Unearthly

by Cynthia Hand

  “I’m Clara Gardner,” I say nervously. “I’m doing a project with Angela for school.”

  She nods. I notice that she’s wearing a large gold cross around her neck, the kind that has the body of Jesus draped across it.

  “You can wait back here,” she says. “She won’t be long.”

  I follow her through an archway into the theater itself. It’s pitch-black. I hear her moving off to one side; then a pool of light appears on the stage.

  “Have a seat anywhere,” she says.

  Once my eyes adjust, I see that the theater is filled with round tables covered in white tablecloths. I wander over to the nearest one and sit down.

  “When do you think Angela might get here?” I ask, but the woman is gone.

  I’ve been waiting for maybe five minutes, completely creeped out by this point, when Angela comes bursting through a side door.

  “Wow, sorry,” she says. “Orchestra went late.”

  “What do you play?”

  “Violin.”

  It’s easy to imagine her with a violin tucked under her chin, sawing away on some mournful Romanian tune.

  “Do you live here?” I ask.

  “Yep. In an apartment upstairs.”

  “Just your mom and you?”

  She studies her hands. “Yes.”

  “I don’t live with my dad either,” I say. “Just my mom and brother.”

  She kind of examines me for a couple seconds. “Why did you move here?” she asks. She sits down in the chair across from mine and stares at me with solemn honey-colored eyes. “I assume that you didn’t actually burn your old school to the ground.”

  “Excuse me?” I say.

  She looks at me sympathetically. “That’s the rumor going around today. You mean you didn’t know that your family had to flee California because of your delinquent behavior?”

  I’d laugh if I wasn’t so horrified.

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “It will blow over. Kay’s rumors always do. I’m impressed by how quickly you were able to get on her bad side.”

  “Uh, thanks,” I say, smirking. “And, my obvious delinquency aside, we moved because of my mom. She was getting sick of California. She loves the mountains, and she decided she wanted to raise us somewhere where we couldn’t always see the air we breathed, you know?”

  She smiles at my joke, but it’s just to be polite. A pity smile.

  Another long silence.

  “Okay, so enough with the chitchat,” I say restlessly. “Let’s talk about our project. I was thinking about the reign of Queen Elizabeth. We could talk about what it was like to be a woman, even a woman with a lot of power, back in the day. A female empowerment kind of project.” For some reason I think this will be right up Angela’s alley.

  “Actually,” she says. “I had another idea.”

  “Okay. Shoot.”

  “I thought we could do a presentation on the Angels of Mons.”

  I almost choke. If I’d been drinking water I would have sprayed it all over the table.

  “What are the Angels of Mons?” I ask.

  “It’s a story from World War I. There was this big battle between the Germans and the British, who were badly outnumbered but won. After it was over there was a rumor going around about these phantom men who appeared to help the British. The mysterious men shot at the Germans with bows and arrows. One version said that the men were standing between the two armies, shining with a kind of unearthly light.”

  “Interesting,” I manage.

  “It was a hoax, of course. Some writer made it up and it got out of hand. It’s like an early version of UFOs, a crazy story that kept getting told again and again.”

  “Okay,” I say, taking a breath. “Sounds like you have it covered.”

  I can just picture the look on Mom’s face when I tell her that I’m going to do a project on angels for British History.

  “I thought it would be interesting for the class,” says Angela. “A specific moment in time, like Mr. Erikson suggested. I also think we can relate it to today.”

  My mind races, trying to think up a tactful way to turn down her idea.

  “Yeah, well . . . I did really like the Elizabeth thing, but—” I’m floundering.

  She grins.

  “What?”

  “You should see your face,” she says. “You’re really freaking out.”

  “What? No, I’m not.”

  She leans forward across the table.

  “I want to research angels,” she says. “But it has to be British, because it’s British History after all. And this is the best British angel story there is. And wouldn’t it be crazy if it were true?”

  My heart feels like it’s fallen into my stomach.

  “I thought you said it was a hoax.”

  “Well, yes. That’s what they would have wanted everyone to think, wouldn’t they?”

  “Who’s they?”

  “The angel-bloods,” she says.

  I stand up.

  “Clara, sit down. Relax.” Then she adds, “I know.”

  “You know wh—”

  “Sit down,” she says. In Angelic.

  My jaw literally drops.

  “How did you—?”

  “What, you thought you were the only one?” she says wryly, looking at her nails.

  I sink into the chair. I think this classifies as a real, honest-to-goodness revelation. Never in a million years would I have expected to stumble upon another angel-blood at Jackson Hole High School. I’m floored. Angela, on the other hand, is so energized that she’s practically shooting out sparks. She scrutinizes me for a minute, then jumps up.

  “Come on.” She bounces onto the stage, still smiling that cat-ate-the-canary kind of grin. She waves at me impatiently to join her. I get up and slowly climb the stairs onto the stage, looking out into the empty theater.

  “What?”

  She takes off her coat and tosses it into the dark. Then she takes a few steps back so that she’s about arm’s length away from me. She turns to face me.

