Cold.
That was the whole world for a while. Not dark, not light, just cold, pressing into every inch of me at once. It was in my fingers and my knees and the backs of my thighs, and it was crawling up my spine, which hurt in two small places like someone had pressed hot coins against my shoulder blades and left them there.
I had never been cold before. I wasn't sure, at first, that this was what it was. I thought maybe it was what dying felt like.
Water was hitting me. Small, sharp drops, over and over, on my cheek and my bare shoulder. Rain. I knew the word. I'd watched a billion raindrops fall on a billion people. I had not known that rain hurt, a little, when you were cold enough.
I opened my eyes.
Gray. A strip of gray sky high above, framed by two brick walls. A metal staircase zigzagging up the side of one of them. A huge green metal box with its lid propped half open, smelling of something sour and old. Puddles in the cracked pavement with rainbows of oil floating on top. A door with a dented metal plate and a light above it, buzzing.
I was lying on my side on the wet ground, curled up like an infant, and I was naked.
I knew about nakedness the way I knew about rain. In theory. Angels don't wear clothes so much as we wear light. I had never once in six hundred years thought about the fact of my own skin. Now I could think about nothing else. Every inch of it was shouting at me. Gravel was pressed into my hip. My hair was plastered to my neck. I was shaking so hard my teeth were knocking together, click click click, a sound I didn't know a body could make.
I tried to stand up. My legs didn't understand the request. I made it as far as my hands and knees before my arms gave out, and I went down again, scraping my palm on the pavement.
It stung. A thin red line welled up across the heel of my hand.
Blood. My blood. I stared at it, fascinated and terrified, and I watched the edges of the scrape knit back together on their own, the red drying and fading until there was nothing but a faint pink mark.
So that came with me. Something did.
I reached back, slowly, with a hand that shook so hard I could barely aim it, and touched my shoulder blade.
There were no wings. I'd known there wouldn't be. Knowing didn't help. My fingertips found skin, wet and cold and smooth, and then, right where my wings had been, a small raised line. Thin. No longer than my finger. I followed it with my thumb. Then the other side: a twin, the same shape, the same length. Two small scars.
That was all that was left of what I'd been. Two little lines. I started to cry, which was also new. My face got hot even though the rest of me was freezing, and my nose ran, and nobody had ever warned me about that part.
* * *
I don't know how long I lay there. Long enough for the gray strip of sky to go a shade lighter. Long enough for the cold to stop feeling like a thing happening to me and start feeling like a thing I was.
Then the metal door opened with a squeal.
A man came out backward, butt-first, carrying two black plastic bags in one hand and propping the door open with his heel. He was older, maybe sixty, broad through the shoulders, with a gut that pressed against a stained white apron and a gray beard trimmed short. He had a ball cap on, faded red. He was humming something under his breath.
He tossed the first bag into the green box. Swung the second one.
Then he saw me.
The bag hit the ground. Something inside it broke.
"Jesus Christ," he said.
I didn't correct him. It didn't seem like the moment.
He was across the alley before I'd finished flinching, down on one knee on the wet pavement, already shrugging out of the heavy canvas jacket he wore over the apron. "Hey. Hey, hey. Okay. I've got you. Can you hear me? Sweetheart, can you hear me?"
I nodded. My teeth were clicking too much for words.
He threw the jacket over me. It was enormous, brown, lined with something soft and pilled, and it was warm. It was warm from him, from his body, and it smelled like coffee and fried onions and motor oil and soap. It was the best thing that had ever happened to me. I clutched it closed around me and made a sound I wasn't proud of.
"Okay," he said again. His voice had gone very gentle, the way people talk to frightened horses. "Okay. You're okay now. Let's get you inside, and I'm gonna call somebody—"
"No," I said.
It came out cracked and too loud. He stopped.
"Please." I grabbed his wrist. His skin was rough and very warm. "Please, don't. Don't call anyone. Please."
He looked at me for a long moment. I don't know what he saw. A girl, I suppose, around twenty. Wet, tangled blonde hair. Naked under his coat in an alley at five in the morning, scraped and shaking, begging him not to call the police. I watched him look at my bare shoulders, at the place where the jacket had slid off one side, and I watched his face change.
He'd seen the scars.
Something went hard in his eyes. Not at me. At someone he imagined. Someone who would leave a girl like this.
"Who did this to you?" he asked quietly.
I couldn't answer. There was no answer that would make sense.
"Is he gonna come looking for you?" he asked.
"No," I said. "No one's coming."
That, at least, was true. Nobody was coming. Not from where I'd been.
He blew out a long breath through his nose. I could see him arguing with himself. He looked at the door. He looked at the end of the alley, where a car hissed past on the wet street. He looked back at me.
"Hospital, at least," he said. "Regional's ten minutes. You could have hypothermia. Hell, you've got hypothermia, look at your lips."
