Fallen in Love (13 page)

Arriane didn’t answer. Tess was right. Their predicament was excruciating.

Tess stood at last and drew close to Arriane. She took the pail from her hands and set it on the ground. She cupped a hand to Arriane’s cheek. “Let Luce and Daniel have their Valentine’s Day. Let us have ours. Celebrate true love by making a covenant with me. Join me, Arriane. We could be so happy together—if we were
truly
together.”

Arriane swallowed the fear rising in her throat. “I love you, but I can’t turn my back on my promises.”

She moved from Tess’s grip. Arriane’s eyes raced to capture every detail about Tess: the slow sway of her red hair in the breeze, her pale bare feet in the rough straw, her hand making the shape of Arriane’s hand’s absence, tears rising in her bright blue eyes.

Even the spectacular golden gleam of her wings.

This would be the last time they would see each other. This would be their last goodbye.

N
ever.

Never.

Never.

Arriane’s soul was heavy as she flew. She should have known this was coming! She
had
known. Something in her soul had long felt that a day like this approached, when Lucifer would call Tessriel back.

But she had
never
expected Tess to ask her to give up her place in Heaven—to trade it for the fires of Hell!

Her temper flared now and her wings flexed and strained in response.

Sometimes when Arriane stayed too long in mortal guise, she forgot how vast her wings were, how strong, how deep the pleasure of letting them out from her shoulders, the winged energy of delight. She should have been feeling the exaltation she always felt when soaring through the sky, but now her silver wings were just sad reminders of what she was, and of what her love was, and of how she and Tess could never be together.

Never.

I can remember the first time I said goodbye to you
, Tess had told her in the barn.
I was so afraid I’d never see you again
.

Arriane remembered it, too: thousands of years ago. She and Annabelle and Gabbe had been hovering in a dark rain cloud on the outskirts of a place called Canaan, watching a mortal celebration led by a man named Abraham, when the angel appeared out of nowhere and hovered before them in the sky.

“Who are you?” Gabbe was hostile, addressing the angel with the bright-red hair and crystal-blue eyes. To Arriane, the unknown angel’s wings were lovely, and her body looked as soft as a cumulus cloud. Lightning flashed across her radiant white skin. Arriane remembered wanting to reach out and touch her, as if to make certain the angel was real.

“I am Tessriel, your former sister in Heaven.” The unfamiliar angel had bowed her head in deference. “Angel of the thunder that rolls across Eurasia.”

Tessriel was looking at Arriane, and something in a distant meadow of Arriane’s soul recalled this angel. Her sister. Yes. They hadn’t known each other well in Heaven—there had been a league of other angels between them, but there had always been a connection. That inexplicable mystery called attraction.

“I bring news of your brother Roland,” Tessriel said to Arriane, who had gasped at the sound of his name.

“Roland resides in Lucifer’s domain,” Gabbe said sharply. “You bring us news from Hell?”

“I bring you news—” Tessriel’s voice wavered and Arriane’s heart went out to her. She hadn’t seen Roland since the Fall and she missed him desperately. This angel had come with a message. Arriane scrambled forward, pressing up against Gabbe, who held her back with the white edge of her wing.

“Go now, leave us be,” Gabbe commanded. It was final.

Tessriel shook her head sadly as she turned to go. She looked back once at Arriane, briefly and with great sorrow. “Goodbye.”

“Goodbye!”

But it wasn’t goodbye. Years later, on her own, walking the shoals of a mortal river, she came upon the red-haired angel again.

“Tessriel?”

Tessriel looked up from the river, where she was bathing. She was naked, her pure-white wings skimming the surface of the water, and her long red hair trailing slickly down her back.

“Is it you?” Tessriel whispered. “I thought I’d never see you again.”

When the angel rose from the river, the sight of her mortal guise was too much for Arriane, who looked away, thrilled and embarrassed. She heard the ripple of wings leaving water, felt a brush of warm wind, and then, a second later, the sweetest lips pressed down on hers. Wet arms and wet wings engulfed her.

“What was that?” Arriane blinked in astonishment as Tessriel pulled away. Her lips tingled with unexpected desire.

“A kiss. I promised myself that if I did see you again, that’s what I would do.”

“And if I left right now and then came back,” Arriane wondered aloud, “would you kiss me like that again?”

