Praefatio: A Novel Read online

  “Holy cow. I heard you’d be able to astral project when you ascended. How was it?”

  Remi? Oh Remi, you came! I was beside myself with excitement, followed by a crushing sense of nausea. It felt like vertigo, I think, considering I’d never had vertigo.

  Dad reached over and removed the soiled blanket, and quickly replaced it with a clean one from the drawer next to my bed. Remi wiped my mouth with a tissue, discarded it, then blotted my face with a wet, cold cloth. My breathing was erratic and more noticeable. My emotions were a jumbled mess of sorrow, regret, pain, excitement, loss, fear, anger, love, and resentment. Tears stung and fell steadily from my bloodshot eyes. I didn’t even know how I ended up back at the hospital. Everything I’d thought about over the past few hours came falling out of my mouth in one garbled, snot-filled speech.

  “Mom came and told me that she’s really an angel and that I’m an angel, well, a half-angel. Remi is too, but I can’t hear his thoughts anymore, unless he wants me to, and for some reason he doesn’t want me to. Nurse Cipher’s been watching over me, but I’ll be released soon. I have no idea what happens after that. And, Gavin Vault … I’ve been hearing his voice since I was nine, and I had no idea who he was until a day ago. And I don’t know how that’s even possible. But I’m in love with him, or his voice, and now he’s a real, live person, and I have no idea what to do. He came to visit me, here. How come neither of you came to visit me? What is he? Gavin. Is he an angel too? And what about all that stuff I read about in the book Remi gave me, Praefatio? What’s it supposed to mean? Remi. Remi, you’ve been an angel this whole time? How could you not tell me? Why were those creatures after us? And that girl, she looks just like me. Is she my sister? What’s going on? Do you both think I’m crazy? Dad, Dad … You’re alive. Oh God, you’re alive. Please don’t leave me.”

  Exhausted, I closed my eyes, afraid to face the answers to my questions. I clutched a box of tissues instead, wiping snot and tears alternately as they fell. Neither Dad nor Remi moved.

  Finally, Dad took my hand in his and whispered, “Gracie, everything’s going to be OK. I promise. You’re ascending. You’ve already been able to separate your spirit from your body, and this is a very important skill for an angel who is also human.” His body was warm, as if there was light beneath it, like when you put your hand over a light bulb. He exhaled deeply.

  “The book I gave you, did you read it?” Remi asked suddenly, sitting on the other side of me. I fully understood the question, but I had not, in fact, read the entire book. When was I supposed to have had time to do that? I read as much as was revealed to me on the pages. “Grace.” Remi stared hard at me. His voice was as gentle as it had been before, with love permeating his tone. “You must finish Praefatio. It has everything to do with you.”

  “Everything, Gracie,” Dad added. “The answers to all of your questions, the reason you exist, why we all exist, can be found within that book. Our job is done now. Vivienne, Remi, and I must return to our posts, take other assignments.” The finality of his tone felt like a knife in my heart. I could not stand the thought of any kind of life without him or Remi in it. After Dad died, I’d found a way to go on, but only because of Remi. How could they leave me when I needed them more than ever?

  Dad stood, looking to Remi then back at me. “Grace, it is not within us to become attached to humans. Our jobs are to protect, guide, to bring word when needed. You were the first human I stayed with for so long. I came to care for you like a real daughter. I pray I am not punished for it. I hope you will always think of me as your father. It would be an honor.”

  The revelations were too much. Dad’s words triggered more projectile puke, ferocious tears, and long, stringy snot. He wasn’t my real father either. I had no one. The only family I had was a wretched sister who wanted me dead and a mother who no one had seen or heard from in years.

  Remi was at the door in a heartbeat. He looked out into the hallway, but before he could open his mouth Nurse Cipher greeted him with replacement bed linens, clothes, and cloths for me.

  Nurse Cipher was beside herself. “We have company; they must have followed her when she left her body. I need to get her cleaned up and out of here, now!” She pushed the door open a few inches and looked at me, then back at Remi. Remi stopped her with a hand to the chest.

  “This isn’t your fight,” Remi stated.

