Illuminate: A Gilded Wings Novel, Book One

by Aimee Agresti

  I had to smile at this. “The stupid ones always look like they’re having so much fun.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “So you’re not wired to just have fun either, huh?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, embarrassed now. “I guess maybe not.”

  “I don’t know what it is with me, but it never occurs to me to just enjoy anything. I’m always thinking days and years in advance. Like I tell myself I’ll take it easy and kick back when I get into college, but I know I won’t—then I’ll just work harder.”

  “Yeah, I wish I could flip a switch and turn that off.”

  “I always feel like the day I let up on myself is the day it all comes crashing down on me. And I guess I’ll always feel indebted to Joan because who knows where I’d be or who I’d be . . . so I owe it to her to keep it together. Do you have that feeling?”

  “Yeah, it’s like the opposite of a sense of entitlement.”

  We both paused, staring off into space, lost in our own thoughts.

  “Wow,” I said finally. “We’re messed up, aren’t we?”

  “No, we’re just, you know, sixteen. And now we’re living in some circle of hell and we’re going to become slaves to Satan or just be killed.” He said it deadpan, only half kidding.

  “Yeah, that’s another thing . . .” I couldn’t quite let it go. “It’s not actually a circle of hell—it’s more of another tier of the afterlife that’s coexisting with our reality.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Remember when we finished that mural and there was that one panel called Metamorfosi?”

  “Sure.”

  “That’s like a level of transition for the Outfit.”

  He was quiet for a moment and then he shook his head. The awning for the hotel was at last in our sights. “This is how it’s going to be now, isn’t it?” he asked. “We’ll be talking and then all of a sudden you’ll hit me with something else that’ll knock me out and we’ll bat some ideas around and then move on to everyday stuff again.”

  “This is our new normal pretty much.”

  “Well, at least we’re not boring.”

  ***

  Lance and I skipped the party that was in full swing in the lobby when we got back to the hotel. It was early, just after seven o’clock, but I felt like I needed to sleep. First, I called Joan to see how she was after her spa trip. She sounded like she was back to herself, but still very much entranced by the Lexington and Aurelia. After we got off the phone, I shut off the light and fell into bed, letting my eyes close. I had just started to drift off, the life slowly seeping out of my weary form, when a buzzer razzed me. My eyes snapped open.

  “You’re missing a great party!” Lucian’s voice filled the room, annunciating each word with milky precision. It could have been a lullaby, if it hadn’t startled me so much. I sat straight up in bed and flipped on the light, wondering if my dreams were speaking to me. But, no, it was that box behind the curtain; he was on the intercom. “Haaaaven,” he cooed. “I know you’re there, I saw you walk in earlier.” The voice was sweet and seductive, requiring me to put up greater armor against it. I took a deep breath and tentative steps toward that box. “Haaaven . . .” it came through again. I pressed the button to speak.

  “Lucian? Hi, I’m here. Sorry, I was just getting in. What’s up?” This was my attempt at sounding easygoing, but I’m sure he could hear that pull of tension beneath my words.

  “Good, don’t go anywhere. I’m coming down to see you.”

  I had to pat at the burning scar on my chest; the ones on my back flared too. “Oh, I was just going—”

  “Nowhere. Just stay there.” The intercom clicked. He had left.

  It would only draw ridiculous attention to myself if I tried to run away now, and he would just find me anyway. He would be persistent—he had been ordered to be. I turned hopelessly to the back of that book of mine, but there was no new entry. I was on my own. The knock rattled the door so much sooner than seemed possible. Three hearty knocks on the walls of my heart. I gave my room a once-over, stuffing the book back in the drawer of the night table and moving that chair from its spot barring the closet door. I went to let him in and before I got there, I noticed the door handle shake. It chilled me. But I opened up anyway and steeled myself.

  “Hi, I was just about to—”

  “I just needed to talk to you for a minute, hope you don’t mind.”

  He came right in, closing the door behind him. There was an extra tremor in his voice, not as smooth as usual. The early sign of a storm rippling the surface of the sea. Casually, I backed up, hitting the desk and then leaning against it like I meant to perch myself there.

  “Everything okay?” I asked, though I doubted I was the picture of calm collectedness myself.

  “Yes, I just wanted to see if you were all right after the, um, excitement this morning.”

