Then I gave a nod, and we bolted.
Halfway down the open stairs that overlooked the playground and sweeping crescent of the Estate’s main road, we peered over at the swarming pigs in blue amidst the snarling pandas.
Click — my stomach dropped, like I’d tumbled over the ledge, when I heard the trigger cocked on a shooter.
Yet when I risked peeking over my shoulder, the gun was pressed to Rebel’s head.
By Bisi.
Bisi met my glare, but he was trembling. I’d never seen him tremble. ‘You stole my shank.’ He rammed the snout of the gun harder into the base of Rebel’s skull. ‘So, I stepped-up. It’s all about the straps.’
I’d wondered what becoming the victim would do to Bisi.
Now I knew. If you took a man’s shank, he bought a shooter. No one could risk being invisible in London. And no one ignored a bloke with a gun.
Except Rebel.
‘Friend of yours, Feathers?’ Rebel leaned his arms on the ledge, as if he was sightseeing.
Bisi puffed up, rubbing one hand against his stiffie. ‘Word on the street is this freak took out Toben. Are you muscling in on my turf? Monsters and murderers hungering to be the new top boys?’
I shrank against Rebel. ‘Do your righteous thing.’
Rebel stretched his shoulders, flexing his wings underneath his jacket. ‘It doesn’t work like that.’ He pushed back against the shooter, like he didn’t realise Bisi wasn’t bluffing. ‘Lay off, muppet.’
At last, Bisi eased off the trigger, before grinning — a slash of gold in the concrete grey of the day — and turning the shooter on me. He pressed almost as close to me as the cold round snout of the gun.
I’d been knifed, beaten, dodged acid and meat cleavers but I’d never had a gun to my head.
Since Rebel had fallen from the ceiling, it’d been nothing but a world of firsts.
I hadn’t expected the wash of terror, edged by impotent fury; I vibrated with it.
Then I yowled, as my wrist was wrenched up, and Rebel spun us, his expression transformed from studied boredom to tight grimness. He knocked the shooter up and away from my head, before clouting Bisi across the mouth.
‘This is what a bro gets for going soft,’ Bisi scrambled backwards. ‘As soon as your man fell short, I should’ve shanked you and your sis.’
Violet hit like a tsunami.
I rode it to a plateau of feathers, where I was stronger, faster, more powerful and nothing mattered but…righteousness.
I ruled over the land of bones below, gnashing my teeth in vicious victory.
Someone was battling me, holding me back.
‘Princess…mind yourself.’
But there was nothing beyond the feathers and bones.
I was lost, as something else took over, and it wasn’t human.
A scream. Bang. Howl.
I couldn’t stop. My hand was around Bisi’s neck. He hung ragdoll limp over the ledge.
‘Feathers, wise up! Let him go!’ The voice came out in gulped gasps, as an angel tugged at my arm.
My angel…
The world blurred back to multicolour.
And I was balanced on the open stairs of Tower Block A, with my hand clutched around Bisi’s throat, as he dangled over the sweep of flashing lights below.
I eased my hold, heart beating wildly. Yet when Bisi edged himself back over the ledge, he jerked me off balance, and then snapped at my thumb with his golden teeth, trying to bite and kiss me all at once.
I shoved Bisi back, and he fell, windmilling through the cold winter sky like a dark angel with broken wings.
Crash — Bisi slammed onto the windscreen of a panda car; the crack spider webbed scarlet.
The alarm screamed; pigs hollered and pointed up at me.
Bisi had been right: I was a monster and, like Rebel, I was a murderer too.
Maybe that’s what being an angel meant.
Sometimes kisses are a revelation because it wasn’t the soft lips that’d awoken me, but the blood when I’d bitten.
I’d known ever since Rebel had kissed me: I was part angel. His blood had sung to my own.
Sirens shrieked, whilst the heavy stomp of police boots echoed up the stairwell.
I clutched at Rebel, only to be dragged down, as he sank to the floor.
When he touched his shoulder, his hand came back sticky crimson from a gunshot wound. I pulled him up; he swayed, and I clasped him close to my chest.
Then we became the hunted.
