Beneath (Heven and Hell #3.5) (6 page)

“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 comprehend 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?”