by Tegan Maher
I turned to examine it in the mirror. It looked like it had been painted on, but even the most skilled makeup artist couldn’t have duplicated it. One side of the mask curved down and came to a point at my jawline so that it covered better than half of the left side of my face, and the other curved gently upward, following my hairline.
“Wow,” I said, touching it. I half expected it to feel like skin, but it didn’t. “That’s really taking it up a notch or twelve.”
She gave me a smug smile. “I couldn’t use my godmother magic to make the dress, but there’s nothing in the rules about using my faery magic to put a shine on it! And the mask was easy. We’ve been using them in celebrations for eons. The colors really bring out the green in your eyes.”
An unexpected lump formed in my throat and I did something I rarely did—I spun around and hugged her. I had the best friends ever.
“All right already,” she grumbled, but gave me just the quickest squeeze back. “Don’t go gettin’ all girly on me. We couldn’t have you representing us in anything less than the best.”
“Well there’s no doubt you hit that standard,” Mila said, reaching up to touch the mask in awe. “Are those real jewels?”
“Of course they are,” Lucy scoffed, her nose curled. “I don’t use fake crap. How would it look if she showed up to a freakin’ angels ball wearing paste? No way. Not if my name’s on it. Our girl is goin’ in style.”
I smiled with a confidence boosted by both her magic and her skill. And maybe a little bit of my own mojo, too. After all, that wasn’t something I generally lacked. “You’re the best, Lucy. There’s no way any angel is gonna outshine me at that ball.”
“Knock ’em dead, sweetheart.”
Stephanie’s bracelet pulsed with what almost felt like excitement, and I couldn’t help but wonder if that should worry me.
Chapter 4
Colin arrived shortly before noon, a full hour before Arariel was due to pick us up. Since entrance to the Celestial Palace required an angel escort, Ari had agreed to come fetch us.
While we waited, I couldn’t help but wonder how we were gonna get there. Was there some sort of secret path? Would he teleport us there or would we each ride a Pegasus? That’s how Stephanie traveled back and forth between worlds. I hoped that wasn’t it because my experience with horses was limited to one pony ride at the carnival when I was five.
Or, maybe I was overcomplicating it and there was some sort of UFO-type beam that would just suck us up when he said so. he’d instructed us not to get dressed until we got there, so I doubted that was it. With my luck, it would be the Pegasus. I thought about that and decided it wouldn’t be terrible. It might even be fun. I mean, as magical beasts, I’m sure they had some sort of magic that kept their rider astride.
Regardless of the method, I was nervous about going to a place that didn’t have a defined exit path for non-angels. It wasn’t so much that I planned to use it, but it was always good to know your options.
Colin examined me with amusement as we sat in the shade on my porch swing. “Why don’t we go down to the tiki and have a drink? You look like you’re gonna throw up. Do you not wanna go? We don’t have to, you know.”
“Oh yes, she does,” Lucy said. She pushed off the porch with her toe, setting her chair to rocking. “I worked my tail feathers off makin’ that gown, and she’s gonna go show it off.”
“I wanna go,” I said, pushing up from the swing and dusting off the back of my jean shorts. “I’m not gonna lie and say I’m not nervous, but I’ve had a weird feeling about the whole shebang for a couple of days now. It’s probably just nerves. A shot of courage would help, I’m sure.”
Lucy scowled. “Only one. You can’t go showin’ up sloshed.” She took a deep breath, then exhaled it. “And what kind of feeling? The kind that says you shouldn’t go? Because if that’s the case, you know better than to ignore your gut.”
Colin tilted his head at me. He knew my ‘feelings’ were more than just your average, run-of-the-mill intuition and had come to trust it. “If you have even the slightest sense that things are gonna go sideways, we’re making out excuses and staying here. I don’t want to end up in the middle of some angel uprising or anything.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s not that sort of feeling. I can’t put my finger on it. It’s not exactly dread. More like a sense that something’s going to happen. Not anything bad, necessarily. But something.”
