Page 34

Indy

I landed on a patch of low-pile carpet.

It knocked the wind out of me, or maybe that was from being whiplash-dragged out of Earth.

Rocket-launched past space all the way into fucking Heaven, which looked—my head made a slow swivel—a lot like a business office.

Desk, potted plants, a dinosaur of a desktop computer, and an assortment of wall art.

Some of it might have merited inspection, but I couldn’t focus on anything with vertigo busily making me its bitch.

So, I stayed down, dazed but far from confused because I knew exactly what had happened.

I’d been played. Conned.

Angel-snatched.

And the motherfucker responsible was standing beside me, dusting his hands down his clothes like some of the stratosphere was still clinging on.

Indignation should have been enough to propel me to my feet, but the head spins fought just as hard to lay me out flat, so I settled to tip my chin back and scowl until Evander finally deigned to look my way.

“You tricked me!” I snapped.

More than that. He made me a deserter.

Twice in one day, I’d been dragged away from the battle that was, by rights, mine to fight.

This time, though, I’d abandoned Loren.

Left him like bait in a trap, except that he was the one fit to be caught.

Evander rubbed the shaved side of his head.

“I said you would survive, and you will.”

“What about Loren?” I asked, insisting on the point he seemed keen to ignore.

“And Sully? You said the hounds were coming for them. What are they supposed to do?”

His expression pinched.

“If they’re wise, surrender.”

“And die ?”

“Swiftly,” Evander replied, entirely too dismissive for my liking.

“Assuming the demons are merciful.”

Turning away, the angel rounded the desk to a stack of papers on the far corner.

He lifted and jostled them, seeking any excuse to avoid my glare.

“Fat chance,” I spat.

Though, Whitney’s death had been so abrupt it was shocking.

It may have been better than being sent back to Hell to be caged and confined or tormented eternally.

But neither option was acceptable.

Neither was okay.

I shook my head.

“They don’t deserve that. We have to help them. We have to go back.”

Planting my palms on the floor helped me stabilize and feel more than the headrush stirring my neurons into a flurry.

Everything was moving inside me, racing like blood through a second set of veins.

It crackled with pleasant heat, pulsing out through my fingertips in a way that felt familiar.

Felt like…

Home , the voice inside me sang.

It trilled and chirped like a goddamned canary, and the sounds made me pause.

I sat on the ground with my body primed for fire, feeling alive for the first time in decades.

I glanced toward the window to find that Evander’s heavenly office came with a decent view.

Beyond the wall of glass, clouds billowed like sparkling snowbanks.

It was like the whole world was white.

Specks of cornflower blue poked through, creating a limitless sky.

Not exactly the golden roads and mansions touted by the Christian faith, but somehow more stunning.

The voice, the phoenix spirit that had, mere minutes ago, been in its death throes, blossomed with life.

It swelled and filled me, crowding around my heart like an internal embrace.

Being high was like this.

Euphoric. Weightless.

Drugs made Brooklyn’s gritty streets as bright as the world outside Evander’s window, and it seemed this was what I’d been chasing all along.

This impossible levity.

I blinked, raking my fingers through the carpet in an effort to tether myself to reality.

My reality, where my boyfriend was about to be attacked by a murderous demon and his pack of feral hellhounds.

“Indigo.”

Evander’s summons broke me from my stupor.

I tore my gaze away from the sea of sky and looked at him.

The second my eyes locked on his pale blue ones, the pervasive feeling of betrayal stoked the fire in my gut.

“You can’t go back,” he said.

“You are a valuable asset to Heaven and must remain here where you are safe. Where your powers are preserved. You feel them, don’t you?”

I did.

Of-fucking-course I did.

But this place, these powers, they were the high I was determined to quit.

The addiction was the same and just as likely to sweep me away from what mattered most.

“I’m an asset,” I repeated while standing with support from the clunky metal desk.

Putting my back to the window and the splendor beyond, I aimed a narrow gaze at the angel.

“If I’m so valuable,” I began, “why didn’t you snap me up before now?”

Evander’s head rocked back like he’d been expecting the question, bracing for it.

“Because then the higher powers would realize I didn’t destroy you,” he replied.

“Destroy me?” I echoed.

The angel set down the papers he’d been shuffling.

Everything on the desk was immaculately arranged, like dots on a grid.

The wall behind him was the same.

Every item and piece of art was perfectly spaced and structured.

They were the kinds of things you could buy at an office supply store.

Motivational posters in plain, black frames surrounded one canvas.

It was a splash of color in the otherwise drab space, textured from an actual paintbrush and, in the bottom corner, it was signed.

N.D.

“There were other phoenixes,” Evander said.

“Centuries ago. You’re quite an old soul, Indigo.” His wistful smile was the most genuine emotion I’d seen on him so far.

“I was your guardian, but when Heaven decided they had no further use for you or your kind, they ordered an extermination.”

He frowned as if the thought pained him.

“I defied that order. You were dying even then, and I didn’t expect you to tarry long. But then came Lorenzo.”

My first glimpse of Loren had been a dark one.

The lifetime in which he’d found me had been full of pain, confusion, and fear.

I didn’t have words to explain the experience of being trapped and kept, caged like some inhuman thing and left in a dark, smelly cellar.

It broke my mind, but I knew enough to recognize my savior when he looked at me with empathy in his eyes.

