Page 23 of Dance of the Phoenix
Jada took a long few moments to give me an answer. “That’s the name of the celestial species we humans usually call angels.”
“Angels,” I repeated, as though the word were foreign. “You mean the winged ones whose names end withel?”
“Just so you know,elmeans God in Hebrew,” Jada murmured. “But yeah, basically.”
For some reason, the only things I could picture were the cupids in that one Raphael painting. “So you’re saying CJ was an angel,” I said, imagining CJ with a pair of wings. It made me want to laugh for some reason.
“A Malachi,” she corrected, her lips stretching into a somewhat wistful smile for a fleeting moment before it dissolved. “And yes. He used to be one.”
Her gaze met mine. “He and I met when I’d just turned eighteen years old,” she said, and when her face softened, I knew she was remembering. “I lived in New Orleans at the time. Fresh out of high school, I was trying to get accepted into the Mardi Gras marching band—I used to play the trumpet.
“But on the day of my audition, I received a call from my estranged mother,” she continued with a grimace. “She told me she needed my help. Which I found hilarious, considering she left home years before, and I had to take care of my disabled, drunk father all by myself. And just when I finally thought I could maybe follow my dream and becomethe first woman—and a Black one too—in that marching band, I felt too bound by our blood ties to not help her.”
She looked away. “She lived in the Boston area at the time, and so I spent my savings to go see her. And when I did, I found a winged man sitting in her small apartment living room.”
“CJ,” I murmured, entranced.
She nodded. “Yeah, Chanjomaron.”
I frowned. “Excuse me?”
“His full name,” she said, her face splitting into a nostalgic smile. “It’s such a beautiful name, isn’t it?”
I begged to differ, but I locked my lips and gave her a sharp nod.I think CJ suits him far better than this weird-sounding mouthful of a name.
“Anyway, my mother was in deep shit with the Malachi,” Jada said, her face faltering. “There is an underground market—like the black market, only for races other than humans—and she was running an illegal trading business of forbidden substances. The Malachi caught a whiff of that and started an investigation.”
There were many things to process here, but one thing confused me. “Why would the Malachi care?”
“Because the Malachi are in charge of interdimensional law enforcement,” she replied matter-of-factly, as if I was supposed to know what that meant. She must’ve seen my confusion because she added, “This realm we know as Earth is in fact one of many that live in parallel to one another.”
I was trying my hardest to swallow my many questions in favor of the most important ones, but this gave me a full stop. Not because it was hard to process, but because I was starting to connect pieces of a puzzle I hadn’t believed actually existed.
I’d had this fleeting thought some time ago that maybe all the things written in the Tefat, the religious book of the Morrow Faith my father belonged to and had tried to instill in me, were actually true.
Since so many things were happening, mainly the Hecatomb and the shit it stirred up, I had put Eliza’s threat from a couple of weeksago in the back of my mind. It had been such a baffling encounter, and a somewhat scary one, that I didn’t feel like thinking about any of it anyway.
But I remembered what she said. The words were engraved in my brain.“Natalia Aileen Zoheir-Henderson, Child of Kahil. As a level-two threat to the Realm of the Living, you demonstrated powers that allude to you becoming a large-scale catastrophe; consider this a warning.
“Under any circumstances, never again attempt to resurrect the Morrow Gods nor ever again visit Esheer or seek the Jinn. Failure to comply with these restrictions will lead to your demise.”
In the Tefat, there was a short chapter about the Realms of Oon. Every time I read that chapter, I treated it like a fairy tale, or a mythological story, because it was far too whimsical to be believed (or had been before I knew about vampires and became one myself, that is). It explained that the Realms of Oon were once delicately interwoven with one another, until an incident had taken place and torn them apart, making each of them exist separately.
The Tefat didn’t go into many details about the Realms of Oon, because only two mattered in relation to the Morrow Gods: Aderra, the Realm of the Living—or, as Jada plainly put it, planet Earth—and Esheer, the Realm of Fire ...
“Aileen?” Jada’s voice snapped me out of my thoughts, and I turned to look at her. She frowned at me. “Am I boring you so much that you had to drift off?”
“No!” I exclaimed at once, giving her an apologetic look. “Sorry, I was just trying to digest what you’re telling me. Where were we again?”
“Why the Malachi needed to intervene in my mother’s illegal trades,” she said dryly, shooting me a questioning look before she resumed. “The Malachi usually avoid our realm for many reasons—unless someone in this realm is threatening the stability of others, including the Malachi’s own realm, Haramon.”
I nodded. “Got it. So that’s why CJ was at your mother’s? To arrest her? How did that go?”
Jada gave me a humorless look. “He was there to take her to Haramon to stand trial,” she said quietly, her voice turning bitter. “She asked him to wait until I arrived because she wanted to make amends with me and say goodbye. As if that would fix all the damage she’d done.”
At least your mother was willing to apologize,I couldn’t help but think, my hands curling into fists. Most people who do bad things are aware of what they’re doing—and do it anyway.
My father didn’t think he’d done anything bad. He knew he was going against the law, that the things he was doing were considered crimes by any sane person, but his blind devotion to his cause, to resurrect the Morrow Gods, made him see them as means to an end. A necessity. He would never apologize for any of it.
