Feather (Angels of Elysium Book 1)

by Olivia Wildenstein

  “You’re not a fool, okay? And I didn’t mention the object of my bet, because it had nothing to do with you.”

  I waited for him to say something snarky or threatening, but what came through the receiver was neither snarky nor threatening. “You’re a romantic, Feather.”

  I glanced down at the water wrapping around the bridge’s foundations, at the gray foam and white whirlpools. “You got that from what? Me telling you I was saving myself for marriage?”

  “No, I got that from your choice of reading material.”

  My arm tightened against my bag, which made my book dig into my waist. Had Amir given Jarod a detailed report of its contents or had Jarod gleaned the storyline from his brief glimpse of the cover?

  “Your appreciation for food,” he continued. “Your conviction that kindness lurks in everyone.”

  “Because it does.”

  “No, it doesn’t.” I was about to argue when he added, “Romantics marry for love. If you need to win a bet to get this guy, then you’re not in love with him.”

  “Of course I’m not in love with him. I’ve only met him once. People don’t fall in love the first time they meet.”

  There was a long pause on his end, as though he were mulling over the fact that a romantic didn’t believe in love at first sight. “I guess I’m wondering why you’re so dead set on marrying this person then.”

  “I have my reasons.” Reasons I didn’t care to share with him.

  “You were willing to spend time with the most reviled man in Paris to win over this person. That tells me you really want to be with him.”

  I sighed. “And what? You care about what I want now?”

  “How much do you want this man?”

  I sighed. “I’ve never wanted anything more.”

  “Then why are you giving up?”

  I stood up a little straighter. “I’m not giving up. I’m changing my method of obtaining it.”

  “Come tomorrow morning.”

  I pushed away from the bridge railing. “Jarod—”

  “Listen to the supplicants. Find one who strikes your fancy, and I’ll help them.”

  I sensed there were strings attached to his offer, and I was afraid of those strings snagging around my feathers and yanking more out. “Is this a trap?”

  “Was tonight a trap?”

  I was still unsure of what tonight had been. Besides a very strange evening.

  “See you in a couple of hours, Feather.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “Sure, I will.”

  “No, you won’t. And tell your driver to stop following me.”

  Jarod didn’t answer.

  “Jarod?”

  When I lowered the phone from my ear, it displayed my home screen. He’d hung up . . . Of course, he’d hung up. I didn’t understand much about Jarod, but I did gather he didn’t like to be told what to do.

  And then, when I was tailed by his chauffeur all the way back to the guild, I gathered one more thing about the Triple: he didn’t take orders from anyone.

  Chapter 18

  I didn’t think I’d run into anyone on my way to the Ranking Room to sign off from my mission, but people were up. Well, two girls. They were checking holo-images of sinners, comparing notes. When I stepped inside the guild, both looked up from their feeds.

  They trailed me with their eyes as I took a seat at the high table and pressed my hand against the glass panel.

  “Are you the American who took on Jarod Adler?” The girl’s blonde hair was cut pixie short which displayed ears festooned with diamond studs.

  The other Fletching turned wide blue eyes on me. “Are you crazy?”

  “I must be to have thought he could be redeemed.” I folded the fabric of my dress until it pleated like an accordion. It was stiffer where the wine had spilled.

  “Chérie, if only you’d asked us. I think twelve of us from this guild tried to help the guy. He’s irredeemable, not to mention a complete ass.”

  “When Laura”—the blue-eyed girl tipped her head toward her friend—“showed up on his doorstep, he told his bodyguard to dispose of the garbage.”

  “Didn’t even spare me a passing glance,” Laura confirmed. “But Leo, from Guild 8—it’s the all-male guild in Paris—he had an even worse time. Jarod made that bulldog of his—what’s his name again?”

  “Ethan?” the other answered.

  “You mean Tristan?” I supplied.

  “Yes. Tristan.” She shuddered. “That guy whipped Leo’s back until it bled.”

  I released my dress, which remained creased. The faint whiff of mulled blackberries and dank cork combined with the image of a flagellated back made bile lurch up my throat.

