Unearthly

by Cynthia Hand

  “You command them, in Angelic, to show themselves.”

  “And they have to?” I ask.

  “Did it feel like you had a choice when I commanded you?”

  “No, it just happened.”

  “That’s how it is for them too, a kind of tool for immediate identification that’s programmed into them,” she says. “Useful, right?”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “Phen told me. He’s the angel I met in the church. He warned me about the Black Wings.”

  She stops abruptly, dropping her eyes.

  “What?” I prompt gently. “What did he say?”

  She closes her eyes briefly and then opens them. “He said that they might try to find me, someday.”

  “But why would they want to find you?”

  She looks up.

  “Because my father was one. And because they want us,” she says. Her gold eyes are suddenly fierce. “They’re building an army.”

  “Mom!” I scream the minute the door of the house closes behind me. She comes running out of her office, alarm all over her face.

  “What? What is it? Are you hurt?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me there’s a war between the angels?”

  She stops. “What?”

  “Angela Zerbino’s an angel-blood,” I say, still spazzing out. “And she told me that there’s this war that’s going on between the good and bad angels.”

  “Angela Zerbino’s an angel-blood?”

  “Dimidius. Now answer my question.”

  “Well, honey,” she says, still looking confused. “I assumed you knew.”

  “How would I know if you didn’t tell me? You never tell me anything!”

  “There’s both good and evil in this world,” she says after a long pause. “I told you that.”

  I can see how carefully she’s choosing her words, even now. It’s infuriating.

  “Yeah, but you never told me about Black Wings,” I exclaim. “You never told me that they go around recruiting or killing all the angel-bloods they come across.”

  She flinches.

  “So it’s true.”

  “Yes,” she says. “Although I think they are more interested in the Dimidius.”

  “Right, because Quartarius don’t have much power,” I say sarcastically. “I guess I should be relieved, then.”

  Mom’s still processing. “So Angela Zerbino told you she was an angel-blood. She just told you?”

  “Yep. She showed me her wings and everything.”

  “What color were they?”

  “Her wings? White.”

  “How white?” she asks intently.

  “They were a perfect, eye-piercing white, Mom. Why does it matter?”

  “The shade of our wings reflects our standing in the light,” she says. “White Wings have white wings, of course, and Black Wings have black. For most of us in the middle, the offspring, our wings are varying shades of gray.”

  “Your wings have always looked pretty white to me,” I say. I’m instantly struck with the urge to summon my wings, to see what shade they are, to discover what my spiritual state really is. I sure as heck don’t know.

  “My wings are fairly light,” Mom admits, “but not as the new-fallen snow.”

  “Well, Angela’s were white,” I say. “I guess that means she’s a pure soul.”

  Mom goes to the cupboard and gets a glass. She fills it with water at the sink, then stands drinking it slowly. Calmly.

  “A Black Wing raped her mom.” I look at her to see if there’s any reaction to that. None. “She’s worried that someday they’ll show up to collect her. You should have seen her face when she talked about it. Scared. Like, really, really scared.”

  Mom puts the glass down and looks at me. She doesn’t seem at all rattled by anything I’ve told her. Which rattles me even more. And then I realize.

  “You already knew about Angela,” I say. “How?”

  “I have my sources. She hasn’t exactly tried to hide her abilities. For someone who’s worried about Black Wings, she’s not being very careful. And to reveal herself to you like that. It’s reckless.”

  I stare at her. At that moment it fully dawns on me how much my mother hasn’t told me.

  “You’ve been lying to me,” I say. “I tell you everything, and you’ve been lying to me.”

  She meets my eyes, startled by my accusation. “No, I haven’t. There are just some things that—”

  “Are there a lot of angel-bloods in Jackson Hole?”

  She seems hurt by my sudden question. She doesn’t answer.

  I pick up my backpack from where I tossed it onto the kitchen floor and head for my room.

  “Hey,” says Mom. “I’m still talking to you.”

  “No, apparently you’re not.”

