by Scott Speer
“This is him?” Maddy asked, tapping the photo.
“Yes, this is him,” Kevin said. “This is Jacob Godright.” Kevin pointed to a handsome man in his twenties standing next to him. “And this is a young human activist named Teddy Linden.”
“The senator?” Jacks asked in disbelief. “He hates Angels.”
“Or hates what they have become. That was another place and another time. You see, Jacob Godright and his followers were convinced that Angels and humans could live together as equals, work together, and even have families together. To prove his point, he secretly married a beautiful, brilliant human girl he had fallen in love with.” Kevin’s voice wavered under the weight of the words. “That girl was my sister, Maddy. She was your mother. Montgomery is your mother’s maiden name. Your real name is Madison Godright.”
He paused.
“Your father was an Angel.”
It was a full ten seconds before Maddy could speak. Or move. Or even breathe. Her galloping heart threatened to tear through her chest. She heard her uncle’s words ringing in her head.
“That’s . . . impossible.” She hadn’t meant to say it aloud, but the word broke through her paralyzing shock. She became aware of Jacks sitting like a sculpture next to her, his face a stony mask of disbelief.
“I’m so sorry I haven’t been able to tell you until now,” Kevin said. “I can’t tell you how much I wish things were different. How much I miss my sister.”
“But I’m not an Angel,” Maddy managed to get out.
“No,” Kevin said, “you’re not. You are human, but you have Angel blood flowing in your veins. You are one of a kind, Maddy, unique in all the world.” He smiled and gave her a quick squeeze on the shoulder. Then his face darkened. “Your birth, which was thought to be impossible, became the catalyst for everything. Your parents said you were a miracle, and a sign, but the NAS called you a bastard, a half blood, and”— he paused on the word—“an abomination.” Kevin’s eyes were apologetic, but his tone was cuttingly honest. “And so, a power struggle began within the Angels.”
“The Troubles,” Jacks said.
“That’s right,” Kevin said. “The Angel Civil War.”
“My father . . .” Jacks said. Maddy watched his knuckles go white as he gripped the armrests of his chair.
“Yes, your father, Isaiah Godspeed, was a rebel along with Jacob.”
“What?” Jacks glared at Kevin, his eyes narrowing into distrustful slits. “My father fought the rebellion. He was killed putting it down.”
“No, Jacks,” Kevin said calmly. “That’s what your stepfather, Mark, wants you to think. The truth is, your father wanted to reform the Angels too. He supported Jacob and his child.”
“Why wouldn’t Mark want me to know that?” Jacks asked.
“Because when Maddy was only a few weeks old, Jacob and Isaiah approached him for help. They were all classmates, and Mark—Isaiah’s cousin—was already a rising star, an ambitious political prodigy. The Jackson Godspeed of his day,” Kevin said, nodding toward Jacks. He turned the final page of the scrapbook. It was blank. Maddy looked at the yellowed, brittle page. Like a future cut unnecessarily short.
“Mark refused to support them and turned them away. With the ranks closed against them, Maddy was brought to me under cover of darkness. The next day, both Jacob and Isaiah were captured by the Council’s Disciplinary Agents, mortalized, and killed in cold blood. Regina, my sister, was also murdered. Kris Godspeed and her child, Jackson, were spared. In exchange for not helping the rebels, Mark was given his position as Archangel and quickly rose in the NAS.
“Jacks,” Kevin said, his tone suddenly gentler, “your mother didn’t know. And still doesn’t. She is innocent. In her grief, she gave in to Mark’s advances and they married.”
Kevin closed the scrapbook and put his hands on the dusty cover. Jacks had turned and stared unseeingly out the kitchen window. Kevin looked at Maddy.
“The Angels promised never again to interfere with your life so long as you lived it out normally, without any knowledge of your past or what you actually are. I agreed, and you’ve been with me ever since.”
The lump in her throat was back and throbbing as it rose. She had come to speak to Kevin in hopes of finally clearing up the foggy dream world of her past. Now she realized that dream was a nightmare, a nightmare he had been protecting her from. She wasn’t just an average, unremarkable girl. She was a perversion of man and Angel. A monster. No wonder she had always felt like a freak.
