Verity means truth. Verity means the honest-to-god truth. 'Course, Mishaer doesn't really believe in God anymore. It's hard to believe, once you've been tossed into the dirt and felt it coat your skin and weave its way through your sinews.
Maybe his child will believe better than he can.
He creaks open the door, groans at the brightness. He used to be a child of light, his very essence beyond the limits of human vision. He used to burn eyes out.
Now, the sun burns his eyes, and he runs his finger lightly over the steel banister as he steps up from the underground basement and onto ground level.
She is waiting there, sprawled across the grass, his little girl, his little child-of-two-histories; his little abomination by heavenly standards.
"Time to go," he says through cold lips. "Verity, it's time to go."
It's dark and cold, and she's only ten, her skin flabby and soft, lungs still growing into their proper shape.
It isn't technically even safe to do this while she's so young, but her father is dying. His body is self-cremating from the inside. She's fairly certain it was the cigarettes, the close quarters; the constant women that came through the flimsy curtain and through and through the hazy drill of Verity's existence.
She doesn't ask if it will hurt. There are levels of pain. She has categorized them, drawn them with stubby pieces of chalk on sidewalks stained by human blood. She has drawn herself in each of the levels, tested herself to guess what she could handle without screaming.
The needle is not too large; she should be okay, if she can hold on to the sides of the metal table and if Mishaer will stop looking at her. Just an outline, just a trace. That is what he told her they will do.
They whispered when she came in the room. Ugly words, degrading words. Voices swirling in her head. Suddenly she knows she's not really hearing the voices, not with her human ears.
Oh. Oh. Oh. That's what a freak is, someone who can hear the raging murmurings of the back alley angels.
Nephilim. The word creaks; groans, and tremors of it come up and down her vertebrae, up and down underneath her sweat drenched skin.
Mishaer told her the word when she was two, and for years it was her only name. Walk down the street, holding the hem of his jacket because he wouldn't take her hand. Nephilim. Sit next to him at the table, eating cold soup from a can because he doesn't want to help her. Nephilim. Come to him at night with her chest heaving and her insides screaming for relief, and he turns over on his cot and leaves her whining like a sick dog on the concrete. Nephilim.
The word clicks into place all the pieces she never knew, but it's too late to change anything. Cardboard in the rain, that's her puzzle. Cardboard in a storm, but tonight you will be iron.
Mishaer doesn't tell her it will be alright; doesn't tell her it will be over soon. His fingers are long nails coated in black, running along her hairline. Verity does not flinch. Does truth flinch? He lets her go and the angels take over again.
Bodies covered in grease, covered in ink, covered in bright red and icy blue like a winter sky and a gold colour that looks like someone tried to bottle heaven but got the plastic version.
If you can't be an angel, you'd better be a fake angel; you'd better wear your halo with a corrupted pride.
The tattoos are ugly on their wasted bodies, but the angels must not care. Baggy clothing, tank tops, pierced lips and noses and tongues, contact lenses that make their eyes purple and green and red rimmed from the terror of the lie. Verity can see past the tattoos, somehow. There is not much left that is soul and not rot, there is not much that has not been devoured by asphalt and broken glass and the infernal inner burning.
The table is iron, and they take off Verity's shirt and press her, face down, onto it. Up and down her spine there is a coldness that seeps from the table into her wasted stomach.
She almost asks if the needles will go right through to her organs because she is too skinny. But that would be a question of pain, so she doesn't. The straps are made of leather and hold her from moving. She can still turn her neck.
One angel with a leather jacket and a red halo made of Xs tattooed around his forehead bends down to her level.
"Your daddy thinks he's gonna finally love you when this is done. Your daddy thinks this will change what you are."
Nephilim. Born of hybrid, born in secret, born in a grimy parking lot, too early, too late for your human mother, too late for your angel father to kill you while you were still unconscious, before the other angels arrived. So truth lived.
"Stay quiet." The haloed angel says, tilting his head and putting a finger on her lips. His skin tastes like jaundice and red pepper.
