World After

62

WE MANAGE to stagger to a beach house among a row of houses shrouded in the mist. In the World Before, these houses were within walking distance of the water but not beachfront properties. In the World After, they sit in a sea of rubble, and they’re the closest houses to the water. Many of them still look undisturbed with their seahorse flags and wooden lounge chairs on the porch, as if waiting for their residents to come home.

I stumble into the living room behind Raffe, so exhausted as to be almost oblivious to my surroundings. Inside, we’re protected from the wind, and although the house is not heated, it feels as if it is by comparison to where we’ve just been. I’m wet and sandy with my flimsy dress clinging to me like wet tissue paper.

Unlike me, Raffe is on full alert. He checks every corner of the house before relaxing his guard.

There’s no electricity so the rooms are dark except for the misty glow of the moon coming in through the picture windows. We’re in luck, though. There’s a fireplace with a box of wood beside it, along with matches and decorative candles on the mantel.

I try lighting a candle. My hand shakes so badly I break three matches before I can finally get one to light. Raffe starts a fire. As soon as the tiny flame lights up, something in me relaxes a little, as if a part of me was seriously worried that my basic functions were on their way to shutting down before the fire started.

Despite his shivering, he gets up and pulls the vertical blinds closed on the windows. I don’t know how he manages to do it. It takes everything I’ve got just to keep myself from crawling into the fireplace to get closer to the heat.

He even takes the time to grab blankets and towels from somewhere in the dark recesses of the house, and he drapes a blanket around me. My skin is so frozen that I can barely feel the soft warmth of his hand brushing against my neck.

“How do you feel?” he asks.

I answer through chattering teeth. “As well as can be expected after a swim in angel-infested waters.”

Raffe puts his hand on my forehead. “You humans are so fragile. If time doesn’t kill you off, it’s germs or sharks or hypothermia.”

“Or blood-crazed angels.”

He shakes his head. “One minute you’re fine, the next minute you’re gone forever.” He stares broodily into the flickering fire.

My hair is still dripping icy water down my neck and back, and my dress sticks to me like it’s made of wet sand. As if thinking the same thing, he wraps a beach towel around his waist and rolls it along his washboard stomach to keep it in place.

Then he takes his boots off. And peels off his pants.

“What are you doing?” I sound nervous.

He doesn’t pause as he strips beneath his towel. “Trying to warm up. You should do the same if you don’t want your precious heat to get sucked out by your wet clothes.” His pants land with a plop on the rug.

I hesitate while he sits close to me in front of the fire.

He opens his demon wings. I suppose he does it to dry them off, but it has the added effect of being a heat trap. The muscles along my back and shoulders relax as soon as I feel the warmth swirling behind me.

I shiver, trying to shake off as much of the cold as I can. He tightens the circle of his wings, keeping the heat of the fire growing between us.

“Good job out there,” he says. He looks at me with quiet approval.

I blink at him in surprise. It’s not like no one has ever said that to me. But somehow this is different. Unexpected.

“You too.” I want to say more. I crack open the vault in my head to see if I can peek in and maybe see something worth saying, but it all pushes against the door, wanting to flood out. I slam the door shut, leaning against it to keep it from bursting open. Still, my tongue gets tangled in all the things I want to say. “Yeah, you too.”

He nods as if he understands, as if I actually had said all those things tumbling out of the vault and he accepts them.

We listen to the fire crackle for a while.

I’ve warmed enough to want to be free of my gritty, wet dress, which is sucking the fledgling heat from my skin. I wrap my blanket around myself and bite into the overlapping edge to keep it in place as a shield.

He grins when he sees me squirming underneath, wrestling with the wet dress. “I’m sure a respectable modern man would turn his back so he wouldn’t see if there was a slip-up.”

I nod, keeping a tight bite on my blanket.

“But we’d lose our heat shelter.” He raises a wing a few inches to demonstrate. Cool air immediately touches my legs. He lowers his wing back into place again. He shrugs. “I guess you’ll just have to not slip up.”

I continue to squirm, getting myself free of the left sleeve.

“Don’t laugh or anything,” he says, “because that could be disastrous.”

I squint at him, giving him a glare that tells him not to try to make me laugh.

“Have you heard that joke about—”

I rip through the flimsy dress under my blanket. It was ruined anyway. I tear it off and toss it out from beneath the blanket.

It lands on top of his pants on the rug.

Raffe bursts out laughing. It’s a beautiful thing—rich and carefree. It calls to me to laugh along with him.

“You are so great at creative solutions,” he says still chuckling. “They usually involve ripping, tearing, kicking, or stabbing, but they’re creative.”

I let go of the blanket with my teeth now that I can hold it securely around me with my hands. “I just got tired of the wetness sticking to me, that’s all. I think I was pretty safe from the threat of your joke being funny.”

“I’m wounded by your comment,” he says with a smile.

The word “wounded” echoes in my head, and I see it does in his, too, because his smile fades.

“What happened back there at the old aerie? I saw you get stung by the scorpion. I watched you die. How did you survive?”

I explain about the scorpion sting paralyzing and slowing down the heart and breathing so that the victim seems dead.

“I thought for sure I’d lost you.”

Lost me?

I stare into the fire without seeing it. “I thought I’d lost you too.” The words barely come out.

The fire crackles and pops, eating away at the wood. It reminds me of the fire at the aerie when Raffe carried me to safety even though he thought I was dead.

“Thank you for returning me to my family. That was a crazy, dangerous thing to do.”

“I was feeling a little crazy and dangerous then.”

“Yeah, I saw that.” I’ll never get rid of the image of him smashing the giant scorpion tubes in rage and killing all the monsters after seeing me die.

His lips twitch as if laughing at himself. “That must have been entertaining.”

“No, it really wasn’t. It was kind of…” heartbreaking. “Heartbreaking.” I blink when I realize what just slipped out of my mouth. “I mean…” Nothing comes to mind that I can substitute for what I just said.

“Heart.” He looks deeply into the flames. “Breaking.” The sounds flow out between his lips like they’re new to him, like he’s never said them before. He nods. “Yeah. I suppose that’s one way to put it.”

The fire crackles. It’s surprising how quickly a fire can warm you up.

“I wasn’t saying you were heartbroken.” I sound like English is a new language for me, the way I stutter out the words. “I just meant it was hard for me to… to watch.”

He neither confirms nor denies that he might or might not have been even a teeny bit heartbroken.

“Well, okay, maybe you did seem just a little heartbroken.” So embarrassing. Now, I’m totally fishing. A part of me is chastising me for being such a dork. The rest of me is listening carefully for a reaction.

The orange and red flames grow larger and warmer. The crackling and popping is rhythmic and hypnotic. The heat is exquisite.

“You’re shivering,” he says. He sounds reluctant. Maybe even sad. “Take a shower. Maybe we’ll be lucky and there will be hot water.”

He hesitates while I hold my breath.

Then he turns away from me.

He stands and heads into the darkness of the house.

As soon as he moves the shelter of his wings, the cold seeps back in. I watch him fade into the shadows. His dark wings and bowed head disappear first, then the broad shoulders and arms.

Then nothing.