Unearthly u-1

by Cynthia Hand

  * * *

  That night’s the first time I ever sneaked out of the house. It’s such an easy thing, really, sliding the window open, stepping out, balancing on the edge of the roof for a minute before I summon my wings and escape. But I’ve been a good girl all my life.

  I’ve obeyed my mother. My feet have never slipped off the path she placed before me. This simple act of rebellion makes my heart so heavy that it’s tough to get airborne.

  I land outside Tucker’s window. He’s reclined on his bed, reading a comic book, X-Men, and this makes me smile. His hair’s shorter than it was yesterday. He must have gotten it cut for our monthiversary. I tap lightly on the glass. He looks up, grins because he’s happy to see me, and my heart twists inside me. I’m glad I didn’t turn out to be a messenger angel-blood. I hate to be the bringer of bad news.

  He stashes the comic book under his pillow, and crosses to the window. He has to force it open, which takes some muscle because the air’s hot and heavy and the window sticks. His eyes dart briefly to my wings, and I see him trying to contain the instinctive fear he has every time he’s confronted with proof that things in this world aren’t quite the way they seem. Then he leans out and reaches for my hand. I put away my wings. I try to smile.

  He pulls me into his bedroom. “Hi. What’s up? You look. upset.”

  He leads me over to his bed and I sit down. Then he grabs his desk chair and sits across from me, his eyes worried but steady, like he thinks he can take anything I have to dish out. He’s with me; that’s what his eyes say.

  “Are you okay?” he asks.

  “Yes. Kind of.”

  There’s nothing left to do but tell him. “I’m not supposed to be here. I’m grounded.”

  He looks confused. “For how long?”

  “I don’t know,” I say miserably. “Mom wasn’t very specific. Indefinitely, I think.”

  “But why? What did you do?”

  “Uh—” How can I explain that it’s all because I turned Christian Prescott down for a date? That my mom is punishing me because I didn’t tell her about being Tucker’s girlfriend. Not that I hid it from her, exactly. I simply didn’t tell her, because I expected her to frown on the idea. Just not this much.

  My face must betray something because Tucker says, “It’s me, isn’t it? Your mom doesn’t approve of me?”

  I hate the hurt I detect in his voice. I hate looking at him and spotting the Avery brave face in his expression. This is so unfair. Tucker’s the type of guy most mothers would love their daughters to date. He’s respectful, polite, even downright chivalrous. Plus he doesn’t smoke, drink, or have any crazy piercings or tattoos. He’s golden.

  But my mother doesn’t care about any of that. After she grounded me she told me that if I was a normal girl, she would have no problem with me dating Tucker Avery.

  But I’m not a normal girl.

  “Is this about Christian?” he asks.

  “Sort of.” I sigh.

  “What about him?”

  “I’m supposed to be concentrating on Christian. My mom thinks you’re distracting me from that. Hence the grounding.” He deserves a better explanation, I know, but I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I didn’t want to feel like I’m cheating on him, when none of this is my choice, and that’s the way he’s looking at me now.

  He’s quiet for another long moment.

  “What do you think?” he asks then.

  I hesitate. I don’t know any stories of angel-bloods who didn’t fulfill their purpose. I hardly know any stories about angel-bloods, period. For all I know they shriveled up and died if they failed. Mom certainly never presented me with another option. She always made it sound inevitable. What I was made for.

  “I don’t know what to think,” I admit.

  It’s the wrong answer. Tucker blows out a long breath.

  “Sounds like we have to see other people. At least you do.”

  “What?”

  He turns away.

  “You’re breaking up with me?” I stare at him, shock waves moving through me like an earthquake. He exhales, runs his fingers over his shortcropped hair, then looks back into my eyes.

  “I think so.”

  I stand up. “Tuck, no. I’ll figure it out. I’ll make it work, somehow.”

  “Your mom doesn’t know, right?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She doesn’t know that I know about you. That I know about the angel-bloods and all of that.”

  I sigh and shake my head.

  “And you’d get in even more trouble if she knew.”

  “It doesn’t matter—”

  “It does matter.” He starts to pace back and forth. “I’m not going to be the one who messes you up, Clara. I’m not going to stand in the way of you and your destiny.”

  “Please. Don’t.”

  “It’s going to be okay,” he says, I think more to himself than to me. “Maybe when this is all over, after the fire happens and you save him and all that, everything can go back to the way it was before.”

  “Yeah,” I agree weakly. It will only be a few weeks, a month or two at the most until fire season’s over, and then the whole Christian thing will be done and I can go back to Tucker with nothing to stand between us ever again. Only I don’t believe that. I can’t. Something inside of me knows that if I go with Christian in the forest I’ll never be able to find my way back to Tucker. That it will be over, for good.

  He’s not meeting my eyes anymore. “We’re young,” he says. “We’ve got lots of time to fall in love.”