Loren didn’t feel sorry for me.

Not quite. More like he understood how it felt to be diminished, exploited, and abused.

I’d spent the next hundred years learning exactly how well he understood.

“It was an unexpected turn of events,” Evander continued, “but not an unpleasant one. I allowed it for as long as I could.” His smile had faded, leaving a sorrowful shadow in its wake.

Did he regret snatching me away from my home?

Cutting off the roots I’d sunk so deep into the earth and left there?

“But things have changed,” I murmured.

The angel nodded. “The phoenix’s soul-cleansing ability was… unintended. And too easily exploited by our enemies. If you were seized by Hell, the consequences could be dire.”

I glanced at the canvas again.

My art was hanging on a wall in Heaven.

If I thought hard, beyond the years spent in the dank basement turned torture chamber, I remembered more.

Life before Loren came in flashes, and Evander was there, giving credence to his claims. We had been friends.

The thought wormed into my brain, and it made me sad.

Another loss gone unnoticed till now.

Something else forgotten.

“But I’m dying.” I let out a petering breath.

“All outta juice. How many souls could I possibly cleanse?”

Evander’s brows drew a hard line across his face.

“Even one is one too many.”

The sadness coiled inside me, settling heavy and deep.

My cheeks flushed with that stupid dry heat that pulsed behind my eyes and made them ache.

Slumping against the desk, I let my head drop and muttered, “Moira isn’t the one I would’ve picked. Just so you know.”

“I know,” Evander replied.

I was looking down, staring at the bowling shoes I’d incidentally stolen, when a glistening droplet landed on the laces.

Snapping straight, I pressed my fingertips to my eyes and brought them back wet.

“I’m crying?” I asked.

Maybe the angel, maybe the universe.

But the answer was as plain as the glitter on my skin.

Evander looked on blankly, and I wanted to shake him.

“No, like really crying,” I insisted.

“Real tears…”

Raising my hand to the natural light spilling through the window, I marveled at the moisture.

They were still flowing, dampening my cheeks, and the feeling spurred me into motion.

“Do you have a jar?” I asked the angel.

“Glass? Bottle?”

Without waiting for his response, I rounded the desk and shoved Evander aside to gain access to the drawers.

I ripped them open one, finding hanging files in the first and office supplies in the second.

Then it was all paperclips, and rubber bands, and staples, and I was about to dump every bit of it out of the plastic organizer then hang my face over that.

“If I get enough of these, Loren can have them,” I rambled.

“He can come with me. I can save him…”

Evander stopped me with the tray in my grasp, and I fixed him with legitimately teary eyes.

“If you return to Earth, you will be taken by the demons, and you will be killed,” the angel said with mounting fervor.

“Lorenzo chose to give you this chance. I would advise you take it. Give his death meaning.”

Snatching the tray from his grip, I upended it, scattering pens and spools of correction tape across the floor.

I hugged the organizer to my chest, fully prepared to catch every teardrop that fell in one of its divided dishes and not caring how absurd I looked doing so.

“His life has meaning! He has meaning,” I insisted, straining till my voice broke and the last words tumbled out.

“To me.”

The flow had slowed, maybe stopped, and I couldn’t bear the thought of that.

A few measly tears were not enough to serve my purpose.

I needed so much more, but I was too frantic to be sad.

Too desperate and fucking deranged, backing away from the angel and the mess I’d made until I felt thoroughly cornered despite that Evander had not moved.

He stood amidst the scattered office supplies, unfazed.

“The souls who ascend,” he began, “the ones you cleanse. What do you think happens to them?”

My chest heaved with shuddering breaths.

“I dunno… Wings? White robes? Halos?”

Evander frowned and gestured to himself, illuminating the fact that he was missing all of those things.

I scoffed in response to his unspoken protest. “I saw your wings at the bowling alley.”

“Because I’m an angel,” he said flatly.

“Other souls, like Moira?—“

“And Loren?” I cut in, and he nodded.

“Let me show you.”

Walking forward, Evander held out his hand to take the plastic tray I clutched.

The bead of liquid in the spot that previously held pushpins was just that.

A drop. A speck that would evaporate as quickly as it had formed.

And my eyes were dry again.

Whatever scrap of heavenly power I’d managed to channel had slipped away and left me grasping.

But I wasn’t ready to give up.

“Wait,” I told Evander.

“Really fucking wait. I don’t have time for a guided tour. You said the hounds were coming?—”

“Loren is fine .” The angel sounded exasperated enough he might have thought I didn’t hear his mumbled addition of, “For now.”

I did hear, though, and shot him a sour look.

The angel’s waiting hand turned up and out, signaling me to stop before I began.

“Even if he wasn’t,” he continued, “there’s nothing you can do to aid him in your current state.”

“What about my future state?” I asked.

“Come along, Indy.”

Evander reached for me again, and it was then I noticed this room had no doors.

Just the window, and I wondered if we were about to launch ourselves through it.

Gazing across the field of white and blue, I imagined—or maybe I remembered?

—how it would feel to cruise on a heavenly breeze.

To dip and dive between clouds.

To be so fucking high and never come down.

When I lowered the tray and let that solitary teardrop slide off onto the carpet, Evander grabbed my arm.

We didn’t go out the window or anywhere that would constitute as up.

We dropped as swiftly as through a trap door, plummeting toward wherever Heaven stored their pieces of Hell.