Radiant (4 page)

ANGELA

I first met him in a church. I had a thing for churches back then; I suppose I still do. They’re so quiet most of the time, a quiet that’s different from anyplace else, cool and peaceful and contemplative in their very nature. I’m not religious, not the way my mother is, but I like churches. I go there to relax, to calm the inner voices of my everyday life, to think.

This church was located in a tiny, out-of-the-way corner of Milan, San Bernadino alle Ossa. I went there because I heard that there was a room decorated with human bones, and I found this horrible and fascinating. I was sixteen that summer, and I’d been going around Italy on my own private creeptastic tour, making a point to visit all the churches that housed the corpses of the saints, whose bodies were said to remain mostly fresh and pliable for hundreds of years after they’d died—
incorruptible
, is the term—that’s how good they were. It was morbid but fun, visiting these nuns in glass cases who all looked the same, dressed in white, their hands folded in prayer, sleeping eternally, like Snow White waiting for the prince’s kiss.

A room of bones was too good to pass up.

The room was in a side pocket of the church. There was a cross on the wall inside made from human skulls—in fact, the walls were almost entirely covered with bones, hundreds and hundreds of skulls and ribs and tiny bits I couldn’t identify. My mother would have had a heart attack if she’d been there. It gave me a wicked thrill, looking at all that macabre art, but it also kind of grossed me out. It was different from the bodies of the saints, so carefully laid out in order that people could come and be near someone holy, even in death. This seemed like a reminder—we all die, and it’s not so pretty—and I looked from one skull to another and thought about how each had once had a face. A life. It was a person who ate and drank and complained about the weather and tried to get by the best he could. Now on the wall of a church, gaped at by a morbid American tourist.

Right then I decided that it’s not polite to leer at the dead. I turned to go.

That’s when I saw him.

He was standing at the front of the church, directly under the dome, staring up at the fresco on the ceiling, angels and sky and people being borne up to heaven, I assumed. He seemed focused on one particular corner of the fresco, an angel in a pinkish robe, what a few hundred years ago might have been red, with gray, outstretched wings. He didn’t look like he was getting anything spiritual from the church, not praying or receiving any kind of divine inspiration. In fact he—the guy, not the angel—was almost scowling. Muttering to himself.

Then I noticed that he was also kind of glowing, a weak, almost unperceivable light flickering out of him.

I knew, in that instant, that he was one of them.

An angel.

Of course I had to introduce myself. I’d never met an angel before, not a real-life angel who existed outside the words in my books, the stories my mother told me. I smoothed my hair back—because, also, this guy was unbelievably attractive, perhaps the most ridiculously good-looking guy I’d ever seen—and applied a layer of lip gloss. I glanced around and saw that we were the only two in the sanctuary, and then I straightened my shoulders, walked up to him, and said, “Hello.”

Not in English, as it turned out.

In Angelic.

I’d never spoken Angelic aloud before that moment, and it surprised me as much as it did him—the way the word sounded, like two notes of music played simultaneously, like a feeling instead of a word.

Hello.

His gaze jerked down from the fresco on the ceiling and landed, red-hot, on me. Astonished. Then accusatory. Then curious.

I was all of those things, too. Because he and the fresco angel had the same face.

We stared at each other for like two minutes.

“What did you say?” he asked slowly in Italian, carefully, like he might have misheard—although there was no possible way that what I said sounded like anything else but what it was.

“I said hello,” I replied, in English.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded.

“I came to see the bones,” I answered. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to talk to God.”

I arched an eyebrow and folded my arms across my chest. “I see. So what does He say?”

Before he could reply, the door of the church groaned open on its rusty hinges and an old and bent-over Italian lady in a black dress hobbled in. She eyed us suspiciously, like two young people had no business making small talk in a church.

I smiled at the angel. The corner of his mouth twitched like he wanted to smile, too, but instead he looked stern. He crossed the sanctuary in three rapid steps and grabbed my arm, his touch slightly cool against my flushed skin.

“Come with me,” he said, and drew me off to the side, back toward the room of bones, where the old lady couldn’t see us.

I opened my mouth to tell him that he may be an angel but I was American and bossing me around was not going to fly, but he put a finger to my lips, which startled me.

“Come with me,” he said again softly.

