Feather (Angels of Elysium Book 1)

by Olivia Wildenstein

  Thankfully, he didn’t prod. “Is there a particular address you’d like me to drop you off at?”

  When the manicured, block-long grassy square came into view, I said, “Right by the arcade, thank you.”

  He pulled up on the corner of Jarod’s street. Eighteen euros glowed on the meter. Tenting the jacket around me, I pulled out the wad of cash and looked through it for a twenty, but the smallest bill I found was yellow and bore two zeroes.

  When I handed it over, the man shook his head. “I don’t have change for two hundred.”

  “I don’t have anything smaller.”

  “I take credit cards.”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t have one.”

  It wasn’t my money to hand out, but I couldn’t not pay. “Please just take it. And do something good with the extra money.” I’d explain my predicament to the Ophanim. Hopefully, they’d understand and give me an advance on my allowance so I could reimburse Jarod.

  The man eyed the yellow bill suspiciously. When he still didn’t take it, I laid it on his armrest and scooted out. And then on feet that felt wedged too snugly inside my patent stilettos, I trudged underneath the arcade toward the crimson doors.

  I wiped my clammy palms on my dress, then pressed the buzzer, and waited. I wasn’t sure if I’d be allowed in, but the familiar click granted me entry. I traversed the cobbled courtyard, eyes cast on the starbursts of lights tangled in the ivy and white blooms.

  A low creak sounded as Jarod’s bulked-up bodyguard Amir opened the door I’d been escorted through the first night.

  “Is Jarod home, Amir?”

  “He just arrived.” Amir didn’t search me, simply led me through the quiet dining room with its cherub-adorned ceiling. Between the fountain and fresco, it felt like Jarod’s house was thumbing its nose at me.

  He had a connection to our world, but what was it?

  At the bottom of the stairs, Amir said, “I’ll be in the vestibule once you’re ready to leave.”

  I nodded, then started my journey up the stairs, the evening running on a loop inside my mind. What would I find upstairs? The truth? More enigmas? As I reached the landing, I slipped Jarod’s jacket off and draped it over my forearm. It felt wrong to have sheathed myself with something that didn’t belong to me.

  Steeling my spine, I let out a breath, took in another, and then I lifted my hand and knocked.

  Chapter 26

  “Come in, Leigh.”

  How—how had he known it was me? Was my knock distinctive? And Leigh . . . not Feather?

  I opened the heavy wooden door a sliver, then wider. The room was so dark I didn’t spot Jarod lounging on the cowhide recliner immediately. Ever since he’d related the story of his mother, I felt like the scent of rust and salt lingered in the air.

  I closed the door behind me, staring at his profile edged in pale light. “You forgot your jacket.” I extended it toward him, but the gesture was senseless considering the distance that separated us.

  He didn’t reach out for it, and I didn’t come closer.

  “Just toss it on the bed,” he said warily.

  I stepped toward the canopy bed and laid it neatly on the tucked steel-gray comforter. “I borrowed one of your bills to pay for my cab,” I said before turning around. “I’ll give it back to you later.”

  “If you borrowed one of my bills, then you must’ve noticed I had many and therefore have no need for repayment.” His gaze was on the golden letter opener he was slowly rotating between his index fingers.

  Each time the blade caught the glow of the sconce outside his window, a vane of light swept over his stubbled jaw, his patrician nose, and the curl of his sooty lashes before vanishing in the unruly waves of his dark hair.

  “I can’t accept your charity, Jarod.”

  “It’s not charity if it’s a gift.”

  “I’m not allowed to take money. Not yours. Not anyone’s.” When he didn’t respond, didn’t even spare me a glance, I segued toward the matter that had brought me back here. “I didn’t know you had a cousin.”

  The letter opener stilled.

  “Is he from your mother’s side or your father’s?”

  He kept his gaze on the object balanced between his hands.

  “Jarod?”

  “Has anyone ever told you that you ask a lot of questions?”

  “Has anyone ever told you that answering with a question is called deflecting?” I crossed my arms. “Tell me how you and Asher are related, and I’ll leave.”

