Hell Followed with Us(43)

“No, I understand. I understand.” He catches my face and makes me look at him. “Hey. We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

That’s exactly what he said when I broke down crying when we were so much younger, when we had just fallen so hard for each other, when I was terrified of being a boy. He wouldn’t pull that phrase out if he didn’t mean it.

He says, “I just want to be with you again.”

I hate myself for how much I’ve wanted to hear those words.



* * *





I tell him that if we want to make this work, then we need to go over some stuff. It’s the only thing that keeps me from feeling like a girl in a classic movie, falling for the man who kidnaps her or holds her down. I look him in the eyes and say there can’t be any apologies, because I don’t want to hear them, but we need to talk about the things the Angels would never let us.

The nest whines as we step into the atrium. Pieces of the front door lie scattered at the mouth of the sanctuary, spread out across the carpet and front porch. The smell of rot isn’t as bad as it had been. The bodies have all been moved. I look to Theo with a frown.

“The Grace wanted them,” Theo says in explanation. In the pale moonlight coming through the stained glass windows, I try to find body parts that weren’t part of the Grace before, but nothing sticks out as particularly old or new. It’s just all the same flesh.

“Didn’t know you got along with Graces now,” I say.

“I don’t,” he says.

Even with the front door broken, I don’t feel particularly exposed here. Living things know not to come too close, and things that aren’t 100 percent alive are what I’m best with. So we find a seat in the pews and sit, because we’re too used to the smell of rot, and messed up like that.

Grace-meat has grown into the carpet under our feet. I whisper, “To me,” and hold out my hand. A tendril of flesh peels itself from the ground and finds its way to my fingers, weaving through them like a child holding tight to a parent’s hand. Theo’s throat bobs. I hold out my palm.

“You want to try?” I ask. “It’s not going to hurt you.”

“I’m fine,” he says. “Really.”

“It’s not going to make you sick this time.”

“Still.”

It’s a strange closeness, this flesh curling between my fingers. Something primal, almost paternal.

We came here to talk, so we’re going to talk.

I say, “You never told me why you left the death squads.”

Left is the safest word. No connotations. I pick it because I know better; I saw what happened when people asked at all, let alone used words like kicked out, failed, exiled. I was the one pulling him away when he got upset. Even now, I still expect a darkness to wash over Theo’s expression.

It never comes.

“No, I didn’t tell you.”

“This is me asking.”

“Tell me how you left, and I’ll tell you why I left.”

“Fine.” I let the Grace crawl farther up my hand, to my arm, where it gets caught in the hair and rears back in confusion like a startled inchworm. “We’d been planning it ever since we realized Mom was serious about putting me in the Seraph program. We wanted to get out before Sister Kipling actually injected me, but…” My back twinges with the memory of the needle slipping into my spine. “That didn’t work out.” Theo makes a sad sound. He knows damn well it didn’t work. “We eventually smuggled ourselves onto a caravan headed to the D.C. compound. Ended up having to ditch halfway into the city when they caught us.”

I don’t mention how I whispered to the Grace escorting us and slaughtered every Angel who laid eyes on me that day. That the Watch and I are the reasons New Nazareth has lost so many people in just the past few days.

“We got stuck in the city after that,” I say. Another tendril of meat comes up to wind between my fingers. “We were about to make it across the bridge when a death squad found us. So.”

“They killed him,” he says.

“They did.”

“And that group you were with a few days ago?”

“Saved me.”

His jaw works under his mask. I know what he’s going to say. “No. You know it won’t work.” He looks away. “They don’t know who I am. If they did, they’d kill me.” But Nick knows who I am, Erin knows, and for some reason I don’t say that. “They kill Angels. It’s what they do. You can’t come back with me, if they see your scars you’re dead, and—” I say this instead. “I can’t lose you again.”

He takes my hand, the one not twined with the Grace-meat.

“Thank you,” he says. To fear and to keep. Mark 10:9—What therefore God has joined together, let no one separate. Not even ourselves. “Not going to lie; I’m impressed you got so far. How did you get past the gate?”

I snort. “Carefully and with our heads down.”

We give that time to settle. For everything in our chests and stomachs to calm.

This time, Theo starts.

“Did word ever make it back about Squad Calvary?”

It takes me a while. I don’t know the squads by name. But it does sound familiar, and when it clicks, my stomach sinks. “That was your squad, wasn’t it?”