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  “He doesn’t understand the pain you’re in, Avalon. He’ll never understand.” Cole was speaking to me again. “You and I shared something special, something he could never replace. If you ended your life now you wouldn’t have to worry about Jensen leaving you for being so damaged. I know you’re damaged and I accept you for who you are.”

  “I’m damaged,” I sobbed. “You accept me. You know me.” I barely even knew what I was saying. It was like I had no control over my thoughts.

  “What are you talking about?” Jensen asked me sweetly. I could tell he was panicking though.

  But I couldn’t answer Jensen. I still felt paralyzed. I could only stare at the mirage of him.

  “Jensen hasn’t been honest with you, Avalon. He’s been lying to you about who he is. But I know who he is. Would you like me to show you?”

  I gulped as tears stung my eyes. “Show me who he really is.” Cole was now hovering over Jensen in the car, glaring at me, then at him.

  “Don’t be afraid. Accept what is,” he said and then disappeared.

  Suddenly Jensen began to panic for a whole other reason that had nothing to do with me. “What the…? The brakes aren’t working!” My heart began pounding loudly as the car picked up even more speed. Cars honked around us, people yelled. “I can’t stop the car or slow it down.” Jensen turned completely around to face me. “Avalon, do you trust me?”

  He’d been asking me that quite a bit lately. Every time the answer was the same. I didn’t know how we were going to get out of this situation, however.

  Through squinted eyes I attempted to nod. He gently, calmly placed his hand on my arm and unexpectedly we were in his apartment, in my room, on my bed. Everything was quiet. I stared up at him, shaken from the experience.

  “There’s something I need to share with you. But first I need to stop that car.”

  ELEVEN.

  Apparently my injury wasn’t nearly as severe as we previously anticipated.

  Once Jensen cleaned up the blood, put a bandage on the cut and gave me some hot herbal tea, I was fine. Just for precautions though he didn’t want me sleeping in case of a concussion. We didn’t talk about how he was able to get us both out of the car so fast. I’m not even sure what happened to the car itself. I’d been in shock. Jensen went out to get me some food from a Chinese restaurant down the street so I was left alone with my thoughts. My thoughts always got me into trouble.

  The night had been a total fiasco. Cole had ruined a good time I should have had, once again. It bothered me how I was seeing full on real life images of him now. A few months ago the most that would have occurred was hearing his voice. Now, I saw him, heard him, even smelled him. He got into my head somehow telling me to kill myself to make all of this go away. But I couldn’t do that to Jensen or Tory or to my mom. They all needed me no matter how much I hated living with Cole inside my head like this.

  The kicker? I wasn’t even depressed enough to have suicidal thoughts. Months ago, yes. But now? Not even close.

  I wasn’t sure how to process it all - the craziness, I mean. I couldn’t tell Tory; she’d think I was nuts. Telling my mom wasn’t an option; she’d have me committed. And if I told Jensen I’d have to face whatever secret he’d been hiding from me - a secret Cole's mirage knew about somehow.

  But I need to know Jensen’s secret…

  Jensen walked through the door with a paper bag filled with delicious smelling food. My stomach growled. I got up to help but felt dizzy and nearly fell to the floor, grabbing the nearby coffee table for stability.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Jensen ran over to me to sit me back down on the couch in the living room. “I’ll bring the food to you.”

  Before serving us, he put a thin blanket on me. “Thank you.”

  “Of course.” He arranged the food on the coffee table and we ate silently. He turned on an action movie but I wasn’t interested. I don’t think he was either. He never once looked up at the screen.

  “Jensen,” I finally spoke after swallowing a spoonful of broth. “Can we please talk?”

  His shoulders slumped; he turned to me and smiled meekly. He’d barely touched his food. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m okay. Thanks to you.”

  “I put a bandage on your head.” He was being sarcastic.

  “You saved us both from dying.” There was no point in sugarcoating it.

  His body became tense. “What are you talking about?”

  “You saved my life by somehow getting us out of the car and into this apartment.”

  “I took you to the hospital and then we came home.”

  Wait . . . huh?

  “And you put a bandage on my head? Why would you put a bandage on my head if I just came back from the hospital?”

  “It needed to be changed.”

  “Jensen, don’t do this to me. Don’t treat me like some stupid, incompetent child. I know what I saw. I know what happened. I know you saved me. I know you saved us.” I breathed deeply, slowly. “But what I don’t know is how you did it. Or who…what you are.”

  “Ava, none of that happened."

  “Yes it did! Why are you lying to me? What will that do? What will that prove?"

  "Stop asking questions."

  "I won’t give up until you tell me the truth so you might as well get it out now.” I folded my arms across my chest, staring at him.

  He took a few dozen breaths before starting his sentence. “You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

  "I will."

  "You'll freak out."

  “I won’t.”

  “Fine then. Just to prove my point…do you believe in the supernatural?”

  “Um…like…vampires and ghosts?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Are you implying you’re either of the two?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Are you dangerous?”

  “To some, possibly. But generally, no.” He ran his long fingers through his hair and I did the same to mine.

  “Whatever it is you can tell me."

