Pretty Faces and Dark Places (12 page)

“Don’t touch me!” I screamed. I was going through all of this pain again because of him, because he’d pulled out my first set of wings just because they had white feathers. The pain was making me want to break something, but I knew that it’d be over soon.

When the pain became unbearable I kneeled on the floor, feeling Andrew as he did the same. I sensed his worry through the sound of his breaths, which sounded like he was moaning along with me, as if my pain hurt him.

My fisted were clenched tight as I felt the wings coming out of my back. My groans were somewhat controlled because I knew that the worst had ended, since the wings already had broken the skin. And finally when it was over, I stayed in that position trying to catch my breath and embrace the feeling of no more pain.

The last thing I expected when I sat back on my knees and looked at Andrew’s face was to see his eyes with no hint of green or white in them. They were pitch black, his wings spread out on both sides of him, his fists clenched tight. When he opened his mouth to speak, there were scary fangs that made me gasp from the look of them, rather than at the words he spoke with a voice that sounded nothing like the warm voice he always talked spoke to me with.

“White feathers!”

Oh, no!

Andrew looked scary, and my first thought was to run away from him and never look back. However, I knew that wasn’t something I could do; I didn’t know the place and I doubted I could take more than one step before he would be able to catch me.

My second thought, the one that was much bigger and argued with my mind to make it true, was to stand up and go to him, hug him and soothe him, just to get him back to his normal self again, because the one that was standing in front of me was anything but the Andrew I knew and had made love with. This one was a stranger, scary, frightening. This one was a demon at its worse.

But then when his words sounded in my ears again and I started to realize what they meant, I knew that my first thought was the right thing to do.

“No!” I screamed as I stood up, taking a few steps away from him in a hurry. My small wings hit the wall behind me eventually, informing me silently that I was trapped. “Don’t cut them off, please!” I begged, knowing full well that Andrew had only taken them out so I could grow another set of wings with black feathers. Now with him saying that they were once again white feathers, I knew that he was going to pull them out, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to bear the pain if he did. I was already still suffering from the growing process.

It was like Andrew was in a different world, and I could be mistaken, but it looked like he not only wanted to cut my wings off – no, it looked as if he wanted to attack me as well. I had no idea why or what I’d done to make him that angry. I had no power over the color of my feathers – he must’ve known that!

Andrew took a step in my direction, and I was so terrified that I couldn’t help but scream at the top of my lungs. “Andrew, please, no! Don’t hurt me!” I cried out loud.

My cry was like pressing a button that controlled Andrew’s body, because his wings closed and his eyes changed from pitch black to beautiful green in an instant. It was a seriously shocking thing to see.

“Maya!” he choked out. It looked as if he was about to say something more, but before he could say it, I heard the door opening. A woman entered the room, looking shocked and worried at the same time. “I heard screaming,” was all she said before her eyes landed on me and she gasped, taking a step back.

From her voice, I was able to tell that that woman was Kathrin. She was the one who’d stopped us when we were going into the woods last year, the one I knew to be Andrew’s sister. And I didn’t know if it was a good thing or not that she had entered the room, but given the look in her eyes – I knew it couldn’t be good.

“White feathers!” she gasped the same words that Andrew had said earlier. I found it strange to see the terror on her hard features as she kept taking steps backward until she was out of the room, still looking at me with a horrified gaze focused only on my wings. “I need to tell my mother!” she said before disappearing again. I knew she would be informing her mother of what she’d just seen.

“Kathrin, no!” Andrew shouted as he ran after her, but when he made it to the door and looked for her, I knew that she was already gone. He punched the door with a clenched fist, and I could sense that anger was dominating his whole being.

I knew right away that nothing good was going to come out of this – not just by the look on Andrew’s face, but also because when my first wings had come out and Andrew saw the white feathers, the first thing that he thought to do was the same as Kathrin just ran to do – tell his mother. But then Andrew came back and told me he couldn’t do it, though I didn’t know why – I knew that to him it was a bad thing.

“Andrew,” I called his name in a low, shaking voice. I was too scared and terrified, and my heart was thumping against my chest as if it was trying to come out. I was choking and my breaths were tangled. I didn’t know what was to come and I couldn’t think of any way to prevent me from going through whatever was in store for me. I only had a hope in the green-eyed demon in front of me – the one that was looking at me with so much passion that it sent warmth over my heart and a hint of comfort over my mind – that he would protect me from any danger that might come upon me.

Andrew took slow and carful steps towards me, as if waiting to see if I’d try to run away from him or if I’d stay in place. I did the latter, not moving an inch. And when he figured out that I wasn’t going to go anywhere, he stood right in front of me, reaching out with both of his hands to hug my face. So many emotions were in his filled-with-sadness eyes as he spoke with that tender-yet-deep voice of his. “I’m so sorry, Beautiful Maya,” he apologized.

His words that I thought would calm me down actually did the complete opposite – they scared me even more. Because it was the same words that he’d spoken before when he was about to pull out my wings.

“No!” I pushed his hands away from me. “You can’t just keep cutting my wings off, Andrew! It hurts so bad!” I whined, sounding like a little child who didn’t want to get a shot, though I wished it was that easy. It was a million times worse to have someone dig their fingers into the freshly cut and deep wound that was in your heart.

