We were closing today, and I noticed my coworker – I heard someone call him Devon – and the assistant manager, Riven, talk a couple of times while they were in the process of closing.  I got the impression they were conferring about me, but I ignored them.

So I wasn’t exactly expecting Devon to shove me in the back of a car when we got outside, slam the door behind me, and run around to jump in the driver’s seat.

Lucky for him, the movement jarred my rib and lung, so for a few minutes I was struggling to breathe and out of it, unable to respond like I normally would.

By the time I could finally see again, I realized Riven was in the passenger seat, arguing with Devon.

“I said offer him a ride to the clinic, not kidnap him!  There’s a difference!  You know that’s a crime, right?  Oh no, I’m an accessory to kidnapping!  Ren’s going to be freaked out if he has to bail me out.  No, no, no!”  He looked like he was on the edge of a panic attack.

“Calm down,” I managed.  “Not gonna press charges or anything, we don’t usually handle it that way with supernaturals, but why exactly am I being kidnapped?”

“We’re taking you to Dr. Woodson.”  Devon said calmly, looking in the rearview mirror at me.  “Riven’s father-in-law.  The doctor who runs a clinic.  And for the record,” he returned to look at Riven, “I knew he wouldn’t agree if I just asked, so…I asked a little more persuasively, so he couldn’t say no.”

I actually let out a mangled laugh at that.  “Never been asked by being shoved in a car before.”

Riven still didn’t seem entirely okay with the situation.  “Someone could have seen us and called the police,” he insisted.  “Even if Judah is being nice about it, it doesn’t mean it’s okay!”

“Fine, fine,” Devon sighed deeply.  “I promise I won’t kidnap people anymore – even demons – and I promise if we get pursued by police I’ll take full responsibility and say I kidnapped you, too.  Happier?”

“No, not really.”  Riven scrunched his face up, sighed, and then turned to look at me.  “Um, sorry, that wasn’t really the plan – at least on my part – but I do think you should visit Adair.  Ren’s dad.”

“Fine, whatever.”  I leaned back in the seat, too tired to really fight about it anymore.  My lung was hurting a lot, if the fairy doctor could help, it’d probably be a good idea.

“Do we need to call your parents or something?”  Riven asked hesitantly.

“Aunt, and no.  She doesn’t care when I come in.”  I looked out the window.  “We talk, like, once a week.”

“I see.”  He paused, but I could see the curiosity welling up in his eyes in the reflection in the window, and it didn’t take long for it to spill over.  “Is that normal for demons?  Fairies are, like, super into their families but I have no idea what demon units are like.  Except apparently you usually don’t have as much to do with other supernaturals?”

Well, I suppose it was only natural for a human to be curious about the supernatural world after being introduced to it.  “Families don’t matter as much to us.”  That was all I was willing to say on the subject.

It wasn’t exactly true, though.  I’d been close to my dad before he died, and with my other aunt and cousin – but not all families were like that.  My relationship with my aunt here was a fairly common situation for demons – polite disinterest. 

It worked better for me than caring about people.

The clinic turned out to be in a super fairy-ish building that nearly made me roll my eyes at the sight of it, but before long I was ushered into a little room in the clinic and the fairy doctor came in, asking me questions about the injuries, checking to see if any other bones were broken.

“Normally,” he told me at last, “we’d do surgery for an injury like this.”

I shrugged slightly.  “Go for it if you want.  You can cut me open, don’t need to worry about the anesthesia – I can deal with the pain.”  Besides, a lot of pain medications didn’t work on demons and those that did would blunt our natural healing abilities.  It was generally simpler to just let it run its course as long as we could handle it.  And I could.

He frowned.  “How old are you?”

I didn’t see what that had to do with anything but I answered anyway.  “17.”

“It’s unfortunate that you’re so young but already know your pain thresholds.  I suppose that’s part of demon life, though.”  He gave me a compassionate smile.  “I don’t generally perform surgeries here, I prefer to send patients to the hospital, but I get the impression from Riven that you weren’t exactly enthusiastic about coming here and would be less excited about the hospital.”

