Wish for Santa: Average Angel Read online

  Contents

  Impressum

  The book

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  A PENNY FOR YOUR WISH

  Felicity Green

  Felicity Green

  WISH FOR SANTA

  Average Angel

  Book 2

  © Felicity Green, 2016

  www.felicitygreen.com

  Cover art and Design: Elementi Studio, www.elementi-studio.com

  Editing: Red Adept Editing, www.redadeptediting.com

  This is a work of fiction. All references to real people, events, and locations are used fictitiously. All other characters, incidents, and dialogue are a product of the author’s imagination and not to be constructed as real.

  All rights reserved.

  Website: www.felicitygreen.com

  Twitter: FeliGreen

  Facebook: Felicity Green

  When Stella Martens meets a little boy whose greatest wish is to spend Christmas with his father, she just knows she has to help him.

  After all, since learning she is a reborn, wish-granting angel named Vitrella, Stella has made wish fulfilling her vocation. Without any magic-angel superpowers at her disposal, Stella has had to make do with whatever an ordinary human teenager could come up with. Until now.

  When Stella has a recurring dream about this boy, she feels called upon to fulfill his seemingly simple and straightforward wish, but doing so soon turns her world upside down. Zack, cute angel of apocalypse, who had pressured her into taking on Vitrella’s wish quota in the first place, downright forbids her to take this one on. But Stella has to stick with the wish she has committed to in order to protect herself and her family from evil.

  So Stella goes rogue and, in an ironic twist of fate, calls forth the demon she has been trying to keep at bay.

  For Taya, my angel.

  1

  I kept dreaming the same dream.

  There was nothing scary about it. In fact, it was pretty ordinary and uneventful.

  Still, every time I had the dream, I woke up with a start, covered in sweat and filled with this terrible sense of foreboding.

  In my dream, it was winter, and the tall trees by the side of the road were covered in snow. The road was white too. A perfect, smooth, white blanket. No tire marks, no gray mush. It didn’t feel like a deserted area, though. It was just an ordinary New Hampshire road in winter, maybe before a snow truck had had the chance to clear it. But it wasn’t the setting that gave me the creeps. There was nothing spooky about it.

  The landscape was drifting past very slowly, as if I was sitting in a moving car on the opposite side of the road, a car that was driving at a snail’s pace, because it was plowing through the snow. I didn’t know who was driving or who was in the car with me because I was staring out the window. There was no music, no talking, only silence apart from that faint, ambient sound of rushing blood in my ears and maybe the low hum of the engine. But I could be making this up—which easily happened when I overanalyzed a dream and sought meaning in every detail.

  So I was drifting through this snowy landscape for a while, and then I saw him: the boy.

  He was walking along the side of the road, in the opposite direction of where I was going.

  I couldn’t see his face well because he had the hood of his jacket up, but he looked about my sister Anna’s age, maybe ten or eleven.

  He was wearing jeans, a blue puffer jacket, and snow boots, and he had a dark-blue backpack on his back, the kind kids used for school.

  In my dream, I knew it was a boy, but thinking about it afterward always made me question how I was so sure. Because he was wearing blue clothes? It could have been a girl, hiding her hair underneath the hood.

  Anyway, he looked just like a regular boy. There was nothing menacing or scary about him.

  But every time I spotted the boy in my dream, I felt as if an electric jolt was shaking my body.

  The jolt woke me up, and I was cold, sweat soaked, and shaking.

  There was something about this boy, something that was somehow relevant to me, something that my body instinctively recognized.

  However much time I spent thinking about it, my dream gave me no clue as to what that might be.

  But the last couple of months had taught me that life might very well reveal to me the significance of that dream.

  Stranger things have happened.

  ***

  I worked at my Aunt Jeannie’s diner and usually spent my lunch break at a table in the back, eating one of Jeannie’s delicious specialties, like pies, meatloaf, burgers, or casseroles. But that day I just grabbed a sandwich and a coffee to go because I had a date.

  Well, it wasn’t a real date, even though my heart beat faster and my skin got all tingly when I thought about who I was meeting up with.

  Zack, my angel. Sigh.

  No, really, he was an angel. Giant white wings and all. I had seen proof, including his time-traveling ability to the past—my moment of conception—and to a hopefully distant apocalyptic future. Zachriel was an angel of apocalypse. His job was to prevent the end of the world as we knew it. He was here to protect me or guide me or whatever—I wasn’t really sure.

  Naturally, I was completely awed by this supernatural being. I was an ordinary, freckle-faced, too-tall, too-curvy girl that boys normally didn’t pay much attention to. For him, it was strictly business, though, so I did my best to give off the same vibe.

  As I hurried to get to the river and then to the bench where we usually met, I was lost in the memories of our first rendezvous there. The grass had been high and green, separating the bench from the river path and giving the illusion of an intimate spot. Now, in November, the vegetation around the bench had died.

