He came at dawn, three days after we buried Hollis.
I was awake. I hadn't slept much since. I was sitting on the fire escape outside my window in Clay's old flannel, with a mug of hot chocolate going cold in my hands, watching the sky over the mountains go from black to gray to the palest edge of rose.
And then the sky split open.
Not the way it does in old paintings, with trumpets and clouds and rays of light. It was quieter than that, and much more terrible. The pale rose of dawn simply went white, all at once, from horizon to horizon, as if someone had opened a door onto the inside of the sun. The birds stopped singing mid-note. A dog somewhere down the block began to howl and then went silent. Every streetlight on Main Street flickered and died.
And on the roof across the alley, where Aurelle had sat with her knees pulled up and her wings folded neat behind her, stood an archangel.
* * *
I had seen archangels before. Everyone in the Hall had, at a distance. They moved through heaven like weather, vast and purposeful, and we lesser orders got out of their way. I had never been this close to one. I had never been looked at by one.
Cael was tall. Taller than the Watchers, taller than any human, and his wings were not white or gold or gray but the color of a blade: bright, cold silver, edged with light so sharp it hurt to look at. He wore no robe, but armor, or something like it, pale and seamless, that seemed to be made of the same stuff as the dawn. His hair was white-gold and cut short. His face was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and the most frightening, because there was nothing in it I could reach. Not cruelty. Not kindness. Just certainty, like the edge of a mountain.
Beside him, small and bright and trembling, was Aurelle.
She'd been crying. I could see it even from across the alley. Angels don't cry, but she had been, somehow. Her face was wet, and her glow had gone dim and flickering, like a candle in a draft.
"Evanthe," Cael said.
His voice was not loud. It was everywhere. It was in the brick under my hands and the metal of the fire escape and the bones of my chest.
"Of the Order of Healers. Who stood at the Threshold and stepped through."
I set down my mug. My hands were shaking. I stood up anyway.
"Yes," I said.
"You know why I have come," Cael said.
"For my answer," I said.
"For your answer." Cael's silver eyes moved over me slowly. Over the borrowed flannel and the bare feet and the two small scars I knew he could see through the fabric as clearly as if I wore nothing at all. "You have been given time. You have been given warnings. You have been shown the record of your choices. Now the Host requires a decision."
"And if I don't make one?" I asked.
"Then it will be made for you," Cael said.
* * *
He told me the terms.
He didn't soften them. Archangels don't soften anything. He stood on the roof of the building across the alley with the white light of heaven pouring around him, and he laid out my choice like a soldier laying out weapons on a table.
"You may return," he said. "Now. Today. The Elders have spoken for you. Ithra has spoken for you." Something flickered behind his eyes at Ithra's name. "You will be restored. Your wings. Your grace. Your place in the Hall of Mending. You will heal as you healed before, those whose names are written, for as long as heaven endures. You will be what you were. Immortal. Whole." The source of this chapter is NovelPing.
Aurelle made a small, hopeful sound.
"Or," Cael said, "you may stay."
The light around him seemed to dim, just slightly.
"If you stay, you will be cut from heaven entirely. Not fallen. Severed. What grace remains in you will be taken. You will no longer heal. Not a burn, not a fever, not a scratch. Your hands will be only hands. You will no longer be untouched by time. You will age as they age. You will sicken as they sicken. And one day, you will die, as they die, and your soul will go where theirs go, and you will never stand in the Hall of Mending again."
He paused.
"You will be human, Evanthe. Entirely. And it will be forever," Cael said.
* * *
I couldn't breathe.
I had known. Some part of me had known since the Watchers came. Maybe since the alley. Maybe since the moment I stepped off the edge of the sky. But knowing a thing and hearing it said aloud by a voice that fills your bones are not the same thing at all.
You will no longer heal.
That was the part that hit hardest. Not the dying. I'd watched humans die for six hundred years, and I'd seen Hollis's face at the end, and I wasn't afraid of it anymore. Not the aging, not the sickness.
The healing.
The thing I had been for six hundred years. The thing I had jumped for. Because I couldn't bear to stand at the Veil and watch people suffer when I had the power to help. And now the choice was this: go back, and have that power forever, and use it only on the names they gave me. Or stay, and lose it completely, and never again be able to do anything at all.
"That's not fair," I heard myself say.
"It is not meant to be fair," Cael said. "It is meant to be a choice."
"Why can't I stay and heal? Why can't I stay down here and help people the way I've been—"
"Because you cannot see the cloth." His voice didn't change, but the light around him sharpened. "You have seen what your healing does when you cannot see the cloth. The minivan. The motel. The record is clear. Heaven cannot permit an unwritten Healer to walk the earth, pulling threads at will. You may have the power with the sight that guides it, or you may have neither. You may not have one without the other."
I looked across the alley at Aurelle.
"Eva," she said. Her voice broke. "Please. Please come home. I can't—I don't—it's been so empty without you. Please."
* * *
"You have until the sun clears the mountains," Cael said.
I looked east. The white light was fading, slowly, the ordinary rose and gold of dawn creeping back in around its edges. Over the peaks, the sky was brightening. The sun wasn't up yet. Not quite. But it would be soon.
"That's not very long," I whispered. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
"It is longer than most are given," Cael said. "Mortals make choices that change the course of their whole lives in less time than it takes to draw a breath. You have been among them long enough to know that."
He turned his silver gaze toward the mountains.
"Decide," he said. "And then it is finished."
He didn't move. He didn't leave. He simply stood there on the roof across the alley, vast and bright and silent, like a statue carved out of the dawn, waiting.
Aurelle stood beside him with her hands pressed against her mouth, and her dim, flickering light, and her wet, beautiful, frightened face.
And I stood on a rusted fire escape above a dumpster in Montana, barefoot, in a borrowed flannel shirt, with a cold mug of hot chocolate at my feet, and the whole weight of eternity on my shoulders.
Below me, the back door of the Broken Antler squealed open.
"Eva?" Clay's voice. Rough with sleep. "Eva, the power just went out, and the sky did something real weird, are you—"
He stepped out into the alley and looked up.
He saw me.
On the roof across the alley, Cael turned his head, just slightly, and the light around him shifted, like a door being opened. Clay followed my gaze, and he saw them.
Clay Owens, sixty-one years old, who'd served two tours overseas and run a diner for twenty-two years and found a naked girl in his alley and decided, on the spot, to be kind, stood in the doorway of his own kitchen in a ratty bathrobe and stared up at an archangel.
"Well," he said finally, very quietly. "I'll be damned."
"Probably not," Cael said, without looking at him. "You see us because I have allowed it, Clay Owens. The Healer has a choice to make before the sun clears the mountains. You are part of what she weighs. It is right that you witness it."
Clay's mouth opened. Closed. Then he looked back at me, and his face did something I'll never forget. All the confusion went out of it, and all the fear, and what was left was something simple and steady and very, very sad.
"That's where you came from," he said. "Isn't it. That's what you were running from."
"I wasn't running," I said. "I jumped."
Clay didn't say anything for a moment.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. I'm gonna go make some coffee. And then I'm gonna call Sari and the Wilton kid, because I bet they're part of what you're weighing too, so they should probably be here for this." He looked up at me, and his eyes were wet. "And whatever you decide, kiddo, I want you to know something."
"What?" I asked.
"That room behind you," Clay said, nodding up at the window. "It's yours. For as long as you need it. That hasn't changed. That's not ever gonna change."
He went back inside. The door squealed shut.
I sat down on the fire escape, and I pulled my knees up to my chest, and I watched the sky over the mountains get brighter, and brighter, and brighter.