around to see I’m not alone. The room is full of guards, at least thirty of them, and I recognise one of them straight away: Riley. He stands in the middle of the guards at the front, and his uniform has two silver pins on the breast pocket, and the weapons on his belt look expensive, dipped in gold. The once pale, skinny guy he turned into under the vampires’ control is long gone now. His eyes meet mine, and for a moment, I think back to the two kids who used to sneak into my mum’s kitchen and steal the cookies she just got out of the oven before running across the garden to eat them. We were once so innocent of the world around us, and it never had a chance to corrupt us both. I see the reality of the world, the cruelty of the angels, and the mistakes of the vampires, but I know Riley will only ever love the angels. The vampires are his enemy, and they are my home.
Things have changed for us both, and there isn’t a way back from this anymore. I could never forgive him for the actions he took, and he could never forgive me for loving the vampires.
“We find you guilty of betraying the angels; how do you plead?” the angel asks me, and I turn back to him.
If I’m going to go down, I might as well go in flames. They will never, ever let me be free after what I did, and this might be the only chance I have to tell the angels what I really think.
“I find every single angel here guilty of killing their children,” I shout, clasping my hands together behind my back and lifting my head high. “Vampires were born from angel blood, they are your children, and you kill them like they are nothing to you. How could you kill an entire race who are related to you? What gives you the right to kill them all? How can you live with yourselves?”
Of course, no one answers me, but I do hear the guards whispering behind me. “Three goddesses came to earth. One of them bore an angel’s child, and that’s how the vampires were created. Why is this not in your history books? Why do you care so little for the child of an angel and a goddess?”
“You speak lies, and they will not save you from your sentence,” the middle angel plainly states, though I see a little wobble in his eyes. Seems my words have hit a nerve somewhere.
My hands shake as I meet the angel eyes who spoke. “I’m a light angel, and it’s hard for me to lie. It’s impossible for me to lie so easily, and you know that.”
“The vampire blood in your system means you do not follow the rules of most light angels,” he effortlessly responds. “Now answer us. How do you plead?”
“If believing the vampires should be saved means I am guilty, then I plead guilty,” I answer, and like a vise is wrapped around my throat, I suddenly can’t breathe. Light blasts around my eyes, and my feet leave the ground as I scratch at my throat, but there is nothing there. Air slowly leaves me as I hear Riley shouting something, and suddenly the vise around my neck disappears, and I slam onto the cold ground. I look up to see Riley in front of me, his back to me and his hands in the air.
“The light above should see her first.” I catch the end of his sentence as he lowers his hands, and I cough, sucking in much-needed air. “She is important to him, and I don’t believe he wants her dead. He told me as much.”
“Fine,” one of the angels responds, and light burns a circle around me once more. Riley looks down at me and steps closer to the light as I gasp for air, trying to breathe in what I can.
“You saved my life once, and now we are even. I hope you don’t hate me,” he softly tells me, like I’m a wounded child he is trying to soothe. Like he did when I was eight and fell sideways off the slide at the park, cutting all my back. I needed ten stitches, and Riley was at my side the whole time, holding my hand while my mother held my other hand. My dad couldn’t stand blood and had to sit down in the