Of Wings and Wolves

eight


It felt like it had been weeks since Summer stood in front of her Gran’s home, rather than just a few hours. The cottage looked dark and uninviting. All of the curtains were drawn, so the warm glow from within couldn’t light the trees the way it usually did, and drizzling rain left everything miserably damp.

Nash opened the passenger door of his sports car. He had brought an umbrella, and she gave him a grateful smile as she took it. “Thanks,” she said, letting the handle rest against her shoulder.

He scanned the forest as though he expected a thousand balam to jump out at once. “Don’t take long.”

“Why don’t you come inside? You could meet my family.”

Nash looked like she had just suggested that they eat mud for dinner. “No. I don’t think so.” He scrubbed his hand over the back of his neck. “I’m going to take a walk. I won’t go far. Don’t even consider leaving without me.”

Summer rolled her eyes. “I don’t think that’s going to be a problem. Trust me.”

She just couldn’t understand him. He was hot one moment, and cold the next. Naked in his tub, pinned against his railing—those were definitely hot moments, the kind where she was breathless with anticipation. But just as quickly, he was done with her. Unfortunately, he looked more like he was in the latter mood than the former.

“I’ll be back soon,” he said, turning away. “Don’t do anything stupid while I’m gone.”

He disappeared into the forest.

Summer had to take several deep breaths to compose herself before she had the strength to go into the house. She had been tense since her conversation with Gran on the phone, but the familiar sights and sounds of home helped heal all wounds.

Gran and Abram were both waiting for her in the living room, and her heart swelled at the sight of them safe and healthy on the battered couch.

Abram crossed the room in two steps to embrace her. It was a little like being lovingly mauled by a giant, cuddly tiger. She squeezed him back until his ribs creaked and he gasped. “Are you okay?” Summer asked, holding him at arm’s length. His cheek still had the slice from the balam on it, and it looked deep enough that it might scar.

“I’m fine,” he said. Gran lingered behind him, silent and watchful. “Where have you been?”

“That’s not important. It only matters that you guys are safe. Have you seen anything since this afternoon?”

“No. What were those things?” Abram asked. He sounded calm, as usual, but his furrowed brow made it look like he was almost on the verge of an Abram Panic again. Twice in a week. Had to be a new record.

“Balam,” Summer said. “I guess they’re a breed of angel.”

Gran sucked in a hard breath. “No.”

“What are angels?” Abram asked, looking between both of them. “I feel I must be missing something.”

Summer folded her arms. “Yeah, Gran. What are angels?” She couldn’t help but sound accusatory. She had only argued with Gran once in her life before—when she wanted to go on vacation away from Hazel Cove right before college—and she didn’t like the feeling. It didn’t help that Gran didn’t put up with defiance, and this night was no different.

She gave Summer a level look. “I don’t know much about those, babe,” Gran said. “Never knew any, myself. They’re not all that common.”

“Are they safe to be around?” Summer asked.

“I wouldn’t say anything of the preternatural persuasion is ‘safe’. Any one of us could be dangerous, if we wanted.”

“If there were three of them, we should assume there will be more,” Abram said. “We need to prepare ourselves to leave—I don’t think we’re safe in the forest for now.” He went down the hallway toward his bedroom, and a dark blur darted into the living room as soon as his door opened.

Summer stooped to pick up Sir Lumpy, who gave her an offended meow. “You knew this was coming, didn’t you?” Summer asked, lifting her cat so that he could climb onto her shoulders.

“I knew that we were in danger of having people come find us.” Gran brushed Summer’s hair out of her face. “Don’t look so hurt, babe. I was trying to protect you. I never intended for us to go back where we came from.”

“And where did we come from, exactly?”

Gran’s fingers stilled on Summer’s curls. “It’s a long story.”

“But these things—these angels—there are a lot of them there,” she pressed, and Gran nodded. “Is that where my parents have been all this time?”

“Yeah. They were meant to follow us here, but they never did. Still…there’s plenty of time.”

“What do you mean, plenty of time? They’ve missed our entire lives.”

“Don’t be angry, pumpkin,” Gran said. “There’s a lot of things you don’t know.”

“Because you’ve lied to us. You’ve lied for years.”

“Babe…”

Summer buried her face against Sir Lumpy’s neck. He purred harder. “I can’t deal with this right now,” she whispered. “I’ll go help Abram.”

Gran didn’t follow her as she walked to the back of the hall, where there was darkness, privacy, and a wooden pentacle hanging from the ceiling. She slumped against the wall and let her face fall into her hands. Sir Lumpy started washing her ear.

