Lucas ✔️

Forty-Two

I nodded as though I understood, but I really didn't. Everything I was seeing just felt... wrong. My brain was in overdrive trying to understand, but it still couldn't. How could I possibly understand the concept that this man died of dehydration after his mule abandoned him in the middle of this sandy desert?

Lucas bent down over the body and reached out, hesitating slightly. I shook my head and crouched down next to Lucas, looking up at him. His long hair formed a curtain around his face which he tucked behind one ear before his hand moved slowly to touch the golden band on the man's finger.

"Don't do it, Lucas," I whispered, watching as his hand moved to pull the ring from his finger.

Lucas' bright golden eyes looked up and met mine for a moment and I gasped. His eyes were swirling with things I didn't – couldn't – understand. He looked right at me then turned and looked to the other side before he pulled the ring off the man's finger and stood up, walking away.

"Why did he do it?" I asked Uriel, looking back at him as I stood up and felt the heaviness of the air around me.

"Only our Creator could tell you that," Uriel replied smoothly as he ushered me in another direction.

Lucas was hunched on the ground with a shiny sword falling from his grip. It was long and breathtaking, but that wasn't what caught my attention. What caught my attention was the two large wings hanging low from Lucas' back, sprouting right from the muscles of his shoulder blades.

They were extremely large and heavily battered, small specks of red splattered across them, matching the red-tipped edges of his sword. I could imagine the wings in their prime, but now they were drooped along the floor, their edges brushing the sand on the ground. Curled up bodies of armour-clad angels with equally impressive wings laid next to him, their dead eyes looking up at the sky as it began to rain.

Lightning cracked in the sky and Lucas looked up, his face curled in pain as tears streamed down his face. He screamed something, his mouth opening as he yelled at the sky, but I couldn't hear him over another loud crack of lightning that hit dangerously close to his hunched form. Lucas didn't seem to care as he yelled to the sky again, his eyes burning with passion.

"What is he saying?" I asked Uriel desperately, clutching the material above my heart that was thumping in pain for him.

"What he is saying doesn't matter," Uriel said softly into my ear. "It's what he's feeling that matters."

"What is he feeling?" Lucas looked like he was in pain, angry, hurt, betrayed and more, but I couldn't understand.

I wanted to blame my human brain and say that this whole scenario was above what I could handle – which it was – but I knew that it was also because I simply had never experienced anything close to what Lucas was feeling. Something that would make you kill others, something that would make you defy God. Lucas was a heavenly being who had roamed the Earth for aeons, and I was a lowly eighteen-year-old girl. The world Lucas knew and the world I knew were very, very different, and I knew right then and there that I would never be able to understand him.

"Regret," Uriel said softly next to me as his body-double stepped onto the scene.

This Uriel was dressed in similar armour to the angels on the ground, the golden shine and unblemished surface a stark contrast to Lucas' bare and bloodied chest. Lucas lifted his head, long golden locks falling around him as he looked up at Uriel. No words were spoken between the two, but I could feel the tension – or maybe that was the air tightening in my lungs.

Uriel just stood and watched Lucas for a moment before Lucas stood, dropping the sword at his side, blood-red rain drops making their way down his abdomen as his wings stretched to full length around him. It felt like posturing, just like how people throw their arms wide when daring someone to hit them.