My Guardian Angel Hates Me

e to think. The statue jerked sideways in the air. Stone doesn't do that. It doesn't reconsider. It doesn't get within a metre of a woman's skull and change its mind. Yet the saint twisted hard enough to tear dust from her broken neck, missed my left shoulder and burst across the pavement. Pain went through my wrist with a clean little snap. I dropped my camera and swore. My hand looked fine. No swelling. No bone pressing where bone ought not press. Still, the pain was real enough to make me sick. Across the street, a man had fallen to one knee. He held his right arm against his chest. Rain darkened his close-cropped hair and the shoulders of a white shirt that looked too thin for the weather. Everyone else was staring at the wreckage. He stared at me. Furious is too mild a word. He looked betrayed. I should have waited for the fire crew. The hotel had been condemned after a kitchen fire, and I had stepped past two barriers to photograph the damage for an insurance report. In my defence, the client wanted close shots. In everyone else's defence, the barriers had CONDEMNED BUILDING printed across them in red. I picked up my camera and crossed the road. The man stood and backed into the service lane beside a florist. I followed because I have never met a bad decision I couldn't make worse by adding curiosity. He turned on me as soon as the street disappeared from view. "Do you ever obey a sign?" His voice was low and rough, as if he'd spent the morning shouting. Up close, he was difficult to place. Thirty, maybe. A hard mouth. Dark eyes with a thin ring of gold around each pupil. His face might have been beautiful if he weren't looking at me as though beauty had personally offended him. He closed his eyes. My wrist throbbed in time with the pulse in his throat. "Thirty-five," he said. I asked what he meant. "Thirty-five interventions in six years. A lift cable. Two cars. A gas main. The balcony in Leeds. That idiot with the nail gun. And now you've walked under half a tonne of masonry because a customer asked for a better angle." The rain seemed to pull away from him. Drops bent at the last second and struck the bricks on either side of his body. I watched it happen three times before my mind stopped offering ordinary explanations. My wrist gave another hot pulse. He flinched. I reached for his hand. He tried to pull back, but I caught two of his fingers. The lane vanished in white light. For a second I felt everything in him. The break in his wrist. A torn place behind his ribs. Exhaustion old enough to have roots. Anger, yes, but underneath it lay a fear so sharp it had been keeping him upright. Then came something warmer. It moved from his palm into mine and travelled straight down my body. My breath caught. His did too. Heat settled low between my hips with an intimacy no stranger had earned. I let go. He shoved the injured hand beneath his other arm and looked even angrier. "That shouldn't have happened." "A useful summary of my afternoon." The light behind him returned, softer this time. Two wings unfolded into the narrow lane. They weren't sweet storybook things. Each one was taller than he was, crowded with cream-coloured feathers bruised grey at the tips. Several had snapped near the bone. One hung loose and wet. The wings filled the air with the smell of rain on hot metal. I laughed. I couldn't help it. Shock has always made me inappropriate. He didn't. His name was Oren. He told me he was my guardian as if confessing to a crime. He had been assigned to me six years earlier, after what he called a transfer and refused to explain. I asked where he'd been when I broke my ankle on a pub stair. He said a guardian prevented death, not humiliation. Saving me came at a cost. A fatal injury couldn't simply disappear. It had to land somewhere, and Heaven had built guardians to take the force without dying. The lift cable that snapped above the fourth floor had crushed his spine. The van that mounted the pavement outside my flat had taken both his legs. He healed each time. Healing didn't make it painless. The broken wrist had been mine. I looked at him then. Properly. At the strain around his eyes and the tiny tremor in his fingers. Shame came late, but it came. "You could have told me." "I'm not meant to be seen." "You could have dropped a leaflet." His mouth twitched before he caught it. That nearly-smile unsettled me more than the wings. So did the warmth that answered inside my own body. Oren felt it. His wings pulled tight. He told me the bond between a guardian and a human ran one way. His pain might reach me for a few seconds after an intervention, especially when he was weakened. Nothing else should cross. Certainly not that. He said certainly with the grim concentration of a man thinking about it in detail. I thought about it too. Rain slid from his temple to his jaw. I had the sudden, vivid urge to follow it with my mouth. His gaze dropped to my lips, and a second wave of arousal rolled through me. This one wasn't mine. At least, it hadn't started that way. The discovery should have frightened me. Instead I wanted to see what happened if I stepped closer. Oren stepped back first. "Go home, Tamsin. Lock the door. Stay away from windows, balconies, gas appliances, sharp objects and anything with