We’re flying, but uncontrollably. Like a badly wounded swan.
He’s so intent on dislodging me, he doesn’t seem to be aware that we’ve strayed into the very edges of the cerubim’s flaring flames.
They don’t burn, however. They’re welcoming. Warmly embracing.
The scarlet glow makes the angel’s feathery wings flicker with a bloody light, as if actually aflame.
He screams.
His wings really are on fire.
With a glare of hate at me, he takes his revenge.
He lets Lorn slip from his grasp.
And Lorn falls, falls away from the ferociously blazing sun that is the furious cerubim.
*
As both angels now burn so terribly around me, I let go of the wing.
Not just because I have to, even though there’s increasingly so little to hold onto.
No – it’s because I want to.
I want to be with Lorn.
To follow him as he falls.
After all, isn’t that my skill?
To soar unaided through the air, as if actually flying?
I swoop down towards Lorn.
Grasp him by an arm.
Pull him towards me.
Embrace him.
Warmly.
Tightly.
I kiss him.
We’ll fall together.
As one.
That’s my choice.
*
Chapter 31
My kisses waken Lorn from his daze.
He smiles lazily, like someone waking from a pleasant dream.
If he realises that we’re falling, he doesn’t show it.
Rather, he warps his arms around me. Embraces me as tightly as I’m holding him.
Such that we’re almost one, not two.
He kisses me. His lips melding with mine.
I caress the back he has never allowed me to see. The back that had worried him so. Yet had never concerned me.
His skin flaps by his side, the folds the angel had carved free. I feel only the hard, stone-like shoulder blades.
His calcified wings.
Yet as we embrace, that hardness softens beneath my fingers.
Ripples.
Flexes fluidly.
He smiles.
Says, ‘Thank you.’
There’s the softest of flutters, the feathers growing, expanding beneath my caressing palms. Then abruptly, with a hard, harsh flap, Lorn’s wings snap free.
Abruptly, too, we’re flying.
Flying effortlessly back towards the blazing cerubim.
*
‘No, no Lorn: you didn’t see!’ I cry out in urgent warning. ‘The angel – I saw the Senator, as an angel, set on fire in those flames!’
‘Then he can’t have been ready,’ Lorn insists, continuing his rapid ascent towards the flaring cerubim. ‘He would never have been ready.’
The flaring, flickering flames of the cerubim now looms everywhere about us. Lorn glows entirely with that glittering bloody red; yet he’s right, he’s not aflame.
Unless you count being aflame inside; with love, with bliss.
The skin of his back is already healing. There’s just the slightest smattering now of blood, just seven drops lying on the very top of his shoulder.
And within each drop, there’s a pip.
I touch them delicately one by one with my fingers.
Wondering which to choose.
‘Not yet, Lorn,’ I say, giving him a final kiss. ‘I’m not ready.’
Wriggling free of his arms, I let go of him.
Then I’m falling once more.
*
Chapter 32
Lorn is too deeply much at one with the cerubim to rescue me.
But I don’t want him to rescue me.
I don’t need rescuing.
The carnival is a whirling world in its own right. Or, if you prefer, worlds within worlds.
I carefully place my chosen pip within the crease of my palm’s lifeline.
It snaps, quickens – snakes out before me like a swiftly untwining thread.
It writhes and weaves through the many interweaving threads of the carnival. It latches on here: here too – as well as here, and here.
Holding on to my end of life’s thread, I use it to swing upwards, up and up through the darkness. Up towards the glow of the carefully directed lanterns.
I let go, soaring gracefully through the air.
Flying.
The small yet incredibly high plinth, of course, lies somewhere out there in darkness.
I land, of course, on it elegantly. Gracefully.
I stretch out my vast wings.
I peer down imperiously on the cowering shepherds far below me.
It all adds to the sense of the miraculous.
End
If you enjoyed reading this book, you might also enjoy (or you may know someone else who might enjoy) these other books by Jon Jacks.
The Caught – The Rules – Chapter One – The Changes – Sleeping Ugly
The Barking Detective Agency – The Healing – The Lost Fairy Tale
A Horse for a Kingdom – Charity – The Most Beautiful Things (Now includes The Last Train)
The Dream Swallowers – Nyx; Granddaughter of the Night – Jonah and the Alligator
Glastonbury Sirens – Dr Jekyll’s Maid – The 500-Year Circus – The Desire: Class of 666
P – The Endless Game – DoriaN A – Wyrd Girl – The Wicker Slippers
Heartache High (Vol I) – Heartache High: The Primer (Vol II) – Heartache High: The Wakening (Vol III)
Miss Terry Charm, Merry Kris Mouse & The Silver Egg – The Last Angel – Eve of the Serpent
Seecrets – The Cull – Dragonsapien – The Boy in White Linen – Porcelain Princess – Freaking Freak
Died Blondes – Queen of all the Knowing World – The Truth About Fairies – Lowlife
Elm of False Dreams – God of the 4th Sun – A Guide for Young Wytches
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