Shadows in the Silence by Courtney Allison Moulton
“I’ve got you,” Will whispered, his voice so weak I wanted to cling to him and comfort him. He knew as well as I that I was finished. The endless power of the hallowed glaive would take one more life tonight.
He picked me up and carried me to a soft patch of grass at the top of Armageddon, and this was the place where I would die. The clouds had gone and the night sky had opened up with a cascade of bright stars. The air was cool on my skin and where Will touched me, I was warm. It wasn’t so hard to breathe now that I was lying down, but breaths came slower and shorter. My heartbeat wasn’t so fierce now, but it was pumping a sense of serenity through me that I didn’t fear. For the first time in many, many lifetimes, I wasn’t afraid to die.
But when I looked up into Will’s face, everything changed. The sorrow in his green eyes was so terrible and so beautiful that I was overcome by it. I’d only seen his tears a handful of times in five hundred years, but still they shattered me every time.
“I can’t do this,” he said, trembling. “I can’t say good-bye to you forever.”
I offered him a smile as sweet and as big as I could summon, but I was so fragile. “It’s all right. This was meant to be.”
He bit his lip and said, “So were we.”
Tears rolled over my cheeks and slipped into my hair as I gazed up at him. “I am so sorry. I love you. Please know that. It’s the only thing that matters now.”
He shook his head. “You can’t leave me alone.”
“But you’re not alone,” I told him. “You have your mother and your brother and your friends.”
He touched my cheek and traced my lips. “I’m nothing without you.”
“Do you remember the night you kissed me for the first time, when I told you that I wanted to live?”
He exhaled, the breath stolen from him, and he nodded. “Yes. oh, God, Ell…”
I smiled at him. “I have. I have lived. Thank you.”
He said nothing, but a tear fell from his eye and hit my cheek.
Time had passed, but I couldn’t tell how much. Will held me in his arms and I curled my body into him, feeling the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed, listening to his heartbeat. My own heart slowed and I grew weaker as my body broke down, but I wouldn’t untangle my fingers from around his shirt. I memorized him, his scent, the feel of him holding me, every contour of muscle beneath his skin, every rip and tear in his clothes from battle…. I wanted this moment to burn itself into my mind, into my soul, so that wherever I went once I closed my eyes this last time, I wouldn’t forget him.
“Ellie,” he whispered, breaking the silence between us.
I tightened my fingers around the cloth of his shirt. “Yes?” My voice was tiny, soft, barely anything more than beating butterfly wings.
His chest shuddered and I felt a warm drop of tear fall onto my hand. “You were quiet. I thought you’d gone.”
“No,” I told him. “But I’m so tired.”
“Stay here, please,” he whispered. “I’m begging you.”
“I’ll try to come back,” I promised. “I’ll find a way. Will you wait for me?”
“I’ll wait forever.” His lips pressed against my hair and he tilted my face up. “I swear to you that I will still be here. Even if you never come back, I’ll keep waiting for you.”
“I will fight all the way here if I have to,” I said, clutching him tighter.
“I know you would. You’re the fiercest girl I’ve ever met.”
I moved my hand up his chest to cradle his face and I pulled him down to me. I took a breath just as I kissed him. He kissed me back gently as his lips moved with mine. Then he broke away with a wretched, sorrowful sound and he kissed my cheek, my temple, my forehead, and my lips one last time.
“I’ll be here,” he said. “For however long it takes. A year, ten thousand. I will not leave this world until you return to me.”
I brushed my hand over his cheek until I couldn’t hold it up anymore. “I promise I’ll come back to you. I won’t forget your face. I’ll come back.”
And then Will’s face faded away.
EPILOGUE
Will
THE ONLY REASON I WAS HELPING KATE MOVE INTO her dorm was because Marcus had made me. And because I liked Kate, though she still scared the hell out of me.
And because she told me I needed to be happy again.
