My stomach drops. ‘You’re coming back to school just so you can check up on me?’
He takes his finger from my chest, points it at my head like a gun and makes a clunking noise in his mouth. ‘You got it, bro.’
‘Don’t call me that either.’
‘Why not? You used to like it.’
‘In that other time before you tried to kill me.’
He waves his hand in the air dismissively. ‘Oh that. Well, you killed my brother, so I say that makes us even.’
‘Dude, it doesn’t work that way. Whatever’s going on with you, whatever you’re on, keep me out of it. I’m not going to meet you here, Skinner. Tell your “employer” you don’t have to check up on me. I have until Ebony turns eighteen to break them up. And I told you I would do it. I’m not backing down on the deal.’
I try to push past him to leave, but he doesn’t budge. He sticks his chest out to block me while scrutinising me with narrowed eyes. Then he lifts his right shoulder and lets it drop. ‘If you say so.’
Something’s not right. Adam Skinner doesn’t give in, not unless it’s part of his plan. I go along with it for now, keeping wary. ‘Yep.’ I point to the exit. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, I’m leaving.’
He doesn’t stop me. But before I feel the sun on my face he says, ‘Of course, there is another way I can survey your progress.’
I turn round slowly. ‘OK, so what’s the other way?’
Examining his fingernails, he says, ‘I’ll just have to hang around with someone else who’s close to the lovebirds.’
My mind races and it doesn’t take long to figure out which friend Skinner means. ‘No way! Leave Amber out of this. I mean it, Skinner. Do not go near that girl.’
In a flash he’s grabbing my shirt, bunching it up in his fists and shoving me against the wall. ‘Touchy, touchy. You’re not carrying a torch for Amber too, are you?’
‘She’s just a good person. Leave her alone.’
‘I can be your friend or Amber’s. It’s your choice, Jordy.’
It gets hard to breathe. I’m not sure why until I glance down and realise my feet aren’t touching the ground. ‘My friends will think I’ve lost it if I start hanging around with you. They won’t accept you.’
He releases me, and when I drop to the floor, he says, ‘You’ll think of something.’
‘Amber won’t let you come near her anyway.’
His smile is nasty. ‘I have my ways.’
And I have mine. Succumbing to this bully is not one of them. ‘No. I won’t do it.’
Surprise registers on his face. ‘What do you mean, Jordy? You won’t do what?’
‘I’m not going to be your “friend” again, and you’re going to leave Amber alone.’
He stares into my eyes for the longest moment, and then laughs. It makes me so angry that I push his chest with both hands. It does nothing but make his eyes flash weirdly like there’s a fire burning inside them. ‘One last thing I nearly forgot to mention,’ he says, his voice dead serious. ‘When your mother died it was Prince Luca who fought Solomon for her soul. We all know who won because she’s now in Skade. But no one knows what happened to her after the King brought her to his palace.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘You’re smart. Figure it out.’ He flicks my forehead with a finger and walks out the door.
‘Adam. Adam.’ He doesn’t stop, but I gotta know what he means. ‘Skinner! What did that monster do to my mother? Tell me!’ He keeps walking. Damn him. So I call out, ‘Fine. I’ll meet you here twice a week.’
He comes back, striding across the green grass and grinning like a great white shark. He puts his mouth close to my ear and whispers, ‘He brought her back to life. She does things for him the other ladies – the souls – can’t.’
I stand there, stunned. My mother is alive? She’s living as a human in Skade? A realm only for souls and dark angels? ‘What things? What things does he make her do?’ I run after him and grab his shoulder. ‘What you’re telling me, is it God’s honest truth?’
He stares at me for a long moment, then nods.
7
Ebony
The day passes in a weird kind of blur with my mind flitting from Sophie to Jordan to Nathaneal to Mum and Dad. By last period I’m over-tired, overwrought and seriously in need of unwinding.
Fortunately my last class is Physics, one of my favourite subjects. I love the sciences, and my craving to learn about life and the universe is encouraged by a great teacher – Andrea Paully. She’s young and understands my need to learn; she says I remind her of herself at my age. And in a class of eighteen, where there are only three girls, it helps to have a female teacher to even out the odds a little.
