The sky is gray and threatening above me. How could the weather change so rapidly? How long was I asleep? I sprint for my bike. “We’re never going to make it. We’re more than an hour away from home.”
“We have to try.” Julian races around me and mounts his bike first. “That’s all we can ever do.”
We ride against the rapidly rising wind, and grains of sand pelt my face and bare arms. Twenty minutes into our journey, the rain trickles down, and soon enough we’re caught in a downpour. We take cover in a copse of trees. I shiver, and Julian pulls me tightly against his chest. Water rushes down his face and neck in rivulets, and his wet lips part in a sigh. I have the urge to tell him that I love him. But I beat it down, because he would think I was crazy. I barely know him.
So I slip my hands under the drenched fabric of his T-shirt and let my fingertips run over the smooth planes of his back. He strips off his shirt, and it lands in a damp puddle at our feet. Then he kisses me, and the force of it makes me stumble back into the rough bark of the tree. I let him guide me down to a patch of shiny grass, lost in the delicious swirls of summer wine that pool in every part of my body.
“You have a twig in your hair,” Julian teases me between kisses. I reach up and tap my head until I find it. I fling it away. I catch sight of my watch and the late hour. “Oh crap!” I use Julian as ballast to push myself up. “My mother will kill me if she sees me like this. We have to go.”
The rain has let up a bit, but it’s still a slog to get back home. Because I’m in such a hurry, I have time to give Julian only a quick cheek kiss at the corner before heading to my house.
I emerge from the memory to find my head in Julian’s lap. It hits me with such a strong dose of déjà vu, I gasp.
The side of my scalp feels tight, and when I reach up and touch a braid there, the thoughts Julian had in his memory rush into my mind. Were they real? Did he show me his true self? Or is it another invention? I can’t think straight with Julian looking at me like he is, like he wants a chance to reenact that day right now.
My instinct is to flee this scene, but I close my eyes and find my strength. It wouldn’t be fair for me to run away, no matter how uncomfortable this is for me. Not when Julian finally seems to be making an effort to be genuine.
Julian carefully lifts my head from his lap and shifts his body to lie next to me. It’s an awkward dance to get comfortable, and a tight fit for both of us, but Julian keeps his hand on my hip, so I won’t fall.
I don’t need to open my eyes to feel the weight of his stare. “I should go.”
“You could stay,” Julian says, his voice hitching. His lips brush my cheek, featherlight. The tangle of feelings for him I’ve been holding back—fascination, fear, frustration, desire—come loose inside me.
“Don’t,” I say, though it comes out strangled. Too weak. Still, I force myself to meet his gaze. His face is just inches from mine. “I can’t do this. I need to be good.” If I cross this line, not only will Neil be lost to me forever, but I’ll be lost to myself.
“You are good,” Julian whispers. “Too good.”
I don’t agree, and I don’t think anyone else would either, but I know what he means. Despite everything Julian and I are to each other, and how easy it would be to close this distance between us, I won’t cheat on Neil. Sighing, I place my hand over his on my hip. In his memory, when I was asleep, he thought about how he needed to feign indifference so that the Morati wouldn’t hurt me. “So the things you’ve done, all the lies you’ve told, were to keep me safe?”
“Yes. Always.” I believe him. I understand now where he’s coming from, even if I still find it difficult to forgive.
“Why do I feel so close to you? You’ve lied to me time after time, but I can’t seem to be able to let you go.”
“I’d like to think it’s because you love me,” Julian says.
Love. The word buzzes around in my head. Do I love Julian? If I do, it’s not in the way I love Neil. When I’m with Neil, I want to be a better version of myself. When I’m with Julian, I want to be reckless and selfish. I hate that he brings out my bad side.
I sit up, my back to him and my feet firmly on the floor. “Oh, Julian.” I pour all my regret and longing into the utterance of his name.
He stands and walks to the window and presses his palm against the glass pane. “But you want to know the truth?”
“That’s all I’ve ever wanted.”
“The truth is, you feel so close to me because you are me.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” My stomach lurches. If the truth is this crazy, maybe I don’t want it after all.
