Page 3 of The Redeemable 4

Yeah, we’ll probably keep a visit to Michael as a last resort.

Lux stood in front of me, towering over me even though I was back in my willowy 5’9 body and no longer in Arcadia’s vertically challenged one.

Hey!

“I’m going with you,” Lux said. It wasn’t a request, or even a demand. It was a statement of fact.

“I’m sorry, but we are going places you cannot go. Well, places you would never return from,” Luc said with something that almost sounded like compassion. From the Devil. Today was a strange day all round.

Lux let out a frustrated grunt between his teeth. “I need to do something.”

I put my hands on his cheeks and did something I hadn’t done in centuries, since I fell. I sifted with another person.

I sifted him to the fourth floor of the hospital, into the neonatal care unit. I checked him over to make sure all his molecules came with him. Arms, legs, only two eyes. Okay, we were good. Apparently moving people through time and space was just like riding a bike.

In the nursery, in two humidicribs side by side, laid Arcadia’s babies. Tiny, pink and defenseless.

“They need you. All of you.”

Lux stared at the babies; Estrella was small but still bigger than Hope, who would have fit in one of Lux’s massive hands.

“Do you know who’s they are yet?”

I stared at him. “Does it matter?”

He shook his head, sadness dragging down the lines of his handsome face and for a second, every one of the two thousand years he’d lived was etched on his face.

“No. They are hers, and I will love and protect them with my life.”

Arcadia was so quiet, but I could sense her awe of the babies. I wasn’t going to lie, they were the most perfect creations I had ever seen.

I turned back to Lux to find him staring at me. Not at me, past me, as if he could see into my soul like an angel.

“You will come back to me, Arcadia Jones.”

Tell him I love him.

“She says she loves you.” We turned back to the babies. “I’ll bring her back, I promise.”

Committing their tiny faces to memory, I knew it was time to go. I walked to the window and slid it open, spreading my wings wide.

“By the way, congratulate Oz on becoming a Papa for me, yeah?”

With that, I fell into gravity’s calm embrace and for the first time in decades, I felt the wind beneath my wings.

Now that song was going to be stuck in my head. Damn you, Barbara.

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