Blest (5 page)

“So she told you?” Jim asked, his eyes darting from Claire to Gunner.

Gunner nodded. “Yeah, man. If my back didn’t hurt so much, I’d think someone was screwing with us.” He clenched his teeth and rubbed his shoulders. “I’m freaking ready to believe anything, if it makes this feeling go away.”

“But . . .” Jim fumbled for words, his heart pounding. He looked at the pictures plastered on Mr. Webb’s wall. “Don’t wings mean that we can fly? And we’re just going to let them be taken away from us?”

“Our mom says it has to be done,” Claire murmured. “That, otherwise, our lives are never going to be the same.”

“So?” Jim challenged.

Gunner’s eyes shifted to Mr. Webb, Gloria, and Michael, who were now conferring in low voices. A grin appeared on his face. “I like that attitude.” He leaned closer. “But she says that the wings are painful when they grow in. Like, this is just the beginning.”

“Mr. Webb says it’s like being stabbed from the inside-out,” Jim said flatly.

“Um, ouch.” Claire blew a few loose strands of her hair out of her face. Her brown eyes focused on Jim and he shivered a little. “You still want to see what it’s like?”

Jim considered for a moment. His dad had lied to him his whole life about who he was. About who his mom was. Could this bring him closer to her? Maybe if he became an angel, he could understand his memories of her just a little more. The train crash. Michael had always told him that it had been a freak accident, some tornado that tore the train from the tracks, but Jim wasn’t so sure. He straightened, defying the pain lancing his back. “I’m doing it,” he whispered. Otherwise, he would be left wondering what it would have been like for the rest of his life.

Claire and Gunner glanced at each other, then nodded at the same time.

“Our mom hid this from us our whole lives, what else hasn’t she told us?” Gunner’s eyes glinted. There was a hardness to his voice that Jim hadn’t heard before.

“Right,” Claire said, giving Gunner a sidelong glance. She sounded uneasy. “We should do it. We just need to be careful and—”

“Now!” Gunner hissed. Without waiting, he dashed for the tunnel. Jim and Claire stared after him in shock for a split-second, before hurtling to follow. Michael stumbled forward, reaching out to try to block his way, but Jim easily dodged him, fueled by a new kind of energy he hadn’t known he possessed. He ignored the screams from the operating room, Michael’s curses and Gloria’s wailing. His feet pounded on the cement in time with Gunner’s steps. For once, it felt like he was finally running in the right direction.

This might be the wrong decision, he thought, but it was still his decision to make. He was going to grow his wings and learn to fly.

Outside, the rain was still falling hard. “Where are we going?” Claire shouted over the rush of the storm.

Gunner grinned triumphantly and dug out a glinting keychain from his pocket. Claire squinted and saw one of the keys was for her mom’s Volvo. Of course Gunner would have a key. Well, at least they were technically sixteen now. Sixteen-year-old freaks . . . their mom had told them the whole story about angels and demons and the Field in the car as soon as Claire and Gunner started having sharp pains in their backs, just like Jim. Claire still didn’t believe it. She really couldn’t believe anything that had happened over the past few hours, ever since Jim had passed out while they were kissing, and she’d had to call his dad from his cell phone.

They reached the car. Gunner flung open the door on the driver’s side and popped the locks. Jim and Claire both went for the passenger seat at the same time, their hands touching. His hand burned through the cold rain. She shivered a little, and not from the cold. “I’ll take the back,” he murmured, and ducked around her. She wished desperately that they could have just shared the seat. Then maybe she wouldn’t feel so afraid.

Gunner tore out of the parking lot, revving the engine. “It’s a shame it’s not the Range Rover, but it feels good to be riding to our futures, huh?”

“I can’t believe
this
was Mom’s big secret,” Claire said, rubbing her aching back. “I thought it was going to be some story about our dad, or that Mom was secretly a criminal, on the run from the CIA.”

Gunner took a sharp left, which sent her smashing into the side of the car. “Yeah, that would have been more believable.” He sped up a hill and she flattened against the seat. Claire gritted her teeth against the pain. Even the cushion felt like needles against her skin. She couldn’t imagine what it would feel like when the wings came in fully.

She looked out the window as the world rushed by them, streaks of marble-gray roads and sidewalks, buttery yellow street lights glowing lonely in the rain. Inside the car there was only the sound of the engine beneath her feet, and the soft clinking of Gunner’s keychain as it dangled from the ignition.

