Fallen Angel

I see her and my entire world falls out from underneath me.

I’m going to kill them.

I know that it’s her. I’ve spent hours with my fingers in her long honey curls. I’ve memorized the coordinates of the freckles on her collarbone and the dimples on her cheeks. I’ve tripped and sailed straight into those gray eyes more times than I can count. I’ve commited myself to the softness and fullness of her stomach and the way it moves when she laughs.

I know that it’s her. 

But at the same time, it’s not.

She’s sprawled across the ground, hair and limbs floating around her in a growing pool of blood. Her lips are just open, and I know in that moment that her soul is floating up through them. She’s wearing her favorite dress, and the blue and white flowers are slowly soaking with scarlet.

She’s not my Avery anymore, she’s Ophelia in the water.

It barely takes me two seconds to choke down this new image of her before I’m running through the store. I’m pushing over shelves and sculptures, I don’t care if I get sued or yelled at or fired for loss of inventory. Something far more important than a few antiques in a second-hand shop was destroyed here.

I fall to her side and I’m crying in an instant. I want to hold her. I need her to comfort me. I wrap my arms around her, one hand on her spine and one behind her head, and lift her up. She’s so frail—so light. The lightness freaks me out, because my shellshocked brain equates lightness with emptiness. Nothingness. 

I’m going to kill them.

“Avery.” I whisper—or at least, I try to. My voice comes out loud and crackling like metal pressing against metal. I feel like an idiot, a lost little kid.

She’s still in my hands. She doesn’t answer like she’s supposed to, with a smile or a quippy, stupid pun. 

Stupid.

Stupid.

Suddenly I’m angry and my tears feel hot against my face. 

I told her that they knew where we worked when I left this morning. Not even eight hours ago. I told her to stay home, because they hadn’t yet figured out where she lived, just where she got a paycheck. 

“Teddy, we can’t be paranoid forever.”

I must’ve stared at her like she was crazy, cause her teasing smile had softened and she’d put a hand on my arm.

“…You really are scared, honey? This is…this is really a big deal?”

“Yes,” I’d urged, cupping her face in my hands, “it’s a really big deal. Please stay home.”

She didn’t know what they were capable of. That they weren’t just a group of nagging church people I’d left behind in a suburb. She didn’t know the truth of what they did—what I did. The evil.

She'd nodded, then leaned forward and kissed me. In that moment, I almost did forget about all of it. She had a way of doing that to me.

When she pulled away, she nodded again.

“Okay, okay. I’ll see what I can do.”

But she didn’t listen to me. Why didn’t she listen to me?

The stickiness of the red on my skin launches me out of my frustration and my heart becomes a drum against my chest. I feel like my body is caving in. My lungs are too full, my eyes are full of salt and too blurred to see what I need to do next. I was always the rational one and I can’t be rational right now.

I just start screaming.

Every sound that comes out of me makes me feel even worse, even more guilty for not getting here earlier. For not answering her phone call. I notice the letter-opener in her hand, no doubt her only protector in her last moments. She shouldn’t have needed a fucking letter-opener, she should’ve had me.

I bury my face in her hair and taste bile when blood hits my lips. My screaming turns to goucghing and I turn my head away from her ghost pale face.

And then I see it.

Just behind her, framed by a broken vase, is a scrap of paper. It’s his handwriting.

“You can’t run forever,” it says, “look at the wreckage you’ll start to leave behind you. Return to us now. Complete the ritual. Or she will only be the first. —L.F.”

I’m going to kill them.

“I’m going to kill you!” I shout at nothing. I know he’s gone by now, racing away with his cronies and leaving sizzling footsteps behind him. That murderer. That devil.

How poetic of him, taking away my guardian angel.

I feel a rage in my throat, and old rage that makes my skin crawl. It’s the part of me that I left two years ago, the worst part about myself. The part I hate. 

The entire reason I left them…and got myself into this mess.

Got her into this mess.

I never thought…

I never thought they would go this far.

“Idiot,” I hiss, “I’m an idiot.”

Because of course they would go this far. I went that far with others who left us, back when I was one of them. That rage, the kind I feel now, is otherworldly. And not in a shitty symbolic way—truly not of this world.

I’m still crying, but it’s like the tears have run out. I’m just shaking and heaving and choking on my own spit. The feeling of the blood is making me sick, but the idea of letting her go seems blasphemous.

But I can hear police sirens now.

I didn’t even notice that the alarm was going off.

2I look down at her face again, her round cheeks already seeming sunken in and deflated. 

My baby.

I shudder and lean down, placing a kiss on her forehead.

“I’m going to kill them,” I promise, once more so I know her soul—dancing in the air above us—can hear and understand, “I’m going to. I love you, Avery. I love you, baby. I love you.”

And then I lay her back down and flee.