The sadness in his eyes was hurting me, maybe as much as what pulling out my wings had felt like. It was really confusing to me to admit to myself all of the feelings I had for Andrew, but I couldn’t deny that seeing him so miserable made the whole world gloomy in my eyes.

Not a moment after I spoke the words, I saw the woman I knew to be Andrew’s mom enter the room, and just like her daughter, she took a step back with a gasp when she saw me.

“What the hell?!” she questioned out loud. “What made her feathers white?”

And I thought they wanted her here for answers …

No one replied, of course. I didn’t know the answer, heck – I didn’t even know they could grow from my back at all, let alone why my wings had white feathers.

“Andrew?” she asked for his attention and reply with just a call of his name.

“I don’t know, Mother. They just grew this way,” he replied, his head bent down. His form spoke volumes of how broken he seemed to be.

“It can’t be, something must’ve gone wrong,” she said, taking a few steps in my direction with her eyes focused on my wings, though she was still careful to keep some distance between us.

“I didn’t do anything,” I tried to defend myself, even though no one was accusing me of anything. I just felt the need to protect myself, by clarifying that I had nothing to do with it.

Andrew’s mom didn’t pay my words any attention. She studied my wings closely, a frown of distaste plastered on her face. “It’s coming from the roots,” she said. I had no idea what she meant by that, but then she shouted, “Kathrin!” and her daughter came from her place by the door to stand a few steps away from her mother.

“Yes, Mother?”

“Get her to the Converting Room,” she ordered. My eyes widened, but – I thought I’d already gone through that?!

I couldn’t do much other than struggle when two men entered the room after Andrew’s mom left. Kathrin asked them to take me to where I knew would be the Converting Room – where I just knew I would feel even more pain than everything I’d felt since I came to the underworld.

The two men were much stronger than me and my struggles were nothing that affected them whatsoever. My arms hurt from all of the pulling and my legs hurt even more from all of my useless kicks, but what hurt me the most was my heart – my heart that was crying for Andrew to save me. Only Andrew’s heart never heard my pleas – if he had one, that is.

Was this love for him? He’d said he loved me. Did that mean that he liked for me to be in pain? That he enjoyed seeing me afraid of the unknown? Did hurting me please him? I didn’t know, but I guessed yes. After all, he’d watched me while the converting went on with a big smile plastered on his face.

In just a minute or two, I was again back in the Converting Room. Once again I was tied to the cross, but this time I didn’t have the large audience from the last time. I could only see Andrew’s family: his siblings and his mother. They were watching as the two men – demons, or whatever – tied me to the cross and collared my neck, pulling me by it to bend down, my legs straight and my face facing the floor.

I wasn’t naked this time; I was still in the jeans and top. I still wondered if they’d bring those bats again to eat my skin. The fear that was consuming my every sense was so great that I almost passed out, or wished I could.

I kept begging and asking for mercy, pleading with them to let me go and pleading with Andrew, whom I could see with the corner of my eye as he sat in one of the chairs with his shoulders hunched down and his wings looking somewhat smaller. I couldn’t see his eyes to know if he was looking at me, but from what I could see, his head was facing the other way, as if he didn’t want to witness what was about to happen. I wondered what had changed that.

To my surprise, I saw Andrew’s mother as she came closer to me. I didn’t know why she didn’t take a seat on her throne-like chair, but I knew that I didn’t like her near me.

“We will start by pulling out the feathers and see if there are black ones underneath,” she said, I assumed to the two demons that had tied me up, her voice stern and her tone commanding.

“No! No, please, don’t!” I cried out loud. “Andrew! Help me!” I screamed and pulled at my restraints, but it was no use – they were very tight and secure. Before I knew it, the torment began.

One day, I fell in our backyard as I was playing with Sophie when we were ten. There was this little piece of wood that managed to get between my nail and the skin of my finger, and in the ER they had to pull out the nail so it would grow nicely later on. Even with drugs, the pain was unbearable, but pulling my feathers out was a thousand times worse.

With every feather they pulled out of my wings, I let out a shriek and screamed for them to stop it. They never listened. By the time they were done pulling hundreds of feathers out of my wings, I was out of breath, with no power to scream any more, completely losing hope that Andrew would make them stop the torture.

“No hint of any black,” I heard Andrew’s mom saying with dissatisfaction. “We’ll have to pull the wings out from the base and wait for new ones to come out.”

“NO! Please, please, please!” I shouted, but it was like they were deaf to anything I said. I felt two hands on my right wing, and two other hands on my left one. They counted to three and then they started pulling them together, at the same time with the same force. The chain that was tied to my collar kept my back from straightening with the pulling they were doing.

It was only then that Andrew’s words when he said to me that he had to do it made sense. I thought that he didn’t love me, but him pulling my wings out himself was actually an act of love. He knew that if his family knew, they would do this to me – this is why he didn’t tell his mother. I’d misjudged him. But I still couldn’t help but wish he would make them stop this. Why wasn’t he making them stop? Why? I was suffering, I was hurting – why couldn’t he tell them to stop? Why wasn’t he helping me? Realizing that he truly loved me didn’t make the pain any less agonizing, or mean that I was able to stop screaming, or crying out loud as I saw my blood seeping down to the floor beneath me.

Finally, they were able to pull my wings out, causing me to release a bloodcurdling scream that sounded all over the room around us. And because apparently I had the worst luck in the universe, I started feeling the now-familiar pain that I’d felt two times before.

New wings were growing out already.