  “You don’t have to do this alone, Remiel. If I die, I die saving Grace,” Nurse Cipher insisted. Another reminder of the email.

  Remi turned to me; the look in his eyes contradicted the smile on his face. He turned back to Nurse Cipher, pushed her gently back into the hallway, then closed and locked the door.

  I heard him. I will take care of you now, was all Gavin said. That was all I needed to gain composure.

  I reached for Dad’s hand, and he took mine long enough to add, “Your life has meaning, Grace. Open your mind and heart to it, and you will find your way. I promise.” With that, he was gone. No puff of smoke, no flying out of the room, just gone.

  Remi raced to my bed and offered me the clothes Nurse Cipher had given him. He turned his back and I put them on. No angel trickery, just one arm and leg at a time.

  I heard what sounded like bending metal coming from the hallway. The sound stopped, then restarted. It grew louder, then softer, and louder again. It was as if someone was playing a trick on us, trying to scare us. But I knew in my gut that it wasn’t a trick. A knocking sound joined the bending metal, followed by scraping and swishing.

  “OK,” I managed, so Remi would know I was dressed. But I hadn’t been paying attention. Remi turned and handed me a sword—a really long one that looked as if it could have been samurai.

  “Seriously? What am I supposed to do with this?” I was only half-joking and terrified as I reached out to take it.

  When the sounds stopped, all that was left was my nervous laughter. I guess I wouldn’t need my sword after all. I placed it next to me on the bed.

  “Just swing it at whatever comes your way that isn’t me. Or better yet, swing at whatever comes your way, including me. Just swing and don’t stop swinging until everything is dead around you. Everything. OK, Grace? I mean it.”

  “Remi?” Nurse Cipher knocked on the door at the same time that she called him. Remi stiffened.

  Something stank like rotten eggs, and this time it wasn’t me.

  Remi opened the door to Nurse Cipher, only it wasn’t Nurse Cipher. There was nobody there.

  The fluorescents hummed to a dim before failing completely. I kept my eyes focused on the door and reached slowly for the sword. I was dizzy, yet surprisingly steady on my feet. With my hands behind me, I managed to unsheathe the sword as if I’d done so a thousand times before, steady and in control.

  “It’s OK. Nothing,” Remi advised me, though he still peered out into the hallway. Its lights had not returned.

  “Do you hear that?” I asked, turning my head from side to side like a dog. It sounded like dripping—not water—something heavier. Oil-based. Pooling. Something was dripping from the air vent directly above me. Warm around my feet, then my legs. So warm, hot even. Then burning. Scathing. Ripping. Tearing through my pant legs.

  I looked down and screamed. An oily creature with sharp, jagged teeth and a ton of eyeballs was encasing me in hot, dark, oily goop. It was slowly coiling and making its way up my legs. I brought the sword from behind me and started slashing at it.

  “Remi, help!” My pants were hanging off me from my thighs to my feet, ripped to shreds by the creature and my sword.

  But Remi didn’t move. He stood fixed at the door. It seemed something more important commanded his attention.

  I remembered what Remi said. I kept stabbing the thing, slashing and knifing. Eyeballs popped off left and right, but the teeth kept biting. I didn’t know which was worse, the pain from the creature, the gashes I’d made with my own sword, or the sound of popping eyeballs. I kept slashing, growing weaker as I did. I had lost a l
ot of blood.

  When the pain got to be too much, I decided I’d had enough of being attacked.

  “Get off me, you slimy, filthy demon, and don’t come back!” As I spoke, the power of my words energized me. “I said, get off me, you slimy, eyebally freak!”

  It worked. The thing slowly retreated down my legs, to my ankles, and then my feet. I watched until it was nothing more than a pile of googly eyeballs and gnarled teeth.

  “Gross!” I shook my head and looked over at Remi, who scrunched his nose up in a stink face at the thing on the floor that had about eighty eyeballs and more than a hundred teeth. Remi blinked often when he was worried, and I feared he might have thought the attack was not yet over.

  “What?” I felt good despite the blood pouring from the slashes in my skin. Right around the time the pain in my legs intensified to one hundred on a scale of one to ten, dizziness set in. I tried sitting on the bed, but my foot slipped on the oil, and a few of the eyeballs went rolling across the room.

