Fallen in Love (12 page)

“Abandon this silly story, Arriane.” She spoke as if in a trance. “I am not in the mood for it today.”

“Oh, but wait! I’m just getting warmed up!” Arriane furrowed her brow. “In so many ways this seeming adversary was the dire opposite of Tanglelocks. Her hair was a red dandelion pouf.” Arriane stroked Tess’s hair. “Her skin was a pale canvas that burned at the slightest
touch of the sun.” She ran her finger down Tess’s smooth, bare arm.

“Arriane—”

“But the creature was a demon with a comb, and in her hands were tamed the destructive locks. This person’s nature, unlike the angel’s, was—”

“Enough!” Tess snapped, jerking her gaze away and toward a shallow, pebble-lined stream at the edge of the pasture. “I’m tired of fairy tales.”

She stood up and Arriane scrambled to join her.

“It’s not a fairy tale,” Arriane insisted, ignoring the goose bumps she felt rising on her skin. She sat up straight and tilted her head at Tess. “The fact that we’re here together—”

“Is only a sign that he wasn’t paying attention.”

“Wasn’t?”
A cold wind crept over the meadow.

“He has given me an ultimatum.”

The blood drained from Arriane’s cheeks, and with it went the brilliant colors in the meadow. The blue sky dimmed, the grass lost its verve. Even Tess’s hair seemed pale. Arriane had known this moment was coming—had known it ever since the start—but still it took her breath away.

Tess bore the black starburst tattoo on the back of her neck, the one Lucifer branded on his innermost circle of demons.

“He knows. And now he wants me back.” There was
ice in Tess’s voice, ice that seemed to creep across Arriane’s soul.

“But you just got here!” Arriane felt like running to her love, falling at Tess’s feet and weeping, but she just stared down at her hands. “I don’t want you to leave. I hate it when you go away.”

“Arriane—” Tess took a step toward her, but Arriane flinched, enraged.

“It’s not his business to say what we can and can’t do! What kind of monster boasts so incessantly about free will and yet won’t let you be free to follow your own heart?”

“I don’t have a choice about this.”

“Yes, you do,” Arriane said. “You just won’t make it.”

When Tess didn’t answer, Arriane’s chest heaved with the initial wave of a tsunami-sized sob. She felt so ashamed. She turned and ran across the pasture. She ran along the streambed and up the soft slope of grass at the western edge of the farm. She trampled through her mistress’s herb garden, unable to see the thyme through her tears. She could hear Tess running after her, her soft footsteps catching up. But Arriane did not stop until she’d reached the door of the old barn where tomorrow morning she would rise just before dawn to do the milking.

She threw herself against the rough wood wall of the barn and let the sobs come.

Tess hugged Arriane from behind, her red braid swinging over Arriane’s shoulder. She laid her head between Arriane’s shoulder blades and they stood like that, both of them crying, for a quiet moment.

When Arriane turned around, leaning her back against the sun-warm wall of the barn, Tess took her hand. Her fingers were long and pale and slender; Arriane’s were tiny, the nails chewed to the quick. Arriane drew Tess through the open rusty-hinged door inside the barn, where they would be safe from the eyes of the other milkmaids, who would be gathering for supper soon.

They stood among hay and horses, a few cows lying curled together in a corner. The scents of the animals were everywhere: the horses’ musk, the chickens’ downy sweetness, the dried sweat of the cows’ hides.

“There is a way for us to be together,” Tess said to Arriane in a low voice.

“How? You would defy him?”

“No, Arriane.” The demon shook her head. “I took my oath. I am bound to Lucifer.”

When Tess turned her head to gaze out the barn’s door and across the endless meadow, Arriane glimpsed the dark starburst tattoo that marred her lovely skin. It was the sole blemish that could adhere to angels’ bodies. Except for their wing scars, every other ink mark or wound or scar in time would fade away.

Lucifer’s mark was the only part of Tess that Arriane could say she did not love. She reached up to touch her own neck, pale and unblemished. Pure.

