Angelborn (9 page)

“
W
ant
anything from the vending machines?” Genna asks brightly, standing up from her spot on her bed, where she’s surrounded by swatches of fabric. I look up from the book I’ve been pretending to read and shake my head. She casts a glance across the room at Maia’s bowed head before leaving. As soon as the door closes, Maia looks up. Her dark-rimmed eyes are full of pain.

“Can’t you guys go somewhere else?” she hisses. “This is my room too.”

I look at the door, then back to her before standing up. She holds her book against her chest like a shield.

“What are you doing? Get back over there!” she says as I cross to her.

“You have bruises under your eyes.” I crouch before her and stroke the tender skin there with my thumb. Her scent is all around me. It’s been that way since the dream, like I exist in a cloud of Maia, and it’s intoxicating. Sweet and spicy, lovely and brutal.

“It’s called makeup, idiot.” She jerks her face away. “Keep your hands to yourself.” She scoots down the bed, away from me, and I sigh. Stand up. Go back to my seat at Genna’s desk.

“Why haven’t you kissed her?” Maia’s voice is small, and when I look over, her head is once again buried in her book.

I rub the back of my neck, trying to knead out the nervous energy. “I…”

“It’s not 1940 anymore. Waiting to kiss someone for three weeks is considered weird, not gentlemanly. She’s getting confused. You need to speed things up — you asked for my help.”

She’s right. I’ve been stalling, telling myself it’s out of respect, that I need to rebuild the foundation of trust Viv and I had, but I don’t have time for that.

We sit in silence until Genna returns with something to feed her sweets addiction. Viv was the same way. She’d visit the bakery almost every day and emerge with a piping hot pastry, the icing oozing down the sides onto her fingers. She’d grow giddy like a child at the thought of anything sugary. I would save up every dime of my salary just to buy her treats and witness her joy.

For some reason, the slick plastic packages of multicolored candies make Genna’s sweet tooth discomfiting. Whether it’s the fact that these candies have shelf lives measured in years instead of days, or that the ingredients list on the back reads as if it’s from a chemistry text, I’m not sure.

I steal another glance at Maia before turning to Viv — Genna. For all their similarities, there are many differences. Viv was ambitious; she’d enrolled in secretarial school in the mornings and helped her father in his shop in the afternoons. She had her eye on becoming a bookkeeper and eventually selling the shop so her parents could retire by the sea. She doted on her younger sisters and was determined that they would study at university, something she had dreamed of before the war.

In this time, Genna and her brother were raised by a nanny. She’s never held a job and approaches her studies rather lackadaisically, in my opinion. Her major is fashion design, which I understand to be more complex than it sounds, thanks to Maia’s tutelage. Still, when I asked Genna what her plans were after graduation, she said that she did not fully expect to become a fashion designer. When pressed on what she did plan to do, she wasn’t sure. She said perhaps she’d figure it out in graduate school.

She looks over at me now and smiles, her mouth tinted purple from the candy. Her smile melts me a little. The differences don’t matter. You can only have one soul mate and, for better or worse, mine isn’t the moody, damaged girl I can’t stop thinking about, whose dreams I can’t seem to stay out of. Who, for some inexplicable reason, can’t stay out of mine.

My only chance is the girl with the purple mouth whose smile is like the sunshine, who greets each day as if it’s a gift, not as if it’s an extension of an ever-present nightmare.

When I met Viv, some part of me recognized her. She was so bright, it was like she belonged in Euphoria. I was drawn to that about her, her lightness, her effervescence. It draws me in even now.

“Where did you go? You’re always off in the clouds.” Genna nudges my arm. I reel my thoughts back in and tuck them away, smiling at her. She blinks rapidly. Maia clears her throat from across the room, and I look down to find that I’m glowing. I stop immediately, not sure how I’d almost shifted into my angelic form. My slipping control is definitely a sign that my powers are weakening much more quickly than the last time. Human form isn’t completely natural to me, so it takes a certain amount of concentration to maintain it. Letting my thoughts fly off, denying my attraction to Maia, worrying about Genna’s variances from Viv … none of that is helping. Once I lose my powers, it won’t be an issue, but then I won’t be able to help Maia.

I need to focus on my mission and ignore the distractions. I look into Genna’s eyes, then down to her lips. They’re sticky and glossy, lacquered with some sort of product she applies regularly from a tube. I should kiss her, but Maia is sitting there, head down, pretending not to pay attention, yet hanging on our every word. I feel her attention.

Perhaps I’ll wait to kiss Genna during one of the rare times that her lip lacquer has worn down. Or maybe tonight, at the party we’re meant to attend.

Genna is still waiting for an answer to why my attention is so easily diverted. I spin a tale of trouble in one of my invented classes, repeating words I heard another student saying earlier in the corridor. She pats my leg comfortingly, telling me how she had that professor last year and knows how tough he is. She leaves her hand on my thigh and I zero in on that, on the sensation, her long fingers and delicate wrist. Free my mind to generate rude thoughts about where I’d like that hand to go, what I’d like it to do.

And if another vision seeps into my imagination, a darker hand with chipped black nail varnish instead of perfect pink, I don’t linger on it. I push it away immediately.

Maia stands up suddenly and I rear back, as if caught doing something wrong. She pulls on a hoodie and stomps out the door without a word. Genna just sighs and shakes her head, giving me a look and a shrug that say,
What are you gonna do?

What indeed?