  “All right,” she says.

  I’m starting to get pretty alarmed.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Show thyself,” she says in Angelic.

  There’s a flash of light, like a camera’s. I blink and stumble with the sudden weight of my wings on my shoulder blades. Angela is standing with her own wings fully extended behind her, beaming at me.

  “So it’s true!” she says excitedly. Tears gleam in her eyes. She furrows her brows a little and her wings disappear with a snap. “Say the words,” she says.

  “Show yourself!” I shout.

  The flash comes again, and then she’s standing with her wings out. She claps her hands together delightedly.

  I’m still stunned.

  “How did you know?” I ask.

  “The birds tipped me off,” she says. “What you said in class about them.”

  So much for laying low. Mom’s going to kill me.

  “Birds drive me crazy, too. But I didn’t know if that was a freak coincidence or what. And then I heard you were a whiz in French class,” she says. “I take Spanish, myself. I’m so good at it because I speak fluent Italian, on account of my mom’s family, all those summers in Italy. It’s similar, a Romance language and whatnot. That’s my story, anyway.”

  I can’t stop staring at her wings. It’s such a shock for me to see them on someone I don’t know, a crazy juxtaposition: Angela with her glossy black hair sweeping over one side of her face, black tank top, gray jeans with holes in the knees, dark eyeliner and lips, purple fingernails, and then these blindingly white wings stretched out behind her, reflecting the stage lights so she’s lit with a radiance that is positively celestial.

  “I didn’t really know for sure, though, until your brother beat the wrestling team,” she says.

  “The entire wrestling team?” That’s so not the version I heard from Jeffrey.

  “Didn’t you hear about it? He we
nt to the coach and asked to be on the team, the coach said no, tryouts were in November, better luck next year, so Jeffrey said, ‘I’ll wrestle the best guys on the team for each weight class. If they beat me, fine, I’ll try again next year. If I beat them, I’m on the team.’ That’s how the story circulated. I have gym first period, so I was right there, but I didn’t pay much attention until he was halfway through the middleweight. Practically the whole school turned out to watch him beat the champion heavyweight. Toby Jameson. That guy’s a monster. It was an amazing thing to watch. Jeffrey just took him down, didn’t even look winded, and when I saw him like that I knew that he couldn’t be entirely human. And then later I wore the angel shirt to Brit History and watched your face get all tense and broody when you looked at it. So I was pretty sure I was right.”

  “It was that obvious?”

  “To me it was,” she says. “But I’m glad. I’ve never known anybody else like me.”

  She laughs and before I can totally process what she’s saying, she bends her knees and swoops up off the stage, gliding effortlessly over the darkened theater and up into the rafters.

  “Come on,” she says.

  I stare after her, thinking of the huge amount of damage I will probably do if I try.

  “I don’t think you have enough insurance on this place for me to try to fly here.”

  She drops lightly back down to the stage.

  “I can’t fly,” I admit.

  “It’s hard at first,” she says. “I spent all last year climbing up into the mountains at night so I could jump off ledges and catch some air. It took months before I was really able to get the hang of it.”

  That’s the first thing anybody has said that makes me feel better about flying.

  “Didn’t your mom teach you?” I ask.

  She shakes her head wildly, as if she finds the idea hilarious.

  “My mom’s about as human as they come. I mean, what angel-blood would name their kid Angela?”

  I stifle a smile.

  “She lacks imagination, I guess,” she says. “But she’s always been there for me.”

  “So it’s your dad then.”

  Her expression becomes instantly sober. “He was an angel.”

  “An angel? So that means you’re a half blood, a Dimidius.”

  She nods. Which means she’s twice as powerful as me. And she can fly. And her hair is a normal color. I’m a pot of envy.

  “So your mom’s not human,” she says. “That means you’re—”

  “I’m only a Quartarius. My mom is a Dimidius and my dad’s just a normal guy.”

  I suddenly feel a little exposed standing there on the stage with my wings out, so I fold them in and will them to disappear. Angela does the same. For a minute we stand contemplating each other again.

  “You said in class you’d never met your father,” I say.

  Her face is carefully blank.

  “Of course not,” she says matter-of-factly. “He’s a Black Wing.”

  I nod like I completely understand what she’s talking about, but I don’t. Angela turns away and wanders out of the pool of light on the stage into one of the darkened corners.

  “My mother was married once, but her husband died of cancer right before she turned thirty. He was an actor, and she was this shy costume designer. This was his theater. They never had any kids. After he died, she went on a pilgrimage to Rome. She’s Catholic, so Rome’s a pretty important place for her, plus she has family there. One night she walked home from evening mass, and a man followed her. She tried to ignore it at first, but she had a bad feeling about him. He started to walk faster, so she ran. She didn’t stop until she was at the family’s house.”

  Angela sits down at the edge of the stage, her legs dangling over into the orchestra pit. She keeps her eyes downcast while she tells the story, her face turned slightly away, but her voice is steady.

