NARA:
I should have called the police.
That was the rational thought, the one screaming through my mind as I stared at the man collapsed on my gallery floor. Stranger in the building. Possibly dangerous. Definitely impossible. All excellent reasons to dial 911—or whatever the Lagos equivalent was at one in the morning when your world had just tilted sideways into madness.
Instead, I knelt beside him.
"Wetin dey do me?" I muttered. (What's wrong with me?)
The darkness that had erupted through my gallery was gone, vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. The broken lights had stopped flickering. Even the generator had returned to its normal, grinding rhythm. Everything was normal. Except for the unconscious man on my floor and the fact that I'd just watched shadows move with purpose, hunting.
Hunting us.
I reached out, hesitated with my fingers inches from his shoulder. He looked... wrong wasn't the right word. He looked too right. Like someone had taken the concept of masculine beauty and rendered it in flesh—high cheekbones, full lips, skin the color of perfectly aged mahogany. His clothes were expensive, tailored, but styled in a way I couldn't quite place. Not modern. Not exactly ancient. Somewhere in between.
The moment I touched him, heat shocked through my palm.
He was burning up. Fever-hot, the kind of temperature that should have had him convulsing. But his breathing was steady, deep, as if he were merely sleeping off exhaustion rather than fighting some supernatural infection.
"Okay," I said aloud, needing to hear my own voice. "Okay. You're going to be practical, Nara. You're going to—"
He stirred, and I jerked back. But his eyes stayed closed, his lips moving soundlessly. Whispering. I leaned closer despite every instinct telling me to run.
The language wasn't anything I recognized. Not Igbo, not Yoruba, not any of the dozen dialects I'd grown up hearing in Lagos's polyglot chaos. This was older, each syllable like music and mathematics combined, like the universe speaking through a human throat.
And then I saw them.
The symbols.
They traced across his exposed collarbone, disappearing beneath his shirt—silver lines that glowed faintly in the darkness like circuits made of starlight. I'd seen them before, briefly, when the shadows came. But now, with him unconscious and the immediate danger past, I could study them properly.
They were beautiful. Terrifying. Familiar.
My artist's eye cataloged every curve and intersection, recognizing the same geometric precision from the mural. But these were different—more complex, layered with meaning I couldn't begin to decipher. Like looking at a masterpiece and knowing you're missing half the context that makes it transcendent.
"I should not be touching you," I whispered, but my hands were already moving, checking his pulse at his wrist. Strong. Steady. Impossibly slow, like his heart beat on a different rhythm than mortal hearts.
Because he wasn't mortal. That much was obvious now. The question was: what the hell was he?
I needed to move him. Couldn't leave him sprawled on the floor where anyone passing by might see through the windows. The back office would be better—private, with a couch he could rest on while I figured out what to do.
Getting him there proved easier than expected. He was heavy—solid muscle beneath the expensive fabric—but when I hooked my arms under his and started pulling, he seemed to... help. Unconsciously, his body shifting to accommodate my efforts in a way that made the move almost effortless.
That scared me more than the shadows had.
By the time I'd maneuvered him onto the office couch, I was sweating despite the air conditioning, my heart hammering against my ribs. He lay there like a painting of an angel— fallen, broken, beautiful. His fractured wings, if he had them, were invisible now. But I could still feel the memory of them wrapped around me: shadow and smoke and something that might have been feathers once.
I grabbed a cloth, dampened it at the small sink, and pressed it against his forehead. The heat radiating from him made the water steam.
"What are you?" I asked the unconscious stranger. "And why do you know my name?"
No answer. Just the steady rise and fall of his chest, the faint glow of those impossible symbols beneath his skin.
I should have been terrified. Should have been running. Instead, I pulled up a chair and watched him, studying the sharp architecture of his face like I would a painting I was meant to restore. Looking for the damage, the places where time or violence had left their marks.
And there were marks. Faint scars, silver-white against his dark skin. Not random—too deliberate, too patterned. They followed the same geometric precision as the glowing symbols, creating a map across his body that told a story I couldn't read.
A story I wanted to read.
"You're mad," I told myself. (You're crazy.) "Completely mad. This man could be dangerous. Could be anything."