  “Clara,” she calls after me in an exasperated voice. “If I don’t tell you everything, it’s for your own protection.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. How does being clueless protect me?”

  “What else did Angela tell you?”

  “Nothing.”

  I go into my room and slam the door, take off my coat, and throw it on the bed, fighting the urge to scream, or cry, or both. Then I go to the mirror and summon my wings, gathering them around in front of me so I can see the feathers more closely. They’re fairly white, I think, running my hand over them. Not as the new-fallen snow, as my mother said, but still white.

  Not as white as Angela’s, though.

  I hear Mom come down the hall. She stops in front of my door. I wait for her to knock or come in and tell me that she doesn’t want me hanging out with Angela anymore, for my own protection. But she doesn’t. She just stands there for a minute. Then I hear her walk away.

  I wait for a while, until I’m sure that Mom is safely downstairs again, and then I sneak down the hall to Jeffrey’s room. He’s sitting at his desk with his laptop, typing away, chatting with someone by the looks of it. When he sees me he types something really fast, then jumps up to face me. I turn the music down a notch so I can hear myself think.

  “Did you tell her you’d b-r-b?” I say with a smirk. “What’s her name, anyway? No point denying it. It will be more embarrassing for you if I have to ask around at school.”

  “Kimber,” he concedes immediately. “Her name’s Kimber.” His expression stays neutral, but I can see a hint of red creeping into his ears.

  “Pretty name. The blond girl, I assume?”

  “You didn’t come in here just to mock me, right?”

  “Well, that’s pretty fun, but no. I wanted to tell you something.” I move a pile of dirty laundry off his beanbag chair and sit on it. My breath catches for a second, like I’m breaking a rule, Mom’s all-important “don’t tell your kids anything” rule, as a matter of fact. But I’m sick of living in the dark. And I’m ticked off, ticked off at everything, at my whole crappy life and all the people in it. I need to vent.

  “Angela Zerbino’s an angel-blood,” I say.

  He blinks.

  “Who?”

  “She’s a junior, tall, long black hair, kind of Emo, gold eyes. Loner.”

  He looks at the ceiling thoughtfully like he’s calling up Angela’s face in his mind. “How do you know she’s an angel-blood?”

  “She told me. But that’s not the right question, Jeffrey.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What you should be asking is why Angela Zerbino told me that she was an angel-blood. And if you asked me that, I would answer that she told me because she knew that I was an angel-blood.”

  “Huh? How did she know you were an angel-blood?”

  “See, now that’s the right question,” I say. I lean forward. “She knew because she saw you take on the wrestling team last month. She watched you wrestle Toby Jameson, who probably weighs two hundred pounds, without even working up a sweat. And she said to herself, wow, that guy’s a good wrestler, he must be an angel.”

  His face actually pale
s. It’s mildly satisfying. Of course I’m leaving out some of the other troublesome details, my stupid thing about the birds and French class and the way I ogled her angel shirt, falling so neatly into her trap. But Jeffrey was the linchpin: She was only certain that we were something more than human after she observed him on the wrestling mat that day.

  “Did you tell Mom?” He looks a little green at the thought. Because if I told Mom, that’d be it for Jeffrey. No more wrestling, or baseball in the spring, or football in the fall or whatever he was dreaming up. He’d probably be grounded until college.

  “No,” I say. “Although she’s bound to ask the right question herself, sooner or later.” It’s kind of odd, come to think of it, that she hasn’t asked me yet. Maybe her sources already told her that, too.

  “Are you going to tell her?” he asks, so softly I can hardly hear him over the music. His expression is truly pathetic, and where a few moments before anger surged through me, now I feel drained and sad.

  “No. I just wanted to tell you. I don’t know why. I wanted you to know.”

  “Thanks,” he says. He gives a short, humorless laugh. “I think.”

  “Don’t mention it. I mean ever. Really.” I get up to leave.

  “I feel like a cheater,” he says then. “All the ribbons and medals and trophies I won in California, they don’t mean anything. It’s like I was taking steroids, only I didn’t know it.”

