Beneath (Heven and Hell #3.5) Page 4
And then he kissed me.
The feel of his lips against mine was overwhelming. It was all-encompassing and it was everything I never knew I was missing.
Is this what it’s like to truly feel?
It was a rollercoaster of emotion, most of it awful… but then there were moments like this, moments that made an angel wonder what else she’d been missing her entire existence.
Without thinking, my wings shifted, wrapping around us both, closing us in and blocking out everything that surrounded us.
He pulled back sooner than I would’ve liked to smile down into my face. “I’m so glad you’re okay.”
“How did you find me?” I asked, confusion clouding my euphoric feelings.
He didn’t speak, but his eyes flashed silver.
I gasped. “No,” I denied, shaking my head.
“I can explain,” he started, and I gasped again, pounding on his shoulders for him to let me up. He moved and I stood, shock spearing through my entire body.
“What have you done?” I cried.
“I didn’t have the strength to keep them from taking you,” he said. “So I went and got the strength to get you back.”
“By becoming a beast!?” I yelled.
“By becoming something more than human, something that existed in your world.”
“In my world?” I said, horror dawning through me.
“Now nothing can keep us apart.”
I laughed, but it wasn’t a pleasant sound. “Hellhounds are not part of my world. They are prey for my kind.”
“Hellhound?”
“That’s what you are, is it not?”
“I was told I was a hound. There was no mention of hell.”
“You’re a fool!” I snapped. “Whoever made you into this was not someone of God; that I can assure you. What did you promise in exchange?”
“What I promised doesn’t matter,” he argued. “What matters is that you’re safe.”
“You shouldn’t have come for me. The loss of your humanity wasn’t worth this.”
He rushed toward me, grabbing my hand and shoving it against his chest. “I’m still the same man. Look at me. Feel me.”
Indeed, I felt the steady beating of his heart. He did look the same. He did sound the same. But deep down I knew the changes within him couldn’t be seen. They were lurking within his very soul.
“You don’t understand,” I whispered. “Hellhounds are evil. They kill. They are a creation of Lucifer himself. You have turned yourself into something that is the complete opposite of what my kind stand for.”
His heart skipped a beat.
I slid my hand out from beneath his and used it to brush away a tear trailing down my cheek.
“No,” he denied, shaking his head. “I’m not evil.”
“How many did you kill tonight, Callum?” I asked, looking once more at the thousands of feathers lying around us.
“I only did that because of what they did to you,” he said, hard. “They deserved it.”
“That wasn’t for you to decide! You do not get to choose who lives and dies!”
“I do when it comes to you.”
I shook my head, unable to say another word. I did this—me and me alone. What would become of him now?
I looked back at Callum, standing there with this look on his face… this look of utter isolation… this sense of realization, as if what he’d done was just now sinking in. “Gemma…” he said, voice cracking before completely falling away.
I went to him, closed the distance between us, and took his face between my hands. “It doesn’t matter,” I said passionately. “This doesn’t have to damn you. What you did… you changed… out of love, not out of darkness. That is what will save you. That is what will save us.”
“Us?” he asked.
I nodded. “I’m going to help you. I won’t leave you like this.”
He pushed my hands away. “I don’t want you because you pity me… out of some sense of warped responsibility.”
“That isn’t what this is,” I denied.
“Then what is it?” he demanded, almost daring me to respond.
I guess this is where I made my final choice. This is where the two parts of me that were torn mended together and created the rest of my eternity.
“Love,” I whispered, clearing my throat. Then, louder, I repeated, “Love. I’m with you out of love.”
His eyes did that flashing thing again, which was actually kind of unsettling, but then he scooped me up and pressed me against him, practically squeezing all the air from my lungs. He felt the same as he always had. We were going to be okay.
Someone made a slight sound behind us and we spun, Callum stepping in front of me, blocking my body from sight. But whatever he saw must not have threatened him because while his shoulders remained tense, there was no sense of alarm anywhere about him.
“Hello, Gemma,” said a familiar voice.
I stepped around Callum to see Airis watching us. “Airis,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
But I already knew. Moments ago I’d made my choice and now it was about to become official.
“I’ve come to collect your wings.”
Shock harpooned through me. “You’re going to take my wings?” I thought they’d merely turn black, that their brilliant white would fall prey to shade.
“What? No!” Callum said, holding out his hand to keep me from going any farther.
Airis glanced at him with barely concealed dislike. “Did you think she would be allowed to keep her wings? Her status? You have damned her to the same kind of existence as those black wings you just murdered.”
