Immortal City

by Scott Speer

  “What did you do?” she in a desperate whisper.

  Jacks looked away from her, out to the boiling storm.

  “I broke the law.”

  “You what?” she choked. “Why?” Somewhere in the distance, a ribbon of lightning flashed.

  “For you,” Jacks growled.

  Maddy reeled. Had Jackson Godspeed rescued her from certain death? And after everything he had said to her at the party? And how badly he had hurt her? And humiliated her? And insulted her? Sudden, uncontrollable anger welled up, but now it was much worse than it had been at the party, because if he had really saved her life, she now owed him. After everything he had done and said, now she was going to have to be grateful to him?

  “I told you to stay away from me,” she said cuttingly. “What part of leave me alone was unclear to you?”

  Jacks released her from his grip, and she immediately slid away. The cold bit through her wet clothes almost instantly.

  “I should have guessed you’d be this way,” he said in exasperation.

  She struggled to her feet and had to lean against the concrete wall to keep from falling over. She was still dizzy. “You had no right to do that.”

  A snarl escaped Jacks’s lips, startling her. In an instant he was on his feet, walking out into the pouring rain, his shoulders heaving. Then he turned and glared at her. Maddy winced at his hostile expression.

  “You stubborn, impossible girl!” he yelled through the raindrops. “Why are you always like this? I save your life, and you’re angry with me?” His blue eyes were blazing, his tone ferocious. Maddy felt her own anger evaporate in his burning gaze.

  “I just, I told you to leave me alone,” she said again, desperately. “Please.”

  “Why?” he demanded. “Why do you push me away? Am I not good enough for you?” He was stalking toward her now.

  “You don’t understand, Jacks,” she said, the emotions twisting inside her. She walked out from under the awning and felt the rain soak into her skin.

  “What don’t I understand?!” he demanded.

  “I have to stay away from you,” she burst.

  He stopped. “What?”

  “Self-preservation!” Maddy screamed. The words rushed out of her as if some internal dam had finally broken. “Don’t you get it? I have to keep myself away from you so I don’t get sucked into the illusion that you might actually like me,” she said, water dripping off her lips. “I can’t let myself believe you actually have feelings for me, Jacks. If I do that, I’ll wake up one day and realize that you’re a famous Angel and I’m . . . I’m nobody.” She felt a lump rising in her throat and swallowed it down hard. She wasn’t going to let him see her cry. “My life hasn’t been easy like yours, Jacks. Things like this don’t happen for me. So, I’ve just learned it’s easier to push them away.”

  Jacks stared, astonished, through the downpour. “You have to keep away from me? I have to fight to keep away from you. Do you have any idea how hard this has been for me? I meet you one night, and just like that, I can’t get you out of my head. When our hands touched, and I saw this . . . streak of beauty in your eyes . . . I’d never felt anything like that before, nothing even close.” He began to pace furiously, the rain flicking off him as he went. “All of a sudden, every fiber of my being is drawn to you, to be with you, and I don’t know why.” He stopped and pointed an accusing finger at her. “I didn’t ask for this. But I felt something in that back room with you, and it’s stayed with me ever since. I want to be with you. I need to be with you.” His tone was both angry and helpless.

  “And that’s why you took me to your party, to show me how important you were, how everyone loved you, how I’d just be one more speck in a sea of girls who wanted you and your fame and your car. You did that because you wanted to ‘be with me.’” All Maddy could do was scoff.

  Jacks’s face rippled with disbelief. “Maddy, I took you there because I wanted to show you the night of your life. I wanted you to have everything, to show everyone else you were special! If I thought you’d see it that way, I never would’ve taken you to the party. Those things aren’t important to me. I just wanted to spend time with you, to make you feel as special, as alive, as you made me feel when we met.”

  “Why are you being so cruel?” Maddy said, her voice cracking. “Please, just leave me alone.” She turned and walked away from him farther into the rain, her emotions twisting inside her. She didn’t feel the hand on her arm until he had spun her around. Then she felt the fingers of his other hand lace into her hair, and in an instant, his wet mouth was against hers.

