I tried not to look too hard at the injuries that covered his flesh. I was about ninety percent sure some of them were new, and I was dying to ask why he wasn’t healing at a normal angel rate. But I wasn’t here to ask questions today.
“You know what I miss most from before I ended up here, other than people?” I gave him a second before I continued. “Color. Everything here is some shade of brown or gray. The artist in me wants to break out a palette of paints and turn this place into something beautiful.”
“You want to paint the walls of Hell?” Joriel asked skeptically.
I grinned to myself. He was talking to me. “Why not? The only real difference between a dungeon and a palace is the decoration.”
“And the light and temperature,” he muttered.
“One problem at a time.” I studied the curved walls that rose around us. “The tunnel effect is actually perfect for full murals, though I guess I’d have a hard time reaching the ceiling.” It wasn’t that high up, nothing like the high ceilings of the palace in Heaven, but it was still a few feet above my head.
“What would you paint?” Joriel asked after a pause.
“I’m not sure. How would you feel about a sunset? Something with a lot of pinks and oranges and yellows. Then I could do the ground in either emerald green or dark blue to represent a field or an ocean. What do you think?” I glanced at Joriel.
He stared around the cave. “I think a sunset is so much more than colors in the sky. It’s the feel of the sun on your skin, the scent and taste of salt on the breeze, the sound of birds calling to each other.”
“I’m an artist. I only have the ability to change what I see, not what I hear and feel. I learned a long time ago to accept that there are some things I am powerless to change.”
“Right now you’re powerless to change anything,” he pointed out. “You don’t have any paints here.”
“Maybe I can’t paint the walls, but that doesn’t mean I’m powerless to change anything. I’m still in control of myself. I can choose what I think and say.”
Joriel shook his head at me, and I got the feeling he didn’t believe me, or he thought I was being naive.
“The last painting I did was of a garden on fire,” I told him. “I wonder if anyone’s decided to peek at it by now. I usually hide my pictures in my closet where no one else can see them, but the flaming garden one was still drying when I left.”
“Why did you hide them?”
“Because I was afraid of what people would think if I let them see the images in my head.”
“So even angels of the first order fear judgment.”
“Stupid, right? Then again, you’ve never met my mother. Not that I’m trying to blame her for my insecurities—that’s on me. I let myself believe that no one else would see the beauty inside the darkness.”
“So why’d you tell me then?”
“Because I wanted to.” I answered him honestly.
I wanted Joriel to seeme, not just another angel of the first order but the person I was beyond the wings I no longer had. And I wanted to see him. Maybe it was because we were alone in this prison, stuck with only each other for company. Well, each other and whoever was responsible for the cuts and bruises that covered his body.
“Painting was how I dealt with my feelings. I gave them colors and shapes, turned everything into pictures that I could understand.”
“So if you had all your paints laid out right now, what would you really draw on these walls?”
I felt my cheeks flush. He was right. If I were given the opportunity to paint, I wouldn’t paint a sunset. “I don’t even know where I’d start,” I told him. “There are so many things that have happened, so much I want to get out.”
“What are you really doing here, Laila?” he asked. “You have free rein of the entire prison.”
“I don’t want to be alone, and I worry about you.”
“Don’t. I’m not your problem. We’re not in this together. This is Hell, Laila—it’s every man for himself. Someday you might show up here and find a monster who doesn’t remember that he used to be an angel.”
I sucked in a breath, not so much at his words but at the truth behind them. He believed what he was telling me.
“When that day comes, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
EIGHT