He recoiled from her words, from the truth behind them.
“I don’t understand, Airis. Won’t I become a fallen?”
“Yes. You have already taken on the status of fallen.”
I glanced behind me. “But my wings are still white.”
“Instead of turning into a black wing and being banished to hell, you are being stripped of your wings, of many of your powers, and will be left to spend your eternity here on earth.”
Callum made a sound, but I didn’t look at him. This wasn’t about him. It was about me and the choices that led me here. It really was more than I thought I would get. In fact, I was confused. I’d never heard of an angel being stripped of his wings and being left on earth.
Airis continued to speak as I worked it all out in my mind. “You will no longer be allowed access to heaven, to the InBetween, or to God. You have betrayed him. You, an angel, were supposed to love him and only him, hold him in your highest esteem.” She glanced at Callum before looking back at me. “But you allowed another into your heart. Another who has made a deal with hell, a deal with darkness.”
“He did it only to save me.” I pleaded, not wanting her to think badly of Callum.
“If you had followed the commands of our Father, then he wouldn’t have done it at all.”
My shoulders slumped because she was right. Airis approached me, and Callum took a step forward, but I held up my hand. “Stay back,” I told him. “This must be done.”
I didn’t think he would listen, but he moved no farther and I turned back to Airis. She lifted her hands, creating a ball of intense, bright light in her palms and then threw it at me. It hit me in the chest. The impact swayed me on my feet and then a searing heat jolted me and I fell to my knees.
The pain was intense, unlike anything I’d ever felt before, and as I knelt on the ground, hunched in pain, my wings began to die. The soft, downy feathers began to shrivel, to curl into themselves. The luminous color faded until they were no longer white, but sickly and old. And then like a tree in late winter shedding its leaves, they began to fall. They floated toward the ground with exaggerated slowness, drawing out my pain as I watched the things I loved most about myself be taken away.
I sat there on the ground, silently crying long after the light had faded and the physical pain had stopped. I tried to compr
ehend the emptiness inside me and the way the air pressed in on my empty back. They were gone. I would never know what it was to fly again. I would never feel the rush of the wind, the freedom of the open air against my skin, for the rest of my entire endless existence.
Finally, I looked up. Airis was still there, but she turned to walk away.
“I still love him, you know,” I said, my voice rougher than ever before.
She stopped and turned back. “I know. It is why you have not been banned to hell, but confined to the earth. You committed a crime. But the crime was committed out of love. Father knows you still love him, Gemma. You just don’t love him enough.”
She disappeared then. I knew I would never see her again.
Callum wrapped his arms around me and lifted me from the ground, cradling me against his chest. I imagined I must have felt awfully light without my wings.
“They punished you for loving me.” His voice was raw.
No. They punished me for not loving God enough. “It could have been worse,” I said, realizing I was lucky to not be sentenced to a life in hell. It was proof that God, my Father, was a forgiving being.
If I couldn’t love him from heaven, then I would continue to do so from Earth.
“How? How could things have been worse?”
“They could have taken my wings and you away.”
His hold on me tightened. “I’m not going anywhere.
I laid my head against his chest as he walked away from the place where I fell. Considering this primitive, raw place was now my home, I was more than relieved to hear him say that.
After I Fell
Six months. That’s how long we had together. In those six months I learned a lot about human emotion and how to live somewhere that was a far cry from perfection. Callum built us a cottage in the woods, near the stream where we met. My favorite thing to do was soak my feet in the water, as I often did, sometimes for hours at a time when Callum was at work or off spending time with the son I hadn’t known he had.
Learning to live without my wings was something I wasn’t sure I would ever get used to. Perhaps after many, many years they would only be a memory, but even when I told myself that, something inside me whispered that I would never really forget.
For the most part, we were happy. It wasn’t the blissful, all-encompassing happiness that I knew only existed in heaven. It had its ups and downs, its smiles and frowns. Callum was a man of many moods. I knew most of that was because of the beast. His emotions seemed to run hot and cold and he would fight them, doing his best to battle the side of him he wasn’t quite sure how to control.
That first month was the hardest because he walked around in fear. Fear that he would lose control and hurt someone, hurt me. I knew he wouldn’t. There was too much goodness in him, and the more time that passed the more he began to believe it too.
We laughed a lot, kissed a lot, and ate a lot. Earth was home to more tastes than I ever imagined and learning about them all was an adventure.
