, anything, to make her feel better compelled him back into the main room. Immediately, he spied the tray of food still waiting to be consumed. Tearing the cover off like it was his only salvation, he scoffed at the meal before them. It was a burger with steak fries that someone had tried to dress up with some sort of pink aioli and sliced vegetables, the whole thing skewered through to hold it together. What sort of comfort would this give her, especially now that it was tepid at best? He tore off the other tray to find what was essentially a grilled chicken that someone had termed “blackened” with a pile of vegetables and cooling whipped parsnips. It too seemed inadequate to serve to comfort He lena with.

He stretched his hand toward it to use some demonic energy to reheat it, only to be reminded too late that such a thing was impos sible now.

“Dammit, dammit, dammit,” he muttered, panicked at what to do. Should he call back downstairs and order something else? March into the kitchen himself and cook her something that would actually bring her solace in her tim e of pain?

“Oh, you’re hungry,” she said, coming from the bathroom herself to see where he had gone.

He covered the food as if ashamed, though he hadn’t been the one to prepare it. “It’s not… We can order somethi ng else…”

Still naked and beautiful, Helena came the rest of the way to their suite’s table and took the lid from him to look down at her burger. “No, this is fine. It’s what I ordered,” she said, setting the lid aside, sitting down too calmly before the plate as if her entire fundamental being hadn’t just irreparabl y changed.

Her ability to radically accept all of this was r emarkable.

He snapped his hand to hover over her plate, even as she moved to pick up the burger and bite it. “No, but it’s not…” But he didn’t know what to say. He felt stupid and useless. “I t’s cold.”

“Yeah, but it would be awful to let it go to waste,” she countered. “And I’m honestly too hungry to wait. It doesn’t matter what it tas tes like.”

He had never heard a more horrifying statement in his life.

That horror must have reflected on his face because Helena looked up at him, then her own eyes went wide as she covered her mouth, realizing what she had said. “Oh, dear, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that. I just don’t want you to worry about me.”

Her apologizing for something as absurd as dismissing his sentimentalities at a time like this deflated his in dignation.

“Helena, I’m sorry,” he said, kneeling down before her and grasping her hands. “This is all my fault. I did thi s to you.”

Gently, she cupped his cheek. “No, you didn’t,” she said softly. “I was more than willing to pay this price to save you. I gave… whatever that was… I paid the price for our souls…” She shook her head again. “I don’t really understand what happened. I keep feeling like I can almost remember it, but the part of my mind capable of understanding it… isn’t… able to r ight now.”

That did not set him at ease. He had always felt there was some sort of higher, or maybe lower was a better word, consciousness that held them in their suffering in hell. Had she spoken to them directly? he wondered.

She then turned once more to her meal and took a bite. After a few moments of chewing she slowed, furrowing her brows as she looked d own at it.

“What’s wrong?” he asked fearful that he knew t he answer.

“Nothing. It’s just… it occurs to me… what you said about simply understanding how to…” She held her hand out to the plate of food, her eyebrows pursing together as she concentrated on the plate. Then before their eyes, steam rose out from the food. A fresh smell of cooked deliciousness wafted from the plate, as if the food there had just come out of the skillet or pot. She did the same to his plate, and within seconds, more steam wafted up.

Helena’s face burst into a genuine smile. “I did it! I did it!” She grabbed Rafferty’s hands squeezing them with excitement. “I just performed a miracle!”