Covenant (23 page)

“
Can we talk about the
dagger later? Celia…is hurt. I don’t know what is wrong with
her.”

Evan finally gets up, and
when he moves toward Celia, his shoulders slump slightly. It seems
like weights press down on him. As he bends to her, I can see the
worry lines deepening around his eyes, and creases furrow his
forehead.

“
What happened?” He gently
sets his hand on her forehead, and his fingers gently caress her
skin lovingly, like a human father would stroke his daughter’s
face. And then he turns to me and asks more demandingly, “What
happened?”

I lick my lips and finally
say, “Kane attacked her.”

His shoulders sink and he
starts shaking his head. “You have no idea what consequences this
will have, not just for Celia but for all of us.” His gaze turns
back toward Celia, and he moves his hands to rest upon her
shoulders. “You need to set your hands upon her shoulders so you
can help me draw the chaos out of her. That is what has immobilized
her. Until we can get her balanced, she won’t be able to move or do
anything else.”

Looking at Evan’s serious
expression, I feel more ashamed, and I will do whatever it takes to
save Celia. I set my hands upon her shoulder and focus with Evan to
draw the confusion from within her.

I don’t know how long we
fight with the discord, but it seems like forever, and for the
first time, I feel this madness spinning around me that exhausts
me. I don’t think Evan has much strength, either, considering the
way his shoulders sag. He seems to age before my eyes.

But our efforts pay off as
Celia’s eyelids flutter open. The mist departs from her blue eyes
as she licks her lips weakly.

“
What happened?” she asks,
her voice soft. She’s having trouble speaking.

Evan and I look at each
other, and neither of us is really sure what to say. Finally, he
caresses her forehead one more time. “Nothing you need concern
yourself with. Lev and I will handle it while you recover. You just
need to rest to restore your strength.”

She closes her eyes,
trusting in what Evan says because Evan has never failed her,
unlike me. Evan motions for me to follow him, so I fly after him
until we reach my space, where he nervously paces
around.

“
I don’t understand. What
were you thinking when you removed the dagger, Lev? What possessed
you? You have no idea what is going to happen because of
this.”

In that moment, I feel anger
burn inside me, an emotion I’ve rarely ever felt, and the heat of
it is so strong it owns me and forces words to come out I don’t
even intend to say. “What possessed me? You stole my past—blanketed
my memories and left me sitting here with nothing to go on except
this idea that, if I just listened to you, everything would be
okay. But it was never okay. That’s not what I sensed deep inside,
and yet all you would tell me is that it would be okay. It would be
okay. It was for the best. Yet, I don’t think any of this has been
for the best!”

Evan sinks down next to me.
“How did you get your memory back?”

“
Theresa helped me,” I
admit, not willing to look in his eyes. Instead, I focus on
brushing my fingers against each other to give myself a
distraction.

He looks at me. “And was it
worth getting them back? Was all the pain worth the knowledge of
what you have lost?”

I finally say,
“Yes.”

It’s not the answer he’s
expecting. I know he still believes he did the right thing in
purging my memory, but the fact of the matter is that if you love
someone, memories of that love don’t die. They never permanently go
away. They will come back to you. It may not be a time or place of
your own choosing, but they will return.

“
Tell me the whole story; I
need to know how all of this came about.” His voice is quiet, and
he has started looking straight ahead instead of at me, so I start
at the beginning when I began associating with Jayzee and the
others. Though he says nothing, I can tell by his expression what
I’ve done is far worse than I ever could have believed.

When I finish, I look at
him. “What do we do now?”

He says, “You do realize
that none of them are going to be satisfied with leaving things the
way they are right now? They are no longer pure. You used to know
this, and I don’t understand why you don’t remember….” His voice
trails off as a new thought hits him. “Unless Theresa purposely
kept those memories from you because she had planned to use you all
the time, knowing what that dagger was capable of.”

I shift uncomfortably
against the soft mattress, sensing a truth coming I probably don’t
want to hear. “And what is the dagger capable of?”

“
It can destroy
angels.”

I inhale sharply. I had
never thought such a thing could exist. “Can they use it against
us?” I fold my arms across my chest.

Evan glances around the
room, a flush on his cheeks. “I don’t know. I don’t think so, but I
would have to consult with Turnoc to know for sure what it can do
and how it does it. And that would mean revealing I no longer
possess the dagger.”

While I don’t even remember
Turnoc, I do get the impression admitting such a thing is horrible.
“I didn’t mean to set things astray. I only wanted to help
Elizabeth.”

Evan stands and starts
pacing again. “If the memory blockage didn’t work on you, and you
still felt Elizabeth’s presence, what could make you think that by
doing the same thing to her, you would be able to fix everything?
You yourself said you can’t erase love, and yet you tried just as I
did.”

Suddenly looking at things
from that perspective only makes me feel so much worse. He’s right.
I had tried the exact same thing on her. “All I wanted was for her
to have a normal, happy life, not one marred by my
absence.”

“
But you can’t change
things, Lev. She loved you. Even though you never meant to, you
fell in love with her, and regardless what you do or what I do,
some part of you will love her still. Even thought you knew what
you had with her couldn’t last, it didn’t change what you felt for
her, and it never will. Ten to one she’s the same way about you.
You are never going to be able to take away her pain. She has to
learn how to live with it just like you do.”

I try to think of something
that will make all of this better, but no words come. It seems as
though all I’ve learned about myself is that I have failed so many
people—Elizabeth, Evan, Sarah, Jayzee, Celia. The list seems to go
on and on.

Evan walks over to me. “I
guess I need to fix your memory right.” He shakes his head and sets
his hands on either side of my face. He whispers, “Shut your eyes
and think of Elizabeth. She is the key.”

