by Cynthia Hand
I sigh. “I don’t know.”
“Why haven’t you told Billy? That’s the entire reason she became your guardian, you know, to help you through stuff like this.”
Because she’s not my mom, I think.
“Billy just got married,” I explain. “I didn’t want to spill my depressing guts all over her on her honeymoon, and Angela, well, she had her own thing going on in Italy.”
“What thing?” he asks, frowning.
I bite my lip. I wish I could tell him about Phen.
“Who’s Phen?” Christian asks with a hint of a smile, able to pick that much out of my head. “Wait, wasn’t he the angel who told Angela about the Black Wings all those years ago?” His eyes widen as they meet mine. “He’s the mysterious Italian boyfriend?”
It’s official. I suck at keeping secrets, especially from him.
“Hey! No mind reading! I can’t talk about it!” I sputter. “I promised.”
“Then stop thinking about it,” he says, which is like someone telling you not to think of an elephant, which of course is the first image that pops into your brain. “Whoa. Angela and an angel. What’s this about the gray wings?”
“Christian!”
“He’s not a Black Wing, is he?” Christian looks genuinely worried, the way he always does whenever the topic of Black Wings comes up. They killed his mother, after all.
“No, he’s not—” I stop myself. “I would have told you if—Christian!”
“Sorry,” he mutters, but he’s not very sorry at all. “So, uh … back to your vision. And why you kept it to yourself this long. Because that, I’m pretty sure, you are allowed to tell me.”
I’m relieved to be off the subject of Angela, although the vision stuff is not any easier to talk about. I sigh.
“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to be having a vision,” I confess. “Not right now.”
He nods like he understands, but I get a flicker of pain from him.
“I’m sorry I didn’t say something about it earlier,” I say. “I should have.”
“I didn’t tell you mine, either,” he says. “For basically the same reason. I wanted to be a regular college student for a little while. Act like I have a normal life.” He gazes up through the windshield into the peach-colored sky. A vee of ducks is cutting its way across the horizon, heading south. We watch the birds ride the air. I wait for him to start talking again.
“It’s ironic,” he says. “You’ve been having a vision of dark, and I’ve been having a vision of light.”
“What do you mean?”
“All I can see is light. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. Just light. It took me a few times to figure out what it is.”
I’m holding my breath. “What what is?”
“The light.” He looks over at me. “It’s a sword.”
My mouth drops open. “A sword?”
“A flaming sword.”
“Shut the front door,” I gasp.
He does his laugh/exhale thing. “At first all I could think was, How great is this? I’m wielding a flaming sword. A sword made of fire. Awesome, right?” His smile fades. “But then I started thinking about what it could mean, and when I told my uncle about it this summer, he completely freaked out. He started me doing push-ups on the spot.”
“But why?”
“Because obviously I’m going to have to fight.” He clasps his hands together behind his neck and sighs.
“Who?” I’m almost afraid to ask.
“I have no idea.” He drops his hands, his smile mournful as he looks at me. “But Walter is trying to make sure that I’m prepared for whoever it is.” He shrugs.
“Wow,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well, we’re kidding ourselves if we think we’re ever going to be allowed to lead normal lives, aren’t we?” he says.
Silence. Finally I say, “We’ll figure it out, Christian.”
He nods, but there’s something else that’s bothering him, a grief that reverberates through me and makes me look up to meet his eyes. Then I know without having to ask that Walter’s dying and that it’s the one-hundred-and-twenty-years rule.
“Oh, Christian. When?” I whisper.
Soon. A few months, is his best guess. He doesn’t want me to be there, he says silently, because he doesn’t think he’ll be able to say it out loud. It hurts him so much, Walter telling him to stay away, the idea that he might never get to spend time with him again. He doesn’t want me to see him like that.
I understand. At the end my mom was so weak she couldn’t even walk to the bathroom. That was one of the worst parts of it, the indignity of it all. Her body giving out. Giving up.
