Wings of Light

by Katerina Martinez

  But there were more dangers than humans that stalked this world, and those creatures—I called them the natives—well, hiding from them was right up there on the list of survival rules for one of my kind. Vampires, witches, shifters, they’d always been hostile to me before getting to know me. Dealing with them was an uphill battle, which was why I walked quietly where I could, keeping my hair tucked underneath my hoody, though always curling a few strands around my fingertips.

  If there was one thing I didn’t like it was the dark, and in a city with so many lights, there were many shadows in which predators could, and did, hide; and tonight didn’t feel right. I hurried home, sticking to the well-lit parts of the street and zipping quickly in and out of subway stations. By the time I reached my apartment building, a fine mist had drifted in from the harbor, transforming every single light around me into luminescent orbs and all but swallowing the sounds of life outside of my immediate surroundings.

  This only made the feeling worse, but I pushed on.

  Fate was waiting for me upstairs; that is to say, she was exactly where I’d left her, sitting on the couch watching cooking shows. As I walked through the door, I caught the tail end of a conversation between two would-be chefs admiring the work of a third. I wasn’t sure what in the hell they were cooking, but it had way too many eyes for my liking.

  “I know, I know,” I said, shutting the door, “You’re hungry. I’m sorry. I got held up.”

  Fate didn’t reply. I could only see her feet hanging off the side of the couch. She was wearing odd knee-high socks and laying on the floor beneath them were a pair of black, studded, combat boots. I set the food down on the kitchen counter—our apartment wasn’t fancy enough to have a living room and a separate kitchen, or even two bedrooms—and walked around the couch to find Fate as pale as a ghost, eyes closed, her chest still.

  “Oh, shit, no!” My heart leapt into my throat. I threw myself to my knees beside her, took her hand—cold, too cold—and then started tapping her face. Too pale, too cold, too still. “Shit. Fate, wake up, Fate… Fate!”

  She opened her eyes and took a deep breath all at once, startling me so hard I fell flat on my ass beside the couch. Fate blinked, then turned her wide, silver eyes on me. “What?” she asked, like I’d just rudely woken her up from a blissful nap.

  I ran my fingers through my hair and let my hood fall. “I—I thought you were dead…”

  More blinking, then she coughed to clear her throat. “Doesn’t look like it.”

  “Are you… alright?”

  Fate tried to sit upright, but winced almost immediately—pain, or tiredness, or both shooting through her the way I knew it did. “Fuck!” she yelled, her voice filling the tiny apartment.

  I reached for her hand and took it, soothing her skin with my thumb. She was still too cold, but her heartbeat was there, at least. “Keep still,” I said, “Take a sec, breathe…”

  She scoffed but didn’t say anything, instead choosing to take my advice and breathe. This wasn’t the first time I’d found Fate for all intents and purposes dead. She was sick. Let me rephrase that, Fate was always sick. I didn’t know why, and neither did she, the best we could come up with was this was some side effect of our transition from the other place we came from, to Earth.

  We both knew that we weren’t human, and yet we had human bodies. We looked, sounded, and even behaved like humans. There was some magic at work that made it so humans couldn’t tell us from any other person on the street, even if they’d never get close to us. Something about us made them nervous and distrustful. It was a blessing and a curse, really. On the one hand I didn’t have any human friends. Not one. On the other hand, I never had to wait in line for anything—people seemed to just get out of my way and let me get ahead of them, like I gave off serial-killer vibes.

  When Fate found her strength again, she sat upright and shook the stiffness out of her joints. “Ooh, that smells good,” she said, sniffing the air, “What’d you get us?”

  I smiled at her, then walked over to the kitchen counter and started unpacking. “Chinese,” I said.

  “Double ooh. Whose fortune did we inherit tonight that we can afford Chinese food?”

  I considered telling her what had happened with the three grand we’d won, but then thought better of it. She was already sick, I didn’t want to upset her, too. “Just came into some money.”