“If you’re sure,” he said, uncertainty tinging his voice.
“I’m sure,” I said. “Now, about that drink.”
Other than a table of vampires drinking Bloody Marys, the tiki was quiet when we got there. It was a little too late for lunch, and most people were either down on the beach or at one of the several pools situated throughout the resort. It was hot and the sky was a deep blue dotted with a handful of fluffy white clouds.
I hopped up on a chair in front of the fan we kept on the bar, then bellied up.Tempest curled up on a pillow in front of her own fan, and Bob slid beers in front of Colin and I.
“Aren’t you guys supposed to be at the ball?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Ari’s pickin’ us up in a little bit, but we figured we’d come down for a drink rather than sitting around.”
Bob raised a furry eyebrow and eyeballed my tank top and shorts. “You goin’ dressed like that?”
I rolled my eyes at him. “Yes, Bob. Why? Doesn’t this look like proper ball attire to you?”
He huffed out a breath. “Suits me. It’s Halloween, so I reckon if you want to attend one of the most prestigious events in creation dressed as a bartender, that’s your call.”
I held up my backpack, which I’d spelled Hermione-style to hold whatever I wanted to carry. That was creative genius on JK Rawling’s part, but then again, so was every other idea she’d come up with. “I have everything all packed nice and neat. Ari said to dress casually because he wanted to show us around first. The ball doesn’t start until nine.”
“So you’re getting a tour as well as a peek into how angels party,” he said. “Nifty. Better you than me, though. I hate wearing a tux. The buttons of the dress shirt always end up tangled in my hair and the jackets make me itch. Monkey suits just weren’t designed for my kind.”
Colin gave him a wry smile. “They weren’t designed for anyone’s kind.”
We shot the breeze for a few minutes, then a drop in pressure made my ears pop. Unless I missed my guess, our ride had arrived.
“Hey guys,” Ari said from behind us, then slid onto a stool. “I figured I’d come early and chill a little before we left. It’s been hell week up there. You have no the logistics behind pulling this thing off. There’s a reason we rarely do it; the seating assignments alone are a nightmare. That’s one task I gladly delegate.”
I grinned at him as he shoved his sunglasses up onto his golden hair. Ari was the protector of water, and like all angels, he was a visual masterpiece. The guy could have any movie role he wanted, and when you added his personality to that, he was about as close to perfect as any being could get.
I’d researched him when I’d first started at the resort, and it had also listed him as the angel often invoked to cure stupidity. He’d laughed when I’d asked him about it, responding that it was just one of those things humans made up. After all, everybody knows you can’t fix stupid.
“How many people are gonna be there?”
He waggled his head back and forth. “Five hundred angels give or take, plus another fifty or so guests.”
I raised a brow. “So we won’t be the only non-angels there? Somehow, that makes me feel a little better.”
“Oh, no,” he said, raising his brows. “Though I have no doubt you’ll be the most interesting non-angels there. I swear, I don’t know why people think they have to invite prestigious guests rather than fun ones. Last year, Shakespeare got so hammered that he fell off the stage while trying to play both Romeo and Juliette. I was about ready to drin
k the poison myself.”
“Wait,” I said. “Shakespeare was there last year? You mean, like his spirit was there?”
I was thoroughly confused. Not that I had anything against ghosts.
Ari took a long pull off the beer Bob had sat in front of him, then shook his head. “No, I mean Shakespeare was there.”
“But Shakespeare died in ...” I paused because I had no idea when the man had died. Not even the century. History wasn’t one of my strong points.
“1616,” Colin finished for me. I wasn’t surprised that he knew the answer. He had more useless trivia floating around in his head than five average people did.
“Eh,” Ari said, “time doesn’t work the same in Celestial City as it does everywhere else. All the times sort of converge.”
“Converge? How is that possible?” I asked.
