“Wait. Shane, what are you going to do?”
I smiled at her. I saw her body melt at my expression. Then I laughed, “I’m going to go back there and probably kill him.” With that, I left her there and drove over the snow back to the cabin.
I never made it back.
Halfway between the cabin and the bar lay a small rumpled mound in snow. The splash of bright red against the whiteness of the snow was what caused me to stop the snowmobile and walk over to it. The smell of sickly sweet blood, mixed with the freshly falling icy snow, filled my nose.
Thick dark hair spread out across red snow.
Grace.
Grace?
Red snow?
Grace’s body. My beautiful Grace, bleeding into the snow.
There was bright red blood all over the snow.
No. This isn’t right. That can’t be real. That CAN’T be blood. The snow is too red.
Grace. What the hell happened? WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED?
“Grace? Grace!” I could hear my voice screaming. Breaking, sobbing her name.
Blood.
There was blood everywhere.
I knelt in front of her and cautiously placed her head on my knees. Her life was pouring out of her. Leaking all over the white snow.
A knife.
So much blood.
Tears blurred my eyes and I squeezed them shut. Please God. Please God. Please God, hear me. Please God, save her.
I put pressure on her side where I thought the blood was coming from, but the wound was too big. There was too much blood. It was warm on my hands.
No, no, no. Grace. Please don’t leave me.
“Grace, hang on. Grace, stay with me. Please GRACE!”
I looked across the snow where Blake’s body was slumped in a huge heap a few yards away. Buzzing sounds of snowmobile engines surrounded me as I lifted Grace’s limp body into my arms and cuddled her close. Her blood oozed warm and thick over my hands; too much blood. Please, God, please spare her.
Her warm blood was spreading across the material of my jeans, soaking through my coat and onto my shirt.
Lea’s screams echoed in the background, but the only thing I could distinctly hear was the slowing weak rhythm of Grace’s heartbeat. “Please, Father, let me be the angel you created me to be. Let me take her pain,” I cried. “Too much blood, Grace, there’s too much blood.”
“Shane, Shane! The ambulance isn’t going to get through this snow! We have to carry her inside,” a familiar voice called to me.
I knew it was probably too late, but I gathered her in my arms and stood up. “Don’t be scared...heaven is breathtaking,” I whispered in her ear as I carried her dying body over the snow to the resort.
Chapter 14
The bright lights of the emergency room’s waiting area stung my eyes. Doctors and paramedics had rushed Grace’s body through the hallways and into surgery, while I stood by helplessly; Grace’s blood was dry and crusted over my hands and arms. Her skin looked pale and lifeless when they wheeled her off the ambulance. Blood was splattered across her forehead and cheeks. It dried in clumps through her hair and on her cold wet clothes. So small and still, she laid on the gurney. When my eyes lost sight of her behind the closed doors of the emergency surgical unit, my legs just gave. I slumped back from the doors and slowly slipped down against the wall until I hit the cold tiled floor of the hospital. I held my head in my hands and cried. “This is all my fault,” I said.
Lea’s body slumped against mine and her arms wrapped themselves around my shaking shoulders. Everybody was in the waiting room with us, but my words were the only words anybody had spoken.
As minutes slowly dragged into hours, I was vaguely aware of people offering me coffee or water. My stomach churned so violently that I didn’t think I would be able to hold anything down. I never moved from my spot on the floor. I just kept thinking that I needed to hear her laugh again. I needed to see her smile again and I needed to hold her and never let her go.
Eight hours. Eight hours, thirty-nine minutes and twelve seconds later, the doors to the surgical unit swung open. Three surgeons with vomit green scrubs walked through, pulling their surgical masks off but still wearing grim expressions. I searched their faces frantically for any indication of how Grace was. Nothing.
I bolted to my feet and ran towards the doctors just as the rest of my friends did. “What’s going on? How is she?” My words sputtered harshly from my lips, coming out raw and angry.
