Turning Point #5
He was already shaking his head before the words left her lips.
Her eyes pleaded with him. “Just hold me? Raven, you don’t know how awful it is not to be able to touch anyone or to be touched. I can kill with my fingertips. I can make people I love go crazy if they touch me. Don’t you understand? I’m lonely!” Her voice cracked. “I just want to be held and… and to hold somebody. I know you can do that much. I’ve seen it in someone else’s memories. You’re holding me. That’s why I knew you’d come back for me. I’ve seen the future, and it’s you and me.”
He kept shaking his head, but for even more reasons than before. “The future is a very fluid place. The smallest thing now can change it later in ways you cannot understand. Believe me, Mika. You can’t trust that what you’ve seen in visions or even memories are still in effect. Or that things mean what you think they do. You have the power to change your future. If you know what is coming, you know things you can do to change it. You’ll be watching for ways to change it. It’s not necessarily what you’ve seen. You’re interpreting what you’ve seen based on what you know now, and it may be something entirely different when—”
“Oh, stop! I don’t want to hear excuses. I know what’s possible. Just hold me, Raven. Please? I know you will again someday, but I need it now. Right now. I can’t stand being in my own body with all these wings and powers and stuff. It was cool at first, but now I’d rather be dead than… than have a body like this!”
Alarm washed over him. Would she harm herself? Empathically, he could accept that she might.
“Don’t say that. I know what it’s like to go a long time without touching another living soul. I know what it’s like to be alone. Our bodies—minds and spirits, too—need human connection. Even angels need human connection.”
It was a chaotic mess of memories, but Raven recalled his dreams of Lilah by his side. He also remembered dreams of life without anyone and how having known the sweetness made her absence even bitterer. But he knew the craving Mika had. It wasn’t even sexual. Just the simple touch of another human and all the sense of connectedness that came with it as though touch itself were the law of gravity keeping a person bound to the earth instead of floating away and into the void of space. No human—and no angel—was meant to live in isolation.
“If you understand, then hold me! I would give up all these powers I have for one night of being loved and held. For even one hour.” Her face scrunched in preparation for more tears. “For one minute.”
She would, too. He knew it. She had never asked to have her life stolen to be part of one of Aoife’s science experiments. And Aoife certainly had never asked permission. Instead, the High Priestess had decided that if she couldn’t find an angel on her own, she’d kidnap thirty college students on summer study programs abroad where they’d be away from any watchful parental eye, subject them to genetic experiments with ancient DNA, and make angels of her own. Mika was just another victim in the plans of Aoife and those she had inherited from her High Priestess mother.
“Please, Raven? Please? If you won’t, then… then… one of the priests who came to see me in the hospital told me something I could do instead to get rid of this living hell I’m in.”
“Priests who came to see me in the hospital.” The phrase reverberated in Raven’s head. By hospital, she meant lab; it had been more prison than medical facility, meant to keep the subjects of the experiments under control.
But what priests had been to see her? He himself had accompanied Aoife to the site as one of the four bodyguards for the High Priestess and partly so he, as the Last Priest, would better understand what the priesthood was doing to fulfill their destiny as guardians of humanity. None of the other three priests guarding Aoife had had any time alone with her, and his own interaction had been brief. Maybe two minutes. Had one of the other priests come to see her later? Had Jakin? Terre?
“He said I had more powers than I knew in this body. Stuff I’d inherited along with the wings and hands that get really hot. He said I could force someone out of their body and into mine and I could live the rest of my life as them in a body that could hug and love and fuck without hurting the man I was with. My right hand over their heart, my left hand to their third eye.” She made the motion as if he were her intended target. “I tried it on a nurse in the hospital but…” Mika stared at her hands, even as they began to glow. “It didn’t work. She died.”
Raven sighed. “Oh, Mika. Mika, no. It’s in the prophecy, but you got it backward. It’s right hand to the third eye and left hand over the heart.”
“Oh.” She hung her head. “I could’ve swapped with her and left the hospital, and no one would ever have known. She would have been trapped there with people thinking she was their angel, and I could’ve been with the man I loved. Not, um, not you. A different man. But he’s gone now, too. Would’ve served that bitch right for being mean to me.”
Inhaling slowly, Raven listened to the nothingness around them. No tug backwards. He’d changed nothing by being here. Nothing.
“I’m so sorry, Mika. I don’t know how much longer I have here with you, but one day, you and I will change the world together. We’ll save it together.”
“I don’t care about changing the world, much less saving it. I just want to be able to be held again by a man. Is that too much to ask?” She held her arms open to him, head high.
“No. No, it isn’t.”
All he had to do was hold her. That alone might convince her to help him in the future. Literally, it wouldn’t kill him to hold her now—as long as she didn’t put her hands on his chest and initiate his transformation. He wasn’t prepared to ascend now. Daegan would not return until the End Times. The world in her now, the world outside this church, was not ready for his ascension, and timing was everything. Maybe if he were careful, he could give her what she wanted.
He closed the gap between them, binding her wrists together in his grasp and pulling her into his arms. Her wings lifted, like her mood, and hung over him in a half-hearted attempt to envelop him if they weren’t chained behind her. He was careful that she didn’t touch him, but where his skin touched hers, his flesh warmed in a manner that took his breath away. Just the sensation of his skin on hers buzzed through him like electricity. Some part of him knew that ascension was almost as close as she was.
“I’m just going to hold you,” he whispered. “Only for a moment. Then I have to go. But one day, you will help me to do something incredible, and then you and I will do great things together.”
Sighing dreamily, she nuzzled his neck, then jaw, searching for his mouth, but he turned his cheek.
“Stop it, Lilah. I told you, I’m just going to hold you.”
Mika jerked out of his embrace, wrenching her wrists from his grip. “Lilah? Fuck you!”
He leapt backward to avoid her clutching swats at his chest. He wasn’t the only one who missed being held. Not just the physical act that made his body happy, but the emotional satisfaction that came with it. He missed Lilah. So much. Too much. He’d lost himself for a split second and let himself dream of a woman who didn’t exist in the future he’d left behind.
“God damn you, Raven! Damn you to hell!” She backed away with her arms crossed, fists tight under her chin. If shooting fire out of her eyes had been another power of hers, he would’ve been dead. “I will never help you. Never.”
Well, there it was. He’d hurt her feelings and now he’d never ascend. Not with her help. He needed an angel’s ordination, and as far as he knew, none of the other Angelseeds had survived. He resigned himself to the tug that would pull him back to his own time.
It didn’t come. Was there still a chance?
“I’m sorry, Mika. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’m missing someone, too.”
“Like I care! You tell me you understand, but you don’t. You just wait. I’ll—”
She stopped and squinted at him. He could almost see the wheels turning inside her head.
“You’ll love me,” she continued. “I’ll make sure of it. And I don’t need your help getting out of here. I’ll cut these wings off myself if I must, to get out of these chains. And when I find you again, it’ll be me you want to hold. That I promise you.”
Something gripped deep in his solar plexus and tugged backward, hard, and like caught in a vacuum, Raven whooshed away between the worlds.
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