“Yes.” He turns to her with an amused expression, pats her on the knee affectionately. “Exactly like Switzerland.”
“You were rude to him,” Angela says to me when we’re back in the spare room at Rosa’s house. She scowls into the mirror and takes off her necklace, starts brushing out her hair.
“I just asked him some questions, Ange. Relax.”
“You interrogated him.”
“I don’t know him.”
“Yeah, well, I do. I’ve known him for years. He’s not evil, Clara. I know there’s all that crap about him being an ambivalent, but that only means he doesn’t want to fight. He’s above that.”
I sit down on the bed, kick off my shoes. “Right. Above it.” I don’t understand how she could be okay with this when she’s so gung-ho about her own duty, her purpose, her bright white wings that mean that she’s so pure of heart, so committed to the side of good. Why wouldn’t she hold Phen to the same standard?
“He’s a good guy,” she says, grabbing a handful of hair and starting to braid it.
“He’s not a guy at all.”
“Look, I don’t need you to protect me, Clara,” she says. “I met him in a church, remember? Hallowed ground and all that? If he was evil he wouldn’t have been able to go in there, right?”
“Okay,” I admit grudgingly.
“So let’s drop it. I don’t want to fight.” She finishes braiding one side and starts braiding the other. I go to the sink to wash my face. I’m brushing my teeth when she appears in the mirror behind me.
“I thought you’d like him,” she says, and I don’t have to be an empath to know that she’s disappointed in my reaction. She likes Phen. More than likes him. She wants me to like him, too. She wants me to see what she sees in him.
I lean over and spit into the sink. “I didn’t say I don’t like him. I said I don’t know him.”
“Okay, so get to know him. Come hang out with us tomorrow. We’re going to Vatican City. Embrace the tourist thing, like you said.”
Her eyes meet mine in the mirror, hopeful.
I’m a softie. That, and I really do want to see St. Peter’s Basilica. “Okay, fine.”
“Really? You’ll come with us?”
“What, you want me to pinkie swear?”
“You’ll like him,” she says. “You’ll see.”
“All right. Hey, wait.” I catch her by the shoulders before she buzzes out of the room. “You haven’t told him about me, have you? About me being a . . . T-person. About my dad?”
“No,” she says, frowning. “We haven’t talked about that kind of thing much this time.”
“Well, don’t. I know you trust him or whatever, but that’s my private stuff, okay?”
“Okay,” she says with a dismissive shake of her head.
“Promise me.” I look into her eyes.
She smirks. “What, do you want me to pinkie swear?”
“Yep.” I hold up my hand, pinkie raised. She grins and hooks my finger with hers. We shake.
“Seriously, though,” I say.
“Seriously. I won’t tell him.” She presses a hand over her heart. “Your secret’s safe with me.”
ANGELA
That first summer, Phen followed me back to Rome. He set a place and time for us to meet, always the same—a small café a short distance from my grandmother’s house, at nine o’clock in the morning on Tuesdays and Fridays—and when the sun began to sink below the horizon he’d bring me back to the café, and he’d say, “Thank you for the lovely day, Angela. See you next time.” That’s the way he kept it, in the beginning. Careful. Courteous. A temporary arrangement where he, the centuries-old angel, would instruct me, the naive little angel-blood schoolgirl.
We took a lot of walks. At first he was hesitant to tell me about the angels and the war between them, but he did let me in on the ways to tell the good from the bad. I thought that the wing-color thing was a bit cliché, really—white for good, black for bad; definitely not politically correct—but it wasn’t about color, he said. It was about light. Black is the absence of light. White is the gathering of it.
He showed me a secret Rome, one I’d never seen in all my touring and being dragged around by my relatives. Phen’s Rome was different: a Rome born out of his perfect memory, the way a grandfather could show you his hometown. Every place was a story, and Phen’s stories stretched back to the days when this sprawling, magnificent city had been a couple of primitive thatched huts. At the Coliseum, he told me about a brave man he once knew, a man who would never show up in the history books. He pointed out the exact spot where the man died. He showed me a house where the most powerful woman in Rome had lived in the year 1636. He told me that she’d invited him inside and boldly tried to seduce him, and I tried to act like the image of this jewel-bedecked Italian broad running her slutty hands all over him didn’t bother me.
But it did bother me.
Because there was nothing grandfatherly about Phen. Most of the time I forgot about his age, or lack thereof. I knew he’d been around since before man had taken his first crawling steps on this planet, but in Rome he passed easily for a run-of-the-mill Italian man in his midtwenties. He wore the right clothes. He used the right slang. He wasn’t like those vampires you see on television who are so clearly old men stuck in young bodies, the way they talk like they’re still in Victorian times, their lips curling up in disgust at the idea of modern frivolities like electricity and gasoline-powered engines. Phen was part of the world; he embraced it. He loved it.
He made it easy to forget, sometimes, that he was more than the most remarkable guy I’d ever met. My heart leapt every time he touched me, even the most innocent, casual of brushes: his arm bumping mine as we walked together, his hand on my back as he guided me through a doorway.
I wasn’t a fool, though. I tried to talk myself out of falling for him. He’s an angel, I kept telling myself. You’re a teenager. Get real. You have almost nothing in common. It would never work. Don’t kid yourself. He probably thinks of you as a child.
“Why Italy?” I asked him one Friday afternoon as we sat down for a late lunch at a restaurant we’d found by following our noses. “Why stay here, out of all the places in the world you could go?”