“Which one of you is part of Grace Taylor’s immediate family?” The words slapped me hard, open handed-like a bitch, across my face.
“She lives with me, my parents raised her. She doesn’t have any other family,” Lea coughed out through tears. “Can you just tell us what’s going on, Doctor? It’s been like almost nine hours and we haven’t been told anything, and honestly, I’m afraid of what I might start doing to this waiting area and all its furniture if somebody doesn’t start talking real soon,” Lea threatened through sobs. Ethan, Tucker and Brayden actually crowded in around the doctors at Lea’s threat, menacingly.
The oldest of the three surgeons motioned Lea to the seats, “Please, come and sit and I’ll explain.” Together, we moved as one unit to the seats, all watching the doctors cautiously.
“Your friend is in recovery right now. We had to place Miss Taylor in a medically induced coma so we could repair all the damage that was done due to the wounds she sustained. She has youth and good health on her side so we are hoping she recovers and heals correctly from the lacerations. She lost a lot of blood, almost 40 %, and it might take days, weeks or even months for her to wake up and get back to the person she was, if she ever does. It’s too early to tell how much damage was done when her heart stopped…two blood transfusions…pierced lungs…major organ damage…life support…miracles…” The words jumbled all together, but I knew exactly what the surgeons were saying.
“Her heart stopped?” Lea cut in. “But, what happened? What happened to her? I don’t understand!”
“We don’t know the circumstances of the attack, but what we do know is that Miss Taylor came into the ER with a puncture wound under her arm that traveled straight down to her hip bone, which damaged numerous vital organs. Now if you will excuse us, we need to meet with the police who have been waiting for our statements on this matter.”
While everybody else went to go eat and wait some more, Lea and I waited to be let into the Intensive Care Unit.
Two hours later, Lea and I silently entered Grace’s ICU room, each taking a seat silently next to Grace’s hospital bed.
I raked my hands through my hair. “This is all my fault, Lea. I should have been there. I shouldn’t have left her. I pushed her. I pushed her too far. I practically pushed her right to Blake,” I whispered.
“No, Shane, trust me. You don’t understand,” Lea’s tears blurred her words.
I leaned my forehead into my hands. “I told her I was in love with her.”
Lea looked up at me, eyes wide in shock.
I slid my hands through my hair and gazed up at the ceiling hoping for some sort of divine help.
“Hold up…What?” Lea gasped.
“I messed up. I thought she felt it too. I didn’t know she was really into her ex-boyfriend. I messed up and we fought. I pushed her away and now she’s here. I wasn’t there to protect her.”
“Ex-boyfriend?”
I wiped at the tears that were forming in my eyes. “Yeah, that’s what she said in the Jeep when we were stuck in the snow. She didn’t want anyone but him.” I laughed roughly. “My fucking luck, the only time I let myself feel something for someone and there’s no chance, and now she’s got fucking machines breathing for her.”
“Do you think she’ll make it, Shane? Do you think...”
I stood up, suddenly filled with a fury and rage. “No. Life isn’t made of miracles, roses and cotton fucking candy, Lea. She’s in a coma. That sick bastard knew exactly where to cut her to make he
r bleed to death, to weaken her entire body before we could get her to a hospital. Think about what she felt! Think about what she suffered the whole time. How many times did they have to revive her? Even the doctor said to pray for a miracle in the same sentence he said how long we should wait before stopping the machines breathing life into her! There’s no such thing as miracles. Life doesn’t work that way. There’s no beauty in it, there’s no hope.”
Lea stared at me with those big brown eyes, pleading for me to take what I said back. Well, I can’t, Lea. This is all part of my punishment, to have someone else I love taken from me. You, Lea, you’re just some collateral human damage that those selfish winged fuckers that you pray to, don’t even give a fuck about. I walked over and sat next to Grace on her bed. Leaning over her, I brushed a dark lock of hair off her face.
Lea walked to the other side, took Grace’s hand, and held up her wrist. “Hope. It’s what’s tattooed on her wrist.”
