by Curd, Megan
Angie let out a shrill scream that could break windows. She was sputtering and pointing, which made Ethan look back at her in confusion.
The crash was deafening.
Hannah flew off the seat and into the tiny foot space. As I pulled her back up, Ethan cussed.
I yelled at him over the noise he was making. “What happened?”
“Owen happened.”
My blood ran cold. I shoved Hannah back down in the space and motioned for her to stay quiet. Thankfully she did without question.
Owen had come to strip my wings. I knew it. He stood casually in front of the front windshield, what used to be the front end of the car now twisted and contorted to conform around his figure.
He traced the dent he’d made with a finger, never looking up at us. I already had a hand over Angie’s mouth to keep her from screaming, but when I knew she would keep it together, I let it go. She looked at me with questions all but exploding out of her. She’d have to wait.
There was a crunch of the metal protesting when Owen pulled himself out of the front-end carnage. He strolled casually over to the driver’s window and slipped his fingers in the crack Ethan had left open. Without any effort he pushed the window down on his own. “You guys having fun on your little adventure with humans?”
Ethan’s mouth opened and closed like a fish trying to breathe. “Owen, uh, look – ”
Owen held up a hand that silenced Ethan on a dime. “I’m not here to punish anyone.”
It was my turn to gape at him. “What?”
He turned his gaze on me and smiled sympathetically. He took two steps to reach the back seat doors. “Ah, Levi. The one that’s causing the ruckus.”
With no warning at all, the left back door was ripped off its hinges. Owen stared at me as he crumpled the corner of the door like it was no more than paper. “You shouldn’t have done this, kid. I was trying to help you out by warning you.”
I opened my mouth to respond, but he threw the car door to the ground, making all of us jump. “No, no, you don’t get to talk,” Owen said as he came and sat down beside me. He looked down and saw Hannah, and his smile grew even wider. “So this is your little human friend.”
He took her chin in his hands and turned her face from side to side. After the inspection, he let her go. Hannah remained silent, but I could tell she was seething. She was too strong to not want to fight back, but I was thankful she was keeping that strength to herself right now. She eyed him with a fierceness that not even I could match. That girl was amazing.
Owen knew it, too. He turned his attention to me and gave me an approving pat on the back. “She’s got spunk, I’ll give you that, Levi.”
“What do you want, Owen? If you’re here for a reason, get to it.”
Owen cracked his knuckles and looked around nonchalantly. “No reason, just wanted to visit,” he leaned in close to my ear, “But I think you should know that the Hunters are coming for you.”
Ethan heard him and spun around in his seat. “If you know this, why are you telling it to us?”
“Because contrary to popular belief, I do kind of like you, Ethan. You listen. Levi here can be a bit rash, but he’s got heart. I’m hoping I can convert him into a good Guard yet,” Owen said. His face was clean and earnest.
I couldn’t figure out what he was playing at. He stood up and got out of the now demolished car. “Don’t pretend to think we don’t know where you’re going,” he said loudly. “We always know where you’re going.”
Once more he went to Ethan’s door and leaned in, his voice barely above a whisper. “But I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt, and also giving you a head start on the Hunters. I wasn’t supposed to come here, but I’m serious when I say I like you guys. If you abandon the girls before they get to you, you’ll be fine. I’ll vouch for you. Your wings won’t be stripped. If not…” his voice trailed off and he shrugged his shoulders. “I’m on your side, guys. Just get out of this mess clean and leave the girls to their fate.”
He stood to go. Before he left, he tapped the front end of the car with disinterest. The car immediately righted itself. Even the little Mercedes hood emblem flew from its resting spot a few feet away and sealed itself back on the front of the car. Owen bowed his head and smiled. “Continue on, gentlemen. You’ve been warned.”
* * *
It took us a moment to get everything under control in the car again. Ethan sped off as fast as possible, while I tried to do damage control for the girls. Either by an amazing stroke of luck or divine intervention, Reina’s house was only ten minutes away. I hedged the questions for just long enough before Ethan called to the three of us in the back.
