Angel Fever (15 page)

I nodded, my thoughts still tumbling. “Yeah, fine. Let’s go into the office; we can use the computer.”

As we headed down the hallway, for the first time in a long time I was aware of just how heavy the silence felt between us. I glanced at Seb. His profile looked set in stone.

In the office, I sat down at the desk and brought up the student lists on the screen. “Do you want to pull up a chair?” I asked.

Seb rolled over a spare office chair, and I moved my own aside to make room. Once our two auras would have mingled companionably; now each was drawn in against our bodies, only touching at the edges where there was no choice. Sitting this close, though, I could smell Seb’s clean, woodsy scent. It brought back so many memories of being his friend – of talking for hours. A faint wistfulness stirred through me.

Seb pulled some notes from his back pocket. His handwriting was small and precise, the words a mix of Spanish and English.

“What about the first morning class?” he said, impatiently pushing the chestnut curls off his forehead. “I think Heather and Lisa should be in yours – they don’t seem to be getting it with me; they always go so far, but no further.”

“Fine.” I cut and pasted their names from one list to the other. “Could you take Richard, though? I think he might do better having a guy for a teacher.”

We made our way through the student lists, our exchanges completely impersonal. For so many months, this had been exactly what I wanted. Now I found myself wondering if avoiding Seb had become only a habit.
Maybe,
I thought tiredly. It didn’t really matter – I couldn’t see things ever being the same between us after so long.

On the list for Seb’s afternoon advanced class, Meghan’s name seemed more brightly lit than the others. I had to bite my tongue not to ask. Finally, frowning down at the paper in his hand, Seb said, “And I think Meghan might be happier with you.”

I moved her without comment. But remembering the two of them on the sofa together, anger stirred. He’d had something really good with her; it was obvious. Why hadn’t he tried harder?

The thought made me coldly furious for some reason. “So maybe you and Meghan should have left here together after all,” I said, still looking at the screen as I typed.

Seb had never had any problem filling in the blanks. His head snapped up, and though his hazel eyes stayed expressionless, the gold flecks in them suddenly seemed to glitter. He folded up the paper and shoved it in his jeans pocket.

“Let me tell you something,” he said as he stood up. “I did not stay here because of
you.
I stayed because I promised Alex. If I hadn’t, then I would have left months ago, and to hell with this place. And, yes, who knows – maybe things would have worked out with Meghan then. Is there anything else you’d like to discuss?”

I was already regretting, deeply, that I’d said anything. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s none of my business.”

“No, it isn’t,” said Seb, and something shrank inside of me: the chill of his voice was close to hatred. “I think we’re finished now.”

In October I turned nineteen.

In a moment of weakness, I let Liz talk me into throwing a party. I got dressed up and smiled, and even danced a little.

But all I could feel was the warmth of Alex’s lips as they pressed against my neck – the strength of his arm around me, holding me close.
Are you kidding? I’d have had to challenge the guy to a duel or something. Might have been kind of awkward.

When it was over I went back to my room and cried so hard that I ended up retching over the toilet.

It wasn’t really a good birthday.

“Y
OU READY FOR THIS
?”
SAID
Bascal’s voice on the phone.

Raziel was in his office, going over maps for his upcoming journey to Mexico City. Annoyingly, it would take days to get there on the still-shattered roads. At least there hadn’t been a major snowfall yet, though it was now late November.

“Ready for what?” he said, distracted.

“The Angel Killers are still alive.”

Raziel’s head snapped up. “
What?
”

“Yeah, a group have been caught near Albuquerque Eden. They attacked some angels there, but missed one. When we went back and captured the AKs, we found a base they’d built up in the mountains.”

Raziel leaned forward, his posture hunched and urgent. “What about Fields and Kylar?”

“Don’t know yet – they weren’t there with them, at least. But listen, boss, these people have been
trained.
Just their bad luck one got away.” Bascal’s voice hesitated. “There’s more,” he said.

Raziel frowned while Bascal spoke, blindly taking in a Tiffany lamp across the room. “Just like Kara Mendez,” he murmured finally. Like Kara, and like those people in Mexico City, whose numbers kept growing. Why did this seem so inevitable?

“Yeah, exactly,” said Bascal. “I can tell you one thing – from the way they were acting,
they
sure don’t know we can’t feed from them. Anyway, they haven’t been interrogated yet – I thought you’d want to have that fun yourself.”

“Yes, thanks,” Raziel said grimly. “Have Albuquerque send them here. Immediately.”

Raziel hadn’t met a human yet who could hold up under enough pain. Apart from Kara, who was exceptional – he rather missed their little games. There was no time for such subtlety with the Albuquerque group, though.

