A/N: Hello again. There's not really much to add, except I hope you're enjoying, and to thank all the faves and reviews. It's going to start picking up after this chapter.
Sam and Kim, you are my hand-holders in fic and I am forever grateful to you.
The Fallen
Chapter 10.
I rarely sleep. Two hours a week is sufficient, and even then it's not an absolute necessity. I've gone months without closing my eyes in voluntary unconsciousness. In fact, when I was an infant, my mother took me to various sleep doctors concerned that my lack of it would inhibit my development. Their conclusion? I was so intelligent I simply didn't need as much as the average child.
They were correct, in a sense, and they very rarely are when it comes to me.
Bella on the other hand sleeps like the dead, for hours on end. After the first couple of weeks in her company she averaged seven hours a night. I have to keep reminding myself of her humanness and her lack of maturation. She's young, she's naïve, and she's impulsive—incredibly so. Her mood can so easily switch from quiet and contemplative to restless and temperamental in a matter of seconds that it occurs to me that she has not yet emotionally matured.
For one so young, however, she has a sound mind. She's perceptive, quick-witted and often inclined to sarcasm—not to mention her love for reading. Her intelligence quite evidently exceeds the parameters of average, and if I had to guess I'd place her IQ at 125. Another fact about her I quickly realized is that she has not retained the ability to see or communicate with angels. While I haven't been gifted with the sight to see them, either, I can still sense their presence from the same distance I do the beasts. There are several dozen in the convent at any given hour, and Bella is completely oblivious to them.
I'm yet to determine the reasoning behind this, but one thing is certain; she is every bit the teenager she appears, and it's becoming a crux.
For six months I remain with her in the convent. It has given her sanctuary for almost twenty years before I arrived, and the fact that Michael personally placed her here holds more weight than me being in possession of his sword. Not too many demons are willing to risk disembodiment for the sake of extra strength, and there are millions of anointed humans throughout the planet for them to target. Though, despite the safety it awards her, Bella has become increasingly frustrated with what she views as her "imprisonment". She's pleaded with me numerous times to take her away, and then becomes sullen and short-tempered when I explain the reasons why she's safer here with me. At times it feels like she is my child, and I'm not exactly comfortable with the act of constantly chastising her. In fact, our relationship has become more similar to that of a captor and captive than a human and her guardian.
It's making her rebellious against me while causing the steadily increasing feelings I harbor for her, both physical and emotional, to appear perverse, at the very least.
For the first several weeks with her, Bella regarded me with a wide-eyed fascination. She was constantly shy and self-conscious, until slowly the mechanics within her shifted. She started flirting with me—openly flirting with me. And while I'm technically a four thousand year old virgin, I am not inexperienced to the point that I'm oblivious to female beguilement.
Ironically, it's something I'm intimately familiar with, even without needing to read the minds of the over-eager females.
In the beginning it was subtle. She touched me often, my hands, my face, wrapping her arms around my shoulders, or running her fingers through my hair. Then she began asking all sorts of inappropriate questions, like whether I am anatomically correct.
"I'm born a human, Bella—what kind of question is that?" I answered, agitated by the very implied innuendo behind her curiosity.
"Mother Superior always told me angels are genderless," she explained her reasoning, while unable to conceal her smirk.
I took a small measured breath before replying. "As light their energies are either male or female, but when they take human form they become physically male or female. They're not genderless." This is when I realize she was playing mind games with me. Her curiosity was feigned in order to breach the subject. "Bella, please stop."
"What?" she puts to me, her eyes wide with completely fabricated innocence.
"We're not discussing this anymore." I'm firm, but it doesn't deter her. In fact, on several occasions she was able to outsmart me and trick me into giving her more information that I began to suspect she might be a lot more intelligent than I first thought. I quickly learn I have to tread carefully with this canny human and not let my guard down.
And still she continued to get more physical with me, until she started kissing me. It was my cheeks in the beginning, until it was my lips. Only briefly, but enough that the implications behind it were evident. Then she started insisting I sleep in her bed with her. For two nights I attempted to oblige her by sitting beside her while she slept, but she was able to entice me beneath the covers, and I instantly became aware of how detrimental it was for us both. Lying partially beneath her, covered in her scent with her limbs draped around me was maddening, until all I could conceive of was the level of sexual frustration that dominated my thoughts.