She literally was one.
Maddy could feel her eyes swelling, and she didn’t know if she would be able to stop the tears. Unsteadily, she got up from the table and walked through the living room to the window. The rain had finally stopped, replaced by fog that hung low over the wet street. Maddy watched a man out walking his dog in the mist.
Jacks sat unmoving in his chair. Now it was his turn to decide what to believe.
“And now they’re hunting me for saving her,” he said softly.
“They’re probably hunting you both,” Kevin said. “Now that you’ve saved Maddy, Jacks, both of you are a threat to the Archangels’ power, a reminder of other . . . ideas about how the Angels should be. Descendants of the rebels, acting rebelliously. Dangerous. They will never allow the two of you to be together. No matter what it takes. If they can, Council Disciplinary Agents will kill you both.”
Maddy heard the scrape of chairs on the linoleum as Jacks and Kevin got up.
“You’ll have to excuse me when I say I don’t like Angels,” Kevin said, and then he offered his hand. “But thank you for saving my niece’s life.” Jacks looked at Kevin’s hand for a moment and then took it. The two shook.
Maddy continued staring out the window in silence. She watched as Jacks’s reflection appeared behind her in the glass. She wondered if he would have some lame condolence. The Immortal Angel telling the freak of nature I feel your pain or something pathetic like that. At least she could stop wondering if he actually cared about her or not. Now, for sure, she knew he would want nothing to do with her.
Jacks stood beside her. Instead of saying anything, she felt his fingers trace up her palm and then lace into hers. He had taken her hand before, quickly and for functional reasons—usually to drag her off to someplace she didn’t want to go—but he had never held her hand. Not the way couples did in parks or lovers did in old movies. Maddy stood there and felt the heat of his grip. It made her think of that first night in the diner, when they had talked about pretend memories and she had felt so connected to him. But now they were further apart than ever, she had to remind herself. One an Angel and the other an abomination.
“We should get going,” he said finally. Maddy couldn’t believe he hadn’t said I should get going, but she was too numb to care. Or think.
“Who is that?” Jacks said. He was looking at the man with his dog.
“I don’t know,” Maddy said. “A neighbor, I guess.”
“How long has he been there?” His tone at once severe.
Suddenly the lights inside the house sprang to life. The refrigerator whirred back on, and the TV in the living room blinked to life.
“—Manhunt under way for Angel Jackson Godspeed . . .” a reporter was announcing under a scrolling breaking news banner.
Outside, the neighborhoods of Angel City lit up one by one along the grid as power was restored. The man with the dog suddenly looked directly at Maddy standing in the open window and vanished. He disappeared in a literal blur and was gone, leaving the dog to look around inquisitively and sniff at its lifeless leash.
Maddy turned toward Jacks, breathless.
His face was twisted in sudden despair.
“How much time do we have?” she asked.
He grabbed her by the back of her hoodie and pulled her away from the window.
“It’s already too late.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
From Maddy’s point of view, three things seemed to happen
simultaneously. First, the house itself seemed to simply explode. The windows, which a moment before had been cold and still and covered in raindrops, suddenly disintegrated into a thousand glittering pieces. The front door disappeared, blown into razor-sharp splinters that knifed their way through the living room. In the kitchen, utensils, teacups, and plates were tossed into the air like lethal confetti.
Second, something collided violently with Jacks. Maddy saw it only out of the corner of her eye. It came through the window, moving so fast it was nothing more than a blur in her peripheral vision. A blur with wings. Jacks was propelled backward through the furniture and into the old TV, which gave a buzzing death cry as it shattered.
Third, as she turned to look back at Jacks, Maddy felt the fingers of an iron grip wrap around her throat. Another winged blur had come through the living room window, and this one had come for her.
She flew backward like a pinball, hitting the wall of school photos and sending most of the frames shattering to the floor. The impact was so violent she was momentarily disoriented. Angel blood . . . perversion of nature . . . Council will kill you if they can. The words mixed with a strange image of a dark figure with glowing eyes. She must be dreaming. She had to be imagining the phantom before her.