  I could spot Zack a mile off. He was sitting there with his hands in the pockets of his green parka and his shoulder-length brown hair in a ponytail. He looked very human, I thought, as I came closer. He was still supernaturally gorgeous, but the expression in his eyes as he was staring at the river made him look so… vulnerable.

  Even though our spot was not so secluded anymore, we wouldn’t be disturbed there, because nobody in his right mind would have taken a walk in this weather. I pulled my coat tighter around me. I was wearing a woolen hat, but my long, dark-blond hair was still largely unprotected against the autumn drizzle.

  The weather stopped bothering me when I stood in front of Zack and the butterflies in my stomach went crazy. “Hi,” I said hoarsely.

  Zack just nodded and didn’t look at me. I sat down next to him and said nothing. I wasn’t really disappointed that he didn’t pay attention to me, as he was often absentminded. When he did focus on me, though, it was very intense, and I savored those moments. Instead, I now waited for him to speak. I had learned that he sometimes volunteered information—information I desperately craved—so I left Zack to his ruminations. And on that day, the uncomfortably stretching silence paid off.

  2

  “My brother drowned me in this river with his own bare hands. Over there.” He pointed across the stream. I looked but didn’t say anything. I was too shocked. We hadn’t spoken about his twin brother, who was now the demon Malachriel, in a long while, not since he had possessed my younger sister Marie, and I had managed to exorcise him. Malachriel had tried to kill me, but Zack had come to my rescue just in time and ba
nished him.

  Ever since then, I’d lived in mortal fear that Malachriel would come back. Zack had underestimated his brother, it seemed. He had genuinely been shocked that Malachriel had come so close to killing me. I didn’t know much about their history, except that they had been twin brothers in their human lives and that Malachriel had killed his brother. I had shied away from bringing up the painful subject, even though I was dying to know more about Zack’s past. The truth was, I had plenty of more pressing questions for him.

  “Have you heard of the expression praying Indian?” Zack asked without looking at me. I shook my head, afraid that my voice might spook him and stop him from opening up.

  “That’s what the English called the Native Americans that had converted to Christianity. My brother always called me that—praying Indian—in a derisive tone because he thought it was laughable that I wanted to follow in the footsteps of the great Sagamore Passaconnaway and learn to live in peace with the new colonists. I was convinced that raising our weapons against them would be the end of the Penacook. My brother thought not forming an alliance with other tribes and not fighting against the foreigners would be the end of our people. In a way, we were both right.”

  I didn’t follow everything he was saying, but things fell into place when he said “Penacook.” The Penacook had lived in this area of New Hampshire, and there was an American Indian Village and Heritage Center not far from Average. I’d wondered about Zack’s Native American looks and how his origins fit in with the Christian mythology of angels and demons. This explained it. It also suggested that he had lived here many, many years ago. Zack explained that he had lived here during the time of King Philip’s war. I needed to look that up. Anyway, it was interesting that he had stayed close to home even after his ascension.

  “Mal joined the Wachusett when they allied with King Philip. After King Philip’s defeat, my brother came back, looking for refuge. I took him in, even though many warned against it.” For the first time, Zack turned and looked at me, as if he needed to make eye contact before explaining. “He was my brother.”

  I met his eyes.

  “When we got word that a militia troop was on its way to our village, to round up Penacook traitors who had fought with King Philip,” Zack continued, “our sachem Wonalancet decided that we had to go north. Enough of us had died. Wonalancet didn’t want to take Mal along because it was people like him the militia was after. My brother asked me to come to the river with him. He claimed he wanted to clear his conscience and join me in my Christian faith. I said I couldn’t baptize him because I wasn’t a priest, but he insisted on this symbolic ritual. I agreed in the end, hoping he would be repentant enough to stay, so my people wouldn’t have to decide between ostracizing him or risking punishment for harboring him.”

  Zack turned his gaze back to the opposite riverbank. “He killed me so he could pretend to be me and escape with Wonalancet. After he drowned me, he put on my clothes, changed his hairstyle so he looked like me, and joined Wonalancet and the other villagers who were about to leave for Nova Scotia. He told them that his brother had agreed to stay behind, surrender, and prevent the militia from following us. When Wonalancet noticed Mal wasn’t me, it was too late. They were already in French territory, and my brother had escaped yet again. I know all this because I stayed with him after I died.

  “On our way to the river, I felt something hitting my head and must have passed out. My spirit left my body before my brother knew that I was dead, and I saw him, standing navel deep in the water, holding my head under. His own face was completely impassive, and his muscles were shaking. He didn’t look down at me but instead off into the far distance—roughly in the direction of this spot, where this bench is now.”

  A shiver ran down my spine. My imagination was running away with me, and I could almost see Malachriel standing there, water splashing, as Zack’s body instinctively fought to survive. I tried to shake this ghostly image off but instead got even more goose bumps, and my throat closed up when Zack continued.

  “Sometimes, I pretend that time is not chronological and that everything that has been, is, and will be exists at the same time. I imagine that I’m sitting here, on this bench, looking over to the other side of the river, where my brother is drowning me. And my brother, he sees me watching him from over here. We look into each other’s eyes across the ever-flowing stream.”

