Page 14 of Baking and Angels

He shook his head violently. “No, absolutely not. Never,” he lied.

Gently he took her hands, and the same strange feeling skittered up his arms. He felt a pressing urge to let go but willed himself to hold on. “Something is going on, yes. But… but…” He raked his eyes over her, trying to find something he could latch onto. And then he did. “Feathers. Look. You havefeathers.”

“Feathers?” she repeated, then looked, her eyes wide and innocent as a child.

“You’re… you’re an angel.” He cursed himself. He had known other demons with feathered wings, though none as beautiful as hers.

“An angel?” she stammered. She struggled to stand up again, which caused her to whap her wings against the wall as she battled for equilibrium. “Angels don’t look like…”

But this time, she stopped and stayed completely still, really looking at her reflection in the mirror across from the shower. “I’ve never seen pictures of angels that look… like…”

She tugged on her wavy, rose-gold hair, streaming around the horns. Her wings drooped a little, then she lifted them again, fluffing them out, as if she could finally see the white-gray feathers instead of the bat-like membranes Rafferty once had. He found himself as enthralled as he had been shocked. Gently, he ran his hands over them, feeling the soft pinions.

Helena continued examining herself in the mirror, the worry line deep between her brows. “How do I undo it? I mean, how do I return to normal?”

He almost said, “This is your normal now,” but caught himself in time when he met her reflected scared eyes. Hecouldn’t.

“Whenever I wanted to… shift…” He blinked, trying to recall the memory, except… he couldn’t. He remembered it happened as a fact, but not the experience of it. “I don’t know… I just… understood that I could and then did. It was more like… I would focus to dampen my demonic aura and not only appear as human but feel human to you.”

“Focuson what?”

“I don’t know,” he repeated, embarrassed.

“Okay, great,” she said dryly. “That was very helpful.” Her wings flexed, twitching off his probing hands. “Andstop it!”

“Sorry,” he said.

She looked at herself again. “So… so that means… demons and angels… they’re not very different, then.”

“I…” But Rafferty had no idea what to say. As far as he knew angels didn’t exist. At least, he had never met one. They had always been demons pretending or misnamed by the mortals they were serving. “I don’t know.”

“I think I know why this has happened,” she said, calming down.

As she calmed, Helena returned to herself. Rafferty didn’t know how else to explain it. One second, she was this beautiful, ethereal creature, and the next, she was the very human woman he had known and fallen in love with. The wings and horns gone, her skin and eyes were back to their normal shades.

“You’re right,” she said with detachment, “I just knew how to do it.” Then she gave a serene little giggle.

Her serenity disturbed him the most. He felt so disjointed. Even though she looked normal, to him she still felt a little uncanny and untouchable now.

Maybe it had been his eternity of paranoia, but he couldn’t help feeling there was something more she wasn’t tell him. Some agenda he didn’t understand but could see the negativespace of.

Demons played tricks on each other all the time. Even as he thought that he forced those thoughts away.

This was Helena.

She wasn’t a demon.

She couldn’t be!

And hewas human.

Have we switched places?he thought, the question breaking over him on a wave ofnew fear.

“I would say this situation is both our doing, so it makes sense we’re going to have to fix it together,”she had said onlyyesterday.

Helena kept her arms wrapped around herself, and the urge to do something, anything, to make her feel better compelled him back into the main room. Immediately, he spied the tray of food still waiting to be consumed. Tearing the cover off like it was his only salvation, he scoffed at the meal before them. It was a burger with steak fries that someone had tried to dress up with some sort of pink aioli and sliced vegetables, the whole thing skewered through to hold it together. What sort of comfort would this give her, especially now that it was tepid at best? He tore off the other tray to find what was essentially a grilled chicken that someone had termed “blackened” with a pile of vegetables and cooling whipped parsnips. It too seemed inadequate to serve to comfort Helena with.

He stretched his hand toward it to use some demonic energy to reheat it, only to be reminded too late that such a thing was impossible now.

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