Page 67 of Angel of Water & Shadow

“Forgetting to put away laundry. Missing a homework assignment. Those things slip through the cracks.” Not life-or-death scenarios involving threats from the underworld. I threw my hands up. “You’re a hunter, Ryder. Isn’t the first rule of thumb to never let your guard down?”

Waiting for him to own up to his mistake was like waiting for the apocalypse. Imminent, but likely never to come in my lifetime. I peered at him out of the corner of my eye. He remained facing forward, chest caved, shoulders hunched, too proud to say the words. I let him sit there like a dog with his tail between his legs for another minute.

“What do we do next?” I huffed out air through my nose. “I imagine dialing 911 is out of the question. What’s the equivalent in Nephilim world? Do we try and bring it up with the Saints?”

“No.” It broke his stillness, and I swore I caught a glisten to his eyes. “No, we don’t need them…” He blinked and it was gone. “Look, you don’t know why these things are after you. But is there anyone who might? Anyone who has more info on your ancestry? About where you came from? Someone you trust?”

Not where, but who.

I clutched the lapis pendant around my neck. What other secrets sat locked away in my dad’s den? It’d be an awkward conversation…but I guess I could just ask him straight up: Are you or mom an angel? I bit out a sigh. If he’d known about my lineage and never told me—why would he divulge anything now, just because I asked nicely? Pinpricks of anger struck my heart. I took a deep, steady breath, inclined to think the chances he knew anything about this were slim to none. I couldn’t let the other, more nauseating, possibility sidetrack me.

Why couldn’t I just look into a crystal ball? It’d be so much easier than breaking and entering into his office?—

My musing provoked a memory, and suddenly the idea didn’t seem so farfetched.

“Have I told you about the tarot reader?” I asked even though I knew I hadn’t. He shook his head to confirm. “At Grad Night, the night I met you, I had an episode—like the one I had that night in the alley you found me in. Anyways, it’s almost like this psychic experienced it with me. Afterwards she grabbed me, all possessed, and started chanting something over and over.”

“You’ve mentioned these episodes,” he drawled, continuing to watch the playful splash of the fountain. “What exactly do they entail?”

I bit the inside of my cheek, my mouth quirking to the other side. I’d never explained this out loud—the whole truth of it, that is. But after what I’d experienced with werewolves, demons, Dr. Finis…The idea of holding on to this secret any longer weighed so heavy on me it felt like it’d sink me to the molten core of the Earth.

There were no words to adequately explain my episodes. But I’d sure as hell try, because I needed to get this off my chest, needed to tell somebody, needed to feel…less alone.

“My episodes,” I repeated uneasily. “It’s like… the world is speaking to me. Directly. Sometimes I listen. Sometimes I talk back. Sometimes all my senses blend together so the only thing I taste, touch, smell, and see are the voices on the air—but also aren’t—because I’m the only one who hears them. It’s…overwhelming. I usually end up blacking out or my brain kind of”—I thought about how I tripped during graduation, which, wow, that seemed so insignificant now—“stalls.”

His face betrayed nothing as he flicked his eyes to me. “How do they manifest?”

“In anything and everything that makes a sound.” I shut my eyes for a beat, the hairs on my neck prickling in anticipation as I listened, fully knowing they weren’t going to come. “In…the crunch of my shoes against the gravel. In the steady laps of the fountain. In the low howl of the breeze that keeps whipping my hair into my face.” I let the unruly waves tickle the bridge of my nose. “To you, that’s ambiance, to me…one second, it’s white noise, the next it’s screaming at me.”

I waited for Ryder to laugh, to shove off the bench, to brush me off as crazy. But he stayed, unmoving, next to me, not looking anywhere else but at me. “And you think this psychic heard these voices, too?”

My breath hitched as he studied me, like I was different, but in a good way—in a way that seemed to intrigue him. I cleared the knot bundled in my throat. “I’m not sure exactly, but she kind of short-circuited during Javi’s reading, right after I had an episode, and that’s when she grabbed me and started chanting.”

“What did she say?”

“Quart…vigi…Quarto vigil?” I butchered it for sure. “Any clue to what that means?”

“The Fourth Watcher.” Ryder’s brows tilted in. “That’s Latin. It’s the old language of the Nephilim.”

Surprise twisted my features. No one but the Voices called me Watcher. How did she know? I’d always brushed it off as a petty nickname. But…did it mean something more? My stomach sank like I’d swallowed a hundred steel balls.

“Hey, you okay?” Javi’s infamous line. It sounded so different coming from Ryder.

I forced my expression to one of indifference even though I was anything but. “What’s a Watcher?”

“Powerful archangels supposedly tasked with keeping humanity safe from demons.” He wiped invisible dirt off the flat stone seat. “Nothing but an urban legend, clearly.”

“Oh.” I wrung my hands, fighting the urge not to put them in my mouth so he’d try and grab them again. “Why…why would she call me that?”

He strummed his fingers against the edge of the bench. “I think we need to find her and ask.”

I dug deep for an excuse but came up with nothing, because there was nothing left to do but face this. “She had a temporary structure for the festival. But…I know who can help us find her.” I sighed, cringing at what that meant.

We stood to leave, the courtyard’s fountain grabbing my attention as I went to follow him to the garage. I stepped over to its basin. The water had turned dark and oily. Red.

“Ryder, do you see this?” My gaze tracked upwards, to each pool of liquid, to the cement wings wrapped around the tiers. He stilled beside me, obviously seeing how the angel’s face had shifted; not frowning but not quite smiling, her lips pulled, brows tilted up. She was crying.

The angel was crying tears of blood.

---