Page 107 of White Lights
But Dez is not an angel. She doesn’t have the perspective on death that Rafe and Yael have. She doesn’t understand how any of this works, only that she seems to have fallen into the strangest secret world at a moment of chaos and danger.
And her heart is broken.
She has a memory of Mo in his room, lying in bed on a Saturday morning, staring at the desert sky through the window above his headboard. Her brother wasn’t often at peace these past few years, but when she’d seen him like that, watching the clouds, he had been.
Maybe it’s possible, what Rafe said. Maybe her film helped him.
On her bedroom floor, she finds the jeans she’d slipped out of before the party, a lifetime ago. She reaches into their pocket andtakes out the pill bottle with the eye. All month, she’s kept it close, but she wonders if she needs it anymore.
Mo is gone. It’s not like she can ever go home.
And now that her brother is dead, she can’t bear to have the eye so close to her. But still, she can’t throw it away. She pushes the pill bottle under her mattress.
A soft knock startles her, but it’s not coming from her door.
She hears it again. At her window. Her tenth-story window. She rushes over to pull back the curtains—and gasps when she sees Rafe hovering in darkness outside.
She scrambles to open the casement. She doesn’t even know how it works. When she finally turns the lever enough to hinge open the glass, he’s laughing at her.
“What if you fell?” she demands, grabbing him by the lapels of his tuxedo jacket. How strange to feel him hovering in thin air. She pulls him inside.
“I thought you might need more proof,” he says, easing himself through her window and dusting the snow off his shoulders. His presence fills the space and charges the air.
If Mo were still alive, Dez would be thrilled by Rafe’s late-night visit. An angel flew to see her. But all she feels is numb.
“Where are your wings?” she asks. She doesn’t see them, but she notices Rafe isn’t wearing his golden scarf.
He glances over his shoulder. “They’re imperceptible inside thebarbelo. It’s for your safety, so first-years don’t see our true natures before they’re ready to.”
Dez wants to see them. Despite herself, her acute agony, she’s curious about Rafe’s divinity. She doesn’t just want toseehis wings. She wants to touch them, to run her hands over them. She wants to lose herself in them so completely she forgets her broken heart.
And wanting this, it makes her skin flush and the room feel hot, even though the window’s open and she’s wearing just a black silk slip dress.
“I wondered,” Rafe says, “whether seeing me fly would freak you out or turn you on.” His mouth turns up at one corner. “I have a guess.”
Dez clears her throat and steps away from him. She can’t do this tonight. Can’t give in to her body’s yearnings. Even if it would take her mind off her pain. “Yael said some things earlier, about the search for a new Angel of Death. She mentioned a Crimson Pinion and a war?”
Rafe’s jaw tenses. “What else did Yael say?”
That I should stay here and give you what you deserve.And she hadn’t made it sound like a good thing for Rafe.
“She said you could explain it,” Dez says.
“I can try.” Rafe exhales. “I should tell you that I’m the obvious choice to replace Samael.”
“Why?”
“Because Sam was my mentor.”
“The Angel of Death was your mentor?” Dez repeats, remembering a conversation they’d once had in the Vault, about their wounds. The way Rafe said his wound was that his mentor abandoned him made Dez think at first they’d been in love. She hears it differently now, how terribly consequential this abandonment had been. For Rafe. For everyone.
“Why can’t he just tell you where the Crimson Pinion is?”
“Because,” Rafe says quietly. “I have to earn it.”
“And how do you do that?”
“Do you remember what you saw in the kinetoscope your first day here?” he asks, and Dez senses him changing the subject.