wheels." I asked if Heaven offered guardians stress leave. He said my death would qualify. That cured me of smiling. Oren followed me home without appearing to follow. I caught him in shop windows, never quite reflected in the same place twice. Once, at a crossing, a bus ran the red light. An invisible hand closed around my coat and hauled me back hard enough to bruise my throat. Oren reappeared beside a post box with blood running from his nose. The bus missed me by less than a handspan. I hadn't stepped into its path. The pedestrian light had been green. The driver looked as horrified as I felt. By the time we reached my flat, Oren had stopped pretending he would leave. He stood in the kitchen while I wrapped his wrist with the first-aid bandage I usually saved for my own bad ideas. His wings had vanished, though their shadow moved over the cupboards when he breathed. Touching him was a problem. Every turn of the bandage sent a soft drag over my own skin. His knuckles brushed my palm, and I felt the answering contact along the inside of my thigh. He went utterly still. "Are you doing that?" I asked. "No." The denial came too quickly. I tightened the knot. Pleasure flickered through me, bright and mean. Oren's uninjured hand closed around the edge of the bench. We looked at each other across six inches of air. I would like to say I remembered the falling saint, the bus, or the sensible fact that he wasn't human. What I remembered was his fear in the lane. What I felt was the exact shape of his restraint, because it was shaking inside me too. The kitchen window exploded. Oren hit me before the sound did. He drove us both to the floor and covered my body with his. Glass cut through his shirt. Each slice burned across my back without opening my skin. For one breath, his mouth was against my neck. His thigh pressed between mine. Pain and desire arrived together, tangled so tightly I couldn't tell which of us had made the sound. Then he lifted his head. A shard of glass hovered above us. It had stopped point first over my heart. Black writing crawled across its surface. The marks were too fine to be letters, but I understood them anyway. RETURN THE LIFE THAT SHOULD HAVE ENDED. Oren took the shard between two bleeding fingers. Whatever he read there emptied his face. All the irritation went out of him. "This isn't an accident," he said. Oren crushed the message in his fist and looked towards the ceiling, towards something far above plaster and rain clouds. Heaven had missed. But it wasn’t finished with me.

Episode Two- What Saving Costs There are graceful ways to leave a third-floor flat. Oren chose the fire escape with one arm around my waist and both wings spread over my head. White light chased us. It poured beneath my front door, filled the hall and came through the walls in thin, searching blades. Wherever it touched, the paint blistered without heat. A framed photograph of my sister and me went blank. My name disappeared from an envelope on the table. Oren kicked the window frame clear and pulled me out into the rain. The fire escape shuddered under our weight. I asked if he could fly. He said yes. I asked why we were climbing down three storeys on wet iron. "Because flying would tell them exactly where I am." The top landing tore away from the wall. We dropped. His wings struck the air once. The force slammed through my shoulder blades and knocked the breath out of me, though it was his body taking the strain. We hit the next landing hard. Metal buckled. Somewhere above us, white light swept over the brickwork and removed every trace of our shadows. Oren took me to a cheap hotel called the Pilgrim, where rooms could still be paid for in cash and nobody examined the guests too closely. The building had been a chapel once. The cross was gone, the saints had been painted over, and an ice machine stood where the altar used to be. According to Oren, abandoned places of worship made excellent blind spots. Heaven remembered the devotion and overlooked what came after it. It was the first thing I'd heard about Heaven that made sense to me. Our room smelled of bleach and old cigarettes. It had one bed beneath a nicotine-coloured light. Apparently the universe could arrange my execution and cheap accommodation at the same time. Oren locked the door, pulled the curtains and shed his torn shirt. The glass had left a map across his back. Some cuts were shallow. Three went deep enough that I could see gold at the edges, a faint metallic shine beneath the blood. His wings emerged when he tried to reach the worst one. They crowded the room, knocking a plastic lamp crooked and sending loose feathers across the carpet. I found a clean towel and made him sit on the end of the bed. He objected. I ignored him. Cleaning his wounds hurt. The bond gave me only an echo, but an echo of glass being lifted from flesh is still enough to make your stomach clench. I worked slowly. Oren's breathing changed whenever my fingers went near the place where his wings joined his back. The skin there was warmer. It looked human until I touched it, then light moved beneath the surface in a fine gold net. Pleasure ran through me so suddenly that I nearly dropped the tweezers. Oren caught my wrist. "Don't." I asked whether it hurt. His gaze moved over my face, weighing the