I obey him without question.
For a moment, it seems nothing happens. Then suddenly I feel all
the memories jump inside my head like a million flashbulbs going
off at once. It blinds me inside, and I groan as I remember not
just the latent images of me with Elizabeth that Theresa hadn’t
restored but also all the other moments of my existence, including
those early lessons of training both Jayzee and Sarah and
tormenting them.

In that moment, I see myself
in constant conflict with both Kane and Colin, two angels who had
never obeyed completely. They walked the finest line between right
and wrong. Now I know that wrong won them over. Still, I have no
desire to judge them, as my own failings have surfaced completely,
and I can no longer hide from any of them. The truth does not
change depending on who tells it. It is fixed, and that is what I
measure my intent to—the truth.

“
So now what can we do?” I
ask, hoping he’s got some kind of suggestion to undo what I’ve done
because I don’t know how I’m going to be able to live with my
guilt.

“
We don’t have time to
second-guess whether Kane is keeping the dagger on him or if he’s
hiding it. We’re going to have to go directly to him and confront
him. This isn’t going to be easy, and you can expect more of the
type of attack he used on Celia. If he is that proficient at it, he
is very dangerous.”

“
Is there any way to defend
against that type of attack?” I stare off into space, trying to
figure out how to stave off an attack of pure chaos. I would never
even have thought of using such as a weapon against other angels,
but Kane apparently did, which tells me he spent a lot of time
preparing for this, and he is definitely good. I completely fell
for it.

“
The only defense I know
isn’t to react, not to give into it, because when you give into it,
the fear takes over and paralyzes you, as we saw with Celia.” He
frowns. “Besides, if we don’t get that blade back and he figures
out a way to use it against us, which I’m still not sure he can,
then things are going to get much worse. I’m going to do some
research to find out what the blade’s potential is. I’d just as
soon the members of the Triune not know the truth unless we have to
tell them.”

I realize my choices are
forcing Evan to take a course he would never normally take—hiding
things and my shoulders sink even more. “So when do you want to do
this?”

Evan says, “Well, we need to
give Celia a chance to recover so she can enlighten us about how
he’s using the chaos like this, and then we’ll have to go looking
for him. So probably tomorrow we’ll settle this one way or
another.”

I would say something,
anything, but there isn’t anything to say at this point, and I
don’t think there is going to be anything to say until we get the
dagger back.

Chapter Seventeen

“
It’s all kind of fuzzy
around the edges,” Celia says, sitting up from the cave floor.
She’s still a bit pale, and it worries me because I’m beginning to
wonder if she will totally recover. Evan seems to think she will,
but I don’t know. What I do know is that if she doesn’t, it’s my
fault. All of this is my fault.

“
But do you remember the
attack? Do you remember what he did?” Evan presses Celia, sitting
next to her.

She rubs her hands up and
down her arms. She acts like she’s cold, something most angels
don’t feel. Then again, I’ve learned not to think there are things
we can’t feel because every time I think, I find out the hard way
we can feel so much more than what we ever expect, and some of it
isn’t good.

“
One moment I was standing
there coming towards him because I thought he had the dagger, and
the next I see this blur of brilliant light and I feel it pulse
into me. There’s pain, and it’s like nothing I’ve ever felt before.
I know what chaos feels like but when that hit me, there was a huge
mass that left me terrified.” Celia shivers as she remembers that
moment. She looks at Evan. “The next thing I know, I’m waking up
here with you leaning over me and Lev standing there, with neither
of you wearing happy expressions. What did it do to me?” She turns
her focus to me. “You said you were the one who found me. What did
you see?”

“
You weren’t moving,” I
murmur, not really wanting to answer. I don’t even want to think
about that image of Celia lying there so still, with her eyes open
like that, unblinking and still. “You looked dead. If you had been
a human, that’s what they would have believed—that you were
dead.”

I walk around Evan’s,
staring out at the blackness surrounding us. Although tonight I
would love to feel starlight, there are no stars, not that I can
see right now. The clouds have obscured them. And so I have to
content myself with the darkness which seems to know me better than
I know myself these days.

Celia’s frown deepens, and I
feel her level of chaos raising slightly, so I start toward her,
intending to help her settle it so as not to raise the potential
danger again, but before I can get there, Evan has already set his
hand on her shoulder, and her fingers reach up and stroke
his.

“
There’s not going to be an
easy way to do this,” he finally says, looking at me. “While I have
been trained to shield against chaos, I’m not sure how effective it
will be on an assault of this magnitude, and there’s no way we have
the time to train you.”

“
Then perhaps we should
just go. I can take you to the place they’ve been
staying.”

Celia licks her lips
nervously. “They aren’t going to be there, Lev. By now, they’ve
probably headed elsewhere.”

Evan nods grimly. “She’s
right. Wherever it is they have been hiding, they won’t return, and
while we can track them, it won’t be fast.”

How could I have ever fallen
for this? How could I have been so foolish? “We have to do
something.”

Evan nods. “I’m going to
talk to Turnoc and the other members of the Triune. I don’t know
what they will tell me, but I can’t pretend we have what we don’t
anymore. I’ve thought about that, and I won’t deceive
them.”

My shoulders sink. “Then I
will come with you when you face them. It’s my fault the dagger is
missing.”

Evan shakes his head. “No.
It won’t do any good. It will only make things worse for you, and
right now, things are bad enough.”

As I start to argue, I feel
the lure of a sojourn call beckoning me, and I gasp, wondering how
I’m going to do it. I haven’t been able up to this point, so how
will this time will be different? It won’t.