If Gran had lied about that, then what else could she have lied about? What was truth, and what was fabrication? Summer missed Uncle Scott. If he had still been alive, he would have told Summer the truth.

Abram’s door opened. He slipped out and shut it behind him before she could see what lay beyond. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

Summer wiped her cheeks dry, and Sir Lumpy rammed his nose into her fingers once before jumping off to attend to his normal kitty business. “I don’t think I’m ready to talk about it.”

He nodded once, a silent acceptance of her mood. That nod was always very validating. “I think we should get rooms at the hotel in town. Somewhere that people wouldn’t think to look for us.”

“Do you really think that would help? Hazel Cove’s not a big place, and being at the university didn’t seem to help.” Of course, she hadn’t found Abram at the university. She cocked her head at him. “What were you doing in the forest anyway?”

“I felt something.” He rubbed the top of his head with his knuckles, like trying to scrub away a particularly sticky substance. “It tingled and hurt and…buzzed. I don’t know, Summer, it felt like there was something in the air around my head.”

She chewed on the inside of her mouth, trying to think of a response that didn’t involve words like “crazy” or “weird.”

Abram blew out a breath. “I know how it sounds.” He nudged at a patch of carpet with his booted toe. “You feel like that, sometimes. Not buzzing, but…you have your own feeling. Here.” He tapped his chest. “I always know when you’re shifting shapes, because it gets stronger.”

“So you followed that…feeling…into the forest.”

“It was strong enough to pull me out of the art building. I went a short distance into the forest and, and it got even stronger. I found those winged things—”

“The balam,” Summer said. “You could see them?”

“Of course I could. How do you know what they’re called?”

“And they attacked you,” she said to avoid the question.

Abram rubbed at the top of his head again. “Not exactly. I tried to catch one. That was when they attacked.”

And that would have been when Summer heard him starting to shout. “You’re stupid,” she said, wrapping her arms around his waist and hugging him tight. “You saw creepy children with wings and tried to catch one. Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

“You’re not saying anything I didn’t think myself,” he said. “It just felt like something I should do. Like they shouldn’t be there. Everything felt out of balance, and I wanted to fix it. How did you get rid of them?”

Summer chewed on the inside of her mouth. If there was anyone she could trust with the truth about Nash, it would be her twin brother. They were practically conjoined at the brain. “Abram…” she began.

A strange smell cut her off.

Summer leaned close to Abram and sniffed his shoulder. It was a smoky, woodsy smell, similar to both Nash and the balam, yet belonging to neither. It was softer. More…feminine?

“Have you been burning something?” Summer asked, pacing around him to search for more of that smell. It trailed down the hallway and led to Abram’s bedroom.

“Stay out of my room, Summer.”

But that was an angel smell. Why would his room smell like angels?

Summer pushed Abram’s arm out of the way when he tried to block her and shoved his door open.

His bedroom was part bachelor pad, part art studio. He eschewed an actual bed for a mat on the floor in order to make room for more canvases, paint, and lights. One of the walls was painted smooth as backing for portraits. Free weights were piled in the corner.

Scott hadn’t given Abram the same doors outside that Summer had, but he did have a huge window, which was usually blacked out with curtains. But now it stood open, the drapes flapped in the breeze, and the cold smell of a rainy night whipped around Summer. It carried the smoky angel smell along with it.

One of those creatures had been in his room.

Summer stepped over a canvas to reach his window and slam it shut.

“For someone who wants to move to town to be safer, you seem awfully unconcerned about locking up.” She turned around to find that Abram stood just behind her. She nearly fell over. “Holy crap, Abram, try to make some noise!”

“Something is out to get us,” he said. “You’ve already met him.”

“You mean…” She almost called him “Nash,” but she stumbled over the name. “Mr. Adamson?”

“He’s trouble, Summer. He wants to hurt us.”

She dismissed his worries with a roll of her eyes and picked her way out of the bedroom. Summer had no clue how he could stand to live in such squalor, but it probably had to do with the same mental misfires that made him an artist in the first place. “You’re crazy. He’s the richest man in the world. He has no reason to want to hurt us.”

“How can you be sure of that?”

“By engaging my brain and using logic, that’s how.”

Summer returned to the living room. Gran wasn’t there anymore, and she was grateful not to have to talk to her grandmother.

She headed for the front door, but Abram caught her wrist. “You’re right. Hazel Cove won’t be any safer than home,” Abram said. “Maybe we should leave the entire country.”

“I can’t go anywhere yet, Abram,” Summer said. “I have commitments. My degree.” She sighed. There was no point avoiding the subject anymore. “And I took the internship at Adamson Industries, which is going to last until at least the end of the semester.”

