Blest (7 page)

Miles chuckled. “Watch out, dude. She’ll want to dissect you if you’re not careful.”

“I can ask my mom about it,” Sydney offered. “I know this is all a lot to take in right now.”

“Thanks,” Jim said. A silence fell over the room.

“I mean . . . demons have red wings,” Leo finally said.

“Leo!” Nora scolded.

Jim scratched his arm nervously. It had to be because of Claire, because they had exchanged blood before they changed—but for some reason he didn’t want to tell the others. He didn’t want them to know about Claire. He wasn’t ready to share her with them, not yet, at least.

“I, uh, I have to go,” he said. “You know, angel or not . . . I still can’t be late for school.”

“Wait!” Sydney said as he turned to the door. “We really should get my mom to—”

Jim didn’t wait to hear the rest. He barreled down the staircase, skidded through an unfamiliar kitchen, and ran out of Sydney’s house.

By the time Jim’s house came into view, the overcast sky had peeled away into layers of soft pinks. Jim was exhausted, but he almost felt too tired to sleep. His mind was strangely empty, like someone had set a forest fire there, leaving nothing but ash behind. It had only been hours since he got his wings, but he felt like a different person.

Jim’s dad was hunched on the front step of the house, his head in his hands. When Jim walked across their overgrown yard to the front door, Michael looked up. “Jim,” he said.

“Hi, Dad,” Jim said. Michael squinted, as if he was staring at Jim against a bright light.

“You let them grow in.” His voice wasn’t angry. He sounded disappointed, almost defeated. He stood up. “We can go to Mr. Webb today, okay? We’ll get this fixed and everything will go back to normal. You won’t have to worry about angels or demons or anything. It’ll go back to normal, it will.”

“Dad,” Jim said, “what’s normal to you? Me going back to being hated in school while you get drunk every day? You think that kind of ‘normal’ makes me happy?” His voice lowered. “If you had told me about this, then I wouldn’t be so confused now. If you had just
bothered
to mention it, I wouldn’t have thought that the other kids all hated me for my sake. I would have known they hated me because of you.”

Michael winced, and Jim pushed aside his guilt, letting his anger flare up. He wasn’t going to feel guilty, especially not for this. He finally had friends. He finally had a purpose. He had been told the truth about everything and his dad still wanted to keep him in the dark. “This is my choice,” Jim said, shoving his way past his dad into the house. “And I’m not sorry I made it.”

“You will be, Jim,” his dad said brokenly. “You will be.”

Jim tried not to listen. He slammed the door to his bedroom and flopped onto his bed.
This is what I want
, he told himself. He just hoped that Claire was happy, too. Whatever she was going through, wherever she was. Whoever she was going to be.

Claire stared out the window as the sun rose over the lake. She could just see the top of her house, poking out between the leafy green trees around it. Behind her, she could hear the chattering of everyone else in Shane’s house. Gunner was telling the story of when he had hid alarm clocks all around the classroom in Boston Prep. People were laughing at his ingenuity. Shane’s laugh made him sound like a wild dog.

She absently scratched at the wings poking out of her back. Just feeling them made her uneasy. She still couldn’t forget Jim’s face as Shane tried to shove the knife into her hands. Jim hadn’t known whether she was going to do it or not. At least Sydney and the other angels had showed up to stop it. The first thing Claire had learned was that the truce between angels and demons was shaky at best. And Shane seemed to think the entire truce was pointless and stupid.

“You could have killed him,” he had told her as he led her to his house. “We shouldn’t have to be afraid of those
angels
.”

Claire hadn’t said anything. Luckily, Shane thought she was still too dazed by her new wings to react. And then everyone else had flooded around Claire and Gunner, congratulating them—Maria, Ben, Julia, Erik. All of Shane’s friends were demons, and they seemed pretty proud of it. Shane kept saying how they could “really do some damage” now that there were more of them in the Scale, which was what they called their clique or something. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be a demon, not if it meant hating Jim just because he was something else. It all seemed so random. Why should she hate Jim and like Shane based on wing color?

A hand wrapped around her shoulder. “Hey,” Gunner said. “What are you doing over here?”

“Watching the sun rise,” Claire mumbled. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

“It looks like you’re thinking about Jim,” he said, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Who happens to be an angel.”

Claire gave her brother a look. His brown eyes burned with an expression she couldn’t identify.

“This is our family,” Gunner said. “Claire, we finally have a
family
.”