  “To think Tristan’s sinner score is only seventy-eight. The guy’s a demon with a capital D.”

  Laura toyed with one of her earrings. “Yeah, he’s totally worse than Jarod. Sometimes, I don’t get how the Ishim score sinners.”

  Neither Tristan nor Jarod had seemed like monsters to me—devious and domineering, sure, but not evil executioners. At least, not Tristan. And Jarod . . . well, Jarod had issues and possessed the potential to be cruel, but he also possessed the potential for compassion.

  The thought took me by such surprise that I blinked at his 3-D image flickering from my holo-ranker. I stared into those pitch-black eyes of his, watched his thick lashes sweep over them. If I truly believed this, then why was I signing off from him?

  “You’re from the New York guild?” The girl’s blue eyes blazed against her dark brown skin.

  “I am.”

  “Do you know a Fletching named Eve?”

  “She’s my closest friend.”

  “Huh.” Laura crossed one leg over the other.

  My skin prickled with wariness at her tone. “Why, huh?”

  “Didn’t she tell you to stay away from the Triple?”

  This time, it wasn’t wariness that made my skin crawl. “She warned me he ran the Court of Demons and that was the reason for his high score.”

  The dark-skinned girl pushed her kinky curls behind her ears, but they sprang right back out. “I know we’re not supposed to influence each other, but if you and I were best friends, and I’d already attempted to reform someone like Jarod Adler, I’d find a way to keep you from signing up.”

  “She . . . she took him on?”

  Laura shot me a wary look. “She didn’t tell you?”

  I swallowed, my heart banging harder than when Jarod declared me prisoner in his house.

  “I shouldn’t have said anything. Please don’t tell the Ophanim,” Laura’s friend said. “I just assumed you knew.”

  “I won’t tell anyone.” My voice sounded flat.

  I tucked my chin into my neck and stared at my scarred palm, tracing the pale line with my eyes, watching it shimmer and blur as tears rose. If I didn’t get my weeping under control, I could take the place of the broken angel statue in Jarod’s fountain. I’d fill that basin up before day’s end.

  “Maybe you should get some better friends,” she added.

  “Marie!” Laura hissed.

  “What? It’s not a sin to give advice.”

  “Your friend probably had a reason for not telling you about her time in Paris with Jarod.” Laura was trying to make me feel better about Eve’s betrayal, but her comment had the opposite effect.

  Eve had urged me to select Jarod, because she knew he was an impossible sinner and wanted me to fail. It wasn’t jealousy that had made her lose a feather, but deceit.

  How could you do this to me, Eve?

  I got up brusquely and speed-walked to my borrowed bedroom, the guild’s quartz halls closing in around me. The elysian sky beyond the glass-domed ceiling usually comforted me, but not tonight. Tonight, everything inside of me hurt. I kicked off my shoes after entering my temporary bedroom, forgetting Celeste was inside.

  Celeste who’d warned me Eve wasn’t genuine.

  I’d fought so hard to defend her. D
isappointment made a sob lurch up my throat. I flung myself onto my bed. A minute later, the mattress dipped, and a soft hand touched my spine.

  “Hey . . . what’s up?” Celeste sounded groggy.

  “I’m sorry for waking you,” I croaked.

  “Forget about waking me. What happened, Leigh? Did he hurt you?”

  I shook my head. “Not he. She.”

  “She?”

  “Eve,” I murmured.

  “Eve?”

  My shoulders shook on another sob.

  “Is she here?” This time, there was nothing groggy about Celeste’s voice. It was all steel edges and alarm.

  I sat up and wiped my cheeks on my forearm. “How are you so wise and I’m so stupid?”

  “You’re not stupid, and I’m definitely not wise. I mean, have you seen my wings? I have that whole plucked bird look going for me . . . But more importantly, what did Eve do now?”

  “She told me to pick Jarod.”

  Celeste slanted her eyebrows.

  “She told me to pick him because she knew I would fail,” I added in a splintered voice.