  “You use the threat of leaving a lot. You shouldn’t threaten someone with something you are incapable of doing.”

  My arms fell out of their knot. “I am capable of leaving.”

  “Then walk out my door and never come back.” His lips barely parted, yet I heard each word loud and clear. Too loud, and too clear.

  “Jarod, please, I only want to help—”

  “So you can marry fucking Prince Charming?”

  I recoiled. My first instinct was always to recoil when someone lashed out at me. My second instinct, though, was to fight back. I fisted my fingers until my nails bit into my palms. “What do you care who I marry?”

  It was on the tip of my tongue to add that I didn’t want to get married anymore, because one, the husband I’d wanted had shown me a face I hadn’t particularly liked tonight, and because two, there was no way in Abaddon I’d collect my missing feathers before the month was out.

  “You’re right,” Jarod finally said. “I don’t care who you marry.”

  My breaths were coming in spurts as though I’d run from Layla’s all the way to La Cour des Démons.

  “Why don’t you tell me how you know him, Leigh?”

  The sound of my mutilated name falling from his lips was a punch to the gut. “I asked first.”

  “We aren’t ten. You’re in my home. My bedroom.” Each sentence was a new jab, but the finishing blow came when he said, “And I’ve been indulging your petty whims since you’ve inserted yourself into my life, so I’ll ask again, how do you know him?”

  My temples throbbed. I was tired. Tired and hurt he’d felt the need to raise his voice and be so insulting. I wasn’t his enemy. “Asher’s the man I wanted to marry.” As silence stretched between us, I worked hard on soothing the ache in my chest caused by my shattered hopes and squandered feelings.

  “Why am I not surprised?” The sneer in his voice made my heart ratchet anew.

  “Wanted,” I repeated, stressing the past tense. “He left me behind on the sidewalk, because I asked too many questions.” I snorted even though it wasn’t funny. “I guess I infuriate all the men in your family. Next thing you know, Tristan will complain about my inane curiosity and have me tossed out of here.”

  Even though I couldn’t see Jarod’s pupils from where I stood, they seemed to bleed into his irises and then into the whites around them. It was an impression—no one’s eyes could go dark from lid to lid, yet that was the way Jarod’s eyes looked in that moment. “He left you stranded on a sidewalk?”

  “Don’t act like you care.”

  He lowered the letter opener, curling the fingers of one hand over the blade. I expected to see blood trickle down his wrist and into his rolled shirtsleeve, but the blade must not have been very sharp.

  “Besides, you abandoned me first, so you have no right to judge him.” My voice wasn’t loud, yet the hurt inside of it seemed to ring across the large room.

  Elysium only knew why Jarod’s desertion stung. He’d entrusted me to Asher. He hadn’t left me alone in unfamiliar territory.

  He sat up and swung his long legs over the edge of the seat, planting his feet wide and pressing up. “I apologize for leaving you.”

  “I didn’t say it to receive an apology.”

  “You should’ve called me. I would’ve come to pick you up.”

  The crazy thing was that I believed him. “I left my phone at—” I’d been about to say the guild but switched it to, “home.” I reached up and
pushed a lock of hair behind my ear with unsteady fingers.

  Jarod followed my hand’s trembling arc back to my hip. I balled my fingers to stifle the tremor before more pity could crowd his expression.

  “Asher’s a cousin on my mother’s side,” he said.

  My lids fluttered from the shock of his voluntary admission. Here I’d thought I would never get an answer from him. Or that if I did, it would take more coaxing.

  “I met him the day my mother . . .” He swallowed, his Adam’s apple jostling heavily in his throat. “The day my mother died.”

  I recalled something Tristan had said: that Jarod had lost both his parents by the time he was eight and that he’d destroyed the wings of the stone angel after his mother passed. And then I measured it against what I knew: that he’d been ranked a Triple that year.

  My nerves began to jangle so fiercely I suspected Jarod could hear them. “How did she die again?”

