Wings of the Wicked

2


THE GIRL SAID NOTHING, AND HER NAILS SLIPPED back into her skin as the boy turned to face Will and me. He had sharp, handsome, tanned features, and his dark hair was shorter than Will’s. I studied his face and noticed that covering the right side of his neck and creeping up his jaw was a vicious line of tangled, marbled scars. It looked as if the scars might continue down his shoulder, but they were covered by his shirt and leather jacket. His wings folded and vanished.

“That was about to get a little too serious,” he said, and a lazy smile spread on his lips. Something about his face was so uncannily familiar.

“About to?” Will’s shoulders relaxed, and he let out a long breath. “It’s good to see you, Marcus. Surprising, but good. I’ve never been happier to see you.”

Marcus? Where had I heard that name before? Memories suddenly flooded back to me, memories of a smiling face, happy times, and of … fire. Why fire? I thought back to the scar on his neck.

Marcus laughed. “We were in the neighborhood.”

“We have been tracking Orek for some time now,” the girl said, folding her wings. She paused and smiled at Will in a knowing way that made something dark swell in my throat. “Hello, William.”

“Ava.” Will acknowledged her politely.

I was very sure that if she took a step toward him, I would smash her nose into her brain.

Will put a hand to the small of my back. “Ava, this is Ellie. You’ve never met each other before. She is the Preliator.”

Marcus stepped forward and gave me a friendly smile. “I, on the contrary, know you very well. It is wonderful to see you again.”

It was strange how things came back to me the way they did. Memories washed through me, warm like hot chocolate and just as sweet. Marcus was my friend. We’d fought side by side for over a century, gotten ourselves in and out of trouble, laughed at each other’s jokes…. Looking into his face gave me a sense of familiarity like when Nathaniel smiled at me in that silly way of his. There was no threat here, and I let my swords disappear. “Hi, Marcus.”

“We saw the nycterid grab the Preliator and take off with her,” Ava said. Interesting that she avoided my name and referred to me by my title. “Why didn’t he just kill her?”

“I wondered that myself,” Will agreed.

“He probably just wanted to get me away from you,” I offered. “Maybe he figured it’d be easier to fight me if you weren’t around. A lot of them think that.”

“Or maybe they wanted you alive.”

My jaw locked. What if he was right, and why? Did the why even matter? I just had to make sure they didn’t get me. Alive or dead. The uncertainty left an ill feeling spreading through me, and my weariness was suddenly overwhelming. Will seemed to sense this, as he always seemed to know when something wasn’t right.

“Are you ready to go home?” he asked, his voice soft.

I nodded.

“Are you hunting tomorrow night?” Ava asked.

“Yes.” Will’s wings and sword disappeared, folding back into him.

“We’ll join you,” Ava said. “Call me.”

“See you then,” Marcus said with a smile.

Their wings grew again, and the two reapers leaped into the air, cloaking their presence by entering the Grim. As they flew they were hidden from human sight, except mine, since I could travel in and out of the Grim just as easily as the reapers, and that of powerful psychics. I assumed Will used the Grim when he was flying, though a part of me would have loved to see the reaction of a human who saw Will airborne with his white wings. He looked like an angel. But the ironic thing was that he wasn’t really an angel, and I was. I was the archangel Gabriel, reincarnated into the body of a human girl. The idea would take some getting used to still, since I never felt anything near angelic.

“Want me to drive?” Will asked, interrupting my thoughts.

“Please.” I gave him a faint, grateful smile.

We walked back to my car, which was parked a few streets down. The white Audi was dubbed Marshmallow II after the original Marshmallow was demolished by a particularly violent ursid reaper. I avenged Marshmallow in the end, though.

We left the city to return to my hometown of Bloomfield Hills, and on these drives I tend to get interesting information out of Will.

“How come I’ve never met Ava?” I asked.

He paused before answering. “She isn’t very social. She keeps to herself for the most part, and she takes killing the demonic very seriously.”

“How do you know her then? If she keeps to herself?”

“I met her on a hunt a long time ago. She’s become very, very good at what she does.”

“Killing?”

“Yes.”

I was glad that was what she was good at—and not something else. My jealousy surprised me. I spent so much time with Will that I’d forget he was his own person and there were nearly two decades when he was by himself between my reincarnations and my awakenings. I didn’t like thinking about my dying, which was probably why I forgot about Will’s loneliness while I was … wherever I was. Heaven, or so I’m told. I was glad he had Nathaniel, and up until tonight, I hadn’t met any of his other friends, at least not in this lifetime. I loved Will—was in love with him—and there was no reason for me to get jealous over his friends. It wasn’t fair to him. He didn’t get to spend a lot of time with anyone but me, because of his duty as my Guardian, so I was always eager about going to see Nathaniel. I wished I could have said the same thing about Ava, but I guessed it was the jealous non-girlfriend in me who wondered if Ava had ulterior motives.

“Well, she was … nice.” I winced at that last word, trying not to sound nasty, but it was hard. I wanted to slap myself out of this funk. Maybe I was cranky because I was tired and a little hungry.

“Liar.”

I blinked in surprise. Either my disdain was painfully obvious or he just knew me that well. “She didn’t seem to like me.”

“She’s not the friendliest,” he admitted. “But I think you’ll at least respect her once you get to know her. I think tomorrow night will be good for you. You haven’t met many angelic reapers.”

“And it’ll be nice to spend time with Marcus again.”

He smiled. Anything that proved my amnesia was waning made him happy, and that made me try harder to remember things. “I agree,” he said. “It’s been a few years since I’ve seen him myself. We might end up needing his help. His and Ava’s.”

“Are they … together?” I asked.

