No Angel

by Helen Keeble

  “Yes?” She leaned out to look up at me.

  I tilted down to catch her hand. With my wings glowing around me and the stars shining above, I softly pressed a kiss to her palm. “No matter what, I’ll always be your angel.”

  Before Faith could respond, I released her. I shot into the air like a fallen star returning home.

  Ha. Beat that, Billy-bloody-Bob.

  I drifted up from a dream of flying Faith through an endless golden sky to discover real sunbeams slanting through my fluttering curtains, promising a beautiful day ahead. I stretched luxuriously, rustling the chocolate bar wrappers still littering my bed from my latest de-haloing. I was a seraph. Not some freaky multiheaded thing, but a mighty being of fire and awesome power. Even Michaela and all her demonic strength hadn’t been able to bind my six powerful wings. I didn’t need to be afraid of her anymore. There was nothing to stop me from going after what I really wanted.

  Faith.

  Get the girl, save the world. Simple. She had said she’d liked me. All I needed to do now was show her that she really liked me. I grinned up at my ceiling. Poor Billy-world’s-dumbest-name-Bob didn’t stand a chance. Already planning how to tempt Faith into my arms, I opened my eyes.

  Hang on.

  I blinked, which somehow seemed to involve a great many more muscles than usual. I was looking at the ceiling. I was also, at the same time, looking at my pillow, my alarm clock, my curtains, the walls, the darkness under my bed, and, most disturbingly, my own face.

  I sat up in bed. My many points of view shifted with me, spinning like a kaleidoscope. From the confused, multifaceted jumble of images, I managed to pick out my reflection in the mirror . . . and my eyes widened in shock.

  All of them.

  Including the ones orbiting my head.

  Chapter 18

  Krystal swallowed hard. “Okay.” After her initial scream, her voice was now very calm in a very forced sort of way. “Let’s not panic. I’m sure everything’s okay.”

  “No it isn’t!” I grabbed her shoulders, shaking her. My eyes whizzed about the small clearing like a silent swarm of agitated bees. I’d waylaid Krystal and Faith on their way to breakfast, dragging them off into the woods before anyone else could see me. “This is not okay! This is as far from okay as it is possible to be! This is the exact opposite of okay! I am COVERED IN EYES!”

  “Are they . . . functional?” Faith tentatively held out a hand as if trying to entice a pet bird to come down. “Can you control them?”

  “Yeah.” Concentrating, I managed to land the nearest eye on her palm. She bit back a shriek, but didn’t drop it. I was treated to a close-up view of her half-fascinated, half-disgusted expression as she examined the eye. I made it blink at her, all my other eyes blinking at the same time. My individual control wasn’t that great yet. “I can see out of all of them at once. You don’t want to know how hard it is to walk in a straight line.”

  “They’re the same blue as your actual eyes,” Faith said, inspecting my face. She turned the eye around in her fingers. “Actually, once you get past the fact that they’re, you know, disembodied eyes, they’re sort of pretty.” A shiver ran down my spine as she stroked the metallic gold “skin” that wrapped the back of the eyeball. “Sparkly. Like jewels.” Her forehead furrowed. “What does that remind me of . . . ?”

  “I am seriously disturbed that this can remind you of anything,” Krystal said. She was clutching at the collar of her coat as if afraid I might drop eyeballs down the back of her neck. “Maybe Michaela cursed you. Or you’re a cherub after all.”

  Faith’s expression cleared. “That’s it!” She dug around in her bag and pulled out a copy of Vogue. I assumed it was hiding more of her dad’s notes, unless fashion this season had taken a really odd turn. “I went searching for anything related to seraphim,” she explained, flipping through pages. She turned the magazine around to show us a color illustration that looked like it might have originally come from a medieval manuscript. “This wasn’t labeled as a seraph, but you agree it looks like one, right?”

  “It’s got the right number of wings, I guess,” Krystal said, examining the three pairs of folded wings that hid most of the figure from view. “So?”

  “So look at the gold sparkles.” Faith pointed at a ring of dots circling the seraph’s form, which I’d assumed were just indicating a halo. “And now look at Raffi.”