  I know exactly what he means. It’s why I dropped out of ballet, even though I loved it, and why I never picked it up again in Jackson. It felt dishonest, doing so easily, so naturally, what the other girls had to work so hard to accomplish. It was unfair, I thought, to take the attention away from them when I had such a huge advantage. So I quit.

  “But if I hold myself back, I feel like a fake,” says Jeffrey. “And that’s worse.”

  “I know.”

  “I won’t do it,” he says. I look into his dead-serious gray eyes. He swallows, but holds my gaze. “I won’t hold myself back. I won’t pretend to be less than I am.”

  “Even if it puts us in danger?” I ask, glancing away.

  “What danger? Angela Zerbino’s dangerous?”

  That’s when I’m supposed to tell him about the Black Wings. There are bad angels now, angels that hunt us and sometimes kill us. There are shades of gray we didn’t know about before, and it’s something that I should tell him, something that he needs to know, but his eyes are pleading with me not to take any more away from him.

  Mom told us that we’re special, but what kind of “gift” comes with a war between angels as the strings attached? Maybe I don’t want any more taken from me either. Maybe I don’t want to be remarkable, don’t want to fly or speak some bizarre angel language or save the world one hot guy at a time. I just want to be human.

  “Watch yourself, okay?” I tell Jeffrey.

  “I will.” Then he adds, “Thanks. . . . You’re all right sometimes, you know.”

  “Remember that next time you’re dragging me out of bed at five in the morning,” I say wearily. “Tell Kimber I said hi, by the way.”

  Then I escape to my room and lay in the dark turning the words Black Wing over and over in my head.

  Chapter 8

  Blue Square Girl

  This morning the sun’s so bright it feels like I’m standing on a frozen cloud. I’m at the top of a run called Wide Open. It’s a double blue square—more difficult than green circle, but not black diamond level. I’m getting there. The valley below is so white and serene it’s hard to believe it’s the first week of March.

  I readjust my goggles, slip my hands into my poles, and flex forward in my boots to test the bindings. All set. I launch myself down the mountain. The cold air whips the exposed part of my face, but I’m grinning like an idiot. It feels so good, the closest I can come to flying. I almost feel the presence of my wings in moments like these, even though they’re not there. There’s a section of moguls on one side of the run, and I try them out, lifting and dropping in and out of them. It makes me aware of the strength of my knees, my legs. I’m getting good at moguls. And powder, which is literally like pushing through cloud, sinking up to your knees in fluffy white snow that flies out behind you as you go. I like to hit the runs first thing in the morning after a new snow, so I can carve my own path through the fresh powder.

  I’ve got it bad for skiing. Too bad the season’s almost over.

  Wide Open deposits me at South Pass Traverse, a trail that cuts almost horizontally across the mountain. I straighten my skis and push off to gain momentum, cutting through the trees. There’s a bird singing back there somewhere, and when I pass by it stops. The trail opens up onto another groomed slope, Werner, one of my faves, and I stop at the edge. People are setting up giant slalom gates on the hill. Race today.

  Which means that Christian will be here.

  “What time’s the race?” I call to one of the guys setting up.

  “High noon,” he calls back.

  I check my watch. It’s a few minutes before eleven. I should go eat, then take the big quad chair up to the top of Werner and watch the race.

  At the lodge I spot Tucker Avery having lunch with a girl. This is a new development. I’ve spent almost every weekend this winter at Teton Village (yay Mom for not scoffing at the ridiculously expensive season pass) and almost every weekend I see Tucker sometime in the afternoon, after he’s done with his morning teaching on the bunny hill. But it’s not like I’m bumping into him all over the mountain. He’s more of a backcountry skier, off the groomed trails. I haven’t tried that kind of thing yet—apparently it requires a partner so if something terrible happens to one of you the other can go for help. I’m not into the extreme stuff—my goal is to become a black diamond girl, nothing fancy. Teton Village is funny, with its signs always reminding you that THIS MOUNTAIN IS NOTHING YOU’VE EVER EXPERIENCED BEFORE and if you don’t know what you’re doing, YOU JUST MAY DIE. The backcountry signs say stuff like BEYOND THIS POINT IS A HIGH RISK AREA, WHICH HAS MANY HAZARDS INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, AVALANCHES, CLIFFS, AND HIDDEN OBSTACLES. YOU MAY BE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE COST OF YOUR RESCUE and I think, um, no thanks. I choose life.