“Alright, Romeo, wipe the shell shock off your face and get ready to meet your other girlfriend, Reina. Be nice. Act like a normal Guard and don’t look like you’re attached to the human, okay?”
“I’m not – ”
“Oh yes you are, and there’s no denying it anymore. We’ll enroll you in some anonymous group when this is all over with. The first step of recovery is admitting you have a problem, remember? Newsflash: you’re in deep doo-doo right now and this is not a Caribbean cruise we’re on. So pull it together and act like you have some of the sense I’ve seen in you the past hundred years.”
He stopped in front of a dilapidated trailer that sat precariously close to the edge of a ravine. The left half was missing the roof and walls. It looked like something had ripped the trailer in half.
Angie hopped out of the car with Ethan, apparently intent on making him as miserable as possible. She had gone after him, unloading question after question. I had to laugh at her insistence on being a pain. Ethan needed someone who could match him in that arena.
I nudged Hannah gently. “We’re here.”
She looked out on the unsightly place with a bit of disgust. Her nose wrinkled in distaste, and it made me laugh. “A Guardian lives here?”
“I guess so.”
She rubbed her eyes. “I don’t feel that good.”
“That’s understandable. You’ve been attacked by otherworldly things, found out you were supposed to die, and now you’re on the run with a couple dead guys,” I joked, trying to make her laugh.
It worked, but her laugh turned into a cough. She looked at me and shivered. “Sorry, must be getting a cold or something.”
I rubbed my hands quickly up and down her arms. She was cold. I took off my hoodie and gave it to her. “Here, warm up. Stay near me.”
She nodded. “I wasn’t planning on doing anything else.”
We met Angie and Ethan a couple hundred feet away. Ethan looked miserable, but not as much as he had when this ordeal began. It must have been because we were meeting Reina. I took in the trailer in shocked awe.
An outdoor table complete with a patched, white overhead umbrella sat on disgusting, smashed down brown carpet. It looked like no one had lived here for a very long time.
Ethan walked up to the tin door that was hanging on by a hinge and knocked delicately. There was no sound but the wind. After five minutes, I glanced at Hannah. She looked like she might be sick. “Ethan, she must not be here. Hannah doesn’t feel good, so I’m going to put her back in the car. We should just go. It doesn’t feel right here, anyway.”
Just then Ethan flew off the cement block that doubled as the step to the door like he’d been electrocuted. He landed back by the car, his hair standing on end. I laughed. “Dude, you look like you just licked a light socket.”
“He deserves worse than that for even coming back to my property,” mused a singsong voice from the trailer. We turned back around, but when I tried to look at the person who spoke, the light blinded me.
I hit my knees and shielded my eyes, the light still pouring through the cracks in my fingers. Hannah was still standing, albeit shakily. Why wasn’t she affected? She spoke to the voice. “I’m Hannah, and this is my Guard, Levi. That’s my best friend, Angie, over there,” she gestured to the pink folding chair Angie ha
d taken residence in nearby, “and I know you’ve had the displeasure of meeting Ethan already. I apologize for that.”
The voice’s pealing laughter was infectious. I could feel myself smiling in spite of the pain my eyes were in from trying to look at her. It was pure, clean, and undiluted. I’d never heard such happiness. My stomach hurt from the desire to have happiness like that for my own.
Her light seemed to dim, or maybe I was just getting used to it. Either way, I could finally look at her. She smiled at Hannah in a motherly way, even though she didn’t look too much older herself. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-one when she passed on. “You are a curious human, young one. I like you,” the voice said. “I’m Reina. How did you find me?”
“Actually, I guess it was time for –”
Ethan cut Hannah off before she could do much damage. “It was time for me to come and apologize for being a jerk last time, and I thought you’d appreciate meeting all my friends as well.”