I scoot over and slip my hand into his, which startles him. The familiar electricity passes between us, making me feel stronger. Braver. I rest my head on his shoulder. I try to comfort him the way he’s always managed to comfort me.
I’m right here, I tell him. I’m not going anywhere. For what it’s worth.
“Thanks.”
“Forget all the gloom-and-doom stuff,” I say after a while. “Let’s just live a little.”
“Okay. Sounds like a plan.”
I pull away, glance at the clock on the dashboard. Seven forty-five—plenty of time, I think. I know something that will make us both feel better.
“Where are we off to now?” Christian asks.
“You’ll like it,” I say, starting the car. “I promise.”
An hour later I park the car near the visitor center at Big Basin Redwoods State Park and hop out.
“Follow me,” I say, and head off beneath the towering trees toward the Pine Mountain Trail.
I’m surprised that I remember the way, but I do. I remember like it was yesterday. It’s shaping up to be a sunny day, but it’s cool in the shadow of the giant redwoods. There aren’t any other hikers along the path, and I get the eerie sense that Christian and I are the only two people on earth, like somehow we’ve wandered back into a time before the dawn of man, and any moment now a woolly mammoth is going to step out of the trees to confront us.
Christian stays a few steps behind me as we hike, a quiet appreciation for the beauty of this place rolling off him. He doesn’t hesitate when we reach Buzzards Roost and have to do a bit of rock climbing. Within moments we’re at the top of the ridge, gazing across the valley of enormous trees, blue coastal mountains in the distance, the gleam of the ocean barely visible beyond them.
“Wow,” he breathes, turning in a slow circle, taking it all in.
“That’s what I said, the first time.” I sit down on a boulder, lean back to soak in the sun. “This is where my mom brought me to tell me about the angels, when I was fourteen. She said it was her thinking spot, and now that I live here again, I think it could be mine, too. I’m supposed to find a thinking spot for happiness class. A safe zone, the professor calls it.”
“How’s happiness class going, by the way?”
“Okay, so far.”
“Are you feeling happy?” he asks with the hint of a smirk.
I shrug. “The professor says that happiness is wanting what you have.”
Christian makes a thoughtful noise in the back of his throat. “I see. Happiness is wanting what you have. Well, there you go. So what’s the problem, then?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why is the class only okay?”
“Oh.” I bite my lip, then confess. “Every time I meditate, I start glowing.”
His mouth opens. “Every time?”
“Well, not every time now, since I figured out how it works. Every time that I do it the way you’re supposed to—empty my mind, focus on the present; you know, just be, remember?—whenever I actually get into it, then boom. Glorified.”
He gives a disbelieving chuckle. “So what do you do?”
“I spend the first five minutes of every class trying not to meditate while all the other students are trying to meditate.”
I sigh. “Which is not conducive to the whole stress-relief thing.”
He laughs, a full-blown, delighted kind of laugh, like he finds the whole thing hilarious. It’s a great sound, warm, spine-tingly, and it makes me want to laugh too, but I only smile and shake my head sadly like, What else can I do?
“Sorry,” he says. “But that’s too funny. All last year you stood up on the stage at the Pink Garter and you tried so hard to achieve glory, and you couldn’t, and now you have to work to hold it back.”
“That’s what we call irony.” I get to my feet, brush dirt off my jeans. “All right. Not that I don’t enjoy chatting with you, Christian, but I didn’t bring you up here to talk.”
He squints up at me. “What?”
I take off my hoodie and toss it down next to him.
Now he really looks confused. I turn my back to him and summon my wings, stretch them over my head, flex. When I glance over at him again, he’s standing, staring with a kind of yearning admiration at my feathers, which gleam white in the sun.
He wants to touch them.
“Clara—” he says breathlessly, and takes a step forward, and reaches out.