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “She tried to reform him, Celeste.” I crimped my pillow with my fingers. “Eve knew it would be an impossible mission. That’s why she told me to take him on.”

  Celeste’s eyebrows jumped.

  “I lost three feathers, and I haven’t even signed off from him.” My wings would eventually heal, but my heart . . . I wasn’t sure it could ever heal from her duplicity.

  Celeste didn’t say anything, but I could tell thoughts were swirling behind those keen eyes of hers.

  I relaxed my fingers on the pillow and hung my head, my orange hair curtaining off my face. “I should’ve listened to you.”

  “Leigh?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m not going to let you fail.”

  I jerked my head up and fixed her with my swollen eyes.

  “First things first, you’re going to make me a promise. You’re not going to sign off just yet, deal?”

  I swallowed. “But, Celeste—”

  “Deal?” she repeated, tone inflexible.

  I loosed another ragged breath. “Jarod brings out the worst in me. I lost two more feathers for lying!”

  “About what this time?”

  I grimaced. “About wine tasting awful.”

  “You tasted wine?”

  “He made me.”

  She scrunched her nose. “He made you?”

  “He told me that he’d leave and never allow me near him again if I didn’t sample the bottle he served with dinner.”

  “Hold up . . . you had dinner with him?”

  I walked Celeste through my strange evening, not leaving out a single detail. I told her about Jarod’s exhibitionist tendencies—or whatever trying to make me uncomfortable in his bedroom had been—his odd flirtatiousness and even odder phone call and invitation after I’d left. And then I explained how I’d found out about Eve’s betrayal.

  “Everyone on the holo-rankers can be reformed. They wouldn’t be on there if that weren’t the case.” Celeste took both my hands in hers. “Leigh, you’re the most determined and patient angel in the human world.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “Don’t roll your eyes at me. I’m being totes serious right now. You’re the best of our kind.”

  “I’m really not.”

  “You’re the only Fletching in the history of Fletchings who acquired over nine hundred feathers without ever losing one. And you probably wouldn’t have lost any feathers if you hadn’t decided to take on a Triple.”

  “I bet there are others.”

  “No. There aren’t. I actually looked it up because I was curious. Now, go to sleep, and tomorrow, we’ll pay your sinner a little visit.”

  “Celeste, I don’t think . . . I don’t want you to come with me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s the Mafia, honey.”

  “Aw. Are you worried about me?”

  I flicked her wrist. “Yes, I’m worried about you.”

  She shot me a smile that touched her eyes. “Nothing to worry about. I’m the most resilient—and according to your bestie—the most loathsome Fletching flitting around.”

  Annoyance hardened my bones. “Eve called you loathsome?”

  Celeste’s smile grew, dimpling her cheeks. “I called her way worse. Cost me a feather. Well worth it, though.”

  I shook my head. “Celeste, Celeste, Celeste. What am I going to do with you?”

  “You’re going to get your butt to Elysium, marry Asher, and then start changing those stupid laws of ours.”

  For the first time that night, I smiled and swore I’d try my best.

  She stuck out her pinky and wiggled it. “Pinky promise.”

  “Because my word isn’t good enough for you?”

  “Your word’s okay. Your pinky’s better.”

  I didn’t see how my pinky could best my word, but I indulged her and hooked it around hers. And then I gathered her against me and gave her a long hug.

  Into her snarled hair, I said, “I don’t think I can ever forgive Eve for what she did to me.” I breathed in the clean, warm smell of Celeste’s skin, like freshly laundered sheets that had just come out of the dryer. “It’s just you now. Just you.”

  Her wiry arms squeezed me surprisingly hard. “You and me against the human world.”

  I sighed into her hair. “And the angelic one.”

  Chapter 19

  I slept as though someone had clocked me upside the head, a deep, dreamless sleep that eased the throbbing in my temples but did little to soothe the throbbing in my chest.