I instantly got a weird, dizzy sensation in the pit of my stomach, and my legs wobbled, as if I’d just stepped off a roller coaster. Something had changed, darkened and brightened at the same time. He pulled me back out of the bone room and into the main part of the basilica, and the old lady was gone. I took a good look at him and gasped again.

He was all in black and white, his hair jet-black, his skin ice-white, and still glowing slightly, still hard to look at, he was so gorgeous. Everything around us was black and white, too, the colors of the world converted to an old movie, made up of shadows and stark contrasts.

He let go of my arm. “We can talk here. In private.”

“What did you do?” I asked, a shiver working its way down my spine, but I refused to let him see that he’d scared me.

“It’s not safe to reveal yourself the way you did,” he said, scolding me. “It was foolish.”

“Why?” I wanted to know. My voice sounded thin in this place, insubstantial.

“What if I’d been one of the fallen?”

“So it’s true? There are good angels and bad angels?” I knew the answer to this, of course. My biological father was definitely not a good angel. But I wanted to hear him define it for himself. I wanted to hear him say it.

“Yes. The sorrowful and the joyful,” he said.

“And which are you?” I teased, but I hoped I already knew the answer. Bad angels wouldn’t come to a church to talk to God.

He shrugged, a completely human gesture. “I’m neither. I’m ambivalent.”

It sounded like a joke. “Yes, well, I’ve had trouble with ambivalence myself,” I said.

He laughed. “What’s your name?”

“Angela.”

“Fitting,” he said.

“What’s yours?”

“Penamue. But you can call me Phen.”

“Phen,” I repeated, liking the sound of his name in my mouth. An angel’s name. “Where are we, Phen? Where have you taken me?”

“The same place we were,” he answered. “But a different dimension.”

My skin prickled with excitement at how cool this was, journeying to a different dimension with a full-blooded angel. Nothing this eventful had ever happened to me, not in the small Wyoming town where my mother had hidden me away for most of my life.

It was the start of something, I thought.

It was the start.

CLARA

You’d think I’d be used to surprises by now. My life is a series of announcements like,
Guess what, Clara? You’re part angel. Guess what: that guy who you thought you were supposed to save, well, he’s an angel-blood, too. Surprise! Angel-bloods only live for one hundred and twenty years, which means your mother is going to die any day now. Ding dong! Guess who’s at the door? Your dad, who’s an archangel, which, by the way, makes you a Triplare, a three-quarter angel instead of the measly one-quarter angel you thought you were.
And each of these times I basically have to reevaluate my entire life. You’d think that nothing could surprise me nowadays.

But once again, I’m floored.

A buzzer goes off in the kitchen. Phen excuses himself and slips out. I turn to Angela.

“Ange!” I exclaim, softly so Phen doesn’t hear me spazzing all over the place.

“I wanted to tell you, but it’s complicated,” she says.

“How complicated is it to say,
Hey, FYI? This boy I like, he’s actually an angel
?”

“I didn’t know I was going to see him this year.”

“And you’re like . . .” I lower my voice even more. “Spending the night with him?”

“It’s not like that,” she says, but clearly it is. She keeps looking at something in the corner of the room. I turn to see what it is—a stack of paintings leaning against the wall.

I get up.

“Don’t . . . ,” Angela says, but I’m already flipping through the canvases, until I hit one of Angela, sprawled across the green velvet sofa, half-wrapped in a blanket and nothing else, the sun falling across her hair in a way that makes it shine blue. It’s a beautiful painting. But that’s beside the point.

“Nice blanket,” is all I can get out.

Her jaw tightens. “I model for him sometimes. But mostly we hang out. We walk around the city. We talk.”

“You talk. About what?”

“About angel stuff, of course, but we also talk about music, and books we’ve read, and art. Poetry. He knows, like, everything.”

“Right, because he’s an angel.”

“Yes,” she says, with a defensive edge in her voice. “He’s an angel. So what?”

“I’m a hungry angel.” He appears in the doorway. “Dinner is served, ladies.”

This could be awkward.

“I thought you might be getting tired of Italian,” he says as we settle around a small table tucked into the back of the kitchen. The food smells wonderful, curry and lamb, something Indian. Phen pours three glasses of white wine. I dig right in, because it gives me something to do besides talk. I need some time to let this revelation settle in my brain.