I wasn’t especially fond of the university life in East Lansing. It was manic, alcohol-and-study-crazed, and there were too many people for me to enjoy it. But it felt safe from reapers here. Since the battle on Armageddon, the numbers of demonic reapers loyal to Hell had been devastated. Reapers no longer prowled the Grim, hunting humans. There were some reapers out there, but so few they were hardly a threat as we picked them off, one by one. We and the angels had just about wiped them out. I was, to be honest, bored and unfocused. Marcus, however, was clearly thriving.
“I think I may enroll,” he confessed.
Kate dropped a box of clothes onto the narrow twin bed on her side of the room. “You can’t just enroll, moron. You have to be accepted.”
He gave her a haughty grin. “Oh, they’ll accept me. As soon as they hear I’m in town, they’ll send their sexiest interns chasing me down the street, waving scholarship offers printed on fragranced paper smattered with lipstick smudges.”
Kate promptly socked him in the gut and knocked the breath out of him. “Find my hangers so I can put my clothes away. It’s after dark and I want to go party. All the fraternities heard I was moving in and I don’t want to keep those hot frat boys waiting. Boys…” She sighed. “Their attention spans are so limited, you know.”
Marcus grinned, grabbed her shirt and tugged her close, and he nipped her neck playfully. I sighed, shook my head, and set the television I’d just brought in for her on the desk. I’d tried so hard since we came up here not to look at the other side of the room, where Ellie was supposed to be moving in her own things today. I never realized how difficult it’d be for me to help Kate move in until I saw the empty bed and desk. My heart tried to break all over again. Everything was just too empty now.
It had been two and a half months. The university hadn’t assigned a replacement roommate for Kate. Things would be easier if there was someone there to fill the void Ellie had left, but there wasn’t. All I had left of her were her swords. I had wrapped them in cloth and put them away in my room. I couldn’t even look at them anymore.
Ellie had died in my arms. Even as an archangel, she had felt so small and fragile. I had held her dying so many times before then, but that final time was different. We had come so far since we were reunited. We’d loved so fiercely. She had been mine if only for such a cruelly short time. A few months in five hundred years was not enough time. I’d do it all over again, though. I’d lose her forever all over again. I would never give back those few months even for a less-broken heart.
One by one the angels had come to the top of Har Megiddo where I sat, holding her body close to mine after she’d died. I’d fought alongside them in that battle, but up close, when they stood quietly watching us, they looked as beautiful as they looked unreal. The angels weren’t supposed to feel emotion, but they were weeping. All of them. Their tears stained their flawless faces like rain running in rivulets across stone. Azrael was the only one of them who came to me, knelt in front of me, and took her from my arms. He was the angel of death come to carry his sister home. I didn’t want to give her up, knowing it would be the last time I ever saw her face. I had died on that wretched hill with her.
I stayed with my mother for a few weeks afterward. I did as Ellie had told me, got to know my mother again, and during those weeks, I felt glimpses of what happiness used to be like. My brother hadn’t been around for almost a month, but Cadan had his own way of grieving, I supposed. once our pain faded and every day seemed less difficult to endure, I wanted to know him like family, to know what it was like to have a brother. To feel less empty.
I wanted to mo
But I prayed every day for her to come back to me, somehow, some way. I would never stop praying.
“Do you need anything else?” I asked Kate, trying to pretend she and Marcus weren’t practically tearing each other’s clothes off while I was still in the room.
“Mmm?” she asked, pulling herself from Marcus just enough to glance at me. “No. Thanks for everything, Will.”
“Actually,” Marcus said, untangling himself from her and peeling her hands off him. He eased toward me while she pouted. He dipped his head close to mine and said in a low voice, “Do you mind stepping out for like, two hours?”
Behind him, Kate guffawed. “Two hours? You wish!”
I slapped a hand on his shoulder. “Sure, man. You got it. I could use some fresh air.”
I headed out of the dorm room, shutting the door behind me, and I wandered toward the elevator. The hall was packed with students and parents who hadn’t quite finished their moving in yet. I stuffed my hands in my pockets as I stepped into the elevator. It rumbled slowly to the main floor and then the doors whined open, allowing everyone to pour out ahead of me. I strolled through the lobby and out into the night. The air was crisp and the sky was clear and bright with stars, though they were a little difficult to see among the haze of city lights.