  * * *

  I stay in bed for two days, the world without color, food without taste. It seems dumb, I know. Tucker’s only a boy. People get dumped; it’s a fact of life. It should have made me feel better that he hadn’t really wanted to dump me. He was trying to do the right thing. Wasn’t that what Christian said when he dumped Kay? I’m just trying to do the right thing. I can’t be what she needs. But I need Tucker. I miss him.

  On the morning of the third day the doorbell rings, which almost never happens, and the first thing that passes through my mind is that it must be Tucker, that he changed his mind, that we’ll make it work after all. Mom’s off getting groceries. I hear Jeffrey jog downstairs to answer the door. I leap out of bed and run to the bathroom to untangle my hair and wash the tear streaks off my face. I throw on some clothes, look at myself in the mirror, and change into a different top, the flannel shirt Tucker loves most on me, the one he says brings out the deep ocean in my eyes. The one I was wearing that day at the Jumping Tree. But even as my hand touches the doorknob to my room, even as I step out into the hallway, I know it won’t be Tucker at the door. Deep down I know that Tucker isn’t the type to change his mind.

  It’s Angela. She’s talking to Jeffrey about Italy, smiling. She looks tired, but happy.

  They both turn as I come down the stairs, one slow step at a time. Considering our last conversation, I can’t decide if I’m happy to see her.

  Her smile fades as she looks at me.

  “Wow,” she breathes like she’s shocked at how bad a person can look.

  “I forgot you were coming home this week,” I say from the bottom step.

  “Yeah, well, it’s good to see you, too.” A corner of her mouth quirks up. She crosses over to me and pulls me off the steps. Then she picks up a fistful of my hair and holds it up in the light that’s pouring in through the window.

  “Wow,” she says again. She laughs. “This is so much better than orange, C. You’ve changed. Your skin’s all glowy.” She presses her hand to my forehead like I’m a sick kid. “And warm. What happened to you?”

  I don’t know how to answer her. I didn’t see what she’s apparently seeing when I looked in the mirror upstairs. All I really saw was my broken heart.

  “My purpose is coming, I guess. Mom says I’m getting stronger.”

  “Crazy.” I don’t understand the naked envy in her golden eyes. I’m not used to her envying
me; it’s usually the other way around. “You’re beautiful,” she says.

  “She’s right,” Jeffrey says suddenly. “You do kind of look like an angel.”

  But it doesn’t matter that I’m beautiful now. I’m terrible. Tears spill onto my cheeks.

  “Oh, C. ” Angela puts her arms around me and squeezes.

  “Just don’t say I told you so, okay?”

  “How long has she been like this?” she asks Jeffrey.

  “A couple days. Mom made her break up with Tucker.”

  Not quite the truth, but I don’t bother to correct him.

  “It’s going to be fine,” Angela says to me. “Let’s get you cleaned up — because even with the glowy skin and everything, you’re a little rank, C— and let’s get some food in you, spend some girl time, and it’ll be fine, you’ll see.” She pulls back and gives me her excited-angel-blood-historian face. “I have amazing stuff to tell you.”

  I decide I’m glad, after all, that she’s here.

  * * *

  When Mom gets home from town she discovers Angela and me in the living room, Angela painting my toenails a shade of deep rose, me fresh out of the shower. They exchange this look where my mom says, without words, how happy she is that I’m finally out of my room, and Angela says that she’s got everything under control. I do feel better, I’ll admit, not because Angela’s a particularly comforting person, but because I hate to look weak in front of her. She’s always so strong, so sharp, so focused. Whenever we hang out it’s like we’re continually playing a game of truth or dare, and right now we’re on dare, and she has dared me to stop moping around and be a freaking angel-blood for once. My time to be a heartbroken teenager is officially over and done. Time to move on.

  “It’s a beautiful day outside,” Mom says. “You girls want to go out for a picnic? I’ll whip you up some sandwiches.”

  “Can’t. I’m grounded.”

  I’m still mad at Mom. Because of her I lost Tucker, and I still refuse to believe it had to be that way. In fact this whole mess, my purpose, my shipwrecked love life, my current state of misery, not to mention my utter cluelessness about how this is all going to work out, leads back to her. Her telling me about this divine obligation that I was supposed to fulfill. Her idea to move to Wyoming. Her insisting and her reassuring me that there are reasons for things and her stupid rules and her keeping me in the dark. All. Her. Fault. Because if it’s not her fault, it’s God’s, and I’m not ready to be pissed at the Almighty.

  Angela frowns at me, then turns to Mom and smiles. “A picnic would be awesome, Mrs. Gardner. We obviously need to get out of the house.”

  * * *

  Angela wants to eat outside, find some picnic table in the mountains, maybe Jenny Lake, she says, but I can’t handle it. It makes me think of Tucker. Just being outside makes me yearn for Tucker. I’ve resigned myself to the idea that I may never go outside again. So we go to the Garter. The stage is set for Oklahoma!, complete with rows of fake corn, a broken-down wagon, trees, bushes, and a yellow farmhouse, a blue sky in the background. Angela spreads out a blanket in the middle of the stage and we sit down on it and eat our lunch.