“Converge isn’t really the right word,” he continued. “It’s more like time doesn’t exist, but that’s not right, either. Time has to exist. It’s just ... different. You’ll see. It’s easier to show you than to tell you.”
Now I was intrigued, and for the first time since I’d opened the invitation, I was looking forward to going. Before, I’d thought it was just going to be a stuffy party put on by a bunch of flakey angels. Ari was okay, but a lot of them were just arrogant jerks our of touch with reality.
“Who else might be there?” I asked, hoping he was going to say Elvis.
He rolled his eyes. ”Please tell me you’re not hoping for a glimpse of the King.” When I cast my eyes down in guilt, he gave a delighted laugh. “I swear, I’m gonna invite him next year myself.”
“If you do, invite the younger version,” Bob suggested. “The older one will give Shakespeare a run for his money.”
“Is that even an option?” I asked, my mind whirring with possibilities. “You can just invite whoever you want, at whatever stage of their lives you want?”
“Pretty much,” Ari said, then drained his beer. “There are some rules, of course, but for the most part, we can do whatever we want.”
“Rules? I asked, intrigued. “Such as?”
He shrugged and his muscles rippled under his pink polo. I swear, if it weren’t for little movements like that, I’d have sworn the man was carved from granite.
“For instance, we can only bring one of you at a time.”
“I don’t get it,” I said, furrowing my brow, then got excited because, well, I’m a superhero nerd. “Are you saying stuff like alternative realities are real? That I actually exist on other planes? Like on Earth 13 or something?”
He gave me a get real look. “You really gotta step watching so much TV. No, I mean I can’t bring, for example, the twenty-eight-year-old you and the forty-year-old you.”
I pressed my lips together, taking in the implications. Oh, the possibilities. “So, you could go back in time and tell me to invest in Microsoft when I was like eight?”
He snorted. “That takes insider trading to a whole new level, and it’s even more illegal where I’m from than it is here. I mean, technically I could, but my wings would fall off and I’d be grounded. Fate’s a prickly witch. She doesn’t take kindly to meddlers. Changing history, even for one person, is one of the few absolute no-nos we have. The butterfly effect is real.”
“What’s another rule?” Bob asked as he polished a wine glass.
“Lemme guess,” Colin said, warming up to the conversation. “You can’t bring anybody who would damage historical records.”
I tilted my head, not quite getting what he was saying, but Ari nodded. “Yeah, that’s another big one.”
“Okay,” Bob said. “You’re gonna have to give me a little more. I’m not following.”
“No revealing history’s mysteries. Amelia Earhart, post-disappearance. Elvis, post-faking his death,” Colin said. “If we could talk to them, we’d have answers that would change history.”
“Well, yeah,” Ari said. “Except Elvis didn’t fake his death.” He gave Colin a skeptical look. “And I’m a little surprised to learn you’re a conspiracy theorist.”
Rather than respond to that, Colin, being the lawyer that he is, caught what Ari didn’t say. “So you’re saying Amelia Earhart didn’t crash her plane into the ocean? That she really did go through a black hole or end up living on an island or in occupied Germany or something?”
Ari scowled. “I’m not saying any such thing. And in case you’ve missed the point of this conversation, I wouldn’t be allowed to tell you even if any of that was how things really went down.”
“So how come you didn’t know who poisoned Cass?” I asked, referring back to when my boss, the disgraced angel of temperance, had been murdered.
“We can only observe exactly what you can. You were there. How come you didn’t know?”
“Because I didn’t have all the pieces. I didn’t know what he’d been doing, and I didn’t know he’d pissed off the wrong people. Or at least I didn’t know which one of his many enemies hated him enough to off him.”
He shrugged. “Same with us. Just because we can jump to any point in time we want doesn’t make us omniscient. As a matter of fact, I did go back and watch Cass die and missed it the same as you did. Except you actually saw more than I did.”
“So are there any big rules that we have to follow while we’re up there?” Colin asked.