“There is another way,” Tess said, pressing close to Arriane so that their feet overlapped. Tess’s love smelled like jasmine, and she often said that Arriane smelled of sweet cream. “A way to stop living like this, with everything between us always a secret.”

Tess extended her arms toward Arriane and reached around her shoulders. Arriane thought for a moment that they were going to embrace again. She felt her body drawing in, needing to be held—

Instead, cold fingers crawled up the back of her neck. “You could join me.”

Arriane lurched away. Her skin crawled.

“Join me as my soul mate, Arriane. Join me and take your place among the ranks of Hell.”

A
rriane recoiled. “No,” she whispered, certain of its impossibility. “I could never.”

Tess’s blue eyes pleaded with a fierce intensity. “We can end our secret affair and proclaim it to the universe.”

The way her voice boomed, echoing off the rafters in the barn, made Arriane nervous.

“Don’t you want that?” Tess cried. “Don’t you want to be together, to snap the arbitrary shackles that prevent us from being our true selves?”

Arriane shook her head. This was unfair. Tess was out of her mind. She had the most sublimely beautiful soul Arriane had ever seen, but this time, she had gone too far. If she cared for Arriane at all, Tess would already know what her lover’s answer would be.

But then—

Arriane wavered, allowing herself for a moment to see the situation from Tess’s point of view. Of course Arriane wanted to love Tess openly. She always would. What else did she have to do to prove it?

No! How could Tess ask this of her? To side with Hell over Heaven! That wasn’t love. That was insanity.

“Maybe the rules are right,” Arriane said tentatively. “Maybe angels and demons shouldn’t—”

“What?” Tess cut her off. “Say it.”

“Lucifer would never allow it,” Arriane finally said evasively, turning away from Tess to pace the barn. She passed the horses in their stables. The cows in their pen. Everything had its place. She looked across the barn at Tess and had never felt further away from the soul she loved the most.

“Lucifer might allow it—” Tess started to say.

“You know how he feels about love!” Arriane snapped. “Ever since …” But she trailed off. That old story didn’t matter, not right now.

“You don’t understand.” Tess laughed a false laugh, as if Arriane were failing to understand something as
simple as an arithmetic problem. “He said that if I brought you with me—”

“Who said?” Arriane’s head snapped up.
“Lucifer?”

Tess stepped away, as if afraid, and for a moment, Arriane thought she saw something in the rafters of the barn. A stone statue … a gargoyle. He seemed to be watching them. But when she blinked he was gone. She found Tess’s wild eyes again, and she felt betrayed.

“You told him?”

Now Arriane marched toward Tess, stopping just short of her lover’s breast. It heaved with surprise at being confronted, but Tess did not back away.

“How dare you,” Arriane spat, spinning on her heel.

Before Arriane could run out of the barn, Tess grabbed hold of her wrists. Arriane wrenched away, feeling Tess’s fingers drag against her skin.

“Leave me be!” Arriane shouted, not meaning it, but Tess wasn’t listening anyway. She came at Arriane again, yanking on the sleeve of her gown so hard the fabric ripped.

“Yes, I told him!” Tess bellowed, shouting right into Arriane’s face. “Unlike you, I don’t care who knows!”

Arriane pushed her. She pushed her so hard, Tess fell backward into a tower of stacked milk pails. They toppled over, falling on her with a clatter, splattering her pale skin with a few white drops.

Tess kicked the pails away and rocketed to her feet.
And then—Arriane had not been expecting this—her wings bloomed out behind her shoulders.

They
never
exposed their wings to each other; it was something they’d agreed on ages ago. It was too plain a reminder that their love was not meant to be.

Now Tess’s broad demon wings filled the barn with shimmery light. They were the gold of the last moment of a sunset, tall slopes that rose high behind her shoulders like twin mountain peaks. They beat lightly at her sides, fully extended, rigid, with the tips curled slightly outward in Arriane’s direction.

The ritual fighting stance.

The horses whinnied and the cows began to bleat as if they could sense the tension, the brink of something bad.