“That’s a word for it.”  I shifted a bit.  “Well if you’re not going to do the surgery, can you just heal the others and leave that?  It’ll heal on its own eventually anyway.”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t,” he correctly gently.  “We are set up here to allow surgeries, we just generally try to avoid them.  Let me get some things prepared, and meanwhile drink this.”  He offered me a cup of tea.

I raised an eyebrow.  “No thanks, not a tea fan.”

“It’s a pain reliever,” the doctor explained.  “Fairy concoction.  I recommend becoming a tea fan temporarily, it’ll help.”

Then he left me while he went to prepare whatever he needed to cut into me.

I took a tentative sip of the tea and while I wasn’t entirely thrilled with the taste, it wasn’t awful, either, and it did seem to immediately soothe me a bit, so…at least there was that.  A lot of painkillers didn’t do much for demons for whatever reason – maybe why our pain tolerance level had to be higher than most people’s – but at least the tea helped somewhat.

I felt someone in the doorway and looked up, expecting to see the doctor or my coworkers, but instead it was a boy I didn’t know.

He was young, probably close to my age, slender, fair, and his white feathered wings were showing – the exact opposite to me.  An angel.

He was looking at me curiously.  “You really intend to let Dr. Adair cut into you while awake?  Are you…masochistic?”

I guess he’d overheard the conversation – it wasn’t like the little room was soundproof or anything.  Lovely.  “Yes, and no.”

I wondered if he was a patient, too.  At first glance, he didn’t really look like one, except maybe his pale coloring, but with his light blonde hair I also wasn’t convinced that wasn’t his natural skin tone.  Then I noticed that the tips of his wings were dragging lightly on the floor.  I was pretty sure that wasn’t normal, so maybe he was here as a patient, after all.

He’d apparently decided to invite himself in and came and perched on the foot of the bed.  “I’m not good with pain,” he confided.  “How did you get better tolerance?”

“Um,” fighting?  And it was kind of a built-in demon trait.  “Training, I guess.  I practiced a lot with martial arts and magic.”

“Oh.”  He seemed to wilt a bit.  “I’m not good with fighting, either.”  His deep blue eyes searched my face for a bit.  “I guess you are?”

I shrugged.  “Used to be, I suppose.  I don’t anymore.”

He tilted his head to one side and I thought he was going to challenge me when his eyes slowly dropped, searching my hands and upper body before returning to my face.  “So…you let people beat up on you?  How come?”

He actually realized I didn’t fight back.  That was new, but kind of nice to be acknowledged.  “They’re humans.  What am I supposed to do, kill them by accident?  I’ll survive.  No point in making the whole situation worse.”

Besides, I deserved it.  I deserved being beaten up, being tortured, being killed even.  Nothing could make what I did better, but having someone give me a fraction of the pain I deserved made it feel a tiny bit better.  For a few minutes.

Maybe I was masochistic, after all.

A shadow fell across the angel’s face and he folded his hands in his lap.  “Humans can be mean,” he agreed.  “Some of them.  I – don’t do so well with humans.”

That was kind of a surprise.  Most of the time, supernaturals weren’t scared of humans.  Hunters, maybe, but your average human wasn’t exactly a major threat or anything.

“How come?”  I found myself asking.  I couldn’t even explain why.  I should be keeping away from people, yet here I was asking him questions just because I was curious.

 He hesitated and for a moment I thought he wouldn’t tell me, but then he did.  “I can’t hide my wings like most angels.  They’re just – always visible.  We haven’t figured out why, but it makes it hard to be out with humans.  They,” he hugged himself, and in that second I caught sight of small scars at his elbow, “they don’t understand the idea of someone with wings.  They have to – investigate.  Experiment.”

I sat up straighter.  “Humans were experimenting on you?”

“Shhh!”  He quickly shushed me, but then nodded, his eyes haunted.  “Some of them saw me, so they, um, took me away to a facility.  They claimed they were taking good care of me and only doing what was necessary to figure out why I have this, uh, defect?  But of course I already did know, but they wouldn’t let me go.  Adair – well, Violet, his wife?  She heard a rumor of an angel being caught and they investigated and stuff and found me and the patrol came and shut it all down.  They brought me here since I didn’t want to be in the hospital.  Too many needles and people in white coats, you know.  I haven’t left here since then.”