lie before deciding it wouldn't survive. "No." He said it too quietly for me to mistake the answer. I touched the base of his wing again. His fingers tightened around me. The sensation that came back was dense and slow. It spread through my breasts, gathered beneath my navel and stayed there. I traced the line where feathers became skin. Oren's head lowered. His reaction moved through my body as if I had been touched in exactly the place I wanted it most. This was a terrible time to discover power. I liked it immediately. He stood so fast that the mattress bounced. I ended up between him and the window, one hand still against his back. He was larger with the wings out. Less like a man dressed for bad weather. His eyes had gone bright, gold swallowing the dark. He told me our bond was damaged. "You feel whatever gets through me," he said. "Pain. Pleasure. Hunger. I will feel you just as clearly." I had been afraid since the window broke. Fear is exhausting when it has nowhere to go. Anger has more uses. So I put my palm on Oren's chest and let him feel what his nearness was doing to me. He made a small sound. Barely there. It landed low in my body. His hand came to my waist. He could have pushed me away. Instead his thumb slipped under the hem of my jumper and pressed into bare skin. The contact doubled. I felt his thumb at my waist and, through him, the hot shock of touching me. I couldn't tell where his wanting ended and mine began. I kissed him. Oren held still for one punishing second. Then his mouth opened over mine. Angels do not kiss gently. Perhaps some do. Mine kissed like a man who had spent six years refusing to admit he had a mouth. His injured hand went into my hair. The other dragged me against him. Every place our bodies met sent sensation around the bond and back again, richer on its return. I bit his lower lip. He liked it. I know because I felt the answer between my thighs before he groaned. The backs of my knees struck the bed. I sat, pulled him with me and opened my legs around his hips. The wings closed over us, turning a bad hotel room into a warm, feathered dark. He kissed my throat. My collarbone. The top of my breast where my shirt had pulled low. Each touch reached me twice. His mouth made one path. His pleasure in giving it made another. I pushed the shirt from one shoulder. Oren's restraint tore a little more. His hand moved beneath my skirt. There was nothing accidental in it. He watched my face while his fingers travelled up my thigh, giving me every chance to stop him. I didn't. When he touched me through the thin fabric of my underwear, my hips lifted into his palm. The answering pleasure struck both of us. Oren shuddered. His forehead dropped against mine. I felt what my wet heat did to him, felt his body tighten with a need so fierce it almost hurt. His fingers moved once, slowly, and the bond turned that small pressure into something vast. I was close far too quickly. I told him not to stop. He stopped. His hand withdrew. The wings snapped close, cold room air rushing over my skin. For a moment I hated him exactly as much as he'd claimed to hate me. Then I saw the floor. Three feathers lay on the carpet. They had changed from cream to a deep, smoky grey. Blood marked the places they'd torn free. Oren backed away from the bed. He looked shaken. Want gave angels weight. That was how he explained it once he trusted himself to speak. They were made to act without appetite. A guardian could care in the broad, bloodless way Heaven approved, but personal desire pulled divine matter towards the earth. Enough of it could make an angel fall. I asked what happened to fallen angels. "Some die. Heaven calls the ones who don't die demons so humans will stop asking." There it was again. Something honest and ugly enough to believe. He picked up the black-marked shard from my kitchen. The glass hadn't cut him when he crushed it. It had melted into a sliver no longer than his little finger, dark as a gap between stars. The message was a correction order. Oren said there were no trials for such things. Heaven had already decided my life was an error. Each attack would look mortal because open intervention drew questions from other guardians. A failed brake line. Loose stone. A driver's foot moving at the wrong moment. Heaven had patience and an endless supply of coincidence. "Why six years?" I asked. He glanced towards the door. I stepped in front of it. My clothes were still crooked. My body still ached from where he'd left me. It added an edge to the question. Why had he been assigned then? Why could he list every accident since? Why did Heaven want back a life that had belonged to me for thirty-one years? Oren pressed the black sliver to the mirror. The glass clouded. Lines appeared across it, written in the same impossible script as the order. I read them without knowing the language. TAMSIN GREY MORTAL TERM COMPLETED AGE TWENTY FIVE CONTINUANCE UNAUTHORISED CORRECTIVE ATTEMPTS THIRTY SEVEN ASSIGNED GUARDIAN OREN STATUS COMPROMISED Underneath, a final line burned itself into the silver. FALL RISK CONFIRMED I stared at the age beside my name. Twenty-five. Six years ago. Oren's face appeared behind mine in the mirror. He looked like a man waiting for a blade. "You were meant to die before I ever saved you," he said.

