No Angel (6 page)
“You have to spread your holy love over everyone,” Faith said, nodding.
I was pretty sure a real angel wouldn’t find that quite so dirty. “You want me to send soothing vibes at people? Looking like this?”
We all paused for a moment, considering my wingspan and incandescent glow.
“Good point,” Krystal conceded. “You’d better go back to normal, Raf.”
“If I knew how, don’t you think I’d have done it already?” I waved my arms, sending up a draft as my wings echoed the movement. I still wasn’t used to the bizarre sensation of the air pushing against them. I groaned as a thought struck me. “Oh, man, and this suit was custom tailored. My dad is going to
kill
me.”
Krystal circled me, ducking under my outstretched wings. “Actually, your jacket isn’t torn,” she said, startled. “They’re just hovering behind you. Not really attached.”
“But I can feel them in my shoulders.” I squawked as she tugged experimentally on my feathers. “Believe me, they don’t come off! Quit it, Krystal!”
“Sorry.” Krystal reappeared, frowning. “How small do they fold up? Maybe we can hide them.”
“Under what, a tent?” Nevertheless, I tentatively flexed . . . something. The wings stirred. Trying to control them consciously was like wrestling with a couple of enormous and recalcitrant umbrellas. In a closet. In the dark. It was ridiculous, considering that I’d managed to fly with the things. I closed my eyes, letting instinct take over. My wings settled themselves on my back with a strange little
twist
.
Faith’s gasp made me open my eyes again. “They vanished!” she exclaimed. “Into thin air!”
“Huh?” I waved my arm behind myself, encountering nothing. But I could still feel them, tucked up behind my shoulders, feathers ruffling in a warm wind. I opened them experimentally, and they popped into visibility again. “They’re still here. Just . . . somewhere else.”
“Well, that’s one problem solved,” Krystal said as I folded them up again. “At least we won’t have to try to explain to the teachers why you’re wearing a cloak.”
“Just a hat,” said Faith. “The halo’s still there.”
I swore. “And the teachers won’t let me get away with that. I tried.”
Krystal tapped her finger against her lips. “You started glowing last night, but you weren’t today. I saw you during your detention. How did you turn it off?”
“I didn’t do it deliberately. It just went away on its own when I—uh.”
“After you what?” Krystal demanded when I didn’t continue. “This is important, Raf!”
“After I, uh . . .” I glanced at Faith. “After I kind of . . . looked up Michaela’s skirt.”
There was a horrible silence.
“That makes sense,” Faith said thoughtfully. “You can’t have a halo if you’re acting like a demon.”
“Hey!” I protested. “I only looked!”
“Yes, but you were still, um, filled with lust, right?” Faith was going pink again. She cleared her throat. “That’s one of the Seven Deadly Sins. It’s not very angelic.”
“But just now I was—uh, that is, you were kind of close to me, and you’re very, um, pretty.” I was certain that my blush had to be as visible as my halo. Clearly, Embarrassment wasn’t a Deadly Sin. “And I’m still glowing.”
Krystal frowned. “Lust is meant to be sinful. I don’t think simply being attracted to someone is necessarily, you know, a bad thing. Maybe you have to actively be trying to take advantage for it to count, as it were.”
There was another, longer silence.
Faith swallowed hard, the sound carrying clearly. “W-well, you’re doing a lot for me,” she said. Her hands went to the top button of her shirt. “S-so I suppose . . .” The shirt slipped, flashing a glimpse of bra strap. “I mean, I do owe you my life.”
“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to!” I spun around to face the wall, my wings briefly flaring out again before I got them under control. “And I can’t just ogle you in front of an audience!”
“B-but if it’s the only way . . . Krystal, can you, um, step outside?”
“Oh, bollocks. This is such a bad idea—”
A hand closed over my arm, yanking me around. Before I could object, I found myself pushed flat against the wall, head jerked down by my tie, being kissed.
Very . . .
thoroughly
kissed.
Not that I had a lot to compare it to, but I was pretty sure your standard kiss wasn’t this intense. Tongue seemed to be getting involved. My hands slid down over warm, curved hips, her body melting against mine—
“Um,” I heard Faith say, remarkably clearly. “I don’t think it’s working?”
I drew back—and found myself looking down at annoyed brown eyes.
“Krystal?”
I yelped, shoving her away.