I leap off the rock. The wind rushes me, cold and greedy, but my wings open and carry me up and up. I sweep out and away from Buzzards Roost, skimming the trees, laughing. It’s been forever since I’ve flown. There’s nothing on earth that makes me feel happier than this.
I circle back. Christian’s still on the rock, watching me. He’s taken off his jacket. He unfolds his gorgeous white and black-speckled wings, steps to the edge of the rock, and looks down.
“Are you coming or what?” I call.
He grins, then lifts off the top of the rock in two powerful beats of his wings. My breath catches. We’ve never flown together before, not like this, not in the light of day, unimpeded, without there being something terrible we were flying away from or something scary we were flying toward. We’ve never flown for fun.
He zips by me, so fast all I see is a streak against the blue of the sky. He’s a better flier than I am, more gifted at it, more practiced. He hardly has to flap his wings to stay aloft. He simply flies, like Superman, cutting through the air.
Come on, slowpoke, he says. Get the lead out.
I laugh and start after him.
Today it’s just us and the wind.
4
THE LABYRINTH
That night I dream of Tucker and me, riding Midas on a forest trail. I’m sitting behind him, my legs pressed against his as the horse shifts under us, my arms draped loosely around his chest. My head is filled with the smell of pine and horse and Tucker. I’m completely relaxed, enjoying the sun on my shoulders, the breeze in my hair, the feel of his body against mine. He is all things warm, and good, and strong. He is mine. I lean into him, press a kiss to his shoulder through his blue plaid shirt.
He turns to say something, and the brim of his Stetson hits me in the face. I’m surprised; I lose my balance and nearly slide off the horse, but he steadies me. He takes the hat off, looks at me with his golden-brown hair all askew, eyes impossibly blue, and laughs his husky laugh, which makes goose bumps jump up all along my arms.
“This isn’t working.” He reaches up and transfers the hat to my head, grins. “There. Much better on you.” He angles his face to kiss me. His lips slightly chapped but gentle, tender on mine. His mind full of love.
In this moment I know I’m dreaming. I know it isn’t real. Already I can feel myself waking up. I don’t want to wake up, I think. Not yet.
I open my eyes. It’s still dark, a lamp outside spilling a watery silver light through our open window, a crack of gold under the door, soft shadows cast by the furniture. I’m filled with a strange feeling, almost like déjà vu. The building is eerily quiet, so I know without looking at my clock that it must be pretty late, or early, however you want to look at it. I glance over at Wan Chen. She sighs in her sleep, turns over.
The dream is unfair, I think. Especially since I had such a good time with Christian this morning. I felt connected with him, like I was finally where I was supposed to be. I felt right.
Dumb dream. My stupid subconscious is refusing to face facts: Tucker and I are over. Done.
Dumb brain of mine. Dumb heart.
There’s a light tapping sound, so faint I think I might have imagined it. I sit up, listening. It comes again. All at once I realize that it was the knocking that woke me.
I throw on my sweatshirt and tiptoe to the door. I unlatch it and open it a crack, squint into the brightness of the hall.
My brother is standing outside my door.
“Jeffrey!” I gasp.
I probably should play it cool, but I can’t. I throw my arms around him. He stiffens in surprise, the muscles in his shoulders tense as I hang on to him, but then finally he puts his hands on my back and relaxes. It’s so good to be able to hug him, to know that he is solid and safe and unharmed, that I almost laugh.
“What are you doing here?” I ask after a minute. “How did you find me?”
“What, you think I couldn’t track you down if I wanted to?” he says. “I thought I saw you today, and I guess I missed you.”
I pull back and look at him. He seems bigger, somehow. Taller, but leaner. Older.
I grab him by the arm and haul him downstairs into the laundry room, where we can talk without waking everybody up.
“Where have you been?” I demand after the door closes behind us.
He’s been expecting this question, of course. “Around. Ow!” he says when I punch him in the shoulder. “Hey!”
“You little twerp!” I yell, punching him again, harder this time. “How could you take off like that? Do you have any idea how worried we’ve been?”
