He was right, and they both knew it. Tate was the sort of person who was always looking for an out, a means of escape. She’d spent her childhood half-lost to the vast worlds of her imagination, or the creations of others via a steady intake of comic books and fantasy novels. At sixteen, she’d begun to seek out other, darker escapes—in the form of drinks, and pills, and partying. For a while that had been enough. But then her mom died—taken by a cancer that started in her bones and spread rapidly through the rest of her—and there was no reprieve from the pain of her passing. In the wake of that loss, the wrongness of Tate’s life became so distinct, so debilitating, that she felt helpless to do anything more than wait for the day that the illusion would shatter, a door would open, or maybe a window, and she’d finally be able to escape into the life she was born for. It was naive. Maybe even delusional. But Tate couldn’t let it go.
Reed was well aware of this. In fact, they’d both been waiting for the day Tate would work up the courage to go, leaving the gas station and Reed behind her once and for all. It was an unspoken inevitability, and they’d both accepted it and said their silent goodbyes a long time ago.
For a moment they stood in a silent impasse, each waiting for the other to take back what they’d said. Then Tatenodded, took her backpack from its locker, and cut through the store, pausing only to nab a bag of chips and pack of cigarettes from the shelves behind the counter on her way out. Reed trailed after her, but she made a point to ignore him as she started for the street. They both knew she’d be back tomorrow, anyway. He’d already fired her more times than she could count, and in turn Tate always showed up for her next shift, and thus the cycle continued.
It was a brisk morning. The air held the nagging cold of early winter, and the streets of the town were deserted, save for a few semis that passed with a roar and rush of wind. Tate walked with her head bowed, arms folded tight over her chest. She was halfway to her home when she heard what sounded like lightning striking, though the sky was clear of clouds.
There was a great burst of light, and for an instant Tate was quite certain that a semi was barreling toward her. The shining beacon split the night sky open, and a ball of fire hurtled through the gash in the darkness and struck in a nearby alley just yards from where Tate stood. The impact was enough to throw Tate off her feet, but she caught herself on a nearby telephone pole, tearing her palms open on the staples and nails from old flyers. Rolling vibrations emanated down the street, ebbing up through the soles of Tate’s sneakers, making her knees feel weak. The air bristled with static.
Tate peered through a pall of smoke, to the place where the fireball made impact. There, in the wake of the explosion,was an entity not known to man. The creature—the angel freshly fallen from heaven—had many eyes, most of them vaguely human, though some had the slit pupils of a cat. Its body—if one could even call it that—was comprised of shifting rings that were something of an amalgamation of flesh and metal. A substance that, as far as Tate knew, did not exist on Earth in any form. The creature had six wings at its core—all of them feathered, the joints broken at gruesome angles.
At the sight of the seraph, Tate unleashed a scream that could have torn the heavens—and it very nearly did, in some lower, more rudimentary half dimension where even the smallest sounds caused cataclysmic disturbances. But Tate would not be privy to this knowledge until much later, when the angel informed her of such.
The light of the seraph dimmed and quivered, its wheels began to cycle and spin, kicking up wind that scattered trash and dust across the streets, ripped at Tate’s curls so violently that her hair came loose of its braid. She staggered back, tripping over her own sneakers, and landed hard on the curb, scraping her elbow badly in the process.
And when she did that, the seraph seemed to...flinch. As if it was privy to her pain. It spoke, though it had no mouth, first Mandarin, then what sounded like Hindi, and when that didn’t take, it tried English: “You are kin of Cain, are you not?”
This made no sense to Tate. “I’m... eighteen. I work at a gas station.”
This seemed to satisfy the seraph, who settled and shifted forms again, more slowly this time and without wind or light or heat. What unfolded next, Tate’s mortal eyes were not fit to decipher. It wasn’t that she couldn’tseewhat was happening, only that she couldn’t understand it. Any more than a two-year-old could understand the intricacies of rocket science. All she saw were shifting glimpses behind the revolving rings and beating wings.
But what she did know was that where there was once a seraph now stood a girl, not far from her own age, naked and long haired and strikingly beautiful. Her wings were gone, and she appeared human in all ways but one: she had kept her eyes. They studded her arms like jewels. One in the crook between her collarbones. Another three embedded into her forehead. One in each palm of her hands. Another in the soft indentation where her belly button should’ve been.
And all of them were fixed on Tate.
“Holyshit.”
