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I sighed. “No, that’d only get me in trouble because she’d think it was me.” I paused and frowned at her. “Wait, where would you even get itching powder?”
She leaned against the dresser with a smug smile. “I have my ways.”
A strange ache shot through my heart at the sight of that smile, like an echo of something I once knew, something precious that was now lost to me.
Before I could dwell on it, Naamah spoke again, breaking my inward focus. “I’ll think of something that won’t be traced to you, then.”
She straightened and summoned something with a flick of her hand. Usually, summoning objects was limited to items in the territory an angel directly belonged to. In my case, I could make objects appear that were within Derdekea’s domain. Naamah, however, was somehow able to call something to her no matter where she was, as long as that object had been claimed by her previously—undoubtedly a sign of her immense power.
“Here,” she said and handed me a large picture book titled History of the World. “Got it for you from Earth.”
I grabbed it with greedy hands and marveled at the high-quality photos illustrating a condensed historical timeline of humanity. I collected and hoarded every scrap of information about Earth and humans in particular that I could find. The walls on my side of the room were plastered with photos and posters of the beautiful variety of Earth’s landscape, ranging from snowy mountain peaks to sunny beaches, as well as pictures of animals and humans.
Among us angels, I wasn’t alone in my fascination for the mortal realm and its inhabitants. Visits to Earth were a coveted privilege awarded only to higher-ranking angels, and as a virtue, I was far from being allowed to go. So all my knowledge had to come from photos and books and other angels’ stories.
Naamah knew about my obsession, and she regularly supplied me with pictures and other Earth paraphernalia.
Like the small electronic device she now handed me.
“Is that…a phone?” I exclaimed. I held it this way and that and jumped when the screen lit up.
“It has movies on it. Here, let me show you.”
She tapped on the screen, and I watched with rapt fascination as she navigated through incomprehensible-looking displays until a video started playing.
I gasped and flailed at it. “Turn it off, turn it off.” My heart hammering in my chest, I glanced around. “If anyone finds this with me, I’m in trouble.”
Like visits to Earth, possession of certain items was tightly controlled and only permissible to those who’d earned the privilege through a higher rank. Technology like this from Earth was definitely above my pay grade.
“Relax,” Naamah said. “I can ward it for you, so anyone snooping through your stuff won’t see it.”
I leaned a bit away and squinted at her. “You can do that?”
She waved a hand. “Piece of cake.”
“For a seraph with a shitload of power,” I muttered.
Naamah laughed and winked at me.
I still marveled at the fact that this powerful angel with a penchant for troublemaking had chosen to befriend me. I just couldn’t make sense of it. I was a lowly virtue, should barely be a blip on the radar for someone of Naamah’s rank, yet she’d breezed into my life one day and decreed that we should henceforth be friends.
Not that it wasn’t par for the course for Naamah to ignore hierarchy and go with the flow of her whims. She did indeed hang out with other angels of lower rank as well. Her network of contacts here could best be described as eclectic, and at worst it resembled the random seashell collection of a four-year-old, where one might find a rare, beautiful conch among ordinary shells and pebbles here and there.
I was most definitely a pebble.
When I’d asked her once why she was interested in being friends with me, she’d only smirked and said, “Because I work in mysterious ways.”
And that had been that. I hadn’t been able to dig any further.
So I’d just shrugged and gone along with it. She was fun to be around, and for some reason I hadn’t been able to figure out, she felt familiar. As if I’d known her in my previous life, which was ridiculous, of course. I’d been a human and she’d been locked away in Hell, and there was no way I’d met her.
I guessed she simply reminded me of someone I’d known as a human, maybe.
My memories of my life before I’d been turned into an angel were little more than slivers of unconnected pictures and almost innate knowledge. While there were things I just knew—how to speak, how to move, general surface-level stuff about humans and Earth—I couldn’t remember any actual situations from my human life, couldn’t remember any of the people who surely must have been important to me.
I knew the melody and all the words to the “Happy Birthday” song, but I couldn’t recall myself or anyone else ever singing it.
More than once, I’d tried to find out who I’d been before I’d come here, to no avail. None of my superiors had a clue about my life before Heaven, and from what I’d gathered, that was the norm with new angels. Their human lives before their ascensions were of no importance. They never remembered anything, and no one cared.