Reina’s eyes narrowed. “Ethan, I may be inherently good, but that doesn’t mean I’m inherently an idiot,” she gestured to Hannah. “Continue, please.”
Hannah looked at me, questioning if she should talk. In our moment of wordless conversation, Reina was beside me with her hand on my shoulder. “Guard, is there something you need to discuss with your Call?” Her voice was gentle, but I could hear the double meaning. “That would be most interesting, since you should not be on speaking terms with her in the first place.”
“It was my fault,” Hannah said boldly. “I pushed him to speak to me.”
“How did you even know he existed?”
“He saved me from a Fallen in Rome,” Hannah explained, “I would have died otherwise.”
“In Rome? When were you in Rome?”
“Last week.”
Reina nodded thoughtfully, then looked at me. “She knows too much.”
“I know, I’m sorry. It isn’t conventional for a Call to know. It’s in the rules, I know. It’s just that she isn’t a conventional Call. There’s something different with her. I’m connected to her in ways that I haven’t been with Calls in the past. No one will tell me her soul status, no one even told me anything about her death, just that she’d die.”
“Then why is the other one still alive? Ethan, are you saying the same is true for your Call?”
Ethan blanched when addressed by Reina. He was as white as a sheet. “No, not in the slightest, my Queen,” he smiled at her, regaining some of his usual playboy flair. “She’s a Kind Soul. She was supposed to die yesterday along with little miss ‘Different’ here in a car accident. I was privy to all the necessary information for my Call’s death, ma’am.”
“May I ask why you didn’t allow her to die, then?”
Angie shifted uneasily in her lawn chair at the response that Reina had given. “Hey now, I’m sitting right here.”
Reina turned on her. “Yes, I know you are, yet the question still remains. Why are you still among the living if your time has come and gone?”
Ethan interrupted before Angie could make a good retort. “I responded in a manner that is unacceptable. My train of thought was to aid Levi. I should have allowed my Call’s time to end. All that came to mind was that Angie was Hannah’s best friend, and allowing one of them to die may have affected the other. You know, Siamese twins and all that. The girls are weird.”
Reina laughed, and once more the air was filled with an almost tangible happiness. “Ethan, for once in your life, you may be correct. These two are key, and keeping them both alive was an intelligent thing to do…in a completely idiotic way.”
Just then a shrill howl drifted into the yard from the wooded area. Reina took two steps forward and rubbed her arms as though she were cold. “Let’s get inside. Things really do go bump in the night out here.”
Ethan chuckled. “You forget where we hail from. I don’t think anything that goes ‘bump in the night’ is something that we can’t handle or haven’t seen.”
“I don’t think you want to know exactly what’s doing the bumping,” Reina said solemnly, “It may very well surprise you.”
Ethan didn’t respond. As another howl ripped through the air, Hannah doubled over and began to cough. I put my hand on her back and allowed her to brace herself on me. “Hannah, are you okay?”
She didn’t say anything as she stared at her hand. Her face was frozen in fear. I kept staring into her eyes, waiting on her to respond. “Hannah,” I said as I shook her gently, “What’s wrong?”
“This isn’t normal, is it?”
My mouth dropped when she lifted her hand to show it to the rest of us.
Her hand was painted with her own blood, except it was tinged with green.
Reina was the first to respond. “No, my dear, it’s not.”
FIFTEEN
Everything was a blur. Ethan and I gathered our Calls with the inhuman speed we were capable of, while Reina circled the area to make sure things were clear. It was barely five minutes that Reina was gone, but it felt like forever. Hannah was curled in my arms crying. It was obvious she was trying not to cough. I felt her fight back another round of coughing fits and rubbed her back in response. “Hannah, it’s gonna be okay. We’ll figure out what’s wrong.”
Ethan paced back and forth as he rubbed the back of his head. His mop of hair was unkempt as usual. “How is this possible? We protected them from the Fallen. Nothing’s happened to her. You’ve protected her, haven’t you?”