“I have seen many a holy thing in the eons since my creation. But... my many eyes have never glimpsed this sacred shit you speak of—”
Before she had the chance to finish her statement, a blinding light split the darkness, far brighter than the one before. In the wake of it, a six-winged figure with four faces—that of a lamb, a lion, an ox, and an eagle. It stood opposite them on the street, perched atop cloven hooves, its wings flickering. When the creature spoke, its voice seemed to echo from the depths of the gutters, and the wind andthe darkness, too, as if the night itself was speaking. “Be not afraid.”
There was an arc of light—like a molten scythe carving through the air—followed by a searing shock wave that threw Tate off her feet. When she struck the asphalt, on her hands and knees, her cheek crushed painfully against the curb. Standing over her was the seraph girl. She’d taken the blow for Tate, and was bleeding badly, but she held both hands outstretched—open eyes glowing in the soft of her palms.
Under her gaze, the enemy angel writhed and struggled with a strangled scream. It shifted faces so quickly, its appearance became a gruesome conglomeration of the animal kingdom—mammal, reptile, insect—until finally, with a shuddering heave, it fell still.
And when it did, the seraph girl broke to her knees. The eyes embedded in her palms squeezed tightly shut. She clasped one hand to the nasty burn at her waist and crumpled to the ground. Tate forced herself to stand, half turned, ready to leave the seraph to her fate. But then the seraph opened her human eyes, which promptly filled with tears. “Help... me.”
Tate took the angel back to her apartment because it seemed like the decent thing to do. She took a hoodie from her backpack, guided the seraph’s arms into its sleeves, and zipped it up. It was an eight-block walk from the gas stationto the studio apartment she rented on the top floor of a motel. The unit was featureless and rather small, just large enough to house a reading chair, a kitchenette, a cramped bathroom, and the twin-size bed where Tate spent many a sleepless night.
Tate made the angel sit on the toilet seat, tossed her a ragged Prince T-shirt, and set about the gruesome task of addressing her injuries. In another time—before her mother’s death and the bad years that followed it—Tate had wanted to become a trauma nurse. She had the temperament for it; everyone said so. Her hands never went shaky at the sight of blood, and she kept a cool head in tense situations. But despite her natural aptitude for nursing, Tate found that caring for a wounded seraph was a difficult task indeed.
Logic told her to begin by assessing her patient: the wounded seraph girl (if she was a girl) sitting perched atop her toilet seat, feet flat on the floor, arms braced on her kneecaps. She estimated that the seraph had approximately ninety-eight eyes, though many of them she held closed. Those that were open and visible seemed to track Tate’s every move as she sorted through the contents of her first aid kit and did what little she could to tend the seraph’s injuries—smearing antibacterial cream across her wounds and bandaging them, dressing her burns, icing her bruises. A few of her eyes appeared wounded, too, and Tate didn’t know how to remedy those wounds, except to flush them clear of blood with a bit of saline solution and patch them with squares of gauze and medical tape.
“What’s your name?” the seraph asked, watching her with all of her open eyes. The angel raised a hand and touched one of Tate’s curls, marveling at her, the angel’s pupils swelling and shrinking. She looked at Tate as though she was someoneworthlooking at, and it made Tate’s heart skip a beat or two.
“Tate,” she said, carefully securing a bandage to a nasty scrape at the seraph’s temple. “What’s yours?”
“It can’t be uttered in your tongue,” said the seraph, wincing slightly. Several of her eyes squeezed tightly shut at the pain. “The closest thing you could call me is...” She proceeded to make several inhuman sounds over a period of fifteen seconds, some of which involved hollow whistles and low tonal fluctuations so slight they were almost imperceptible to the untrained ear. It was a beautiful sound, a beautiful name, but when Tate tried to pronounce it, she failed miserably several times before the seraph took mercy on her.
“How about you call me Kamiel?” the angel suggested, cutting her short. “Or perhaps Kami, if you can’t pronounce that either.”
“I like Kamiel,” said Tate, relieved, and a little embarrassed, at her own verbal limitations. “Who was that figure across the street? The one with all of the animal faces?”
“A war seraph. He’s hunting me.”
This didn’t surprise her. Tate was far from religious, but she was levelheaded enough to know an angel when she saw one. “Why?”
Kamiel seemed to grapple with the words. “I... I did notwant to worship anymore. I grew tired of singing His praises. My fatigue became anger. My anger became a mighty fire, like the eye in the heart of a star, and I burned a hole through the heavens and fell here.”