Claire looked back at the group, who had shuffled from the living room into the kitchen. Ben ripped open a pantry door and asked if there was any “fucking food” here. Shane told him to shut up and pulled Maria toward him, one arm wrapped around her shoulder.

“Yes, they’re lovely,” she said.

“I don’t think you understand,” Gunner insisted. “Jim is part of the problem. All of the angels are trying to destroy us, just because we think differently than them.” He stood. “You better get yourself together before Carlos shows up.”

“Who’s Carlos?” Claire asked, a little too loudly.

Shane’s neck twisted as he looked in her direction. “You clearly weren’t listening,” he said angrily. “As I already
told
everyone, Carlos is in charge of us all. He’s coming to Pearlton to do some very serious business, and he’s going to need our help.” Shane narrowed his eyes at Claire. “And when he gets here, you better hope you’re listening to everything he says. He doesn’t tolerate mistakes very well.”

Claire swallowed audibly. She looked at Gunner for support, but he just looked away, his eyes cold. She curled up on the couch and stared at the blank television screen in front of her, watching her reflection swim in the dark screen, as if she were deep underwater and trying desperately to break to the surface.

• • •

The walk back with Gunner was awkward for a while. Claire could almost feel a new kind of energy radiating from him. He stalked down Shane’s neatly paved driveway, his shoulders swaying and his fists clenched. The wind was bitter, slicing through the trees and sending goose bumps across Claire’s skin. The dark jeans and rose-colored cardigan she had thrown on yesterday morning—a lifetime ago—weren’t enough in this predawn chill.

Gunner stayed a few feet ahead of her as they marched along the empty road. When she couldn’t stand the silence anymore, she skipped to catch up with him.

“Hey,” she said.

“What?” he asked, not looking at her.

“Are you kidding?” she asked, stopping in the middle of the road and crossing her arms. “We just find out we’re freaking demons, that we have wings and we have to randomly hate people, and you want to pretend like you’re taking it all in stride?”

Gunner whipped around, his brows knitting together. “What am I supposed to do? Freak out? You’re doing that well enough for both of us.”

“I think a little freaking out is perfectly normal, given the circumstances,” Claire said.

Gunner huffed and started walking again.

She caught up to him. “What’s going on, Gunner?”

“Look,” he said impatiently. “The way I see it is that we don’t have a choice. This is who we were meant to be, so why fight it? This is just like getting yanked out of one school and dumped into another, but now this change is permanent. Finally.”

“Finally? You’re really happy about this?”

He fumbled for words for a second, his hands twisting in the air as he walked. “I’m happy that there are other people in our lives, yeah. And I’m pissed that Mom was trying to take all that away.”

“So . . . a demon. You want to be a demon.”

He twisted to face her again. “I want to be what I’m supposed to be! I just want to be with people who won’t disappear for once.”

Claire went quiet once more, letting the silence settle heavily around them as they started walking again.

After about twenty minutes, their house came into view. Claire sighed in relief. But as they got closer, Claire caught sight of her mom’s Volvo, and her heart stopped. The trunk was popped open and one cardboard box was already sitting in it. She had a sudden, strangling fear, that feeling she got whenever she saw boxes in a car. It meant she had to quickly shed all of the things she had become, hop into a car, and try to become someone else, somewhere else.

“What the hell?” Gunner said under his breath, and sped up the wooden stairs leading to the kitchen. Claire sprinted after him. The kitchen was empty. Gunner slipped into the hall and she heard his feet pounding the stairs to the second floor.

“
Mom?
” he yelled. “Mom, where are you?”

A door slammed open. Claire ran up the stairs after him, her heart racing, and took a sharp corner into their mom’s room. Inside, Gloria was huddled over a half-packed suitcase on the bed, face in her hands. Clothes were littered across the carpet. Gunner stood behind her, his hands balled into fists.

“We can’t stay here!” Gloria wailed. “Not after what you two have done!”

“What, become what we were supposed to be?” Gunner challenged.

Their mom looked up at him, her eyes red from crying. She sniffed. “You think you’re supposed to be a demon? I tried to spare you this. After all I—”

“After you made us run away from our real family, over and over!” Gunner shouted. “You made sure we were as isolated and alone as possible!”

“Gunner.” Gloria gasped. “That’s never what I meant to happen. But you . . . you’re right.” She stood up, her voice broken. “You have a new family now. I’m leaving, before he gets here.”