  I twisted one of my eyes around to inspect myself. The way that the sunlight flashed from my hovering eyes was similar to the illustration.

  “And my father wrote something underneath this,” Faith continued. “‘Each of the four living creatures had six wings and was covered with eyes all around, even under its wings. Revelation 4:8.’ That’s got to be referring to seraphim.” She shut the magazine, looking triumphant. “So there you go. You’re meant to be covered in eyes!”

  “Great,” I snapped. “That’s a tremendous relief. Apart from the fact that I am covered in eyes. I can’t wander around looking like this!”

  As if to underscore my predicament, the bell for first lesson rang. The sound of stampeding feet drifted through the bushes to our clearing. My eyes tightened nervously, drawing together into a swirling, basketball-sized swarm. Krystal bit her lip, looking up at them. “I guess you can’t make them disappear, like you do your wings.”

  I glared at her. At least my multitude of eyes was useful for something. “I fold my wings. You tell me how I’m supposed to fold bloody eyes.”

  “Well,” Faith said slowly, her gaze traveling up and down me in a way I would normally have appreciated, had I not been too busy freaking out about my monstrous new additions. “In that case, we’ll just have to hide them.”

  I stared glumly into my jacket. I stared glumly back out at myself.

  I’d dreamed of having Faith’s hands under my clothes. I’d never imagined it would be in order to stuff them with eyeballs. Something had gone terribly wrong with my life.

  “What are you looking at?” Michaela slid into the seat next to me.

  I jumped, pulling my jacket closed. “Nothing!” It was mostly true. I kept feeling like I was wearing a blindfold, even though my regular eyes were uncovered. “What do you want?”

  Michaela’s eyebrows arched. “Sounding a bit tense there, Rafael.” I didn’t like the gloating undertone to her voice. “Something worrying you? Discovered something missing?”

  “Believe me,” I said, “that is exactly the opposite of my concern at the moment.”

  Michaela looked momentarily baffled by that, but then her lips curved in a smile that was even more predatory than usual. “Don’t worry. Your problems will soon be over.” She straightened, turning to take up her English book with an air of dismissing me from her reality entirely. “Enjoy your last day on earth.”

  Maybe Michaela had done something to me. She certainly looked smug. As if all her plans were finally coming to fruition . . . which meant she had to be on the verge of opening the Hellgate. And, given that there was no chance I was going to be able to get her expelled in the next twenty-four hours, I had to stop her myself. By any means necessary.

  I felt sick at the thought. I didn’t even like killing spiders. Michaela might be possessed by ultimate evil, but she still looked like a human being. How could I burn her alive?

  But if I didn’t do it, Michaela would open up the Hellgate and start bringing her buddies through. Suzanne and the other mean girls were bad enough without being possessed by demons. And it wasn’t just girls like Lydie and Krystal who were in danger from them. The whole world was, if the school turned into a production line for a demonic army. If stopping that from happening meant killing Michaela, then I damn well had to man up and do the deed.

  I had a nasty suspicion that none of this logic was going to help when it came down to me, Michaela, and a sharp piece of metal.

  Of course, given that Michaela wasn’t exactly quaking in fear of my seraphic might, it was possible I was worrying about nothing. I sl
umped with my elbows on the table, burying my face in my hands. Last night everything had seemed so bright and simple. Could my day get any worse?

  “Attention, class!” The Headmistress stalked into the room. She glowered at us all as if she didn’t want to be there any more than I did. “Ms. Wormwood is indisposed, so I shall be substituting for her today. Get out your books.” She waited impatiently as we all did so. “Open your books.” Pages rustled. “You may now commence reading your books.”

  There was a short pause.

  “Uh, Headmistress?” One of the girls put her hand in the air. “Aren’t you going to give us a lesson?”

  “This is English Literature class!” the Headmistress barked, and the entire front row cringed. “In it, you read English Literature! No further activity is requi—Mr. Angelos, is that a gumball?”

  To my horror, I realized that one of my eyes had fallen out of my trousers and rolled into plain sight. I scooped it up. “Yes. Yes, it is. Definitely. Sorry.”