But he'd protected me. When the darkness came, when those things with wings and hunger had burst through, he'd shielded me with his own body. Wrapped those ruined wings around me like a barrier against hell itself.
That had to mean something. Right?
My phone buzzed—Chiamaka again, probably worried I'd finally had the breakdown she'd been predicting since the funeral. I silenced it, unable to explain this situation to anyone. Unable to explain it to myself.
The stranger's breathing changed. Deeper. Ragged. His head turned, and even unconscious, his expression twisted with something that looked like pain. Or grief.
"Adaorah," he whispered.
I froze. That was my middle name. The name my mother had given me, the one almost no one used except family. How did he—
"Please," he continued, his voice rough with sleep and fever. "Forgive me. I tried to save you. I tried—"
His hand shot out, gripping my wrist with surprising strength. His eyes opened, and I gasped.
Silver. His eyes were molten silver, flecked with gold like starlight on water. And they looked at me with such desperate recognition, such raw longing, that I felt it like a physical blow.
"You came back," he breathed. "You always come back."
"I don't—I don't know what you're talking about."
But even as I said it, something stirred in my chest. A flutter of recognition that made no sense. I'd never seen this man before in my life. I would have remembered. No one forgot a face like that.
His grip loosened, his eyes struggling to focus. "Nara. You're... Nara now. Different name. Same soul. Same—" He broke off, coughing. The sound was wet, painful.
I grabbed the water bottle from my desk, helped him sit up enough to drink. His hand covered mine on the bottle, steadying it, and the contact sent another shock of heat through me. Not fever. Something else. Something that made my skin tingle and my breath catch.
"Who are you?" I asked when he'd finished drinking.
He studied me with those impossible eyes, and I saw calculations running behind them. Decisions being made about what to tell me. What to hide.
"My name is Ezrael," he said finally. His voice carried an accent I couldn't place—formal, archaic, as if English were a language he'd learned centuries ago and never quite updated. "And you brought me back. You shouldn't have."
"I didn't bring you back. I just... I found a mural. Touched it. And then you—"
"That mural was a seal," he interrupted. "Designed to keep me contained until..." He trailed off, looking away. "Until the bloodline died out. Until there was no one left to wake me."
"Bloodline? What are you talking about?"
Before he could answer, his body went rigid. His eyes rolled back, showing only white. The symbols on his skin blazed bright enough to cast shadows across the office walls.
"No," he gasped. "Not yet. I need more time—"
"What's happening?" I grabbed his shoulders, felt the violent tremors running through him. "Ezrael, what's—"
"They're coming." His hand found mine, squeezed desperately. "They felt me wake. They'll want to take me back, or destroy me trying. And you—" His silver eyes locked on mine. "You're in danger now. Just by being near me. You need to—"
The temperature plummeted. My breath clouded in front of my face. Every light in the gallery exploded simultaneously, plunging us into darkness broken only by the silver glow of his symbols.
And in that darkness, I heard voices. Multiple. Layered. Speaking that same ancient language Ezrael had whispered in his sleep.
They weren't coming.
They were already here.
Ezrael pulled himself to his feet, swaying but standing. He positioned himself between me and the office door, his body a barrier. I could see the effort it cost him—every muscle taut, trembling with exhaustion.
"Stay behind me," he commanded, and his voice had changed. Deeper. Resonant with authority that made every cell in my body want to obey.
"I don't take orders from strangers," I managed to say, though my voice shook.
"Then take advice from someone trying to keep you alive." He glanced back at me, and for just a second, his expression softened. "Please, Nara. Trust me. Just this once."
The office door didn't open. It dissolved. Shadow peeled it away like paper, revealing the gallery beyond. And in the gallery, standing among the paintings and sculptures I'd grown up around, stood a woman.
She was beautiful in the way ice sculptures are beautiful—perfect, cold, inhuman. Her skin was too pale, her eyes too bright, her smile sharp enough to cut. She wore modern clothes, a tailored suit that looked like it cost more than my entire gallery, but somehow they seemed wrong on her. Costume rather than clothing.
"Ezrael," she said, and his name in her mouth sounded like a curse and a caress combined. "You've been asleep for so long. We were beginning to think you'd never wake."
