Queens of Wings & Storms

by Angela Sanders et al.

  I didn’t really have time to indulge her, but I felt guilty, so I followed her outside to the rectangle of concrete where seniors were allowed to smoke.

  We weren’t alone. There were five mean girls waiting for us and they wanted to beat me up. What the hell?

  The other girls were scholarship students I’d seen around. I wondered why Zondra was hanging around them. They usually kept to themselves, ate lunch as a pack, hung out together. I remembered running into one of them, Tracy, in the girl’s bathroom on the first floor. She’d been smoking and there was a nasty nicotine haze I had to inhale. I’d have walked out if I hadn’t had to pee so bad. I had called her “white trash.”

  It was Tracy who stepped forward. She had a knife in her hand. I didn’t need to be able to read the future to know she didn’t mean to just hurt me; she was planning on killing me.

  Why?

  I looked around at the others and saw no help on any of their faces.

  Think. Think.

  And then I saw it. A little flicker at the edge of my vision. I turned and there was a small girl in a pink party dress. It didn’t quite fit her, which told me it was either a hand-me-down or a thrift store purchase.

  “My sister doesn’t like you,” the girl said.

  I took a chance and turned away from Tracy to focus my attention on the little girl. She wasn’t wearing shoes, which meant she was from beyond the Between.

  “I can see that,” I said. “Do you know why?”

  I could see some of the girls behind Tracy giving each other looks. Wondering what was going on because I was speaking out loud. I knew I could communicate with the little girl mind to mind but some part of my brain was telling me there might be an advantage to Tracy and the others listening to my side of the conversation.

  “She doesn’t like rich girls,” the little girl said.

  “I’m not,” I said, and realized what a ludicrous denial that was. “Rich” was relative. My father made a ton of money but didn’t feel reach because he couldn’t afford his own jet. I shopped in thrift stores because I wanted to, not because I had to. I never went hungry unless I was skipping meals to lose a few pounds. I was never cold unless I forgot to put on a coat before going outside.

  “What’s your name?”

  “I’m Stacy.”

  “Can your sister see you, Stacy?”

  The little girl’s eyes flickered over to Tracy. “She used to see me when she was little, but people kept telling her she was crazy, so she stopped seeing me.”

  That was so sad, but I’d already encountered more than a few people who thought I was crazy for recounting the few things I had about what I’d seen since the accident. Even Kasi didn’t really believe me.

  “Why are you here Stacy?” I deliberately used her name again, hoping it would penetrate whatever angry haze Tracy had wrapped herself in.

  “I don’t want her to hurt you,” Stacy said.

  I was thinking that was kind of her to look after me and then she punctured my self-involvement by saying, “She’s in trouble a lot and if she does something really bad, they’ll take her away and then Lacey will be all alone.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “Our little sister.”

  I was starting to get the picture now.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let me see what I can do.”

  I turned back to face the girls. Looked Tracy right in the eyes. “Stacy doesn’t want you to hurt me.”

  “Stacy?” Tracy looked enraged. “What do you know about Stacy?” She stepped forward. A couple of the girls looked less blood-thirsty than they had a moment ago but Zondra looked like she was a Roman watching a gladiator fight and they’d just let the tigers loose.

  What did I ever do to Zondra? I heard Dai’s voice in my head. “It’s not what you did so much as what you didn’t do.”

  I shook my head to clear it. I couldn’t afford to screw this up.

  “She says if you get in trouble, they’ll take you away and leave your little sister alone.”

  That got through to her.

  “What does Tracy look like?” she asked me as if daring me to lie.

  “She’s about this tall,” I gestured. “She has brown hair and blue eyes. And she’s wearing a pretty pink dress with ruffles on the collar and cuffs.”

  “I bought her that dress,” Tracy said. “Pink was her favorite color.”

  I held my breath. Finally she looked up.

  “Get out of here,” she said to the other girls.

  “But Trace—” Zondra whined.

  “Shut up Zee.”

  Zondra shut up and I walked away though I wanted to run.

  What the hell was that all about? I found out soon enough when Tracy caught up to me in the cafeteria. She sat down and slammed her tray so hard on the table that her fruit cup bounced.

  “If I ask you who the guy in the red shirt is, what would you say?”

  “Tall, thin, white with dark hair that looks like he never washes it?”

  Tracy nodded and peeled back the lid on her fruit.

  “I don’t know who he is, but I know what he is.”

  She looked expectant.

  Even though she’d already accepted that I could see dead people, I hesitated. If I told her what I thought the boy really was, there would be no going back. And if I told her how I knew what he was, it would be even worse.

  “I think he’s a trapped soul,” I said. “Demons are trying to use him to do their earthly dirty work, sort of like an apprenticeship to getting a job in hell.”

  “I don’t believe in hell.”

  A line from Dr. Faustus popped into my head. Because—A.P. English. “I think that hell’s a fable,” I quoted. “Think so still, till experience change thy mind.”

  Tracy narrowed her eyes. “Shakespeare?” she asked.