Tessriel nodded, a vast smile on her face.

“Goodbye,” Arriane whispered, closing her eyes. When she opened them, she said, “Hello.”

And Tessriel kissed her again.

And again.

On a dark fjord north of Norway … on a ship setting sail for the Indies … on a dusty desert plateau in Persia … or in a rainstorm inside a rain forest—when the world was uncomplicated and young and neither fallen angel had yet turned in the direction each would ultimately turn in, Arriane and Tessriel were always saying goodbye to say hello again, always moving in or out of a kiss.

Now, feeling as far as she ever had from the lips of the demon she’d loved, Arriane passed a pair of herons in the sky. They were paired, but she had to be alone. Because of old allegiances neither would betray. It drove her mad with frustration. She needed to be someplace lonesome and remote, where her heart could ache in peace.

Tears blurred her vision as she climbed over the low-lying meadows of the valley below. She didn’t want to leave Tess; she couldn’t leave quickly enough. Soon, she had escaped the dairy in its little verdant vale, which she had grown to love.

Love
. What was it, anyway?

Daniel and Lucinda seemed to know. There had been moments when Arriane thought she danced toward love’s awareness: tender, fleeting moments locked in a
kiss with Tess, when both souls lost themselves completely. If only they could have stayed like that forever, lying to themselves in an extended state of bliss.

Maybe love was lying to yourself.

No. The world bore down on them, and in the broad, clear light of day, Arriane knew that what she felt for Tess both was and was not love. It was everything—and it was impossible.

It was why they had already been through this kind of goodbye, the ugly kind, once before.

It was a few hundred years after the Fall. Arriane had finally made her choice. She had been back to the plains of Heaven and, after some time, had made her peace with the Throne. Her wings shone a terrific iridescent silver—the mark that she was accepted once again—and Arriane was eager to show them off to her love. She found Tessriel under the Amazonian waterfall where they had agreed to meet.

“Look what I’ve done—”

“What have you done?”

Just as Arriane’s wings bore a brand-new silver shine, Tessriel’s wings were tainted—a glorious, gaudy gold.

“You never told me you were considering …” Arriane’s voice trailed off.

“You never told me, either.” Tess’s eyes welled up with tears, but as soon as she wiped them away, she looked angry.

“But why? Why would you side with him?”

“Isn’t your choice as arbitrary as mine? Your master is only the authority because you say he is.”

“At least he is
good
, unlike your master!”

“
Good. Evil
. They’re just words, Arriane. Who can trust them, anyway?”

“How—how can I love you now?” Arriane whispered.

“It’s simple,” Tess said with a sad shake of her head. “You can’t.”

It was Roland who brought them back together. Now Arriane almost wished he hadn’t. But at the time, she had needed Tess more than she ever would have admitted. Roland arranged for a stolen moment between the two in Jerusalem, after what was supposed to be Cam’s marriage to Lilith.

That marriage hadn’t happened.

But Arriane and Tessriel had. As soon as they saw each other, their argument dissolved into another unstoppable kiss.

“We must be free to each be ourselves independently,” Tessriel had told her, “but we shall never be as strong and solid as we are when we’re together.”

“Be careful,” Roland was always saying when she would sneak off to be with Tess. And Arriane was. Never
once did they get caught. Never once did the angels suspect Arriane’s secret romance with one of Lucifer’s closest demons. She had been careful about so much—except the destiny of her heart.

She simply had never expected Tessriel to make her choose.

But now it had come to that, and there was only one choice.

This goodbye had to be forever.

Arriane couldn’t breathe. Tears streamed down her cheeks now as she gasped and blindly flew on, not knowing where she’d go.

Would she ever see her love again?

A sharp pain seemed to pierce her heart, an agony riddled its way into the fissures of her bones. What was happening? Then a dark premonition sapped at her soul, and Arriane cried out in fear.

She clutched her heart, but this wasn’t mere heartache.

Something was wrong.

Tess
.

In the middle of her flight across the mountains of northern Italy, Arriane swooped around to reverse directions in the sky. Her wings shuddered and her heart stalled and the only thing she knew was that she had to
get back to the dairy farm. It was a lover’s intuition, a slow consciousness spreading through her brain.…

Until she was absolutely certain …

Something had happened—

Something unspeakable.