He lets his arm drop to his side and turns slowly to face me. “You are part angel, Felicia. And that part came from me.”
thirty
“THE NIGHT YOU WERE MUGGED in Kenya, the day before your thirteenth birthday, I stood in front of the window to Earth in the Morati’s palace and just happened to see you. And then suddenly, inconceivably, your thirteen-year-old self stood in front of me, in Level Two.” Julian shakes his head and looks toward the ceiling. “You were there only for an instant, but I was irrevocably changed, and so were you.”
I remember seeing Julian in my nightmares—nightmares that turned out to be a memory of my brief first visit to Level Two.
“But how can that be?” I fly to my feet, stride across to the window where Julian stands. “I don’t feel like an angel.” If anything, I feel more like a demon.
“I don’t know how or why, but our shadow DNA transferred to each other during the fissure. You have eight percent of my DNA. And the eight percent DNA that you lost?” He puts his hand over his heart. “It’s here. In me.”
Is this why Julian and I have always had this strange, overpowering connection? Because we are literally part of each other? My knees buckle, but Julian catches me before I can faint. He scoops me up in his arms and sets me gently back on the sofa. I tuck my legs underneath me and squeeze my arms across my chest.
“Angels have DNA?”
“Angels don’t have mortal DNA, but we have shadow DNA. A human’s mortal DNA is connected to their immortal shadow DNA. When a human dies, the shadow DNA is what’s left. Some call it a soul. It’s the part of you that moves on.” Julian runs a hand through his artfully disheveled hair. “We exchanged shadow DNA, and it made you stronger. Superhuman.”
My being part angel does explain some mysteries. Why I never got sick as a teen and why I recovered so much more quickly than Neil after our car accident. Why I was able to wean myself off the Lethe drugs in Level Two faster than others, and why I got headaches and felt weak in the brimstone jail. And the incident at Western Bridge, where I thought I repaired a tiny part of it, even though that’s something only angels can do. Maybe I wasn’t hallucinating it. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” I ask.
He sits on the opposite side of the sofa, like he doesn’t dare to touch me. “I should have. I guess I had this foolish notion that you could love me for me.” He looks at me slightly askew, his features soft and vulnerable. My heart leaps with yearning, but I don’t trust it. Because as much as I want to believe Julian is essentially good, if a bit misguided, he is Morati, after all.
And that makes me eight percent Morati. Eight percent evil.
“The Morati haven’t killed me. What do they want?” I ask.
“If I knew . . .” His pupils flick away just for a second, but that tiny movement reveals everything. He might have told me about my hybrid nature, but he’s still hiding things from me for my own good.
“Never mind.” I hastily untangle the braid Julian put in my hair and smooth the crinkled strands between my shaking fingers.
“I’m on your side. I always will be,” he says.
I can’t stand to look at him anymore. “One hundred percent on my side? Or only eight percent?”
“Felicia!”
“See you tomorrow, Julian.” I speed for the door.
“The Morati are da
ngerous,” he warns as I leave. As if I needed to be reminded. I slam the door on my way out.
Libby’s office is empty. Neil must be at sound check already. Yesterday’s concert went well, if you judge by the crowd’s reaction.
I rush over to Assembly Hill, burning with even more secrets that I won’t tell Neil. That I’m part Morati. That every time he looks at me, he’s looking his greatest enemy in the face. That I’m evil, and somehow I’ve always known it. I have to push through the crowd to get to the front. It’s later than I thought, and people are restless for the music to start.
Keegan is new onstage, his small frame dwarfed by an enormous drum set. He grips his drumsticks with such force that his knuckles are white. Neil probably put him up here to build up his confidence, but the panic in Keegan’s eyes tells me it’s going to backfire. I don’t protest. It might humiliate him even more to kick him out at this point.
Libby waits behind my piano bench. Neil plays the opening notes of a song, and I slide into place, running my fingertips over the keys. I steady myself and turn my head to take in our audience. It’s like viewing a giant, undulating patchwork quilt, with all the career groups sticking together in vast swatches of color. There’s a tiny speck of red right up at the front—the superfans that Neil has recruited to be healers—and black around the edges of the crowd, where the security team stands just in case.