I'm honestly not sure what she wants from me, but I'm willing to wager it flies directly in the face of every warning I have given her. Warnings she has evidently taken little heed of.
Girls her age are sexual beings, governed by a ceaseless cycle of hormones. I've forgotten just how much—for my own sanity, at least. Bella's no exception. It's becoming precarious with her, and while I've been able to withstand her advances, I'm struggling. She realizes this, too, and she's deliberately wearing me down. She will often prance around me half-naked, and she's under no misapprehension of exactly what kind of physical response she's drawing from me.
I am still part-human, after all, and my body often functions on impulse alone. At times I have barely any control over it; even after hundreds of years of forcing it into dormancy out of sheer necessity. If anything, it has only made the primitive beast that forever lurks within me more restless.
Over the last several nights I've kept my watch over her from a perch on the roof of her bedroom window. The cool English night air is a welcoming relief from the constant seduction that is her presence.
The first night she sulked so much she resorted to punishing me by blurting out an obscene blasphemy that almost caused me to topple over the side of the building as my wings tore violently from my body. Forcing them fully free before again retracting them, I burst into her room, full of rage.
"What is wrong with you, Bella!?" I roared at her, causing her to immediately cower away from me. "If you insist on acting like a child, then I will have no choice but to remove myself from you. Is that what you want?"
She appeared momentarily full of remorse before she straightened up and glared back at me in defiance. "Well, go then, Edward," she mocked me. "I've survived twenty years without you!"
"You've survived by the grace of my brother who placed you out of harm's way, young lady. Don't forget that!" God in heaven, I sounded like her father, only reinforcing how unorthodox our relationship had become. Something she didn't miss, either
"Only because you're a screw up of an angel who left me unprotected!" she yelled back, and her words stung. Then, grabbing the first object closest to her she hurled it at me.
It was a figurine of Michael, and for a fraction of a second I considered catching it before deciding to let it shatter against the wall; two inches from my head.
"Do you want me to leave?" I asked in a quiet voice, after giving her a moment to calm herself down.
"Yes—leave!" she fumed before turning her back on me, grabbing her book and throwing herself stomach-first on her bed.
Releasing an exasperated breath, I climbed out her window and positioned myself back on the roof. Seer or no seer, I was beginning to understand exactly why I always had zero inclination toward teenage girls.
She hasn't spoken a word to me since.
I continue keeping a close watch over her, nonetheless; I couldn't stop if I wanted to. During the day I keep track of her through the minds and eyes of the sisters and the other various humans she interacts with. And when she leaves to go on her daily walk, I accompany her. It's still not safe for her to be outside the convent on her own, even with her amulet—as I discovered long before I arrived in the city.
There's four demons who still lust over her, and I fully anticipate that sooner or later one, or all, will come for her. They've shed her blood too many times over the centuries; it draws them to her, almost unwittingly. Together with her death and the power it will award them, it is too much of a temptation.
At some point soon I know I'll have to remove her and take her into hiding, but until I've worked out where and when, I've decided to keep it from her. My initial plan was to stay for as long as it took to draw the demons out, but in almost seven months not a single fiend has come close. This concerns me, and I'm not naïve to believe they've willingly given her up to me.
They're undoubtedly planning something, and I don't want to alert Bella in any way and worry her. Though, while she's ignoring me she's making it a lot easier.
Bella sits down on the park bench and opens her book: Pride and Prejudice. It's her favorite, she revealed to me previously, and she's read it several times.
I sit dutifully beside her; though, she behaves as if she's unaware of my presence. We're on the fourth day of silence and already it's exasperating. Her stubbornness is childish, but my frustration over it is infinitely worse, and the fact that I am unable to read her mind only exacerbates it.
"Isabella," I speak softly, appealing to her. "Please. This is getting ridiculous."
She shrugs a shoulder in a jerky, irritated motion, but otherwise continues to ignore me.
