Blest (14 page)

Jim’s world rushed by in black and white, like an old movie with no sound. He hadn’t realized just how much richer and more colorful everything had been with Claire. Even when she hadn’t been around, he had known in the back of his mind that she loved him. He had to keep telling himself that he did the right thing. That all the pain and hurt he had caused her would be worth it if she was safe from the Tribunal. He knew it was the right thing to do, but he couldn’t forget the way her face had fallen when he said he didn’t love her. He couldn’t forget how the light in her eyes had gone out, like a wild fire burning to ash. He hated himself for it. Now, every time he saw a flash of her in the hallway, it felt like someone was stabbing him in the stomach. And she looked . . . different. Something had changed about her, for the worse. Her preppy cardigans and bright dresses had been replaced by deep scarlet shirts and black jeans. The excitable, friendly laugh Jim had loved about her had been replaced by a cynical scowl and a monotone, flat voice, like nothing in the world could impress her.

Gunner changed, too. He started only wearing black, usually a black leather jacket and black jeans. Around a week after the Drop, a tattoo appeared on his neck. Jim glanced at it in the hallway and saw that it was a broken cage.

Miles had been with him, hobbling on the crutches he’d had to use since the Drop. He rolled his eyes. “These freaking demons think they’re all persecuted by the Tribunal and stuff, like we locked them out of Glisten for no good reason. That cage is supposed to be Slag, I think. Breaking it means breaking back into Glisten.”

On Wednesday, Jim saw that Claire had a similar tattoo on the side of her neck, a broken cage that was only visible when her hair was out of the way.

Later that day, Principal Lumen called an assembly to talk about Shane. She said there would be a memorial erected in his honor, and listed his “outstanding qualities” that made him an “ideal Pearlton student.” The demons sat in the back of the auditorium, a wide radius of empty seats around them. He expected at least Maria to be crying, but instead she was stony-faced, staring straight ahead. Claire, Gunner, Ben, Erik, and Julia looked the same, as if they were statues.

Thursday was the day Jim had been dreading more than anything else: Biology Lab. He waited for a few other students from the class to go there first, so he could blend in with them and find a seat on whatever side of the classroom was furthest from Claire. When he got there, she was already leaning at a desk, talking to Maria. Her hands were clasped behind her head and she was tipping in her seat. A flash of scarlet twinkled on her nose. A nose stud.

He relaxed a little as he surveyed the room. This time, it wasn’t likely that he would get Claire as a partner. There were twenty-four other students in the class. Those were practically lottery odds. Mr. Webb started the class by holding up a plastic model of a brain. He tapped it and grinned.

“This is what all we are,” he said. “Our thoughts, our feelings, our impulses. Our actions, our personalities. It’s all stored in this big gray lump.”

The class fidgeted in their seats. Jim caught a few people typing on their phones, trying to hide them behind backpacks and purses.

“And today, you get to dissect a model like this!” Mr. Webb declared, thrusting the brain above his head victoriously. “You can find out how, when just a tiny little piece of brain changes, a person can change completely, becoming unrecognizable.” He paused, as if waiting for the class to applaud. He looked a little disappointed when no one did. “Anyway,” he huffed. “The partner listings are as follows . . .”

Jim waited, tense, as Mr. Webb listed off different names, reading from a clipboard. “Okay, and Jim Blest . . .” He looked up, smiling. “You’re with Claire Morgan.”

Jim froze in fear, his heart pounding. Time stopped for him, but Mr. Webb kept on reading the names. No one else cared. No one else even knew they had been together, he reminded himself. Slowly, very slowly, he looked in Claire’s direction. She only looked bored, absently picking at her black fingernail polish.

The class shuffled to their respective lab stations. Claire was the last one to get up, prying herself from her seat with a sigh and heading to the station. Jim offered her a robotic wave, as if his hand was propped up by a spring. “Hey,” he said. “What are the odds, right?”

She brushed past him, strapping lab glasses to her face and looking down at the brain in front of them. It came apart in a few big chunks. Mr. Webb explained that the goal was to label each one of them and write what the parts did. Claire took a pen out and tapped at one of the chunks curiously.

“I like your new nose,” he blurted. “I mean, your thing. The nose, uh, ring. Stud. It looks good.”