“Now that’s a good question,” Ari replied. “And yes, there are. Basically, you have to follow the same rules we do. You can’t talk about current events with anybody from the past or do anything else that could damage the timeline.”
“And how do you enforce that?” That seemed like an almost impossible rule. I mean, the big stuff was easy—no discussing Fortune 500 companies, etc, but the little stuff could be tricky. Like he said, the butterfly effect. Small ripples could make tsunamis.
He waved me off. “We don’t. Fate does. She’s put a magical gag over the whole city. If you start to say something that can mess things up, it simply won’t come out.”
Bob frowned. “But how does she—”
Ari gave him a knowing smile. “Because she is omniscient. She has to be.”
“You talk about her like she’s a real person,” Colin said just as Stephanie approached the bar.”
“Hey Des, Colin,” she said, then winked at our companion. “Ari, always a pleasure.”
I raised a brow at the blush that spread across his cheeks and wondered what the story was there.
“Who are we talking about as if she’s real?” she asked as she slid her empty glass across the bar.
“Fate,” I said.
“Oh, she’s real, all right. But which one are you talking about?”
“There’s more than one?” I asked, confused.
She laughed. “Of course there is. There are three. But I assume they’ve spelled the ball like they always do, so you won’t have to worry about anything.”
That was a relief, at least. If they could make an angel’s wings fall off, I shuddered to think what they could do to a mere witch. “Will they be at the ball?”
She shook her head and looked at us over the rim of her sunglasses as she took the fresh drink Bob handed her. “Nooo. They will not. They keep to themselves ever since Apollo got them drunk and took advantage.”
“Wait,” Bob said, “All three of them? Are they hot?”
Stephanie burst out laughing as she realized his mind had taken a dive straight into the gutter. “No, they are not hot. Or at least not all of three of them. And even if they were, they’re too freakin’ terrifying to think of in that way. Apollo got them drunk and convinced them to alter his fate. They got super salty about it once they sobered up and have refused to party with us since.”
“Steph, why aren’t you coming this year?” Ari asked.
“Um, because I’m on a gorgeous beach at a luxury resort,” she replied, pulling the wedge of pineapple of the rim of her glass and taking a bite of it. The sun glinted off her sable hair and her brown eyes
glittered with amusement. “Why would I possibly want to trade a bikini for a ball gown? You know I hate those things.”
Ari huffed a breath out through his nose. “You never wear a gown. You always wear your formal toga.”
She waved a hand and her bracelets chimed together. “Still. Makeup, hair, catty angels, blah, blah, blah. The food’s fabulous, but that’s about all it has going for it. No offense. I’ll stay right here and catch up on my reading.”
With that, she turned back toward the beach, her sarong dropping off her tanned shoulder as she sauntered away.
“That’s a shame,” Ari said with a faint smile as the delicate scent of her jasmine perfume faded from the air. “She always spices things up, but I can’t say I blame her. Are you two ready to go?”
I drained the last of my beer and nodded, anxious to finally learn how we were going to get there.
“Close your eyes,” he said as he put a hand on each of our shoulders. “You’re gonna love Celestial City.”
Chapter 5
I was used to teleporting, but whatever he did, it wasn’t that. Or not exactly that, anyway. A wave of nausea swept over me and I doubled over, sucking in deep breaths to keep from heaving. Colin had a decidedly green tinge, too, or at least I thought he looked green. It was hard to tell because rather than being blue, the sky was a soft pink with fluffy lavender clouds.
A castle towered in the distance behind him, shimmering in the sun as if it were crusted with jewels. To be fair, it was owned by freakin’ angels. It probably was.
“Sorry about that,” Ari said, grimacing a little. “Sometimes I forget that interdimensional travel is tough on mortals, especially if you’re not used to it.”
“Wait—interdimensional?” I said, swallowing hard against my gag reflex.Though I’d suspected the city was on a different plane, it felt a little strange to know it for sure. And to actually be on a different plane of existence was more than a little surreal.