Page 40 of Wrath of One
The one who wishes I didn’t exist.
Neither of us steps closer. I don’t know why the thought of hugging her is crossing my mind right now.
She tilts her head slowly at me.
“The blood and fire. Has—has it come already?” Her voice quakes just lightly at the end.
I nod.
“He’s charming. He charmed you very fast. He makes everyone who meets him trust and accept him so easily.”
She shakes her head at me like a disappointed mother.
It almost makes me wonder if maybe, just maybe, she too was enchanted by him more than she’ll ever admit. I’m the product of whatever it was the two of them once had together.
I’m just starting to think it wasn’t all violence they shared.
“I think I need your help,” I say with my shoulders squared and my head held high.
I shoved her away the first time. I ignored her cautions.
And now I’m asking without shame for her help.
“I know you do.” She isn’t arrogant when she says it. Her eyes are soft as she looks at me with some form of emotion there.
“Can you come fight? Can you use your power against him?” My mind is reeling with possibilities of how she may be able to help in the chaos waiting for me.
Long blonde hair shifts around her delicate features as she shakes her head slowly at me.
“Angels help in little unseen ways. We prevent futures more than we change presents,” she says in the strangest choice of words. “And ghosts of angels…” She pauses, and the sadness in her features haunts every angle of her face. “We do nothing at all.”
I swallow that thought down. Nothing. She can do nothing.
Why did Azazel tell me I needed her? I don’t understand it. She’s the other half of me. Half of her blood runs through my own. It’s the angelic and the holy warring against the demonic and the hellish. And if she can’t help me…
No one can.
“You don’t need me, Izara. You need you.” She extends her hand to me, her long, ghostly fingers reaching toward me.
My heart trembles in my chest, and my eyes feel wet when I glance up at her and all the remorse that surrounds her.
“Before you go, I want you to know, it wasn’t you I didn’t want. I would have loved you.” My throat hurts when I swallow, and it just makes more tension press into my chest. “It was Lucian’s future I didn’t want. It was his shadow over our lives that I wanted to destroy completely. I couldn’t do it, though. But you can.”
“How?” The question tears out of my throat with a desperate, gasping sound. All my life I was unwanted, and then I was wanted again by a father who manipulated and used me for his own gain. And my mother was always but a phantom in my mind and faraway memories that never even wanted me. Now she says she always did, and I don’t know what to believe anymore.
I don’t know what todoanymore.
I started this and I mean to finish it. Even if it means destroying the man that gave me life.
I just don’t know how.
“I’m not strong enough.” The dampness burns my eyes.
Etheria’s expression is so sad as she takes me in. She’s as haunting as that marble statue built in her honor at the academy.
“You will be.” It’s said like a promise or a premonition. “You just have to acceptbothsides of who you are first.”
I don’t even know if I can do that. Accepting the hellish side had been so easy because I am destruction. I’ve killed and done irreversible things.
