Wingless

Chapter 12 [Celeste's POV]

The minute I wake up, I dash down to the living room to see Lues. But he's not the only one there. A cruel looking girl, tattoos etched on every spare inch of her paper-white skin, piercings on her bottom lip, her eyebrow, her nose, her bare navel, and probably so many other places I can't see. She's wearing a skimpy leather black sort of jumpsuit, only the shorts are so short it could have been a top and her stomach is totally bare. She's sitting next to Lues, as if she has just woken up before him, looking down at him if she's trying to read him. Bile rises in my throat. So entranced she doesn't notice me, the girl continues looking down at him: it's not love in her eyes, but hunger, greed, desire. Is that the way demons love? I never noticed that in Lues' eyes. He always looked as if he loved me.

Evidently he was lying.

Bile rises in my throat and I push away. I transform, fly into the woods, sit on a tree stump and cry. I can't believe Lues betrayed me. "They were always bad girls ..." Why me? He had never told me.

Because I was a game. 

I remember the girl's platinum hair, her piercings and tattoos and low-cut top and tiny shorts. I can see why she's preferable to Lues; and easier too, a demon girl. She's not a mortal, you can sense it, and she's definitely not an angel. With angels, girls and boys take it on different days, but who knows how demons do it? I'm crying hard now, but I don't care who hears me. Then a sharp voice cuts straight through my misery.

"What's up with you?"

White hair, piercings, tattoos ... I'm about to scream, but then I realize it's not her. Her face is different, and she's wearing a low-cut lace dress. She doesn't look demon, though ... I remember how Lues looked - pale and dark and otherwordly, but not like this. This girl is cut and tough, with the pinched face of someone who doesn't eat enough or sleep enough. Lues was a Prince.

She could be a poor demon - but then all demons are rich. Whenever they're short on money they go down to Earth and help themselves, my father told me. 

She isn't a demon anyway. I can sense it.

"What are you?" I ask blankly. I know I can't win a fight with her, but if she wanted to kill me she'd have killed me anyway. She looks practical, not cruel. Then again, she does look cruel. Why am I so fearless then? I can read her feelings, almost as if she was an Angel.

Her lips stretch into a smile. It looks foreign on her face, like she hasn't smiled for a long time. 

"I'm a Fallen Angel."

"What?"

"A Wingless angel who was exiled for falling in love with a demon. And the thing about loving a demon, is that they won't love you back." Her face twists in pain.

"Yeah, I know that all right."

"That's why you were crying?" I nod, tears threaded along my eyelashes. 

"I went into his room ... lying on the sofa with another girl-" I start crying. Her eyes flash in understanding and she sits me down on the tree stump.

"You won't forget him." she whispers. "Not for a long time. But learn to hate him and his kind, learn to hate the angels too, them who will never understand what it's like to be played by someone so cruel and heartless. Learn to love only those who understand you. And that lessens the pain."

We entwine fingers, her papery claws with their pointed black fingernails, my childish hands, like starfishes. We are different. But it seems I'm destined to be a Fallen Angel.

"Go to the Angels and announce it, so they make you Wingless. Don't tell him, or he will kill you. When you go down back to Earth, you'll arrive at the Tombs of the Fallen. I'll be there, waiting for you, and you can come and join us."

"There's more of us?" I ask.

"There's more of us," she smiles. "It felt so good when they found me too, that there were others like me."

I nod, the throbbing pain that courses through me eased slightly - slightly, but it's better. I have a friend that understands me, what I'm going through. "I'm Celeste." 

"I'm Cadi." And she leaves, just in time for me to see the scars ripping through her back, huge white scars shaped like the curving buds of angel's wings.