Page 59 of The World That We Knew

“Why would you? I was intolerable.”

She grinned. “Not all of the time. Anyway, she trusts you now.”

Julien shook his head, in disbelief.

“She told me so herself,” Lea told him.

His eyes were so dark. Those gold flecks were gone. Lea ran a hand through his long hair. She wanted to cry whenever she looked at him. She wanted to thank him for keeping his promise.

“You never told me what she was,” Julien said. “You said you would.”

“I will.” As Lea watched Ava she felt a catch in her throat. “But someday,” she said to Julien. “Not today.”

Ava felt the angel in the heat of the firelight before she spied him. He had come to them again as she had feared he would. She had cheated him out of his rightful prize and now he had come for Lea once more. But he hadn’t taken her when the bees had swarmed and Ava most certainly would not allow him to take her now. That was when she knew. She would not take her maker’s advice. She would not run.

Since their last encounter, Azriel could see her even though he was meant to only see mortals. Perhaps it was because she had grabbed hold of him and he now recognized her essence. Whatever the reason, he knew her and he knew what he wanted. She could not persuade him to change the course of what was meant to be, but she remembered what the doctor had told her. There was a trick mortals played, and now she would do the same.

You must be willing to change places.

She was willing.

She called for Lea to follow her.

Lea must be willing as well.

If it was possible to trick an angel, it was possible to do the same to a mortal girl.

“What could she want?” Julien asked.

“Whatever it is, I owe it to her.”

They went to a cave used by wolves when the mountains belonged to them.

“Don’t ask any questions,” Ava said. “One last time, do exactly as I say.”

They exchanged clothes. There was no reason for Ava to tell Lea why she now donned the blue dress and Lea wore the gray dress Hanni had made for the golem when she first decided she must send her daughter away. Ava wrapped a black scarf around her head to ensure that her even blacker hair didn’t show. She pulled off the rabbi’s boots and gave them to Lea, then slipped on Lea’s shoes even though they were two sizes too small.

“Don’t leave this cave until you can no longer see me. Do you hear me? Then, once I’m gone, go to the border with Julien. He’ll find the way.”

There was something unexpected in Ava’s tone. A sort of terror was folded inside the words.

“Where will you be?” Lea asked, feeling Ava’s terror.

“I will be doing what I was made to do,” Ava told her.

When she led the angel away, he would assume he was following Lea into the dark woods, and by the time he realized his mistake, it would be too late. The moment to take her would have passed.

Before Ava left, she and Lea threw their arms around each other. They didn’t need to speak.

I beg you for one thing. Love her as if she were your own.

This was how it had begun, and how it would end.

Ava set out in mortal guise, the angel following. She made certain not to be too fast and went at a mortal’s pace. She forced herself to think like a mortal. This way or that? Over this rock or around it? Mortals hesitated. They stumbled. There he was, at her heels, in his black coat, carrying his book, ready to open its pages. She was so concentrated on the Angel of Death that she made a very human mistake. She could see a distance of a hundred miles and could inhale the sparks of fires burning in Paris, for the city was in chaos, and would be liberated in a matter of days. But she didn’t spy the shadow of a man lying in wait. A German soldier on his own was camped nearby. He had killed too many people to count or remember. He had one thing in mind, how to go on living. He spied Ava long before she took note of him, and when she was almost upon him, he lifted his rifle.

Ava stopped in her tracks. In a way she was relieved. If meeting with the soldier was meant to have caused Lea’s death, it was a death she would have gladly taken on. But he would find out she wasn’t mortal soon enough. She would trick him as she’d tricked death.

“Come here,” the soldier told her in German. “Do as I say and I won’t shoot.”