The cold wind bites into me, and I welcome it. I am not a good person. Lusting after Caleb is wrong, so, so wrong. He belongs to someone else, so why can’t I stop this attraction? This obsession, really, and I’ve never been one to be obsessed over boys.

Not like Cadence, my roommate from the group home, who would primp in front of the mirror for nearly an hour. Dusting her face with powder and coating her lips with shellac, failing to realize nobody wants to kiss that shit. The sad thing was, the kinds of guys she dated would just lift her skirt and bend her over their back seat before sending her on her way. She was a tough girl — you learn to be tough quick in a group home — so I’d do her the favor of ignoring the sniffles coming from her bed late at night. The next weekend, she’d just repeat the whole thing over again. We all did what we could to survive.

I tried it one time. Sex. I just wanted to feel normal for once. I can’t even remember his name. Jason? Jerome? I met him at the mall. He was a rent-a-cop, had his own place and a quiet way about him that put me at ease. I demanded to be on top, and he didn’t mind. I didn’t take off my clothes, didn’t really let him touch me. After it was over I just left, never said anything to him and never talked to him again. I didn’t feel any more normal.

Crushing on someone else’s man is kinda normal, though, I guess. But I hate being in the same room with them. And I hate that I stay on purpose just to torture myself. But today it was too much. I had to bail.

I head off campus, leaving the path bordered by blue security lights, trying to clear my head and walk off some nervous energy. There’s this bubbling, vile poison inside me that wants to lash out at someone, anyone. At Caleb for making me want him, at Genna for being perfect enough to get him without even trying. Mostly at myself, though.

It’s dusk, but the city is oddly quiet. A dead man stands on the yellow lines in the middle of the street wearing a construction hat and a fluorescent orange vest. An older woman follows a young mother pushing a stroller down the sidewalk. The woman is barefoot and wears a hospital gown, untied in the back, but she’s unaffected by the cold. I zip my hoodie tighter around my neck and am careful not to make eye contact. The woman reminds me of Miss Sadie, watching over me for all those years. I haven’t thought about her in a long time.

I step to the side to let them pass into the coffee shop behind me when a conspicuous orange-red light shines from within the alley.

A James Dean-type leans against the wall in front of me, clutching an unlit cigarette in his shaking fingers. His white T-shirt is painted with bloodstains.

“Hey, you got a light?” he says. I ignore him and crane my neck to squint over his shoulder into the brightness.

Not one but two angels are there. My heart nearly stops. I’ve never seen two at once, but thoughts of Caleb’s Vultures freeze me in place. Then I see a pair of ragged boots on the ground. The boots twitch, and the body attached stands, but an identical pair of feet remains on the concrete. My shoulders relax a bit; at least one of these is an Angel of Death.

I wonder what her pitch is? “Come with me if you want to — ” not live, not die, maybe live again? I’ve never been religious, not only because of the visible evidence that most of what the preachers said was crap, but because if there was a higher power, he or she had ignored me since birth. A little divine intervention would have been nice.

The dead guy is homeless, he’s agitated and shaky, probably just OD’d. Those types usually act erratically in their afterlife, like they’re stuck forever on a trip gone wrong. The homeless guy mutters and starts shuffling away from the angels. They don’t do anything. All I can see is light, no heads or faces, but I get the impression that they’re watching him leave.

He walks toward me, muttering under his breath.

“Hey,” I say to him. His eyes are wild and unfocused. Clumps of hair are matted to his head. “You should go back with them. There’s nothing out there for you.” He doesn’t listen and shuffles past me out into the street.

I shake my head. The angels are still there, and now it feels like they’re staring at me.

Something shoots through me, maybe it’s a residual of the few hours I spent blissfully free of the dead. Seeing the world the way normal people do. Knowing what I’ve been missing. What life could have been like. All I know is I’m angry. For me, for Caleb, for all the dead who wander the world — it isn’t right. Before I know it, I’m stalking down the alley to come face-to-light with these two angels.

I’d expected heat based on the brightness, but there isn’t anything — just blobs of illumination in vaguely person-like shapes. I round on them.

“Why don’t you
make
them go with you? Why leave them to just wander around? What do you think they can do here? Take care of unfinished business? No one can see them! No one but me. You know sometimes they go crazy, right?” I want to pull up my sleeve and show them my arm, my useless left hand, but I don’t. It’s too personal, and I’m too mad. “If you all are supposed to care for us, to help us, then don’t just leave them here wandering around mindlessly. Take them wherever they’re supposed to go. Let them be reborn or whatever. It’s cruel.”

My voice is shaking by the end of my rant, and I feel spent. My body sags, and suddenly I wonder if I was wrong in my assessment. Caleb said the Vultures always traveled in twos, and their light is supposed to be black somehow. I’m certain one of these is an Angel of Death. The other one shines a few shades lighter, with more of a yellowish tint. This one dims while the Angel of Death darts into the air like a flare and disappears.

My anger dissolves, leaving me empty and cold. I turn and make my way toward the front of the alley when I hear a voice behind me.

“They must have a choice.”

My heart races, and I turn back.

I don’t know what I expected an angel to look like in human form, but the man behind me is not it. Based on Caleb’s smooth and innocent face, I thought a full angel might be much the same way. This man appears to be a few years older than me. Bright blue eyes regard me from a rugged face. His eyes have premature crinkles like he’s been working in the sun, and there’s a sturdy masculinity to him that I didn’t expect. Short curly brown hair covers his head. He’s dressed simply in a loose-fitting black shirt and pants, feet bare.