“What?” He looked genuinely confused.

“I mean, are they dating?”

“What? No.”

“Did you ever date her?” There. I said it. I held my breath.

“What are you talking about?”

I regretted asking, but I had to know. “It’s just a question.”

“Why would you ask me that?”

“Curiosity.” He was six hundred years old. I shouldn’t have had to spell out my concern to him. He should be able to read girls by now, especially me.

“Well, it’s not what you think,” he said at last, his gaze lingering on me until he had to look back to the road. “We never … dated.”

My stomach turned over. His response was so dodgy that, no matter how desperately I wanted to believe his every word, something deep inside of me wasn’t so unquestioning. It was clear he didn’t want to talk about it anymore, and in truth, I didn’t either. I chewed on my lip, thinking about the nycterid who’d tried to fly off with me. I tried not to think about falling a thousand feet through the air, very nearly to my death. “Do you really think the reapers wanted to take me somewhere alive?”

“It’s a possibility,” he said. “But we don’t know enough to make serious assumptions. We’ll just carry on as usual. If we see the nycterids again, we’ll destroy the rest of them.”

A terrible thought clawed its way to the surface of my mind, and I shivered. “Do you think it has something to do with the Enshi?”

“It’s gone,” Will said with a sternness that made me flinch.

“But Michael said—”

“Michael was wrong. There’s no way Bastian could’ve dragged that sarcophagus up from the bottom of the ocean. The Enshi was destroyed.”

I exhaled, doubt pulsing through me. We’d managed to drop the sarcophagus containing the creature called the Enshi off a boat only miles from the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean, but the archangel Michael had appeared to me and warned me that Bastian would retrieve it and I was to prevent that.

Bastian was a demonic reaper of unimaginable strength, so powerful that even I couldn’t get anywhere near him. His power brushed me off as if I were a fly. I wouldn’t be excited to have to face him again, and I’d be even less excited if Michael ended up being right and Bastian managed to get the Enshi out of the ocean.

“Everything will be okay,” Will said in that way of his that turned my insides to jelly.

I forced a smile and paused to study his face. He was gorgeous, undoubtedly so, and as soon I acknowledged that, the memory of his lips on my skin made heat rush into my cheeks and spin through my insides. I zipped my head around to look out the passenger window because, thanks to my light complexion, my cheeks turned into tomatoes whenever I was embarrassed, and nothing was more certain to make me blush than thinking about being kissed by Will.

My heart sank as quickly as it had fluttered. It wasn’t like he’d ever kiss me again. Since he’d learned that I was an angel, a divine thing, he’d been distant in every way imaginable. He was still my infallible Guardian, but he wasn’t allowed to touch me that way because I was Gabriel, the archangel.

Centuries ago, my brother, the archangel Michael, gave Will his sword and the duty of being my Guardian. With that enormous responsibility, he was forbidden to be any more than that, and Will was not one to disobey. He could be my friend, but Michael believed it would be improper and dangerous for Will to become romantically involved with me. To angels, the reapers were nothing but instruments to be used up so Heaven’s forces wouldn’t have to get their wings bloody. If Michael thought Will wasn’t good enough for me, then he couldn’t be more wrong.

As much as I hated to admit it, it had been easier to be around him before he’d kissed me that first time. I was a seventeen-year-old girl. I wanted to be loved by a great boy, and I was, but I couldn’t have him. And it broke my heart.

“You’re very quiet.” His voice startled me.

“I’m just tired.” I rested my head against the cold window and closed my eyes, relaxed by the gentle hum of the moving car. I’d come so close to dying tonight, so, so close. More than anything, I wanted to curl into his arms and just be held. We were confronted by our mortality so often that it gave us an intimacy that few shared, even those in love. It was heart wrenching to have something so amazing just out of reach. It would be simpler if he was just there to protect me because it was his duty, and not because he was in love with me.

“How are you feeling?”

I shrugged. “Just another night on the job. I’ll live.”

“You had quite a fall.”

“Well, you caught me, didn’t you?”

He was silent after that. When he pulled into my driveway, I knew that in a moment he’d slip into the Grim and be gone. He was my secret, but he wasn’t mine.

It was the last week of January, and I was finally off the hook after my mom had grounded me for almost two months when she’d discovered I’d lied to her. I was forced to confess to her that instead of going up north with Kate for Thanksgiving weekend, I’d been with Will the whole time, though I left out the “flying to Puerto Rico with a fake I.D.” thing. As far as she knew, Will was my boyfriend, but since he’d tried to distance himself emotionally from me after our trip, she thought we were broken up. It was best to leave it at that.

“See you tomorrow?” I asked him. “We can train after my homework is done and hunt at dusk.”

“Perfect. I’ll meet you at Nathaniel’s, then.”

After I’d destroyed the old warehouse where we used to train (incidentally, in the process of avenging Marshmallow), Nathaniel had set up a full workout room in the basement of his house for us. If we wanted to spar and take it up a notch, he made us go outside. We didn’t need what happened to that warehouse to be repeated in Nathaniel’s house.

I sneaked into my house through the back door by traveling invisibly through the Grim. Will returned to his post on my roof, where he always stayed until dawn, keeping a lookout. Demonic reapers tended to come out only at night. They were sensitive to daylight, and while they didn’t burst into flames from anything but my angelfire, they smoked like chimneys under the bright sun, and direct sunlight was extremely painful. Will spent his days hanging out at Nathaniel’s so he could eat and shower and relax while I was in school. It was good for him, and school was good for me too. I needed my friends, and while school threatened to eat me alive, it helped to feel like a normal high school senior on occasion.

Except on exam days. I’d rather face Bastian than an econ test any day.