Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One
1. The Calm Before the Storm
2. Laissez Les Bon Temps Rouler
3. You’ll Be One of Us Soon
4. Boom
5. Everything Okay in Here?
6. The City of the Dead
7. I Have to Tell You Something
8. That’s Just the Krewe
9. I’m Sorry I Had to Do That
10. The Thrill of the Chase
Part Two
11. You Are Going to Be Taken
12. A Zydeco Birthday
13. I Couldn’t Stay Away
14. Her Name Is Clio
15. Get Off My Back
16. I’ve Seen That Guy
17. Meet Me at Midnight
18. I Should Have Been There
19. I’ve Been Waiting Months to Do That
20. We Need to Focus
21. The First of Many Soul Captures
Part Three
22. We’re All Winners
23. You’ve Been Consorting with Them
24. I’ve Been Flying
25. I Can’t Handle This
26. You Only Live Once
27. This Isn’t Even You
28. Good to Have You Back
29. You’re Kind of a Troublemaker
30. Don’t Say Another Word
31. She Really Wasn’t Trying
32. What Happened with Us?
33. All Hail, Queen Haven
34. Prepare to Chase and Be Chased
35. Is This Your Way of Making Me Feel Needed?
Acknowledgments
Read More from the Gilded Wings Series
About the Author
Copyright © 2013 by Aimee Agresti
All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
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www.hmhbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-0-547-62615-4
eISBN 978-0-544-03479-2
v1.0313
FOR BRIAN AND SAWYER
There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a mill-race in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not innocent freedom of the soul.
—Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Part One
1. The Calm Before the Storm
I hadn’t expected the end of high school to feel this way. Sure, there was a certain fizzy exuberance warming the chilly hallways of Evanston Township High School. There were joyous squeals and heartfelt hugs. There were colorful tatters of festive wrapping from token gifts littering the floor. There was that spirited roar of hundreds of our classmates simultaneously buzzing about their plans for the coming week. But all of that had nothing to do with the milestone I had reached with the ring of that final bell seconds earlier, and everything to do with the winter white blanketing the football field outside the window, where cars screeched out of the parking lot, their horns honking wildly. The holiday break was upon us all. That Dante, Lance, and I wouldn’t be back here until June’s graduation ceremony wasn’t news on anyone else’s radar. I gazed out the window again as the Chicago wind wrapped a wayward sheet of newsprint around the goalpost. In my mind, memories swirled in the same reckless way. Graduating early had to be the ultimate anticlimax.
The locker next to me slammed and Dante appeared. “Sooooo, everyone seems to be going to Jason Abington’s Christmas party tonight,” he needled me, eyebrows twitching up down, up down. He was making fun of me in the way that only best friends can get away with.
“Fantastic,” I said with the full dose of necessary sarcasm. I pulled off the taped photos from the inside of my locker door and gave them a last glance—all featured me with either Dante or Lance—then grabbed my bag and coat. I nodded at the now empty locker, then closed it one last time. Bang. I flashed Dante a look that said I wouldn’t be sweet-talked into any party- crashing expeditions. “Spend the evening with a house full of sloppy drunks in Santa hats while Jason and Courtney hook up in every room?” I had gotten over my longtime crush, but I still didn’t feel like watching Jason paw at his brainless bombshell of a girlfriend. No thank you.
After the conflagration that was our prom—no metaphors here: the entire event really had gone down in flames, taking with it the historic Lexington Hotel downtown in what had been dubbed “the Great Chicago Fire, Part Two” by the Chicago Tribune—Jason had actually called me once. It was soon after school let out for the summer. I had thought it was Dante playing a trick on me, and by the time Jason convinced me it was him, I was too shocked to speak. It didn’t really matter, though—by then I was uncharacteristically settled in the boyfriend department. Maybe boys have some sort of radar for when you no longer need them and that is precisely when they finally start noticing you.
“So, then that’s a no?” Dante asked with mock innocence.
“That’s a ‘not-if-everyone’s-life-depended-on-it’ no . . . again.” I couldn’t resist adding that last bit. It sometimes felt like Dante, Lance, and I lived in an entirely different universe from everyone else at school. We had played this odd role in, well, saving them from losing their souls this past spring, but it’s not as though any of them knew. I was beginning to think I had hallucinated it all. Our lives—Dante’s, mine, Lance’s—had changed, but no one else’s had.
“Okay, okay, got it.” He put his hands up in surrender. “You’re no fun.” He paused, and then asked with a smirk, “How ’bout a Christmas carol?”
I scanned the area around us, but as usual none of the bodies bouncing like charged atoms along the crowded hallway paid us any mind, so I played along, with just the slightest roll of the eyes: “‘Angels We Have Heard on High’?”
Dante gave me a friendly smack on the arm. “Ha! Am I crazy or do these jokes never get old?” He fixed his attention over my shoulder. “You’re still coming over for holiday movie madness, right?”
