World After (31 page)

A
HUGE
crash rocks the water.

A tangle of wings and limbs rockets across the surface, ripping a channel through the sea.

It’s Raffe and two angels entangled in a grappling match. They twist and fight as they plow through the waves.

They soon separate and end up spending their energies splashing and bobbing in a drowning way. Both enemy angels have their swords out which makes swimming even harder. They hang onto them, fighting the water with their drooping, useless wings.

Raffe fares no better. His leathery wings shed liquid better than the angels’ feathered ones but they’re big and clumsy and he obviously has no idea how to swim with them. Maybe there’s no ocean in heaven.

I swim toward him.

One of the angels drops his sword, crying out in pain and frustration. He probably held it as long as possible but it’s hard to stay afloat while putting a sword into its scabbard and even harder to swim with a sword in your hand.

The other angel bobs on the surface, trying to stay afloat with one hand clamping his sword. The third time the angel dips under water, the blade tip swings down as though too heavy for
him. The angel’s head comes back up and he gasps “No, no, no” with real anguish.

The blade’s tip falls into the water and disappears. The angel’s sword has made the decision for him.

Aside from their comrades in arms, it wouldn’t surprise me if the sword is the only thing most warriors bond to. It brings back memories of Raffe’s stunned shock and hurt when his sword rejected him.

I swim faster. Or I try. The cold has made me so numb and shivery, it’s hard to feel like I’m in control of my body.

They’re all staying afloat but just barely. I wonder how long they can keep it up.

Just outside Raffe’s wingspan, I call out. “Raffe, stop thrashing.” He turns to me. “Calm down and I’ll come get you.”

I’ve heard that most drowning victims can’t calm down. They have to impose their will against every survival instinct to stop flailing and let themselves feel like they’re drowning. It takes an infinite amount of trust to count on someone else to save you.

Raffe must have enormous willpower because he immediately stops splashing. He moves his arms and legs gently but it’s not enough to keep him afloat.

He starts sinking.

I swim with every bit of turbo I’ve got.

His head is below water before I can reach him. I tug up on him but his giant wings are a huge drag and I’m pulled down instead.

We both sink below water.

Even as we submerge, he still doesn’t thrash. I’m awed by how much iron will it would take to override his instinctive needs. And how much trust.

Underwater, I can’t tell him to close his wings all the way to reduce the drag. I frantically reach for his wing and shove at it.

He understands and closes his massive wings tightly along his body. They look as light and thin as air. I’m sure that if he knew how to use them in the water, he could glide like a stingray.

Kicking and pulling as hard as I can, I drag us to the surface. I’m not a super strong swimmer but like most California kids, I’ve had enough time in the ocean to feel comfortable in it. With Raffe’s hollow bones, or whatever it is that makes him light, he’s not a heavy burden.

Relief floods through me when his head pops up and he can breathe. I swim with one arm angled across his shoulder and chest, keeping our faces up.

“Scissor your legs, Raffe. Keep kicking them.” His legs are a powerful motor. Once we get going, we get into a steady rhythm and we make good progress away from the splashing angels.

The one I cut up is still bobbing feebly in the bloody water not too far from the others. I don’t know what would happen in a fight between a gang of angels and a school of great white sharks but I’m glad I won’t be close enough to see it.

Since the angels are squarely in the sharks’ territory, my bet is with the sharks. Who says angels can’t be killed?

They quickly disappear in the mist and I rely on Raffe’s uncanny instinct for direction to get us to shore.

I hear Southern California water is warm but no one ever says that about Northern California water. It’s not exactly Alaska, but it’s cold enough to give me hypothermia, or at least what feels like hypothermia. I’ve never seen a surfer go in the water here without a wetsuit. But Raffe’s body is warm even in the freezing water, and I suspect that his heat is keeping me alive.

When we get tired, we rest with his wings open. The buoyant wings keep us steady and afloat without any effort on our part.

When we near shore, the waves become whitewater and we tumble awkwardly. We time it so that we dive under the water when a big wave hits and pop back up when it’s calmer.

We manage to wash up onto the sand. We crawl just far enough to be above the pounding surf before collapsing in a heap of soaked hair and clothes.

I look over to make sure he’s all right.

He’s panting for air and staring right at me with a look so intense it makes me squirm.

I grasp for something to say. We haven’t really talked since he left for surgery from our hotel room at the old aerie. A lot has happened since then. Until a couple of hours ago, he thought I was dead.

I open my mouth to say something meaningful, memorable. “I…”

Nothing comes.

I reach out, thinking that maybe we could touch hands, wanting to connect. But seaweed is tangled between my fingers, and I reflexively shake it off. It lands on his face with a slimy plop before sliding off.

He sprawls on the sand, quietly laughing.

His laugh is weak and in need of air but it may still be the greatest sound I’ve ever heard. It’s full of warmth and genuine mirth, as only a living, breathing—um—person can have.

He reaches out and grabs my arm. He drags me to him along the sand. My dress bunches up, more sand than fabric, but I don’t care.

He pulls me into his arms and holds me tight.

He is the one pocket of warmth in a sea of ice. Being in his arms feels like the home I never had. He’s still panting his laugh that rumbles through his chest. My chest moves with his, making me smile.

But somewhere along the way, the mood changes. He keeps going, his chest convulsing in spasms that sound a lot like a weak laugh but isn’t. He holds me so tight that if an army of scorpions came and tried to drag me out of his arms, they wouldn’t be able to.

I stroke his hair and repeat the words of comfort he whispered to me the last time we were together. “Shhh,” I say. “I’m here. I’m right here.”