“So, Clara,” Phen says after a while, “tell me about yourself.”

I take a sip of wine, which I know should taste good but instead tastes sour and strange. “I, uh . . .” How much has Angela told him about me, I wonder? “Well, I recently graduated from high school. I’m going to Stanford in the fall.”

“With Angela. You’re a couple of geniuses, you two,” he says. “What do you plan to study?”

“I don’t have a plan, exactly. I guess I’m hoping that I’ll try out a bunch of stuff and find something I like.”

“Do you have any hobbies? Talents?” he asks.

Suddenly I feel like I’m at a job interview.

“Uh—” I don’t know what to say. I used to be a ballet dancer, but that feels like a million years ago. I’m not into sports like Jeffrey, or poetry like Angela, or music like Christian. Fishing, maybe? I like fishing. But fishing was all about Tucker. Hiking, boating, swimming in rivers, white-water rafting—I can’t separate any of those things from Tucker.

I need a hobby.

“Clara’s an empath,” Angela supplies for me.

I half choke on my bite of meat.

“Interesting,” Phen says as I cough like crazy. Finally my lungs calm down a bit. I take a drink of wine and wish it were water.

“What’s your story, Phen? Angela really hasn’t told me very much about you,” I say, eager to change the subject. “You’re an Intangere?”

“Yes, I think we’ve established that,” he says wryly.

“And what do you do?”

“Are you asking if I flit around from cloud to cloud, sing in a heavenly choir?”

I take a bite, chew for a minute, shrug. “I guess I don’t know what it is that angels actually do.”

He takes a long drink of his wine. “You’re direct,” he says. “I like that.”

I smile and wait for him to answer my question.

“We do angel business,” he says after a minute. Smirks. “You mere mortals wouldn’t understand.”

“Angel business, like helping the souls of the dead find their way to heaven or hell?” I glance over at Angela, who gives me a warning look. She’s been superquiet this entire time. For once I’m the one asking all the questions.

“Yes, some angels handle the souls of the dead,” he says.

I remember my mother telling me once that more than a hundred people on this planet die every minute. That’s a lot of angels. “So is that what you do? Look after the dead, guide them toward the light, that kind of thing?”

“No,” he says. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m what you would call a muse.”

Angela looks surprised. “A muse?”

“I inspire people,” he says, like it’s something ordinary people do as a vocation: professional inspirer.

“You never told me that,” she says. “Have you ever inspired me?”

He raises his eyebrows, laughs when she gasps.

“I thought I was
your
muse,” she says with a flicker of disappointment. “Can you put an idea directly into my head?”

“I can give you an image, a line of music, a word, anything I want. But most of the time I don’t have to. I simply provide a brief moment of clarity. You fill in the rest.”

“That’s amazing,” she says, and I can almost see her mentally going over the stuff she’s done around him, the poems she’s written or the music she’s played on her violin for him, trying to understand how he might have inspired her.

“Yeah,” I agree, if only to be agreeable. “It is. Very cool.” Truthfully, though, the idea of an angel who’s able to plant ideas in my head without me knowing about it doesn’t sound like good news to me. Who knows what else he could plant there? It’s a little bit
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
, in my opinion. I make a silent note to keep my mental barrier up around him, the way my mom taught me, so he won’t be able to read my mind. Or stick stuff in it.

“It’s a small gift, compared to what others can do,” he says modestly, but I can tell he’s flattered. I guess he doesn’t get to take credit for what he does that often. And I don’t for a second believe that being a muse is all this guy can do.

“So give us an example,” Angela says. “Something you inspired.”

“Oh, I don’t know. ‘Once upon a time,’” he says. “I came up with that.”

Angela’s eyes widen. “You came up with the phrase ‘once upon a time’?”

“It was a long time ago.” He eats a bite of food while we stare at him. “Humans are brilliant in their own right. And quick to learn, I’ve found.”

“So you’re a teacher? Officially, I mean?” she asks, her voice a little more high-pitched than normal, maybe because she wants him to teach her more “officially.”

“It was my duty,
once upon a time
, to teach humans,” he says.

“What did you teach them?” I ask.

“How to write. Some have argued that was a bad thing, giving them the written word.” He smirks. “Leads to all kinds of trouble. But that was my job.”