The next time I go to hit him, he catches my fist, holds me back. I’m surprised by how strong he is, how easily he stops the blow.
“Who’s ‘we’?” he asks, and when I don’t understand what he means, he clarifies: “Who was worried?”
“Me, you idiot! And Billy, and Dad—”
He shakes his head. “Dad didn’t worry about me,” he says, and in his eyes I see that angry gleam I’d almost forgotten, his fury at Dad for leaving us when we were kids. For not being there. For lying. For representing everything in his life that feels unfair.
I put my hand on his arm. His skin is cold, clammy, like he’s come from walking around outside in damp weather or flying through clouds. “Where have you been, Jeffrey?” I ask, calmly this time.
He fiddles with the buttons at the top of one of the washing machines. “I’ve been doing my own thing.”
“You could have told us where you were going. You could have called.”
“Why, so you could convince me to be a good little angel-blood? Even if I ended up getting arrested?” He turns away, his hands shoved in his pockets, and scuffs at a spot on the carpet with his shoe. “It smells good in here,” he says, which strikes me as such a ridiculous attempt to change the subject that it gets a smile out of me.
“You want to do some laundry? It’s free. Do you even know how to do laundry?”
“Yes,” he says, and I picture him at a Laundromat someplace, frowning at a washing machine as he separates whites from darks, about to do his very first load of laundry on his own. For some reason the image makes me sad.
It’s funny that all this time, all these months, I’ve wanted to talk to him so much I’ve had imaginary conversations with him, thinking about what I’d say when I saw him again. I wanted to grill him. Chastise him. Convince him to come home. Sympathize over what he’s going through. Try to get him to talk about the parts of his story that I don’t understand. I wanted to tell him that I love him. But now that he’s here, I can’t think of what to say.
“Are you going to school somewhere?” I ask.
He scoffs. “Why would I do that?”
“So you’re not planning on graduating from high school?”
His silver eyes go cold. “Why, so I
can get into a fancy college like Stanford? Graduate, get a nine-to-five job, get married, buy a house, get a dog, bang out a couple of kids—what would our kids be, anyway, thirty-seven-and-a-half percent angel-blood? Think there’s a Latin term for that?—and then I’d have the Angel-American dream and live happily ever after?”
“If that’s what you want.”
“It isn’t what I want,” he says. “That’s what humans do, Clara. And I’m not one.”
I struggle to keep my voice neutral. “Yes, you are.”
“I’m only a fourth human.” He looks up at me like he’s gazing into me, inspecting my humanness, too. “That’s a pretty small piece of the pie. Why should it define me?”
I cross my arms over my chest, shiver even though it’s not cold. “Jeffrey,” I say quietly. “We can’t just run away from our problems.”
He flinches, then pushes past me for the door. “It was a mistake coming here,” he mutters, and I wonder, Why did he come here? Why did he want to see me?
“Wait.” I start after him, catch his arm.
“Let go, Clara. I’m done playing games. I’m done with all of it. I’m not going to have anyone else tell me what to do, ever again. I’m going to do what I want.”
“I’m sorry!” I stop, take a breath. “I’m sorry,” I try again, more quietly. “You’re right. It’s not my place to boss you around. I’m not—”
Mom, I think, but the word doesn’t come out. I let go of his arm and take a couple steps back. “I’m sorry,” I say again.
He looks at me hard for a minute like he’s deciding how much to tell me.
“Mom knew,” he says finally. “She knew that I was going to run away.”
I stare at him. “How?”
He scoffs. “She said a little bird told her.”
It sounds exactly like something Mom would say. “She was kind of infuriating, wasn’t she?”
“Yeah. A real know-it-all.” He smiles the raw-hurt kind of smile. It breaks my heart.
“Jeffrey—” I want to tell him about heaven then, about seeing Mom, but he doesn’t let me.
“The point is, she knew,” he says. “She even kind of prepared me for it.”