  Part of me wanted him to continue, wanted him to tell me how he became the angel Zachriel and how Mal became a demon under archangel Abaddon’s orders. I wanted to know how it came to pass that Mal had helped bring the world down and Zack had to prevent the apocalypse. But I could almost not stand the sadness and haunting tragedy of his story anymore, so I was kind of glad when Zack turned to me in a businesslike demeanor.

  “So, have you been successful in getting this man a job?” he asked.

  I quickly changed gears too. “Yes. Mr. Halson is now employed as an assistant manager in a big department store. Doubled his income.” I couldn’t help but sound proud.

  Mr. Halson’s wish had come to me on my Angel Average Facebook profile. I’d set this profile up for people to express their wishes after Zack had revealed to me that I was a reborn angel named Vitrella, whose job it had been to fulfill wishes. Vitrella had cleverly used that power to become a fallen angel. Fallen angels come back to earth as shooting stars and are reborn as humans—who, like me, don’t remember a thing.

  Vitrella had fulfilled a woman’s wish to have a child. My mother’s wish.

  Why had she done that?

  Good question and one that I had been trying to figure out since Zack had told me the story. He kept promising to reveal things to me, but so far, I had been given more unanswered mysteries.

  For example, Zack had explained to me that his brother, Mal, the demon, was after me because of Vitrella. I had assumed Mal had had a feud with Vitrella and wanted to kill her. One of my theories was that she had made herself fall in order to hide as a human.

  But when Malachriel had tried to kill me a few weeks ago, he hadn’t known who Vitrella was.

  So there were some unconnected dots, to put it mildly. I still wasn’t sure how I’d gotten caught up in all this. I only knew that I couldn’t extricate myself from it.

  Angels had a job to do. They did this job with passion and commitment, which lent them something Zack called grace. It was like an armor against evil. Before rebirth, Vitrella had seen the wishes of humans on her glass visor and fulfilled them. I didn’t know how exactly, but I would really like to know—and have that same ability.

  Now I had to do her job without any superpowers. Zack claimed that with Vitrella gone from Heaven, there was now an imbalance, and if I didn’t do her job, an apocalyptic catastrophe would ensue. No pressure, then.

  The real reason I did it, though, was because of the grace. When I committed to fulfilling wishes, I got an angel’s grace too. And Malachriel—or any other demon, for that matter—couldn’t harm me. He couldn’t get to me. He had been trying to do this by messing with my family. He had possessed my little sister Marie, who’d then stabbed my other sister Anna.

  I needed to make my armor against evil so strong that Malachriel wouldn’t be able to get to me via my family. I needed to protect them from harm.

  So I had been fulfilling wishes like crazy. My Facebook profile was buzzing with the news of this wish-fulfilling angel, and I had enough wish requests. I was on a mission.

  “Impressive,” Zack said about me fulfilling Mr. Halson’s wish. “I thought you said his resumé was so bad that you couldn’t do much with it.”

  I had sent Mr. Halson’s resumé everywhere, figuring it was a numbers game, and wasted a lot of time with that. “I couldn’t, because I’m no expert. So I hired one.”

  Zack looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “With what money? I thought your diner wages went to your college fund.”

  “True. I didn’t pay for it. Don’t worry,” I hurried to say when his eyes darkened. �
��I didn’t do something bad. Ever heard of crowdfunding?”

  I explained the concept to Zack. People on Facebook had paid small amounts to this crowdfunding project to raise money for a career advisor to help Mr. Halson.

  “And people give money, just like that?” Zack sounded skeptical.

  I shrugged. “I already told you that this Facebook profile isn’t a one-way thing. People help each other all the time and fulfill each other’s wishes if they happen to be able to. It sometimes works like a wish-fulfilling exchange. They’re happy to help and contribute to a crowdfunding project, probably hoping someone will do it for them one of these days.”

  That seemed to please Zack very much. He nodded and stood up. “Keep up the good work.” He briefly put his hand on my shoulder then turned to go.

  Now, a couple of months ago, I would have been arrested by his touch and would have sat there, dreaming about him maybe touching other body parts.

  Not anymore. “Hang on,” I said, stopping him. “Aren’t you forgetting something? I believe you owe me some information. That’s the deal.”

  It was too. An answered question for a fulfilled wish.

  He stopped and looked at me with those sparkly eyes. “Go ahead.”

  It was always really hard to pick a question.

  So far, I had found out that Mal answered to an archdemon named Abaddon. Zachriel answered to Michael, who was an archangel. Archdemons and archangels were something like a different race than humans. Ordinary angels and demons like Zack and Mal used to be human. If those former human angels got cast out of Heaven as fallen angels, they would also return to earth as humans—it was a cycle. I was trying to figure out why Vitrella had done that voluntarily—a direct question, which Zack refused to answer. But I would get there, eventually.

  “Who did Vitrella answer to?” I asked. “Who was her boss?”