Claire’s eyes traveled to Gunner’s face. His jaw was clenched, and his eyebrows were furrowed. She wondered what he was thinking. She opened her mouth to try and break the silence, but it felt like she had eaten a bunch of cotton. Or maybe sand. It was the first time in her life that she wasn’t sure what to say to Gunner.

He hadn’t reacted very well to the news. When Gloria came home and found them both on the couch, biting pillows to keep from screaming, she had told them they were growing wings and it was time to get them removed. Gunner had gone a little bit insane. “It would have been nice to have some advance notice!” he had shouted.

“What if we want things to be different?” Claire had asked quietly. But that had just made their mom cry even harder, and Gunner had looked disgusted. Claire had never seen him treat Gloria like this before. Whenever they got yanked out of a new school and forced to pack up all their bags, Gunner was usually the one who calmed Claire down. Claire and Gloria had a checkered past of screaming at each other or crying with each other.

Claire turned around to look at Jim, who was quiet in the back seat. He was looking out the window with his chin in his hand, his elbow propped up against the car door. His hair was still wet, hanging over his eyebrows and dripping onto his nose. The next time they passed a light, he turned to her and they both startled, locked onto each other’s eyes.

As they peeled around another corner, Claire saw the blurry neon lights of a convenience store in the rain. “Wait, stop!” she said.

Gunner hit the brakes and pulled to the side of the road. He turned to her. “What?”

“Ice cream,” she said, pointing at the store. Both Gunner and Jim looked at her, open-mouthed.

“Ice cream?” Gunner asked incredulously, like he had misheard her.

“Come on,” she said. “Unless you have a better idea, we’re getting ice cream and pain relievers. We’re going to need it.”

“Comfort food and comfort pills, perfect,” Gunner said sarcastically.

Claire laughed a little and threw open the car door. She didn’t wait for them, plunging into the rain and across the parking lot into the store.

After grabbing three pints of ice cream, three plastic spoons, and a bottle of Advil, Claire threw some wadded dollar bills onto the counter without bothering to count them. She sprinted back to the car. Her mom had said that the growing pains usually started the night before your sixteenth birthday, but the wings grew in from midnight to dawn. They had a few hours before things were going to get bad, but she didn’t really trust anything her mom had told her. She had lied to them this long, how could Claire believe anything she said?

She got back into the car and Gunner hit the gas, taking them through the wet, gleaming streets of the fancier Pearlton suburbs and veering up the hill to Lakewood Drive. He cut to the right and drove to the other side of the lake, where there were fewer houses, and turned into a little beach surrounded by big pine trees. The car crunched onto the gravel parking lot and Gunner stopped, still clutching the steering wheel.

The lake glowed silver from the moon, and the wind skimmed the waves. The rain had faded to a drizzle, whispering outside the car windows and plunking onto a sad little picnic table growing with patches of green moss and sprinkled with orange pine needles.

“Is this where we make our last stand?” Gunner asked.

“Hey,” Jim said. “It’s a first stand. We’re standing up for something we believe in.”

“What, wings?” Gunner gave him a sidelong glance.

Jim laughed. “No. I barely believe that part. But if it’s real, I just think we deserve to choose.”

Claire nodded. “I don’t get it. Our parents were all . . .
not human
. But they’re frantic to get us to go to Mr. Webb’s creepy lab so we don’t turn out like them?”

“Mom’s doing what she’s always done—run from the things she’s scared of instead of facing them,” Gunner said, an angry edge to his voice.

“She was trying to protect us,” she said slowly, then turned to Jim. “I’m sure your dad was, too. But you’re right. This should be our choice.”

Gunner turned off the ignition and there was a sudden silence. “Yeah. Finally, one thing Mom can’t take away from us.”

“Cheers to that,” Claire said, uncapping the bottle of pills and shaking two into her hand. She passed the bottle to Gunner. When they had all taken some, they wordlessly got out of the car and headed to the edge of the lake. She and Gunner walked to the shoreline and stopped where the water met the earth. Claire watched it roll across the rocks and dirt and sand, nearly reaching the tips of her shoes before pulling back, as if the lake was breathing steadily, in and out.

“She can’t take this away from us,” Gunner said again, almost like he was muttering it to himself. His fist was clenched.

