Angel Fire (3 page)

Above, Seb felt a cool wind whispering past his wings; the evening was quiet and peaceful.
Enough,
he told himself. The thought seemed to float into his mind of its own accord, but the moment it did he knew that it was true.

He couldn’t do this any more; couldn’t take the never-ending disappointment. If he’d never seen another like himself in all these years, in a country as populated as Mexico, then it was time he finally faced the truth – there were no others. No half-angel girl was going to miraculously appear to ease his loneliness, no matter how strongly he thought he sensed her. She didn’t exist. She’d only been a figment of his imagination all this time; a beautiful phantom. By some bitter joke of nature he was alone – the only one of his kind – and it was time to just accept that and try to get on with the rest of his life, whatever that might bring.

The decision felt right. It also felt like something had just been ripped out of his chest, leaving a jagged hole that would never be filled. Seb lay on the soft grass, gazing upwards as his angel self flew, so effortlessly agile against the stars. And he knew that what he’d been thinking wasn’t quite true – as long as he had this other part of himself, he would never be completely alone.

It only felt that way.

T
HE SCISSORS WERE COLD AGAINST
my neck.

I stood in the bathroom of our motel room with my eyes shut, trying not to notice how much I hated the sound of each metallic
snip
, or the odd, awful feeling of lightness that was slowly spreading its way across my head. Even though I knew how much we needed to do this – of course I did; it had been my idea in the first place – that didn’t mean I had to enjoy it. Alex wasn’t enjoying it much, either. In fact, he probably hated this part most of all. But when I’d brought up the idea earlier that afternoon, he admitted he’d been thinking the same thing – and now the scissors didn’t hesitate as he worked them. If I hadn’t suggested this, he would have.

It was weird, though...both of us so eager to do something that neither of us actually wanted.

I heard Alex put the scissors down on the bathroom counter. “Okay, I think I’m done.” He sounded uncertain. Dreading what I was about to see, I opened my eyes and stared at myself in the mirror.

My once-long hair was now short. Very short. I don’t even know how to describe it. Sort of a pixie cut, maybe, if the pixies had gone berserk with the scissors. And more than that, it was no longer blonde – it was a deep reddish-gold that made me think of autumn and bonfires. I’d thought it might go better with my skin tone than brown, but now...I swallowed. In the mirror, my green eyes were wide and unsure.

I looked nothing like myself.

Alex was staring, too. “Wow,” he said. “That...makes a big difference.”

I wanted to blurt out,
You still think I’m beautiful, right?
I bit the words back. “Still being beautiful” was not the point – not that I’d ever really thought I was, anyway; it was Alex who thought that. But the important thing now was just staying alive. In the bedroom, I could still hear the newscast that had been playing non-stop ever since we’d turned on the TV: “
Police are searching urgently for the pair for questioning... Again, if you see them, do not approach them yourself, but call our special hotline... They are suspected to be armed and dangerous...
”

I knew without looking that they were showing my sophomore school photo again – and that it was probably on every Church of Angels website in the world by now. So to be honest, changing my most noticeable feature hadn’t exactly been a tough decision. At least no one knew what Alex looked like. There was a police sketch, but it was laughably wrong: the security guard who’d been at the cathedral had remembered him as being about ten years older and fifty pounds heavier than he really was, bulging with muscle like a football player.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the girl in the mirror. It was like a stranger had stolen my face. I reached for the red eyebrow pencil I’d asked Alex to buy and traced it over my eyebrows. The effect was much more dramatic than I would have expected. Before, I barely even noticed my eyebrows when I looked at myself. Now they seemed to jump right out at me.

This was me, now.

Feeling oddly shaken, I put down the pencil and ran my fingers through what was left of my hair. Half of it spiked up, the other half flopped down. Someone, somewhere, might pay good money for a haircut like this – like the type of runway model who’d wear a garbage-bag dress held together with safety pins, maybe.

“I’m glad you don’t want to be a hairdresser,” I said to Alex. “Because I don’t think your work is very mainstream.”

He smiled and touched the back of my neck; it felt weirdly vulnerable to have the skin there so exposed. “No one will recognize you, that’s what’s important,” he said. “Christ,
I
almost wouldn’t recognize you.”

“Oh,” I said. I didn’t mean to sound quite so forlorn, but the thought of Alex not recognizing me was just...wrong.

Catching my look, he wrapped his arms around me from behind and drew me close against his chest. The top of my head came up just past his chin. “Hey,” he said, his eyes meeting mine in the mirror. “We’ll both get used to it. And you’re still gorgeous; you know that, right? It’s just different, that’s all.”

I let out a breath, relieved he hadn’t stopped thinking that. Maybe it was petty, with everything else that was happening in the world – but so much had changed already, without changing how Alex viewed me, too. I wanted that to stay the same, for ever. “Thanks,” I said.

He propped his chin on top of my head, looking amused. “Well, it’s sort of a no-brainer. You’d be gorgeous if you shaved
all
your hair off.”

I laughed. “Let’s not test that one, okay? I think this is radical enough for one day.” I rested back against his chest, taking in his tousled dark hair and blue-grey eyes in the mirror. “Gorgeous” was actually the word I’d use to describe Alex, not me. It still gave me a tingle like Christmas morning sometimes, to realize this boy I was so much in love with felt the same way about me.

Meanwhile, my hair had not stopped being very short. Or very red. I kept getting mini jolts of surprise every time I saw myself, like my mind hadn’t caught up with what had happened yet.

“I wish there was some kind of dye we could use on your aura, too,” said Alex after a pause.

I nodded, rubbing his toned forearms. “I know. We’ll just have to be really careful.”