“Crap,” Krystal said, a little out of breath. She pushed her hair back. “Maybe we did that wrong.”
“We?”
I scrubbed my hand across my mouth, horrified. “I’ll tell you what was wrong! You sexually assaulted me, that’s what’s wrong! When I don’t even fancy you!”
Krystal flushed, and not in Faith’s delicate roselike way. She looked more like an angry tomato. “Believe me, I’m fully aware of that,” she spat. “But Faith didn’t want to, and I thought that if I took you by surprise, I might be able to substitute!”
“Um, guys?” Faith ventured tentatively.
“Keep your bright ideas to yourself in the future,” I snarled. “And your tongue!”
Faith bobbed at Krystal’s elbow, hands fluttering. “Really, guys!”
“
My
tongue!” Krystal said, practically incandescent with rage herself. “I wasn’t the one with the wandering tongue! Or hands!”
“Guys!” Faith shouted, the loudest I’d ever heard her soft voice. “Raffi isn’t glowing anymore.”
“I’m not?” I paused, caught somewhere between relief and indignation. “But I really, really,
really
am not into Krystal. Not even subconsciously. Trust me on that one.”
“Thanks for that clarification,” Krystal said sourly. “I was worried that a tiny bit of my self-esteem might survive the night uncrushed.”
“Wrath,” Faith said. “It’s another Deadly Sin. And Raffi got angry. So that’s another way to turn him off again.”
“Yeah, well,” I muttered, shooting Krystal a dark glare. “Won’t be a problem getting rid of the halo in the future then, if it comes back.” Krystal made a rude gesture at me, which I was pretty sure had to be sacrilegious under the circumstances.
“At least you can turn up to class now without founding a new cult,” Faith said with forced brightness. “I’m sure your heavenly presence will free the other girls from demonic influence.”
“Actually, I’m pretty sure it won’t.” Faith and Krystal both looked at me—one with perfect trust, the other with perfect irritation, both expectant. I set my shoulders. “But I know what will.”
S
o I was, for want of a better word, an angel, possibly with a holy mission to protect the world from the forces of evil. Obviously, there was one thing I had to do as soon as possible.
The next morning, I got up at the crack of dawn, liberated a helmet from the communal bike shed, and set off to learn how to fly.
A half-hour hike found me a nice wide clearing in the woods, well away from the school buildings. With a last glance around to check for onlookers, I shrugged my wings out. Early morning mist scurried along the ground as I lofted them to full vertical extension, the glowing pinions reaching for the sky like outstretched hands. I crouched, looked up, and took a deep breath.
“Okay,” I said softly, and swept my wings down.
It was a good thing I’d worn a helmet.
“Right,” I muttered to myself, spitting out dirt. “Less sideways, more up.”
After another ten minutes of running, leaping, and rather unangelic swearing, I was still resolutely earthbound. I brushed the mud off my knees, scowling. Maybe what I needed was motivation. I’d certainly had plenty last night. Unfortunately, I didn’t think Faith would appreciate her own guardian angel pushing her out a window, not even in the interest of science. And I wasn’t quite confident enough in my wings to want to throw
myself
out of a window either.
I crouched down in a sprinter’s stance and squeezed my eyes shut. Just think of all the things I’d be able to do once I mastered flight. I’d be able to save Faith if she fell again. I’d be able to sneak out in the evening and find the nearest pub—
“Oh my
God
,” said a voice behind me.
I leaped into the air in alarm—literally. A short midteens girl in a baggy cardigan and unflattering glasses stood frozen in the bracken, staring up at me with her mouth hanging open. “You’re . . . you’re an angel,” she said.
As I was hovering six feet above her on glowing, slowly beating wings, this did not seem like something I could deny. The rising sun highlighted the girl’s tear-tracked face and red eyes. She took a hesitant step forward, holding up a hand to shield herself from my light. “Who are you?” she breathed.
With my head backlit by my incandescent feathers, she must not have been able to make out my features. If only I could get away quickly, she need never know my identity. “Yes, I am an angel,” I said in the deepest voice I could manage while frantically trying to work out how to go
up
. I wobbled dangerously in the air. “Sent from Heaven to, uh . . .”
“Smite the wicked?” the girl suggested hopefully. She sniffed, swiping her sleeve across her nose. “Because I can totally give you a list. Starting with that bitch Joanne.”
