Page 101 of Angel's Fall

“If this is your path – if you are determined to end it all in some terrible act of hate for them and despair for yourself – I want no part of it!” Christine spoke with a voice like iron. “I am leaving. I would not be Raoul’s prisoner in life and I will not be yours in death!”

To his utter shock, Christine turned, strode to the door, and opened it. It was simple as anything, but it was like a knife to Erik’s heart to see her go.

“No!” Erik cried as he rushed after her, grabbing her hand and falling to his knees before her.

“I will make my own choices!” Christine bellowed in return, wrenching away her hand. “I do not know what life is left for me outside that door, but I would rather face it and fight for it – for even a few moreseconds– than let you take it from me!”

“It’s the only way!” Erik repeated, the words thick on his tongue as he grabbed for her skirts. “We have to end it to be free! And I will take everyone who trapped us in this cage of fate with us!”

“Spare me your poetry!” Christine yelled back. “I don’t want to hear it – not if you’re going to use it to justify killing yourself! Andme, for God’s sake! I want to live! And I deserve totry, no matter what sort of mess I’ll make of it or pain I’ll feel. The men in that room who you hate and all the strangers you want to destroy – they deserve to live! They deserve a chance! And so do you!”

“How can you say that?” Erik pleaded. He could barely see her beautiful, furious face through his tears and he could not understand how she could still see a way out. “How can you look at all of this and see anything but ruin and sin?”

“Oh my poor, unhappy Erik, how can you not know?” Christine asked in return, her voice and face softening at last. “How can you ask that, when it was you who taught me to see beauty behind ugliness?”

The cacophony that had filled Erik’s skull since Perros was suddenly silent. The world was still and quiet as Christine looked at him with utter pity and resignation.

“What?” Erik asked as Christine knelt with him, taking his hand.

“You have helped me, always, to be brave,” Christine began as she touched his face, new tears glinting in her forest eyes. “You taught me to see beyond fear, to keep breathing and doing andlivingwhen the pain was too much. You taught me to see beauty, and I found it in you. I fell in love with that.”

“I didn’t teach you bravery,” Erik breathed back, in awe of her once more. “It was always there.”

“Nevertheless, because of you, I was brave enough to see. I loved you. I still do and always will,” Christine went on, and Erik held her hand tighter.

“You make it sound like this is a final goodbye.” It was one thing to rave and plot and dream of their end and fear any world without her, but to have it happen was another thing entirely, and it hurt like nothing before.

“Because if you do this – if you refuse to see – it is. You ask me to stay and die with you if I love you, and Erik...” Christine swallowed back a sob and her hands were warm and solid in his. They shook as she held him, and he hung onto her, because if he did not, he would fall forever.

“Christine, please,” Erik breathed even though he did not know what it was he was begging for.

“I have worn my love for you like a chain, a weight of iron dragging me down to the bottom of the sea, to a place where there is no light or breath,” she began, each word another cut to his soul. “And I have let it, because I thought I deserved the void – that I deserved this terrible, hopeless love – because of the darkness in you and the darkness you fostered in me. Drowning down here was my penance, my punishment for loving your darkness and letting it feed the darkness in me. But I was wrong.”

Christine steadied herself, breathing deep as if before a song.

“I love your darkness because it is yours. Because I see what is beyond it and I forgive it. I forgive the mistakes of the man you were and, beyond all reason, I love the man you are. And I hold on to hope for the man you could be. That is who I need: the man who you can become if you justforgive them.”

“Who?” Erik asked in wonder.

“All of them – Raoul and Shaya and the cruel, cold world. Let go of your revenge and fear and hate,” Christine begged, her forehead against his. “You helped me be brave enough to hope. You showed me how to be brave enough to love. For me, if you love me... Be brave enough to forgive.”

Erik heaved a sob, clinging to her to keep from falling, his heart tearing to shreds again and again as the demons and ghosts and better angels fought within him. If he loved her? How could she doubt that, and yet, how could she ask something so impossible?

He was a creature of the dark, abandoned and broken. A phantom. A monstrous thing wrought by humanity’s cruel hand. How could he let go of the fear that had sustained him? How could he not answer the world’s hate in kind? How could he step into that light she spoke of when, over and over, it had done nothing but burn? Yet, how could he refuse her any wish?

“I cannot live in a world without you,” Erik wept.

“Then don’t. I will not die here in the darkness with you, Erik. I want you to live with me in the light.”

Her words were like dawn in his heart, the soft creep of sun after night’s long chill. He felt it, the touch of that first sliver of light on the dark places in his soul that had ruled him for so long. But no longer. For Christine, he would let the light burn his hate away.

“Yes,” Erik gasped, nodding against her, and she embraced him fiercely in turn. “Yes,” he repeated and she kissed him.

Had Erik ever been kissed before? He did not know, for this was so different, so new. Christine’s lips pressed against his deathly skin, and he came alive in a way he never had before. His heart surged as he embraced her, tasting their tears and the breath of life from her lips. She kissed him, and the shackles and cages fell away. The light eternal of her love saved him, right there on the floor, hidden away beyond the lake.

“Help me,” he begged as he pulled away, breathing deep. For the first time in days (or maybe in forever) he was determined to breathe as long as he could. “Christine, I don’t know how. I don’t know what to do.”

“The scorpion. Show me where it is.” Christine pulled him up with her as she rose. “Promise me it will make everything safe.”

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