Page 89 of Vanish Into Light

Water dripped off the edge of the roof overhead, crystal flares in the late afternoon sunshine. A few white, cotton clouds scudded across the sky, like something out of a painting, or an old movie: a sky that Gallo had never seen in person. The blue of it was clear, the smooth, pastel shade of an eggshell.

His chest squeezed up tight, and he breathed out in awe, not caring that he sounded like a little kid. “Oh my God.”

Gavin pressed in on his other side, swearing under his breath. “Shit. Is that…? I mean, there’s no way…”

As quickly as delight had moved through him, worry came crashing back down. “Rose and Lance,” he said, pushed back from the window, and took off down the hall at a run.

Curses and the splash of water meant that Tris and Gallo followed him.

The house, he noted, was silent save for the noise they made. No roaring wind, no booming thunder. Light fell in warm panels through the windows, gleaming on the ripples they left in the water.

The great hall looked like it had all day, plus a few inches of water: scattered with debris and rubble. But now, warm sunlight poured in from the hole in the ceiling overhead, gleamed in all the facets of the stained-glass portrait of Saint Michael. And illuminated the two crumpled, kneeling figures on the dais. Lance had Rose wrapped up in both arms; her face was pressed into his neck, and her shoulders shook.

There was no sign of Beck, or Morgan.

Lance had a trickle of blood down the side of his face – and a telltale gleam of wetness on his cheeks – but they otherwise seemed whole.

The pain they were feeling now, etched deep in the lines around Lance’s mouth, evident in the shuddering of Rose’s back, was emotional, and not physical.

“Oh.” Gallo let out a deep breath and felt like his lungs had caved in, hurting for his friends.

Tris’s arm landed warm and heavy around his shoulders; he couldfeelhis lover’s relief – and his disbelief. “Damn,” he said, quietly, “that son of a bitch really reset everything, didn’t he?”

A scatter of clinging raindrops fell down through the hole in the ceiling, gleaming like jewels in the fall of sunlight.

“I think so,” Gallo said. He didn’t know if he dared to hope – not when Lance and Rose looked like that. Not when his whole life had been dark, and rainy, and soot-smeared, and spent living beneath the shadow of the war that had been going since before he was born.

He took a few steps deeper into the room–

And a shadow fell over Rose and Lance.

Fear spiked. “Guys, watch out!” He charged the last distance, water surging nearly up to his knees.

Something dropped down through the hole in the roof – no, someone.

A figure descended feet-first, seemed to float down – and then he heard the soft rustle of…offeathers.

Gallo stumbled to a halt at the base of the dais, head kicked back so he could watch, his fear tumbling quickly to awe. To shock. All that he’d seen, and still, somehow, he had trouble rectifying the vision that greeted him now.

After their weeks spent in Beck’s company, the spread and flex of wings was a familiar sight. But rather than smooth black membrane, and bony points, these wings were thick and soft-looking with feathers – white feathers as long as a man’s arm. They sprouted from the back of a figure dressed in pure white, hair in gleaming gold curls that framed the regal, straight-lined visage of a figure straight from a Caravaggio.An angel, he thought, before shining golden sandals landed lightly on the wet stone of the dais. An angel with a sparse, strong body chiseled from marble, with a sword on his hip, with a circlet of gleaming platinum perched on his crown.

White wings mantled, and a beautiful face bent, a blue-white gaze fixed on the man the angel held almost-reverently in his arms.

Behind Gallo, someone gasped.

Gavin said, “Is that…?”

The angel’s face lifted, and the eyes were the same; the eyes were Morgan’s. His voice, when he spoke, was like the resonant chiming of a bell, of many bells. “It is done.”

Rose scrambled to her feet; she swayed, and Lance caught her around the waist and kept her upright. She reached – and then hesitated, hand hovering beside the face of the unconscious man in the Archangel Michael’s arms. The hair that fell across his forehead was the tawny wheat-gold of a lion’s mane, but the face was the same: the nose, the high cheekbones, the narrow jaw. The lean, sinuous body the same, too. But there were no horns, no wings, no claws.

It was Beck.

Above the wild thumping of his own heart, Gallo could hear Lance’s ragged, open-mouthed breathing. Heard the catch and falter in Rose’s voice, the choked-back tears, when she asked, “How…is he…is he alive?”

“Yes,” Michael said. Gaze shifting to meet Rose’s, he added, “and he’s mortal.”

She put her trembling hand to Beck’s naked chest, right over his heart, and gasped. “He’s alive,” she whispered, and Lance’s hand gripped white-knuckle tight on her waist; he rested the side of his head against her hip.

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