Normally when you play with a drummer, the drummer sets the tempo for the rest of the band. But Keegan is inexperienced, so he follows the beat put down by Moby on the bass. Keegan is a fraction of a second off, playing rolls on the snare drum that lag behind the rest of us. The music feels heavy, like playing in a sea of molasses.
Moby tries to adjust for Keegan’s ineptitude by slowing to his speed, but Keegan gets frustrated and bangs on the high hat, snare, and bass drum willy-nilly. A pressure builds in my head every time he hits the cymbals, which is at least every four beats. I throttle my floor pedal, and my teeth grind together as I pound out the notes. Libby’s hand on my back digs into my spine, and the energy she pumps into me congeals and clogs in my veins.
Dark thoughts gather at the base of my skull. I want to scream at Keegan to stop his god-awful racket. I want to rage at Neil for misjudging putting Keegan onstage as a kindness. I want Libby to back off, to stop breathing down my neck. The darkness presses up against the energy within me, pushing it slowly down the length of my arms.
Keegan kicks over the cymbal, and it lands with a crash between Moby and Neil. The dark energy surges into my fingertips and into my piano keys. Libby backs away from me, and Moby and Neil stop playing. I continue like a woman possessed, and the music hovers over the crowd like a black cloud. The purple spirit trappers punch the yellow demon hunters, and the white guardian angels hurl insults at the green caretakers.
My hands are jerked off the keys, and the music stops on a high, keening note that echoes over Assembly Hill. The crowd stands frozen in place, their mouths gaping open as they stare up at me. I’m a public menace, and now everyone knows it.
Neil lets go of my arms, and they drop to my thighs. Keegan huddles behind his drum set, and Moby tries to coax him out.
Libby directs Neil to play a ballad, something to calm the crowd. “What were you thinking?” she whispers harshly into my ear.
Neil begins to sing, his rich, warm voice soaring over the crowd, filling their ears with promises of safety, love, and happiness. I can almost believe the message is for me. But it’s not, and it never will be.
I bolt, tripping over my bench as I go. Without looking back at the stage, I run.
Sometime later there’s a soft knock on my door. I lie facedown on my bed. My foot throbs to the rhythm of the memory globe underneath the bed.
The door creaks open.
“There’s glass in your foot,” Neil says. I stepped on a shard of his picture frame when I tore off my shoes and threw them at the wall. I thought I’d cleaned up all the pieces when I’d hung the photo of him back up, but apparently I didn’t do a very good job of it.
“Don’t I deserve the pain?” I mumble into my bedspread. “Isn’t it clear enough now that I’m a horrible person?”
“You didn’t mean to agitate the crowd like that.” The bed shifts as Neil sits down. He takes my foot into his lap and extracts the shard. The throbbing recedes into a dull ache. Did I mean it, though? Deep down? Because if I didn’t, why did it happen?
I turn over onto my side to face Neil. He recoils with a gasp. “What happened to your eyes?” he asks.
I’m sure my eyes are puffy and red, but do I really look that bad? “I’m sorry,” I moan. I’ve been saying that a lot lately.
“It’s okay. We calmed everyone down. But, Felicia . . .” He pauses. “We took a vote, and you’re out of the band. I mean, for the time being. Maybe once things have settled down, in a few weeks, Libby will reconsider.”
As if the fallout from tonight’s concert weren’t bad enough already, now I’ve lost my last real link to Neil. We don’t room together, we don’t train together, and now we won’t play music together. I’ll never see him. He’s slipping away, and there’s nothing I can do. I want to ask him if he voted in favor of me, but I’m too scared of the answer. At least he hasn’t broken up with me, but can that be far behind?
I reach out my hand to him, but he backs away. “Keegan’s waiting for me. He needs more practice, so I gotta go. But I’ll pick you up for class tomorrow?” He gives me a half wave and scrambles out the door, like he’s afraid of me. Like he knows what is festering inside me.
