I slept, which I had never done before.
Nobody tells you what it's like. One minute you're lying on a narrow bed with a quilt pulled up to your nose, listening to the clink of dishes and the hiss of the grill coming up through the floorboards, and the next minute the light through the window has moved all the way across the wall, and there's drool on your cheek, and you have no idea where the time went.
It was terrifying. It was also the most delicious thing I'd ever felt.
There was a plate on the crate beside the bed. Clay must have brought it up while I was gone wherever sleep goes. Pancakes, three of them, golden and stacked, with a pat of butter melted to a puddle on top and a little plastic cup of something dark purple beside them. Two strips of something brown and crisp. A fork wrapped in a paper napkin.
My stomach made a sound like an animal.
That was the other thing nobody tells you. Hunger isn't a thought. It's a creature that lives inside you and grabs.
I ate the pancakes with my fingers before I remembered the fork. I poured the purple stuff on them and made the same noise I'd made over the hot chocolate, only louder. It tasted like summer and sugar and something wild, a little sour at the edges. I licked the cup. I'm not ashamed. Later I learned it was huckleberry syrup, and that people in this part of the world are as serious about huckleberries as Healers are about the Writ.
The brown strips were bacon. I am not going to describe what bacon did to me. Some things are private.
When I'd finished, I sat on the bed with grease on my fingers and syrup on my chin and laughed out loud, all alone, at nothing.
* * *
Clay came up in the afternoon with a stack of folded clothes and a pair of rubber-soled shoes that were only a little too big.
"Lost and found," he said, setting them down. "You'd be amazed what people leave in a diner. Got a box of reading glasses down there could open an eye clinic."
"Thank you," I said.
"You keep saying that," Clay said.
"I keep meaning it," I said.
He grunted, but he looked pleased. "You feeling up to coming down? Lunch rush is done. It's quiet. Thought you could sit at the counter, see the place. If you hate it, you come back up here, no harm done."
I wanted to see it more than I could say.
* * *
The Broken Antler was long and narrow, with a row of red stools along a counter and booths with cracked vinyl seats along the window. The floor was black and white tiles, worn gray in a path from the door to the register. Old photographs covered the walls: men with fish, women on horses, a black-and-white picture of the street outside with horse carts where the cars were now. Above the door hung a set of antlers, enormous and pale, and one side of them was snapped off halfway, the break worn smooth by years.
"That's how she got her name," Clay said when he saw me looking. "Long story. Tell you sometime." He gave me a sideways look. "If you stick around."
A bell hung from a curl of metal above the door. It was small and brass, and it jingled whenever the door opened.
The diner wasn't empty. There was a couple in a back booth, sharing a slice of pie with two forks. There was a cook behind the pass-through window, a big man with a shaved head and tattooed forearms, scraping the grill and singing very badly in Spanish. And at the far end of the counter, on the last stool, sat an old man doing a crossword puzzle.
He was small and neat and very, very old. His white hair was combed carefully. His cardigan was buttoned wrong, one button off all the way down, and he'd either not noticed or decided not to care. He held a pencil in one spotted hand and a cup of black coffee in the other, and when I sat down three stools away, he looked over the top of his glasses at me with pale blue eyes that were much sharper than the rest of him.
Readers can find the author's published chapter on NovelPhoenix.com, since this version was taken without consent.
"Eight letters," he said, as if we'd been in the middle of a conversation. "'Messenger from on high.' Starts with an A."
I stared at him.
"Archangel," I said, before I could stop myself.
He counted on his fingers. His face lit up. "Well, I'll be. That's it." He wrote it in, very carefully, in pencil. "Hollis Grant," he said, and held out his hand.
I shook it. His skin was thin as paper and cool. Under it, I could feel his heart, slow and tired and steady, an old engine that had been running a long, long time. Nothing in him was urgent. Nothing was breaking. He was simply old, and getting older, the way the mountains were.
"Eva," I said.
"Pleased to know you, Eva." He tapped the paper. "You any good at these?"
"I don't know. I've never done one," I said.
