I mean, nice symbolism and all, but wouldn't God have a better means of communication?
Anyway, the People had been in a perfect place and had gotten chased away by humans overrunning the place. Which seemed kind of odd, too, since the People and humans had to be connected somehow. Otherwise, they wouldn't be able to breed. Like lions and tigers. Right?
It all sounded like some kind of creation myth to me.
And none of it explained how I fit into their story.
Why could I almost fly that night I faced off against Bartlef, the creepy school counselor with the terminally bad breath and an evil plan to rule the People through controlling a child he wanted to force me to have?
Where did my powers come from?
And why couldn't I use them now?
I worried at my lower lip with my teeth as student after student filed in.
Still no sign of Josh.
My thoughts circled around and around and around as the other students in the class found their seats.
Oma Elaine kept trying to get me to talk to Mom about my father. I told her I hadn't had time to talk to Mom—not entirely untrue since Mom had been on the road a lot the last few months, and was scheduled to be gone for three solid weeks on her latest trip. Her job as a pharmaceutical rep kept her busy.
But mostly, I think I didn't want to know what she might tell me, because Mom had grown up right here in Fairy. If I really was the People's nala—their mythical savior-turned-power-sucking-monster—then it meant that either my mother or my biological father was one of the People.
Mom didn't seem likely.
But she would never talk about my father. According to her, he had taken off entirely when I was little, after she made a few aborted attempts to get him to be any kind of daddy, and she had no idea what had happened to him.
But if he was one of the People? That meant that Oma Elaine might be right. I might really be the People’s nala instead of just plain old Laney Harris.
I didn't want to be some Chosen One for an entire race.
And I sure didn't want to be a monster.
Besides, if I was one them, I wanted the cool not-quite-there wings to go with it.
The thought brought a stab of guilt with it, and my thoughts ran up against Josh again.
His wings had been ripped off because of me.
I shuddered, tears springing to my eyes.
That was the moment he walked into class, of course.
Chapter Three
Josh
The flying dreams aren't technically nightmares.
Waking up from them is the nightmare. In that moment between sleeping and waking, I forget, for just an instant, that I'm damaged.
But then the knowledge slams into me, pounding words into my back were my wings used to be.
Broken.
Destroyed.
Flightless.
I have actual nightmares, too. Dreams where I relive the night I lost my wings.
No. "Lost" is too bloodless a word for what happens in these dreams.
The night my wings were ripped from my shoulder blades.
And I have dreams where I've actually lost my wings—as in misplaced them.
I wander around in these dreams, searching for them, asking people to direct me to my missing body parts.
My father tells me the Fairy doctors tried to reattach them. I was in surgery for hours and hours, but in the end, there was nothing they could do. Apparently, surgery in the ether is less straightforward than in the rest of the world—and there's no real precedence for reattaching completely severed wings.
Severed. As I stepped into the classroom and got my first look at Laney in weeks, that word echoed through my mind.
Her blue eyes searched mine anxiously, like she was trying to figure out what to say. I didn’t know, either. What I did know, what I could tell from the way she looked at me, was that she felt all the guilt for my wings that I wanted to project on her.
Somehow, that made it easier to snarl at her, turn my back, and walk to the other side of the classroom to find an empty seat as far away from her as possible.
I could feel eyes on me all the way to my new desk—not only Laney’s eyes, but everyone else’s, too.
The few students who were also People, of course, had an idea of what had happened. The others only saw that I walked away from the girl I was supposedly dating. Or at least sleeping with.
That made me feel even worse, somehow. I was being a total dick. But I didn’t take it back. Instead, I slid into my desk and stared straight ahead, waiting for the teacher to start class.
Even without looking at Laney directly, I saw Andrew go over to her, put his hand on her shoulder, and murmur something to her. Turning my face away so I couldn’t even see that, I clenched my fists and gritted my teeth. Andrew’s concern for Laney made me unreasonably jealous. It wasn’t fair to him or Laney, and I knew it. She hadn’t been asked to be thrown into this any more than I had. Wanting her to suffer—and apparently, wanting her to suffer alone—may have made me the shittiest boyfriend ever. That was how I felt, though.
My stomach heaved at the thought of a whole day like this.
A whole life.
Wingless.
Asking what happened to the wings after the reattachment surgery failed had seemed rude. Like I didn’t appreciate the doctors' attempts to reattach them. So I still didn’t know where they were.
I was obsessed with it now.
What happened to ethereal medical waste? Was it burned? Did it decompose like things in the human world? Or were my wings just … stored … somewhere?
So much I didn’t know.
Even more I wouldn’t ask.
I was glad when Mrs. Norman finally called class to order. It was good to be able to focus on something besides the inside of my own head for a while.
Of course, if I’d had my choice, I wouldn’t have picked George Orwell’s 1984. I don’t know why so much of literature in school is so depressing.
But at least Winston Smith’s problems were different from my own. For one thing, I’m not especially afraid of rats.
There was, however, a dark-haired young woman in my life, one I thought I loved.