There is no danger of her talking; Verity's never been one for words.
Four years old, crying and screaming. You're supposed to forget what it's like to be four, but when there's blood, your blood, all over your mouth and your face and in your hair, it's a particular level of pain. When you drag yourself to a plastic bucket and wash your blood away in water that's filled with infection and sin, when you will never speak again because, according to Mishaer, you didn't deserve to have a tongue—
Verity is confident within her shaking bones that this pain will not be like that pain.
The first needle, above her collarbone. Drawing down into the crook of her back in a curved line, moving precisely while her body vibrates. This is not pain. This does not even register. This is like scraping your finger against asphalt and feeling only the sting of rough gravel.
The outline of wings on her back is thin and faint, grey ink, snaking on her skin. Six wings, like her father. Six fake, imprinted drawings that stretch from her neck to her waist.
They show her in the mirror, reflect the light so she can see what they have drawn on her back. She only stares, suddenly wishing it was more beautiful, more dramatic.
Is this what truth dies for? The grey outline of a wingspan that should be large enough to cover the sky?
With a trembling finger, she points to a drawing tacked up at the corner of a cracked mirror.
Give me that give me that give me that.
Truth needs its frills. Truth needs the outline to be red, not black, carved into skin, not painted on. Angel wings are not easy to rust, not easy to break, not easy to create, but Verity does not want the wings of a heavenly angel.
Plastic gold and too-bright red; swirls combined with harsh edges, grace with power, power with finality.
Make me a warrior of god.
She continues to point until they pay attention to her, every angel turning to listen as her guttural noises rise in tone, in desperation.
Make me an angel give me those wings.
Verity climbs onto the table, lies down and wraps her arms around the metal frame.
They bring the needles back silently.
This is pain off the scale, this is four angels surrounding her, this is ink so deep in her body that it touches the fragile sinews that snake muscles across her back, reaches deep into her body, infuses her organs with ink and rust. She feels it already, burning her from within.
That's what it means to be an angel, isn't it? In truth. Every angel she has ever known has had a cigarette to their lips, a breath that smells like death, a stapled on smile; letting it play the role that grace used to.
Consume like a fire.
Oh. Oh. Oh.
I will be like Mishear, she thinks, when the pain is the worst, when she is sure that the liquid dripping down her foot is her own blood, that they have peeled away all of her skin, installed cardboard wings with gold tipped feathers.
Then she stands up, turns to reflect the light so she can see where the lines meet, how talented the artists have been.
Wordless, wordless, wordless.
She is a mosaic, her back a woven piece of art, the most magnificent they have ever done, her skin is a maze of line and colour and patterns that only angels know how to draw.
Humans are the artists, angels only copy what they see, and the result is terrifying, these are the most realistic wings Verity has ever seen.
Verity's body has become the abomination, but there is no one in heaven listening as the tattooed, paper silhouette angels cry out for holy wrath to reign down on her, holy fire, holy rage.
A girl, a nephilim, an angel, Verity.
Every breath she takes makes her back tremble, and the wings look like they are moving, like folds of skin are being slowly yanked from a wound, like she has been flayed and the strips of her flesh have been sewn together to create her.
Wings, red, gold, black, burning.
Plastic, plastic, she will always be a fake. Pasted on replica.
Colour-in-the-dots angel.
Truth means that the cigarette, the needle, the pain is going to kill her, and she is ten years old. She has already begun to wear them out.
She gets up and leaves, no one stops her. The art has surpassed the artists and they are all afraid.
Verity dances on the edge of the sidewalk, and people see her. Faster, faster, and the voices are screams, look at that child look at her back what in god's name is that a tattoo of wings oh my god look at that child—
She feels the last gasp of burning, searing breath choking up through her non-existent lungs, heaves her way onto the last rung of a ladder overlooking the patch of concrete with the white chalk marks.
Her wings are red and gold and flicker in the sun for the 2.2 seconds it takes for truth to hit the ground.