  He opened his fingers to display the golden letter opener. “Stabbed herself with this.” A slender, bloodied wound marred his palm—the blade wasn’t as blunt as I’d estimated.

  Knives couldn’t stop angel hearts, at least, not winged one’s. Which meant Jarod’s mother was a Nephilim, but Nephilim couldn’t have children, so Jarod must have been adopted. Which meant I was wrong about him being able to see what we were.

  But that suddenly wasn’t important anymore. “Did she plant it inside her chest . . . herself?”

  He lobbed the letter opener at his bookcase where it clanged against a spherical glass bookend. “No. I put it there.”

  I gaped in horror at Jarod. “Why?”

  “You should run away now, Feather.” He turned his face away. “And this time, stay away.”

  Even though I tried to stay away from the cracked sinners, I’d been around enough of them to learn that a truly dangerous person didn’t avert their eyes when they delivered a threat, much too desirous to savor the fear they instilled.

  “You killed your mother, Jarod?” I repeated softly.

  He raised his chin, leveling his bottomless eyes on me. “Why does this surprise you? My soul’s putrid.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “You should come to terms with the fact that some people have no good in them and that I’m one of those people.”

  “Did she hurt you?”

  “Hurt me?” He gave a dark laugh. “I told you already. She wasn’t interested in me, Feather.”

  The return of my nickname on his lips solidified my resolve to dig for the soul that lay beneath the granite shell he’d built around himself.

  “Why are you still here? Leave!” he barked.

  “Stop trying to scare me.”

  He took a step toward me, his expression turning almost feral.

  I stood my ground. “I need to understand one last thing.”

  Even though Nephilim couldn’t have children, the fact that he’d destroyed an angel’s wings made me wonder if his adoptive mother had told him stories about us, or if, for some reason that defied all logic, he could see what we were.

  I let my wings ripple into existence, then snapped them out as far as they could extend.

  His gaze jumped to the spires of his canopy bed.

  “You see them, don’t you?”

  “Them?” he asked, using that bored tone of his.

  “Look at me, Jarod.”

  Slowly, as though it physically pained him, he dragged his attention back to me.

  My heart held very still. “You know what I am, don’t you?”

  “A pain in my ass,” he muttered.

  “Besides that,” I deadpanned.

  A nerve twitched next to his eye. Sensing he’d be harder to break than elysian quartz—not that I’d ever tried, but I’d heard only angel-fire could cut through it—I stepped closer. Human hands fell through our wings like powdered sugar through air, but angel-bloods could feel our feathers.

  I took the fingers he’d balled and pried them open. Surprisingly, he let me straighten them. Without breaking eye contact, I lifted his hand toward my shoulder, then beyond it.

  For a heartbeat, I worried I was wrong, that his fingers would slip right through my feathers. But as our hands neared my wings, his exhales pulsed harder against my brow. Right before I could set his hand on the peak of my wings, he put up some resistance, but it was too late. I hoisted my wing until its tip brushed his palm.

  He shuddered so hard it shook his entire body. Shook mine, too.

  His touch sent a slow shiver through each shaft, making the vanes tremble. I reasoned that the sensation had everything to do with the discovery that my sinner was an angel and nothing to do with the feel of his skin against my feathers.

  His eyes sparked, then sparkled like the Eiffel Tower at night.

  I swallowed, trying to quell the tremors sinking into my wing bones. “You’re one of us,” I whispered, my voice hoarse with emotion.

  But how? Had his mother, a Nephilim, conceived him, or had he somehow run away from a guild before his wing bones could materialize?

  Gently, I released his wrist, allowing him, now that I had my answer, to snatch his hand back.

  Although his eyes kept shimmering, he parked his fingers back next to his side. “I am nothing like you,” he growled, spittle smacking my forehead. “Unlike your kind, I don’t seek to do good for personal gain, to better my soul, or grow those appendages you believe make you so glorious and superior.” He stepped back, then stalked past me, grabbing his jacket from his bed.

  “Jarod!” I swung around, my feathers swaying from my brusque spin. “What are you doing?”