"Adanne." Ezrael's voice was flat. "I should have known they'd send you."
"Who else?" She stepped into the office, and I felt wrong just being in her presence. Like reality bent around her, accommodating something that shouldn't exist in this dimension. "I always did have a talent for retrieving lost things."
Her gaze slid past Ezrael to me, and I felt it like ice water down my spine.
"And you've found a new pet," she continued. "How... predictable."
"She's not—" Ezrael started.
"Oh, but she is." Adanne's smile widened. "You always choose her, don't you? Every life. Every incarnation. You find her, you fall, you destroy her. It's almost romantic. If it weren't so tediously repetitive."
"Leave," Ezrael said. "Tell them I'm not going back."
"Going back?" Adanne laughed, and the sound was like breaking glass. "Darling, you're not imprisoned anymore. You're free. But that freedom comes with... obligations. Contracts that must be honored. Debts that must be paid."
"I paid my debt," Ezrael growled. "I've paid it over and over. Centuries in darkness. Centuries of—"
"Yes, yes, centuries of suffering." Adanne waved a dismissive hand. "But the game has changed, Ezrael. The rules are different now. And you—" She looked at me again. "You're part of those new rules, little artist. Whether you want to be or not."
I found my voice. "I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know him. I don't know you. I just want—"
"You want answers?" Adanne's eyes gleamed. "How delightful. Then let me give you one: you are not entirely human. You never were. That light inside you, the one your mother tried so hard to suppress? It's awakening. And everyone—" She spread her arms wide. "—everyone will want a piece of it."
Before I could process that, before I could even begin to formulate a response, Adanne was moving. Faster than human. Faster than possible. She crossed the distance to Ezrael in a blink, her hand rising with something sharp and silver gleaming in her palm.
Ezrael met her strike, catching her wrist. The impact shook the room. The air crackled with power—his silver light against her corrupted radiance.
"Run," Ezrael said to me, not looking away from Adanne. "Nara, run."
But I couldn't move. Couldn't look away. Because as they fought—impossibly fast, impossibly violent—I saw something in the reflection of the office window.
My own reflection. Normal in every way.
Except for my eyes.
They were glowing. Faintly, subtly, but definitely glowing.
Gold.
Like light contained in flesh.
Adanne saw it too. She laughed, high and sharp, and vanished mid-strike. Just gone, dissolved into shadows that retreated through the door.
Her voice echoed from the darkness: "So you've chosen her again. How wonderfully predictable. I'll tell them. They'll be so interested."
Then silence. Complete and total.
Ezrael slumped, catching himself against the desk. His breathing was labored, each inhale sounding like it hurt. The glow of his symbols dimmed.
I rushed to him, catching his arm as he started to fall. "I've got you. Just—what do I—"
"Mirror," he gasped. "Look in the mirror, Nara."
I didn't want to. Didn't want to see what I knew would be there. But I looked anyway.
My eyes stared back at me from the reflection. Still glowing. Still wrong. Still impossible.
"What's happening to me?" I whispered.
Ezrael's hand found my face, his palm cool against my cheek. The touch sent another shock through me—not heat this time, but something deeper. Something that felt like recognition. Like coming home.
"I'm sorry," he said softly. His silver eyes were sad, ancient with grief. "You shouldn't have woken me. You shouldn't have touched that mural. Because now..." He swallowed hard. "Now they know you exist. And they won't stop until they have you."
"Who?" I demanded. "Who are 'they'? What do they want?"
"Everything," he said simply. "They want everything. Your power. Your bloodline. The child—" He stopped abruptly, as if he'd revealed too much.
"What child? I don't have—"
"Not yet." His thumb traced my cheekbone, the gesture tender and terrible. "But you will. And when you do..." He closed his eyes. "Heaven and Hell will go to war over what lives inside you."
The office spun. I couldn't breathe. Couldn't think. "I'm not human," I said numbly. "You said I'm not entirely human."
"No," Ezrael agreed quietly. "And neither, entirely, am I."
In the window's reflection, behind us both, I saw them. The shadows with wings. Dozens of them now. Circling the gallery like sharks scenting blood.
Watching. Waiting.
Ready.