Anger flashed through Abram’s eyes. “You’re working for Nashriel Adamson.”

“That’s right.” Summer frowned. “Wait, where did you hear his first name?”

“You’ve got to quit. We can’t trust him.”

She wiggled free of his hand. “You don’t know him.”

“And you do?”

Summer thought back to being pinned against his balcony, sinking into his bathtub, being carried through the forest. Margaret had said that no woman had ever seen his office. Maybe Summer didn’t know him well, but Nash had been right when he said that she knew him better than anyone else in the world.

“Maybe,” she said. “I’m going to step outside for a second. I’ll be right back.”

“It’s very dark. I don’t think you should go alone.” Abram wasn’t a very good liar. She could tell that he wasn’t worrying about the darkness. He was worried that she was going to run off.

She gave him a brilliant smile. “Just for a second. I’ll be fine.”

Summer opened the door to find that Nash’s car was gone.

Forgetting her brother behind her, she slowly approached the place his car should have stood. There was no sign of it. Not even tire tracks to indicate that it had driven away.

“What are you looking for?” Abram asked. He had followed her outside, and the skin on his bare arms was prickled by the night air.

She bit her bottom lip. Nash had been bent on having her at his house, so she hadn’t expected him to vanish. But it was hard to deny what was right in front of her eyes.

Hot and cold. Guess he had gone really, really cold.

“Nothing, I guess,” Summer said. Why did she feel so disappointed? She hadn’t even wanted to stay with him. She turned back to her brother and forced a smile. “What’s for dinner?”

Abram wasn’t looking at her. His attention was focused on the forest over her shoulders, and his eyes widened.

A creature stood among the trees, watching the cottage. It was partially veiled by the thick branches, but even in the night, it glowed with its own internal light. She could make out bare shoulders, a bare chest, crooked teeth. Its hair and eyes were equally colorless, and its skin was slick, semi-transparent plastic over the swirl of silver blood in its veins.

She wanted to say that it was a man, except that she had never seen a man that huge. It was twice as tall as Nash, and easily a thousand times uglier. It reeked of melting flesh. Very few things smelled truly bad to Summer, but this stench made her skin want to crawl off of her bones.

And it was staring at her with murder in its eyes and Nash’s car crushed under one foot.

“F*ck,” Summer said softly.

She didn’t have enough time to change. She grabbed Abram’s arm and threw him into the house.

“Find Gran!” she shouted.

He knew better than to argue with her. He fled into the cottage, the door slammed behind him, and she rounded on the monster as it stomped through the forest. It crushed a sapling under its foot, tore through the branches, and burst into the clearing.

It swiped at her, and Summer threw herself under its grasp. The breeze of its fist ruffled her hair.

The monster was slow to turn on her, unlike the balam, which had been speedy little bees. This was more like the bear that Summer had fought in the cave: lumbering, but powerful.

It took a step toward the cottage, as if it hadn’t decided if it wanted to attack Summer or the building. She grabbed a heavy branch and wielded it like a baseball bat. “Look at me!” she yelled. “Come over here!”

Her shouts seemed to do the trick. It stomped toward her, faster than she expected, and swatted the branch out of her hands.

The contact sent Summer flying.

She hit the wreckage of the car. Pain lanced through her back, and she slid to the ground with a groan. The healing heat came over her, but not quickly enough.

Summer crawled under the wreckage of the car and tried to shift shapes as quickly as she could. She focused on stepping into her second skin, but it was suddenly about as easy as leaping from the sidewalk to the top of a ten story building.

Come on, Summer. Change!

But her body wouldn’t obey.

Metal and plastic groaned around her, and the car started to lift from the mud. Summer muffled a cry underneath her hands.

The front door opened, and Abram stood framed in the doorway. He had Gran’s shotgun against one shoulder.

Stepping onto the lawn, he jacked a round into the chamber.

“Get away from there!” he shouted. His voice was deeper, more powerful than she had ever heard it before, and it carried the weight of authority.

The monster dropped the car and faced Abram.

“No,” she whispered. He wasn’t any more of a fighter than Summer was. He would be pulverized. She wiggled out from underneath the car, emerging soaked in mud.

Abram squeezed the trigger. A gunshot thundered through the forest—and didn’t hit the monster. It was moving faster now, with less confusion and more purpose, and it easily dodged the attack.

One of its meaty hands struck Abram, driving him to the ground.

“Abram!” Summer cried.

A hand caught her arm before she could run to him.

Nash.

Even though it was a rainy, muddy mess in the forest, Nash looked as immaculate as when he sent her into the house. “The gibborim hasn’t gotten you, has it?” he asked. She shook her head. “Good. Come with me.”