Episode Three- The Weight of Want I remembered the day I died. It had rained then too. A commuter ferry struck something beneath the river and rolled far enough to throw half the passengers into black water. I had been standing near the rail with a paper cup of coffee. One moment I was wondering whether the lid was leaking. The next, the river had my legs. There had been a little girl in a red coat. I caught the hood as she went past me. I held her face above water and lost sight of everything else. People told me afterwards that a current should have dragged us beneath the hull. They called it miraculous when we surfaced on the other side. The girl lived. I spent a night in hospital with mild hypothermia and a bruise shaped like a hand around my ribs. I had never wondered whose hand. Oren sat on the floor of the Pilgrim with his back against the locked door. The room had begun to lighten around the curtains. Morning was coming, ordinary and rude. He told me he'd been my guardian for eight weeks when the ferry went over. My term had already been entered into the ledger. Guardians weren't meant to cause death, but once an ending arrived they were forbidden to prevent it. He had watched me go into the water knowing I wouldn't come out. Then I grabbed the child. He saved us both. I asked whether that was when he'd started wanting me. Oren looked down at the dark feather in his hand. "No." "That came later." The first correction came four months after the ferry. A delivery bike missed me by centimetres when its steering locked. Oren thought it was chance. The lift cable convinced him otherwise. By then he'd broken three laws to keep me alive and had begun to feel things when I did. Coffee. Cold water. The aching relief after I called my sister. Small sensations, easily ignored. Then I went home with a man whose surname I never learned. Oren stopped there. I didn't need the rest explained. The bond had carried my pleasure into him while he stood wherever invisible guardians stood. The thought should have felt like an intrusion. It did, a little. It also put a dark flush along his cheekbones, and I was mean enough to enjoy that. He said he'd stayed away after that. It hadn't helped. Every rescue drove the bond deeper. Pain opened the path. Desire learned how to use it. "So Heaven is trying to kill me because you got hard while I had sex with somebody else." "That is an offensive simplification." "Is it inaccurate?" He rubbed a hand over his face. It wasn't. The mirror behind him turned white. Oren was on his feet before a figure stepped through it. She came into the room without breaking the glass. Tall, bare-headed and dressed in the colour of bone. Her wings were narrow and perfectly kept. No rain stains. No broken feathers. Even her face had an orderly beauty, each feature placed with the care of someone setting a table for guests she disliked. Her name reached me before she spoke. Marael. She had supervised Oren's assignment. Marael looked at me with polite distaste. Her attention moved to the unmade bed, my bare shoulder, the dark feathers on the floor. I had the absurd impulse to tidy up. She told Oren the correction could still be contained. He would surrender his memories from the past six years. Heaven would repair what desire had damaged. My death would follow the approved mortal sequence and leave no stain on him. Approved mortal sequence meant something would kill me while everyone agreed it was unfortunate. Oren refused. No speech. No grand declaration. He said one word and put himself between us. Marael sighed. The room folded. Walls met where the bed had been. The ceiling dropped sideways. For an instant I stood on every surface at once, and Oren's pain ripped through me as Marael drove him to his knees without touching him. She called desire an infection. She said humans had appetite because we were brief, and angels had purpose because they were eternal. Mixing the two had produced every fall Heaven had ever been forced to hide. Oren reached for her and his arm bent backwards at the elbow. Mine screamed with borrowed pain. I had no heavenly weapon. I had a broken hotel lamp and the black sliver from the correction order. I chose the sliver. When I drove it into the white mirror, the room snapped back into place. Marael's composure cracked with it. A black line opened across her palm. Gold light leaked out. Through that cut, I felt her. Nothing. That was the horror of it. No anger. No pleasure in Oren's punishment. No pity. Marael had been scraped empty so thoroughly that obedience had room to spread out. Oren struck her with one wing. The mirror shattered. She fell backwards through the broken surface and vanished, leaving a hundred reflections of us on the carpet. Every one of Oren's reflections had darker wings than the man standing beside me. We ran. The Pilgrim had a basement laundry with boarded windows and three dead washing machines. We barricaded the door with a plastic chair that wouldn't have stopped an angry child. It was ridiculous. Oren's elbow had healed by the time we reached the basement. Mine still ached. He stood beneath a flickering strip light with blood from Marael's attack drying at one corner of his mouth. I wiped it away with my thumb. He caught my hand but didn't remove it. Marael had given me the part he hadn't. Heaven wasn't afraid I had a rare power or tainted blood. I was dangerous because I was ordinary. Oren had wanted something for himself and the sky hadn't fallen. Any angel might do the same if another human lived long enough to prove the choice was possible. My death would erase the evidence. His emptying would erase the witness. I told him I wouldn't thank him for the ferry. I hadn't asked him to break the world on my behalf. I wouldn't turn his disobedience into some polished love story either. He had watched me, hidden things from me and spent years resenting the price of his own decisions. Oren listened without defending himself. When I finished, he said he had hated me at times. He hated my carelessness. He hated the way danger seemed to find my body before he could breathe. Mostly he hated that every rescue gave him another reason to make the same choice. I asked what he wanted now. His hand slid to the back