  “Those eyes belong to someone who’ll probably want them back, all of them. Don’t make enemies, Grace,” Remi added. He took another look down the hallway. If all those eyes belonged to one person, I really didn’t want to know who.

  What? Wasn’t he the one who told me to go ninja on whatever attacked me, including him?

  I sheathed my sword and slowly placed it on the bed. I couldn’t leave the googly-eyed evidence lying around, and I didn’t think the angel vs. demon clean-up crew was coming. A pillowcase seemed like the most sensible way to transport eighty oily eyeballs and a lotta teeth, so I pulled it off the pillow and prepared myself for what I had to do. Dizziness made it hard to focus. My feet sloshed in the blood and oil that had pooled up around them.

  Kneeling down sent searing pain shooting from my hips through my shoulders. Still, I opened the pillowcase as if the eyeballs were going to jump into the bag of their own free will. The pain worsened. I wondered how long I could keep up the angel charade.

  “Oh, just get in the bag,” I joked in grossed-out frustration. But then something miraculous happened. All the eyes turned toward me. Then they rolled themselves into the pillowcase, one by oily one, and the teeth disintegrated into fine powder on the floor.

  Remi took a last look out into the hall, then shut and re-locked the door. I had a feeling whatever was after me wouldn’t be stopped by a deadbolt. Gradually, I realized something else: These beings were after me and me alone. Remi just happened to be around when they came for me. I wondered if that would always be the case.

  I knotted the pillowcase, placed it on the chair beside the bed, and took a seat on the mattress. Remi followed and knelt down in front of me. He placed his hands over my ripped-up legs. He looked up at me, shook his head, and said, “You have to be more careful, Grace. You are human.”

  I felt my wounds healing under Remi’s hands. But who would heal me after Remi was gone? Mom’d said the demons wouldn’t stop until I was on their side, or dead.

  Remi and I sat quietly. He blocked me from his thoughts, but I couldn’t imagine he was happy with the way things had turned out. All I was thinking about right then was carrying around a bunch of shaky eyes and what would happen when their owner returned to claim them. I hated the sound of my own thoughts.

  Finally, I whined, “Why do you do that? Why do you block me out so I can’t hear what you’re thinking?”

  Frustration creased his forehead when he spoke. “I’m not blocking you.” Remi let out a long sigh. “Someone else is. Someone doesn’t want you to know what I’m thinking.” Remi stood, and the look on his face told me everything. He was leaving me, too.

  “How can you leave me? ‘Read Praefatio,’ he says! Why can’t you teach me everything I need to know? Why can’t you stay with me?” I yelled.

  Remi took two steps back—as if I was going to hit him or something. That wasn’t the Remi I knew.

  “Sorry. I’m not used to angels speaking with that tone. Even one who is part human,” he said, accentuating the word “human.” It made me want to sock him.

  “That’s the second time in minutes you’ve referred to me as human,” I spat, surprised by how offended I felt.

  “Grace,” he began again with no change to his tone, like he was losing patience with me. This was a new side to Remi. “You have to finish Praefatio. If you don’t, none of this makes any sense. You, Mom, Dad, the Larsons, even Gavin.” The way he added Gavin at the end, the way his tone changed, made me sad. His eyes were wet as he took another step back, paused, and then another. Still, he looked like an angel, so childlike, a boy fighting manhood with every fiber of his being.

  In that moment, I remembered the words I had read in Praefatio. “ … the more time they spent around humans, the more like humans they became … ”

  Remi smiled. He must have heard my thoughts.

  “So what’s going to happen to you, your human body, I mean? I think Jenny would be really hurt if you died or something bad happened to you.” I couldn’t help but be reminded of the pain I felt when I thought my father had died. It made me wonder why Remi had cried so much at the funeral knowing Dad was alive. And where was Jenny anyway? Why isn’t Remi at the show with her and Sean?