  “Did you, now? And did this happen before or after we spoke on the phone earlier today?”

  “You ask too many questions, you know that?”

  “If I didn’t ask so many questions, neither of us would be living the life of luxury we live now.”

  “Pft. You call this luxury?”

  “Hey, we’re eating take-out instead of dried noodles and peas again. It’s pretty luxurious.”

  I brought the food over to the coffee table in front of the couch, then settled down next to Fate. She was a tiny, wiry little thing, barely an inch over five foot, and even paler than I was, if you could believe it. Ghost grey hair, poker straight and streaked through with strands of color, fell in a neat bob to frame her elfin face, but the most striking thing about her was her eyes. They were almond shaped and silver; like two black dots swimming in pools of shifting mercury.

  “You’re staring again,” she said.

  I snapped out of it and blinked rapidly. “Sorry… I did it again, didn’t I?”

  “Yep. Not that I don’t appreciate you longingly staring into my eyes, but I’m hungry.”

  “I wasn’t staring longingly.”

  “Sure, you weren’t.” She tapped the side of her nose, grinning, then picked one of the foam containers up and started tucking in with a pair of chopsticks. “So, how’d it go?” she asked between stuffed mouthfuls. For a small thing, she ate like a wildebeest.

  “How’d what go?” I asked.

  “Did we win?”

  “Oh… no. We didn’t.” I’d forgotten she knew about the ticket—today was lottery day.

  “Dammit. We never win. To think of all the money we spend on tickets, money we could probably spend on…”

  “Real fruits and vegetables?”

  “Until I can think of something better, sure, let’s go with that. Fuck. You’d think with my name I’d have a little more luck with stuff like this.”

  I gave her a sidelong glance. “Do you really know for sure Fate is your real name?”

  She shrugged. “Is Seline yours?”

  “Feels like it could be.”

  “We have this discussion at least once a week, and we’ve been on this world for ten years. Are we getting boring?”

  “I hate to break it to you, but people who live under the radar like us have to live boring lives.”

  Fate’s eyes narrowed. She swallowed what she’d been chewing, then reached for my hair, and plucked a tiny shard of glass out. “And yet, this suggests something exciting happened to you.”

  Ah crap. “It’s nothing.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “What? No. I’m fine.”

  “What happened to you?”

  “Fate… nothing happened.”

  She examined me more closely. “You’ve got a tiny cut on your head.”

  My hand went up to the spot she was looking at, fingers brushing against what could’ve been a cut, but one that had already started to scab over. “We don’t need to talk about it, okay?”

  “It was him, wasn’t it? He found you?”

  “Fate, please. I’ve handled it.”

  She set her food down on the table and crossed her arms in front of her chest. “I don’t understand why you’re always trying to leave me out of stuff, like you don’t think I can handle even knowing about the shit that happens to you.”

  “It’s not that.”

  “Then what is it?”

  I sighed deeply. “Look, you’re not always okay… I know how fragile you can be, and I don’t want you to have to worry about me, too.”

  “Fragile?” she a
sked, her voice rising an octave. “Listen very closely. We may not remember much about what happened before we fell through a rift and into this world, but the one thing we do agree on is that I saved your life. I’m not fragile, and the fact that you’d say that—”

  A bout of coughing cut her sentence in half. The sound was terrible, like her chest was filling up with water. She started shaking, and without thinking about it, I wrapped her up in my arms, rubbed her back, and whispered soothing words into her ear, helping her fight through the worst of it. Slowly, after maybe a minute or two, the coughing died down, and Fate relaxed into my shoulder.

  “Are you okay?” I whispered, still rubbing her back.

  “I think so…” she said, her voice croaky and hoarse.

  I grabbed a bottle of water from the coffee table and handed it over to her. Fate drank, and as I watched her, I noted how the fight had completely left her. She was still shaking a little, still uncomfortable, probably still in some pain—pain the medicine of this world couldn’t hope to heal. When she finished drinking, she turned her shifting, silver eyes on me, then nodded at the food.