of my neck. "You. Without duty making it sound noble." That was the first answer he'd given me that felt he wasn't trying to be good. I kissed him with all the anger still in my mouth. He answered in kind. The laundry door dug into my back. Oren's body pinned me there, solid now, every hard line of him made heavier by the thing Heaven feared. His wings opened across the room. One knocked detergent from a shelf. The box burst on the floor, powder puffing around our boots. I laughed against his lips. He bit the sound from me. My jumper came off. Then his shirt. I touched every scar he'd taken for me and felt his response travel through the bond. The place beneath his ribs from the gas explosion. The pale ridge over his heart from a bullet I'd never seen. The long mark across his hip left by the van. He trembled when I kissed each one. By the time Oren lifted me onto a washing machine, there was nothing distant or divine in his face. He looked hungry. I preferred him that way. His mouth moved down my throat and over my breasts. He took his time there, learning what pressure made me gasp, what the bond returned to him when his tongue found the sensitive peak. Pleasure built in layers. My own. His. Mine again, sharpened by the knowledge of what he felt. I opened his trousers and wrapped my hand around him. His wings struck the pipes overhead. The sound he made was raw enough to strip the last of my fear away. I moved my hand slowly, watching his control leave in pieces. Each stroke came back to me as a deep, pulsing heat. He kissed me as if he could pour the sensation into my mouth. Then he dropped to his knees. Oren pushed my skirt up, pulled my underwear down and put his mouth between my thighs with no trace of heavenly restraint. The first touch nearly finished me. I gripped his hair. The bond let me feel the pleasure he took in my taste, in the movement of my hips, in every broken sound he coaxed from me. He was thorough and a little cruel about it. Whenever I came close, he slowed. Whenever I swore at him, I felt his satisfaction warm my own blood. I stopped caring who might hear. My climax went through us both. Oren's body locked. Light burst beneath his skin. For several breathless seconds the bond held me inside his pleasure as well as mine, stretching the release until my legs shook around his shoulders. He stood before I had recovered. I pulled him between my knees and tasted myself on his mouth. There was a question in the way he held me. I answered by guiding him to me. When he entered, the connection opened completely. I felt the fierce pressure of him inside me. I also felt what it was to be wrapped in my heat, how close it brought him to losing control. He felt both sides too. We paused there, stunned by the impossible intimacy of it. Then I moved. We found a rhythm that was untidy and desperate. The washing machine rocked beneath me. His feathers brushed detergent dust into the air. I kissed the pulse in his throat and tasted salt, blood and something faintly electric. Nothing about it was sweet. We were angry. We were hunted. He had stolen six years for me and lied about the receipt. I wanted him anyway. Oren's hand closed around my hip. He drove deeper, and the bond flared so brightly that I saw his memories behind my eyes. The ferry. The first time he'd laughed at something I muttered when I thought I was alone. Every moment he'd looked away too late. He saw mine in return. He saw that I wanted the man who complained, bled, lied and came back. The wings were incidental. We reached the edge together. Oren tried to hold back. I pulled him closer. The release broke through us hard enough to stop my breath. His mouth pressed to my shoulder, my name rough against my skin. Pleasure circled the bond, each pass making the next stronger, until it hurt and I still didn't want it to end. Something cracked above us. Not a pipe. Not the ceiling. The sound came from Oren. His wings turned grey from root to tip. Feathers fell in a soft rush. Beneath them, one band of a white collar split around his throat. I hadn't seen the collar until part of it broke. Oren looked up. The ceiling opened into a sky with no sun. Hands made of light came through. He shoved me from the machine a moment before they closed around him. Our bodies separated. The bond did not. I felt the grip on his throat. Felt his wings dragged upwards while his hands clawed at empty air. I caught his wrist. For one second I held him. Marael appeared above the hole, her cut palm already healed. She looked down at me and said, almost kindly, "Now he has something worth removing." The light tore Oren from my hand. The ceiling sealed. His dark feathers settled across the laundry floor. He was gone, but the bond stayed open. Through it came cold, pressure and the first cut of a blade against the place where his wanting lived.

Episode Four- How Angels Fall Oren had spent six years following my pain. I followed his for one night. It led me back to the Bellweather Hotel. The street had been closed since the stone saint fell. Yellow tape snapped in the wind. Floodlights washed the front of the building, but nobody guarded the side lane. Sensible people assumed three locked gates and a condemnation order would be enough. I had already demonstrated my feelings about signs. One of Oren's feathers lay inside my coat. The dark shaft pointed wherever his pain sharpened. By the time I climbed through a broken ground-floor window, it was angled straight up. The hotel had burned from the centre. Soot covered the lobby in greasy fans. Rain came through holes in the roof and tapped against a row of brass luggage trolleys. The old lift stood open, its floor missing, the shaft climbing into blackness. I'd photographed that shaft four hours earlier. In the mirror beside it, Marael was waiting. Her reflection watched me even when I turned away. The cut I'd given her showed as a black line across her palm. Behind her stretched a white corridor crowded with closed doors. She had left the bond open on purpose. She wanted me to come. That should have made me cautious. What it made me was angry. I pressed the black sliver against the mirror. Nothing happened. Then I added Oren's feather. The glass softened around my