  “What you’re incapable of: leaving.”

  Before my next breath, he’d flung his bedroom door wide and trampled down the stairs, his furious footsteps echoing against the runner and then against marble. As another door clanged shut, rattling the very walls of the house, I drew my wings around me. My feathers quaked as his words reeled through me, scoring me deeper and deeper.

  It’s not personal. Not personal. Then why did it feel like he hated me?

  A tear curved down my cheek, and I raised my hand to scrub it away but froze at the sight of my skin.

  I’d attributed the shine in Jarod’s eyes to emotional turmoil, but it wasn’t the sight of my wings that had made them glitter. It was the sight of my skin.

  Its reflection.

  I’d just smoldered Jarod Adler.

  Oh, Great Elysium, what was wrong with me? My body must’ve been wired defectively, because why else would it want to seduce someone who detested all I was and all I stood for, someone who’d murdered their own mother?

  I watched my flesh glitter, then snapped out of my daze and sought out the switch to turn off the absurd glow. Since I’d never smoldered, I realized I had no idea how it worked. All I knew was that I should be able to control it.

  My heart was beating too fast, which must’ve caused my flesh to light up. I flared my nostrils, inhaling long and deep, then exhaled until my lungs cramped. The scent of Jarod almost choked me, but I persevered, sensing I needed to relax in order to stop shining. I repeated this breathing sequence until the vibrations in my chest decreased and dowsed my radiance.

  Chapter 27

  On the upside, the shock of smoldering Jarod tempered the shock of learning he’d murdered his own mother.

  As I tucked my wings back, I caught the gleam of the letter opener that had ended a Nephilim’s life. I watched it suspiciously, as though it might levitate and stab me.

  What had prompted an eight-year-old to kill his mother? I’d heard Nephilim often lost touch with reality, the pain followed by the absence of their burned wings progressively consuming their minds. Had she become so crazed that Jarod took it upon himself to end her suffering?

  As I moved across his bedroom, the glossy wood creaking under my weight, I let my gaze stray off the letter opener and onto a decorative purple-stingray box that held up a row of leather books, then higher toward the crown m
oldings of the pale ceiling. This would be my last sight of La Cour des Démons, because I couldn’t come back. Not after all Jarod had said, and certainly not after my skin’s humiliating display of affection.

  Besides, I had nothing to gain by staying.

  My footing faltered. Ugh. Jarod had called my kind selfish, and I’d just proved him right.

  But our kind wasn’t selfish. My blood heated with indignation that he’d planted this seed inside my mind and that it had dared take root.

  Building our wings didn’t only benefit us; it benefited humans. If we didn’t earn our feathers, then we couldn’t ascend to Elysium. Our race would become mortal and perish, and in turn humankind, because no virtuous souls would be harvested and re-implanted into wombs to counterbalance the incessant influx of depraved ones. Not to mention that humans who spent their lives bettering the world would no longer be rewarded, and those who spent their time spoiling it would no longer be punished.

  Without us, the apocalypse humans had feared for millennia would come to pass and ravage the world angels kept in equilibrium.

  So, no, Jarod Adler, we aren’t selfish. We are necessary.

  Why couldn’t I have come up with all of this in his presence? Why did my mind work with a broadcast delay?

  Jarod Adler obviously didn’t understand our system. How could he, though? He hadn’t grown up in a guild. Perhaps, his scorn for angels stemmed from that. Perhaps, that was why he’d murdered his own mother. Because she’d robbed him of the opportunity to live among us.

  As my theory solidified, I stepped onto the landing and bumped into a soft body.

  “Muriel!” I gasped, reaching out to steady her.

  “Leigh? Is everything all right? I heard doors slam.” She rubbed her eyes, smudging her residual mascara.

  “Everything’s . . .” I’d been about to say fine, but that would’ve been a lie. I sighed. “Jarod and I got into a fight, and he left.”

  She frowned, her navy eyes running over my face as though to decipher the reason for our fight. Then she sighed. “And I suppose you did not resolve it since my boy’s weapon of choice is always flight.”