by Susan Ee
I put the tuna in my mouth and slowly chew. ‘It’s good.’
She peeks at me from beneath her hair.
‘Are you hungry?’ I ask.
She nods. For a second, her eyes dip down to the bandage on my shoulder. It’s spotting with blood.
She looks away as if ashamed and gazes up at the locusts circling above us. But her eyes keep drifting back to my bandage, and her nostrils flare like she smells something good.
Maybe it’s time for me to go.
I’m putting the can down when I hear an animal calling. It sounds like a hyena. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a hyena, but my bones recognize the sound of a predator in the wild. My hackles rise on the back of my neck.
A shadow jumps between the trees to my left.
Another shadow leaps between branches, then several more.
And as the next one jumps closer to the nearest tree, I see the shape of teeth and wings.
Hellions.
A lot of them.
The trees around us begin to boil with shadows leaping from tree to tree, getting closer. The mad hyena laugh keeps up its steady call as the mob of shadows leaps toward us.
Paige’s locusts fly toward the hellions. But there are too many of them.
I grab Paige’s hand, and we run toward the main house. The skin along my spine prickles, trying to sense how close unseen claws are to sinking into me.
I yell toward the house. ‘Hellions!’
Raffe looks out the dining room window.
‘How many?’ he calls out as we run to the house.
I point to the shadows hopping closer to us from the woods. Raffe disappears from the window.
A second later, he bursts out the front door and thumps down the porch, carrying a backpack with a blanket bundle strapped to it.
As he runs by the picket fence, we both look at Beliel’s broken chain hanging off the post. Beliel is nowhere in sight.
I assume the hellions freed him. They may not like each other, but they’re still on the same team. Isn’t that why Beliel invited me to look into his past, so he could lure the hellions to help him?
Raffe tosses the backpack to me. I assume the bundle attached to it is his wings.
I slip on the backpack while a couple of Paige’s locusts land beside her. They hiss at the shadows gathering around them.
I take a step back. I still can’t bring myself to get too close to those scorpion stingers. ‘We gotta go, Paige. Can you get them to fly us?’
My heart races at the thought of being held by one of these monsters, but I’m more comfortable with that idea right now than being in Raffe’s arms. He’s made it pretty clear how he feels about me – about us – and the fact that there is no us.
Raffe throws me a dirty look. He bends over and swipes his arm behind my knees, lifting me up in his embrace.
‘I can go with one of the locusts.’ I stiffen in his arms and try to lean as far away from him as I can.
‘The hell you will.’ He runs a couple of steps before spreading his wings.
With two sweeps of his wide wings, we’re up in the air.
My arms wrap around his neck. I have no choice but to lean close and hold tight. This isn’t the time to argue.
The locusts are just behind us with my sister.
Shadows leap toward us through the trees. Angel Island must be some kind of hellion convention center. Either that or these new hellions are far too good at organizing.
Raffe leads the way toward San Francisco. Behind us, a cloud of hellions bursts out of the trees after us.
11
As usual, there’s a swarm of locusts funneling over Alcatraz. My hair whips my face from the wind generated by their wings. As we near, a stream of locusts heads our way.
They join our little group until we swell into a swarm of our own. The creatures aren’t nuzzling us, but they’re not attacking either. They seem to be joining us on our flight by sheer instinct.
The hellion cloud behind us pauses. It’s nowhere near the size of the locust swarm. It hovers in place for a few seconds as if assessing the situation, then the cloud turns around and shrinks into the distance.
I take a deep breath and let the tension out. We’re safe for the moment.
Raffe watches them go with a frown, deep in thought. I look back at the hellions retreating and realize what the problem is. The hellions aren’t behaving as stupidly as they should.
I have a nagging worry about what just happened. What did I release into the world?
The funnel over Alcatraz becomes thinner as more of the locust swarm peels off and heads toward us.
This new group flows in a spike formation led by a locust with an extra large scorpion tail curled over his head. Something about that makes me nervous. They’re just following my sister out of instinct, aren’t they?
I dismiss the uneasiness as a reasonable reaction to the sight of a large locust swarm coming in our direction.
But a second later, the leader proves my worries right. He’s close enough now for me to see the white streak in his long hair. I turn cold when I recognize him.
He’s the one who toyed with me by shoving me against the rollup gate of the shipping container filled with desperate people who had been starved for sport. This is the one Beliel said they bred and trained to be part of the locust leader group.
He’s bigger than the others, and I remember Beliel saying the leader group got better nutrition. Why is he here? Can Paige order the locusts to turn on him? This one is too twisted and dangerous to live. I don’t want him anywhere near us.
When he reaches us, he grabs the arm of the locust Paige was tending to earlier, jerking him to a stop in midair. White Streak looks almost twice the size of Paige’s locust.
White Streak rips off a wing and tosses the screeching locust toward the water.
Paige screams. She stares wide-eyed as her pet helplessly beats the one wing he has left as he falls like a rock toward the water.
He makes a tiny splash in the dark bay. The water swallows him up as though he never existed.
White Streak roars at Paige’s other locusts, jabbing his oversized stinger menacingly into the air.