  “Eat,” she said. “We don’t want our one take-out in weeks to go to waste.”

  I had picked up one of the containers when the hair on the nape of my neck stood on end. My entire body went cold, the same way it had in the moments before Abvat had emerged from an alley and started chasing me half-way through Brooklyn. I perked up and scanned the room, ignoring non-essential details like what was on the TV or what time it was. I did notice the mist caressing the outside of our apartment’s windows, tendrils of it swishing along the glass panes, obscuring our view of New York beyond them—the only thing good about this apartment was the view of the Brooklyn Bridge, and I couldn’t even see that.

  I set the container down again and slowly rose to my feet.

  Fate looked up at me, slurping up a couple of stray noodles. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Something,” I said, “Get your jacket.”

  “My jacket?”

  “Now, Fate!”

  Fate shot up like a dart, slipped into her combat boots, and plucked her jacket from the back of the sofa. She hadn’t finished sliding her hands into it when the front door to the apartment burst open, and a man built like a fortress stormed through. He was bald, he looked like he could rip a person’s arms off and beat them with them, and he was wearing a pair of sunglasses indoors and at night, which meant he was also a douchebag.

  I rushed him, taking strides across the room and throwing my foot into his gut before he could get his bearings. It was like hitting solid rock. I recoiled, stunned by how little I’d hurt him, if I’d even hurt him at all. I thought about punching him, but I didn’t want to break my own hand, so instead I reached for the only stool in our apartment and broke it across his shoulder—one of the benefits of living in such a small place was most things were in reach—but that didn’t look like it’d fazed him much either.

  “Is he made of iron or something?” Fate yelled.

  “Rock, in fact,” the man growled, his voice like a mountain, deep and powerful.

  He wound back his arm. Already I could feel magic curling off him in waves, pulsing around me, filling the room. It took all I had to avoid getting hit when his arm came down, big guys weren’t usually fast, but he was. He came at me again, this time with his hands extended looking to grab instead of hurt. I ducked under his arm and rolled across him, along my living room floor. The guy snarled and spun around, but he didn’t focus on me this time—he focused on Fate.

  She backed away from him as he advanced on her, but I knew she wouldn’t be able to get away from him. I dashed toward him and threw myself onto his back, wrapping my arms around his throat and locking them in place. He flailed, trying to grab me, but he was so big his arms couldn’t bend enough for him to get a grip.

  “Fate, run!” I yelled, and for a moment she looked dumbfounded, like she didn’t know what to do. I yelled at her again, and then she started running, but she didn’t get far. Another man had appeared in the room, and he’d caught her by the wrist as she’d tried to flee. Neither of us had seen him, it was like he’d just manifested out of thin air—or out of shadow.

  Unlike the first guy, this one didn’t look like a block of solid concrete with fists, and yet he felt a thousand times more dangerous. He was broad shouldered, he wore a long black coat, and a buttoned-down black shirt popped at the collar. On his fingers were several rings, many of them carrying precious gems, most of them red. I also spotted a necklace with a blood red stone peeking out from inside his shirt. While he looked like something out of a fashion magazine, I could tell he was probably all muscle underneath what he was wearing.

  I almost froze at the sight of him, not because he was an intruder in my apartment, but because he was… just gorgeous to look at. Even having that thought at a time like this was awful, but I couldn’t help it. He looked across at me, then glanced at the light-switch nearby and flicked it off, throwing the room into darkness save for the glow from the TV.

  “Let me go, you creep!” Fate snarled.

  “It’ll be easier if you don’t resist,” the man holding her wrist had a strong voice, but there was almost something melodious to it, a delicate warmth hidden under layers of ice.

  “Said every creep ever,” Fate snapped.

  “We don’t mean to hurt you, but if you resist, you will not be given a fair chance.”

  “Fair chance? At what?”