“No!” Gunner lunged at her, his hands connecting with Gloria’s shoulders, and slammed her back into the wall.

“Gunner!” Claire shrieked, wrenching his arm as hard as she could to try to get him off of her.

He whipped around. Claire thought he was going to push her, too, but then something flashed in his eyes. “You’re not going anywhere,” he snarled at Gloria. “You’re our mom, and we’re a family.” Then he turned and stormed out, slamming the door as he left.

Claire ran to Gloria, whose shoulders shook with silent sobs.

“
Mom
?” Claire asked. “Mom, are you okay?’

“Nothing’s going to be okay now,” Gloria whispered.

Claire stared for a moment at her mom, then turned and went down the hall into her own room. She wove her way between all the still-packed boxes to stand in front of her mirror and look at her red wings. Gunner was convinced that this was who they were supposed to be. Her mom was convinced they had made a terrible mistake. Who was right? She took a breath, trying to steady herself and stared back into the mirror. As she lost herself in her own tired gaze, she noticed something on her left wing. A single, white feather, shining like a tiny sun in her dark room.

On the bus, Jim passed Shane without looking at him. Even so, he could feel Shane’s eyes on him. It seemed so strange that he had never seen Shane’s wings before—even from the back of the bus, they stuck out beside Maria’s like big, red flags.

There was no sign of Claire or Gunner, which made Jim feel both relief and disappointment. He wondered what Claire looked like with her new wings, and whether she hated him. To distract himself, Jim took out his notebook and tried to scribble something else, anything else. But all he could draw were feathers.

Right before lunch, during History, Jim felt like he was sleepwalking. Luckily, Miles took the seat next to him as Mrs. Darcy droned on about The American Revolution. Miles chattered at a rate of about two thousand words per second, peppering his words with different hand gestures, like he was weaving a blanket in fast forward.

“We were part of that, you know,” Miles whispered, pointing at the PowerPoint presentation gleaming at the front of the class. “We flew around at night and helped people dump all that tea into the ocean.”

Jim looked at a grainy portrait of Benjamin Franklin dressed up as an Indian, his chin still in his hand as he tried to stay awake. “You’re saying that the angels were revolutionaries?”

“If that’s what you want to call it.” Miles fiddled with his pencil until it broke in half.

But then something else Miles had said stuck with him. “When do I get to fly?” he asked.

“Soon. As long as humans aren’t around, you can fly straight into the clouds. Not too high, though, it’s really cold. And you could get hit by a plane. Or sucked into a jet engine, that would be a bummer. Then you’d be like angel confetti. Poof!” Miles spread his hands out violently.

Jim laughed a little. “Wow.” He pictured spreading his arms on the top of the water tower and jumping, flying over the trees and leaving all of Pearlton behind. What did it feel like? Did you have to flap your wings like a bird or was it more like gliding?

“Mr. Blest!”

He jumped in his seat. The whole class was staring at him. He looked up at Mrs. Darcy sheepishly. She had her finger pointed straight at him.

“Um . . . yes?” he asked.

“Do you have an answer for me?”

He panicked, feeling embarrassment rush through him like a fire. He hadn’t heard the question. Mrs. Darcy clucked her tongue.

“1776, Mrs. Darcy,” Miles said, waving his hand. “The Declaration of Independence was written in 1776.”

“Miles!” Mrs. Darcy sighed. She glared at Jim for a second, then turned back to point at the projector again.

“Thanks,” Jim whispered.

Miles just winked at him.

Even without the flying, Jim thought, it was at least nice to finally have friends.

When the bell rang and class ended, Miles invited Jim over his house to play a new game. “It’s called
Hellfire
, man,” he said breathlessly. “It’s so funny what these humans make up about demons. I think it’s so, I don’t know, ironic that I can kill all these virtual demons. Or what humans think as demons, right?” His voice dropped. “Everyone knows you can’t kill demons with a machine gun, only with the right kind of metals. But, whatever, it’s fun to mow them down, right?”

Miles nudged Jim for agreement, but Jim couldn’t speak. Claire had appeared at the other end of the hall. She clutched her books to her chest. When she saw Jim, she looked at the floor. Her crimson wings glittered in the fluorescent hallway light. In a weird way, they were beautiful, mesmerizing, shining like rose petals after a morning rain.

“Watch out,” Miles mumbled. “New demon. Too bad, she’s pretty hot.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Jim muttered.