5
Ever since Jerusalem Children’s Home spat me out at sixteen, I’d expected to end up stumbling home with some bloke bleeding out from a gunshot wound.
What I’d never expected...?
Home to be a witches’ house. The bloke to be an angel. And to have just discovered my own angelic heritage.
When Rebel shivered, I held him tight, yet I was frozen too. His feet dragged, tripping against mine.
The House of Rose, Wolf, and Fox rose out of the damp fog beside the silver snake of the Thames. Ancient woodland glowered behind the stone and blackened diagonal timbered mansion. Smoke snorted in furious bursts from the high spiralled chimneys.
I shuddered.
Did you know spell lobbers were real, J?
There isn’t space on earth for what I know. But right now? You need to dump the punk, turn your hoochie ass around, and use your brain, rather than the sweet tingles between your legs.
I jolted to a stop.
Rebel groaned, grasping the stone sundial that marked the centre of the sweeping drive. ‘Princess?’
‘We’ll be at your yard any moment, bro.’
He shivered again. But this time, I didn’t reckon it was with cold.
Was Rebel frightened because he’d defied the witches to help me? How big a risk had he taken?
Yet how dangerous was the world Rebel had fled, if a witches’ house still meant safety?
I’m done with being afraid. So, no arse turning.
You’re playing with fire. If you go inside, the witches will kill you for breaking their toy.
They can try.
And there’s the Feathers-bitch I love.
I could hear J’s smile. For once, it disturbed me, although I didn’t know why.
I unfurled Rebel’s hand, finger by finger from its death grip on the sundial, and then dragged him crunching over the gravel to the rounded arch of the pillared porch.
Rebel had sneaked me out of a side door in the early hours, when the house had still been veiled in black. Now I saw the red daubed symbols around the high oak door and wicker angel effigies swinging in the porch like they’d been hung.
Hell, the Blair Witch had nothing on Evie, Louisa, and Richard Deadman: witches, angel tamers, and my true captors.
Strange, since Rebel’s kiss and his exchange of blood, this truth was clearer. I could read his feelings, spiderwebs at the corners of my mind, but only fleeting sensations.
Before I could knock, the door was wrenched open — creak — and a bearded bloke loomed over us. He held himself motionless, yet every giant inch of him radiated fury.
Rebel shrank back.
Da, in slim russet wool suit and waistcoat, his white shirt matching his perfect teeth, asked crisply, ‘Where have you been, Zach?’
‘Zach?’ I mouthed at Rebel, but he didn’t hear me; his gaze was fixed on Da.
‘I’m sorry, but it’s like this, see,’ Rebel faltered, ‘I made a deal—’
‘Do you get to decide on what’s best? To make deals, boy?’
When Rebel shook his head, I grasped his hand in my pocket. He winced, expecting me to hurt him like I had earlier, and that flushed me with unexpected shame. But I only held his hand lightly in mine.
‘And why is that?’
‘Because you’re in charge, Da.’
I’d faced the disappointment of agency staff each time I’d swaggered back in the early hours to Jerusalem.
Curfews were for geeks and losers. The kid
s who took the beatings and ended up at the end of a shank.
So, if you didn’t want to get dashed, you broke the rules.
This? Returning to face the music of a parent who actually gave a damn? If it hadn’t been for the danger in Da’s steel eyes and his headmaster sadist vibe, I’d have found reassuring.
Maybe I had daddy issues.
Da rubbed at his grey beard, which was as regimented as his hair.
‘I believe we shall have to reinforce that lesson.’ Stanbury had been the wannabe, but here was the true Christian Grey, only all grownup. But Rebel was such an innocent, I don’t think he even understood what they were playing. ‘Inside.’
Rebel flinched.
I’d only glimpsed a grand oak galley running above the wooden entryway and gold threaded tapestries, as we reluctantly stepped past Da, before Rebel dropped to his knees. I fell next to him. His eyes were screwed shut, and it was only me stopping him from collapsing.
‘Up.’ Da barked. ‘You shan’t think kneeling will reduce—’
‘Back off, Sir Canesalot. Your boy here’s been shot. Bang, bang?’ I mimicked a shooter at Rebel’s back.