What happened next, Arriane did not intend—but she also could not help it: Her wings responded to the call. They bloomed out from her shoulders in a rush that felt so innately good, she let out a heedless cry of joy. But in the next moment she choked with regret to see them billowing out at her sides.

Tess beat her great golden wings, and her body rose. She hovered in the air for a fraction of a second before she lunged down, tackling Arriane. The two of them rolled to the floor of the barn.

“Why are you doing this?” Arriane cried, gripping Tess’s shoulders, straining to hold her back as they wrestled.

Tess had a fistful of Arriane’s long hair. She jerked it backward to look Arriane in the eye. “To show you I would fight for you. I would do anything for you.”

“Let me go!” Arriane did not want to fight her love, but her wings felt the old magnetic pull toward the eternal foe. Arriane screamed out in pain and slapped the face she’d only ever wanted to dote on.

“Once you join me,” Tess fumed, pinning Arriane’s hands to the ground, “he will accept you. He will accept our love.”

Arriane shook her head, cowering beneath her lover. She was afraid of what Tess would do next, but she had to tell the truth.

“It’s a trick.”

“Shut up.”

“A trick to get me down there. One more soul is all he wants.” Arriane strained against her lover’s grasp, against her own leaden wings, which cast sparks each time they brushed against Tess’s. “Lucifer is a merchant,” she shouted over the din of their brawl, “staying in the market after sundown just to make one last sale. As soon as I joined you—”

Tess froze, her flushed face an inch above Arriane’s. She let go of Arriane’s hair, unleashed her from where she was pinned to the ground. She cupped a hand to Arriane’s cheek. “So you’ll consider it?”

There was so much heat in Tess’s blue gaze that Arriane’s heart melted.

“I can remember the first time I said goodbye to you,” Tess whispered. “I was so afraid I’d never see you again.”

Arriane shivered. “Oh, Tessriel.”

How could she resist one final kiss? The fight dissolved as her head lifted toward Tess, whose whole face changed. Love flooded back in, filling the space between their bodies until there was no space between them. They threaded their fingers through each other’s hair, limbs entwined, and held each other close. When their lips met, Arriane’s whole body ignited with frustrated passion. She drank her love in, never wanting to break from this embrace, knowing that when it was over …

They
would be over.

Her eyes drifted open and she gazed upon her true love’s peaceful face. Arriane could never really think of Tess as a demon. Never.

She would remember her like this.

Without her realizing it, her lips had pulled away from Tess’s. Her heart was heavy, cumbersome, and sad.

She sat up slowly, then rose to her feet. “I—I cannot join you.”

Tess’s eyes narrowed and her voice grew shockingly cold, the way it did when her pride was wounded. She didn’t get up from the ground. “You’re a fallen angel, Arriane. It is time you realize it and come down from your altar.”

“I am not that kind of fallen angel.”
I am not like you
. “I fell because I believe in love.”

“That’s a lie! You fell because Daniel dragged you and me and everyone else down with him.”

Arriane flinched. “At least Daniel’s brand of love doesn’t require that one person betray her nature.”

“Are you so sure of that?”

The question hung in the air. Arriane walked to the trough against the far wall and added feed and a bucket of well water to the horses’ bins. She heard Tess sigh.

“I believe in Daniel’s cause,” Arriane said. “I believe in Lucinda.”

“Wrong again, you were
assigned
to them. You
have
to look after them or those idiots from the Scale will come for you.”

“It doesn’t mean I don’t believe! I won’t give up on Lucinda and Daniel.”

“Instead you would give up on us?” Tess was crying now; she sat in the center of the barn and wiped her tears on her muddy handkerchief. “Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, Arriane.”

“I know. We agreed to fly to Saint Valentine’s Faire, where Lucinda and Daniel and all the others will be.” Arriane’s voice wobbled. “We were going to be merry.”

“Merry? Pretending I am not your love and you are not mine? Pretending to search for what we already share?” Tess scowled.