Toward a Secret Sky

by Heather Maclean

  We were on our way to meet the Record Keeper. I was going to turn over my mother’s journals and the disappearing ink letter, and Hunter was going to find out who her new Guardian angel would be. She was as excited as a kid on Christmas morning.

  “I hope he’s young,” she whispered. “And good-looking. Not like anyone could be as lovely as Gavin, of course . . .”

  “Hunter!” I shushed her.

  She raised her voice. “I mean Gavin, that guy you go to high school with, the normal human you have a crush on . . .”

  “Yeah, that’ll fix it.” I rolled my eyes.

  “Sorry.” She scrunched up her face. “But I can’t help it. He’s divine. I mean, really, how do you not want to get with that?”

  “Hunter!” She was hilarious in an almost unholy way. I wished she were my sister.

  She lowered her voice to a whisper. “You know it’s true. You know you want to.”

  She was right, of course. I did. I missed Gavin terribly. I had only known him for a couple weeks, but it felt like we’d been together my whole life. He’d become part of me. When I was with him, I felt completely engulfed by his presence, like I was wearing new skin. Without him, I felt naked.

  We stopped in front of a large doorway flanked by tall columns on either side. An inscription in stone above the door spelled, Dei sub numine viget.

  “Under God’s power, she flourishes,” I read out loud.

  Hunter looked at me. “Since when can you read Latin?” she asked. “You couldn’t read it at St. Paul’s.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t. I don’t know Latin. I just know what that means for some reason. It’s the motto of Princeton University. Maybe that’s how I know it.”

  “Do you know someone who went to Princeton?” she asked, raising her eyebrows.

  “No,” I admitted. “It just popped into my head.” I shrugged. “Maybe I read it somewhere.”

  Hunter heaved the heavy golden door open, and we went in. It was darker and colder than the other rooms; probably to protect the records, I thought. A giant wooden table that looked like an altar rose from a platform at the back of the room. It held the thickest book I’ve ever seen—maybe the biggest book in the history of humanity.

  Behind the book sat a tiny, shriveled old man. He had the kind of creepy, long white hair that flowed right into a long white beard, so I couldn’t tell which strands were from his head and which started at his chin. A gray-haired woman, who looked at least one hundred years younger than him, stood by his shoulder.

  “Welcome,” she greeted us. “I’m Theodora, the translator. And this is the Record Keeper.”

  I couldn’t tell if the Record Keeper nodded at us or was falling asleep. He seemed so old, I was afraid he might disintegrate all over his big book.

  “Hunter Sinclair?” Theodora called.

  “Yes, ma’am,” she answered.

  “The Record Keeper has found the name of your new Guardian angel. Here it is, along with everything you need to know, including your Leaving Time.” She handed Hunter a small piece of folded paper.

  “Thank you.” Hunter did an awkward half bow, half curtsy.

  “And Maren Hamilton?”

  “Yes, that’s me” I said, wondering why I wasn’t as automatically polite as Hunter.

  “You have something to give us?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I answered, forcing the foreign-sounding word out. I held out the leather-bound journal. “It’s from my mother. She used to work for the Abbey. I think it’s important.”

  Theodora stepped forward and took it from me. Her eyes crinkled with kindness in a way that made me miss my mother something awful.

  “Thank you so much, Miss Maren,” she said. “These things will be invaluable to us. We will make sure they get to the High Council immediately. Gavin has told us great things about your bravery. We are indebted to you.” My heart seemed to pump extra-warm blood through my veins at the mention of Gavin’s name.

  “You’re welcome,” I answered.

  The Record Keeper spoke for the first time, in a raspy voice, “Tzeteh’ Leshalom VeShuveh’ Leshalom.”

  Theodora translated, “He says ‘Go in peace . . .’”

  “‘And return in peace,’” I interrupted. “Toda. Toda. Thank you.” I bowed a couple of times like Hunter, and we, for some crazy reason, backed out of the room like lunatics.

  We weren’t more than two steps outside the door when Hunter turned to me. “You speak Hebrew?”

