Hell Followed with Us(56)

He crouches beside me.

I fight to keep myself still. As still as possible. His breath gently huffs behind his mask; his shoe scrapes on the carpet as he keeps his balance. He smells like smoke and sweat.

Nick’s fingers hover, for a moment, over my arm. Over my cheek, over my hair.

“Shit,” he whispers. “Shit.” He gets up and goes to the door but stops, reaching for the doorknob but unable to grab it, and he turns away like he can’t consider the idea any longer.

He takes off his jacket.

And his shirt.

The pale expanse of his chest is cut through with awful scars. He’s not as muscular as I thought he would be, but there’s power in the way his arms move. He turns his shirt over, inspects it. There’s a scar on his shoulder and a few on his collarbone. One on his soft stomach, shiny and white. He pats his pockets, then digs in them.

What—what are we? Am I still mad at him? He apologized, and I guess I accept it. I need to apologize to him too. I want to get past this, I don’t want to worry about this anymore; I want to sit down, talk about it, and move on. I’m sick of worrying about where I stand with the boys in my life.

I have the apology in my pocket. And right now, Nick is with me.

Nick, seeming to accept that whatever he’s looking for isn’t in his pocket, turns to shake it out of his jacket. With the faint moonlight coming in through the narrow window, I can make out the mass of scars on his back. There are so many, it makes my stomach turn. They’re dark, all the way from his shoulders to his waist, a pattern—

A pattern I know.

Those aren’t scars at all.

They’re tattooed wings.

What the FUCK.

That doesn’t make sense. That can’t be right. No, I’m seeing it wrong, that has to be it. The shadows are playing tricks on me. I’m seeing feathers where they aren’t supposed to be. I saw them before I fell asleep, it’s Seraph messing with me. That must be it.

But he shifts in the light, and they’re still there. They’re carved into his back, scoring all the way down like acid poured across his skin, like a monster tore him apart with its claws.

Nick was a death-squad soldier. Nick was an Angel.

A knife falls out of his jacket and hits the carpeted floor with a muffled thump. His shoulders go with it, sagging like he’s suddenly carrying an unbearable weight. He sinks to the floor, absolutely unreadable behind his mask, and he starts to cut his shirt into strips. His arm strains when he yanks at the fabric. I stare at the muscles there, at the edges of feathers creeping onto his sides. There are so many little scars in lines down his sides, right where they would be if he’d tried to claw them off with his fingernails.

Breathe.

He told me to keep Judgment Day out of my mouth before I’d even said it. He’d had to figure out his own rules too. Breathe. He didn’t cry when Trevor died, he didn’t cry at the funeral. Breathe. He moves and leads like a trained soldier, and he tried to tear the tattoos out of his skin with his bare hands.

Oh God, and I told him he was just as bad as Mom.

Nick rips the last strip off his shirt and works my arm out from under my head. I let myself go limp and close my eyes all the way so I don’t have to pretend.

He ran from the Angels. He made it. He got away from the Angels, found a home, and survived.

He wraps the bandages tight around one arm, then the other, to cover the rotting pieces, blisters, and burns, and he slips in bobby pins to keep it all in place.

Nick did it. He did exactly what I’ve always dreamed of; the thing Dad died trying to do for me.

I keep my eyes shut as he moves to the other side of the room. I tell myself I’ll look when he leaves, but he never does. When it’s been quiet for long enough, I peek and find him asleep against the door.

I lie awake, measuring the air in my lungs. The bandages are warm against my already hot skin. They smell like him, like smoke.

He knows what I’ve been through. He understands.

I press my face into my arm, right where the bandages wind into the crook of my elbow. He called me a monster, and I called him one back. He suffered as an Angel, and I led them to his home to burn everything to the ground.

Lord, we can’t keep going like this.





Suffering is the price of flesh. Be grateful for the gift of it.

—Sister Mackenzie’s Sunday school lesson



The Watch and a few others—Sadaf, Alex, Erin—stand in the courtyard too early in the morning. None of us could sleep. Birds chirp, the sun barely breaks the horizon, and everything still reeks of smoke.

Nick stands by the broken fence, having found a replacement shirt that shows off the hard lines of his forearms. I keep thinking about his wings, long and beautiful and torn to shreds on his sides. As soon as I open my mouth, everything will come spilling out, so I chew on my bottom lip and pick at the makeshift bandages. At least I don’t feel the urge to puke every time I turn my head.

Did Nick think I’d wake up and not notice the bandages? It’s kind of endearing.

“You know,” Salvador says, rubbing xyr scars, “I was gonna ask Chris how he made that cool ace patch. I wanted one.”

Aisha says, “God, that’s not important.”

“I know. It’s just…sinking in.”

“Chris died?” Alex says. Erin squeezes her eyes shut like she can will it not to be true if she just tries hard enough. “I thought I saw him—”