“I said hello,” I replied, in English.
“What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“I came to see the bones,” I answered. “What are you doing here?”
“I came to talk to God.”
I arched an eyebrow and folded my arms across my chest. “I see. So what does He say?”
Before he could reply, the door of the church groaned open on its rusty hinges and an old and bent-over Italian lady in a black dress hobbled in. She eyed us suspiciously, like two young people had no business making small talk in a church.
I smiled at the angel. The corner of his mouth twitched like he wanted to smile, too, but instead he looked stern. He crossed the sanctuary in three rapid steps and grabbed my arm, his touch slightly cool against my flushed skin.
“Come with me,” he said, and drew me off to the side, back toward the room of bones, where the old lady couldn’t see us.
I opened my mouth to tell him that he may be an angel but I was American and bossing me around was not going to fly, but he put a finger to my lips, which startled me.
“Come with me,” he said again softly.
I instantly got a weird, dizzy sensation in the pit of my stomach, and my legs wobbled, as if I’d just stepped off a roller coaster. Something had changed, darkened and brightened at the same time. He pulled me back out of the bone room and into the main part of the basilica, and the old lady was gone. I took a good look at him and gasped again.
He was all in black and white, his hair jet-black, his skin ice-white, and still glowing slightly, still hard to look at, he was so gorgeous. Everything around us was black and white, too, the colors of the world converted to an old movie, made up of shadows and stark contrasts.
He let go of my arm. “We can talk here. In private.”
“What did you do?” I asked, a shiver working its way down my spine, but I refused to let him see that he’d scared me.
“It’s not safe to reveal yourself the way you did,” he said, scolding me. “It was foolish.”
“Why?” I wanted to know. My voice sounded thin in this place, insubstantial.
“What if I’d been one of the fallen?”
“So it’s true? There are good angels and bad angels?” I knew the answer to this, of course. My biological father was definitely not a good angel. But I wanted to hear him define it for himself. I wanted to hear him say it.
“Yes. The sorrowful and the joyful,” he said.
“And which are you?” I teased, but I hoped I already knew the answer. Bad angels wouldn’t come to a church to talk to God.
He shrugged, a completely human gesture. “I’m neither. I’m ambivalent.”
It sounded like a joke. “Yes, well, I’ve had trouble with ambivalence myself,” I said.
He laughed. “What’s your name?”
“Angela.”
“Fitting,” he said.
“What’s yours?”
“Penamue. But you can call me Phen.”
“Phen,” I repeated, liking the sound of his name in my mouth. An angel’s name. “Where are we, Phen? Where have you taken me?”
“The same place we were,” he answered. “But a different dimension.”
My skin prickled with excitement at how cool this was, journeying to a different dimension with a full-blooded angel. Nothing this eventful had ever happened to me, not in the small Wyoming town where my mother had hidden me away for most of my life.
It was the start of something, I thought.
It was the start.
CLARA
You’d think I’d be used to surprises by now. My life is a series of announcements like, Guess what, Clara? You’re part angel. Guess what: that guy who you thought you were supposed to save, well, he’s an angel-blood, too. Surprise! Angel-bloods only live for one hundred and twenty years, which means your mother is going to die any day now. Ding dong! Guess who’s at the door? Your dad, who’s an archangel, which, by the way, makes you a Triplare, a three-quarter angel instead of the measly one-quarter angel you thought you were. And each of these times I basically have to reevaluate my entire life. You’d think that nothing could surprise me nowadays.
But once again, I’m floored.
A buzzer goes off in the kitchen. Phen excuses himself and slips out. I turn to Angela.
“Ange!” I exclaim, softly so Phen doesn’t hear me spazzing all over the place.
“I wanted to tell you, but it’s complicated,” she says.
“How complicated is it to say, Hey, FYI? This boy I like, he’s actually an angel?”
“I didn’t know I was going to see him this year.”
“And you’re like . . .” I lower my voice even more. “Spending the night with him?”
“It’s not like that,” she says, but clearly it is. She keeps looking at something in the corner of the room. I turn to see what it is—a stack of paintings leaning against the wall.
I get up.
“Don’t . . . ,” Angela says, but I’m already flipping through the canvases, until I hit one of Angela, sprawled across the green velvet sofa, half-wrapped in a blanket and nothing else, the sun falling across her hair in a way that makes it shine blue. It’s a beautiful painting. But that’s beside the point.
“Nice blanket,” is all I can get out.
Her jaw tightens. “I model for him sometimes. But mostly we hang out. We walk around the city. We talk.”
“You talk. About what?”
“About angel stuff, of course, but we also talk about music, and books we’ve read, and art. Poetry. He knows, like, everything.”
“Right, because he’s an angel.”
“Yes,” she says, with a defensive edge in her voice. “He’s an angel. So what?”
“I’m a hungry angel.” He appears in the doorway. “Dinner is served, ladies.”
This could be awkward.
“I thought you might be getting tired of Italian,” he says as we settle around a small table tucked into the back of the kitchen. The food smells wonderful, curry and lamb, something Indian. Phen pours three glasses of white wine. I dig right in, because it gives me something to do besides talk. I need some time to let this revelation settle in my brain.
“So, Clara,” Phen says after a while, “tell me about yourself.”
I take a sip of wine, which I know should taste good but instead tastes sour and strange. “I, uh . . .” How much has Angela told him about me, I wonder? “Well, I recently graduated from high school. I’m going to Stanford in the fall.”