Claire didn’t look up.

He gritted his teeth.
You broke up with her
, he reminded himself.
She has every right to ignore you. You did it for her sake.
He had known it would be a sacrifice. But thinking about it and experiencing it—sitting here with her this close, unable to reach out and touch her, to even make eye contact with her—was worse than he had ever imagined. Claire didn’t hate him, she had erased him.

Jim deflated, adjusted his lab goggles, and got to work. They quietly moved around each other, past each other, and didn’t look up from the papers for the rest of the class. On the surface, Claire looked like she was experimenting with identifying parts of the brain. But Jim knew her real experiment was pretending the past had never happened.

• • •

After school, Jim threw the hood of his sweatshirt over his head and slunk through the woods toward the water tower. Even though he probably could get away with flying up to it, he wanted to climb, to feel the cold rust of the ladder in his hands. To remember what it had been like, before all this. At the top, Jim edged over to the back of the tower, grabbed some of his spray bottles, and started adding to the picture.

By the time he finished, it was so dark he couldn’t even see what he had painted. He blew out a breath and gazed into the dusky sky, where the night was falling over the trees. Sighing, he jumped over the railing of the water tower and spread his wings, gliding over trees and houses before landing in the overgrown yard behind his house.

He slipped in through the back door and went straight to his room, where he sank onto the bed, shifting his shoulders so his wings didn’t get cramped at a weird angle. He focused on the painting from his mom, the red-white sunset, losing himself in it.

Ever since school had started, his life had been a whirlwind. New friends, Claire,
wings
. He hadn’t felt that heavy, listless feeling of being alone that he was so used to. Now, it settled like the weight of an old friend, that old familiar feeling of isolation.

The door in the kitchen slammed. Jim’s dad stomped around, humming to himself. Jim closed his eyes and willed his dad to leave him alone. After their confrontation over Jim’s wings, the past month had mostly been awkward silences. It wasn’t that different than normal, really. His dad was usually never even home when Jim got back from school.

Michael’s heavy footsteps grew closer and stopped outside Jim’s door. Jim winced when he heard a quiet, insistent knock.

“Yeah?” he croaked.

“Jim, it’s me,” his dad said.

“Oh, really?” Jim snapped. “It’s not some stranger wandering through the house?”

Michael didn’t answer. Jim felt a flush of hot guilt, and then anger that he felt guilty. If his dad had told him about angels and demons before all of this happened, maybe things would have been different. At least Jim would have been prepared. Maybe he would have hated Claire from the start, like the rest of the Feather. Although, if he were being honest with himself, that wasn’t what he wanted, not really.

Michael cracked open the door. The wisps of black hair on his head glimmered in the ceiling light. “Can we talk?”

Jim shrugged and looked out the window. “About what?”

Maybe his dad was drunk. A few times before, Michael had come into his room to tell him something “really important” and then passed out on the bed. When Jim looked up at him, though, he realized that his dad was sober. The look of hurt in his pale blue eyes made Jim burn with guilt again. This time, the feeling wasn’t so easy to push away.

Michael sat at the edge of the bed. “I . . . I want to talk about . . .” He cleared his throat. “Do you think you made the right choice?” He jerked his head in the direction of Jim’s wings.

“The right choice,” Jim echoed. Had he really had a choice? He could have either had surgery to remove a part of who he was or he could join a world that he knew next to nothing about. He sat up on his bed, looking at the purpling shadows of bushes and trees outside the window. “I finally feel like I have friends. And . . .” He thought about telling his dad about Claire, but stopped himself. It was an overwhelming rush of adrenaline and nausea and vertigo just to think about her. She had been the best thing to happen to him. And now she might be the worst.

“And . . .” His dad insisted.

“I don’t know. It’s cool to have a crowd of people I can hang out with. There’s not, like, a whole lot else.”

“No? What about flying?”

“We can only fly at night, and I still kind of get nervous if I’m doing it alone.” That wasn’t really true, either. He had flown over Claire’s house every day since they had broken up last week, feeling half like a guardian angel and half like a creep on wings. Just being that close to her made him feel more alive.