There were seven of them; from hidden cameras, it was obvious how close-knit they were. Good. Raziel ordered two of them sacrificed immediately and made sure the others heard. Standing alone outside a door in the downstairs corridor, Raziel inspected his nails as the frantic, pleading shouts echoed and finally ended. This sort of thing was beyond crass, but necessary.

Finally he entered a room. They’d separated the AKs, and a girl – Chloe, he believed – sat huddled in the corner, crying. She flinched when she saw him.

“Do you know this girl?” he asked, holding up a photo of Willow.

Her face emptied of colour. “No, I – I’ve never seen her before,” she stammered.

Raziel smiled. “In other words, yes, you do. Everyone knows who Willow Fields is. Your lie is rather obvious, my dear. Where is she?”

Chloe looked sick. “I mean, I know who she
is,
but I don’t
know
her – not personally.”

Raziel perched on a table, one foot still on the floor;he swung his other leg casually. “You heard the screams, I suppose. Tracy and Paul, I believe, were their names?”

Her face contorted and she pressed her cheek against the wall, her throat working.

“It would be such a shame if anyone else had to die,” Raziel went on mildly. “Especially when this is all rather futile. We
will
find your intrepid leaders, you know. We can just do it with more deaths, or without. Which do you prefer?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she whispered.

How tedious. Raziel held back a sigh as he took out his cellphone and dialled. “Another one,” he ordered. “And I think you’d better do it in here. Chloe doesn’t seem convinced yet of how serious we are.”

It took two more AKs in the end; Raziel was tetchily wondering whether he’d have to start bringing in random strangers off the street next. But Chloe finally broke, sobbing out that the Angel Killers were in Nevada. She didn’t know exactly where; they had an underground base in the desert north-west of Vegas, about a hundred miles out. And other groups of AKs had also been sent into the field, though she didn’t know where they were either.

Raziel held back a smile. He hadn’t even asked about that last part – they’d definitely made progress. He touched Chloe’s face, his fingers lingering. She was really a very attractive girl.

“Well done,” he said. “And now suppose you tell me why you and your friends are immune to us? Is it something the AKs did?”

She stared blankly at him, shook her head. “I…I don’t—”

She wasn’t lying this time – he could see her struggling with the definition of
immune
when her little group had just been decimated. “Never mind,” he said, rising to his feet. “You’ve done very well to tell me about your friends in Nevada, my dear. Very well indeed.”

“Please don’t hurt them,” she whispered.

“Never,” said Raziel. “Why, the very thought.” He left the room and closed the door behind him; as he strode back to his office, a church official joined him.

“Well?” the man asked.

“Take care of her and the other two – no need for drama this time,” said Raziel without pausing.

Back in his office, Raziel’s satisfaction faded as he realized his dilemma.

As he’d long suspected, Willow was alive –
alive
– and was training new AKs. Even through his fury, Raziel felt a flash of hard pride – he’d known that no daughter of his could be vanquished so easily. But finding her might take a while, now that the angels’ psychic skills were so compromised; Chloe’s description could encompass hundreds of square miles.

And with all that was going on, Raziel didn’t have time to undertake the search himself.

He glared down at the map of Mexico. Unbelievably, there were now almost a hundred immune humans locked away there, with more being discovered every day. Through a sense of trepidation he hardly understood, he’d put off this journey for as long as possible – but now if he didn’t deal with it, word was sure to explode among the angels. For unless stopped, this immunity might just keep spreading throughout humanity, until angels were unable to feed at all.

It would be like a judgement.

Absurd. Even so, Raziel was gripped by a cold fear. The Council deaths had occurred in Mexico City, orchestrated by his own hand. What if this powerful, unknowing energy that he kept sensing was in response to that? What if the human immunities in Mexico City, in the Angel Killers, were somehow his fault?

No one can be allowed to know what I did,
thought Raziel. Currently, not a single angel alive suspected that he’d been responsible for assassinating the Council. If they found out, it could be the thing to galvanize the despondent ones back into action, so that they banded together with those who already hated him – all of them united against a common enemy.

No, he had to go to Mexico City and could waste no further time about it – if there was any evidence against him to be found there, he had to suppress it. The problem of Willow would have to be solved some other way.

Bascal,
he decided. Let him get a good-size gang together and go searching in the Nevada desert for the Angel Killers, using whatever psychic powers they still had left – the little thug would enjoy doing away with them immensely.

Raziel had just reached for his phone to give the order when it rang, vibrating under his fingers. And even though he was barely psychic himself any more, he felt a sense of dread.

He hesitated, then answered. The news that came, on top of everything else, was like a punch in the throat.

Pawntucket. His daughter’s hometown.

“Don’t let the news leak any further,” Raziel said finally; somehow he sounded in control. “I’ve got to go to Mexico City for a while first. I’ll be in Schenectady by the tenth – we’ll take care of them then for good.”