  “I’ve been studying about Black Wings,” she says, taking a big bite of a green apple.

  “Is that safe? Considering what Mom said about the consciousness thing, and all that?”

  She shrugs. “I don’t think I’m more conscious of them than I was before. I just know more.” She pulls out a new notebook, one of those plain, black-and-white composition books, the pages covered front and back with all that she’d gleaned about angels. Angela typically writes in a tight, loopy cursive, but the writing in her notebook is always hastily scrawled and smeared, like she can’t get the words down fast enough. She flips through the pages. I think about my own journal, which I started with such passion and determination the first week I got my vision. I haven’t touched it in months. She puts me to shame, really.

  “Here,” she says. “They’re called the Moestifere, the Sorrowful Ones. I found this old book in a library in Florence that mentioned them. Sad demons, it translated.”

  “Demons? But they’re supposed to be angels.”

  “Demons are angels,” explains Angela. “It’s more of an artistic distinction, really.

  Painters would always depict angels with beautiful, white, bird wings, and so the fallen angels had to have wings, too, but it wasn’t enough to simply give them black feathers. They made them bat wings, and then it evolved to the whole horns and tail and pitchfork image that people think of now.”

  “But that guy we saw in the mall, he looked like a regular man.”

  “Like I said before, I think they can look however they choose to. I guess it’s how they make you feel that’s important, right? Suddenly bawling your eyes out, for example, would be a bad sign.”

  “The sorrow in my vision, my mom said it could be a Black Wing.”

  Angela’s expression is sympathetic. “Have you been having the vision more now?”

  I nod. I’ve been having it about once a day, every day, for the past week. It only lasts a few minutes, a flash really, nothing substantial. Nothing more than what I already know: the Avalanche, the forest, walking, the fire, Christian, the words we say to each other, the touching, the hug, the flying away. I’ve been trying to ignore it.

  “Mom keeps saying I need to train, but how? I can fly fine. I can carry stuff; I’m getting stronger, but it’s not my muscles that need to get stronger, right? So how can I train? What am I supposed to do?”

  She chews on my questions for a minute, then says, “It’s your mind you have to train, like your mom said that one time, you have to separate yourself from all the crap, get down to the core, focus. We can do it together.” She smiles. “I’ll help you.

  It’s time, C. I know this thing with Tucker sucks, but you can’t really turn your back on this. You know that, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So let’s do it,” she says, clapping her hands together and jumping up like we’re going to start right this minute. “No time to lose. Let’s train.”

  She’s right, as usual. It’s time.

  Chapter 19

  Corduroy Jacket

  So we train. Every morning I rise with the sun, and I try not to think about Tucker. I shower, comb my hair, brush my teeth, and try not to think about Tucker. I go downstairs and make myself a smoothie — Angela has us on a raw food diet; she says it’s purer, better for the mind. I go along with it. I even add the seaweed, which, oddly, makes me think about Tucker. And fishing. And kissing. I gag it down. After breakfast there’s meditation on the front porch, which is pretty much a vain attempt not to think about Tucker. Then I go inside and spend some time on the internet. I look up the weather report, the direction and speed of the wind, and, most important, the level of the current fire danger. In these last days of August, it’s always on yellow or red alert. Always imminent.

  On yellow days I pass the afternoons flapping around the back woods with the duffel bag, exercising my wings, adding more and more weight each time, trying not to think of Tucker in my arms. Sometimes Angela comes with me and we fly side by side, weaving patterns into the air. If I work hard enough, push myself long enough, I’m able to banish Tucker from my mind for a few hours. And sometimes I have the vision and don’t think of him at all for a while.

  Angela’s got me documenting the vision. She has a spreadsheet. On the days that she isn’t hanging out, helping me, she usually calls around dinnertime, and I can hear the music from Oklahoma! in the background, and she grills me about the vision. She gave me a little notebook that I keep in the back pocket of my jeans, and if I have the vision I’m supposed to drop everything (and when I have the vision, I usually drop everything, anyway) and write it down. Time. Place. Duration. Every facet of the vision I can remember. Every detail.

  It’s because of this that I begin to notice the variations. At first I assume the vision’s exactly the same every time, ov
er and over again, but when I have to write it down I realize that there are small differences from day to day. The gist is still the same: I’m in the forest, the fire approaches, I find Christian, and we fly away. Every single time I wear the purple jacket. Every time Christian wears black fleece. These things seem constant, unchangeable. But sometimes I climb the hill from a different angle, or I find Christian standing a few steps to the right or left from the day before, or we recite our lines: “It’s you,” “Yes, it’s me,” in a different way or a different order. And the sorrow, I notice, changes. Sometimes I feel the ache of it from the first moment.

  Other times, I won’t feel it until I see Christian, and then it crashes over me like a breaking wave. Sometimes I cry, and sometimes my attraction to Christian, the magnetism between us, overwhelms the grief. One day we fly away in one direction, and the next day we fly away in the other.