My aura – the energy force that surrounds every living thing – was silver and lavender; a distinct mix of angel and human. Any angel who spotted it would know instantly who I was: the only half-angel in the world, the one who’d tried to destroy them all. It was a risk that couldn’t be avoided, though, unless we planned to go live in a cave somewhere.

“Anyway, hopefully people won’t be trying to shoot me quite as often now,” I said.

“That’s the idea,” he agreed. “Because, you know...I kind of want you to stick around for a while.” His eyes flickered with memory, and I knew what he was thinking without trying, because I was thinking about the same thing. The worst day of both our lives: when he’d held me in his arms, just a day ago, and thought I had died. My arms tightened over his. The truth was, I
had
died. If Alex hadn’t been there to bring me back, I wouldn’t be here now.

“That’s what I have in mind,” I said softly. The crystal teardrop pendant he’d given me sparkled in the light. “Sticking around with you for a very, very long while.”

“Deal,” said Alex.

His head lowered in the mirror, and I shivered as his warm lips brushed my neck. Then he glanced up, listening, as a new voice came from the TV: a woman caller with a Southern twang to her voice. “She must be sick, that’s all. But just because she’s mentally ill doesn’t mean she’s not dangerous. Why, you can tell from that photo – there’s just a deranged
look
in her eyes...”

Actually, my eyes looked more worried than anything else, just then. Alex and I went back into the bedroom, where the two news commentators on the screen were nodding gravely, agreeing that, yes, I must be deranged to have attempted an “act of terrorism” against the Church of Angels – which was what the media was calling my attempt to seal the gate between the angels’ world and our own.

I sank onto the bed. The Church claimed I’d been trying to set off a bomb in the cathedral; that I hated the angels so much I’d planned to blow the whole place up, regardless of the thousands of worshippers there to witness the arrival of the Second Wave. Me, a deranged bomber. It would have been funny if Alex and I weren’t in so much danger.

An image of the cathedral in Denver from the previous day appeared: its broad white dome and massive columns; its parking lot, choked with cars and people. And its high silver doors, standing open as countless angels streamed out. I’d seen the footage several times now; I still couldn’t take my eyes off it. I watched in morbid fascination as the angels’ wings flashed gold in the sunset, pouring out from the cathedral in an endless river of light and grace. In their ethereal form, angels weren’t normally visible except to the humans they were feeding from, but they’d made an exception as the Second Wave invaded our world. They’d wanted to hear people’s cheers, Nate had told us. The cattle, cheering their slaughterers.

The Second Wave and me were the big news of the day. Everyone on the planet seemed to be debating what this meant: whether the angel footage had been faked or not, what it meant for our world if it hadn’t been. The news programme showed the same clips over and over, with the headline
Angelic Arrival
scrolling past at the bottom of the screen. Then, when they got tired of that, the commentators took more phone calls, from all across the country: people who’d seen the angels arriving; people who wished they’d seen the angels arriving; people who thought they’d seen
me
; people who wished they could see me so they could give me what I “deserved”.

I sat watching tensely, still hardly able to believe that just six weeks ago, my life had been relatively normal – or at least as normal as possible, when you’re psychic and like to fix cars. And then I’d done a reading for Beth Hartley, a girl in my high school back in Pawntucket, New York. I’d seen her joining the Church, becoming sick and listless. I’d tried to stop her, but hadn’t been able to – and in the meantime, an angel named Paschar had foreseen that I was the one who’d destroy them all.

I sighed as I watched the angels flying across the screen. God, I wished he’d been right. I thought of my mother, sitting lost in her dreams, her mind forever destroyed by what Raziel – I hated calling the angel my
father
; he didn’t deserve the word – had done to her. She wasn’t the only one. Millions of people had been hurt just as badly by the angels. Millions more were probably being hurt by them right that second, while all the callers on TV exulted about angelic love.

Angelic love
. The words left a bitter taste when you knew the angels were really here to feed off human energy, as if our world was their own private fish farm. And thanks to something called angel burn, they were seen as creatures of beauty and kindness, even as their victims’ life energy crumpled under their touch. The result might be a mental illness like my mother had, or MS, or cancer, or almost any other debilitating disease you could name. Because when an angel fed from you, there were only two certainties: one, you’d be damaged for ever in some terrible, irrevocable way...and two, you’d worship the angels until the day you died.

I glanced at Alex sitting beside me, taking in the firm lines of his face; the dark eyelashes that framed his eyes; the mouth that begged to have my finger on it, tracing its outline. By the time Alex was barely sixteen, his entire family had been destroyed by angels. Now dozens more of his friends had been killed by them too.

The black
AK
tattoo on his left bicep didn’t stand for “Alex Kylar” – it stood for Angel Killer.

Alex was the only AK left. The only person in the world who knew how to fight them. The thought of anything happening to him was like razors slicing my heart – and our plan to recruit and train new AKs wouldn’t exactly keep us out of the line of fire. Part of me really did want us to go live in a cave – or up on a Tibetan mountaintop, or out in the middle of a swamp somewhere –
anyplace
that was remote and safe, so we could just be together without worrying, for ever.

But we didn’t have a choice, and we both knew it. No matter how we felt about each other, we had to do something about what was happening.

I leaned against Alex; he put his arm around me and drew me close. His jaw had tensed – the special number to call if you’d seen me was flashing on the screen again. “God, I’m tempted to just stay here for a few more days,” he muttered. “No one would expect you to be holed up so close to Denver. We should wait until things have calmed down a little, so that—”

“Alex, wait,” I broke in. Urgency had swept through me; suddenly I felt sick with tension.
The front desk,
I thought.