Paige’s small band of locusts buzzes in circles, looking confused. They look to White Streak and steal glances at Paige, who is crying over her murdered pet.
White Streak roars again.
All but four of Paige’s locusts flutter reluctantly into the insect swarm behind White Streak.
White Streak’s locusts tighten their circle around us. The roar of their wings is deafening, and our hair blows everywhere. White Streak swings back and forth, staring down Paige.
She looks like a little stitched-up doll in a monster’s arms with an even bigger monster stalking her.
Raffe must feel my tension, because he flies in White Streak’s path toward Paige. Raffe’s demon wings claw the air around us with every stroke. He pauses in front of White Streak, letting his crescent-shaped wing blades flash in the sun.
White Streak widens his eyes like a crazed man. I wonder what he was in the World Before? A serial killer?
He puffs up at the sight of Raffe, assessing him. He glances at me, probably wondering whether Raffe will drop me to fight him.
He roars at Paige’s locusts, not daring to take on Raffe directly, at least not right now. He may be a killer when it comes to starved prisoners and little girls, but he’s not willing to fight an angel demon.
He turns and swipes his tail at one of Paige’s remaining locusts. He doesn’t sting, just uses his stinger to slice Paige’s locust across the face, drawing a line of blood across his cheek. The smaller locust cringes, looking like he thought that the bigger one meant to slit his throat.
White Streak turns his back on us as if to show that he’s not afraid. He grabs Paige’s pet by the hair and flies away, with the smaller locust awkwardly fluttering his wings to stay up.
The unsure beast turns and gives Paige a distressed look. He doesn’t wa
nt to go. But all Paige can do is reach out her hand as he fades farther away from her.
This is some kind of leadership challenge, and the swarm seems to be waiting it out to see who they’re supposed to follow. Whatever it is she did last night to rally the locusts against the angels, it’s not working against White Streak.
A serial killer versus a seven-year-old girl. No contest. I’m just glad he didn’t make a move to hurt her, thanks to Raffe.
Paige is left with the locust who carries her and the two flanking her. Our smaller group probably makes it easier for us to fly without being noticed and shot at, but I don’t like the feeling of being bullied, especially by that marauding insect.
We move on.
I can see worry in Paige’s eyes. I’m guessing she doesn’t care about having her power taken, but she hates to see her locusts getting punished.
12
‘We need to go to the Resistance,’ I say as I cling to Raffe’s neck. ‘Maybe Doc is there. He might be able to help both you and Paige.’ My mother should also be there, waiting for us.
‘Human doctor?’
‘Trained by angels. I think he sewed on Beliel’s wings – I mean, your wings onto him.’
He’s quiet as he sweeps his large demon wings through the air.
‘I don’t like it either,’ I say. ‘But what choice do we have?’
‘Why not?’ He sounds resigned. ‘Might as well fly into the heart of the enemy where the primitive natives can tear me to pieces, sell my body parts for money, and grind the rest to be consumed in teas for sexual potency.’
I tighten my arms around his neck. ‘We’re not that primitive anymore.’
He arches his perfect eyebrow at me, sending waves of skepticism.
‘We have Viagra now.’
He gives me a sideways glance as if he suspects what that is.
We fly over the water and down the East Bay landmass as the sun sets. Steering clear of the aerie, we take the long way around toward Resistance headquarters. There is a surprising number of angels in the air today. They fly in formation from every direction toward Half Moon Bay, where the new aerie is located.
When we see a particularly large group in the air, we land in front of a mall and lie low beneath the awning of a Macy’s department store.
‘They must be flying in for the Messenger election,’ says Raffe. There’s worry in his voice as he watches the host of angels flying above us.
I unwrap my arms from his neck and step away from his warmth. It feels chilly on my own under the department store awning. ‘You mean there are more angels coming into the area? Like we didn’t have enough on our hands.’
From this distance, the angels look like they’re inching across the sky. Raffe watches them fly overhead. His body twitches just a little, looking like he’s making an effort not to jump into the air and join them.
‘What was it like to be one of them?’ I ask.
He gazes at the sky for a long moment before saying anything. ‘My Watchers and I were on a mission once to clear the area of a demon invasion. Except we couldn’t find any demons. But Cyclone, one of my Watchers, was so worked up for a battle that he wouldn’t accept that there was no one to fight.’
He nods toward the angels flying in the distance. ‘We were flying in formation like that when Cyclone suddenly decided that if he could just cause a big enough scene, then the demons would be attracted to the noise and destruction and they’d come to us. So he started flying in circles as fast as he could, sure that he would cause a cyclone.’
He smiles at the memory. ‘Half of us joined him as a lark while the rest of us landed to watch and heckle. We started throwing things at him – twigs, leaves, mud, whatever we could find – because everyone knows that a tornado should have debris.’
He has a mischievous look in his eyes as he remembers. ‘The ones in the air, they flew over to a tree that I swear must have been diseased, because it had these rotten oranges still on the branches. They started throwing them at us, and it turned into a giant mud and orange fight.’ He chuckles as he gazes up at the sky.
His face is relaxed and happy in a way I’ve never seen. ‘We had orange pulp caked in our ears and hair for days after.’