I hadn’t seen Callum in almost two days when he pulled into the yard, cutting the engine of the motorcycle that he drove. I was hanging clothes on a line he’d strung between the trees and I dropped what I was holding and ran to meet him. He smiled and kissed me as he always did, but I saw something brewing in his eyes. The beast was close to the surface and it made me afraid.
“Is everything okay, Callum?” I asked, wondering what could’ve changed since the last time I saw him, when he was happy and relaxed.
“Nothing for you to worry about,” he said, setting me away from him.
I went back to the laundry and he went inside to change. I was humming my favorite hymn when I heard him yelling from inside the house, calling my name. I turned just as he burst through the door, racing toward me, fear on his face.
“What’s the matter?”
“Get in the house. Lock yourself in,”
A voice from behind, someone concealed by the sheet hanging on the line, spoke up. “You think those walls will keep me out?”
I turned, yanking the sheet down to reveal a man with dark hair and brown eyes. He had cruelty written on his features.
“No. But I sure as hell will.” Callum snarled.
Who was this man? Callum seemed to know him, but it didn’t seem to be a pleasant acquaintance. I watched his body shake and quiver just like it always did before he shifted, but instead of shedding his skin and sprouting fur, he fell to his knees and let out a cry.
“I prefer you in your human form,” the man said, holding up some kind of amulet.
“What is that?” I asked.
“Get in the house, Gemma,” Callum ordered again, but his voice was strained and weak.
From out of the trees three others materialized. They weren’t human. From the grossly formed faces, disfigured bodies, and empty eyes, I knew these were the demons I’d heard Sinead mention a few times before. I looked back at the man holding the amulet. He smiled and my skin crawled.
I ran toward the house, but I felt the pull of invisible ropes as they wrapped themselves around me, tugged, and then suspended me just above the ground.
“She isn’t part of this,” Callum said as he struggled to his feet.
“Perhaps not, but this way she can see what happens when you fail to fulfill a deal that is signed in blood.”
“What is he talking about, Callum?” I asked.
He looked at me, guilt marring his features. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” I asked, fear beginning to claw at the back of my throat.
“For everything,” he said as sweat dripped down his face. His skin was pale and he swayed on his feet. That amulet had to be the cause of his weakened state.
“Allow me to explain,” said the man with the dark hair. “This man here made a deal. In exchange for his hellhound status, he would indebt himself and future hounds in his lineage to me. He would be there when I called.”
I glanced at Callum, trying to catch his eye, but he wouldn’t look at me.
“But I have called twice now. And twice he has refused me.”
“That wasn’t a deal,” Callum spat. “It was a curse!”
“We can work this—” I began, but he held up his hand to say, “No. There is no working anything out. That wasn’t the deal.”
I began to struggle against the invisible binds that held me. To try and break free. To be a participant instead of a victim.
There was no escape.
“Run, Callum. Run,” I told him, pleading with him to go.
He shook his head. “I’m not leaving you here.”
I didn’t have time to argue because the demons pounced. They jumped him from all sides. He did his best to fight them off, but there were three of them and only one of him—and he wasn’t able to shift, the one thing that would save his life.
I had to watch, in horror, as he was overcome by the demons, pushed to the ground, and I could see nothing but a pile of bodies and hear the sickening thud of flesh.
After a few moments a scarlet trail of blood began to run. It slid from beneath the pile of bodies and crept toward me, telling me everything I needed to know.
The demons stood, looking satisfied and vile. The man stuffed the amulet in his pocket and turned to walk away, calling after the creatures who did his dirty work. When they were almost out of sight, the binds that held me released and I was dropped onto the ground like a sack of flour. I scrambled on all fours toward Callum, who lay in the grass unmoving and bent at odd angles.
“Callum!” I cried, reaching him, grabbing his face and turning his head in my direction. He was covered in blood and it was impossible to tell what injuries were the worst. I didn’t bother to try to decide.
Instead, I raised my hands above his body, palms down, and reached inside me, calling on one of the powers that hadn’t been stripped away. I healed him for hours, stopping only when I collapsed. I poured out every last shred of effort I had, letting it flow over and around him.
His eyes didn’t move. His skin was cold and his lips were blue.
I learned another hard lesson that night in the woods.
You cannot heal those who are already dead.
And so I buried him. It took me a full day to dig a hole big enough to fit him. I positioned it near the stream, but beneath the trees. I planted some wildflowers over the freshly turned earth and I mourned. I grieved so long that I began to use that grief to build a wall around myself so I would never know pain like this again.