Page 185 of Drown Like Heaven
He won’t let me fall. He won’t hurt me.
Fearfully, I cracked my eyes open. I expected my heart rate to increase when I saw hiswings…but it didn’t. My pulse remained steady, like my breathing, like my mind. All my thoughts drifted away into nothing. Micah’s eyes were locked onto mine, reaching into my soul and holding me there, comforting me.
“You’re an angel?” I whispered, the word foreign and strange in my mouth.Angel. It shouldn’t have been real, but it somehow was.
He nodded.
“And Mason is too?”
Another nod.
“What does that mean?”
His muscular arms were braced on the door on either side of me, and he hung his head for a moment, shoulders rising and falling steadily with his breath. I dared a brief glance at the massive wings protruding from his back, the black featherscovering their surface, then I stared back at his face, a small shiver trickling through me.
“It means I’m an angel. I was born in Heaven, and I fell to Earth, and now I’m here.” He didn’t sound happy to be telling me this, for whatever reason. I had no idea how or why I felt so calm, so capable of taking in this information.
Morethan an angel.A fallen angel.
“So Heaven is real? Like in the Bible? Is God real?” I couldn’t stop the questions from tumbling past my lips, one after the other.
“Not quite like in the Bible. Heaven is a real place, though, yes. God is…real, as well. Not in the way you think.”
I furrowed my brows, waiting for him to elaborate.
“Imagine the Abrahamic religions were half-right and Greek mythology was half-right—in all the things they believed to be true. That’s how everything actually works.”
A sudden moment of clarity struck me and panic speared sharp through my brain—only to disappear after an instant. I couldn’t feel panic…at all. And if I wanted to panic about that fact, I still couldn’t.
“Please move,” I said with as much force as I could muster, tightening my hands into fists. “I can’t fuckingthinkwith you like this.”
Micah dropped his hands from the wall and backed up one step, giving me just enough room to walk around him. I didn’t turn back to look at the wings, choosing instead to stalk straight through the kitchen into the living room. I grabbed a throw blanket from the back of the couch then tossed it over my head, curling up into a ball on the leather armchair, the blanket blocking out the world.
I heard Micah enter the room a few moments later, and I was pretty sure he was just standing in the middle, staring at meunder the blanket. My breath was warm on my face against the knit, the leather cool under my cheek.
“What is the gold?” I asked, voice slightly muffled.
“Ichor,” Micah answered. “It’s what angels’ power comes from.”
I blinked into the darkness. “…Power?”
“There’s more to an angel than just wings.”
“Okay,” I responded slowly, choosing not to linger on the mention of other powers. This was too much for me to wrap my head around, and I was still confused by my complete lack of panic. “Are you immortal?”
“Yes.”
A chill moved through my bones.
“How old are you?”
“Ninety-something.”
My lips pressed together and I stared wide-eyed at nothing, my eyes unfocused on the inside of the knit blanket. “Mason?”
“About the same age. A couple years younger.”
Okay…