He watches the angels flying away from us.
I can almost see the lonely years creeping back to him like shadows at the end of the day. The happiness seeps out of his face, and he’s back to being a hardened outsider traveling in an apocalypse.
‘You’re sure this human doctor can transplant wings?’ he asks.
‘That’s what Beliel said.’ Of course, Beliel said a lot of things.
‘And you’re sure he’s at the Resistance camp?’
‘No, but I’m pretty sure he was rescued off Alcatraz by the Resistance. If he’s not there, maybe someone will know where he is.’ I have all kinds of worries about going to the camp and trusting the doctor who messed up Paige in the first place.
I sigh. ‘I can’t think of a better plan. Can you?’
He looks at the angels for a little longer before turning and heading into Macy’s.
It’s not a bad idea. Paige and I both need to change into some real clothes, so we might as well go shopping while we wait for the sky to clear. We leave the locusts outside and follow Raffe into the store.
Inside, the electricity is out, but there’s enough sun coming through the huge windows to light up the front part of the store. Many of the racks are drunkenly leaning or scattered on the floor. Clothes of all colors and fabrics spill into the aisles. In the windows, naked mannequins lie on top of each other in sexual poses.
Someone has sprayed graffiti on the ceiling. A crude knight stands alone with his sword drawn against a fire-breathing dragon that is ten times his size. The dragon’s tail disappears into darkness where the window light fades deep into the store.
Beside the knight are the words ‘Where Have All the Heroes Gone?’
It looks to me like the artist thought the knight didn’t stand a chance against the dragon. I know just how he feels.
I look around and try to remember what it was like to go shopping. We walk through the special-event dresses. The racks and floor are covered in silky sparkle and shine.
This would have been my year for the prom. I doubt anyone would have asked me, and even if someone had, we couldn’t have afforded one of these dresses anyway. I run my hand through the shimmery fabric on a rack of full-length gowns, wondering what it would have been like to go to the prom instead of a masquerade ball full of killers.
I catch Raffe watching me. The light behind him halos his dark hair and broad shoulders. If he were human, the girls at my school would have died just to be in the same room with him. But of course, he’s not human.
‘That would look good on you,’ he says and nods to the movie-star dress in my hand.
‘Thanks. Do you think it’ll go well with combat boots?’
‘You won’t always be fighting, Penryn. There will come a time when you’ll be so bored that you’ll wish you were fighting.’
‘I can only dream.’ I pull out the dress and lay it against me, feeling the soft, sparkly fabric.
He steps over and scrutinizes me in my pretend dress. Then he nods his approval.
‘How do you think things might have been . . .’ My voice dries up. I swallow and keep going. ‘If you were human, or I was an angel?’
He reaches out as if he can’t help himself and runs his forefinger along the shoulder of the dress. ‘If I were human, I’d plow the nicest farm for you.’ He sounds completely sincere. ‘Better than anyone else’s. It would have golden pineapples, the juiciest grapes, and the most flavorful radishes in the entire world.’
I just stare at him, trying to figure out if he’s joking. I think he’s serious. ‘You haven’t been to a lot of farms, have you, Raffe? Most of us aren’t farmers anymore anyway.’
‘That wouldn’t diminish my little human commitment to you.’
I smile a little. ‘I
f I was an angel, I’d tickle your feet with my feathers and sing angelic songs for you every morning.’
He scrunches his brow, looking like it pains him to try to envision this.
‘Right.’ I nod. ‘Neither of us have any idea what it would be like to be in each other’s world. Got it.’
He looks down at me with sincere eyes. ‘If I were human, I would have been the first in line for you . . .’ He looks away. ‘But I’m not. I’m an archangel, and my people are in trouble. I have no choice but to try to set things straight. I can’t get distracted by a Daughter of Man.’
He nods a little to himself. ‘I can’t.’
I hook the dress carefully back on the rack and make myself listen to what he’s telling me. I just need to accept the situation.
I take a good look at him, steeling myself to see determination and maybe even pity. But instead, I see turmoil. There’s a battle raging behind his eyes.
A tiny light of hope flares in my chest. I don’t even know what I’m hoping for anymore. My brain can’t seem to keep up with my heart.
‘Just this once,’ he says almost more to himself than to me. ‘Just one moment.’
Then he leans down and kisses me.
It’s the kind of kiss that I’ve been dying for since I was born.
His lips are supple, his touch tender. He strokes my hair gently.
He licks my lips – a probing, wet glide – then touches my tongue with his. Electric sensations zip from the tip of my tongue down to my toes and back again.
I feel like I’m drowning in him. Who knew such a thing existed? I open my mouth and grab him tighter, almost climbing into his arms.
We kiss wildly for what seems like a year, for what is only a millisecond. My breath is ragged, and it feels like I can’t get enough air. My insides are melting, flowing like lava through my body.
Then he stops.
He takes a deep breath and steps back, holding me at arm’s length.
I groggily take a step toward him on pure instinct. My eyelids feel heavy, and I just want to get lost in the sensation that is Raffe.
There’s a mix of longing and sadness in his eyes, but he’s not letting me get any closer.