I have a sudden flash of this guy scratching out the ABCs on a cave wall for a group of awestruck Neanderthals. Then it occurs to me. He’s an angel, but he doesn’t give off an angel vibe. No sorrow. No joy. Which means that I don’t know what side he’s on.

Which means I can’t trust him.

Once again I get the distinct feeling that something bad is going to happen, that someone’s-dancing-on-my-grave sensation.

“So you were a Watcher,” I say slowly, trying to keep my voice casual.

His eyes flash at the word.

“Clara,” Angela mutters. “Enough with the Spanish Inquisition.”

I meet Phen’s dark eyes, hold his gaze.

“What do you know about Watchers?” he asks.

“I’ve read
The Book of Enoch
.”

He sighs. “Inaccurate.”

“Okay, set the record straight. You were there, right?”

Silence. I wonder if I’ve gone too far, if I’ve foolishly cheesed off somebody who’s going to turn out to be a Black Wing and squish me like a grape.

“Originally it wasn’t a bad thing, to be a Watcher,” he says. “All the term means is that we were sent to watch over the humans, teach them. Some of us did more than watch, obviously.” He looks away. “Some of us fell in love with them.”

Angela shoots me a glare that would melt steel. I ignore her. “So you’re not evil, is that what you’re saying?”

He meets my eyes again. “I’m ambivalent. I refuse to fight on either side.”

“You’re neutral,” Angela pipes up. “Like Switzerland.”

“Yes.” He turns to her with an amused expression, pats her on the knee affectionately. “Exactly like Switzerland.”

“You were rude to him,” Angela says to me when we’re back in the spare room at Rosa’s house. She scowls into the mirror and takes off her necklace, starts brushing out her hair.

“I just asked him some questions, Ange. Relax.”

“You interrogated him.”

“I don’t know him.”

“Yeah, well, I do. I’ve known him for years. He’s not evil, Clara. I know there’s all that crap about him being an ambivalent, but that only means he doesn’t want to fight. He’s above that.”

I sit down on the bed, kick off my shoes. “Right. Above it.” I don’t understand how she could be okay with this when she’s so gung-ho about her own duty, her purpose, her bright white wings that mean that she’s so pure of heart, so committed to the side of good. Why wouldn’t she hold Phen to the same standard?

“He’s a good guy,” she says, grabbing a handful of hair and starting to braid it.

“He’s not a guy at all.”

“Look, I don’t need you to protect me, Clara,” she says. “I met him in a church, remember? Hallowed ground and all that? If he was evil he wouldn’t have been able to go in there, right?”

“Okay,” I admit grudgingly.

“So let’s drop it. I don’t want to fight.” She finishes braiding one side and starts braiding the other. I go to the sink to wash my face. I’m brushing my teeth when she appears in the mirror behind me.

“I thought you’d like him,” she says, and I don’t have to be an empath to know that she’s disappointed in my reaction. She likes Phen. More than likes him. She wants me to like him, too. She wants me to see what she sees in him.

I lean over and spit into the sink. “I didn’t say I don’t like him. I said I don’t know him.”

“Okay, so get to know him. Come hang out with us tomorrow. We’re going to Vatican City. Embrace the tourist thing, like you said.”

Her eyes meet mine in the mirror, hopeful.

I’m a softie. That, and I really do want to see St. Peter’s Basilica. “Okay, fine.”

“Really? You’ll come with us?”

“What, you want me to pinkie swear?”

“You’ll like him,” she says. “You’ll see.”

“All right. Hey, wait.” I catch her by the shoulders before she buzzes out of the room. “You haven’t told him about me, have you? About me being a . . .
T-person
. About my dad?”

“No,” she says, frowning. “We haven’t talked about that kind of thing much this time.”

“Well, don’t. I know you trust him or whatever, but that’s my private stuff, okay?”

“Okay,” she says with a dismissive shake of her head.

“Promise me.” I look into her eyes.

She smirks. “What, do you want me to pinkie swear?”

“Yep.” I hold up my hand, pinkie raised. She grins and hooks my finger with hers. We shake.

“Seriously, though,” I say.

“Seriously. I won’t tell him.” She presses a hand over her heart. “Your secret’s safe with me.”