Beautifully Damaged

28. Courage

My head was heavy, and my eyelids sore when I woke up hours later. The urge to let myself fall back into dream-filled sleep heightened at the way my chest felt like it was being crushed under the heavy weight of my newfound knowledge. I blinked up at the glowing light of the lamp on the side table beside me. The light seared my eyes, making them water. Brushing away the water from my eyelids, I pushed myself up to sit on the couch.

Deep-seated fatigue made my wired muscles ache with strain at the effort. I pulled my earphones out of my ears, letting them fall to the cushion beside me. Darkness still saturated the world outside of my curtains, cold and malevolent. Glancing at the clock as I went, I swept the blinds out of the way to find a blanket of angered clouds hanging over the city. It was so thick that I’d thought that it was somehow still dark out. The fact that it was nearly noon had ruled that theory out entirely.

I leaned on the windowpane, feeling the cold glass against my fingers, reminding me that I was awake. There didn’t seem to be much difference between my nightmares and life anymore.

My breath clouded the flawless screen, spreading across it like ice across a like in winter, between the rest of the world and I. Silence reigned over my apartment, a chasm with no certain end. A small corner of white caught my eye as I turned my back on the window, almost indiscernible from the ivory of my front door.

For once, hesitation didn’t hold me back, there was no fear instilled in me. I only moved forward and took the slip of paper from underneath the door, flipping it open.

The words didn’t immediately register in my head; they were just meaningless strokes on a page larger than any of the other notes had been. It was the handwriting it was different. I ran my fingers over the page, the impressions much deeper than any of the previous notes. Instead of the distant sensation of unknown hanging just out of reach, my mind fabricated a picture that I could see clearly.

Alex had written this, not long after I’d shut him out, figuratively and literally. I sighed, sat down on a stool at the kitchen’s granite island, and began reading.

Though you may not want to listen to anything I have to say right now, you only know the part of your history that deals with your death and the circumstances behind it. There’s more than just that; there’s still everything that happened between your death and your reawakening.

A cavernous sense of premonition took up residence in the forefront of my mind, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to hear what else had possibly happened to me.

When Lucy was shot, Azrael met her at the gates of death, as he does for everyone in her condition, he recognized her as one of mine, as someone who I was supposed to be protecting. Azrael was tired of the rising deaths he had to attend to, and the laziness of the guardian angels as a whole. In his mind, your death was the last straw.

You must know that people don’t very often get resurrected. Actually, it almost never happens, and hasn’t in many millennia. Azrael wanted to punish me, and give you your life back, and so he sent you back after the hype over you died down. He is the one who set up your life as you are now.

I finally knew who my mysterious benefactor was, and who had been sending me the notes. The fact that it was the Angel of Death only encouraged the thought that I could never go back to attempting to live normally.

Your restoration threw off the balance of Life and Death, and Death does not like to be cheated.

Shivers ran up my spine at Alex’s personification of death, and gooseflesh appeared on my skin. A queasy feeling simmered in my stomach, and I took a deep breath to calm it.