  Sleep had offered me reprieve, but the instant my lids had opened, Eve’s betrayal had washed through me like an arctic waterfall, leaving me chilled to my wing bone marrow. I curled my fingers around my warm pillow, pondering whether to contact her through the guild’s holo-com system.

  Confronting her while emotional was probably not a good idea. Besides, I didn’t feel like seeing her face on our holographic phone. If she even picked up my call. She was probably too busy collecting one of her fourteen remaining feathers.

  I suddenly remembered her reluctance to take on a sinner in Paris. She must’ve known I would figure out what she’d done.

  A small hurt sound formed at the back of my throat. I tried to stifle it, but it climbed out of me and got lost in the whoosh of the bedroom door carving the air.

  “I was just coming to wake you.” Celeste carried a large mug over to me. “I made you a vanilla latte.”

  “Thank you.” I sat up and took the mug. “I don’t think—I don’t think I want to—”

  “Nuh-uh.” She flung the comforter off my legs. “You’re going, and I’m going with you.”

  “Celeste—”

  “If you don’t go, Eve wins.”

  “Maybe I don’t want to win anymore.”

  “And I don’t want her to win, so get up. Drink your syrupy coffee, then get dressed. We leave in fifteen.”

  I gave Celeste my hardest stare—or tried to. Glaring at her proved quite difficult, considering how she rolled her eyes at my attempt to look angry.

  “Besides, you made a pinky promise. Those are airtight.”

  The arcade was dark with bodies when we arrived on the Place des Vosges at noon, the line of supplicants wrapping around the block. I wondered how long Jarod had been doing this. Unless his uncle had started the monthly tradition?

  “Le culot de ces deux-là.” The gall of those two. A bony hand clasped my forearm and twisted me around. “Hé-oh. Derrière.” Get back in line.

  I shrugged the woman’s hand off. “We’re not here to—”

  Before I could finish my sentence and explain we hadn’t come for an audience with Jarod, Celeste snarled, “Don’t touch my friend.”

  “I’ve been waiting for over two hours!” the woman, who’d gripped my arm, squawked.

  I pul
led Celeste back. “We’re not here for the same reasons you are.”

  The woman knotted her arms in front of her. “Why are you here then?”

  The person behind her, an elderly woman with a cloud of gray hair, wound a protective arm around a young boy.

  The looks lobbed our way ran the gamut from annoyed to concerned to downright aggressive. “Elles sont peut-être des putes,” I heard someone whisper. They’re probably whores.

  “La petite est un peu jeune pour se prostituer, non?” another answered. The small one is a little young to prostitute herself, isn’t she?

  Celeste’s fingers jammed into fists. “We’re not—”

  “Celeste . . . it doesn’t matter.” I grabbed her fist, pried her fingers loose, and dragged her toward the blood-red doors guarded by Amir and another brawny guard dressed in an impeccable suit.

  “Bonjour,” I ventured.

  Without a word, Amir jutted his head toward his fellow guard, who inserted a key in the metal plaque.

  When the woman at the front of the line started forward, elbowing me, Amir shot out his thick arm to bar her way. “Not you.”

  I slid past the woman, then past the two guards, towing Celeste behind me.

  “Just you, Mademoiselle Leigh,” Amir said, propping the door open.

  I was startled he knew my name, but he had rifled through my bag. “Celeste’s my sister.”

  “Jarod mentioned you’d come. He didn’t say anything about a sister.” The way he spoke the word told me he didn’t put much stock in the fact that we were related.

  “Please, Amir,” I said. “She’s just here to keep me company.”

  He took Celeste in. “My orders—”

  “Can you at least ask him?”

  Footsteps resounded, and then familiar blue eyes sparked in the obscurity of the covered porch. “I thought I heard your voice.”

  My heart swayed with relief at the sight of Tristan and then with anguish. As I absorbed his easygoing smile, I decided the two girls I’d met in the Ranking Room had gotten erroneous information. He couldn’t have flogged an innocent Fletching.

  I smiled. “Hi, Tristan.” When I caught his gaze wandering over my shoulder toward Celeste, I said, “This is my sister, Celeste.”