My empathy blinks on like one of those fluorescent bulbs that takes a minute to charge up.
Sorrow descends on me like a cloud moving over the sun. Loneliness. Separation, always this sense of separation from everything good in this life. The field where Samjeeza stands is full of sunshine, but he can’t absorb its warmth. He can’t smell the new grass at his feet, the fresh rain from this morning’s spring shower. He can’t feel the breeze. All of that is beauty, and it belongs to the light. Not to him.
I should be used to it by now, the way he pops up and plays with my head.
I give him the mental equivalent of a nod.
But it suddenly occurs to me that maybe that’s not true anymore. I sit up. I raise my hand and ask Mr. Anderson for a hall pass, suggest in a vague way that I need to use the restroom, possibly for female reasons.
I call my house from the phone in the office. Billy picks up.
“Trouble?” she asks immediately.
“Can I talk to my dad?”
“Sure thing.” Silence as she sets the phone down. Muffled voices. Footsteps.
“Clara,” Dad says. “What do you need?”
“Samjeeza’s here. I thought maybe you could do something.” He’s quiet for a moment. “I’ll be there in a minute,” he says finally.
It literally takes him a minute to get here. I barely have time to sit down on one of the hall benches to wait for him before he comes striding through the front door. I stare at him.
“Did you fly here?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“Wow.”
“Show me.” There’s a fierceness in his eyes that strikes me as familiar, like I’ve seen this look on his face before. But when? I lead him outside, across the parking lot, to the field. I hold my breath as he steps without hesitation over the fence and onto unprotected ground.
“Stay here,” he orders. I do.
Samjeeza is standing, in human form, on the far edge of the field. He’s afraid. It’s his fear that I’m remembering, I realize, from the day of the fire. Mom suggested that someone was going to come looking for her, and Samjeeza pictured two white-winged angels, one with red hair, the other blond, glowing and fierce, holding a flaming sword.
My dad.
Samjeeza doesn’t move or speak. He stands perfectly still, his fear radiating out of him along with the sorrow now, and humiliation, that he would be so afraid.
Dad takes a few steps toward him, then stops. “Samyaza.” The man suit Samjeeza wears seems transparent, false, next to Dad’s solid radiance.
Dad’s hair glitters in the sunlight. His skin glows. Samjeeza wilts before him but tries to sneer.
“Why are you here, Prince of Light? Why do you care about this weak-blooded girl?” He’s going to be playing the part of super-villain in today’s performance.
“I care about her mother,” Dad answers. “I warned you about that, before.”
“Yes, and what is your relationship with Margaret, I wonder?” Dad’s joy wavers. “I promised her father I would look after her,” he says.
Her father? Good grief. So there’s more stuff I don’t know.
“Is that all?”
“You’re a fool,” Dad says, shaking his head. “Leave this place, and don’t bother the child, or her mother, again.”
“Don’t you mean the children? There’s a boy too, isn’t that right?”
“Leave them be,” Dad says.
Samjeeza hesitates, although I know he has no intention of fighting Dad. He’s not that crazy. Still, he lifts his chin, meets the quicksilver of Dad’s eyes for a few seconds, and smiles.
“It’s hard not to fall in love with them, isn’t it? There’s a Watcher somewhere in you too, Michael.”
The glow around Dad brightens. He whispers a word that feels like wind in my ears, and suddenly I see his wings. They are enormous and white, a pure sweet white that reflects the sun so it’s hard to look directly at them. I have never seen anything so magnificent as my father — my throat closes on the word — this creature of goodness and light, standing there protecting me. He is my father. I am part of him.
“I will crush you under my heel,” he says in a low voice. “Go. And do not come back.”
“No need to get excited,” Samjeeza says, taking a step back. “I’m a lover, not a fighter, after all.”