“Back in my day, we barely cared if people saw us,” Michael boasted. “I would fly all over the place, for miles and miles.” He gestured with his hand. “You could reach the tops of churches or mountains or trees and sit there all day, watching the world go by. Your mother and I used to . . .” He hesitated.

Jim rolled his shoulders against the wall uncomfortably. Michael hadn’t mentioned Evelyn in years, unless he was drunk. Tears glimmered at the corners of his eyes and he scratched the black-and-silver stubble peppering his face. “Flying was freedom. It was a freedom I’ll never know again.” He paused. “But the risks weren’t worth it. Not then, when there was no Pact.”

Jim sat up. “No Pact at all?”

Michael shook his head. “The demons were trying to make this push, they were all over the Soviet Union, you know. Pulling strings. But that fell apart and they panicked, decided to try and force their agenda on people. That was the War of the Broken Wall. Remember, angel and demon blood can cause serious catastrophes. Any natural disaster in the nineties and early this millennium, that was almost always from some huge battle. Hurricanes, volcanoes, tsunamis. It was a bad time.”

“And then they just stopped?”

“The Tribunal declared the need for a truce and the demons knew that they would end up destroying the Field completely if the war went on. The new Pact was signed about a decade ago.”

Jim went quiet, trying to take it all in. “But who did the Tribunal meet with? Is there, like, a demon tribunal or something?”

His dad laughed. “No, they hate any kind of leadership. There are High Councilors in Slag, but they’re just the strongest and the cruelest. Demons thrive in chaos . . . or so they think. But the Tribunal got some of the most powerful demons together and the Pact was signed.”

Jim pictured some big desk in the clouds, with papers and pens. He let out a long breath. He remembered Shane claiming that the Tribunal treated demons unfairly. “But how does the Tribunal have the power to make Pacts binding?”

Michael stroked his chin. “They’ll banish the demons who break the Pact, or at least the leaders. During the War of the Broken Wall, we captured demons for the Tribunal to send to Slag. Eventually, the demons knew they weren’t going to win.”

“So they decided that a Pact would make things easier?” Jim asked.

Michael nodded. “The Broken Wall Pact limited when we should be flying, too. A lot.” His dad looked out the window, where a deep blue evening folded over the dull gold of the sunset. “The Internet and all these freaking phones with cameras . . . it’s a lot harder to get away with stuff now. The Tribunal didn’t want to deal with it.”

“When did you and Mom get your wings removed?” Jim asked carefully.

“We started thinking about it when we realized having a kid and fighting in a war weren’t really that compatible,” Michael said gently. “Especially because your mom was . . . she was going to be promoted to a general. They thought she could turn the war in the angel’s favor.”

A General
, Jim thought
. Like Sydney’s mom
. “But . . .”

“But she wanted to raise you more than take over the Field.” He shook his head sadly, his voice dropping to a whisper. “We tried so hard to get away, but the demons had found out about how important your mom was to the cause. We kept running and running, but it wasn’t enough.” He cleared his throat. “Your mother didn’t have time to get her wings removed. She wasn’t given that chance.” He looked at Jim, then looked away again, his blue eyes glimmering like stones underwater. “Do you remember a train ride, Jim? The train crash your mom died in?”

Jim swallowed heavily and nodded. Sometimes, that felt like the day his life had really started, and the five years before that were just some hallucination.

“That wasn’t by accident. We were being hunted—by a powerful demon named Carlos.” He sniffed. “We didn’t want to fight anymore; we were taking the train to escape to Pearlton. We had heard about Mr. Webb, and how he could remove our wings. We just wanted to start over.”

Jim shifted uncomfortably in the bed. He thought about what Michael had been dealing with for so many years, on his own.

“The decision wasn’t easy, Jim,” Michael said. “My whole family stopped talking to me. They called me a coward. And I know—” His voice broke. “I know you’ve suffered for my mistakes, and I’m sorry for that.”

“Dad.” Jim put his hand on Michael’s shoulder. “I understand.”

“I know I’m never going to win Father of the Year,” Michael said, looking at the floor. “But I love you, Jim. And I’m proud of you, for being brave enough to grow your wings, despite everything. I worry for you, and it’s not what I would have chosen. But if you’re happy, then I’m happy.”