Forsaken (7 page)

But in that moment I hated myself,
everything I had become. I hated the angels who had tried to take
her, I hated Cole for what he had done, I hated the entire
afterlife. I wanted to fix this. But how could I do something so
selfish?

The gravel crunched as I parked the
truck in the tiny lot. I wasn’t sure why I was here or what I
expected to get out of this. I wanted some answers, for someone to
tell me what was right and what was wrong. It seemed a church
should be the place to find someone who could answer that for
me.

The chapel was empty when I entered,
as I should have assumed it would be on a Friday afternoon. I
looked around, making sure no one would be watching from the
shadows but my senses told me there was no one around.

I worried I might burst into flames as
I knelt at the altar. I wasn’t supposed to be here. Angels weren’t
supposed to walk the land of the living. I wasn’t alive. But here I
was, searching for answers as any mortal man might in the house of
the Lord.

“
If you’re out there,” I
said quietly with my eyes squeezed shut. “Help me know what the
right thing to do is.”

I sat and waited. What was I supposed
to be doing? Listening for words to be spoken to me? A feeling from
within? I wasn’t sure.

Nothing came for a good three
minutes.

The sensation started in my fingertips
and crawled up my arms to my chest. The air that flowed through the
building suddenly sounded hollow and far away. My vision faded in
and out and I struggled to make my eyes focus on the marble floor
at my knees.

A chorus of low chuckles resonated
from the darkness. I heard them whispering my name, calling me to
join them, to go back to where I now belonged.

I gasped for air.

“
Are you alright,
sir?”

The call of the dead dropped away
instantly as a voice from behind me rocked me back to my senses. I
realized then that I had dropped to all fours and was shaking
violently. An itching like I couldn’t describe ran under the skin
of my back as I struggled to fight back what I was.

The priest who stood in the aisle
behind me looked concerned and took a hesitant step toward
me.

“
I’m fine,” I said as I
shook my head and climbed to my feet. It took every ounce of
concentration I had to keep my wings from erupting. That would make
for a difficult conversation. Actually, it might kind of make this
priest’s life, seeing a real angel. It would also probably greatly
increase the size of his congregation. “Sorry, I just got kind of
dizzy.”

“
Why don’t you have a
seat?” the middle-aged man said as he indicated the front row
pew.

I wanted to slip out and avoid this
entire situation I had stupidly put myself into but couldn’t do it
without offending the man who was trying to be nice. “Thanks,” I
said uneasily and sat beside him.

Neither of us said anything as we sat
side by side and looked at the stained glass window featuring a
baby Jesus.

“
Do you believe in
redemption, Father?” I blurted out before I could stop
myself.
Ah crap.
I really didn’t need to get into a discussion with a man of
God in my current… condition, about redemption.

“
Of course,” he said with
a slight smile as he looked at me. He had the same expression as
most did when they looked at me up close. The look that something
was wrong with me but they couldn’t figure out what. “Our Lord and
Savior died so that we might be redeemed.”

“
Even if someone does
something so selfish it could destroy someone else for the rest of
their life? Even if someone does something to make themselves
happier than they could imagine? Even if it’s only for possibly a
few days?”

“
We all make poor
decisions. Hopefully we think long and hard about them before we do
something we will regret.”

I nodded as I stared at the ground at
my feet. My hand slipped into my pocket and found the small box
there. My fingers rubbed it as they did a dozen times a
day.

“
But there is always
forgiveness when we fall,” the priest said in a steady
voice.

I wished he hadn’t said
that last part. I still didn’t have the answers I was
seeking.
Try to make the right choice but
there is always forgiveness.
I wanted
someone to tell me exactly
what
the right choice was here. I doubted you were
still entitled to forgiveness after you died. “Thank you, Father,”
I said as I stood and walked out the door.

The water lapped at the rocks below
us, the slight breeze bringing the salty scent up to where we sat
on the rocky ledge. I picked a rock up and threw it out into the
water.

Jessica sat next to me, reclined,
propping herself up on her elbows. She stared out over the water
but I could tell she wasn’t really seeing anything. She’d said less
than ten words since we’d left the house and walked over the hill
to the ocean.

“
Are we ever going to be
able to move past this?” I said as I my eyes fixed on the bracelet
I had given her at Valentines. The tiny white gold leaves reflected
the bright sun.

Her eyes dropped to the ground too but
she didn’t respond for a while. “I hope so,” she said
softly.

“
I don’t want things to be
this way,” I whispered. She still didn’t say anything.

“
I don’t know how to fix
this, Jessica,” I said. I could feel the desperation inside me
start to boil up. “Things are so spun out of control I don’t know
what to do. I hardly know what is right and what is wrong anymore
here. I never had a hard time seeing the line before in my life,
but now I’m not sure where it begins and ends.” I took a deep
breath and glanced up into her face for a moment before my eyes
fell back to the ground.

“
I wish things could be
different. I wish there was a different way we could have fixed
this whole thing. But this is the way things worked out. It’s not
perfect but it’s what we have. As long as you’re involved that’s
perfect enough for me.”

Jessica took several shallow breaths,
her eyes finally drifting from the ocean to my face. “I just don’t
understand why we can’t just move on with our lives together,” she
finally spoke. “So what if things are a little screwed up. Believe
me, I can deal with a screwed up life. I’ve done it my whole
life.”