Ms Paully is really nice, but she has a thing about tardiness and hands out detentions like Einstein developed theories. And for no good reason today, only that my head’s in a daze and I’m walking slower than usual, Amber, Sophie and I end up late for class. I groan. Detention is the last thing I need. I’m so ready to go home.
But at the classroom door I get the shock of my life. Ms Paully isn’t teaching today. Another teacher is – a man. He’s writing his name on the whiteboard, but I don’t need to read the words to know this man’s identity. His distinguished look, polished foreign voice and expensive dark suit, are disturbingly familiar.
It’s Zavier, the man who, according to Mum and Dad, organised my adoption.
Sophie runs into my back. ‘Hey, what’s up? Are we going in?’
When I don’t answer, she peers over my shoulder. ‘Oh, yeah, I heard Ms Paully had a car accident last night.’
Both Amber and I gasp.
‘She going to be OK, but she broke her pelvis, her left leg and a couple of ribs. She’ll be absent for the rest of the year.’
‘Oh my God!’ Amber says, clutching her books to her chest.
Sophie continues moving past me when she realises I’m not budging yet. ‘Ooh-la-la!’ she sings after seeing the man writing on the whiteboard. ‘I could get used to seeing him around the corridors. Suave and sexy, that’s some combination. You know, girls,’ she calls back to us, ‘we should start sitting in the front row. I hear the view is better there.’
‘Ladies, you’re welcome to come in and take a seat,’ Mr Zavier says without lifting his eyes off the board as he writes instructions under his name in stylish, eloquent strokes. ‘I don’t bite, though I can’t speak for the rest of this rabble behind me.’
Fifteen boys laugh.
‘Morons,’ Amber murmurs, just noticing I’ve hardly spoken or moved since we got here. ‘Honey, are you coming in?’
I know I should, and that I will have to at some point if I want to remain in this class, but it’s the end of the day, I’m tired and I don’t want to face this man right now. I don’t want to ask him what he’s doing here.
‘Ebony, what’s wrong?’ She sees the teacher’s name on the board. ‘Oh my God, isn’t that –’
I wrap my fingers round her arm. ‘I can’t go in there today.’
‘OK, I understand. Do you want me to take you to the nurse?’
‘No. I just need to find Jordan.’
‘So you want to go home?’
‘Yeah. Yeah, I do.’
She peels off my backpack. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ she says, and hurries us away, leaving Sophie flummoxed as she watches us turn and leave.
We don’t stop until we’re outside and breathing in fresh air. In the late afternoon the winter sun is perfect to warm up my chilled blood. We sit on a bench and Amber pats my hands. ‘Hon, you’re as pale as a ghost. Are you sure I can’t get the nurse?’
I don’t want to lie to Amber. She’s my best friend. She knows about the angels. But what am I supposed to say? How do I explain that the last time I saw that teacher he was standing in the burnt-out shell of my house? ‘It’s been a long day. I just want to go home.’
She pulls her phone from her skirt pocket. ‘Mum will ta
ke you.’
‘No, don’t call your mum. Dawn’s been so wonderful; I don’t want to inconvenience her more than I already have. Jordan has Biology in Mr Dawson’s lab. It’s last period. He won’t mind.’
‘OK.’ She selects a digit on her phone and lifts it to her ear. ‘Hey, moron, don’t ask, too complicated to explain on the phone but she needs to go home – now.’
He says one word. I hear it clearly. ‘Where?’
‘Out front of the Science Block.’
I hear his footsteps bounding down the corridor before Amber puts her phone away. Running straight over without breaking his stride, he gets down on his haunches in front of me. ‘What happened?’
Amber fills him in. ‘We had a substitute teacher in Physics. Ebony recognised him and she didn’t feel like going in.’
He swings his eyes back to me with a furrowed brow. ‘Who is this dude?’
I take a deep breath. ‘He says he’s my uncle. As in my real, flesh-and-blood uncle.’
‘You’re adopted. How’s that possible? How much does he know about your origins? Does he know you’re an angel?’