fingers. Crossing felt like pushing my face through cold oil. The burned hotel vanished. I stepped into a place with no wind and no smell. White walls met a white floor. Light came from everywhere without warming anything. Heaven looked like a building designed by someone who distrusted comfort. The doors had names on them. Millions of names, each cut so faintly into the surface that I saw them only when I passed. Some doors shivered with laughter or music. Others leaked the smell of hospitals. One had a dog's bark trapped behind it, the same hopeful sound repeated over and over. Lives, I realised. Reduced to records and filed where nobody could touch them. Oren's pain pulled me left. I found him in a circular room at the end of the corridor. His wrists were fixed above his head in bands of white light. His feet hung just clear of the floor. Half his feathers had been removed. The wings beneath were raw, all bone and torn gold. Marael stood beside a narrow glass table. On it lay six small vessels. Five were full of a moving grey liquid. The sixth waited beneath a silver blade. His memories. One year in each jar. Oren lifted his head when I entered. For a terrible second he looked through me. Then the bond found what the blade had missed. Heat struck low in my stomach. His pupils widened. The answering desire was weak and bruised, but it was his. Marael seemed disappointed. She told me I had confused wanting with freedom. Appetite only gave an angel something new to obey. Oren had broken himself for a sensation that would fade as soon as my short life did. I looked at the jars. "Then why are you working so hard to cut it out of him?" Her face changed. I ran at Oren. Marael moved faster. The silver blade entered my side below the ribs. There was almost no pain at first. Just pressure, a cold presence inside my body. Oren felt it before I did. He convulsed in the restraints. The bands cracked. I pulled the black sliver from my pocket and drove it into Marael's forearm. She released me. Blood followed the blade out of my side, startlingly red against all that white. Oren broke one wrist free. The room shook. He tore loose with more force than grace. One ruined wing struck Marael into the glass table. The vessels rolled. I caught the nearest before it fell, looked at Marael and dropped it. Oren swept the others from the table. All six smashed at her feet. Memories flooded the room. I saw myself on a railway platform, yawning into my scarf. I saw the back of my head as I slept. I heard a joke I'd made alone in a supermarket aisle and felt Oren's unwilling amusement. Small pieces of six stolen years moved through the air like smoke. He breathed them in. Recognition returned to his face all at once. He reached me, put both hands around my jaw and kissed me. The kiss landed hard, more proof of life than tenderness. Through the bond I felt the last of the fog clear from him. Marael rose behind us. Oren turned and threw the silver blade. It pinned her wing to the wall. We ran deeper into Heaven. My wound closed as Oren pulled me along. The cut transferred to his side, leaving blood on his trousers. Even half-stripped, he was still my guardian. Still taking what was meant for me. The corridor narrowed until we had to move shoulder to shoulder. My name began appearing on every door. TAMSIN GREY. DROWNING. TAMSIN GREY. CRUSH INJURY. TAMSIN GREY. BALLISTIC TRAUMA. TAMSIN GREY. IMPACT. Thirty-eight doors. The last one showed the silver blade Marael had just used. Oren stopped. The truth was set into the walls around us. Each rescue had created a debt. Guardianship held those endings in divine flesh, where they could heal without being erased. If a guardian fell, the protection ended. Every wound returned to the human life from which it had been taken. He hadn't known. Marael's voice came from the corridor behind us. Heaven had never trusted its servants with the full price of leaving. Oren's fall had already begun. His choice in the laundry had broken the collar that kept desire from becoming will. One more act of mortal want would finish it. Then thirty-eight deaths would find me at once. He pushed me towards the nearest door. "Go back. I'll surrender." I refused. He tried to make it an order. There was a central record beneath the Bellweather, the mortal root through which correction orders entered our world. If we reached it before his fall completed, we might cut my debt from the ledger. Might. Heaven had no reason to provide instructions for theft. The only way out was down. We reached a wide chamber with a floor of clear glass. Far below it, the burned hotel waited like the bottom of a well. White light sealed every wall behind us. Marael approached at the head of a dozen angels. Their wings were immaculate. Their faces were empty. Oren tried to open the floor and couldn't. Divine hands passed through it. Only mortal weight could break the boundary from Heaven's side. He looked at me. I knew what he needed before he spoke. So did he. Want had already dragged him close to earth. Enough desire would finish the fall. It would also start killing me. I should have been afraid. I was, somewhere beneath the anger and the ache between my ribs. Yet the strongest thing I felt through our bond was Oren preparing to give himself back. He would let Marael empty him if it kept me breathing. I couldn't bear the mercy of it. I caught his damaged wing at the root and pulled. Pleasure went through him, violent and immediate. His body struck mine. I kissed him before he could argue. Marael told us to stop. Oren's hands closed around my waist. He fought himself for a moment, then gave in with a sound against my mouth. Giving in was the wrong phrase. He chose. That difference travelled through the bond like a match along oil. He tore my blouse open. Buttons scattered across the glass. His mouth closed over my nipple, tongue pressing hard, while his hand shoved beneath my skirt and pushed my underwear aside. Two fingers drove into me without preamble, curling forward, and I bit down on his shoulder to keep from crying out. My hips rolled against his hand without permission. He felt that too, felt the clench and flutter of me around his knuckles, the slick heat of it, and groaned against my breast.