“Love on this one,” I sighed. I knew what was Lea was trying to do, give herself hope despite all I had just said. My God, how blind human faith runs so deep. Ignorance truly is bliss.
“Faith is on the back of her neck,” Lea whispered. “Do you believe in heaven, Shane?”
Agony twisted through my soul, tying it into knots.
“She’ll go right to heaven, Lea, and I bet it’s the most beautiful place ever created. She’ll sing and all the angels will turn their heads to listen.”
Lea gasped and her tears fell faster; thicker, her body started shaking with uncontrollable sobs. “No, she won’t. She doesn’t ever get to go to heaven!”
I brushed a finger over Grace’s pale cheek. “She was a good person, Lea. She’ll go to heaven.”
Lea’s face reddened and she stood up demanding my attention. “No, Shane. You don’t get it!” She closed the gap between us and through her tears, she hissed, “You don’t know who she really is, where she’s really from. She was there, before Noah, the Ark, and the flood. Her soul was there when the angels fell in love with the humans. They called them the Watchers, The Grigori. Together, they made a pact to marry the human women, to teach them to see clearly. There were like two hundred of them. They became fallen angels and when they married the women, they gave birth to the Nephilim, and they were all punished. She was the only one who never had a child. That’s her so-called ex-boyfriend, Shane. She’s been looking for an angel for centuries...some angel named Shamsiel. And her name…her real name was Selah. She doesn’t ever die and go to heaven, Shane. She goes from dying body to dying body, living all these effed up lives looking for some…some angel that she hasn’t seen for thousands of years!”
She took a deep breath and her body shook. “She told me before we left for Tucker’s that she thought Blake was him. She says that angels have a distinct eye color. And they…”
No. Oh God, no.
“Stop,” I whispered. I slid up to Grace’s face and cupped her chin. “That’s fucking impossible! Grace! Wake up!” I grabbed her shoulders and shook her body, trying to wake her up.
Lea tried pulling me away, “What the hell are you doing! Get off her. You’re going to kill her faster!”
I flew off the bed, hands covering my mouth; I dropped to my knees. “Gabriel? Michael? Raphael? What did you do?” I whispered.
“Stay over there, Shane, I swear to God if you touch Grace again like that you are going to watch me morph into Lea circa 2005, gangster bitch and go postal on your ass. You need to calm the eff down, I’m getting Conner!” She seethed as she stomped out of the room.
I walked back toward Grace’s bed and swept my eyes over her tousled mess of hair that framed her flawlessly exquisite face. A face that I now knew would haunt me forever. It’s as if I were seeing her for the first time again. Not being able to fight the impulses that hammered through my body, I reached out to run a fingertip along one unruly strand of that black hair that curled silkily against her pale skin.
My fingers trembled when I withdrew my hand. How I marveled that anyone could cause my body to react this way again over the past few weeks. Now I understood why.
I sat listening to the slow rhythmic cadence of the ventilation machine that helped sustain life in her precious body. I inhaled and exhaled along with the tempo of the dreadful sounds, trying to bring my violent rage under control.
I should have known. I should have known that the only fucking person on this God forsaken rock to make me ever feel like that would be her.
I scowled at the thought of how messed up I was, how selfish and arrogant I had become. Each day I lived had become blurred and mixed together, with no distinction to any of them. The only solace I found, the only time I felt my existence counted, was when I played my music. Although, the truth was, even that was fading. I became restless with this life, with all the meaningless women, none of which could ever satisfy the hunger I had; I was fed up with everything. I scowled again at myself as I sat before this beautiful dying creature. I had become a sulky ornery human trapped in the damaged soul of a fallen angel. But she was here. She’s been here the whole fucking time.
Michael had told me they took her to heaven, promised me they wouldnʼt allow her body to die and rot in the earth. Now I was being told by a mortal that this soul, trapped in this body, the one that was hooked up to life support in front of me, had been traveling through millenniums in search of me. How fucked up was this punishment?
