“My mom told me. She said that one night, a few days before I was born, another angel appeared to her and told her about the angel-bloods. She thought it was a crazy dream for a while. But she told me as soon as she saw that there was something different about me. I was ten.”
I think about the way Mom told me about the angel-bloods, only two years ago, and how hard it was to accept. It blows my mind to think about what I would have done if she’d sprung that kind of information on me when I was a kid. Or if she’d been raped.
“It took me a long time to find out anything else,” Angela says. “My mom didn’t know anything about angels besides what it says in the Bible. She said I was a Nephilim like in Genesis, and I would grow up to be a hero like in the days of Samson.”
“No haircuts for you, then.”
She laughs and drags her fingers through her long black hair.
“But you knew about the Dimidius and Quartarius and all of that,” I say.
“I’ve picked up the facts here and there. I consider myself a bit of an angel historian.”
It’s quiet for a minute.
“Wow,” I say.
“I know.”
“I still think we should do our history project on Queen Elizabeth.”
She laughs. She turns toward me and pulls her legs up and sits Indian-style, so close her knees brush mine.
“We’re going to be best friends,” she says.
I believe her.
I have to be home by ten, which gives us hardly any time to talk. I hardly know where to begin, the questions come so fast. One thing is clear right away: Angela knows tons about the angels, so much of the history, the powers they’re rumored to have, the names and ranks of different angels who appear in literature and religious texts.
But in other areas, things about angels and angel-bloods that you can only get from the inside, she doesn’t know much at all. She and I could learn a lot from each other, I realize, being that my mom only tells me what she thinks is absolutely necessary, if that.
“You did all your research in Rome?” I ask.
“Most of it,” Angela says. “Rome’s a good place to find out about angels. Lots of history there. Although I met an Intangere in Milan last year, and I learned more from him than any other source.”
“Hold up. What’s an Intangere?”
“Silly,” she says like I should have guessed. “That’s the Latin for the full-blooded. It literally means whole, untouched, complete in itself. So there’s the Intangere, Dimidius, Quartarius, you know.”
“Oh right,” I say like it had just slipped my mind. “So you met a real angel?”
“Yep. I saw him and I don’t think I was supposed to. We were in this little out-of-the-way church, and I saw him standing there kind of glowing, so I said hello in Angelic.
He looked at me and then grabbed me by the arm and suddenly we were someplace else, but like we were still in the church, too, at the same time.”
“Sounds like heaven.”
She frowns and leans closer like she hadn’t heard me correctly.
“What?”
“Sounds like he took you to heaven.”
Her eyes widen with sudden comprehension. “What do you know about heaven?”
she asks.
I flush.
“Well, not a whole lot. I know that it’s dimensional, that it exists right on top of Earth.
Like a curtain, my mom says, a veil. She went there once — I mean, an angel brought her there.”
“You’re so lucky to have your mom,” Angela says with envy in her eyes. “I have to work so hard to get all my information, and all you have to do is ask.”
“Well, I can ask,” I say a bit uncomfortably, “but that doesn’t mean she has to answer my questions.”
Angela looks at me closely.
“Why wouldn’t she?”
“I don’t know. She says I have to find out these things on my own, by experience, or some baloney like that. Like earlier, you said your father was a Black Wing. I have no idea what that is. I assume it’s something like a bad angel, but my mom’s certainly never mentioned it.”
Angela thinks for a minute.
“A Black Wing is a fallen angel,” she says finally. “I guess they fell a long time ago, closer to the beginning.”
“Beginning of what?”
“Time.”