The need for oxygen brought Maddy suddenly, painfully back to the present. She was staring into an expressionless black mask with gleaming, computerized eyes. The Angel stood larger than Jacks by nearly a foot, was muscularly built, and wore some kind of futuristic black armor that covered his entire body. His wings were armored too and black, like bat wings. Whatever Maddy had imagined Angel Police would look like, it wasn’t this. The mask made the Angel look like a ghoulish robot.
Her mouth opened to scream, but the vise-like hand that was around her throat simply tightened and choked off the sound. She flailed. She clawed at the enormous arms and willed her feet to move, but the Angel’s grip constricted like a snake. Her knees buckling under her, Maddy felt her body surrender. The Angel lifted her by her neck and threw her against the far wall.
She heard the crack as her head smacked against the stone fireplace. A high-pitched ringing began in her left ear. She tried to roll over and scramble away, but the Angel was over her at once, pinning her to the ground. His speed and strength were spectacular. Overwhelming and absolute. She saw a heavy glass paperweight sitting on a stack of bills on the corner table, grabbed it, and swung it at the Angel’s head. He caught her arm midswing. She heard the crackle of a radio from somewhere within the mask. The voice was cold and indifferent.
“I have the girl. Prepare for extraction.”
It was already over.
Behind her, in the direction of the kitchen, Maddy heard a male scream. She recognized it at once. Kevin. She had never heard him scream before. The sound made her blood run cold. This was all her fault. She had led them to a trap.
Maddy looked into the masked Angel’s glowing, electronic eyes. His mouth was hidden, but Maddy had the strangest feeling that he was grinning at her.
In an instant, the glowing eyes looked up, as if in surprise.
Jacks’s hand whistled through the air, catching the Angel’s arm and bending it in an impossible angle. Jacks’s other fist blurred, his Divine Ring a flick of light in the dark room, landing a crushing blow into the black mask.
The look on Jackson’s face was something she had never seen before. His eyes flared, ferocious. They burned with a kind of fire. Maddy could only think of one word to describe it: wrath. His mouth opened to release an inhuman roar. Wings burst from behind him, broad and menacing. Maddy’s mind flickered back to what Jacks had told her at the outlook: a Battle Angel’s wings.
The black Angel came at Jacks again. He thrust his hand forward as she had seen Jacks do in the diner and at the street corner, but Jacks was faster. For a moment the Immortals shimmered in time, flickering like television static. Maddy saw Jacks blur a hand around the Angel’s leg, and with a howl of rage on his lips, he threw the winged creature into the wall.
Jackson’s murderous eyes shot back to Maddy.
“Are you okay?” he thundered.
“I think so.”
The sound of Kevin’s screams came back to her. She struggled to her feet and stumbled into the kitchen.
Maddy found Kevin sitting against the cabinets below the sink. A jagged cut on his forehead had begun to ooze blood. The candles that he had so carefully set up were now cracked and broken on the floor around him. The scrapbook sat mangled in the corner, its pages wrenched out, pictures scattered everywhere. One of the photos had caught on an overturned candle and was starting to burn.
“Kevin!” Maddy screamed.
“I’ll be fine!” Kevin yelled. Another explosion shook the walls as more winged silhouettes crashed into the house. Steps thundered on the stairs as they swooped down from above. The siege’s noose was tightening around them.
“You have to go now,” Kevin said, and looked at Jacks. “Fly!”
They would only have a moment to escape or never.
Jacks’s wild eyes were on Maddy, but he didn’t move. He waited for her decision. Maddy looked in Kevin’s eyes. Something in them didn’t want her to go, but begged her to all the same.
“Okay,” Maddy said, turning to Jacks. “Let’s go.”
She felt his heavy arm scoop her up and had only a moment to dig her nails into his skin before they were torn skyward. They shot through the jagged opening of the window, Jacks’s wings thrashing the air, and climbed into the foggy night.