“Sure thing.” It was Lance’s voice behind me. Two vinelike arms wound around my waist and held me close. He leaned his chin on my shoulder. “What time do you want us?
“Happy graduation, by the way,” he said. He turned to me, lunging, to peck me fast and firm on the lips.
“And to you, too,” I said, just flirtatious enough, kissing him back.
“Ugh. I swear, sometimes you guys are worse than Courtney and Jason.”
“I’m offended,” I said in mock protest.
“I’m not!” Lance said, squeezing me. He planted an exaggerated smack of a kiss on my neck but then straightened up just as fast. He pushed his clunky black glasses farther up on his nose, his gaze darting. From the corner of my eye, I saw my favorite English teacher passing, trying not to see us, it seemed. Even after Lance and I had been together so many months, I still blushed when we had these moments at school. I never would’ve guessed I would be the type to even have moments like this at school. I had proved to be anything but this type for my entire high school career up until this last semester.
Dante shook his head. “The things I put up with in the name of friendship.” It was true. The three of us had one another and we were grateful. Dante and I had been pals since we were little kids. Lance had been something of a loner until that fateful internship brought us all together in our junior year. It had been his i
dea for us to do summer school and graduate early. “What would we miss? Another prom?” he’d joked. And so we had spent those sunny months studying, writing papers, taking tests, and now we were done.
After we cleaned out our lockers, we set off down the hall, Lance’s warm hand in mine. “I was starting to think this one might be a flight risk tonight,” Dante said, nodding in my direction.
“Fine, I’ll be there.” I sighed. “I just have to finish my college applications,” I explained to Lance. “We can’t all be evil geniuses like Dante, who can write application essays in his sleep.” I was done with the ones I really wanted—Northwestern, University of Chicago, Princeton, and Harvard and Yale (those last two were just for kicks)—but I still had my safety schools left. I had waited till the last minute on those in the hopes that I wouldn’t really need them.
“Whatever, there’s plenty of time,” said Dante, who seemed to score perfect grades without breaking a sweat.
“They’re due in, like, a week.” Lance laughed. He was also brilliant, but was supremely organized and had sent his off back in September.
“Exactly! Plenty o’ time!” Dante flashed that wide, winning smile. “Dude, I’m finishing mine on the way to the airport. I’ll send ’em before the plane takes off.” I slapped his arm playfully. He was kidding now.
The hallways had mostly cleared by the time we made it to the door. I wrapped my scarf around my neck and Lance held the door for me. The three of us stepped out, and a gust of wind swooped to meet us. Heads down, we pushed on to the L station.
Over the summer we had started taking the L to that familiar stop downtown and then walked through a pile of rubble to the ruins of the glamorous hotel we had once called home. At first, we just needed to be near it, like anyone visiting a grave site. We would sit wordlessly sorting through all our memories of the horrific and the good—because, despite it all, there had still been some good—we had witnessed there.
We picked up hot chocolate from a weathered convenience store underneath the L tracks and made our way to South Michigan Avenue along grungy streets that grew emptier and emptier by the block. Every inch of sky appeared gray as the wind whipped us enough to convince me that even if we weren’t going to be soon boarding a plane and heading south for the next few months, we probably wouldn’t have had too many more pilgrimages here before the frigid depths of a cruel Chicago winter would have kept us away.
Louisiana. In just over a week, we would be on our way there. We were volunteering in a student program in New Orleans, doing a host of community service projects and, I could only imagine, having an adventure or two. I had once been to Florida—Disney World—with my adoptive mother, Joan, but otherwise, I had never been farther south than our cousins’ place in Evansville, Indiana. And sure, I had lived away from home, at the hotel, but that was in Chicago. No matter what had happened at the Lexington, at least the proximity to home had been a comfort. But now . . . New Orleans? My pulse picked up.
I pulled my jacket closer around me and glanced from behind a curtain of my hair to Dante on my left, who was watching the sky, and Lance on my right, hands in his pockets and his eyes on the pavement. None of us had spoken since boarding the L in Evanston. That, in itself, seemed to be a sign that our thoughts would have been nearly identical.
We turned the corner and found ourselves at the foot of the Lexington Hotel debris. Whenever I stood here, it was almost impossible to imagine what the entrance, with its swooping awning and stately steps, had once looked like, or how row after row of windows had reached ten stories into the sky. The building had been decimated in such a way that it seemed a bomb had gone off inside. Only jagged portions of the first level remained, spiky bits of the façade jutting up and out. The rest of this behemoth had been reduced to no more than a series of mountainous piles of oddly shaped fragments, like one of those 3-D puzzles of architectural landmarks that Lance liked to put together and display in his room.
There had been endless news stories about the tragedy. In the immediate aftermath, they eulogized the impossibly glamorous owner, Aurelia Brown; her second in command, Lucian Grove; and their beautiful but sinister staff, known to us as the “Outfit”—all assumed to have been turned to dust in the flames. Lucian. Even now, it was hard to think of him, to imagine what had become of him. Whenever he crept into my mind, I had to swat those memories away. The loss of him stung. I had printed out every article, read them just once, and tucked them away in an envelope under my bed.