  “Did you bring enough for everyone, Mr. Angelos?”

  “Actually, yes,” I said miserably. I drew my jacket a little closer around my body. “I really don’t think they’d want them, though.”

  The Headmistress snatched the wastepaper bin from beside the teacher’s desk and stalked toward me. She held it out commandingly. “Empty your pockets, Mr. Angelos.”

  “But—”

  “Now.”

  I had no choice. I dropped a double handful of eyes into the bin, thankful that the swinging lid concealed what I was actually depositing. I could only hope that I’d have a chance to reclaim them before the caretakers came around this evening.

  “See me after class, Mr. Angelos,” the Headmistress said darkly when I’d finished. She started back to the front of the room.

  I felt a weird pull deep inside my body, which intensified as she moved away. Uh-oh. Previously, my eyes had never gone more than a couple of feet from the rest of me, and I hadn’t tested how far they could actually roam. Now I was discovering that limit. The Headmistress didn’t seem to notice anything, but it felt like she was pulling on elastic strings embedded in my bones. I had to grab onto the edge of my desk to stop myself from being yanked after her like a hooked fish.

  “What are you doing?” Michaela hissed. She wound her heels around the legs of our table to hold it in place as I leaned against it. “Sit down!”

  I could only manage a pained grunt in response, the hard edge of the desk nearly cutting me in half. The Headmistress had to be as strong as a rhino.

  With a sensation like a snapped rubber band, my eyes pinged free. I thought for a second that the Headmistress must have yanked them straight off—but I could still feel them, bobbing upward like released balloons. In fact, all my eyes seemed to be floating outward, no longer confined by my clothing. My jacket hung loose and empty at my sides.

  Shit. Apprehension gripped my stomach. I opened my eyes, expecting the screaming to start any second.

  It did, but the sound came from my own throat.

  Dimly, I was aware of the classroom erupting into chaos around me. My normal eyes were still back there with the rest of my body. But my angelic eyes had gone . . . somewhere else.

  A brilliant, terrifying space, where the very air seemed to be burning with white fire. Now I could see the tendrils connecting my eyes to the rest of me. They sprang out from under my wings, which were folded at my back in a brain-meltingly alien geometry.

  But that wasn’t what made me scream until the noise echoed in my head, blocking out everything else.

  That was the thing hovering above Michaela.

  Chapter 19

  You saw the demon?” Faith hugged herself, as pale as my sheets. She and Krystal had snuck in through my window around midnight, Faith not having been able to get away from her mother earlier. “What did it look like?”

  “All . . . fiery wings and eyes, and these sort of tentacle things, all hooked around Michaela.” My hands moved vaguely, trying to sketch the demon’s shape in the air. “It was right on top of her. Well, not exactly on top.” I blew out my breath in frustration. “I haven’t got the right word. That place was sort of alongside everything else. I could still see the normal world, but I could also see in this other direction, where the demon was. And my wings. That’s where they go when I fold them up out of sight. I just managed to twist my eyes in the same way by accident.”

  “Can you do it again?” Krystal asked. She sat cross-legged on my bed, shoulders hunched, resolutely not looking up. My angelic eyes bobbed over our heads like the world’s worst party balloons. “Now? Please?”

  I reflexively drew my eyes down a little closer, a couple nestling in my hair like a gruesome tiara. “No way. I don’t want to see things again that way. It wasn’t just that other place I could see—I could see everything around me too. And I mean everything. It was like having X-ray vision combined with an out-of-body experience. I could see under everyone’s clothes. Under their skin.” I shuddered at the memory. I’d had to clamp all my eyes shut, unable to make sense of it all, and the second I was alone in my room, I’d yanked my angelic eyes back down into the normal world. “I nearly decked the Headmistress when I came to. I thought she was some horrific creature like the demon. I could see her guts churning, her bones clicking together . . . everything. I don’t want to see things like that again.”