"Please." I didn't know what else to say. I knew enough about hospitals to know they would want names, and papers, and an explanation for the girl with no history and no clothes. And I knew, with a certainty that came from nowhere, that I couldn't let anyone look too closely. "I'll be all right. I just need to be warm. Please. I'm asking you."
He rubbed a hand down his face. His beard rasped under his palm.
"Damn it," he said, mostly to himself. "Damn it all."
Then he slid one arm under my knees and the other behind my back, and he picked me up like I weighed nothing. He grunted a little. "Okay. We're going inside. We'll get you warm, and we'll talk about it. That's the deal. No promises past that."
"Thank you," I whispered.
"Don't thank me yet. I haven't decided if I'm an idiot," he said.
* * *
Inside was heat and light and noise. A narrow back hallway. A kitchen that roared quietly with machines I didn't have names for yet, a flat steel grill already hissing, a big metal box humming a low song. He carried me past all of it, through another door, and up a set of narrow wooden stairs that creaked under every step.
At the top was a small room with a slanted ceiling. Boxes stacked against one wall. A window that looked out over a street of old brick buildings with mountains floating ghostly behind them in the gray morning. A narrow bed against the far wall with a bare mattress and a folded quilt on top.
He set me down on it as if I might break. Then he went to a radiator under the window and twisted a knob, and it clanked and hissed and started, slowly, to breathe out heat.
"Storage room," he said. "Used to be my office till I realized I hate offices. My niece crashed here a couple summers back. There might be some of her stuff—" He was already pulling open a box. "Here. Sweatpants. And this." A gray sweatshirt with a faded mountain on it and the word GLACIER across the chest. "They'll be big. She's taller than you. Put 'em on. I'll be right outside the door."
He turned his back. He went out. He pulled the door almost shut.
I sat on the edge of the bed, shaking, holding a pair of sweatpants and staring at them. I knew what they were. I'd watched humans put on clothes a million times. It was an entirely different thing to be the one figuring out which hole the legs went in.
It took me three tries. The sweatshirt was easier. It swallowed me to the thighs, soft and worn and smelling faintly of someone else's laundry soap, and when I pulled the hood up over my wet hair I finally, finally stopped shaking quite so hard.
"Decent?" he called.
"I think so," I said.
He came back in with a mug in each hand and steam rising off both. He held one out. "Coffee. And this one's hot chocolate. Didn't know which kind of person you are."
I didn't know either. I took the hot chocolate because the word chocolate sounded kind. The mug burned my palms, and I held on anyway, because burning was better than cold.
I took a sip.
I'd like to say I handled it with grace. I did not. I made a noise. A loud one. My eyes went wide, and I nearly dropped the mug, and the man actually laughed, short and surprised, like it got knocked out of him.
"That good, huh?" he asked.
"I didn't know," I said. My voice wobbled. "I didn't know anything tasted like that."
He stopped laughing. He looked at me a long moment, at the girl in his niece's sweatshirt crying over hot chocolate, and something in his face went sad and soft at once.
He sat down on an upturned crate across from me, elbows on his knees, his own coffee between his big hands.
"I'm Clay," he said. "Clay Owens. This is my place. The Broken Antler. Diner. Downstairs. We open in"—he checked a watch on his wrist—"forty minutes, so this is gonna be a quick conversation."
"Okay," I said.
"What's your name?" Clay asked.
I opened my mouth, and the whole thing came out without my permission. "Evanthe."
He blinked. "Evan... what?"
"Evanthe," I said.
"Huh." He turned it over. "That's pretty. Bit of a mouthful at six a.m." He studied me. "Eva okay?"
Eva. I tried it on, the way I'd tried on the sweatpants. It fit better on the first try.
"Eva," I said. "Yes."
"Okay, Eva." He sipped his coffee. "Here's what I'm gonna do, and you can tell me if it's crazy. I'm not gonna call anybody. Not today. You're gonna sit up here and get warm and maybe sleep, and I'm gonna bring you up some breakfast. And then later, when we're closed, you and me are gonna talk about what you need. A place to stay. Work, maybe. I always need help. Whatever you're running from, you don't have to tell me. Not yet. But I'm not gonna pretend I didn't find you. That fair?"
I looked at him. This man who didn't know me. Who had given me his coat. Who had seen two strange scars on a naked stranger's back and decided, all on his own, to be kind.
In heaven, we used to say that the humans who were truly good never knew it. That they would have been embarrassed if anyone told them.
"Clay," I said. "That's more than fair."
He nodded, once, like that settled it, and stood. At the door he paused.
"My nieces are about your age," he said, not looking at me. "Three of 'em. I'd want somebody to do the same." Then, gruffer: "Drink your chocolate. There's a blanket in that box. I'll be back."
The door clicked shut.
I sat in the little room above the diner with the radiator ticking and the mug warm in my hands, and outside the window, over the old brick roofs, the gray sky broke open, and a thin, cold line of sunlight came down across the mountains.
It was the first sunrise I had ever felt on my skin.