"B'Shem Yeshua! [In the name of Jesus]" I blaspheme, muttering it only partially beneath my breath before expelling it heavily. I swear in the name of God if her mind wasn't so closed to me, I'd start questioning whether she was actually Isobel.
"Why would I talk openly to my guardian angel?" she speaks a moment later, without looking up from the pages of her novel; her casual tone completely feigned. "I see no one else doing it. People will think I'm mad."
"Mad?" I burst, beyond comprehension while struggling to keep the tone of my voice low. "You are completely maddening!" Lunging off the bench to my feet, I turn my back on her and walk with stiff, angry strides to the other side of the park; leaning up against the trunk of an old Ash tree. She has me so flustered and angry that I need to put a lot of distance between us before I do something I'll inevitably regret.
I fume, folding my arms tensely across my chest while I wonder—for the fiftieth time in an hour—whether she's in fact closer to twelve than she is twenty. And what I ever saw in her beyond her silent mind that I had risked and forsaken my heavenly body of light for this wretched human existence. I'm sure Michael knew of her temperament long before he led me to her, and is right now laughing at my expense.
She continues to read as if nothing had happened, and when she rises to take the rest of her walk back to the convent, I blindly follow. I linger at least twenty feet behind her, waiting for her to buy her coffee before once more trailing after her. Only this time, after taking several strides from the corner store, she pauses and turns to glance at me over her shoulder. She's waiting for me, and when my eyes catch hers she smiles, her entire face warming in apology.
"I'm sorry," she mouths slowly, something she speaks out loud when I reach her side.
I only nod, conceding and smiling slightly to myself, regardless.
"Peace offering?" she petitions, holding up a second cup of coffee and placing it in my hand.
I release my breath in relief just as much as exasperation. I open my mouth to beseech her to understand my actions, before cutting myself short.
A sudden revelation dawns on me.
As I gaze down at her impossibly beautiful, but no less young and innocent face, I realize that I have been judging her by an unobtainable standard; by the standards I hold for myself. She's human, she's always been human, and yet, I expected her to exceed the limits of her own humanness; to share my knowledge and perception of the world. I've been incredibly arrogant, and have been seeing her through a lens slanted with the disdain I harbor for humanity.
While I've had four thousand years of life experience, she has not. She's young, but she's by no means a child, and yet she's been acting like one because a child is exactly how I have been treating her. My own basic lack of understanding of the human psyche is the cause of this. I've always regarded the human race as substandard and rudimentary, and have treated them in accordance. Bella included.
The brutal reality is she's an orphaned nineteen year old girl who's lived her entire life deliberately sheltered from the outside world. She's been shut away within the looming confines of the convent for reasons that were never explained to her before me. She has every reason to feel frustrated with her life. And she has every right to treat me just as disdainfully as I have—albeit unwittingly—been treating her.
That night she invites me back into her room where I sit beside her on her bed while she reads and watches her favorite sitcoms. At times she's content enough to talk to me, and I oblige her as much as I can without giving too much information away. She holds my hand and rests her head on my shoulder, and this time I don't discourage her. Instead, I relish the touch and feel of her smooth warm skin against me, and the way she fits so perfectly against my side.
Several times over the course of the night I check the perimeter of the city like I always do. There's nothing. I don't detect any of the fiend's minds, nor is there any whisper of them from the few humans who are still awake. Satisfied, I head back to Bella. It's a couple of hours before dawn and she's fast asleep.
I take the seat by her window and relax as I listen to her gentle rhythmic breathing. An hour passes, the sun is not yet visible over the horizon, but the sisters are already awake and beginning their day. They harbor a quiet acceptance of me, and while I still make every effort to avoid them, they haven't yet attempted to seek me out. The allusive Michael, my brother—the very one whom they revere as a saint—has reassured them that I am not a danger to Bella, but a form of earthbound angel sent to protect her.
I find myself momentarily distracted in the pre-dawn Liturgy of the Hours prayer when an all too familiar sensation washes over my body of skin. In the next instant I completely freeze before lunging to my feet and reaching for the hilt of Michael's blade.
There's six of them, and they're less than a mile from the convent.
A/N: Let me know your thoughts. They say things like reviews will cause a dopamine high. That's a high I could enjoy ;)
MWAH xoxo
