Eutopia - Apocalypse

Chapter 8

‘Is Phoibe okay? And Horace, are they alright?’

‘Eutopia, they’re fine. Worried, but they’re okay’

Eutopia visibly relaxed and her bird-thin shoulders slumped as she hugged her knees tighter to herself and shook with the cold that still slithered through her bones.

‘Can’t you do something?’ Mike demanded, glaring at the nearest angel, who stood guard over the two of them huddled together on the floor of the main room. ‘It was your Commander who half drowned her in the first place!’ Mike pulled back from Eutopia just enough to pull his thin work shirt off and throw it over her head, before drawing her to him again and wrapping his work-heavy arms around her shoulders in a bid to keep her warm.

Adrien, the angel Mike had addressed, merely shifted his weight from one booted foot to the other and turned his face away. His frosty eyes met the lighter, yellowed gaze of Blaze who guarded the opposite side of the hollow, echoing room the prisoners had been led to. Jackson had been disposed of in Eutopia’s absence, as Jinn had instructed, leaving behind an air of bitter subservience. With no previous Commander to keep the Watchers in check the angels found themselves uneasy with following orders.

‘I know something that would soon warm her up,’ Blaze snorted derisively under his breath, making Adrien grin.

Eutopia leant into the warmth of Mike’s bare chest as if Blaze hadn’t spoken, the muscle lean and sinewy with labouring at Horace and Phoibe’s farm, was comforting in its familiarity to the point that Eutopia found her jangled nerves soothed instantly by Mike’s presence. The heat from his body, through his shirt that hung too loose on her, thawed the frost that had crept into her bones since Jinn and Jonathon had escorted them back to the base and left them wordlessly in the largest pillared chamber. 

‘And you,’ she asked softly, earnestly when the angel’s looming over their prone figures on the stone floor gave no real reply to Mike’s question. ‘How are you? I thought… I thought you were. Gone.’ She gasped at the huge hollow blackness that materialised at the notion, the sickness at the pit of her stomach lurching dangerously close to the forefront of her mind as she remembered the flash of metal and the sight of Mike’s shaggy red head falling down beneath a heavy blade. Eutopia reached up to touch the neat but now bedraggled bandage that bore all the hallmarks of Phoibe’s handiwork.

‘I’ll live,’ Mike smiled, his grey eyes filled with empty humour.

‘But for how long?’ Jinn smirked as he strode purposefully into the centre of the room where they sat, the other two angels instantly falling back but hovering just out of the peripheral view in case they should be needed. Since Mike’s unexpected arrival Eutopia had noticed a chilliness creeping through the Commander’s demeanour, like rime crystallising the edges of the landscape on a clear autumn morning. 

‘Give her something warmer to wear, please,’ Mike said.

‘She looks warm enough to me,’ Jinn replied looking down at Mike’s bare chest whist he adjusted the fall of his thick, woollen cloak that spread down his expansive back in an azure shadow. Mike stood, his own broad shoulders that seemed slight and delicate when in such close proximity to Jinn, were squared. Eutopia stood too, the hem of Mike’s roughly woven work-shirt falling almost to her knees, dwarfing her as she looked fearfully from her oldest friend to the angelic Commander. She could sense the tension prickling between them and she knew the dog-determined expression that had set into Mike’s ruddy features. He was spoiling for a fight and this most definitely wasn’t the time or the place for it. She lay a hand on his arm, her sapphire eyes wide and pleading.