Queens of Wings & Storms

by Angela Sanders et al.

  “You didn’t think about other people’s feelings. You didn’t think about what they might be going through. You didn’t think about the harm you were doing by dismissing people.” Dai’s gaze had sharpened into a silver glitter.

  Are his eyes silver? I thought and in the next minute, they turned back into a more human blue-gray.

  “You’re saying I was self-centered,” I said, just to clarify.

  “Self-centered, self-involved. Everything but self-aware.”

  “I’m aware now,” I said, thinking about how I’d sensed my nurse’s feelings.

  “Yes.”

  “You said it wasn’t personal. Do you mean the demon wasn’t actually targeting me, I was just a…target of opportunity?”

  “Not exactly.”

  I waited for Dai to say more but he didn’t. “Do angels communicate telepathically?” I asked, annoyed. “Because getting an answer out of you is like pulling teeth.”

  “I can’t tell you everything.”

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  “Cannot. I sensed the demon working on you and all I could determine was that it wanted you dead as part of a bargain someone else had made.” A chill ran through me.

  I immediately thought of Elle. Of the gold cross she sometimes wore around her neck. She’d been raised Catholic—though as far as I knew, the last time she’d been in a church was on her wedding day—but I knew she believed in all sorts of woo woo things. She believed in fallen angels. She believed in curses. And she was the only person I could imagine who would want me dead.

  “But I didn’t die.”

  “No.”

  “Thanks to you.”

  “It was not your time.”

  “So the bargain hasn’t been fulfilled.”

  Dai nodded slowly. “that is true.”

  “Is that why you’re here? You expect another attack on me?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “And your job is to protect me?”

  “If I can.”

  “‘If’ is not a reassuring word, Dai.”

  “Much depends on you,” Dai said. And then there was a sound like a thunderclap, and I woke up in my hospital room to find my father sitting next to my bed. I could sense his sadness and worry even before I opened my eyes. But underneath the sorrow and the worry there were other emotions that didn’t quite fit. Relief and guilt made sense but there was also a feeling of…frustration. He was angry about something. I had probably pulled him away from some important business deal. He was on his phone, texting someone. It was strictly forbidden to turn on your phones in the hospital—something about interfering with the machines or something—but my father was one of those guys who felt untethered if he didn’t have a phone or a device in his hands. And he was also one of those guys who didn’t think rules applied to him. I can’t tell you how much money he’d paid in parking fines for getting caught taking up a “handicap space.”

  I studied him for a minute before he knew I was awake. He was handsome as ever, his dark hair just beginning to show a little silver. He’d always kept himself in good shape, running and playing tennis, but he was looking particularly buff for someone who was working so hard.

  He keeps himself in shape for Charisse, a voice said in my head. Charisse? And the moment I thought the name, I got a flash of a beautiful biracial woman laughing at something my father had said.

  Charisse. Oh no, I thought. My dad was cheating on Elle. I wondered if she knew. Probably. That would explain why she was angry all the time.

  Poor Elle.

  That last thought surprised me. It was probably the first time I’d ever had a sympathetic thought toward my stepmother. And it led to another unfamiliar emotion—anger at my father. He was such a good-looking man—actor handsome—and even some of my friends had mentioned how hot they thought he was.

  Euww.

  But it had never crossed my mind that he might be a cheater. And of course, as soon as I acknowledged that thought, I wondered if he’d cheated on my mom.

  Maybe he did, a voice whispered in my head and I tried to ignore it.

  “Hi dad,” I said.

  “Roisin,” he said. “My darling girl.” My father is two generations removed from Ireland, but when he gets emotional, he starts talking like his grandfather. Eamon had been around when I was a little girl and I remembered him as a man who always smelled of cigarettes and booze, though he always had a sweet in his pocket for me.

  “Why did you try to kill yourself?”

  “I didn’t,” I said. And it must have been because I was under the influence of the painkillers that I blurted out what I hadn’t told anyone. “There was a guy in the car,” I said. “A guy in a red shirt. And he forced me off the road.”

  “You were carjacked?”

  I nodded, because in essence, that’s what had happened. I could feel his rage flare and that confused me. Because nothing in his emotions said “disbelief.” He believed me and he was angry about something.

  “Dad?” I said.

  “Fuck,” he said under his breath. “Yes?”

  “You believe me?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Get some sleep. I need to talk to Elle.” He was already dialing his phone as he walked out the door.

  Elle. She hadn’t been to the hospital to see me in days. I’d heard the nurses talking about her being a no-show at my bedside and clucking about what a shame it was. I was mostly grateful. I was already dreading going home and having to cohabit with her full time without the buffer my father’s presence provided. I already knew he had one foot out the door. I could sense the anxiety under his words wasn’t for me.

  He came back into the room with a tight smile on his face. It couldn’t have looked phonier if he’d tried to manufacture the expression. “Good news,” he said. “They’re taking your bandages off tomorrow and if all goes well, you can go home.”