The wet rushing air burned against Maddy’s face. Compared to now, the first time they had gone flying had been a leisurely stroll. Now they rocketed through the night, ferociously, painfully. Angel City receded below them until it was nothing more than an indistinct glow. The night fog enveloped them.
The muscles of Jacks’s back rose and fell with the exertion of his wings. Maddy looked back through the lashing air. She saw nothing at first, just the fog and inky black night. Then the unmistakable outline of Angel wings emerged. Three dark shapes were coming toward them in the dark, their yellow eyes glowing like banshees’.
“There are three of them!” she yelled over the rush of the wind. Slowly, surely, the pursuing Angels seemed to be nearing. Maddy watched helplessly as they began to close the gap.
Then, through a break in the fog, she spotted it. The Los Angeles skyline. In the foggy night the twinkling buildings hovered like ocean liners on a sea of mist. When Jacks spoke again, his voice was little more than a whisper in the wind.
“Listen. This will probably be the worst pain you have ever experienced in your life. Everything in your body will tell you to let go, but you have to hold on. You have to hold on, Maddy, no matter what. No matter how badly it hurts. You can never, never let go. Can you do that for me?”
Maddy nodded. She crossed her arms around his neck and gripped her elbows with as much strength as her hands would bring to bear. Jacks wrapped his arms around her arms, pulling them so tightly around his body she winced. Banking steeply, they soared toward the towers of glass.
The Angels behind them had gained. Maddy didn’t need to look back. She could hear the hiss of the wind over their wings. Jacks rushed forward with disorienting speed. She watched as a towering building emerged from the fog like a ghost. It quickly eclipsed her vision, a wall of glass rushing eagerly to greet them. Jacks didn’t change course. He didn’t slow down. Maddy felt a primal panic well up inside her. She watched the wall approach until she could see her reflection in it. The raw terror overpowered her rational thinking, and she screamed. In that exact instant, Jacks buckled at the waist, pumped his wings, and wrenched Maddy straight down.
They dove. Viciously. The thrust nearly tore her off Jacks’s back. It was like the first big drop of a roller coaster—except excruciating instead of fun. Every cell of her body screamed at her to let go. Pleaded. The tearing sensation in her arms and fingers was overwhelming. Blood drained from her head.
They
flew directly down the tower’s surface, so close she could touch it, so fast it appeared as a single, unbroken sheet of glass. A strange popping noise filled her ears, and she realized the windows were exploding as they passed. A wave of shattering glass pursued them as they rushed toward the fast-approaching ground.
Maddy’s eyes opened in agonized slits and she saw the street. It was like death itself rushing up at her. Then, with impossible precision, Jacks leveled and shot straight forward over the ground. Streetlights, signs, cars: all flew by at deadly speeds, missing them by inches.
The acceleration bled away and Maddy found she could breathe again. She looked back. Sure enough, the first Angel had been pulled into Jacks’ trap. He was not as nimble—or as strong—as Jacks, and as he leveled, his wing caught on a streetlamp, sending him tumbling over the pavement and taking several parked cars with him.
One down, she thought.
“Are you okay?” Jacks’s voice was strained with exertion.
“Yes,” Maddy gasped. She hazarded another look behind her.
“There’s two now!” she shrieked.
“Hang on.”
Zigzagging through the jungle of downtown, Jacks banked hard and low. Maddy looked up at a gaping concrete mouth. They were going into a tunnel. She heard the snap of air as one of the Angel agents swooped in right behind them.
The tunnel was bathed in an eerie blue-green. Headlights reflected off the tunnel’s glossy ceiling, giving it a cold, futuristic feel. Up ahead Maddy could see a row of orange lights coming right at them. She heard the blare of the semitruck’s horn. The sound seemed to come from everywhere all at once. Jacks put on more speed. The big rig bore down on them, filling the claustrophobic tunnel, its trailer only a few feet from the tunnel’s ceiling. Maddy realized with sickening certainty they were going up over the top. They would have to squeeze through the tiny gap between the top of the truck’s trailer and the ceiling of the tunnel.