  “Marlowe,” I said. “Sorry, it’s a bad habit of mine to quote other people when I don’t quite know what to say myself.”

  “Sorry,” she said. “that’s not a word I’ve heard you use very often.”

  “Since the accident, I’ve been working on being a better person,” I said.

  She nodded, then asked, “Why am I seeing him?”

  “I don’t know that either. You’re not the only one seeing him. And every time they see him, they want to do something really bad.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like kill me.”

  That stopped the conversation for a moment. “I don’t have any reason to want to kill you,” she said. “I don’t even know you really. We haven’t had any classes together since sixth grade.”

  “the demon that’s giving this kid his marching orders wants me dead,” I said. “It’s just looking around for a way to do it.”

  “I’m sorry,” Tracy said and dug into her fruit.

  “I’m sorry about your sister,” I said. “When my mother died, I thought I’d die too.”

  Tracy looked at me. “My mother’s dead too,” she said. “She died in the same accident as my sister.”

  Shit. So much for bonding. “I’m so sorry,” I said again, knowing that my empty words would offer her no comfort. She just nodded and finished her lunch without saying anything else.

  I was troubled by the thought that my life was still again in danger. I had thought that whatever supernatural force had originally targeted me had turned its attention to Elle. Clearly not. Now we were both apparently in its crosshairs.

  Word of the incident with Tracy and her squad got around.

  So now people were afraid of me. I heard the whispered conversations that followed me around in the halls. I heard the things they called me. I tried to ignore the names but when I heard my ex-boyfriend’s skanky new girlfriend had labeled me, “that jigsaw-faced freak,” I nearly lost it.

  And by now I was dreaming about the boy in the red shirt nearly every night. Sometimes he would caper around like the Joker or something. But sometimes he’d taunt me with cryptic “clues.”

  “the debt
must be paid,” he said.

  “What debt?”

  He’d just grin.

  I’d met Dai in the Between a couple of times to see if he could help me puzzle out what was going on.

  It had finally occurred to me that he was like a supernatural shrink. He might suggest things and he might steer me in a certain direction. He might even give me a little help at certain crucial moments, as he had at the hospital when I wanted to stay with Elle. But mostly he expected me to solve my own problems.

  And I had problems.

  In addition to dealing with the results of all the awful things I ever did, I was also worried about my father.

  FBI agents had shown up in his Chicago office and left with everything but the light fixtures. Former colleagues were making immunity agreements left and right and all of them seemed determined to throw him under the bus.

  I knew my father played fast and loose sometimes but had convinced myself that the white-collar crimes he was involved in were basically victimless crimes.

  I loved my father. And it was hard to see things from another perspective.

  I was in fifth period calculus when Dai showed up. “Ms. Quinn is urgently needed at home,” he said to Ms. Olutunde and she let me go without a comment other than, “I hope everything will be all right.”

  “What’s happened,” I asked Dai as we hustled to my car.

  “Elle’s been mugged,” he said.

  “Is she all right?” I asked.

  “She is. Two Valley college students came to her rescue.”

  “The guy with the red shirt. He’s getting bolder.’

  Dai’s face was grim. “Or someone is getting more desperate.”

  We found Elle in the emergency room where she was waiting for someone to take a look at her injuries. There were so many people in the waiting room that other, more inured people had been triaged ahead of her.

  She looked terrible. Both her eyes were blackened and there was a bruise forming on her jaw. She had abrasions and scrapes on her hands and knees and blood on her pants where they’d shredded.

  Dai left but I stayed with her until she finally, three hours later, got in to see a doctor, who cleaned out the abrasions, gave her prescriptions for painkillers, and sent her home.

  We left her car in the parking lot and drove home in mine.

  On the way we stopped at a drive-through pharmacy to fill the prescription and then at a fast food joint to get a soda to wash the pills down.

  “You know,” she said, “if your dad divorces me and the prenup holds up, I could probably go into the drug business with just the pills we’ve got on hand.”

  I looked at her sideways. “Divorce?”

  “You don’t know about Charisse?”

  “I’ve heard her name,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” she said. “I think Ryan is behind the attacks on both of us.”

  “How?”

  “You’re going to think I’m crazy.”

  “You can’t be any crazier than I am,” I said.

  “It was something the kid in the red shirt said. He kept saying, “The debt must be paid.”

  I felt a chill. “He says that to me, too.”

  “What do we have in common?”

  “Dad,” I said.

  “Exactly.”

  I was about to say that was crazy and then I thought of the first time he visited me at the hospital after the accident. I’d felt all the expected emotions coming from him. Worry. Fear. And guilt. At the time I thought it was just that he felt guilty that I’d tried to kill myself, guilt over him not being there for me. But what if it had been something else?

  Elle saw my expression. “You don’t think it’s crazy.”

  “I don’t think it’s crazy,” I said, “but it’s awful.”

  “I think it’s worse than awful,” she said. “I think that he’s made a deal with the devil once before.”

  I thought she might say more but around then the pills kicked in and she leaned back against the head rest and started to dose.