  I was not looking forward to either event. I knew my face was healing under the bandages because I felt the wounds itching as they formed scabs under the thick ointment coating my skin. “Will you be here tomorrow?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No, I’ve got to fly back to Azerbaijan.”

  Of course you do, I thought.

  “He’s lying,” said the voice in my head. But I had already known that. He was going to Charisse, whoever she was.

  My father left soon after that and I got a text from Kasi, asking me what was up. Kasi had been the only friend who visited me in ICU and she had been angry with me too.

  “If you were suicidal, you could have told me,” she said.

  “I wasn’t suicidal,” I said.

  “You crashed Elle’s car into the canyon.”

  “I wasn’t suicidal,” I insisted.

  She looked at me skeptically.

  “It was an accident,” I said. “I’d never driven Elle’s car before, and it had way more horsepower than my car.” This was the lie I had decided to tell. No point in trying to convince anyone that a demon had caused the accident.

  “Oh Roisin,” she said. And tears started sliding down her face. I was annoyed by that. I was the one in the hospital, I was the one who needed comforting and nurturing, and nobody wanted to nurture me.

  I want my mommy, I thought, and was horrified when Kasi said, “I know you do, but she’s dead.” I had said it out loud.

  Soon after that, she stopped coming to see me. Told me hospitals depressed her, but that she’d see me when I got home.

  She texted me a lot. But I didn’t have the charger for my phone and Elle kept ‘forgetting” to bring it.

  If she hadn’t been my best friend since we were in grade school, I would have written her out of my life right then. I hadn’t expected anyone else to visit—especially not Jared—but I’d always thought Kasi was a rock and she’d turned out to be a pile of sand.

  Pretty is as pretty does

  Dr. Patel cut off my bandages the next day, using a pair of curved scissors that felt cold against my skin. She exa
mined my face from every angle., keeping her own studiously blank. “It’s looking good Roisin. Skin’s a little puffy in some places but I don’t see any serious infection.” She held out a mirror for me to take a look.

  It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. I looked like someone had taken a picture of me, turned it into a jigsaw puzzle, and then run a red sharpie along the edges of the pieces where my face had been stitched back together. Some of the seams were barely noticeable, but in other places where the flesh joined, there were angry ridges of thick, seeping scar tissue. I didn’t look like a candidate for a face transplant, but it was still pretty awful.

  “You ready to go home?” Dr. Patel asked.

  “Ready as I’ll ever be,” I said. She gave me a sheaf of prescriptions and then I got the obligatory wheelchair ride down to the lobby where Elle was waiting for me. She nodded toward the women manning the front desk. “I’m her guardian,” she said, and they nodded and made a note. I knew they wouldn’t let me leave unless they were sure I was in the hands of a family member or trusted friend. I wonder what people who didn’t have any family or friends did. Did they pay an Uber driver to pass themselves off as family?

  The orderly pushed me out to the curb, and we waited as Elle went to fetch our ride. I wondered what she was driving since I’d destroyed her car.

  She was tight-lipped and silent all the way back to the house. I could smell cigarettes on her breath, but it didn’t seem like the time to say anything about her secret smoking. When we got home, she opened the door and walked to the door without waiting for me. I think she would have slammed it in my face if she could have gotten away with it. I got a text from Kasi just as I was changing my clothes. I’d been cautioned to take only baths because it was dangerous for me to get water splashed on my healing face.

  She wanted to come over and see me, but I told her I needed to rest. She sent me a return text full of emojis. I hated that. I get that emojis can be useful for short-handing emotion but a string of prayer hand and heart emojis didn’t really work for me.

  I could feel depression setting in, chilling me like a cold fog during “June gloom.” While I’d been in the hospital, I’d been so drugged up that my emotional level had pretty much been “zoned out.” Now I had to deal with the reality of my situation. The surreality of my reality.

  “Dai?” I said experimentally, hoping he might answer. Of course he didn’t. I still wasn’t sure how this “guardian angel” thing worked. And just as I was about to start an epic pity party, he was suddenly there. He was dressed much the same as he had been when I’d seen him in the Between, jeans and a t-shirt and bare feet.

  “What’s with the bare feet?” I said. “It makes you look like the ghost of someone who was buried without his shoes.”

  He ignored the comment. “You having bad dreams yet?” he asked.

  Yet? I did not like the sound of that. “No.”

  He nodded at that. “Let me know if you do start having them.”

  Hmmm. That sounded like he was planning on sticking around, which made me a little happier. “What kind of bad dreams?”

  “Nightmares,” he said.

  “Nightmare is a synonym for bad dreams,” I said. “Could you be a little more specific?”

  He sighed. “The Between is a construct,” he said. “A buffer zone between the world of the living and the world of the dead. There’s a gate at bounds each side of the Between and you went through it when you died.”