Even though he knew he shouldn’t, he tried desperately to make eye contact with Claire. All he wanted was some confirmation that she was still thinking about him, some sign that he was in her thoughts as much as she was in his. But she didn’t even look at him as she passed. Jim felt a whirlwind of longing and hurt and confusion. He wanted to reach out and grab her. He could feel that same electric charge that he had felt at the water tower and at the lake, pulling him closer to her. As she disappeared behind him, he bit on his tongue and forced himself to not look back at her.

He didn’t realize he was holding his breath until he got to the end of the hall. Miles said something about grabbing his lunch and disappeared to the right. Jim’s shoulders sagged as he headed toward his locker. He took a few more steps, then stopped. He turned around, hoping to catch one last glimpse of Claire, but all he saw was the empty hallway.

A hand slammed over his mouth. He tried to shout in surprise, but someone jerked him straight into a supply closet, knocking over a bucket and sending a mop clattering. The door closed and there was only darkness. The hand let go of his mouth and, suddenly, a pair of lips pressed into his.

“Jim,” Claire murmured. “I missed you.”

He couldn’t help kissing her back for a moment, then reality rushed in and he gently pushed her away. “What are you doing? Just now . . . I thought . . . don’t you hate me?”

“Shut up,” she said, slipping between his arms and kissing him again with an almost desperate hunger. Finally, they pulled away. Jim kept his hands wrapped around Claire’s waist, hoping he would never have to let her go.

“Okay,” he said breathlessly. “But really. Why didn’t you even look at me in the hall?”

“Didn’t you get the memo? I’m a demon. And you’re an angel. That means we’re supposed to hate each other.”

“I can tell, with all the kissing we’ve been doing,” he said softly.

“Be serious!” Claire gave him a little shove. “Do you hate me?”

“No!” Jim said, shocked. “How can you even ask that?”

“Good.” She rested her forehead against his. “I don’t hate you, either. So what are we going to do? We’re pretty bad at the demon-angel thing.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “This is dangerous, though. The demons are violent. I couldn’t imagine what they would do if they found out about us. Or what Gunner would do.”

“He’s probably just confused,” Jim said, pulling her closer against him. “I know I am.”

“Yeah, but . . .” Claire trailed off.

“What?” Jim asked.

The class bell rang. Claire’s arm tightened around his wrist. “Jim,” she said urgently. “Will you stay with me, even though you know what I am?”

“Of course,” he said. “I might not be sure about choosing to get my wings, or being an angel or anything else, but I’m sure of how I feel about you. No matter what.”

She kissed his neck and opened the closet door. The light shimmered on her red wings. “Good. Because I have a feeling this is going to be a lot harder than we think. Now wait before you come out, in case anyone sees us together.” As she closed the door again and slipped away down the hall, Jim thought he caught a flash of one white feather glowing against all her red ones. He smiled a little.

After a few seconds, he finally felt like it was safe to leave the closet, and reemerged into the bright white lights of the hall.

In a daze, he staggered to his locker and opened it, grabbing the crumpled paper bag that contained his PB&J sandwich. He could still feel Claire’s lips on his, her ghost haunting him, her voice filling his ears. He squeezed his eyes shut. How was he supposed to do this?

“Dude, there you are!”

Jim turned to see Miles and Nora standing at the corner of the hallway. “What were you doing? Cooking a steak for lunch? Let’s go, I’m starving!” Miles whipped around and led them to the cafeteria. Jim tried to make conversation with Nora by asking if there any more signs of the planewalker, but instantly regretted it.

“Oh, so many signs!” She pounded her fist into her hand. “This is really, really exciting. There haven’t been reports of a planewalker for decades, maybe more.”

“Nothing more exciting than a super-powerful demon moving in next door,” Miles mumbled.

“That’s not why it’s exciting!” Nora glared at her brother. “But if we could track him down and capture him, we could figure out how he got out of Slag. And what Slag is like.”

Miles shrugged as they marched down a staircase, coming closer to the roar of the cafeteria crowd. “I already know what Slag is like: bad.”

As they walked into the cafeteria, the demons—who had taken a table right in the middle—all tracked them with their eyes. Including Claire. Jim stared back at her, stunned, but she didn’t budge. From this distance, she looked like any of the other red-winged, blank-faced demons. For a moment, it felt like their kiss in the supply closet was something he’d dreamed.