  The kiss was raw. Hungry. She opened her mouth and his immortal breath rushed into her. He pulled her against him and kissed her again. The storm raged around them.

  When their lips finally came apart, his breathing was hard and ragged. She felt the steam of his breath against her hair. Her feet touched the tops of his, and standing on him like that, she let him hold her. The downpour was steady all around them. Maddy concentrated on slowing her racing heart. She could still taste him in her mouth. She could still hear his words echoing in her head. Could she really believe him? Could he really have feelings for her?

  She stepped back off his toes and looked at him. He was watching her through wet stabs of hair, scrutinizing her. Waiting. Another ribbon of lightning glowed in the sky and she saw a flash of his eyes. She felt desire welling up inside her. She wanted to kiss him again. But she didn’t want to be a silly, Angelstruck girl. She took another step away and looked out into the storm, embarrassed. Jacks’s face fell in frustration.

  They stood there quietly, neither speaking.

  “I was scared, Jacks,” Maddy finally whispered. “I mean, not about what happened to me. But scared for you. The reporters . . . they said you were next. With the murders on the Walk of Angels.”

  Jacks nodded, gently wiping water away from her cheek with his thumb. “Well, now I have something much worse to worry about.”

  “What happens now?” Maddy said.

  “Now they’ll come for me.” She looked back at him. His face had hardened.

  “What?”

  “The Angels.” He paused. “The Council’s Disciplinary Agents.”

  “Because you saved me?” she asked in disbelief. The idea of Angel Police flickered in her mind. What would that even look like?

  “Because I saved someone who wasn’t supposed to be saved. There are consequences in my world, Maddy.”

  “What consequences?” The lightning flashed again and this time she saw fear in his eyes.

  “They’ll take my wings,” he said quietly.

  “They can make you . . . they can take them?” A stab of panic hit her stomach.

  “Yes,” he said, his mouth a grim line. “The Archangels would never admit it officially, although somebody out there sure seems to know about it. They’ll remove my wings, which will draw the immortality out of me. They’ll do it slowly and make sure they do it right.”

  “They can’t do that. You’re Jackson Godspeed.”

  “They can. And they will. There is a system to uphold. Disciplinary Agents are hunting me as we speak.” Jacks’s face was miserable but resolute. “Nothing is impossible when you break the rules.”

  Maddy shook her head, as if the movement could somehow shake the reality away. She simply couldn’t believe it. That by saving her he had actually, knowingly put himself in line for a consequence this severe. So much was kept hidden about the Angels, about how they handled their internal affairs—brutally, it turned out. All the while they put on a smooth, clean exterior for the public and the media.

  “What can I do?” she said finally.

  Jacks looked at her through the deluge.

  “Come with me.”

  There he stood in the pouring rain, the image of shirtless soaked perfection. He stood before her offering her a choice just like he had the night they went flying. She was at another crossroads. She knew she could just leave. Knew she probably should.
But they were going to take his wings, and it was all her fault. Her fault for going to the party, her fault for trying to follow through with her plan, her fault for leaving and insisting on walking home. Could she really leave him now? Before she had even decided, her mouth opened.

  “Yes,” she said. Just like when he had invited her to the party. It simply came out, as though her true desires could no longer be repressed.

  Jacks smiled a dripping, radiant smile. A flash of lightning lit the roof, followed closely by a bark of thunder.

  “There are Angels I know who will help us. I can’t fly or the ADC will take me immediately. We need to get off this roof and lie low, travel on foot.”

  Maddy nodded. Her decision made, questions began pounding her mind. She pulled out her BlackBerry Miracle and tried to power it up. The screen was black and lifeless.

  “Dead from the rain,” Jacks said. “Mine too. They can track them anyway. Come on, let’s get going.”

  Jacks began walking toward a door on the far end of the rooftop. Maddy lingered for a moment, thoughtful.

  “How did you know?” Maddy asked.