I turn, and twin black smudges shimmer up at me from the bedspread. It looks like makeup. I materialize a mirror, and it’s immediately clear why Neil freaked out. My eyes are painted with black eye shadow nearly up to my eyebrows, and my eyelashes are coated with heavy mascara. I don’t know how it got there, but I want it gone.
Frantically I wipe at the eye shadow with the edge of my sheet, but no matter how much I rub, I only succeed in dirtying my sheet. The eye shadow doesn’t come off. It’s like a physical manifestation of the Morati—a permanent reminder written on my eyelids that my soul is stained with black.
thirty-one
WHEN I ENTER THE GYM the next day, I’m frustrated and angry and ready to knock someone over. Neil left without me. He’s avoiding me after my meltdown onstage. Not that I blame him. I’d avoid me too, if I could.
Moby approaches me, his balled-up fists gripping the frayed sleeves of his black shirt. “I dig the eyes. Totally badass.”
“Thanks.” I tilt up my chin. If I can’t remove the eye shadow, I’ll have to own it.
“I voted to keep you in the band. Keegan’s the problem, not you.” Musically speaking, Moby’s right. But if the main purpose of the band is to enhance people’s moods, then I’m the problem.
“That’s sweet of you. But maybe this a good thing. Now I won’t have any distractions from training.”
Moby nods, even though it’s a weak attempt to look on the bright side. “Let’s spar?”
As an answer I throw a punch from my right shoulder, keeping my arm straight and aiming for his ear. He blocks it with his left forearm, bringing his right arm in at a diagonal to push it down with his hand. He then throws a punch from his right shoulder, and my left arm comes up to block it. We continue this chain of punches and blocks, faster and faster, until both of us are panting.
He spins out of my reach, doubles over, and rests his hands on his knees. “Damn, girl, what has gotten into you?”
If only he knew.
I switch to training roundhouse kicks and arm blocks with Emilia. Furukama comes over to demonstrate how it is done, helping me position my arms so that the right one is turned and reaching toward my left hip, while the left one is bent toward my shoulder with the knuckles facing out. When Emilia’s leg comes up, I launch my knuckle toward her neck to block and then bring up my right fist in an overhead punch that glances off her cheek. Then I kick and she blocks. She’s more flexibl
e, so her kicks go higher, but I’m laser focused, landing all my kicks and punches until she, too, bows out.
For the remainder of the training, Furukama demonstrates a new fighting technique, and we alternate partners. By the end of the session, my legs and arms groan. I don’t know how I’ll lift them tomorrow. But even more concerning is how I’ll face Julian in our private training.
I have no doubt he’ll be turning on the charm. What scares me is that he’ll eventually wear me down. And if that happens, I can’t be alone with him. If I give in to Julian, I’ll kill my last shred of a chance with Neil, and maybe the last shred of my humanity too. I can’t risk it. I need someone to train with us.
The most likely candidate is Brady. First because he genuinely seems to enjoy my company, and second because he often spends nights guarding the brimstone jail, which strongly suggests he can’t be Morati.
I corner him as he’s leaving.
“Howdy, Twitchy.” He still hasn’t dropped his nickname for me. “Fixin’ to go back to the dorms?” Neither he nor the other recruits in my class are aware that I’m training with Julian on the side.
We step over the rubber duck—Furukama’s ridiculous rubber duck—as we exit, and head toward Eastern Avenue. Once we’re out of hearing range of our classmates, I stop him. “You’re ambitious.” He’s one of the best in our class, and he’s determined to get selected this rotation. “Why is the seraphim guard so important to you?”
“Cancer took over my life. I couldn’t escape the treatments, the hospital visits, the looks of pity.” Brady faces me, conviction lighting up his face. “But in Level Two I joined the fight against the Morati, and for the first time in forever, I felt strong. Seraphim guards are the toughest, and I don’t ever want to be weak again.”
I hug him. I can’t take away what he went through, but I can offer my support. “Do you want to improve your odds for Ascension Day?”
Brady runs a hand through his wavy hair. “How?”
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