  Is this girl talking to Tucker now his backcountry partner? I take a few discreet steps to the side so I can see her face. It’s Ava Peters. She’s in my chemistry class, definitely one of the pretty people, a little busty with that superlight blond hair that almost looks white. Her dad owns a white-water rafting company. It doesn’t surprise me to see Tucker with a popular girl, even though he’s definitely a Have-Not. At school I’ve noticed that he’s one of those guys who seems to get along with everybody. Everybody but me, that is.

  Ava’s wearing too much eye makeup. I wonder if he likes that kind of thing.

  He glances over at me and smirks before I have a chance to look away. I smirk back, then try to saunter over to the deli counter, but I can’t pull it off. It’s impossible to saunter in ski boots.

  I stand with a few spectators on the side of Werner run and watch Christian hurl himself at the gates, sometimes grazing them with his shoulders as he passes through. It’s graceful, the way his body bends toward the gate, his skis coming up onto their edges and his knees nearly brushing the snow. His movements so careful, so purposeful. His lips pursed in concentration.

  After he blasts through the finish line I penguin-walk over to where he’s watching the other racers run the course and say hello.

  “Did you win?” I ask.

  “I always win. Except when I don’t. This was one of the don’ts.” He shrugs like he doesn’t care, but I can tell by his face that he’s unhappy with his performance

  “You looked good to me. Fast, I mean.”

  “Thanks,” he says. He fiddles with the number that’s strapped to his chest: 9. It makes me think of 99CX, his license plate.

  “Are you trying for the Olympics?”

  He shakes his head. “Nope. I’m on the ski team, not the ski club.”

>   I must look confused, because he smiles and says, “The ski team’s the high school’s official team, which only competes against other teams from Wyoming. The ski club’s where all the hard-core people go, the skiers who get sponsors and national recognition and all that.”

  “Don’t you want to win gold medals?”

  “I was in club, for a while. But it’s a little too intense for me. Too much pressure. I don’t want to be a professional skier. I just like skiing. I like racing.” He grins suddenly. “The speed is very addictive.”

  Yes it is. I smile. “I’m still trying to make it down the hill in one piece.”

  “How’s that going? Getting the hang of it?”

  “Better every day.”

  “Pretty soon you’ll be ready for the racecourse, too.”

  “Yep, and then you’d better watch out.”

  He laughs. “I’m sure you’ll crush me.”

  “Right.”

  He looks around like he’s expecting someone to join us. It makes me nervous, like any moment Kay will materialize out of thin air and tell me to step away from her boyfriend.

  “Does Kay ski, too?” I ask.

  He gives a short laugh. “No, she’s a lodge bunny. If she comes at all. She knows how to ski, but she says she gets too cold. She hates ski season, because I can’t really do stuff with her on the weekends.”

  “That sucks.”

  He looks around again.

  “Yeah,” he says.

  “Kay’s in my English class. She never says much. I always wonder if she’s even read the books.”

  Okay, so my mouth is completely disconnected from my brain. I look at his face to see if I’ve offended him. But he only laughs again, a longer, warmer laugh this time.

  “She takes honors classes to look good on the college apps, but books aren’t really her thing,” he says.

  I don’t want to think about what her thing might be. I don’t want to think about Kay at all, but now that we’re talking about her, I’m curious.

  “When did you and Kay start going out?”

  “Fall, sophomore year,” he answers. “She’s a cheerleader, and back then I played football, and at the homecoming game she got hurt doing a liberty twist. I think that’s what it’s called—Kay usually tells the story. But she fell and hurt her ankle.”