“She was just trying to do what she thought was best for us. That’s why she was running.”

“No, it wasn’t.” Gunner’s voice was cold. “Jim and his dad stayed in Pearlton their whole lives, right? No, the running was for something else, something about our dad. Some other kind of secret.” He kicked a rock and it skipped across the sand, plunking into the water. “I just thought, all these years . . . I thought that eventually, she would tell us who he is.” His voice broke, and he turned away. “I guess we’ll never know.”

Claire reached for his hand. Gloria, Gunner, and Claire never said the ‘D’ word. Talking about their father was strictly off-limits. Neither of them remembered him. Their mom refused to talk about him. Claire could only imagine Gunner’s disappointment, if he had thought that this would be the day Gloria finally told them something.

“I’m done with that,” Gunner said bitterly. “From now on, we stay in Pearlton, no matter what. And we figure out what it means to be d—” He abruptly shouted in pain, doubling over and trembling.

“Gunner!” Claire gripped him by his shoulders as he snarled and spit.

“Just leave me alone!” he hissed, tearing away from her and staggering along the water. Claire jumped back and stumbled directly into Jim.

“Whoa.” Jim caught her. “You okay?”

Claire stared at Gunner, who was panting raspy breaths a few feet away. “He’s just . . . he’s . . .”

“Not okay?” Jim asked.

She turned and looked up at Jim as he held her in his arms, keeping her steady. “We’re going to get through this,” he murmured. “I mean . . . you got us ice cream. What else do we need?”

Claire laughed and nodded a little. Jim motioned at his gray sweatshirt, which he had laid across the rocks and the sand. He helped her sit down and handed her a pint of mint chocolate chip and a spoon. “I was just thinking about what an awesome painting this would make.”

He pointed at the sky, where stars prickled the night canopy, winking down at them. Slowly, Jim lowered his finger, guiding Claire’s eyes from the sky to the middle of the lake. The glassy surface of the water rippled with waves, reflecting the stars and the half-moon like a dream. A hesitant breeze stirred tree branches and carried the sounds of crickets chirping from somewhere nearby.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Jim asked quietly. He flinched, clutching at the small of his back, and took a deep breath before continuing. “That’s what I like about art. It forces you to look at a moment, to get inside it and really live there. And life is really just about moments. A long, long series of moments we’re usually too busy to appreciate.” His hand clamped down on hers, holding it tight. Claire felt stronger from his touch, able to face anything.

They sat like that for what seemed an eternity, watching the dark waves, the lights of houses on the other side of the lake. At one point, Jim slipped his notebook from his pocket and started to sketch, pausing every now and then when the pain became too much to bear. Claire watched in awe as he slowly brought shapes to life with his pencil.

When he was done, Jim held up the drawing to show her a picture of the lake at night. The paper shimmered with the moonlight. Two figures sat in the clouds above the beach, holding hands.

“That’s us, sitting above the world.” He tapped the lake he had drawn. One half was white and one half he had shaded to a shadowy black. “Claire, I don’t really . . . I don’t really trust people, but I feel like I can trust you. No matter what happens tonight, we can survive it. As long as we stick together.”

Claire nodded. He tore the page from his notebook and gave it to her. “Here,” he said. “I want you to have this one.”

“Thanks,” Claire said breathlessly, her heart racing. She took the page from him, folding it and putting it in her pocket. They locked eyes. Jim leaned a little closer—

And then Gunner screamed and fell to the sand, violently writhing back and forth, tearing at his clothes. Claire and Jim jumped up, running to him.

“Gunner!” Claire cried. Seeing her strong, stable brother like this terrified her more than anything. She dropped to her knees to comfort him, but Gunner hollered and roared like some kind of wild animal. Abruptly, he jumped up and ran straight into the woods, halfway out of his shirt.

Jim and Claire gaped after him, stunned.

“That doesn’t seem promising,” Jim said with a gulp.

Claire wanted to smile, to laugh, but a searing pain shot up her back and exploded across her shoulders. She wanted to act strong in front of Jim, to show him she could handle the pain, but suddenly she was stumbling across the beach in a daze, too disoriented by the pain to even know where she was going. It sounded like someone was screaming, shrieking in agony right in her ears, but she realized it was her. She tripped on her foot and her hand sliced across a rock, drawing blood. Claire curled into a ball, trying to keep all of the pain inside her. And failing.