Amber shrugs. ‘That depends on whether he’s been lying to Ebony, or not.’
‘Lying about what?’
‘My birth,’ I tell Jordan. ‘Amber and I checked his house out during our last semester break for proof that I was born there – like he’d told me.’
‘So you’ve met him before?’ Jordan asks, looking confused.
‘He came to my house after the fire,’ I explain. ‘It was the first time I could walk through the remains.’
‘I didn’t see him there,’ Amber says.
‘He didn’t stay long. By the time you came back from checking the barn, he was gone.’
I pluck at an invisible thread on Amber’s blazer sleeve as memories of the day of the fire fill my head, how I went searching room by blazing room for Mum and Dad without finding a sign of them.
‘You OK?’ Amber asks, noticing my sudden withdrawal, and my watery eyes.
I nod and remember what I was about to say: ‘I think Mr Zavier might work for Prince Luca.’
Jordan’s eyes open wide. ‘Then he would know your origins. He would know whether you’re human or angel.’
Amber scolds him, ‘But we already know Ebony is an angel. Why would you doubt that?’
‘I only meant for certain – that’s all.’ He looks at me and shrugs his shoulders with a sheepish grin. ‘I’m just saying, you know?’
‘Well, I suppose you’re right, if anyone knows the truth, it would be Mr Zavier,’ I tell him.
‘How sure are you that he’s working for Prince Luca?’
‘I have no tangible evidence, but when we met at my house he said some weird things.’
‘Like what?’ Jordan frowns.
‘He wanted to know which one of my parents “cracked” first. He said it was important that he know whether it was Mum or Dad who admitted they had lied about my birth.’
‘Oh my God,’ Amber exclaims.
‘And he wouldn’t give me a straight answer to any of my questions. But there is something that proves . . .’ I glance at Amber. ‘Well, that I lived in his house when I was little.’
Jordan looks from me to her. ‘What?’
She says, ‘Ever since Ebony was a kid she dreamed of a big white house with shiny floors, fancy paintings, a polished timber staircase, a beautiful piano, that sort of thing. And when she saw Mr Zavier’s mansion, she recognised it as the house from her dreams.’
‘What?’
‘There was one room in particular I remembered more than the others,’ I explain. ‘It had a distinctive mural hand-painted across the ceiling. It was always so vivid in my dreams.’
Amber says, ‘I saw the mural too. It was exactly like Ebony described to me loads of times since we were kids.’
Jordan frowns. ‘It looks like you did live in his house once, but that doesn’t prove he works for Prince Luca.’
‘On the night before the fire, my parents told me that sixteen years ago a man named Zavier offered them a baby to raise. He told them his young sister was my biological mother and had died in childbirth two days earlier.’
Jordan gasps, ‘Shit.’
‘Mr Zavier told me he would willingly submit to a blood test to prove he’s telling the truth, and that he would answer my questions when I was ready to know who I am.’
Jordan leans forward and says gently, ‘Ebony, if he’s willing to give DNA, it’s unlikely he’s an angel or working for Prince Luca. In fact, he could be the real thing.’
I nod. ‘I know. If this man is telling the truth, and he is my biological uncle, he’s living proof that I’m not an angel. It would mean Nathaneal has made a mistake. But if Zavier works for Prince Luca he could be lying about everything. Now he’s my teacher and I don’t know what to believe. I can’t go into his class with my head full of so many conflicting images and ideas.’
‘Fair enough,’ Jordan says, then peers at me with an intuitive look. ‘You don’t want him to be your real uncle, do you?’
Once I would have been thrilled to be able to prove that I’m not an angel, but now? ‘No. I wouldn’t like that at all.’
8
Nathaneal
As always, standing before the northern gates of Avena quickens my heart. Majestic and wondrous in height and width, and created by the hand of the High King himself, they are a kaleidoscope of colour, an infinitesimal number of constantly moving atoms too small for the eye to see.
But even in beauty there is danger, for to touch any part of these gates can prove as devastating as a thousand bolts of lightning straight to one’s heart.