He felt every contraction around his hand. I felt his need harden against my thigh. The doubled sensation made privacy impossible. It also made shame pointless. The angels stopped several paces away. Perhaps they'd never seen one of their own want openly. Perhaps they felt it moving through the room and recognised an appetite they had been taught to call corruption. One lowered her weapon. Another stared at the wet sound of Oren's fingers working inside me as if the sound had given her a new sense. Marael ordered them forward. Only three obeyed. Oren pulled his hand free and lifted me. My back met a white pillar, skirt rucked up around my hips. I wrapped my legs around him and worked his trousers open, took him in my hand, thick, already slick at the tip and positioned him against me. "Tamsin," he said. My name held fear, warning and need. I kissed him and guided him inside me. He pushed inside me in one long stroke that forced the air from my lungs. The stretch of it jolted my shoulders back against the pillar, bowed my spine. Not gentle. The pillar was cold and hard behind me and he was hot and hard in front and there was no softness anywhere and I didn't want any. I wanted the truth of his body choosing mine while Heaven watched its rule come apart. He moved hard and deep. Each stroke drove pleasure across the bond, through him, back into me. I felt the tension coiling at the base of him the same moment I felt it coiling in myself. His ruined wings spread and beat once. Grey feathers spun around us like ash from something burning. Marael reached for him. An angel stepped into her path. Then another. I barely saw it. Oren filled my senses. His mouth at my throat. His hand gripping my thigh. The unbearable feeling of being wanted by someone who had been built without permission to want anything. He told me he was close. I felt it. His muscles locking, his rhythm stuttering. My own orgasm was right behind it, my whole body clenched tight around him, my fingers digging into his shoulders, my thighs shaking where they gripped his waist.

"Choose it," I whispered. Oren did. His hips drove forward one final time and held there, buried to the hilt, his climax tore through the bond. Mine followed, sharp enough to blank the room. The last white ring around his throat burst. Light flew out in fragments. For one suspended second Oren was fully angel and fully free. Then gravity found him. The glass floor shattered under our bodies. We fell through rain, soot and six storeys of burned air. Oren held me against his chest. His wings broke apart above us, every feather turning black before it vanished. We hit the old ballroom floor. Pain arrived in pieces. My wrist broke. My lungs filled with river water. A van crushed my pelvis. A bullet opened beneath my collarbone. Thirty-eight endings queued inside me, patient at last. Oren lay beside me, breathing like a man for the first time. No wings. No light beneath his skin. No power to take back what he had carried. Blood filled my mouth. He pressed both hands over the wound in my chest and looked towards the black lift shaft. "The ledger is below us." Another death entered my body. Oren pulled me to my feet. "Every time I saved you is coming home."

Episode Five- A Cruel Kind of Mercy The Bellweather had a basement beneath its basement. Oren found the entrance behind the dead lift. A narrow ladder ran down the shaft, past the level shown on any building plan. He went first. I followed because stopping had become difficult. My left knee kept remembering a car that had never hit me. My ribs broke between one rung and the next. Oren couldn't feel any of it. The bond had thinned when his wings burned away. I still sensed him as warmth at the edge of my mind, but my pain no longer crossed. He had wanted mortality. Heaven gave him the part where somebody else could suffer in front of him and he could do nothing. He climbed beneath me with one hand ready under my foot. Halfway down, the ferry found me again. Water filled my lungs. My hands slipped from the ladder. Oren caught my coat and braced himself while I coughed river water into the shaft. There couldn't have been water in me. There was anyway. It poured from my mouth, black and cold, then vanished before it struck the floor below. When I could breathe, he asked if I could keep moving. I said no and climbed down. The shaft ended in a stone chamber older than the hotel. Roots had pushed through the ceiling, pale and thick as wrists. They all fed into a slab of black glass standing upright in the centre of the room. The ledger. It wasn't a book. Humans like books, so that was how Oren had understood it. The real thing had no pages. Names moved under its surface in currents, millions of lives written in light and carried down into the earth. Mine burned near the centre. Thirty-eight white lines branched from it. Each one ended in Oren's name. He touched the glass. The slab showed us the ferry. I saw my body beneath the overturned hull, one hand still locked in the red hood. That was the approved ending. The child was meant to live. I wasn't. Then Oren entered the memory. He dragged us through the current with a force that broke his ribs and shredded one wing against the propeller. I saw his face when I took my first breath on the riverbank. He hadn't loved me. He hadn't even liked me yet. He had simply decided the ledger was wrong. That choice was more dangerous than love. Love could be dismissed as weakness. Judgement meant an angel had looked at Heaven's order and found it wanting. Marael came down the ladder alone. Blood darkened one sleeve. Her pinned wing dragged behind her. She looked less perfect in the underground damp, and more frightening for it. Above us, the angels who had refused her order were being contained. She said the word as if it covered anything from a locked room to a blade. What they'd witnessed couldn't be allowed to spread. Oren put himself in front of me out of habit. He was mortal now. Marael could have opened him from throat to hip with one hand. She didn't. The ledger had rules even Heaven couldn't ignore. A mortal and the guardian attached to her record could amend that record together. Oren's fall had made three endings available. They appeared in the glass. The first returned me to my approved term. I would die there, carrying every deferred