He’s as warm as the afternoon sun on a summer day.

We hold each other in our little pocket of warmth, hidden from the monsters of the night by the mist swirling around us and the bloody surf pounding at our feet.

W
E
MANAGE
to stagger to a beach house among a row of houses shrouded in the mist. In the World Before, these houses were within walking distance of the water but not beachfront properties. In the World After, they sit in a sea of rubble, and they’re the closest houses to the water. Many of them still look undisturbed with their seahorse flags and wooden lounge chairs on the porch, as if waiting for their residents to come home.

I stumble into the living room behind Raffe, so exhausted as to be almost oblivious to my surroundings. Inside, we’re protected from the wind, and although the house is not heated, it feels as if it is by comparison to where we’ve just been. I’m wet and sandy with my flimsy dress clinging to me like wet tissue paper.

Unlike me, Raffe is on full alert. He checks every corner of the house before relaxing his guard.

There’s no electricity so the rooms are dark except for the misty glow of the moon coming in through the picture windows. We’re in luck, though. There’s a fireplace with a box of wood beside it, along with matches and decorative candles on the mantel.

I try lighting a candle. My hand shakes so badly I break three matches before I can finally get one to light. Raffe starts a fire. As soon as the tiny flame lights up, something in me relaxes a little,
as if a part of me was seriously worried that my basic functions were on their way to shutting down before the fire started.

Despite his shivering, he gets up and pulls the vertical blinds closed on the windows. I don’t know how he manages to do it. It takes everything I’ve got just to keep myself from crawling into the fireplace to get closer to the heat.

He even takes the time to grab blankets and towels from somewhere in the dark recesses of the house, and he drapes a blanket around me. My skin is so frozen that I can barely feel the soft warmth of his hand brushing against my neck.

“How do you feel?” he asks.

I answer through chattering teeth. “As well as can be expected after a swim in angel-infested waters.”

Raffe puts his hand on my forehead. “You humans are so fragile. If time doesn’t kill you off, it’s germs or sharks or hypothermia.”

“Or blood-crazed angels.”

He shakes his head. “One minute you’re fine, the next minute you’re gone forever.” He stares broodily into the flickering fire.

My hair is still dripping icy water down my neck and back, and my dress sticks to me like it’s made of wet sand. As if thinking the same thing, he wraps a beach towel around his waist and rolls it along his washboard stomach to keep it in place.

Then he takes his boots off. And peels off his pants.

“What are you doing?” I sound nervous.

He doesn’t pause as he strips beneath his towel. “Trying to warm up. You should do the same if you don’t want your precious heat to get sucked out by your wet clothes.” His pants land with a plop on the rug.

I hesitate while he sits close to me in front of the fire.

He opens his demon wings. I suppose he does it to dry them off, but it has the added effect of being a heat trap. The muscles along my back and shoulders relax as soon as I feel the warmth swirling behind me.

I shiver, trying to shake off as much of the cold as I can. He tightens the circle of his wings, keeping the heat of the fire growing between us.

“Good job out there,” he says. He looks at me with quiet approval.

I blink at him in surprise. It’s not like no one has ever said that to me. But somehow this is different. Unexpected.

“You too.” I want to say more. I crack open the vault in my head to see if I can peek in and maybe see something worth saying, but it all pushes against the door, wanting to flood out. I slam the door shut, leaning against it to keep it from bursting open. Still, my tongue gets tangled in all the things I want to say. “Yeah, you too.”

He nods as if he understands, as if I actually
had
said all those things tumbling out of the vault and he accepts them.

We listen to the fire crackle for a while.

I’ve warmed enough to want to be free of my gritty, wet dress, which is sucking the fledgling heat from my skin. I wrap my blanket around myself and bite into the overlapping edge to keep it in place as a shield.

He grins when he sees me squirming underneath, wrestling with the wet dress. “I’m sure a respectable modern man would turn his back so he wouldn’t see if there was a slip-up.”

I nod, keeping a tight bite on my blanket.

“But we’d lose our heat shelter.” He raises a wing a few inches to demonstrate. Cool air immediately touches my legs. He lowers his wing back into place again. He shrugs. “I guess you’ll just have to not slip up.”

I continue to squirm, getting myself free of the left sleeve.

“Don’t laugh or anything,” he says, “because that could be disastrous.”

I squint at him, giving him a glare that tells him not to try to make me laugh.

“Have you heard that joke about—”

I rip through the flimsy dress under my blanket. It was ruined anyway. I tear it off and toss it out from beneath the blanket.

It lands on top of his pants on the rug.

Raffe bursts out laughing. It’s a beautiful thing—rich and carefree. It calls to me to laugh along with him.

“You are so great at creative solutions,” he says still chuckling. “They usually involve ripping, tearing, kicking, or stabbing, but they’re creative.”

I let go of the blanket with my teeth now that I can hold it securely around me with my hands. “I just got tired of the wetness sticking to me, that’s all. I think I was pretty safe from the threat of your joke being funny.”

“I’m wounded by your comment,” he says with a smile.

The word “wounded” echoes in my head, and I see it does in his, too, because his smile fades.

“What happened back there at the old aerie? I saw you get stung by the scorpion. I watched you die. How did you survive?”

I explain about the scorpion sting paralyzing and slowing down the heart and breathing so that the victim seems dead.

“I thought for sure I’d lost you.”

Lost me?

I stare into the fire without seeing it. “I thought I’d lost you too.” The words barely come out.

The fire crackles and pops, eating away at the wood. It reminds me of the fire at the aerie when Raffe carried me to safety even though he thought I was dead.