I meandered past the tall dorm buildings, through the parking lots, weaving around vehicles, and aimed for the field beyond the small woods. It was interesting how this bustling, sprawling city just ended so abruptly and became farmland. on one side of the road, it was a busy university campus and on the other, there were fields and trees and lots of deer.
A blinding flash of light above my head made me squint and shield my eyes. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen before: a falling star, hurtling toward the earth. I watched in awe, slack-jawed, and the hairs on my arms rose, tickling me. My mind raced with possibilities, but I had no answer for what I’d just witnessed. So I ran, unsure of exactly what I was following, but certain it was no natural phenomena. The energy erupting from this thing was enormous, and whatever it was, good or evil, it was dangerous.
The falling star disappeared over the tops of the trees and the ground gave a tremendous roar and shook like a quake so strong that I was knocked to the ground. I picked myself off the grass and kept going. I had to know what it was. I had to know. I was lost in a daze, blinded on every side of me but up ahead. Nothing mattered in the world but finding this fallen star.
I darted through the trees, my shirt catching on twigs, but I didn’t stop. The woods began to thin and then I found myself in a clearing, gazing at a smoking, shallow crater in the earth.
I didn’t know when I’d stopped breathing, but suddenly I gasped for air. Heat and energy rolled across the grass toward my feet. I crept forward, sliding down the gentle slope into the crater, staring at the thing in the center of it that emanated a brilliant light and slowly unfolded itself before me.
Wings the color of moonlight and gold unfurled themselves from around a small, crouched feminine figure. The light coming from her was blazingly bright, but I never squinted, only stared wide-eyed with an overwhelming hope and careful joy. The girl pushed herself off the ground, her strange white clothing luminous beneath her wings. She lifted her head to look at me from beneath a waterfall of hair the color of cherries and dark chocolate and flame, and I fell to my knees.
She smiled, a gesture so beautiful and sweet that I felt tears sting my eyes. “Hello, Will.”
“Impossible,” I breathed, unable to compose myself. I was shaking all over as if I were freezing, but her light was warm and gentle.
She stepped close to me, folding her wings back. She lifted a hand and my body rose unbidden to my feet. I reached up with trembling hands to touch her face.
“You’re real,” I said, staring at her in wonder. “This isn’t a dream. Gabriel, you’ve returned.”
Her smile became something that was very human and held a thousand secrets.
“Just call me Ellie.”
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About the Author
COURTNEY ALLISON MOULTON lives in Michigan, where she is a photographer and spends all her free time riding and showing horses. She is the author of the Angelfire trilogy, including the first two books about Ellie and Will, ANGELFIRE and WINGS OF THE WICKED. For more information about Courtney, visit her online at www.courtneyallisonmoulton.com.
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Other Books by Courtney Allison Moulton
Angelfire
Wings of the Wicked
Credits
Jacket photo © 2013 by Amber Gray
Jacket art and design by Joel Tippie
Copyright
Katherine Tegen Books is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
SHADOWS IN THE SILENCE
Copyright © 2013 by Courtney Allison Moulton
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Moulton, Courtney Allison, date
Shadows in the silence: an Angelfire novel / Courtney Allison Moulton.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: In the final battle for Heaven and Earth, Ellie, who has the reincarnated soul of an ancient reaper-slayer, must grapple with her archangel powers to save herself and all of humanity.
ISBN: 978-0-0620-0239-6 (trade bdg.)
[1. Reincarnation—Fiction. 2. Soul—Fiction. 3. Angels—Fiction. 4. Monsters—Fiction. 5. Horror stories.] I. Title.
PZ7.M85899Sh 2013
2012005261
[Fic]—dc23
CIP
AC
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12 13 14 15 16 LP/RRDH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FIRST EDITION
EPub Edition © JANUARY 2013 ISBN: 9780062203014
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Courtney Allison Moulton, Shadows in the Silence