  "Do you really think that by knowing you'll be any better off?" Jensen wondered.

  "It couldn't hurt," I said matter-of-factly. Jensen blankly stared at me. "I’m asking you to tell me because I care about you and I want to know what happened tonight. I don't want to live through my life feeling crazy about -"

  “I’m an angel.”

  “Wait…what?"

  "You heard me."

  "No, I don't think I heard you clearly. What did you say?"

  "I said I'm an angel, Avalon."

  I looked at him with wonder. But that passed quickly when I realized I was laughing hysterically. "That’s not possible."

  Was I actually going to believe this? My head was whirling with curiosity and denial. How could this possibly be happening? This type of thing only happened in movies. Not to me. And not in reality.

  "It is possible. I'm living proof that it is." He was the most serious I'd ever seen him.

  “You’re crazy,” I muttered, concluding the laughter.

  “Am I? You don’t really think that, do you?” I shook my head in disbelief. “You’re smart, Ava. That’s why I told you. You’d think logically about this.”

  “There’s nothing logical about this at all, Jensen! Angels aren’t real. They don’t exist.”

  What had I been expecting to hear? Would I have been okay if he’d told me he was some other supernatural creature?

  “What do I have to do to prove to you I am what I say I am?” he asked, arms folded across his chest.

  “Fly.” That was the first thing that came to mind.

  “Myth. We can’t fly. However, we do move quite fast.” I barely took a full breath before he disappeared. He tapped my shoulder on the opposite side of the couch.

  I gasped. “How did you do that?”

  “The term is *blinking. We can move anywhere at any time with anyone in less than a second. Ever heard of the expression in the bl
ink of an eye?”

  I tried processing what I’d just seen. “And that’s what you did for us in the car?”

  “The car, the night you had that nightmare in the cab, our date at Old Tily's...”

  “You know you sound ridiculous, right?" I tried pushing aside the fact that Jensen had somehow disappeared, then reappeared in a different location right before my very eyes.

  "I know I sound ridiculous. But can you honestly still say that after what you've just seen me do? I'm not a magician, Ava. I don't have any tricks up my sleeve. This is me. This is who I am."

  "Jensen…no. This isn't possible."

  "Then let me show you the Mustang."

  "What happened to it?"

  “When I found the car on the wrong side of the highway going quite fast I blinked both myself and the car into an empty parking lot where it wrapped around a pole. My car is totaled. But I’m just glad it wasn’t you who didn’t make it.”

  “Where’s the car now?”

  “In the garage.”

  “I need to see it.” This would be some sort of proof for me. At least, I hoped it would be.

  “Are you well enough to walk around?”

  “I think so.” Jensen carefully took me by the hand to help me walk to the garage of his apartment building. As we walked past the many vehicles I began to feel nervous.

  Can this be true? Can Jensen be this mystical creature I never believed actually existed?

  “It’s just over there,” he said. We walked a couple paces further. And then I saw it: the large, crumpled piece of scrap metal in Jensen’s parking space. It hardly appeared to be a car, let alone the Mustang I had been in several hours beforehand. I still couldn’t make sense out of any of this no matter how hard I tried forcing my mind to think this was conceivable.

  “Jensen…who…are you?” My body almost went numb. Had he suddenly become a threat to me? Or was I making this into a bigger deal than it was? That was, if I truly believed his insanity at all.

  “I was born in sixteen-ninety-two and died in seventeen-fifteen at the young age of twenty-three. I am exactly three-hundred-years-old. Just celebrated my birthday in March,” he chuckled, which I found a bit inappropriate given the unrealistic circumstances.

  “So all that stuff about traveling, the money, the foster homes, knowing Tory - that was a lie?”

  “Although I did most of those things in my old human life, some of it was a lie, yes.” He cleared his throat. “I had to create a modern-day human life for myself to convince you to get to know me. But I do know Tory. She just doesn’t know me.” I was perplexed. “I was her *Guardian Angel for a while.”

  “Her what?”

  “I looked after her, guided her. I helped her to make better choices. But she has a different Guardian Angel now.” I suddenly felt uncomfortable. “But before her I was yours for most of your life.”

  My heart stopped pounding in my chest altogether for a moment. “So what you’re telling me is…you’ve known me for twenty-two years?”

  “Give or take a few months.”

  “You were there the whole time?”

  “Yes. Avalon, I didn’t share this with you to make you feel uncomfortable. I told you so you would understand who I am.”

  “So you knew what happened to me all along then? With Cole?” I was getting angry, although I felt a bit psychotic for believing this.

  “No, I didn’t know any of that. That happened after Tory was assigned as my *Watch-Over.”

  “Why did you stop watching over me?” If he truthfully wanted me to believe this, he could at least give me the right of asking as many questions as I’d like. It seemed only fair.

  He chuckled to himself and bit his lip. “This whole mess started because I became rather obsessed and infatuated with a human I fancied.”

  “...Me,” I noted.

  “Yes.” He looked almost ashamed.

  “Is that not allowed where you come from?” I thought for a moment. “Where do you come from? Heaven?”