  “What?” He strained to hear her over the roar of the downpour.

  “How did you know I was in trouble?” she said again. She might not follow the modern Angels, but one thing she did know from her required Angel History reading was that they never disclosed how they made their saves. They simply performed them, leaving the public to guess about their trade secrets.

  Jacks’s eyes searched hers. How many rules could he break in one night? “You know I’m not allowed to tell you this.”

  Maddy stood where she was. Something in her needed to know. “Do you trust me?” she asked quietly. The rain continued pounding down across the Immortal City.

  After a moment, Jacks let out a long breath and spoke. “I saw it,” he said simply.

  She looked at him through the cascading liquid.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I felt it first and then saw it. After I focused on your frequency,” Jacks said. “Every person has a frequency. In Guardian training we learn how to tune to them so we can then do it for each of our Protections. We learn people’s frequencies. That way we can instantly feel when something bad is about to occur and then tune in through the static of all the other human beings. It sounds more complicated than it really is.”

  “But with me?”

  Jacks paused. “I felt your frequency that first night in the diner. How could I not?” He looked out into the night. “It’s the big secret of how we always know when our Protections are in danger. Tuning to the frequencies. Otherwise it would just be random images, feelings. Like jumbled static.”

  Maddy’s heart stopped in her chest. The world around her halted. Everything faded into the background as Jacks’s words rang in her head. The Angel looked at her stunned expression.

  “I know it sounds amazing, but to us it’s really no big deal, like flying or anything else we train for that the NAS keeps secret. It’s just one of those things. Like being double-jointed or something.” He laughed.

  Even soaking wet, Maddy felt every hair on her body standing on end. Jacks walked over to the roof access door and tried the handle. It was unlocked. He turned to her. Despite the rain, he could see she had gone white as a ghost.

  “What is it?”

  “We need to go back to my house,” Maddy said. “I have to talk to my uncle.” Lightning flashed right overhead, followed by a vicious crack.

  “I’m sorry, Maddy, it’s just too dangerous. They’ll be looking for us there.”

  “I have to, Jacks.” Her voice was growing hysterical. “I have to talk to my uncle. It’s important.”

  “Maddy, we can’t. It’s out of the question,” Jacks said.

  “You don’t understand. I’m going to my uncle’s house,” Maddy yelled through the storm, “and I’m going whether you come with me or not.”

  Then the night seemed to literally explode.

  It was like a terrible firework lighting up the sky as a finger of lightning reached down and struck a power line on the hill not far away. The crack of the contact deafened Maddy’s ears, leaving them ringing. A plume of blinding sparks erupted from the transmission tower, momentarily illuminating the ghostly Angel City sign, and then, like strands of Christmas lights being unplugged, the streets and neighborhoods of Angel City went dark. They blinked off one by one until Maddy and Jacks were consumed in blackness. The rain continued to splash down, washing the Immortal City’s streets clean under the cover of darkness, churning filth into the overflowing gutters.

  A square of light formed in the abyss as Jacks opened the roof access door, bathing them both in the dim light cast from the building’s emergency power.

  “Is there any way I can get you to change your mind?” he asked.

  “No,” Maddy said stubbornly.

  “Okay.” Jacks sighed. “Then let’s go.” He gestured to the door.

  Her heart still racing, Maddy followed him out of the rain and into the cold—but dry—stairwell. She couldn’t feel her feet on the metal steps as they descended. Maddy’s scattered mind had focused into a single laser of a thought. It was time to find out what really happened to her mother and father. Time to find out who her parents really were.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Sylvester sat in his darkened cubicle in the Homicide Division, bathed in the blue glow of his computer screen and the yellow cast of the emergency lighting. The storm had knocked out the power, but the backup generator at the station had kicked on almost immediately. The reduced output was running the computers and the televisions and the few dim emergency lights. The amber glow made the normally bright and sterile police station look strange and eerie. Rivulets of rain traced down the windows as the downpour continued outside.