“
You don’t understand,” I
said in despair as I pressed my hands into my face and dragged them
down over my eyes.

“
What don’t I understand,
Alex?” she said, her voice cracking. “What is it that I’m missing
here? I love you, I’m pretty sure you still love me. I don’t want
to spend my life with anyone else. What more do we
need?”

“
Of course I love you,
Jessica! But I can’t control what is going to happen to me!” I
shouted louder than I had meant to. I’d been telling her the same
thing over and over.

“
I don’t care!” she
shouted back as she got to her knees and came closer to me. She
took my hand in hers and looked at me with pleading eyes. I could
only keep my eyes fixed on the water below me. “Marry me, Alex.
Marry me.”

I knew I couldn’t look her in the eye
or my already wavering willpower would crumble. I wanted to cry, to
fall apart, anything. I felt like every crucial piece of me was
shattering inside. I thought it was going to kill me when I shook
my head. “I can’t.”

Tears started sliding down Jessica’s
face as she closed her eyes for a moment. She dropped my hand and
in a movement that was too fast, was gone into the woods behind
me.

CHAPTER FIVE

JESSICA

I was hollow after we left California.
I moved around in a numb state, my actions automatic and mindless.
My emotions were numb after Alex said the things he did, after he
killed my hopes of someday calling him my fiancé. People don’t come
back from the dead, he would be staying an angel. While Alex was
still an angel, he would never completely be mine.

I tried to find hope in this
situation, to see a way around this but you can’t overcome
death.

I felt myself pulling away from
everyone, not that there were too many people to distance myself
from. Emily got sick of my non-responsiveness fairly quick. She’d
tried to get into an argument with me several times, tried to talk
some life back into me but there was little point when I didn’t
even respond. Rita was worried about me but as long as I performed
my duties at work there was little she could do. Austin backed off,
for that I guess I could be grateful. Sal thankfully remained
clueless. She didn’t need anything else upsetting her life, she’d
dealt with enough already.

Alex knew exactly what was wrong with
me. He knew why I was so sullen and where my mind had gone to. He
could change it all with four little words but he was never going
to.

I felt crushed. After dealing with the
insanity that had been my life for so long, I had resigned myself
to an existence of unhappiness and solitude. I was never going to
have those things in life that other girls had. And then things
changed. Alex had been able to accept the things that were
happening. More than that, he had saved me from it.

Here was my once chance at a normal
life. As normal as it could be, being in a relationship with
someone who was dead. And now it was being cut off. Never allowed
to continue to grow.

This would be my only chance at this.
No one else would ever understand me the way Alex did. No one would
ever accept me as I was and with all the impossible things my life
involved.

And most importantly, I would never
love another man like I did Alex. A love like that didn’t come
around more than once a lifetime.

But we were never going to move beyond
this point. We were as far as we were going to go.

In a way Jason had been right. As long
as angels were a part of my life, I was going to be
alone.

X

“
Come on,
that
has got to make you
feel a little better,” Emily said as she smiled and waved at the
guys across the club. They waved and smiled back. Even though I was
trying not to look at them in return, I could tell it was me their
all too probing eyes were turned upon. I didn’t understand why, not
with Emily standing beside me looking like a Greek
goddess.

“
How
is this supposed to make me feel better?” I said as I pulled
her toward a more secluded part of the club. “I just feel like a
piece of meat.”

“
Well if you don’t want
it, I wish I was getting a little more of that attention,” she said
as she tried not to let her drink spill. Despite Emily’s claim to
be a terrible drunk she had downed a few drinks already. Apparently
I was going to be driving her home. “I don’t think they can help it
though, just look at you. I don’t have that angelic
advantage.”

I shushed her and looked around to
make sure no one had heard her. It was unneeded though; the music
was pounding so loudly you couldn’t hear anything unless you were
right next to the person. The noise was hurting my head. I was a
little worried my ear drums might burst.

Emily was right though. With the
strobe lights flashing, there was something a little, well… weird
with the way it danced on my skin. It seemed just a little too
luminescent. It creeped me out a little.

I had come home from work earlier that
day to find Emily waiting for me.

“
I can’t take this mopey,
empty thing you’ve become anymore,” she said as she hauled me into
my bathroom. “We’re going out. One way or another you’ll be coming
back a little less miserable.”

Just under an hour later she had me
buffed, shined, and makeupped to perfection and here we
were.

We found an empty table and I tried my
best not to touch its sticky surface as we sat down.

“
So what’s the deal with
you lately?” Emily said bluntly as she turned her eyes on me. “Why
have you been so… gone?”

“
I haven’t been gone,” I
said defensively, noticing another guy leering at me.
Why
did Emily think this
would cheer me up?

“
Ugh, don’t even try to
pull that crap on me,” she said as she rolled her eyes. “I can
hardly even stand to be around you recently. You can barely even
look at Alex. And seriously,
it’s
Ale
x! What’s up?”

I kept Emily’s stare for a
long minute, debating with myself on whether to finally tell
someone what was devouring me from the inside out. It would
probably feel good to just get it out. “On the night that Cole took
me, he told me Alex was going to ask me certain
question
that night.”

Emily seemed confused for a minute. I
had little doubt her slow wit was connected to the drink in her
hand.

“
Alex was going to ask me
to marry him that night,” I spelled it out for her.

“
Oh my gosh! Are you
serious?” Emily gaped.