Da’s face drained to chalk.
After that? Everything blurred into a burst of frenetic commotion.
Da patted Rebel down for the key to the handcuffs, before releasing him.
I tried to pull away, but Da snapped the handcuffs back over both my wrists, before tenderly scooping Rebel up into his arms, as if he was a kid.
I tagged behind Da, the sudden outsider, as he marched into a vast kitchen of inky-black cabinets and exotic marbles. My eyes watered from the smoke that wafted out of the open inglenook fireplace, which was large enough to spit an angel.
Ma and Evie glanced up from sorting through a sea of washed underwear — lace bras, cotton boxers, and silk corsets — on the central counter.
The glow from the chandelier and the vibrant modern punk of Slaves’ “Cheer up London” (no way that wasn’t Rebel’s iPod hooked up to the speakers), shocked me like a bullet to the head.
And in the one second before the everyday transformed to horror — when I glimpsed beneath the labels and the drama — I got it.
This was what Rebel loved. Why, after everything, he came back.
A home.
Rebel had known this family (when I’d only ever struggled to make my own), for decades. How could I compete with that? And why the hell did I crave to?
Then Evie exploded.
With a shriek, she swept the neat piles of bras flying across the kitchen. An ivory and rose underwire landed in the hearth with a bright flare and then sizzle.
Evie vaulted the kitchen counter, thrusting me aside to stroke Rebel’s hair.
I lounged against the stone wall.
Ma merely pursed her lips, as Da laid Rebel on the long oak table. ‘Be still, Evie.’ When Ma turned to scrutinise me, I gagged, overwhelmed by the memory of her papery dry hand clamped over my nose and mouth. ‘Why is our angel bleeding?’
I didn’t mean to say it. I don’t even know where it came from. But it still slipped out. ‘He was trying to save me. He was being a hero.’
Evie snorted, but Da’s shock melted to pride, before he smiled.
I smiled too, until Da shucked his jacket and undid his cufflinks. Then with an alpha display that made me even more definite he was never going anywhere near my arse with his large hands, he folded back his shirtsleeves to the elbow.
I launched myself between the witch headmaster and his whipping boy. No way was Da laying a hand on Rebel, when I’d just hauled him across London.
The new, possessive part of me stirred. But there was something else as well, even darker and deeper. It snarled just as loudly that Rebel — and his blood —was mine.
Da’s thin lips twitched. ‘Zach has a bullet lodged in his bad wing. He’ll heal but only once the bullet’s taken out. I don’t imagine you know how to remove it, but please do enlighten me.’
I gestured go ahead with my handcuffed hands.
When Da massaged his thumb into Rebel’s bent wing, Rebel’s eyes shot open. He stared up at me like he was drowning. Then his eyelids fluttered, whilst Da massaged across his back, working into the feathers.
I examined the folded wings, as Da stretched out each one, working his fingers into the layers of soft feathers, skirting the gunshot wound.
Did all angels have bent wings, or only the bad ones?
When Rebel purred deep in this throat — a thrilling, growly purr that called to me — I grinned. Hell, I itched to wring that sound from him. To ease the pain in his wing and coax that purr out of his soul.
It was unsettling, this new closeness to Rebel. Yet just as I’d experience the urge to sooth his pain, I’d be blasted with the impulse to hurt him. Like the two powers inside me were warring.
The way Rebel relaxed under Da’s touch, I realised he must’ve been in agony with his wing, even before he was shot.
Rebel was good at hiding pain.
And the truth.
I reached out to stroke the tip of Rebel’s wing, as he’d stroked my bare arm; I was desperate suddenly to see if it was silky soft.
Evie batted me away. ‘No touching, my lovely. You’re not invited to the party.’
Ma selected a bundle of dried herbs, which hung from an oak beam on the ceiling, but Da waved her away. ‘Boys who disobey do not warrant spells of healing. I’ll dig out the bullet the old-fashioned way.’
Evie sidled to Pa, winding a curl around her little finger. ‘Uncle Richard, at least allow me to whip up a Rose Anti-Pain. When I broke my arm—’
‘And if the other angels had located Zach? He didn’t take an effigy. If we’d lost him again?’ Da’s hard gaze had found out Ma’s.