That was like a supernatural’s worst nightmare.  I thought I’d been through some bad things, but his life sounded worse.

“What about your parents?”  I couldn’t help but ask.  “What – if you can’t hide your wings, wouldn’t it be safer to go to a supernatural-only community?”

“My parents…they haven’t found them since I was rescued.  Violet says they may have gone into hiding or been killed trying to rescue me, but no one knows.  They’re still looking.”  He turned his head away slightly, as if trying to hide the sadness there, but I could still see it.  “That’s probably my only option, but I’m…hesitant to leave yet.  I feel safe here.  Adair said there’s no rush.  They’re even letting me stay in the house, in an extra bedroom.  It’s not permanent, but every time I go to step out the door, even into the yard, I just…can’t.”

He’d found a place of safety, he didn’t want to leave.  With what he’d been through, I could understand the instinctive fear of going out where someone might see him again.

We were both quiet for a bit, when it dawned on me that I didn’t know his name.  “I’m Judah, by the way.”

“Damion.”  Then he smiled slightly, biting his lip as he turned back to look at me.  “It’s kind of funny, our names are a bit reversed, right?  Shouldn’t you be called Damion and I should be Judah?”

Okay that was a tad amusing.  “Sure, if you want to exchange names, I’ll just explain to my teachers that I go by Damion now.  Won’t freak out anyone who knows I’m a demon in the slightest.”

He laughed lightly, his smile lighting up his whole face.  I found myself instantly thinking that he should look like that all the time – the sad, haunted look didn’t match him.

“I do miss school,” he mused.  “Adair’s been sort of home-schooling me to get me caught up, but…I can’t exactly go to a real school.”

I groaned.  “You’re not missing much.  Cliques, bullies, teachers who don’t care, piles of homework – come on, isn’t it nice to skip all of that?”

“I like learning,” Damion explained.  “I used to like doing schoolwork, homework, assignments – all that.  It was fun for me.”

“Nerd,” I teased him.

He made a face at me.  “I’d switch places with you and go to school for you, but,” he paused, touching one of his wings lightly.

The teasing fell away instantly.  “You can’t hide them somehow, somehow not magical?”

He kind of shrugged and shook his head at the same time.  “We tried?  That was how I went to elementary and middle school, but it got harder the bigger they got.  It’s this whole ordeal, trying to wrap them as close to my body as possible and then wear baggy clothes and it took a long time each day to get ready.  Adair says that’s probably why my wings are weaker now and I can’t use them properly – too much bandaging and constricting them for years.  I don’t think he’d let me do it anymore, even for school.”  His face looked a little wistful.

An idea popped into my head and before I could remind myself that I was not getting involved with people – for their sakes, especially someone as beautiful and fragile as this lovely creature – I came right out and said it.

“Well I’m probably going to be here for a while for this surgery and I assume have to come back a couple of times for checkups – you want to take a look at what I’m studying now and entertain yourself with a look at what we high school students are studying these days?”

His face lit up.  “Can I?”  He asked eagerly.

“Sure.  My backpack, uh,” I looked around.  “Well, I had it, I don’t know if Devon or Riven has it now – they’re the ones who brought me in.”

“Oh, I know Riven!”  Damion said brightly.  “He’s really nice.  He was trying to help me figure out a safe way to get around town and stuff because he’s a unicorn hybrid and apparently they know stuff like that?  But we haven’t worked out the kinks.”

Huh.  So…Riven wasn’t human after all, even though he looked like one.  A unicorn?  I didn’t even think those still existed.

Damion continued along, unaware that he’d probably just told me a secret.  “His husband is Ren, that’s whose old room I’m in – he moved out to live with Riven, so they had a spare room, which is where I get to stay.  I’ll go see if he has your backpack!”  He jumped up, then paused at the door and gave me the most beautiful smile I’d ever seen.  “Thank you, Judah!”

A couple of things passed through my head as he left.  First, I really shouldn’t get involved with him.  Of all people, he was pure and innocent and most definitely deserved not to get caught in the crossfires of a demon’s battles – he really didn’t need me in his life.  Second, though, I would do anything for that smile.

I was crushing on an angel.