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┏━━━━━━𖤐━━━━━━┓ chapter three: red right hand ┗━━━━━━𖤐━━━━━━┛
Marlene had always heard stories about the supernatural.
It came with the territory — her father's moderate obsession (as he liked to put it) with folklore couldn't but rub off on her. Marley's bedtime stories weren't those of knights in shining armour and damsels in destress. She didn't care if the evil Queen wanted to poison Snow White or that Aurora would never wake up. No, her father'd told Marlene tales of real kings and queens, told her of fairies and the malevolent queen Maude; stories from the Bible when she was too young to read it, and spoke of Gods and creatures as old as time itself.
But those were just stories.
Until a little more than a week ago.
Marlene's reality had twisted and turned in ways she couldn't have even imagined, and she had spent every waking hour of her impromptu house arrest trying to come to grips with it. Trying to process the existence of everything she used to believe to be nothing but lore.
She had gone through every book on angels in Arthur's library (which there was a lot), but most of them depicted the winged menaces as benevolent celestial intermediaries between God and humanity. Sure, Marlene hadn't met many of them, but from the few she had and those who had cursed her entire bloodline, they didn't appear quite so benevolent.
The lives of thousands for the lives of millions — don't you think it's a fair price to pay for Heaven on Earth?
She almost asked her father about the man, the angel, who had visited him all those days ago. Almost. But every time Marley was close to breaching the subject, an invisible force seemed to stop her from doing it. Perhaps, she was simply afraid of hearing the truth. Marlene was never one for confrontation, anyway, and always sought to avoid it at all cost.
But the tension in the house was becoming palpable. And every time she managed to get a glimpse of her father (when he wasn't doing his best to avoid her), she saw shadows on his face that hadn't been there before. He looked wary, weathered, wrong. Like something was eating him from the inside. A parasite. A secret.
Arthur was restless. He would leave the house in the early morning to give a lecture, which was strange in itself since he had always insisted his subject be taught strictly after 11 a.m — Arthur liked his students awake, he argued. He would work in his office for hours and come home late in the evening. "This semester is pretty rough," he'd say and do it all over again.
Marlene didn't push, though. When she wasn't sleeping, she had her head stuck in a book, a journal by her side to write down any information that seemed valuable. She also read up about the sigils on their house — apparently, Arthur had put them there quite a long time ago to ward it from angels. He had told Marlene that the runes rendered them almost powerless and didn't allow entrance without permission. Clearly, Archangels were a fat, royal exception.