  He snickered. “I come from *The Middle Plane. It’s a world all on its own…in between Heaven and Earth created specifically for angels - Light and Shadow. How can I explain it in words you’ll understand?” he asked, stroking his chin with his thumb and index finger. “The world I live in is purely magical. Everything is magnified to the highest extent. The clearness of it all is what makes it particularly unique and ultimately, special beyond compare.”

  “Clearness?”

  “Meaning transparent. You can see right through it.”

  “You can see through everything?”

  “Yes. The Middle Plane can be compared to a very large looking-glass.”

  “Um…is there anything else?”

  “What? The fact that my world looks like a giant glass ball doesn’t fascinate you enough?” he laughed.

  “Knowing you there’s more,” I inquired. Although Jensen’s world seemed abruptly amazing, I found it a tad funny. None of what he was saying seemed realistic.

  “Well,” he sighed lightly, “I guess it could be interesting to know that no human eye, no telescope, no spacecraft can see my planet - just as no human can see Heaven.”

  “Why is that?” I asked.

  “My world wasn’t made for humans. Just as your world wasn’t made for angels; although we can inhabit both if need be.” I shook my head in understanding. “But no, it’s not allowed in my world to fall in love with a human. Getting emotionally attached is practically a sin. Although we look over you, you’re beneath us. At least that’s what we’re taught. I personally believe you’re above us.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “You all have the ability to think for yourselves. To grow. To learn. To become something better, bigger than you ever thought you could be. You have the ability to change. As angels we must stay obedient or drastic measures will be taken to put us back in our place.”

  “So then...how are you allowed to be here with me right now, Jensen?”

  “I’m not. I was exiled to Earth to suffer.”

  “You were exiled here by G-d?”

  “*The Angel Vaad - vaad, meaning committee or council in Hebrew - are four angels who rule over The Middle Plane. Supposedly, they were chosen by G-d to do His bidding in our world long before I was born as a human.”

  “Have you ever seen G-d before?”

  “No. None of us have. Only the ones in Heaven get to see Him in full form.”

  “You understand how crazy all of this sounds, don’t you?”

  “As you've mentioned for the twentieth time now," he chuckled, "I do. That’s partly why I didn’t want to tell you the truth about me to begin with.”

  “And the other part?”

  “I despise being an angel under the law of The Angel Vaad. Hence the reason I rebelled and I’m now here.”

  “If you say you've been punished for being…obsessed with me, your punishment doesn’t seem too bad though. I mean, you're here right now talking to me. The world hasn't come crashing down.”

  “They sent me down here with a place to live, money, a car and a job so I could blend in with the humans the best I could…living right by you, to watch you every day from afar…never being allowed to communicate with you. But…they told me if I went to see you they’d send a Shadow Angel after me to capture me…so The Angel Vaad could kill me. They planted me right here by you to torture me.”

  "The day you came to my room with the lip-gloss from Tory…"

  "That was all me. She had nothing to do with me giving it to you."

  Involuntarily my stomach sank. “So…these Shadow Angels. I take it they are the bad guys?”

  “You got it.”

  “And you’re a…?”

  “I’m a *Light Angel. We seek to do good and only good. *Shadow Angels enjoy wreaking havoc wherever they can.”

  “They sound miserable,” I noted.

  “Oh trust me, they are.” He chuckled to himself, as if recalling his interaction with
a Shadow Angel in the past.

  “So that means a Shadow Angel is after you right now?”

  “I wouldn’t doubt it. However, I’ve barely used my abilities since I arrived here. The more power I use the easier it’ll be for the Shadow Angel they sent after me to find me.”

  “But you said they gave you your apartment, job and car. So they obviously know where they put you.”

  “Ha!” he chuckled. “The Angel Vaad are a bunch of ignorant, irresponsible, arrogant beings. Trust me, they’ve forgotten where they put me. But when it comes to punishment, they send the Shadow Angels to do their dirty work and to find the culprits.”

  “You’re in love with me," I blurted out.

  His eyes popped open. “I shouldn’t be.”

  “But you are."

  “Yes, I am. Very much so. I have been for a very long time.”

  I froze in place. My stomach sank then bounced back up - trillions of little butterflies flapped their wings inside my stomach, filling my heart with so much joy I thought it might burst. I controlled my breathing after a couple seconds and said, “Are you serious?”

  I felt his index finger nudge my chin so I would look up into his dazzling ocean blue eyes. His lips lightly hovered over mine, pondering as to what he should do next. I shut my eyes and waited for him to kiss me. Instead, he gently - with a shaky hand - placed my hand over his heart. At first I didn’t feel anything. And then the steady rhythm began.

  Thump-thump, thump-thump.

  “When an angel finds his soulmate his heart beats…for the first time since his human life. Do you feel that?” Jensen whispered. He held the palm of my hand steady on his chest so I could feel the rhythm of thuds beneath my fingertips more clearly, more precise.

  “It’s beating,” I said.

  It’s beating because of me.

  At that moment I realized I wasn’t ready for Jensen’s so called truth.

  _____________________

  ** Reference Angelic Key

  TWELVE.

  “Would you please explain to me why you’re not speaking to me?” Jensen prompted the next morning as we were awkwardly seated at the kitchen table.