I reached a hand out to touch his shoulder, but I stopped just like Emma had. I was afraid if I touched him it would get worse, as if offering comfort would break him.
“I didn’t know what Suriel was doing.”
“How could you not know?” Jamie sounded accusatory.
“It was an emergency and there was a lot happening. We were trying to save . . .” I stopped and tried to think; was it a life, or just Ravensong from being deformed? What would have happened if we hadn’t been able to reverse the damage? Would she have died, or would it have consumed her and made her into something else? Demons weren’t contagious; what had happened earlier today was impossible.
“She helped me save my friend from . . . a demon.” I had to be careful what I said, because they weren’t police or anyone who should know what was happening with an ongoing investigation. A witch was supposed to keep anything said to them sacred like a priest in the confessional, but there were a lot of different kinds of witches and mystics, so the pointy-hat rule didn’t automatically apply.
“But she couldn’t leave it at that, she’s just like all the rest of them up at the College. She had to meddle and take more than she was supposed to.” He wrapped his arms around himself as if he was trying to hold himself together.
I went to him and said, “Levanael, without Suriel there today, something terrible would have happened.”
“She was always gifted,” he said, crying and starting to rock himself. I couldn’t stand to see him starting to break without touching him. I wrapped my arms around him and he didn’t fight me. I hugged him tight and prayed that he would be all right.
Emma laid her hand on his shoulder and then her other hand on my arm, and it jolted through me like a circuit had been completed. We were surrounded by white wings and the singing of angels and between the feathers was the golden light and I knew if the wings unfolded we’d be standing in the light of God.
Jamie screamed a sound of such hopelessness that it broke my heart and the light was gone, the angels fled. Jamie pushed and fought against me. I let him go and he stumbled into Emma, almost knocking her down. She grabbed his arm to steady them both and he tore away from her.
“No! No! I won’t let them destroy you the way they destroyed me!” He turned back to me. “Get out, Zaniel, get out, stay away from Emma. I won’t let you take her to that place where the angels sing. I won’t let you break her the way it broke me.”
Emma tried to reassure him. “You channeled a seraph today, Jamie. You’re not broken.”
He pointed a finger at her and shook his head over and over. “You don’t know what they do to you. You don’t know what it’s like to be alone in the light and then to have the light taken away, too, so that you’re alone in the darkness.”
“Levanael,” she said, crying.
“No, Levi, just Levi, I can’t be the other, not if it will hurt you, Emma. I won’t feed you to them, the way my family fed me.”
He turned to me then, and said, “The way your family fed you to them, Zaniel.”
“Fed us to who, Jamie?”
“Yes, I’m Jamie, just Jamie alone in the dark.”
“Fed us to who, Levi,” I said.
He shook his head. “You know who, Z.”
“The College of Angels,” I said.
He nodded, tears streaming down his face.
“They can’t force me to go to the College of Angels,” Emma said.
“Why do you think they send people from the College here to the store, Emma? They’re looking for more angel-touched that they missed, and they missed you.”
“They didn’t miss me, Levi. I told you my parents refused to let them take me.”
“Levi.” Bast’s voice soothed over all of us; I smelled lavender, but not incense. I found her with a spritz bottle in her hand, spraying lavender-scented water in the air, but it was more than that; her voice seemed to calm us, too. It was her store; she had a right to use magic to calm us down. She was speaking and I couldn’t remember the words, as if they weren’t meant for me, or maybe I wasn’t supposed to remember them.
Bast hugged Jamie and he let her hold him, but I realized there was movement on the other side of him as if there was something there I couldn’t quite see. I concentrated and it was his totem. The orangutan wrapped its overly long arms around Jamie. Emma was crying on the other side of them, her dove like an echo of angel feathers around her head with a glowing almost-halo to make it even more confusing. I saw movement out of the corner of my eye again and it was the raccoon standing there on two feet beside my left leg. It looked up at me as I looked down at it. It—no, he—looked at me with those big, dark eyes and seemed to be trying to tell me something, but I didn’t know how to hear the message. Did I say, What’s wrong, Lassie, is Timmy down the well, or would it be like a Disney movie where he started talking like a person?
“I don’t know what you want, boy,” I said, as if he were a real pet.
“He wants you to call your friend and see if she’s missed him,” Bast said. She was taking Jamie back to one of their rooms where they usually read tarot or did reiki. Emma tried to follow, but Bast made her stay out.
“You’re on the register. I can’t keep all our customers from wanting to come inside forever.” The moment she said it, the door to the store opened and a group of people came inside.
Bast called back over her shoulder, “We’ve got this, Zaniel. Call your friend before your phone rings for work.” The door shut behind them.
I glanced down at the raccoon. He didn’t look solid in the way that a real animal would, but it was more solid than some Guardian Angels, but then it wouldn’t blast a human’s mind to look at a raccoon, and even a Guardian Angel in its pure form could be too much for some people.
I hadn’t known that the College took people’s totems and non-angelic spirit guides away from them. I didn’t remember it happening to me as a child, but I trusted Jamie’s pain on this. The College had told us all that only angels were worthy guardians and guides and that all the rest were if not evil at least unworthy. We were taught to counsel people to only listen to their Celestial guides. I concentrated in a way that was more familiar, and my own Guardian Angel was still at my back like a halo of light and white feathers. The raccoon was still there at my side, and either they ignored each other or the two energies were so different it didn’t matter to them. A tightness in my shoulders loosened. Had I really believed that just because I had a totem, my angel would leave me as unworthy? Maybe, okay, probably. I’d never taken anyone’s spirit anything away from them, but I’d been taught that anything short of angelic was lesser, and that the angelic didn’t like being around lower spirits, and everything was less than angels.
I blinked and let go of both types of seeing. I was just standing in the store watching Emma answer questions from the small crowd of customers. She glanced my way, then mouthed the words Call your friend. She turned back to the couple who were asking her questions with a smile.
I walked to the side of the room near the crystals and the outer door and away from the customers. It was the best I could do for privacy without leaving the store, and I wasn’t ready to leave without seeing Jamie again.