Mom smiled, her eyes sparkling. God, please don’t let her say anything embarrassing. “Hi, Michael,” she said, holding out her hand.

“Hello, Mrs. Crawford,” he responded, shaking her hand. He was so steady, as though this was normal for him. Did he battle demons all the time?

“Shelly, please,” my mother corrected. “Mrs. Crawford is my ex-husband’s mother.”

I tried not to gawk. None of my friends ever called her by her first name.

She turned to me. “What’s the scoop? I thought you said you were going out with your friends.”

I didn’t know what to say. So much had happened tonight I was afraid to speak for fear that everything I’d seen and heard would pour out of me in one big purge.

“There was a change of plans,” Michael chimed in. “We’re going to hang out a bit, maybe get something to eat.”

Mom looked at me to verify he was telling the truth. I nodded dumbly, grateful for his quick thinking. He hadn’t even lied.

“I’m going to take a long, hot bath.” She fussed with my jacket collar and smoothed a lock of my hair back into place. “The living room’s all yours if you want it.”

“Thanks.”

“I should…” She motioned to her room and grinned. Then she whispered in my ear encouragingly, “He’s cute.”

“Mom!” I whispered, glancing at Michael to make sure he hadn’t heard her. Even with his hair messy from fighting, he looked more like a movie star at a photo shoot than someone who had just fought off a demon.

Fought a demon! We had a lot to talk about indeed.

Chapter Thirteen

Michael went outside to split some logs while I paced the living room, trying to collect my thoughts. Damiel was a demon. If I hadn’t seen that black smoke around him attack me like something out of a horror movie, I never would have believed it. And what were those weird images? They came in too quickly to make any sense.

Fiona used to say that she would love it if a guy fought for her, but having just been in that position, I could honestly say it was terrifying. Michael could have been hurt. He tried to warn me, but I didn’t listen.

Michael came in with an armful of logs and placed them in front of our old brick fireplace. Crouching on the floor beside them, he grabbed a piece of newspaper and crumpled it in his smooth, strong hands.

I knew his hands when they were callused. How could I know that? Mom told me once that people who experienced psychotic breaks saw things that weren’t really there. Was that what was happening to me?

The light was suddenly too bright. I rubbed my eyes, pressing with my fingers. I didn’t even know where to begin. “This is crazy. Am I hallucinating?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

I kept pacing, the heels of my boots noisy on the oak parquet floors. My thoughts—like a tongue to a broken tooth—kept returning to that small mud-plaster house. Pinkish yellow morning sun filtered through the open doorway. Michael was outside, wearing robes of some kind. He was so tall he had to stoop to come in.

“Why do I keep seeing things? It feels as if I know you, but not from now. Everything’s…” I realized I couldn’t bring myself to explain the way things looked. Nothing made sense. “Different.”

Raking a hand through his hair, he glanced down the hallway to see if my mother was within earshot. Her door was closed, but I could hear the water running for her bath.

“Those are memories,” he said.

Memories? It was one thing to have hallucinations, but to have them confirmed was something else. Visions of him flashed before me, too numerous to track. Darkness and light. Some were present-day—fighting with Damiel. Others seemed to come from another time.

I shook my head, as if I could shake them away. “It’s too unreal.”

His back toward me, he stacked small logs around the paper in the fireplace, making a teepee. “Reality isn’t what you think.”

“I don’t know what to believe. It seems like a different life.”

“It was a long time ago,” he said.

“What do you mean a long time ago? How long?” I pressed.

Michael struck a match and held it to the paper. Flames licked yesterday’s front-page news, consuming a scrunched color photo of the Space Needle. “You tell me.”

I closed my eyes to hold onto what I was seeing. It was before the Roman Empire, before the Chinese Dynasties, even before Mesopotamia, but try as I might I couldn’t register how long ago it was. My mind spun. I’d been fascinated with ancient cultures most of my life, only to find out that I’d lived in one. I had been there.

Buzzing like I’d had too much coffee, I collapsed on the couch. “How can that be? Both of us remembering that far back? It’s impossible.”

“No, not impossible,” he said. “Improbable. There’s nothing left of that time, no artifacts, no written records. Everything it once was has washed into the sea. People can’t remember their past lives that far back. If Damiel hadn’t tried to dislodge your memory from this life and throw it back into that one—”

“Damiel did what?” I scowled at him.

“I stopped him.”

“Michael. Tell me what’s going on!”

Sighing, he blew the flames until one of the logs caught. The light from the fire cast an orange shine in his hair. “I’ve been given another chance.”

“Another chance for what?”

The air around us grew still and cold and the fire gave off too little heat. I shivered.

Michael got up and sat on the couch beside me. Resting his elbows on his knees, he tented his fingertips together; they were gray from the newsprint.

“I’d been sent to watch,” he said. “I saw many things over the years and at first I thought all there was to this world was sickness, brutality, and death.”

His skin drew a little tighter to the bone and filled with golden light, as though he shone from within. “But one day I saw you…and you were the most beautiful thing…” Heat rushed through my chest: he’d called me beautiful. “I became obsessed, neglecting my duties to watch you each day…preparing food, gathering flowers to make dyes for the fabric you wove.”

Goose bumps formed on my arms and tickled the back of my neck as he spoke. What he was saying had to be true. I’d never told him about the loom. How else could he have known?

“I wanted to be with you. Wanted you to see me,” he continued. “Even though so many of the others had fallen before me, I thought this was different, that I was different. That letting you see me would be enough…”

An image of a meadow came to me. Yellow sunlight streamed through bright spring leaves, bathing everything in dappled light. Michael stood there, wearing the robes I’d seen him in before.

“One day, I appeared. You weren’t much older than you are now.”

I stayed with the image. Behind Michael were wings—actual wings—the same ones I’d dreamt of. Had I been dreaming of him? As the goose bumps on my arms spread all the way down to my feet, I remembered how peaceful, how good being near him felt—much as it did now.

“You had wings.”

“Your mother had died. You asked me to stay in the meadow to keep you company. An angel’s duties.”

“You’re an…” I couldn’t say the word. But it explained so many things: the flashes of light that day in the woods, the way he seemed to glow, his unearthly beauty.

“It was forbidden for us to mate with humans.”

A tendril of sadness wove itself around my heart. What we felt was forbidden?

“Other Watchers started to see I was in trouble, told me to get reassigned. I should have left you alone… Instead, I came to you often.”

I remembered returning to the meadow to wait for him, the late afternoon sun dancing through the leaves.

“Even this lifetime, when I first saw you…It’s like I’m being forced to choose again, between Heaven and being with you.”