  I’d been so engrossed in the exchange I hadn’t noticed the mountain I’d been holding onto had lost consciousness. He toppled over and I went with him, cursing as my shoulder hit the floor. Squirming and kicking, I moved out from under him and quickly sprang to my feet. Fate was still being held, but the man holding her had positioned himself so he was between us now, even if I could only see half of him against the glow of the TV.

  “Let her go,” I snarled, even as my heart started to race. The darkness around me made my throat seize up, made my hands turn clammy and cold, brought out the fight or flight instinct in me, killing all logical process. I hated the dark almost as much as I distrusted guys with black hair, and both of those things were here in abundance.

  First a Naga chases me halfway through Brooklyn, and now this.

  “Impressive,” the man said, “How did you know Crag’s throat was his weakness?”

  “His weak… what? Look, I don’t know who you are or what you want, but you need to let her go and get the fuck out of our apartment right now.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not going to happen. The easiest thing would be for you to comply, otherwise you’ll give me no choice.”

  “No choice? What, you’re gonna kill us?” Maybe Abvat, sick of my dodging him, had finally splashed out for a hitman, and a good one at that. There I always thought he was a cheapskate.

  He gave me a piercing stare, one that answered my question without the need for words. “Now, Seline, are you going to comply, or not?”

  He knows my name… how does he know my name? There was a shuffling behind me, then a hand clamped down on my shoulder like a vice, causing me to yelp. “Sorry about that, boss,” Crag, said, his voice like a rockfall against my ear. “Won’t happen again.” He pressed down harder against my collar, almost to the point where I thought it would snap, forcing me to my knees.

  “Seline!” Fate yelled. “You said you wouldn’t hurt us!”

  “We won’t,” the man holding her wrist said, “But, by decree of the Obsidian Order, you must come with us. Now.”

  “We’re… not… going anywhere,” I grunted. “Fuck the Order.”

  “You will come with us, or you will watch her die, and then you will die.”

  Even in the dark it was impossible to miss Fate’s eyes, those glimmering, silver pools reflecting what little light there was. I didn’t have a choice. I bowed my head and surrendered.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Obsidian Order. Bullies and thugs at b
est, murderers at worst. They were the boogeymen, the thing supernaturals like us hid from if we could, even more so than the natives. Stories of other beings like me being scooped up and never seen again were whispered by the same lips that had ever spoken about the Order. They were merciless, they were assholes, and they were everywhere.

  Now they had us.

  Ten long years, Fate and I had avoided being captured, and now they had us. If that little snake Abvat didn’t have anything to do with this, I’d let them shave off all my hair before they did whatever else they were going to be doing to me. Dammit. I should’ve killed him when I had the chance.

  “Seline,” Fate whispered. We were blindfolded and sitting in the back of a car. I had no idea where we were going.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Do you think they’re gonna kill us?”

  I sighed. “Yep. Probably.”

  “Crap… I never got to find out who won.”

  “Who won what?”

  “Ready, Steady, Bake.”

  I frowned. “The cooking show?”

  “Yeah. I was rooting for Marie, but Emily was the dark horse all season.”

  “Wait, that was a baking show?”

  “What did you think it was?”

  “They were cooking something with eyes on it.”

  “Oh, yeah, they’d make hyper-realistic cakes and stuff. This episode was a Halloween theme. You should pay more attention to the TV I watch.”

  I shook my head. “Y’know, we should probably be a little more focused on the situation at hand and, maybe, getting out of it?”

  “Fat chance of that. My hands are tied so tight I can’t even be turned on by it.”

  “You always say you’ve got a good sense of direction… do you know where they’re taking us?”

  A pause. “No, but I’d say we’ve been on the move for about an hour. On the highway for twenty minutes.”

  “Highway… so we’re out of the city.”

  “I can hear you, you know,” came the booming voice from in front, filling the whole space of the car. It was Crag, the guy I’d knocked out.