  “No,” I said. “Why?”

  “Um, you just did,” Hunter replied. “And don’t tell me you must have read it somewhere or that it’s the motto of your high school.”

  “No, no, it’s not. I don’t know. I don’t even speak Spanish, and I took it for three years,” I said. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure! You said ‘tova’ for ‘thank you.’”

  “It’s toda, actually,” I said, then clamped my hand over my mouth. “Oh my gosh, I am speaking Hebrew! This is freaking me out!” I wondered if the magic of Magnificat was giving me special powers all of a sudden. Hopefully, they would last until my next foreign language test at school.

  “All right, Babel,” Hunter said, grabbing me by the arm. “Let’s get back to our room. I’m dying to open this and find out about my new angel boyfriend!”

  I was lying on my bed, watching Hunter get ready. Her new Guardian angel was named Jonathan. There was a portrait attached, and by all accounts, Jonathan was young, blond, and quite handsome. Hunter was scheduled to meet him, and leave with him, in half an hour.

  As she packed, she filled me in on her wicked fantasies: how Jonathan would fall madly in love with her at first sight, and they would have gorgeous babies with fat cheeks and little cherub wings. I didn’t have the heart to tell her it didn’t work that way, that if her angel really loved her, he’d have to give up his powers, but I supposed they could still have beautiful babies. I tuned her out when she started detailing what an amazing kisser she hoped Jonathan would be. It made me ache for Gavin. I thought about our kiss beneath the crypt. My lips pulsed at the memory. I played out my own fantasy in my head. Gavin and I were alone in the vast, dirt-floored room; no Alfred, no Hunter. Gavin stuck the burning torch in the ground, and then took off his shirt and spread it out like a blanket. He sat down and then pulled me to him. I fell, and he caught me on his chest. He wrapped his strong arms around me, bent his head, and kissed me. I closed my eyes and let the warm tingling race through my body.

  “Maren!” Hunter shoved my knee.

  “What?”

  “You’re not even listening to me, are you?”

  I sat up. “No, I am, I’m listening. You were just saying . . . um . . .”

  “That I was sorry . . .” She coached me.

  “Sorry? For what?”

  She sat down on the end of the bed, her face serious. “Maren, I have a confession to make.”

  “Yeah?” My stomach knotted with worry. A minute ago, she’d been jabbering about a heavenly wedding, and now she was tearing up.

  “I’m not sure how to say good-bye to you . . .”

  “Awww, you don’t have to. We’ll see each other again.” I patted her hand. “I’ll drag Gavin back to London. This wasn’t a fair visit. Way too much excitement.”

  She shook her head. “No, it’s not that easy. I’m leaving. For good. I’ve decided to go home with Jonathan.”

  “What do you mean, ‘home’?”

  “I mean back to his angel home in the south of England.”

  “You can’t be serious!”

  “I am,” she said, tears now streaming down her cheeks. “I’ve been thinking about it for days. Since St. Paul’s, actually. I can’t stay here, where the demons have locked on to me. I can’t always be looking over my shoulder, afraid of every shadow. If I go back with Jonathan and live with his clan, I’ll be safe. And I kind of miss having a family.”

  It was hard to argue with that. But I had to try. “You ca
n’t spend your whole life hiding in an angel village!” I protested, remembering Rielly trapped in Scotland, away from her friends and family. “It’s not fair! And you won’t be able to text or call and . . . and I’ll miss you too much!” Water pooled in my lower eyelids.

  “I know,” she sniffed. “But until they figure out a way to erase my heartbeat from the memories of all the demons in a thousand mile radius, I have no choice. And I’m going to miss you terribly! You’re like a sister to me. The sister I never had!”

  A sister. I had just been thinking that same thing about her.

  “We are sisters,” I said. “We’re like family. Why don’t you come back to Scotland with me?”

  “No, I can’t complicate your life any more than I already have. You were such a dear to come down with Gavin and rescue me. I’ll never forget you for it. But you have to live your life, and I need to find one.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I reached over and gave her a hug, and let my own tears spill. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. It was unreal how many tears I had, like I was plugged into a never-ending fountain of pain. It spilled all over poor Hunter.