  “She thought she was safe,” she says. “But that night she dreamed of the man standing at the foot of her bed. His face was like a statue, she said. Like Michelangelo’s David, impassive, sad in the eyes. She started to scream, but then he said something in a language she couldn’t understand. His words paralyzed her; she couldn’t move or make a sound. She couldn’t wake up.”

  I sit down beside her.

  “And then he raped her,” she murmurs. “And she realized it wasn’t a dream.”

  She glances up, embarrassed. One corner of her mouth lifts.

  “So the downside is that I wasn’t exactly conceived in love,” she says. “But the upside is that I have all of these amazing powers.”

  “Right,” I say, nodding. I’ve never heard of such a thing happening. An angel raping a human? I can’t imagine it. The night is starting to take on a weird sort of Twilight Zone feel. I came to work on a history project, and now I’m sitting on the edge of a stage with another angel-blood as she spills her entire life story to me. It’s surreal.

  “I’m sorry, Angela,” I say. “That . . . sucks.”

  She closes her eyes for a moment, as if she can see it all in her mind.

  “So if your mom is human and you’ve never seen your dad, how did you even know you were an angel-blood?” I ask.

  “My mom told me. She said that one night, a few days before I was born, another angel appeared to her and told her about the angel-bloods. She thought it was a crazy dream for a while. But she told me as soon as she saw that there was something different about me. I was ten.”

  It’s not really the kind of story you want to hear from your mom. I think about the way Mom told me about the angel-bloods, only two years ago, and how hard it was to accept. It blows my mind to think about what I would have done if she’d sprung that kind of information on me when I was a kid. Or if she’d been raped.

  “It took me a long time to find out anything else,” Angela says. “My mom didn’t know anything about angels besides what it says in the Bible. She said I was a Nephilim like in Genesis, and I would grow up to be a hero like in the days of Samson.”

  “No haircuts for you, then.”

  She laughs and drags her fingers through her long black hair.

  “But you knew about the Dimidius and Quartarius and all of that,” I say.

  “I’ve picked up the facts here and there. I consider myself a bit of an angel historian.”

  It’s quiet for a minute.

  “Wow,” I say.

  “I know.”

  “I still think we should do our history project on Queen Elizabeth.”

  She laughs. She turns toward me and pulls her legs up and sits Indian-style, so close her knees brush mine.

  “We’re going to be best friends,” she says.

  I believe her.

  I have to be home by ten, which gives us hardly any time to talk. I don’t even know where to begin, the questions come so fast. One thing is clear right away: Angela knows tons about the angels, so much of the history, the powers they’re rumored to have, the names and ranks of different angels who appear in literature and religious texts. But in other areas, things about angels and angel-bloods that you can only get from the inside, she doesn’t know much at all. She and I could learn a lot from each other, I realize, being that my mom only tells me what she thinks is absolutely necessary, if that.

  “You did all your research in Rome?” I ask.

  “Most of it,” Angela says. “Rome’s a good place to find out about angels. Lots of history there. Although I met an Intangere in Milan last year, and I learned more from him than any other source.”

  “Hold up. What’s an Intangere?”

  “Silly,” she says like I should have guessed. “That’s the Latin for the full-blooded. It literally means whole, untouched, complete in itself. So there’s the Intangere, Dimidius, Quartarius, you know.”

  “Oh right,” I say like it had just slipped my mind. “So you met a real angel?”

  “Yep. I saw him and I don’t think I was supposed to. We were in this little out-of-the-way c
hurch, and I saw him standing there kind of glowing, so I said hello in Angelic. He looked at me and then grabbed me by the arm and suddenly we were someplace else, but like we were still in the church, too, at the same time.”

  “Sounds like heaven.”

  She frowns and leans closer like she hadn’t heard me correctly.

  “What?”

  “Sounds like he took you to heaven.”

  Her eyes widen with sudden comprehension. “What do you know about heaven?” she asks.

  I flush.

  “Well, not a whole lot. I know that it’s dimensional, that it exists right on top of Earth. Like a curtain, my mom says, a veil. She went there once—I mean, an angel brought her there.”

  “You’re so lucky to have your mom,” Angela says with envy in her eyes. “I have to work so hard to get all my information, and all you have to do is ask.”

  “Well, I can ask,” I say a bit uncomfortably, “but that doesn’t mean she has to answer my questions.”

  Angela looks at me closely.

  “Why wouldn’t she?”

  “I don’t know. She says I have to find out these things on my own, by experience, or some baloney like that. Like earlier, you said your father was a Black Wing. I have no idea what that is. I assume it’s something like a bad angel, but my mom’s certainly never mentioned it.”

  Angela thinks for a minute.

  “A Black Wing is a fallen angel,” she says finally. “I guess they fell a long time ago, closer to the beginning.”

  “Beginning of what?”

  “Time.”

  “Oh. Right. Are their wings really black?”

  “I think so,” she answers. “That’s how you know them. White wings equal good angel, black wings equal bad.”

  Crazy, all that I don’t know. It makes me feel foolish. And uncomfortably curious. And scared. “You just go up and ask them to please show their wings?”