One I might be on the verge of betraying.
So much for being distracted from my own life.
Through the entire class, I could feel Laney sneaking glances at me, trying to figure out what was going on, why I had snubbed her publicly.
I was trying to figure out the same thing.
I didn’t come to any conclusions, and I don’t know if she did, either. Before class had ended, I had my books ready to go, and at the sound of the bell, I moved out the door as fast as I could.
In fact, escaping Laney Harris was the fastest I had moved since the night my life changed forever.
Laney
The first thing Josh said to me in the hospital after he lost his wings....
No. After his wings were ripped away from him.
The first thing he said to me when he saw me after his wings were torn from his back, leaving him broken and bleeding—the very first thing he thought to tell me—was that he loved me.
But he’d been high on pain medications. Maybe he hadn’t meant it at all.
That was all I could think when he took off from class without ever having even looked at me. My stomach twisted, and I couldn’t even bring myself to look around me to confirm what I was sure I would find: everyone staring at me, wondering why Josh was so angry with me. I could feel Andrew standing by my desk, waiting for me. I hadn’t even seen him walk up.
Hard to believe that less than four months ago, I had been worried about Andrew giving me The Look—the one that said he would love to be more than friends.
Now I was glad he was sticking by me. Even if he did sometimes still give me The Look, he seemed mostly willing to just be friends. And to wait for me after class when almost everyone else had left.
When I looked up from shoving my books in
to my book bag, I realized that almost all my human friends in the class had waited for me.
Tears welled up in my eyes for an entirely different reason this time.
They had no reason to be this loyal. In the midst of all the Fairy drama, I had all but dropped them. And they might not remember it anymore, but in the end, it was at least partly my fault that their friend Sarah had died. She had been my friend, too, though, and I had grieved as much as any of them when she was killed.
Now, Andrew, Ally, Natalie, Scott, and even Quentin, Sarah’s former boyfriend—the one she had given her life to save—all gathered around me, creating a buffer between me and the rest of the school. Gossip spread fast in a place as small as Fairy High, and one of the most popular guys in school had just totally snubbed me in front of an entire class.
“Meet us for lunch?” Andrew said. “I’ll wait for you outside the cafeteria.”
I nodded mutely, absurdly thankful for his kindness.
“Okay, then,” Ally said. “Let’s get you to Chemistry class.” Apparently, my human friends had decided to spend the day escorting me. My throat closed up with the tears I wouldn’t let fall from my eyes. I might not have the words for it, but I hoped they knew how much this meant to me.
When Ally and I passed Josh in the hallway on our way to the marble staircase at the end of the building, I couldn’t keep my gaze from lingering on him.
From the way his back stiffened, I could tell he felt me looking at him, but he never turned around.
Those tears came even closer to leaking out.
By lunch, the whispers were following me from class to class, but my friends had made sure that I was never alone, and no one else quite had the nerve to say anything to me directly. Probably for the best. As raw as I felt, there’s a good chance I would have exploded at anyone who aimed any snark in my direction. Once that happened, there weren’t any guarantees that I wouldn’t have blurted out what was really going on with Josh.
Because as miserable as he was making me, I also sort of understood why he was acting like he was. He was suffering from the equivalent of an amputation, and almost no one here knew it. It was awful, and in some ways, that was as much my fault as Sarah’s death had been.
If I hadn’t shown up in Fairy, Bartlef wouldn’t have decided that he needed me to be the Chosen Mother, he wouldn’t have made his power-grab when he did, and there wouldn’t have been any sort of showdown.
It all came down to the fact that Josh would still have his wings if not for me.
I skipped the lunch line, choosing instead to huddle down on a bench between Andrew and Natalie, the chattiest of my friends. As usual, her boyfriend Scott sat beside her like a slightly amused, very quiet support team, ready to nod when called on to do so, but always with a smile for Nat that lit up his face.
“You have to eat something,” Natalie said. “If you don’t eat something, you won’t have enough energy to get through your afternoon classes. Here. At least eat some fruit.” She pulled an orange out of her hot-pink lunch sack and plunked it down in front of me. I really liked Natalie, and I was thankful for her kindness, but right now, her non-stop talking was making me tired.
Then again, as long as she kept talking, I didn’t have to.
And if I ate the damn orange, no one else would expect me to say anything, either. I picked it up and began picking the peel away, one slow strip at a time.
The sound of it tearing away from the fruit reminded me of Josh’s wings being ripped from his body, and I had to drop it back on the table, swallowing back bile even as I blinked back tears.
When Natalie’s chatter stopped, I looked up.
They were all watching me. I glanced from one to the other of them. “What? Did I miss something? I’m sorry.”
Andrew cleared his throat nervously, and a few of them nodded encouragingly. Apparently, he had been elected spokesperson for whatever they all apparently wanted to say to me.
