“You can see them?” she asked as she paced the confines of my room.

“I thought they’d have feathers,” I said, trying to not look too amazed as her wings shimmered and glistened like jeweled light behind her.

“They’re cloaked right now. I bring them out when I’m flying or if I need to deliver a message. When people see the white feathered wings, they know you mean business.” She peered back over her shoulder at me. “But I don’t need to do that with you, do I? You know what I am.”

“No, I mean, yes. I know what you are,” I said, still intimidated by her.

“Most people can’t see them when they’re cloaked,” she added. I could tell she was making an effort to put me at ease. “Have you always seen things?”

I remembered Bill telling me how I saw angels as a kid, and then the hellhound a few weeks ago, the flickering lights around Michael. Yet there had been nothing for all the years in between. “Once when I was a kid, maybe, but I think it’s more of a recent thing.”

She stopped pacing and turned to face me. “Around the time you first saw Michael?”

“I saw the hellhound first.”

“Michael was near. Given your connection, I’m not surprised.” Tilting her head, she closed her eyes and smiled. The gesture made her look pensive, connected to another world. “Sight is a gift that God gives people when He wants them to see the truth.”

I wondered exactly what kind of truth I was supposed to be seeing, when her manner changed. She stood up a little straighter, became more formal, courteous.

“I came to see how you’re doing,” she said.

“Fine,” I said, though I was anything but.

“I’m sorry you feel hurt by what happened.”

Something about her apologizing brought up all my sadness again. Did she know Michael had dumped me? Did he tell her? I tucked the duvet around my legs, though I wasn’t cold, and fought back the urge to start crying all over again.

Not wanting to get into it with her, I changed the subject, remembering something she’d said earlier. “What’s a sponsor?”

She sat beside me on the bed, and the shimmering gold light from her halo washed over me like a spring breeze. “When Michael came back, he needed help to rejoin the ranks of the Grigori again, so I was assigned to help him.”

“How do you help him?”

“However he needs me to, which is a pretty big job description.” She smiled. “Michael has a very difficult journey ahead of him. Lust was his weakness and he just came back from…a type of limbo, essentially. He’s lucky he didn’t fall further. We’ve never had a Grigori come back before, so Michael’s an experiment, a prototype. He’s the first angel in a real human form.”

“Don’t you have one?” I wanted to ask her how far Michael fell, how bad things really were, because I didn’t know anything about that part, but something stopped me. What if he’d done something so terrible I could never forgive him?

“My form,” she said, motioning to herself, “is made of light. I can make it solid at will. Michael doesn’t have the strength for that. Having a human body is new to him, to all of us. It may give him a type of strength, but it may also backfire and become a weakness.”

“I don’t understand what you’re getting at.”

“You will. In time.”

As though remembering something, she looked at me intently, her golden eyes fierce and beautiful as a big cat’s. As her halo flared slightly, I heard the sound of white noise in my ear.

“Did you hear anything?” she asked.

“Just static,” I replied.

“You can’t hear my thoughts anymore, which is good.” She relaxed and her face softened. “You are better.”

“I knew I would be,” I said.

“Do you mind if I show you something?” she said. “I don’t know if it will work, but I’m curious and I thought it might be worth a try.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked nervously.

“Take you down our communications network and show you what Michael does.”

“Your what?”

“As you discovered earlier today, we communicate telepathically. But it’s more than that. We’re linked into each other like a network, so we can see what’s going on with each other when we need to.”

So that was how she had found us earlier. “You mean you can see…” Michael and me kissing?

“Only when he’s working,” she replied quickly, as if she’d read my mind.

Can she hear my thoughts? I stared at herintently. Is she listening now?

If she was, she didn’t let on. “The network’s in place so we can back each other up. It’s how we communicate. If an angel on duty disconnects from that network, the way Michael did today, we have to check on each other, in case of injury. It’s for our safety. Any number of things could attack us when we drop our connection.” She turned to face me. “I didn’t know what I’d see.”

“Oh.” Her explanation didn’t make the idea of her being able to see us any easier, but at least she couldn’t read my mind. “How do we do this?”

Still sitting beside me on the bed, she took both my hands in hers. “You relax and look into my eyes. I don’t know exactly how it will appear to you. It could appear as a vision, but it may seem like you’re there.”

I looked into her beautiful golden eyes, and a light flashed behind them, like sunlight through amber. I had the sensation of being pulled in, as though I was falling into her. I gasped.

“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “Just breathe and let me do all the rest.”

I kept staring into her eyes as my bedroom disappeared around me and I was speeding down a wide tunnel of misty, silvery light. I flew through it as it bent and twisted several times and then opened into a room—a dirty, rundown apartment with cracked paint and water stains on the walls. It was so realistic, as if I was actually there, and yet I knew I wasn’t. Arielle’s presence blazed behind me as I took everything in.

There was no furniture—even the sink had been torn from the wall—and the carpet was stained with blood, vomit, and God knows what other bodily fluids. On the floor, amidst tattered clothes and broken glass, lay a sandy-haired guy in his early twenties, not much older than Bill. His eyes were glazed, haunted, and slightly open, and it seemed as though he hadn’t showered or eaten in days. Beside him, pieces of tinfoil were scattered among a filthy-looking needle, a dirty ashtray, and a threadbare red bandana.

Most notably, on—or rather through—his chest sat something fuzzy and black, half the size of a man. It looked like lint, if lint could be animated, and it had hollows for eyes. Something about seeing it made my stomach churn, my chest tighten like the skin of a drum.

“You see it, don’t you? I wasn’t sure if you would.”

“Oh my God,” I said. Realizing I was cursing in front of an angel, I covered my mouth. “What is that thing?”

“A lesser demon. I guess you’d call it a minion of sorts. It’s feeding on his addiction and despair.” Her hand touched my shoulder. “They’re parasites. They stir up negative emotions so they can feed off of them.”

The thing writhed silently on the guy’s chest and, suddenly agitated, the guy staggered to get up and reach for the tinfoil beside him, what I assumed were his drugs.

“How did it get on him?” I asked Arielle.

“They attack people and make them do horrible things, but nobody knows they’re there. People think they’re doing these things to themselves, but really they’re feeding a parasite.”

“So when people say ‘a monkey on your back,’ it’s almost true.” I shuddered at how it was more through than on him. I thought of Fiona, how she’d said she wasn’t the one who hurt herself. “Do they attack everyone?”

“All the time, but it’s about the choices people make. If someone chooses to hurt themselves or someone else, these things get in. If someone is happy and loving, it sours the milk and they leave.”

“What about my friend Fiona?” I asked. “She wouldn’t hurt herself, and yet…”