Ma hurled the dried herbs onto the hearth next to the ivory and rose bra. The fire sprang up — bang — like a fountain of blood. ‘That’s it, for real. He’s grounded.’
‘You’re grounding an angel?’ I stared from one witch to the other, with Rebel stretched out on the oak table between them, bleeding from his wing.
The crazy bastards kept Rebel safe by stealing his freedom. Yet their fear of these other angels was real.
What the hell was an angelic top boy like?
When Ma pressed the blade into Da’s hand, and he burrowed it into Rebel’s wing, I winced on the angel’s holler.
The shadow of his emotions tugged on me. His pain… It crawled across my own skin like claws screeching down slate.
Hell, if they wouldn’t heal him, then I would.
I leant down and snogged Rebel.
The angel kiss wasn’t a revelation. It was comfort.
I might only be half angel, but spell casters weren’t the only ones with magic.
I nipped at Rebel’s lip, swiping at the sweet copper in case that was the key, losing myself in the gentle intimacy. In the blood.
Until a long-nailed hand wound round my hair, wrenching back my head. My wet lips kissed the air.
‘Gatecrashers,’ Evie spat out each word, like I’d maimed her favourite Ken doll. ‘Will. Be. Turned. Into. Gargoyles.’
‘An angel kiss to heal him,’ I panted.
‘And where would you acquire such a silly,’ Da twisted the knife, and Rebel whimpered, ‘conceit?’
‘Yeah, about that,’ Rebel blushed, ‘I lied.’
For something that wasn’t a surprise, it still hurt.
Just like Evie’s kick to the back of my knees and her vicious whisper, ‘Even special ones have to drink. And when you do, it’ll be the most scintillating surprise to discover what a changed woman you become.’ Her chuckle was low, like water over crystals in an underground cavern.
Instantly, Rebel had risen off the oak table, his wings glowing and glorious, as they beat — beat — beat the wind against our faces. He was the ancient angel of my apartment, not Da’s boy. There was not one submissive atom in him; the spiked collar around his neck was armour.
I quaked, as Rebel
towered over me, but he only held out his hand, pulling me to my feet.
Slam.
Sugary copper zinged through me, lighting up my shoulder blades.
Rebel rocked, righteousness alone holding him on his feet. His wings wrapped around, hugging me to his body like I was a part of him.
I’d never felt closer to anyone.
And that terrified me.
I didn’t know if I wanted to escape or surrender.
His tone was hard, ‘No one harms Violet. If anyone tries, then I’ll bolt. And this time, I’ll never come back.’
Ma gasped. Then one-by-one Rebel’s family crowded around us, stroking, soothing, and promising.
Who was in charge now?
Yet as Evie butterflied reverential kisses along Rebel’s feathers, she cast me looks laced with venom.
The Deadmans’ promises were as empty as the ones adults had thrown at me all my life. They were no more than gags to shut you up and shape you into their good little soldier.
J had been right: The witches would kill me, one way or another.
Because I’d stolen their angel.
Every bitch had to drink. And I couldn’t forget the stone wolves, with their fangs bared in pain, trapped in the corners of my new bedroom.
Gargoyles.
How many toys had Rebel dragged home as guests to that room before me?
And how many had ever been allowed to leave?
The flickering light from the beeswax candles caught the snout of the stone wolf in the corner of my bedroom; shadows danced across its sneer.
Hell, the wolves were mocking me. I didn’t blame them. I was a wallad for sitting my arse on the soft fur of its slain brother and forgetting my lesson.
Since I’d been old enough to toddle, I’d been taught the harsh lesson to look out for number one alone. Why? Because no one else would.
And certainly not some bloke.
Rebel held out the goblet to me again, ‘Will you have a drink?’ I turned away, pressing my chin to my raised knees as I hunched on the bed. He sighed. ‘I made it myself.’
‘Flashing wings and threats were all for show then? You don’t trust your family either?’
Rebel slammed down the goblet onto the oak chest of drawers. When water spilt down the rim, pooling onto the wood, he smeared at it frantically with the sleeve of his leathers.
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