  He looked at me to see if I was following. “Okay,” I said, because he seemed to be waiting for some acknowledgement.

  “You’ve gone beyond the Between and into a place where souls reside.”

  “You mean Heaven?” I asked.

  “And hell,” he said.

  “So, angels and demons, and souls?” He nodded. “What about God?”

  “He exists in another realm entirely.” I didn’t know how to process this. My mother had been a Christmas and Easter churchgoer and my father had gone along with her, mainly to network. I’d never gone to Sunday School or Bible Camp or anything that would have prepared me for this.

  “What does this have to do with bad dreams?” I asked.

  “The thing that wants you dead exists in the realm beyond the gate but now that you’ve gone through it and returned, it has a way to get into your world. Through you. Through your dreams.”

  “I can handle bad dreams,” I said. “Can it get into the real world?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what do I do then? Find an exorcist?”

  “That might help,” Dai said.

  “You have a terrible bedside manner for an angel.”

  “It’s not my duty to comfort you with pretty lies,” he said. “I told you it wasn’t your time to die, and it wasn’t. But now that you’ve been given a reprieve, it’s up to you to find out what your destiny is.”

  “It sounds like I’m being groomed to be a demon hunter.”

  Dai looked thoughtful. I think there’s more to it than that,” he said. “and I think you’ll find the answers in your dreams.”

  He squeezed my hand then, and his touch made me blush. Physically, he looked like he was in his early twenties, but I knew he had to be a whole lot older. How old, I wondered. “How old are you?” I blurted out.

  “Angels were created long before humankind,” he said, which was only half of an answer.

  “So you’ve been around for thousands of years?” I asked. “Do you ever get tired of life? Bored?”

  “We are not made the same way as humans,” he said. We do not spend much time in the earthly realm and in the realm beyond the Between, time works differently.”

  “Still—”

  “Still,” he said.

  “Have you always looked after me?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Does everyone have a guardian angel?”

  A shadow passed over his face. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I do not know,” he said. Somehow I knew he was lying.

  “Yes you do,” I insisted.

  He sighed again. “It has to do with destiny and free will,” he said. “It is beyond your understanding.”

  “I’m in AP classes,” I said. “I got close to perfect scores on my SATs.”

  “I know you’re intelligent,” he said. “But there are things that are not meant to be shared.”

  “That’s not fair,” I said, knowing I sounded like a child.

  “I know,” he said. “I must go.” He left as unceremoniously as he had arrived. The room felt empty without him.

  A few weeks after I got out of the hospital, weeks in which Elle and I probably didn’t exchange two words, she drove me back to the plastic surgeon’s office for an evaluation. Dr. Patel took my head in her hands and tilted it this way and that while shining a light so bright it made me squint.

  Her hands were warm on my skin. Her touch felt good. I wondered if she had kids. I wondered if she touched her kids like she was touching me now. Gentle. Soothing. Soft.

  “I’m pleased with the way this is healing up,” she said. “In about a month we can do the plastic surgery.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Elle said. Dr. Patel looked up, puzzled. “Roisin can live with the consequences of her actions.”

  Elle glanced over at me with a mean smile. “Unless she wants to pay for the surgery herself.”

  Dr. Patel didn’t have much of a poker face and her shock was evident.

  “I wonder if I could have a private word, Mrs. Quinn,” she said.

  “It’s fine, Dr. Patel,” I said before Elle could reply. “My father will be home soon, and he can sort out the next step.”

  Dr. Patel glanced from me to Elle and back again, but all she said was, “I’ll see you in a couple of weeks, then.”

  The darkness at bay

  Elle caught up with me in the parking lot as I reached my father’s car.

  “Your father and I have discussed this,” she said.
/>   “You’re a liar,” I said. I think she wanted to slap me, but the optics wouldn’t have been good—woman slapping girl with stitches all over her face in the middle of a hospital parking lot. There were security cameras all over the place. A video like that would go viral in minutes.

  “Get in the car,” she said.

  I did, and carefully buckled the seat belt. Dad’s car was built like a tank. Elle preferred driving it to the rental car the insurance company had provided and told my father he could get a rental the next time he was in town. I got the impression she didn’t think that would be anytime soon.

  Elle kept glancing at me on the way home, clearly expecting me to say something but I just looked out the window and pretended she wasn’t there. I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction or arguing or begging her to change her mind. If my parents wouldn’t pay for it, I would set up a GoFundMe campaign. That might not sway Elle, but it would embarrass my father, make him lose face with his business associates.

  I knew he wouldn’t want that, especially now that he was suddenly facing all kinds of legal trouble stemming from some deals he made right around the time my mother died.

  The school year was almost over, but I figured I could spend the summer in a no-tell motel somewhere, financed by my “emergency” fund. I’d long had a contingency plan in case I had to make a quick getaway.