My body tensed from the accusation laced in Ethan’s voice. “Of course I’ve protected her! That’s my job! Maybe it’d be easier if I wasn’t doubling up when you decide to go flirt with Guardians.”
“Don’t you blame the fact that your Call is infected on me. A Fallen shouldn’t have even gotten close enough to make that an issue.”
I couldn’t believe he’d just said that. How was this possible? “Infected? What happened?”
Reina announced her arrival by halting in front of us and bringing a slight wind behind her from her speed. When she looked into my eyes, it was like she could see my soul. If I had one, that is. “Levi, what’s happened to your Call?”
I didn’t answer right away, since admitting everything that happened in the past twenty-four hours would probably get me killed on the spot. Reina pushed us all inside her home, looking behind her as we entered. She examined Hannah’s hand, where the tainted blood stained in the crevices. Reina nodded grimly. “Her blood is still mostly red; it can be fixed if we work quickly. Get in here and don’t touch anything.”
While the outside had been a quantifiable train wreck, the inside was amazing. The tile in the entryway was white marble. Most of the walls were made of glass, allowing us to look into the other rooms. It was massive; how it all fit into half of a double wide I have no clue. If Hannah hadn’t been coughing against my chest, I might have taken the time to look around more.
Reina continued to prod us along like cattle down the lengthy corridor. We reached what looked like the kitchen area through the glass. She sat us all down around a massive mahogany dinner table that could have sat probably twenty people and handed Hannah a white towel. “Take this, please.”
Hannah nodded and clutched the towel with pleading in her eyes as she watched Reina speed from the room. She turned to me, barely keeping her panic under the surface. “What’s happening to me?”
“You’re transitioning,” Ethan said before I could find a gentler way to put it. “Let’s just say this: if we don’t reverse it, your looks won’t be winning you homecoming queen anytime soon.”
I hugged Hannah closer and breathed in her intoxicating scent. “It’s okay, we’ll get it taken care of. Reina said we could fix it.”
Angie pounded the table right next to Ethan, causing him to jump. “Aren’t you capable of any kind of compassion?”
Ethan looked genuinely shocked that Angie would even ask. “No, I’m not. None of the Guards are. No emotions, remember? We don’t feel anything
but pain. I come by my jerk tendencies naturally. You, on the other hand, are supposed to be a Kind Soul. I have yet to see that label proven correct.”
She shrugged his jibe off and continued. “Then why is Levi capable of caring?”
“Because he, too, is transitioning,” Reina said after entering without a sound.
This was news to me. “I didn’t think a Fallen affected a Guard. We’re not that different,” I said sadly. Hannah’s shocked eyes and recoil made me amend the comment. “Not that different in pecking order, I mean.”
“That’s correct,” Reina said thoughtfully, “But I believe you’re transitioning up, while Hannah is transitioning down.”
For a split second my heart soared. “I’m becoming a Guardian? How?”
Reina smiled. “Somehow, your Call has managed to start the process. It’s unbelievable, but that’s the only thing I can come up with. Somehow she’s made you feel again. You will transition within the year completely. Show me your wings,” she commanded.
I let go of Hannah only after making sure she could support herself for the moment I’d be gone. “Please don’t look,” I asked her. She nodded and closed her eyes.
After taking off my hoodie, I let the familiar pain rip down my back. Moments later the whooshing sound of my wings announced the pain was over.
“Holy –”
“Don’t curse in here, Ethan,” Reina chided, cutting him off before he could get struck by lightning or something for cursing in front of a Guardian. She walked over to me, running her hands across my wings and bringing them forward so I could see them. “See? You’re transitioning.”
A Guard’s wings were black. No exceptions, no substitutions, nada. Mine, however, had taken on a steely grey color. When I moved, the color changed ever so slightly, giving them an almost iridescent glow.
Ethan was pissed. “Well, hell! If I knew breaking every rule in the rulebook and then falling for a human would get me to become a Guardian, I’d have done it long ago!”