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CHAPTER 7
I stepped out of my bathroom, freshly showered and fully dressed, ready to fly to my meeting with Aziel, as my gaze fell onto the chest of drawers in the corner, where I kept my clothes and personal belongings. On an impulse, I went over there, pulled out the lowest drawer, pushed aside tunics and leggings, and let my hand glide over the box that came into view.
I opened the lid and gingerly picked up the neatly folded, large black fabric inside. In almost reverent manner, I unfolded the item of clothing.
Even though it was torn, I could still make out the shape of the tunic it had once been, the size and design hinting at a large male as the owner. Old wrinkles were still visible, as was the blood specking it here and there.
I’d woken up wearing this. After I’d been made an angel, I’d opened my eyes to a new life, with no memories of my old, covered in a makeshift dress created with this ripped tunic…and a scent that had felt like a caress for my soul.
I pressed my nose into the tunic and inhaled.
A scent that had long faded.
My chest drew tight with the keen sense of loss of something precious.
Azrael had never explained how I’d come to wear this piece of clothing that was so very obviously not mine, despite my many questions. He had to know.
I’d once asked Bifiel what she was wearing when she’d woken up as an angel after her ascension, and she’d stared at me like I was a brainless worm. “Nothing, of course,” she’d said. “I woke in a bed, covered with a sheet, and there were clothes for me to put on. Which is standard practice for all angels-made.” Her tone had clearly communicated that I should know this.
My fingers brushed over the black fabric of the tunic. Someone had put this on me—after my ascension. My human body would have been left on Earth, the transformation to angel crafting a new physical body directly from my soul. So someone who’d seen me as a newly made angel had not only taken the care to cover me, but also used his own tunic for it. Talk about giving someone the shirt off one’s back.
There was a story there, and I had an inkling that it was important.
If only I could fucking remember.
I sniffed once more at the tunic, chasing that elusive scent, but all I smelled now was the box I stored it in and whiffs of dried blood, which was too generic a scent to glean anything from.
I couldn’t even recall what the original fragrance had been. I only remembered that it had felt like comfort.
One more caress of the single thing left over from my past life, and then I set it back inside the box and returned it to the drawer.
* * *
I landed outside the cave, shook my wings, and then folded them before magicking them away.
In the beginning, right after my ascension, it had taken considerable effort to learn how to do this. My wings had been out for days at a time because I hadn’t been able to make them vanish, and I’d kept bumping into doorways and furniture because my brain had apparently been overwhelmed with accounting for the presence of large appendages at my back.
My balance had been off, too, and I’d stumbled around like a baby giraffe learning to walk. It was a good thing I healed fast as an angel, because the number of bruises I’d acquired during that time had been staggering. And just when I’d gotten used to the weight of wings on my back, I’d managed to make them go away and had stumbled yet again because my balance was off once more.
It really was so weird that the wings could be insubstantial enough to dematerialize, but when they were visible, they had real weight to them.
Making the wings disappear was a matter of focus, but also one of faith. I had to believe they would vanish into thin air if I wanted them to, and I had to concentrate on pulling the part of my energy that flowed through them back into myself, thereby retracting the wings, in a way.
Realizing that they could indeed simply dematerialize at a thought and therefore weren’t as permanently corporeal and tangible as my legs, for example, also had its drawbacks—there had been a time when I’d been quite anxious about them spontaneously disappearing on me while I was flying. Because if it was focus and belief that made them come and go, what if my concentration faltered while they were out? What if I suddenly stopped believing they were there during a flight?
Needless to say, once that fear had slunk in, that very thing had actually happened.
Finding myself abruptly wingless while up in the air a couple of times, I’d plunged to the ground, screaming bloody murder all the way down. Those moments had shown me just how hardy and unbreakable angels were. Much like when my flight instructors had pushed me off high buildings in order to teach me how to fly and I’d crashed down repeatedly, those moments when my faith in my wings had faltered had left me bruised and hurting, peeling myself off the ground with a groan. What would have killed—or, at the very least, seriously maimed—a human had only given me scratches and a broken bone here and there.
Except that one time, when I’d unluckily fallen onto the spire of a building and the metal rod at the top had skewered me in the chest. I’d hung there like a pierced insect from a human’s collection, and it had taken another angel to pull me off the rod and fly me down.
I rubbed over my breastbone, right where that damn metal menace had speared me. Years had passed, but I swore I could still feel a phantom twinge of the long-healed injury sometimes.
Well, at least I’d gotten really good at tolerating pain. That should be an advantage during combat.
Which brought me back to why I was here.
I took a deep breath, gathering my nerves, then walked around the spray of the waterfall and into the cave.