  Sylvester’s cubicle was a temporary one that had been set up for him in the open-air bull pen the detectives all shared. He himself was usually downstairs in a windowless room, double-checking paperwork for other investigators or handling the occasional small property crime. It had been years since he had been invited upstairs. He hadn’t had time to unpack yet. All around him were unorganized stacks of folders and still-unopened file boxes. On top of one of the boxes sat a tub of Red Vines. An indulgence.

  The detective had been up at 5 a.m. that morning, investigating another pair of gruesome severed wings. Another star, another Angel—Lance Crossman, who had already been missing. Now probably dead, though they hadn’t found the body yet, only his wings, which had been broken in many places, twisted and cracked. This time the killer hadn’t left them on Lance’s star—with the police barricades and the media coverage, there was no way he or she would have been able to do so unnoticed. Instead, they’d been securely wrapped and delivered anonymously to ACPD headquarters. The desk sergeant who’d had the misfortune of opening the package had been taken to the hospital in severe shock.

  After that, Sylvester had gone down to Long Beach. Local police had fished a mutilated, bloated body out of the bay just hours before—Theodore Godson. At least the press hadn’t been able to get any pictures.

  Other detectives in ACPD had no leads on this case, and the Angels weren’t being helpful. They’d just wanted it swept under the rug until after the Commissioning, although someone had already leaked to the press the night before that Angels were being killed. A surge of calls with supposed tips flooded the ACPD offices. Sylvester had been out interviewing potential witnesses all day and all night, trying to unearth solid intel. Or the body of this third victim. Instead all he’d been able to collect was gossip, like the fact that Ryan Templeton had had a secret cocaine problem. Not very heavenly of him.

  On Sylvester’s computer screen were gruesome images of the crime scenes. Disembodied wings. Glistening blood splattered over the famous stars of the Walk of Angels. He studied the images, scrutinizing them for details that he had missed. As he did, the glitz and glamour of the boulevard seemed to mix and blur wi
th the blood and carnage in a very unsettling way.

  He flipped to a prison photo of a man with an unkempt beard and an otherworldly look in his eyes. William Beaubourg. Sylvester had interviewed the three arrested HDF members at the Tombs jail downtown, trying to figure out what they knew about the murders and Beaubourg’s current whereabouts. After being released from San Quentin prison earlier this year, Beaubourg had immediately disappeared, releasing videos on the Internet that talked about the coming “War on Angels.” The jailed operatives seemed to hint to Sylvester that the HDF was behind the Angel murders. But were they just trying to gain notoriety for their cause? Sylvester was unable to piece together what Angel would be helping the HDF. But he couldn’t rule them out.

  And then there was Mark. Sylvester was still hunting for hard evidence—all the dots weren’t connecting to point to Mark Godspeed as the culprit. But Sylvester’s gut told him that the Archangel was somehow involved. The detective had already cleared Jackson. His alibi had entirely held up, and he had been seen in public during the time at which forensics figured Templeton was murdered. Plus Sylvester’s long-honed intuition told him the Godspeed kid was clean. Unlike most of the Immortal City.

  But Mark: the way he had almost totally discounted Sylvester’s findings, even basically threatening to discredit the detective. How he merely wanted to cover up the murders, not help with the investigation. Was he going for a strange power play among the Archangels? Was managing this panic somehow going to allow him to consolidate control? Sylvester thought back to Mark’s actions almost twenty years before. With those actions in mind, Sylvester would put nothing beyond him. There was no way he could be trusted.

  Sylvester flipped through more files, rubbing his burning eyes. He leafed through a stack of reports Garcia had gathered from locals living near the crime scenes. Anybody who thought they had seen something strange had been interviewed. Most were nothing of interest, just fancies of worried people, but he took the time to scan through them anyway. One of the reports he stopped on was from a homeless man who had been sleeping in a doorway next to Theodore Godson’s star on the night of the first incident. The report was several pages long and appeared to be nothing more than the rant of a drunk or a drug addict. Sylvester groaned, pulling the report out of the stack and setting it aside.