Hell Followed with Us(79)

I should kill her for what she did. She deserves it. Dad told me to make them suffer.

“Please,” she says.

Please…what?

A cold pit settles in my stomach, a horrible contrast to the fire still searing through me.

I step back, my wings dragging on the floor.

She wants me to kill her.

“No!” She reaches for me, snatching for my jaw the way soldiers hold their Graces. I rear back, and she grabs me by my half-broken arm. “Seraph, please. Please.”

This is all her fault—everything she’s ever done to me, to the people who came before me, every single person who suffered as the Flood broke them apart. I should tear her to shreds, drag her by the leg and bite it off, and crush her body under my claws.

“I know you hate me,” she says, clinging to me, “and you have every right. I understand. If it’s any consolation, we’re all going to Hell for what we’ve done.”

She—

Our living saint is saying the Angels are going to Hell.

Our living saint is…a heretic?

No. No, it doesn’t work like that. She can’t be. She created the Flood. She built Seraph from the ground up. She destroyed me, she destroyed everything. And now she’s trying to repent her repentance? Now she feels bad? Now?

She’s so close. Her face is so close to my fangs. I should just end her. End whatever bullshit she’s trying to pull, end this pathetic attempt to trick me.

But I can’t.

Even though my jaw is dislocated and my insides bubble up when I speak, I manage, “Why?”

“Why?” Her lip trembles. Her hands find my face, and she holds me close, like she’s trying to cradle me, keep me away from the stained white walls and bloody floor. “We have made so many mistakes. I never should have wanted this.” Her eyes are glassy—with terror, remorse, martyrdom. It scares me. “If I can’t take it all back, I can do this. Please, let me do one thing right.”

Mistakes. Let her do one thing right.

But why now? Why is she coming to me now, when I am this—not when she could have stopped this, when she could have never stepped into the Angels’ arms in the first place? Why didn’t she stop when I begged her to? Is it now that she can look me in the eyes and see what she’s done?

I speak because I have to. “Mistakes.”

Sister Kipling says, “Yes. A mistake.”

“I could tell Mom,” I say. “Have you killed.”

“If you want me dead, you can do that now.”

I snap my teeth at her. She squeezes her eyes shut and does not move.

She says, “Lord, just make it quick.”

So I sit back and watch. Watch the heaving of her chest, the quiver to her lip, her fingers clutching her stained white coat.

A heretic. It’s too good to be true.

Nobody who has caused this much suffering deserves an easy ending. She doesn’t get to do one thing right to take even the smallest weight off her soul.

God will judge whether she has truly changed her ways in her heart, but I don’t have the luxury of being sure. I’m fucked no matter what I do, so I might as well try.

She can let Nick know I’m still alive.





O sacred head now wounded, with grief and shame weighed down, now scornfully surrounded with thorns, Thine only crown!

—Angel hymn



The pain eases eventually, like most pain does, and God has nothing to do with it. It’s less the ebbing of a tide and more watching a tsunami wash back out to sea, taking everything with it except bones and exhaustion. It’s the kind of exhaustion where even breathing is a struggle. Where you’re almost asleep, but you barely have the presence of mind to close your eyes.

The door opens again. I pick my head up the best I can, expecting to see Sister Kipling, but standing in the threshold instead are Theo and Mom. Their eyes are wide like they’ve never seen a Grace before. Like they’ve never seen a monster or blood.

“Oh God,” Theo whispers.

“Brother Clairborne,” Mom chides. “Don’t take His name in vain.” Her voice isn’t as sharp as it could be. It wavers, unsteady and small.

Good. Let her see what she’s made of me.

“I’m not,” Theo says. “God, look at you.” He starts into the room, and Mom tries to follow, but Sister Kipling appears in the narrow space between them, murmuring that she should give us some space. Mom jerks back—”That’s my child,” she says—but Theo takes the opportunity and shuts the door behind him.

He smiles. “Hey.”

He’s carrying a pail of water and a towel over his shoulder, and there are two things about him that are different. One: His left hand is bandaged. Creeping out from under the gauze are cracks like mine, the edges of lumps and broken bones.

And two: There is a little spark inside him. Something that calls to me, one of my neurons wormed inside his brain. Milling around like ants, firefly sparks, feathers.

“Sorry,” Theo says. “I know I’m staring. I just—wow. Look at you.” He takes the towel off his shoulder and kneels beside me. “How are you feeling?”

I take my first words slowly, try to make my mouth and throat do what I’ve always done, just form the words and put them out there. Instead, I choke. My body worked when Kipling was here, so why won’t it now? It doesn’t come naturally anymore. I have to force it, the way you have to blink manually when you’re reminded of your eyelids. And when I do make a single word, it sounds like something else, an animal putting together sounds in a rough mockery of human speech.