  He stepped back yet again, but I could hear him as clearly as if he were right next to me. “I was conceived on earth, from two angels while they were in human form. That had never happened before. While we are in human form, we are completely vulnerable to human emotions … and tragedy.” He paused. “That’s why Gabe was able to die. His human body actually died. He could not appear to you after his death since he did not have a human body to appear to you in. Because you were still human and not in imminent danger, you would not have been able to see him in his celestial form, unless he had been granted a Divine Exception.”

  It was strange hearing Remi refer to our father as “Gabe.” I could tell he was struggling, not just with what he was saying, but how he would say whatever it was he was trying hard not to say. Remi shifted his weight from his left to his right leg, then back again.

  “How did I see him just then?” I wasn’t born yesterday. “I did just see him, didn’t I?” I didn’t think my mind was playing tricks on me. Then again, I had gone from the hospital to the Larsons and back to the hospital, apparently without ever physically leaving.

  “I guess because you’re less human now. Already ascending … You saw your sister Emeria, and she doesn’t have a body. But humans can only see us if we want them to, especially if we don’t have a body to inhabit or haven’t taken on a form. Most humans never see us, even when they are in danger. There are a lot of rules. You need to read the book. As for you, no one knows what you are capable of. It’s why some people are scared out of their minds about your existence.” Remi lowered his head.

  “So what about you? Why didn’t you tell me about you? Were you always an angel, or did you become one … like me?”

  Remi leaned against the wall, as if he was using all his self-control not to run screaming from my hospital room. I was tempted to unleash my bag of eyeballs on him. Then he ran one hand through his ringlets, knowing I loved the way they bounced around his face. He took a long, deep breath. “Despite your existence, it’s forbidden for angels in human form to conceive a child on earth. As such, my parents were punished. Their castigation was to become human after I was born. Your parents, Vivienne and Gabriel, were already posted here. It was decided that I would be given to them to raise, since there was no way for a human to parent an angel. Michael preferred for us to grow up together since we were the only ones of our respective kinds on Earth. With no precedent for someone like me or you, it was thought that we would come into our ascensions as late as our eighteenth birthdays or as early as normal human puberty. Mine came sooner than anyone expected, when I was seven.” Remi sounded so official when he used his “angel voice.” Lots of big words.

  My thoughts turned to the weekend Remi and I went camping with the Larsons and Remi got sick. Mr. La
rson had to call Mom and Dad because Remi was hospitalized. Dad said Remi needed to get his appendix out, and despite my protest, I was not allowed to visit him. We ended our camping trip early, the Larsons took me home, and Remi returned two days later, as if nothing had happened. That was the last time we ever went anywhere with anyone other than Mom or Dad. I remember thinking the first time I saw him after he had been released, that the bones in his back—his scapula bones—stuck way out. Still do.

  That was same the week I started hearing His voice.

  Wings, Remi thought as he listened to me put everything together in my head. “They told me everything that weekend. How could they not? They gave me Praefatio, the angels’ version of the Bible,” he added.

  “Remi?” I started to get up to hug him, wrap my arms around him, but couldn’t. I felt weighed down, heavy. I lowered my left leg slowly at first, and as I crossed my right leg over to stand up, I felt wobbly and unable to hold the weight of my body, which seemed to have doubled. It was a chore to raise my head, but when I did, Remi had moved all the way to the door, preparing to leave.

  His genuine smile gave me courage. I leaned slightly forward to try again, slower this time, and a shadow cast on the oily, slick floor nearly scared me to death. The shape of angel wings, much wider than I would have expected, surrounded me from behind.

  Get outta town! Sofriggingheavy!

  I turned to inspect my new appendages, and my body rose about three inches off the bed, forward, feet dangling. I tried to find the floor; I found it, and the oil slick where the eyeball demon left his slime, and fell flat on my face. I hit the cold tile with a hard thump.

  Just prior to falling, in the bathroom mirror across from my bed, I saw my wings—silvery-white and fluffy with brick-red feathers underneath.

  Eenie Meenie Miney Mo

  The floor smelled of hospital-grade cleaner, bleach infused with laboratory-made pine scent, the fibers of a mop that had been used too many times to be effective in actual disinfection, rare sickness, incurable disease, and opaque bodily fluids. Disgusting.