wound. Oren would remain free and mortal. The second moved the debt into his mortal body. He would die thirty-eight times, if the first death left enough of him for the others. My life would continue without a guardian. The third restored the bond. Oren would return to service. The ledger would absorb the injuries and close my correction order. Heaven would recognise my continued life as lawful. In exchange, every memory and appetite connected to his disobedience would be removed. Six years gone. Desire gone with them. I would live. Oren would endure it, which meant whatever we were would be cut out of him. Oren chose the second ending before Marael finished explaining it. I told him no. He reached for the glass. I caught his hand. He was stronger than me even without grace, but the van struck my pelvis again and took us both to the floor. Pain split me open. When it passed, I was lying across him with his arms around my back. He begged then. Quietly. He said he had already lived longer than any human life. He said one death or thirty-eight made no difference if I walked out. I kissed him to stop the arithmetic. His mouth was warm. Mortal. There was no doubled pleasure now. I felt only my own bruised lips and the desperate way he held me. It was smaller than what we'd shared and somehow harder to leave. He had made enough choices for me. He chose the ferry. He chose every rescue after it. He chose to want me when Heaven had built a collar around the wanting. I wouldn't let him turn freedom into one final act of obedience and call it love. This choice belonged to me. I pressed my bleeding hand to the third ending. Oren tore it away before the ledger accepted it. "I won't forget you." I told him what would happen if he refused. I would choose the first line. I would take my term and leave him with all that freedom he claimed to value. It was cruel. I knew it while I said it. He knew I meant it. For once, my guardian looked as if he truly hated me. Marael warned us the amendment required consent from both names. Oren looked at the glass for a long time. Then he asked for one minute. She gave us less. He pulled me against him and pressed his forehead to mine. The weak thread of our bond brightened with the contact. He opened every memory he had left. They entered me without order. Rain striking wings I couldn't see. His hand around my coat at the crossing. The lonely fury of healing from wounds no one knew he'd taken. My laughter in empty rooms. My pleasure reaching him against his will, then very much with it. The detergent-scented basement. The white chamber. The exact instant he chose gravity. He gave me his hatred too. All of it. The fear inside it. The exhaustion. The desire that made every complaint a confession. I gave him what I could in return. The shock of seeing his wings in the lane. The pleasure of making him lose control. My anger over the years he'd hidden. The hard, inconvenient truth that I wanted him without believing he was good for me. Our last kiss tasted of blood. He touched the third line. The ledger took him out of my arms. Light drove through his spine. His body arched above the floor. New wings tore from his back, clean and cream-coloured, every damaged feather replaced. White bands closed around his throat and wrists. I felt the bond seal. The pain left first. Thirty-eight deaths lifted from my body so quickly I collapsed from the absence of them. Then went his desire. There was no dramatic break. No final cry. Warmth simply withdrew from the private place in my mind where Oren had lived. It receded until I couldn't remember how sharing a body had felt, only that I once had. He landed barefoot on the stone. His shirt was whole. The blood had gone. So had the dark ring around his eyes and the bitter set of his mouth. Oren looked peaceful. I had never seen anything so empty. Marael touched two fingers to his forehead. She gave him his assignment as if the past two days had been a clerical delay. Tamsin Grey. Thirty-one. Continued term authorised. High intervention probability. He looked at me. Polite concern. Nothing else. I waited for a flicker. Anger would have been enough. The smallest pull at one corner of his mouth. Any sign that a memory had hidden where Heaven's blade couldn't reach. There was none. Marael told me the correction order was closed. She also told me, very softly, that reopening Oren's appetite would reopen all thirty-eight debts. Heaven had learned from the mistake. There would be no fourth choice. Oren carried me up the ladder because his new orders required him to preserve my life. His hands were careful. His body gave me no answering heat. By the time we reached the ballroom, dawn was pushing through the broken windows. Police found me alone. That was how it looked to them. Three months later, the Bellweather came down. I watched the demolition from the safe side of the barrier, which would have surprised everyone who knew me. I didn't become obedient. I still took jobs that required ladders and hard hats. I simply stopped confusing danger with proof that I was alive. Life felt different when I knew exactly what it had cost. Oren stayed close. I saw him in windows and dark phone screens, always just outside the world. Heaven had assigned him to me again. Perhaps it thought that was efficient. Perhaps cruelty becomes efficiency when nobody in charge can feel the difference. He never spoke unless necessary. I started keeping records of impossible survivals. A man who walked away from a train wreck. A woman pulled breathing from a frozen lake after four hours. A teenage boy missed by six bullets at close range. I didn't contact them. I wrote down their names and waited. Heaven had closed my correction order. It hadn't made me harmless. One wet evening, a delivery van skidded on the road outside my office. The driver fought the wheel, lost it and mounted the kerb. I was standing in its path. Oren appeared and pulled me into a doorway. The vehicle struck a bollard. This time no pain crossed the bond. His shoulder had taken the impact, and I felt nothing. He released me at once. "Please exercise greater care," he said. It was such an Oren thing to say that hope made a fool of me. I asked whether he hated me. He frowned, not angry, only puzzled. "Angels don't hate." I looked at his perfect wings and knew he was telling the truth.