He looked away from Claire, only to lock eyes with Gunner. There was something different about him. The friendly, mischievous grin had disappeared, like traces of sunlight on water that faded with passing clouds. Gunner looked at Jim for a moment, then turned away as if he couldn’t be bothered. Shane leaned over and whispered something in his ear, and Gunner barked out a laugh.

“They got
two
new demons, and all we got was you? How is that fair?” Miles moaned. He looked at Jim and smiled. “No offense, man.”

“None taken.” He followed Miles to a table nearby, where Sydney was sitting with Leo.

“About freaking time!” Leo said, his mouth full of French fries. “We’re getting stared to death over here.”

“Leo, close your mouth when you chew!” Nora scolded, sitting next to him.

Leo rolled his eyes and shoveled another handful of fries into his mouth.

Jim tried hard not to look at the demons sitting across from them, but it was practically impossible. He kept seeing the gleam of red wings from the corner of his eye, as if the right side of the cafeteria was on fire. During lunch, the angels mostly talked about how much they hated the demons. “All they want is chaos among the humans, so they can control them,” Sydney explained. “They’d be happy if the humans had no laws, no rulers, no government. Nothing to protect them from the demons as they take over. Thank Glisten for the Tribunal.”

“The Tribunal?” Jim asked.

“The Tribunal has powers that other angels don’t,” Nora explained. “Lord Castile, Lord Valas, and Lady Ichallas have ruled Glisten for thousands of years. They created the earthquake that sank Atlantis and turned it into Slag, and they’re the only ones with the power to banish demons there.”

“But if the demons are such a threat, why doesn’t the Tribunal just banish
all
of them to Slag?” Jim asked, puzzled.

Sydney shrugged. “Even in Glisten, nothing is perfect. There are disagreements between the three of them all the time. And rumors that they hate each other. I think they all have separate agendas, and it takes all three of them to banish a demon.”

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

“Yeah.” She nodded. “Demons who get caught breaking the Pact are banished to Slag by the Tribunal. Which is why even though Shane pretends to be all badass, he wouldn’t ever actually do anything. It’s too risky.”

Jim scratched the back of his neck. “But what about, like, if we didn’t hate the demons? What if one of them wasn’t so bad and we could . . .” He trailed off when he saw that they were all staring at him in shock.

“You mean be friends with those . . . those creatures over there?” Nora asked in horror.

“Jim,” Sydney said, her face deadly serious, “don’t ever say that again. Do you know how many Guardians have died because the demons have broken Pacts before? Do you know how close we’ve come to just never trying for peace again? Demons can’t be trusted. As soon as their wings come in, it’s like there’s fire in their blood or something. Even if you think you can trust them, they’ll turn on you eventually.”

“But—”

“Dude.” Leo wiped French fry grease from his mouth with the back of his arm. “Trust me, they already tried everything. It’s been thousands of years. One time, I think it was Lady Ichallas, she thought love would be the answer.” He cackled, throwing his head back. “This angel and demon, they fell in love. They had a kid. A half-angel, half-demon kid!”

“—she was named Annabelle,” Nora said, picking up speed with every word. “Annabelle the Viper, that’s what she’s called now. She could cause plagues. The Black Death in Europe? All her. She thought that cities were getting too crowded and human population was getting out of control. And that was her solution. Like, a third of the population in Europe was wiped out because of her. Children died in the streets, entire cities fell apart.”

“The point is that even if a demon could be trusted, which they can’t,” Sydney said, “we can never risk that kind of thing happening again. People that are half-angel, half-demon always end up going insane from being torn between two different planes. And then they abuse their power. A lot.”

Jim chewed on his lower lip, trying not to think of Claire, of the future they could never have together.

Miles sighed and opened a bag of cookies. “Can we talk about something else? I’m trying to enjoy my sugar high over here, not talk about Slag’s Greatest Hits.” He held out a cookie to Jim. “Want one?”

Jim managed to smile and reached out for the cookie. He had to take things one step at a time. Normally at this time, he would be eating under the steps by the gym, the best spot at Pearlton for sitting alone. Now, for the first time, he actually had a group of friends to eat with, tease him, share food. It just sucked that the price of his new friends was pretending to hate Claire. Because he knew he couldn’t do it. He knew he had to be with her, somehow.

He glanced over at the demons just as Claire snuck a look at him—and his breath caught in his throat. Claire immediately looked away, shaking her head. Jim sighed, feeling as if his whole body was deflating.
This is how it has to be
, he reminded himself. But for how long?