  I was devastated that she was leaving, but it was more than that. I had a lifetime of pent-up sorrow. I cried for the dad I never knew, the mom I had buried, the angel who’d just died for me. I cried for my lost youth, the other Abbey orphans, the victims of all the evil in the entire world. As she clung to me, Hunter started bawling, probably for the same reasons. We’d been through what no one else had; what other girls couldn’t even imagine.

  After a bit, Hunter gently pulled away. “I have to go,” she said, and smiled through her tears.

  “Let me walk you!” I said, standing up and wiping my face furiously to prove I could be normal again.

  “No, stay here. I don’t want to meet Jonathan blubbering like a baby!”

  I couldn’t believe she was actually leaving. I looked around the room, desperate for something to do, something to give her. “Here!” I said, removing the Tudor rose necklace from around my neck. “Take this. For luck. To remember me by.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t,” she said. “That’s from your mum.”

  “But yours was too, and you lost it running around London because of me.” I held the shiny chain out. “You need one to get into Jonathan’s village anyway, and I want you to have mine. I want to know that you have something from me. If you don’t take it now, I’ll follow you all the way to the bridge, weeping. Like a sad puppy. It will be terribly embarrassing for you.”

  She giggled, which made me giggle. “All right, if you insist.” I nodded and slipped it over her head. “I’ll never take it off!” she promised.

  “You’d better not, or I’ll hunt you down.”

  “Promise?” She grinned.

  “Absolutely,” I answered.

  I gave her a final hug and sent her on her way, bravely holding back more tears until she disappeared around the corner. Then I flopped on the bed and sobbed myself to sleep.

  Jo stood in a field of wildflowers. The sun shone unusually bright, forcing me to squint my eyes to see her. This gave her a fuzzy glow, making her twirling, gymnastic movements even more fairylike. She spotted me and smiled.

  A shadow crossed the grass and darkened her face for a moment. I looked up and saw a black bird circling. The dazzling light made the animal hard to see, so I held my palm out to cover the sun. The bird’s wings were scalloped at the ends, like a bat’s.

  Jo didn’t look up; she never took her eyes off of me. She waved a just-picked bouquet of bright purple. The shadow returned to her face and grew larger. Much larger. The bird was descending.

  The creature let out a terrible, piercing scream that made my head throb. I stuck my fingers in my ears. Moving my hand caused the sun to flash me right in the eyes, and everything became bright red for a moment. I shut my eyes to refocus, and when I opened them, I saw the bird wasn’t a bird at all. It was a demon, all red-bodied and slick with blood. It swooped down and grabbed Jo before either of us could move. I tried to scream, but the sickening sound flying out of the demon’s mouth drowned out everything else.

  During those first few seconds of consciousness after I woke up from my unexpected afternoon nap, I thought everything was okay, the same way I’d reacted after my mom died; I would wake up and think everything was normal, that she was down in the kitchen baking cinnamon scones. It was an amazing feeling. But before I could enjoy it, reality would come and punch me in the face.

  I was lying in my bed at Magnificat. Hunter was gone. Forever. Gavin was not allowed near me. And I was still having terrible dreams.

  Jo! My dream was about Jo! My chest tightened at the thought that something horrible had happened to her. And I was a million feet underground, helpless.

  I jumped out of bed. It was time to go home. I was done with Magnificat, done with secret codes and dangerous missions. I wanted to get back to my grandparents, to Jo, to my life. I would figure out how to send a call over to Gavin, and we’d be on our way.

  I threw open the door and walked right into a Messenger angel. She was insanely tall—over seven feet—dressed in flowing robes, and was more than blocking my exit.

  “Sorry,” I said. “If you’re looking for Hunter, she’s already left.”

  “I’m actually here for you, Maren.” Her voice resonated like harp strings. “You’ve been summoned.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Standing alone in the light-filled room, in front of three tall chairs that held three very tall individuals, it was hard not to think of the Inquisition. Or a television cop show. They weren’t policemen, of course; they were angels. And I wasn’t being charged with a crime. At least, not yet. But I did feel like I was being interrogated.