“Er, no.” What the hell did angels talk about? Half-remembered bits of the few Christmas services my dad had forced me to attend drifted up out of my memory. “I come bearing Good News! For unto you a child shall be born!”
The girl stared at me. She did not look like she considered this to be glad tidings.
“Hey, I just deliver the news, I don’t write it,” I snapped, most of my attention still occupied with wing-wrestling. So this joint moved like
this
and then rotated like
that
. . . and to my unending and eternal relief, the ground fell away from beneath my feet. “Bye!”
“But I’m
fourteen
!” I heard her wail as I soared straight upward. I kept going until I was certain I must be no more than a distant dot in the sky.
“Phew,” I muttered, hovering once more. That had been a close one. I glanced down to see if the girl had gone away yet—and wished I hadn’t, as my stomach pitched at the sight of nothing but thin air between me and the inch-high trees below. I swallowed hard, focusing on the horizon instead. “Okay, Raf. You got up here, so you can get down again. Nice and slow.”
I tentatively tried to bank, tilting my wings like I’d seen seagulls do—and nearly fell to my death. Heart hammering, I managed to hover again. My wings obviously didn’t work like a bird’s. I concentrated for a moment on them, trying to visualize their motion. It seemed to involve twisting in more directions than I had names for. I risked a glance over my shoulder and saw that feathers flickered in and out of view as they beat, as if they kept briefly flashing into wherever they went when I folded them up all the way.
“Huh.” At least they seemed to function well enough, if I didn’t think about it. I fixed my eyes on the distant roof of the sixth-year girls’ dormitory, as tiny as a dollhouse below my dangling feet. “Okay, wings, let’s go
there
.”
Without any effort, my body still upright as my wings churned gently away behind my shoulders, I slid down out of the sky as if on an invisible escalator. I parked myself directly above the dormitory, taking care to stay too high to be seen from the ground, and pulled out the pair of binoculars I’d borrowed from Faith. I had a hunch about who was behind all this. And I was going to find out exactly why she was always so late to class.
Five minutes later, my patience was rewarded. A dark figure emerged from the building, her head swiveling as she checked she wasn’t being followed.
Michaela.
I kept pace with her, tracking her progress through Faith’s binoculars. She was heading straight for the old shrine where I’d talked with Faith and Krystal last night. With one last cautious glance behind her, she disappeared into the ruined building.
I dropped silently next to the shrine, folding my wings the instant my feet hit the ground. With a quick check that my feathers were hidden and I wasn’t glowing, I circled the old building, searching for a window. Finding one, I stretched on tiptoe to peer inside.
Lit by the flickering light of a dozen candles, Michaela was chalking an enormous pentagram on the stone floor, whispering under her breath in some arcane tongue.
It was so nice being proven right.
The death threats, the stalking, her complete lack of attraction to me . . . it all made sense now. She was being influenced by demons.
Faith had been dubious when I’d advanced my theory last night. “I don’t think the demons would target Michaela, Raffi,” she’d said, shaking her head. “They go after weak-willed people, who they can tempt into evil. Michaela’s already beautiful and smart and popular. Why would she
need
to sell her soul?”
Even when Krystal had added her voice to mine, pointing out that it was suspicious that Michaela had arrived at the school mere weeks after Faith’s father had died, Faith had remained stubborn. “It’s a coincidence,” she’d said finally. “She’s never been caught drawing any pentagrams, even though I know for a fact my mother told all the teachers to keep a close eye on her.”
Well, I’d been able to keep an even closer eye on her, and now it was obvious who the demon planned to have as its host. The question was, should I go tell Faith and Krystal what I’d discovered or just confront Michaela here and now? I had heavenly glory on my side, after all, while she had some chalk. This whole thing could be over before breakfast.
While I was hesitating, Michaela drew a few final lines. Still chanting, she stepped into the pentagram . . . and her head snapped around. Her black eyes locked straight on mine. Reaching under her skirt, she pulled out two long, wicked daggers.
Warmth licked my hidden wings, as if something with burning-hot breath had exhaled down the back of my neck. Stifling a yell, I spun—but there was nothing behind me. Even though my spine was now pressed against the wall, I felt tentacles trail over my feathers, the touch light and curious.
There was something else in that mysterious space where my wings went. Something
alive
.
I ran for the school as if all the forces of Hell were after me. Which, just possibly, they were.