It’s this beauty that reignites my love for my homeland, knowing that once the gates open all the natural wonders of Avena will unfold before my eyes.
Michael commands the Gatekeepers, and, even though I know what comes next, my breath still catches at the sight of the gates opening inwards and revealing a thousand glistening stairs spiralling downwards in a spectacular arc.
Stepping through the gates, I inhale deeply, the air thinner but purer than Earth’s atmosphere, and as I make my way across the arc each step allows my lungs time to adjust to the variance.
Arriving at the lower platform, which is still high above the land, Michael sends three Thrones on ahead to secure the road. They release their metallic blue wings, and plunge feet first off the platform.
I never tire of watching them. Such uniform precision is an impressive trait of this revered order. They land in soundless synchronisation, remarkable for their size, and immediately begin striding across the paved roads that lead to the city centre, checking buildings and side streets, their presence alerting the city of my return.
I take a deep breath as memories storm my senses. It’s always, always the memories that break me at this point, memories of a moonless night, deep in the Lavender Forest, and the unanswered cry of an infant’s first contact with the living world.
My parents were right to blame me. Even though I was only seven at the time, I knew better. Ebony’s kidnapping occurred because, excited by what she had just showed me through a mind-link before her birth, and eager to tell my father, the captain of security, who had not wanted me to be there, I rushed.
The birthing chamber was a temporary, dome-shaped structure, purposefully created to protect the imminent birth of a future princess. The chamber walls consisted of hundreds of layers of pure silk, intricately woven to keep light from showing through it and inadvertently revealing the chamber’s position. Security was high that night because the infant was already promised in marriage to a high-ranking prince, a future king.
But I foolishly allowed a splinter of light to escape the birthing chamber when I exited. That single glint revealed our secret location. And I will never forget the injured soldiers’ screams as they lay writhing in agony when the enemy’s fiery explosions bore down on us, burning their skin and melting flesh off their bones.
> Michael doesn’t rush me as I prepare to reacquaint myself with my homeland. He sees my memories flooding in and out at staggering speeds, and slaps his hand down on my shoulder. ‘Easy now, cousin, remember who you are.’
But . . . Michael, who am I?
Placing his hands down on my shoulders, he turns me to face him. ‘You are Nathaneal, Seraphim Order’s highest-ranking prince, a future king.’
‘That’s not what I mean.’
He frowns. ‘What do you mean?’
‘The legend told about me . . . is there any truth to it?’
‘Oh, that thing written in hope and stardust before the Earth was born.’
‘Are you saying it’s nonsense, because I would be thrilled to know there is nothing in it and I can be free to live my life with my beloved Ebony.’
His gold eyes lose their playful light. ‘The legend says hope and stardust, our king says blood on a wall of stone.’
I stare at him a moment. I haven’t heard this before. ‘Are you saying my name is written on a stone wall in blood?’
He nods slowly. ‘As the One who will lead us in battle, defeat our enemy, and bring peace and unity to all the worlds.’
‘That’s all?’
He laughs, until I ask, ‘Whose blood?’
‘The blood of those who died in the great revolt.’
‘The first angelic war.’
‘Is it any wonder Prince Luca wants to eliminate you?’ he says.
‘But I’ve done nothing to justify being named this leader of angels who will unite the worlds in peace. That would be you, Michael. You’ve commanded Avena’s armies for three thousand years. What experience have I had?’
He gives me a sympathetic look. ‘You’re still young, Nathaneal. Give yourself time.’
‘What if I can’t be this defender, this champion of the people? So far I have only been a burden to Avena. What if I don’t have what it takes to be a king?’
He studies my face, golden eyes unblinking. A smile starts slowly and quickly grows. ‘You will. You just have to trust me on this. Can you do that?’
I look to the horizon where the Lavender Forest merges into the sky. When I think of home my thoughts turn to Ebony. In those fleeting moments before her birth, Ebony understood how destiny had entwined our lives. She shared those visions with me in a mind-link from her mother’s womb. But today she can’t remember the images or their importance. I’m asking her to trust me, just as Michael is now asking me to trust him.
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