  The oldest one, the one who did most of the talking, leaned forward and asked me yet another question. He had a short, well-trimmed white beard and a shiny bald spot on top of his head. He reminded me of Moses.

  “Do you know why this place is called Magnificat?”

  “No,” I answered.

  “Can you guess, though?” he challenged. “Try. Really think about it. Go on.”

  I took a deep breath. Nothing they had asked me so far was terribly difficult, but I still had no idea why I was there. I couldn’t imagine the High Council sat around asking teenaged girls to solve riddles, and I was getting kind of sick of it. I wanted to catch Gavin before he left, but I had a feeling they already knew that.

  “Magnificat is the name of an all-girls’ Catholic high school outside Cleveland, Ohio.” I shrugged. “My old school beat them in lacrosse when I was a freshman.”

  “Mmm-hmmm,” the angel said. Does he know I’m not really trying? I couldn’t tell from his face, but the three of them did look like they could sit there for hours. I decided to dig a little deeper in the hopes of finally ending the celestial quiz session.

  “Well, it’s a Latin word, right?” He nodded for me to continue. “It’s got the root magna which means ‘great,’ like in ‘magnanimous’ or the ‘Magna Carta.’ It reminds me of the word magnify, which is basically to make something greater, or bigger. Um, so isn’t that what magnificat actually means in Latin, ‘to magnify’?” How do I know any of this? I can’t even ask where the bathroom is in Spanish.

  “Yes,” he answered, leaning forward. “Keep going.”

  “The Magnificat is a prayer, a prayer to Mary. No, it’s her prayer, right? It’s what Mary says when she meets up with her cousin Elizabeth?” I could see from their faces that I was right.

  “Anything else?” the angel asked.

  I closed my eyes to see if I could summon any more information out of my brain. “It’s used in the Roman Catholic Vespers, Lutheran Vespers, and the Anglican Evening Prayer. It’s usually sung, and it was put to music by . . . Bach.” I stopped. I heard myself talking, but I had no idea where the information was coming from.

  The angel leaned back and consulted with his companions. They spoke in low whispers. After a
few minutes, he tipped toward me again.

  “Thank you, Miss Hamilton. You’ve impressed us with your ability and your patience,” he said. I hope he isn’t being sarcastic about the patience bit. “We have only one more question for you: how do you know all of these answers?”

  Finally, my last question, and it was a trick question. How? Who the heck knows?

  “I don’t know,” I said simply, hoping they would accept the truth. “The information is just there, like it’s been beamed into my head or something.” I shrugged in an effort to appear I didn’t care, but my newly discovered genius was freaking me out.

  “Maren,” the angel said, surprising me by suddenly using my first name. “You are a most unique young lady. We’ve been waiting for you for some time now.”

  “For me? Why?”

  “There are only a precious few people who carry a double discovery gene. You’ve inherited it from both sides, from your mother and your father. And as such, you have incredible gifts.”

  “You mean my dreams?” I said, bristling at the mention of the mother I no longer had and the father I never knew.

  “Yes, your precognition and your ancestral memories.”

  “My what?”

  “We believe that you, Maren, possess a collective, although unconscious, ancestral memory. It’s extremely rare and an extremely valuable skill.”

  “A collective unconscious what?” I knew what all the words meant individually, but together they made no sense whatsoever.

  “Simply put, you hold all the memories of all people that have gone before you. That’s how you can read Latin and speak Hebrew when you don’t read Latin or, I assume, speak Hebrew,” the angel explained. “Have you not noticed information comes to you out of the blue, like just now with the prayer?”

  I had known the name for scree on the way to Gavin’s village and rattled off the title The Golden Ass in front of Graham without having heard of the story. I nodded.

  “Have you ever physically seen anything from the past?” the angel asked. The way his face scrutinized mine made it hard to think about the answer. He added, “Or anyone?”