~~Young~~

Chapter Twenty Three

   Sera looked up to Gage in utter confusion as the angel clung to her. Gage began to shake his head- he had never seen her before either- when she pulled away. There was a small blue and red something peeking out from under the angle’s breastplate, a necklace he knew all too well. Gage looked back to the armor he had run into earlier. It was almost exact to this angel’s only plain. He looked back to the angel, then to Sera, then back to the armor…

   He turned back to the angel wide eyed, “its…she’s your sister Sera,” he said absently before he gained his wits and placed a hand on Sera’s shoulder, “it’s Joey.”

   She was nothing of the frail child he had known her as. Now she looked everything of the proud warrior woman she was meant to be. No wonder it was so hard for her to be trapped inside that body.

   Sera matched Gage’s dumfounded expression and looked to Joey in disbelief, “So…you were an angel?”

   She nodded quickly, “yes.”

   “My guardian angel?”

   “While you were on earth, yes.”

   “On earth?” Sera shook her head, “where else would I have been?”

   “Preferably at my side,” God mumbled.

   Once again the world swam for Gage, though this time it was Sera who was quick to hold him up. That armor he had walked into hadn’t been engraved because it was to be done by the wearer…and Sera wasn’t nearly the artist her sister was.

   “She’s the other guard?” Gage asked in shocked awareness.

   He looked between Sera and Josephine as they stood side by side, not just sisters by mortal birth…they were the same height, held their postures in the same way, noses, lips, ears, they were identical except for hair and eye color. Joey’s hair was fair and she had those crystalline blue eyes, Sera the opposite with brown on brown. Really looking at Sera, he had to admit she did appear leaner now, which in itself was a shame…only their wings were mismatched. Sera’s with her brown on the top and the white…at…the…bottom.

   Shit, those weren’t white feather’s on the bottom third of her wings but golden yellow feathers. Somehow he had managed to miss that before. So that meant despite the brown there was still quite a bit of divinity to her. It kind of gave Gage this odd feeling, like maybe…maybe he wasn’t good enough for her.

   God strolled up to the group of them with a smug expression, “why do you think I wanted her back so badly? When she took off so did Josephine, leaving me unprotected, vulnerable to attack. I couldn’t have that, I needed both my Seraphim back.”

   Gage scrubbed a hand over his face, what a fool he was to not have put that together. Seraphim, God’s personal guard…Seraphine, the woman he loved who had been hunted by God…no wonder. Though Gage had never known either of them in their true forms he had known their story.

   Fearing rebellion after he spurned his brothers and sisters, and subsequently their children, when Zeus geared up his campaign to take the throne and switched it to God he knew he needed protection. He couldn’t trust any of the other gods or demi-gods already in existence so he created his own. The Seraphim came first to protect himself, and then as a good willed gesture the Archangels came next. Having the thing for pairs as he did he created two. Seraphine was first and as such she was the stronger of the two, and the one bearing the most responsibility. Josephine came next, but to make up for lack of strength he bestowed her with intelligence. The warrior and the strategist, together they were undefeatable.