Far easier to read were those more recent pieces speculating about what might be done with this hallowed ground. There was talk of reopening the hotel one day, but now the site stood completely untouched. At least like this it still felt like ours.
With charred chunks of terra cotta, stone, and brick crunching beneath our sneakers, we wound our way up our favorite hill of debris to nestle in against a twisted metal beam that was like a bleacher seat. From here we could look down into a gully where, on a sunny day, you could see the crystals of the chandelier sparkling from where it had crashed to the floor of the lobby. It was the very last sign of the opulence of the place where each of us had been swept off our feet, had fallen in love, before discovering that the people we were so enamored with were trying to recruit us for their dark ways. And in fact, they weren’t people at all; they were devils, who had started out like us but had lost their way and were now in the business of buying souls, granting grand wishes, and finally committing their converts to an eternity below.
In a matter of days, we would, I had no doubt, be thrust back into some version of that world all over again. That’s what awaited us in New Orleans and we all knew it, even if we hadn’t spoken of it yet. It just made sense. I touched my necklace—a golden angel wing—for strength, then warmed my hands around my paper cup. Lance tightened his arm around me as I huddled close.
“To easier times in the Big Easy,” Dante said, his voice heavy as he held out his cup of hot chocolate in a toast.
“To voluntourism, New Orleans–style,” I offered, holding mine out too.
“Cheers,” said Lance.
Added Dante, before sipping: “Thank you, Mr. Connor Mills, student coordinator extraordinaire.”
Volunteer tourism, or voluntourism, had been a brainstorm of ours last summer. If we were graduating early, we reasoned, we needed to do something with all that time. The three of us were far too Type A to sit around for a semester, and we hadn’t really wanted to race off to college early. That felt like . . . too much. We already had enough on our minds without jumping into any sort of intense academic pursuit just yet.
The idea originated when I had returned to my old candy striper job at Evanston General Hospital in June, working alongside Joan. One afternoon, a pickup basketball game landed an out-of-towner, one Connor Mills, in the ER after he took an elbow to the eye. It was ugly, but it could have been much worse. It didn’t hurt that he was the type who could pull off the disheveled look: rugged and athletic, he had dirty blond hair, the scruffy good looks of a pro mountain climber, and an easy charm, even after a head injury. It was a busy day at the hospital, and since they wanted to monitor him for a concussion, he was there until after nightfall. I was removing his dinner tray, enjoying a fleeting lull in the day’s activity, when he started talking.
“So, you’re in med school over at Northwestern?” he asked me in a southern drawl. He wore a gauze patch over one eye. “How long y’think till this heals up?”
“You must not be able to see very well,” I said, smiling. “I’m just a volunteer here. I’m in high school. So I can’t give any medical advice but I can hook you up with the really good cookies from the break room down the hall if you’re still hungry. Sometimes the night nurses steal ’em, so I always hide a few.”
“I might take you up on that.” He laughed.
“Where’s the guy who did that to you?”
“My buddy.” Connor shook his head. “I’m in town a few days, seeing friends. Didn’t expect to sp
end it here.”
I felt sort of bad for him, and since I wasn’t needed anywhere else at that moment, I hung around and challenged him to a game of poker.
I had just won a round and was gathering up the vending machine M&M’s we used for betting when Connor said, “So you’re a volunteer? I help run a program in New Orleans. City kids, Katrina victims, all sorts of community outreach. Bet you’d like it.”
“How much would you bet?” I held out a handful of M&M’s.
He laughed, taking one and popping it in his mouth. “We call it voluntourism down there.”
“That’s catchy.”
“You should apply. You can come hang out. Winter’s much nicer there.”
By the time Connor was released, he had won me over, and he promised to e-mail me the application. Dante and Lance hadn’t needed much convincing to join me. As soon as we were accepted we began wondering what might really be waiting for us in New Orleans.
“So . . .” Someone had to break this silence as we stared at the ruins. “Anyone getting any fabulous graduation gifts?” I asked, my voice as light as possible. Joan was taking me for a girls’ day of shopping and spa treatments in the city before I left, in her continuing effort to make me less of a tomboy. I loved her for that.
“Still trying to convince my mom the chef’s table at Alinea is a worthwhile investment.” Dante, our resident gourmand, laughed quietly to himself.
Lance pulled his arm from me and leaned forward, elbows on his knees as he studied the building’s mountainous remains. A harsh gust blew a gritty spray of brick and mortar dust into our faces. “No,” he said finally, his tone flat. “But actually, I kind of have something for you guys . . .”
How about Seventeen? And one of the gossip magazines; those are fun. Us Weekly? I should’ve raided the hospital gift shop.” Joan shook her gray ponytail and grabbed the magazines off the newsstand in front of the cashier.
Infatuate Page 1