  “No, I guess not.” Faith was looking rather queasy. “My father wrote in his notebooks that angels can look inside human hearts. I didn’t realize he meant it literally. That sounds—”

  “Awesome,” Krystal breathed. Her own eyes were alight with sheer glee. She actually bounced up and down on the edge of my bed. “Raf, let me do an experiment.” She pulled a coin out of her pocket and palmed it behind her back. Then she held out both her closed hands. “Do your eye thing, okay?” At my hesitation, she thumped me in the arm with the side of her fist. “Come on, this is important!”

  Reluctantly, I gave my eyes that odd little twist that popped them free into that other space. Immediately, my perception widened. I could still see the everyday world stretching out around me, but I could see over and through things, as if I’d stood up from lying flat in long grass. “Above” me stretched that incandescent white sky, cloudless yet somehow growing foggy and vague higher up. Occasional twists of eye-searing flame roiled soundlessly across it, like horizontal lightning. Even though they looked distant, the effect was still unnerving. I huddled down, feeling horribly exposed in the barren, alien landscape, and pointed my eyes back toward the plane of the normal world. A sort of diffuse black fog shrouded everything, but the glow from my folded wings let me see through it well enough. I tried to concentrate just on Krystal, but my expanded field of view was too wide. I couldn’t help but see the rest of the room—man, I was going to have to find a broom, because the dust bunnies underneath the wardrobe were revolting—including Faith.

  My jaw dropped open. “Oh, wow,” I breathed, staring at her.

  Faith went a deep pink. She crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Stop looking through my clothes, Raffi!”

  “But . . . you’re beautiful,” I said, still dazzled. Faith went even redder. “No, I didn’t mean—I can’t see your body, there’s this sort of shimmery white stuff wound around you.” I reached out as if I could touch the glowing, tightly furled petals veiling her form. “It’s like you’re wrapped up in a cocoon or something.”

  Faith looked taken aback, but pleased. “It must be my spiritual armor. My father’s notebooks talked about cultivating a shield of virtue, to ward off demonic attack. I do the meditations every morning, after my workout.”

  “Huh,” Krystal said. “Maybe I should start doing that too. Though preferably not at six a.m.” She shook her fists at me. “Back to the experiment. Raf?”

  “The coin’s in your left hand,” I said, cocking a few eyes in her direction. Unlike with Faith, I could see straight through Krystal, but now that I was prepared, it wasn’t so bad
being able to see all the squishy bits. Actually, it was kind of cool how much insane complexity was packed into her skin. “And it’s a penny. From 2003. Kind of tarnished. So?”

  With a startled look, Krystal examined the coin herself. “You’re right.” A slow, triumphant grin spread over her face. “Which means I know what you are!”

  “Brilliant, Sherlock.” I twisted a few eyes back into the normal world just to give her the scale of withering look she deserved. “We already knew I was a seraph, remember?”

  “Not that,” Krystal said dismissively. “You’re something much more interesting. You’re four-dimensional!”

  “I thought the fourth dimension was time,” Faith said after a pause.

  That was a lot more intelligent than the thing I’d been about to say, which was “Huh?”

  “That’s Einstein’s dimensions,” Krystal said to her. “In physics. I mean four spacial dimensions, like in geometry.” She took in our identical blank expressions. “Oh, wonderful. Am I the only person here who’s read Flatland?”

  “Do we look like total geeks?” I said.

  “Faith, you’ve got to know what I’m talking about. It was your dad who lent me the book.” Faith shook her head, and Krystal sighed. “Okay,” she said, rubbing her forehead in thought for a second. “We see our world as being three-dimensional, right? Things have depth, width, and length. So imagine a two-dimensional world. It would have width and length, but not depth. It would be like a piece of paper.” She smoothed out a section of my sheet in demonstration. “Two-dimensional beings would be like drawings on a flat surface. They wouldn’t be able to lift off the sheet or even know that there was such a direction as ‘up’ or ‘down.’ And a line would be like a wall. They wouldn’t be able to see past it.” Taking a ballpoint pen from her pocket, she drew a circle on my sheet, then a smaller circle inside it. “So, for instance, if a two dimensional being was standing here,” she marked a spot outside the bigger circle, “they wouldn’t know about this small circle, because they wouldn’t be able to see through the big circle. Okay so far?”