I waited apathetically. I couldn’t imagine that anything he had to say was going to be earth-shattering. No matter how grateful I was for their intercession in my slow social suicide, unless it had to do with the fate of an entire People, or the disfigurement of one particular person—the one I was in love with—I really wasn’t interested in what any of them could say to me.
That’s what I thought, anyway.
Until Andrew began speaking.
“Laney, we’re not stupid.” My stomach tightened, and I waited for what came next. Was he about to tell me that they remembered the night of the slaughter in the school auditorium? “We know that some of the people in Fairy are different.”
That made me sit up straight. It was pretty much the first thing that had penetrated my fog of misery all day. My gaze sharpened and I checked out each of my friends as they watched my response to Andrew’s pronouncement.
Oh, yeah. They definitely know what they’re talking about. Maybe not specifics, but they know something.
My first instinct was to run straight to Josh.
Who wasn’t speaking to me.
I blew out a breath and waited again. I needed all the information I could get before I made any decisions about what I was going to do with what I knew.
Andrew glanced around again, then leaned in toward me and lowered his voice. “We don’t know exactly how, but everyone who grows up in Fairy knows that some people here are just … different.”
“Not bad different,” Natalie broke in. “Just different different.”
“Whatever that means,” Ally said, bumping her friend’s shoulder with her own.
Andrew nodded, his tone growing even more earnest. “And some of the ones who are different are even related to us. My cousin Jimmy is one of them. Whatever they are. And here’s the deal: it doesn’t matter. We don’t care. That’s just how things are.”
Everyone was nodding, their eyes wide as they watched me.
“But as far as anyone knows, none of those people who are different have ever left Fairy for longer than a few years—maybe college, if they’re lucky. Then they all come back. Not a single one of the people who are different ever moves away for good. And not a single person who grew up somewhere else and moved here was one of the different ones.” Andrew leaned back, never taking his gaze from my face. “You’re the first one that anyone has ever heard of, Laney. You’re—” He paused, as if searching for the right word. “You’re different from the usual different around here. We don’t know why, but from the way everyone else is acting, you’re important.”
He scratched one cheek, at a loss for a way to wrap up what he was saying. “And we don’t know what happened last fall, but we know it wasn’t your fault. You got pulled into Fairy’s weirdness before you even knew what it was. But we think that the town needs you for some reason. And I guess…we want you to know that whatever is going on, we’ve got your back.”
A long silence followed his speech, everyone apparently waiting for my response.
I watched all of them watching me, and tried to figure out what to say.
Finally, with a whoosh of air, I put my head down on my forearms and began shaking with laughter.
“Laney?” Ally asked. “Are you okay?” She put a hand on my back, stroking it gently as if I were crying.
Then suddenly, I was crying. I could sense my friends around me, and instead of pulling away, they all drew in closer, again creating that wall between me and the rest of the world.
They protected me while I cried it out.
When the storm of tears passed, I realized that I felt better than I had felt in weeks. I might have been involved in Josh losing his wings, but it wasn’t my fault. And it didn’t matter how angry he was with me—he, along with all the other People of Fairy, Texas, apparently still needed me. I was different from different, and for some reason, that was important.
I wiped the tears away from my face, blew my nose on a napkin Scott handed me, and said, “Thank you.” Reaching out, I took each of their hands, one at a ti
me, and squeezed them. “I love y’all more than I can say. I promise, if I can ever tell you what’s going on, I will.”
Then I stood up and marched over to the table where Josh, Mason, and Kayla were sitting with a group of football players and cheerleaders—a mixed group of humans and fairies (demons, People, whatever they were)—and squeezed myself in between Josh and Mason.
“Hi, guys,” I said, smiling back and forth between them. “Looks like we need to have a chat.”
Chapter Four
Josh
Everyone assumed that I was going to be the next leader of the People. In any clan, the Oma and the Abba provide spiritual guidance and serve as advisors to the Council. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work. But Roger Bartlef convinced everyone to put the Council aside a few years ago when he became Abba. It turned out he wanted all the power for himself. Not just political power, either, but actual power. The kind we’re all pretty sure Laney has.
I knew I would have to communicate with her eventually.
But eventually wasn’t right now. I wasn’t ready to deal with her. And it wasn’t fair that she felt like she could just come sit down next to me and announce that we needed to talk. “Have a chat,” she said, like it was something minor.
Roger Bartlef and Hazel Biet hadn’t been acting entirely alone. There were whole factions of People in Fairy who wanted a change in leadership, who didn’t want the old guard to maintain their control over how we lived our lives. Oddly enough, Oma Raina, the Oma before Elaine, had been one of them.
Bartlef had taken power as Abba, but most of us didn’t believe it would last.
We had believed that even before we had a savior Yatah, then a nala, to put our faith in. My own father had been gearing up to oppose Bartlef for control when Laney showed up in town and turned my whole life upside down.
So for her to push herself in between me and Mace and announce that we needed to “chat” didn’t just feel wrong—it felt like an insult.
Like I hadn’t been training for this sort of thing my whole life.
Flightless (Fairy, Texas Book 2) Page 2