“Wait! My brother—you have to help him!”

Nash gave a dismissive glance toward the monster. “Why?”

She grabbed his shirt in both of her hands, jerking his face down so that they were eye level. He looked shocked at her strength. “You need to help him because he might die if you don’t!”

That argument didn’t seem to convince him either, but he gave a long-suffering sigh as he opened his shirt one button at a time.

“Very well. If you ask it of me.”

It made her feel like she was going insane to watch how slowly he prepared himself when Abram was wrestling with a monster twice his height. Nash shed his shirt, rolled out his shoulders, and faced the monster.

How could he care so little about her brother being in danger?

“Hurry!” Summer urged.

The wings didn’t grow from his back. They simply appeared with a flare of light, which was so bright that she was rendered momentarily blind. When her vision cleared again, Nash had already moved into the fight.

The gibborim turned to swipe at Nash, and Summer realized that its back was a ragged mess. There were open wounds where its wings should have been planted, and organs twitched inside its body—were those lungs?

Abram scrambled to the place he had dropped the shotgun. But the instant he picked it up, Nash landed next to him. “Stay out of the way, mortal,” Nash said. “I can’t have you shooting me accidentally.” He jerked the shotgun out of Abram’s hands and flung it into the trees before taking flight once more.

Summer darted across the clearing and snagged Abram’s hand. “That f*cker took the gun!” he said, shaking her off immediately.

“Don’t worry. He knows what he’s doing,” Summer said. Silently, she added, I hope.

But her brother wasn’t listening. He broke free to search for the shotgun.

After watching Nash drive away the balam so easily, Summer had expected him to dispatch this creature with the same ease. But this thing—this gibborim—was so much larger, and so much stronger. Nash’s punches didn’t seem to have any real effect.

Summer had to change. She had to help him.

The gibborim’s hand closed on one of Nash’s wings and jerked him out of the sky. His shout of surprise pierced straight through Summer’s heart, breaking her concentration before she could even find it. All Summer could do was watch helplessly as Nash was pinned to the mud with a hand at his throat.

Abram emerged from the forest with the shotgun. “Get down!” he called to Summer, and she threw herself to the ground.

Double ought buckshot ripped through the gibborim’s wounded back. It reared and screamed—without releasing Nash’s throat.

His eyes slid closed. His wings flickered, faded, vanished.

The gibborim turned to face Abram with Nash in hand. The shotgun had no effect on it from the front. Summer had to get him to turn around again.

She grabbed one of the rocks lining Gran’s flowerbed and hurled it at the gibborim’s back. She struck the spine. “Hey!” she yelled, throwing another rock.

It rounded on her with a screeching cry. Two long steps, and it reached for her with clawed hands—

A gunshot split the air, and its face went slack with shock.

The gibborim fell to the mud at her feet.

Abram advanced on it, aiming the shotgun at its back. His face was calm as he squeezed the trigger again. Summer clapped her hands over her mouth and tried not to scream.

Once it stopped twitching, Abram kicked the gibborim onto its back. Silver fluid gushed out of its wounds.

“I think that did it,” he said, calm as ever.

Summer was safe. Now she could go into hysterics.

But the sight of Nash sprawled in the mud a few feet away managed to drive away her urge to freak out. She dropped by his side instead.

His wings were gone and his eyes were shut. He didn’t react when she shook his shoulder. His skin was slicked with silver blood, and she had no way to tell if it belonged to the gibborim, or because of some terrible wound she couldn’t find. She had to get him inside and wash him off.

Summer grunted as she tried to lift Nash.

“What are you doing?” Abram asked.

“What’s it look like? Are you going to help me?”

He didn’t move.

She was strong—stronger than Abram, in fact—but Nash was tall, so getting him off the ground was awkward more than difficult. But once she had him in her arms, she was surprised to find that he was as light as though he was hollow-boned.

Summer staggered toward the cottage. “At least open the front door,” she said through gritted teeth.

Abram didn’t move, but Gran was already waiting to let her in.

“You’re crazy,” he said as Gran rushed ahead to open Summer’s bedroom door.

“He did just try to save you,” Gran said. “You could show a little gratitude, Abram.”

“He didn’t leave me behind when I was healing from the balam attack, and I owe him.” Summer settled Nash on her bed. He looked strange and out of place in her room, which was cluttered with all of her knickknacks and posters.

“He’s the one who saved you from the balam?” Abram asked.

“Yes. And you can help me clean his wounds, or you can go bury the gibborim’s body. Your choice.”

“You have no idea what you’re getting into,” he said.

He left her room and slammed the door behind him.