When he hung up, he sat very still. His fingers closed around a plastic pen; it bent and snapped. He had a flash of the willow tree from his dream, its branches blazing in the glow from his wings. And now he remembered where the real tree had been.

The knowledge chilled him; more than ever, he had the sense that everything was slipping from his fingers – and that it was all because of Willow somehow. Raziel’s jaw clenched. No. He would
not
be defeated.

He called Bascal and explained what was going on, snapping the words out. “Go to Nevada immediately and find the Angel Killers – leave no one alive,” he finished. “Do you hear me?
No one.
”

The clock read 8:41.

Still hugging my pillow, I stared blearily at the numbers – then it hit me, and I swore and scrambled out of bed.

For days I’d been having unsettling dreams I could barely remember, which kept me lying awake for hours. Last night had been the worst yet. Now I’d overslept; I had less than twenty minutes to help set things up for the simulation.

I threw on jeans and a V-necked black T-shirt, then brushed my hair with quick strokes. As I did, my crystal pendant caught the light, sparkling against my skin.

Two days ago, Alex had been dead for a year.

I put the hairbrush down and hesitated, looking at my dresser drawers. I didn’t do this very often. But now, though I was already running late, I pulled open the top drawer.

Tucked away under my socks and bras was a folded piece of paper.

There is no greater universe than holding you…
For a change, my eyes stayed dry as I read the poem, and then Alex’s message at the bottom.
I love you. Today on your birthday and always. Alex.

“I love you, too,” I whispered. I kissed my finger and pressed it lightly against his signature. As I put the paper back into place, my hand brushed a tiny package.

Even after all this time, I’d never opened Seb’s present. Suddenly curious, I unwrapped it – and found a flat beige stone about an inch long, exactly the same as a million other stones in the desert. Then I turned it over and caught my breath. The stone had a pattern, some fluke of nature: the figure of a girl with long hair and outspread wings.

An angel with no halo. Me.

I’d never thanked Seb for this; I’d just thrown it in my drawer unopened.
Seb, I’m sorry. It’s beautiful,
I thought, running my thumb over the stone’s smooth surface.

Sam stuck his head in. “Hey! You coming, or what?”

I shoved the stone in my pocket; a minute later, I was jogging behind Sam towards the training room. As we went through the main entrance, we were enveloped in chaos. The entire base was there – we had almost two hundred recruits now, all at different levels. That included some of our original AKs who’d taken longer with the energy work; most of them would leave in the spring.

At the centre of the massive space sprawled an earthquake-ruined city. The set’s shattered buildings always made my stomach tighten. It looked way too much like an explosion site.

We were just about to start when there was a fizzling noise: the holograph machines failing. Again.

Sam groaned and went over with a guy named Eric, our computer guru. Everyone had been tensely poised; now the mood relaxed as the two of them huddled over the computer.

Suddenly I realized I was standing beside Meghan. She had on camouflage trousers and a black T-shirt, her rich auburn hair piled on top of her head.

“It’s like having a fire drill back at school,” she said as our eyes met. “Remember, we’d get to hang around outside for a few minutes?”

“And miss algebra if we were lucky.” I felt very conscious of the stone Seb had given me, nestled in my pocket. From the corner of my eye, I could see him across the room, talking with some of his students.

I hesitated, then decided to say it. “Meghan, listen…I was really sorry to hear about you and Seb. I’ve wanted to tell you that for a long time.”

She didn’t answer for a second. Then she sighed. “Yeah. Not my smartest move ever – getting involved with a guy who’s in love with someone else.”

I froze; I hadn’t expected her to just come out with it like that. Her voice went on, low and non-accusing. “But I couldn’t help it; I just…fell so completely in love with him. I really thought that someday he’d wake up and see how amazing we were together.” She snorted. “Stupid, huh?”

I licked dry lips. “So what happened?”

Meghan shrugged, her face creased with sadness. “Oh, I don’t know. After Alex died, Seb was so desperate to be there for you, and…well, I guess it made how we both felt pretty obvious, even if neither of us wanted to see it. Finally it got to where being with him hurt more than it made me happy. Time to call it a day.”

Oh. I cleared my throat, my cheeks on fire. “I always wondered why you didn’t hate me,” I admitted softly.

She glanced at me in surprise. “Why? It’s not
your
fault.” She gave a slightly bitter smile. “When I’m being extra-mature I know it’s not his either. He never lied to me, even though sometimes I really thought that…” She trailed off, then made a face. “Oh, who knows? Seb is complicated. And not my favourite topic of conversation, to be honest.”

She looked up and grinned suddenly, a real smile that lit up her face. “Hey! We’ve got lift-off!”

The holographic angels had appeared, hanging motionless in the air. I managed a smile too as people cheered. Deep down, I guess I’d always known that Seb wasn’t over me. I still hated hearing it.

Sam clapped his hands. “Okay, y’all!” he shouted. “We start in five, four, three—”