  I kind of walked her into the house and got her settled on the bed, impatient to resume the conversation. But when she woke up later, she seemed to have forgotten that she’d said anything. I tried to get her to open up again, but I could tell I was upsetting her, so I let it drop.

  I needed to talk to Dai.

  His appearance at school had created quite a stir.

  There were plenty of rumors swirling around who he might be and lots of questions too. Everybody wanted to know who he was.

  “The cop who saved my life.”

  “Is he single?”

  “Are you guys dating?”

  “What does a hot guy like that see in you?” Kasi had asked me, adding a perfunctory, “no offense,” a moment later. “I mean, he’s really…and you’re—”

  She gestured toward my mangled face.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I know. Beats me.”

  I’d tried getting back to the Between to find out what he was up to, but meanwhile, my dad’s legal problems were getting worse. Reporters were staking out our house. He’d been working out of his home office and spent hours there behind closed doors. Elle and I were tiptoeing around him because he was so angry all the time.

  Angry and…something darker.

  The truth revealed

  “Do you sense anything different about Ryan?” Elle asked me one night when Dad was out, and we were eating a dinner of tortilla chips and salsa in the kitchen. Elle was a stress eater and the stress of the past few months had gotten to her. The days of tofu noodles and soy crumbles and fresh berries for dessert had given way to the comfort food of her childhood, salty and sugary snacks that didn’t require cooking. Cheap ice cream and packaged cupcakes and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. She was gaining weight, which was a good thing. She’d been almost anorexic before her mastectomy.

  I could have avoided the question, but I felt like we were both combatants in whatever war was going on and we needed to share intel.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “It’s like we’re not even here,” she said.

  I would have rushed to defend my father, to point out that he was a busy guy who had to deal with a lot of things, but it had long since been clear that all he cared about, really, was his business and himself. Plus, I’d begun to get the terrible suspicion that he was somehow the puppeteer controlling the boy in the red shirt.

  I still couldn’t figure out why the boy wanted either Elle or me dead. But as she opened a Margarita in a can to wash down her chips and salsa, Elle said something that caught my attention.

  “I almost died today.”

  “What?”

  Elle nodded and slurped at her drink. “I was in the pool doing laps and suddenly something grabbed me by the foot and yanked me under the water.”

  “Something?”

  “I couldn’t see what it was. I don’t wear my contacts when I’m swimming.”

  “How did you get away?”

  “JoJo jumped in the water and whatever it was let go.”

  “Good dog JoJo,” I said, and she got up from her bed in the corner of the kitchen and came over to lick my hand. Then she licked Elle’s, who ruffled her fur.

  I guess JoJo’s forgiven her for yelling at her that time, I thought. Dogs are awesome.

  “Elle, we can’t just sit here and wait for this wardrobe-challenged freak to kill us. We need to go after him.”

  “How?”

  “We know he can go back and forth through the Gate. But every time he comes through to our realm, he’s got an advantage. So we need to go to him.”

  “But won’t he have the ‘home team’ advantage?”

  “No. I don’t think so. I think he’s trying to curry favor with someone or something. He’s like the superfluous henchman who gets killed first.”

  “I can’t go back,” she said. “I can’t.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “You stay here and watch out for Dad.�
��

  “And if he comes home while you’re …gone…what do I do?”

  I had no idea.

  “Call my name,” I said, with no idea whether that would work or not. I wasn’t even sure I could get to where I needed to go without help. I went into my room and lit the scented candle Kasi had given me for my birthday. It was scented with orange and vanilla and spice and smelled gorgeous.

  I never really meditated but I tried to consciously slow my breathing and my heart rate. I emptied my mind and visualized that gray space and the green curtain.

  And then I was back in the featureless limbo, with no sign of green curtain or any other thing.

  I had no idea how I was supposed to go about summoning him. “Dai?” I ventured, but there was no answer.

  Because that would have been too easy. I started to walk and eventually came upon what I first thought was a large marble mile marker, but which turned out to be a stone angel made of pure white marble.

  As I passed, she turned toward me and for a moment, I saw my mother. “Mom?” I said but she had turned to stone again and did not answer.

  I felt a pang but kept moving.

  I could hear other things moving and see their shadows, but nothing approached me. And then I came to what looked like a barbed wire fence stretching to infinity in each direction.

  I didn’t see a gate and wondered if I could climb under it without shredding my skin from my bones. Then I heard the crying. Oh hell, I thought and almost laughed at the irony. I carefully grabbed the bottom strand of wire and pulled it up as far as I could. The wire caught on my hair and pulled away large tufts of it. It hurt as each strand was ripped from my scalp.

  But it wasn’t the only thing that hurt. Where the stitches had been in my face started to itch and then started to burn. Soon it felt like the pieces were breaking apart. The pain was so intense I nearly vomited. But I held it together. After what seemed like another mile of walking, I saw a young, black-haired boy wearing a red shirt.

  He was seated with his knees drawn up and his head down. I could feel his pain radiating like heat.

  I walked up to him and squatted beside him.

  “Hello?” I said and reached out to touch his arm. He recoiled, but the brief touch had activated a flood of images.