Should I have realized when I was torn out of my rotting prison and thrown into Shaneʼs dying body that some other kind of punishment was in store for me? Maybe, but I would have never thought about them involving the humans. How sick and twisted the angels were to punish me after my imprisonment, with the very person who I was punished for loving. I liked it better in hell.
I should have known she was Selah. Grace looked so much like her, almost identical. I should have grabbed her and kissed her the very first night I saw her. I would have never let her go. I should have told her who I had been. But, I just thought she was another girl, who just looked as breathtakingly beautiful as my Selah.
I should have known.
I could hear Tuckerʼs dumb ass voice all the way down the hallway of the hospital. He came in with an enormous bouquet of the foulest smelling flowers Iʼd ever seen. Lea and Conner walked in a few steps after him, holding coffee cups, and wearing the same pinched lips. Obviously, the flowers had offended them as well. Or Lea told Conner I freaked the fuck out.
Lea handed me a coffee watching me cautiously, “Feeling better now? Anything new with Grace?”
I shook my head. “Iʼve been just sitting here, quietly talking to her. People who are in a coma can hear everything around them, so we should constantly be talking or just reading to her.” I looked directly at Lea pretending I was the calmest person alive. “Sheʼll fight harder to come back if she knows how much sheʼll be missed here.”
Lea sat next to Grace and began whispering in her ear. I took the opportunity to leave, because I needed to find Gabriel or Michael. Any of the archangels. I needed to know why I had been lied to, but even more importantly, I needed to know who was trying to kill Grace and how I could save her.
I knew undoubtedly that Carl Sumpton was not an option any longer, since I had received a message on my phone that his body had been found near one of the entrances to Central Park while Grace was in surgery. So why had we traveled all the way in a blizzard to run from an already dead man to have someone else try to kill Grace?
Blake was no help either. He sat in another hospital room, ranting like a blithering idiot. He told the police that he had no recollection of anyone named Grace, or even how he got up to the vacation house. The last thing he remembered was drinking in a bar after work with Tucker and his uncle two days prior, some sort of celebratory thing about a case they had just gotten. He admitted to shooting up heroin in the bathroom of the bar and believed the whole situation was a bad high.
Nothing made sense.
I slumped past the nu
rses’ station. One of the young nurses eyed me and smiled a mouth full of bright white teeth. “Sir,” she called. “Did you know we have a chapel on the first floor of the hospital?” I stopped in my tracks. Why in the world would she think someone like me would want a chapel? “Many of the families of our patients here find peace with their situation after theyʼve lit a candle there or said a prayer.”
A large golden cross lay against her collarbone; it rose up and down with the rhythm of her breathing. Once again, it never ceased to amaze me, the well of faith that most humans had despite their ignorance of heaven. How they could believe in something but had never laid eyes on it; maybe that was what was so special about humans; that complete blind faith.
“Thank you,” I nodded. I followed her pointed fingers to the elevator and pressed the down arrow. Some sort of angel better be there to make sense of all this to me, because I was seriously starting to formulate some major apocalyptical visions in my head.
The elevator doors opened to the harsh stench of alcohol and whatever cleaning fluid hospitals used to try to cover the smell of death. I choked back my gag reflex and stepped in. If Graceʼs body was going to die, I needed to take her out of here. This was no place for her soul to linger. My body shuddered with fury at the thought of her dying here. It took every ounce of my strength not to scream out.
When the elevator ceased its downward motion, I could wait no longer, I pried the doors open with my hands and thrust them into the sleeves of the wall. The reoccurring beeping sound vaguely alarmed me that I might have broken the doors, but I didnʼt stop to care; there would be a hell of a lot more shit broken if I didnʼt find the answers to my questions.
I followed the faded brown signs towards the hospital chapel and yanked the doors open furiously.
The only source of light in the small room was from the blaze of glass-covered lanterns that posed as prayer candles. Leaning against the farthest wall was the archangel, Gabriel, with his mighty arms crossed in front of him.