"Never done a crossword." He shook his head slowly, like I'd told him I'd never seen the ocean. "Well. Come in tomorrow at seven, and we'll fix that."
"Hollis comes in every day at seven," Clay said, setting a plate of fries in front of me without asking. "Rain, snow, the end of the world. Coffee black, two eggs over easy, rye toast, and he takes eight hours to finish the newspaper puzzle and won't let anybody help."
"I let her help," Hollis said mildly. "She's got a good eye." He went back to his puzzle.
* * *
That was when the door banged open, and the bell went wild, and a girl blew in like a storm.
She was my height, maybe a year or two younger than I looked, with a mess of brown curls shot through with a streak of bright purple, a tiny silver hoop in one nostril, and an apron already half tied around her waist. She was talking before the door had closed.
"Clay, I'm so sorry, I know I'm late, my car did the thing again where it just doesn't, and I had to get my neighbor's kid to jump it, and he's twelve, Clay, a twelve-year-old jumped my car, and I'm pretty sure he did it wrong, but it started, so." She stopped. She saw me. "Oh. Hi. Who are you?"
"This is Eva," Clay said. "Eva, this is Sari. She's my afternoon girl when she bothers to show up."
"Rude, but fair." Sari stuck out a hand. Her fingernails were painted black and chipped. "Hi, Eva. You new?"
"I think so," I said.
She laughed like that was a joke. It hadn't been, but I liked the sound so much I didn't correct her.
"She's gonna start tomorrow," Clay said, and that was the first I'd heard of it. "Breakfast shift. You can show her the ropes when you come in."
"Oh, amazing. Fresh blood." Sari leaned against the counter and looked me up and down, at the too-big sweatshirt and the lost-and-found shoes and my hair, which I had tried to comb with my fingers and failed. Her face did something careful. She didn't ask. I watched her decide not to ask. "Okay. You and me are gonna be friends, I can tell. I need your info for the schedule board." She grabbed a dry-erase marker from beside the register and uncapped it with her teeth. "Eva what?"
My mind went blank.
Humans had two names. Sometimes three. I'd known that. I had known it for six centuries. It had simply never occurred to me that I would need one. Angels are called what we're called. There's no what.
Sari waited, marker poised over the little whiteboard on the wall.
"Eva," I said slowly. "Eva..."
Behind me, the door opened. The brass bell rang, high and bright and clear.
"Bell," I said. "Eva Bell."
"Eva Bell." Sari wrote it on the board in round, loopy letters. "Cute. That's so cute. It sounds like a girl in an old movie."
At the end of the counter, Hollis Grant turned a page of his newspaper. Over the top of his glasses, his eyes found mine, and I could have sworn there was a smile in them.
"Every time a bell rings," he murmured to no one in particular, and went back to his puzzle.
I didn't know what he meant then. It would be a long time before I watched the old movie he was quoting, curled up on a couch with my head on someone's shoulder, and laughed so hard I cried.
* * *
That night, after the diner closed, Clay sat with me in the last booth and laid it out.
A room upstairs, for as long as I needed it. Meals from the kitchen. Breakfast shifts at the counter, six to two, and he'd pay me cash under the table until we "figured out the paperwork thing," whatever that meant, and he said it in a tone that made me think he'd figured out other people's paperwork things before.
"You don't have to tell me anything," he said again. "But you lie to me, and we're done. I don't care what you did or where you were. I care if you're honest with me. That's the rule."
"I won't lie to you," I said.
That, at least, was easy to promise. I'd find out soon enough that I couldn't lie to save my life. Angels are terrible at it. We were never built for it. Every time I tried, my face went hot, and my voice went high, and I said something absurd.
But I didn't know that yet.
"Okay then, Eva Bell," Clay said, and slid out of the booth with a groan. "Six a.m. Don't be late. Sari's always late, and somebody around here has to make me look good."
I lay awake a long time that night in the narrow bed, listening to the radiator tick and the town go quiet outside. Somewhere out there, past the brick buildings and the dark shapes of the mountains, the sky I'd fallen out of was full of stars.
For the first time in six hundred years, I didn't look up at them.
I was too busy being warm.