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surprised me as much as it did him—the way the word sounded, like two notes of music played simultaneously, like a feeling instead of a word.
    Hello.
    His gaze jerked down from the fresco on the ceiling and landed, red-hot, on me. Astonished. Then accusatory. Then curious.
    I was all of those things, too. Because he and the fresco angel had the same face.
    We stared at each other for like two minutes.
    “What did you say?” he asked slowly in Italian, carefully, like he might have misheard—although there was no possible way that what I said sounded like anything else but what it was.
    “I said hello,” I replied, in English.
    “What are you doing here?” he demanded.
    “I came to see the bones,” I answered. “What are you doing here?”
    “I came to talk to God.”
    I arched an eyebrow and folded my arms across my chest. “I see. So what does He say?”
    Before he could reply, the door of the church groaned open on its rusty hinges and an old and bent-over Italian lady in a black dress hobbled in. She eyed us suspiciously, like two young people had no business making small talk in a church.
    I smiled at the angel. The corner of his mouth twitched like he wanted to smile, too, but instead he looked stern. He crossed the sanctuary in three rapid steps and grabbed my arm, his touch slightly cool against my flushed skin.
    “Come with me,” he said, and drew me off to the side, back toward the room of bones, where the old lady couldn’t see us.
    I opened my mouth to tell him that he may be an angel but I was American and bossing me around was not going to fly, but he put a finger to my lips, which startled me.
    “Come with me,” he said again softly.
    I instantly got a weird, dizzy sensation in the pit of my stomach, and my legs wobbled, as if I’d just stepped off a roller coaster. Something had changed, darkened and brightened at the same time. He pulled me back out of the bone room and into the main part of the basilica, and the old lady was gone. I took a good look at him and gasped again.
    He was all in black and white, his hair jet-black, his skin ice-white, and still glowing slightly, still hard to look at, he was so gorgeous. Everything around us was black and white, too, the colors of the world converted to an old movie, made up of shadows and stark contrasts.
    He let go of my arm. “We can talk here. In private.”
    “What did you do?” I asked, a shiver working its way down my spine, but I refused to let him see that he’d scared me.
    “It’s not safe to reveal yourself the way you did,” he said, scolding me. “It was foolish.”
    “Why?” I wanted to know. My voice sounded thin in this place, insubstantial.
    “What if I’d been one of the fallen?”
    “So it’s true? There are good angels and bad angels?” I knew the answer to this, of course. My biological father was definitely not a good angel. But I wanted to hear him define it for himself. I wanted to hear him say it.
    “Yes. The sorrowful and the joyful,” he said.
    “And which are you?” I teased, but I hoped I already knew the answer. Bad angels wouldn’t come to a church to talk to God.
    He shrugged, a completely human gesture. “I’m neither. I’m ambivalent.”
    It sounded like a joke. “Yes, well, I’ve had trouble with ambivalence myself,” I said.
    He laughed. “What’s your name?”
    “Angela.”
    “Fitting,” he said.
    “What’s yours?”
    “Penamue. But you can call me Phen.”
    “Phen,” I repeated, liking the sound of his name in my mouth. An angel’s name. “Where are we, Phen? Where have you taken me?”
    “The same place we were,” he answered. “But a different dimension.”
    My skin prickled with excitement at how cool this was, journeying to a different dimension with a full-blooded angel. Nothing this eventful had ever happened to me, not in the small Wyoming town where my mother had hidden me away for most of my life.
    It was the start of something, I thought.
    It was the