  “Excitement, right.” That seemed to be the favored euphemism for death and general horror in these parts.

  “I understand you knew that man.”

  “Well, he came into the gallery and bought a photo, that’s about it. I brought it up to him right before—” I let it hang there, no need to finish.

  He moved closer to me, standing right in front of me and staring in my eyes, diving into them, looking for something. But I had closed them off enough—he couldn’t plumb their depths and make me lightheaded like he had in the past. Instead I held my gaze strong, giving the impression I wanted to keep him an arm’s length away, though secretly every part of me would have loved for it to have been otherwise. But he didn’t so much as brush his fingers against my hair.

  “I like you, Haven,” he said, in a way that looked like it pained him. “Is that so hard to believe?” I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to. He went on, almost talking to himself. “Maybe it is.” He looked away for a second. “But I want to keep seeing you, I need to. I care about you, even if that doesn’t make sense to you right now.”

  A buzz shattered the tension. We both jumped and swiveled our heads toward that box on the wall.

  “Haven.” Aurelia’s rasp hissed out, scaring me enough that it made me lurch toward the intercom. I took a swift step and his hand clamped down on my wrist. He looked at me with a furrowed, worried brow. It looked like he didn’t want me to answer her, but I was torn between evils. I went to the one I feared the most, pulling away from him. “Yes, hello, Aurelia, I’m here,” I spoke into the intercom, still looking toward Lucian. He took a seat on the bed and ran his fingers over that flower on the bedside table: the flower he’d given me, still alive.

  “Is Lucian there, by chance?”

  Our eyes darted to each other. He had no expression, his face no more than a mask. Since he didn’t indicate otherwise, I answered honestly. “Yes, he is, he just stopped by.”

  “Excellent, please send him back up to my office. I have some pressing matters to discuss and some people for him to meet.” He hung his head and sighed, looking defeated. An escapee caught just before clearing the gates.

  “Of course, Aurelia.”

  “Quickly please.” And she was gone, the static snuffed out.

  We looked at each other and he hung his head again. I could tell he didn’t want to go.

  “I guess you’re being summoned,” I said softly.

  He stood up and ran both hands through his hair, leaving his hands atop his head as he sighed.

  “Yeah, I guess I am,” he said. “I have so much more to say to you, Haven.” There was no flirtation behind the statement, but something else: concern? “But I should go now. I should go.” He let himself out.

  The minute he did, I thought for a moment and flew to the door to lock it. Still in my uniform, no time to change, I climbed up the ladder in the closet, heels and all, and made my way through that claustrophobic cave of a passageway. I gave up trying not to rip my stockings within the first few feet of crawling. By the time the passageway opened up and I could stand, my knees felt raw and
burned. I kept going though, not letting anything slow my pace, and I made it to that peephole into Aurelia’s office just as Lucian burst through her door.

  “I see we don’t knock anymore?” Aurelia said calmly, not looking at him. He marched in and threw himself against the love seat, sprawling out in a way that showed he didn’t care anymore about manners or decorum. He didn’t speak. “It’s impolite to disappear when we’re entertaining guests,” she continued. “Need I remind you that half of the city—the important half—is at Capone right now, and you should be too?” He studied his tie, not looking at her. “Care to explain yourself at all? Do I need to worry about your loyalty to our organization?”

  “You know where I was,” he said.

  “Yes, this is true. And I hope you were getting somewhere just now.” She sounded angry.

  “Well, if I was making any progress then you certainly put a stop to it.”

  “Well, were you?”

  “You’ll never know now.”

  “I’ll take that as no. Don’t play these games with me.”

  “You’re the one who’s playing games. After your stunt today I would put our odds very low that there’s any chance of getting her. In case you haven’t been able to gather, she’s sufficiently terrified now and I think she’s too suspicious to be wooed.”

  Aurelia sat back in her chair. And then spoke slowly, choosing her words carefully: “Today was . . . unfortunate . . . in many ways.”

  “I think that’s a safe estimation,” he sniped back, bitterly.

  “But also . . . necessary.” She was quiet for a moment, as though letting herself briefly surrender to thoughts she didn’t want to face. “I, perhaps, failed to appreciate how the incident with—” She couldn’t say Neil’s name, so she backtracked. “—how events such as those of today would reverberate with our sensitive young prize.”

  “Yes, you did. You acted out of hand, and you know you did. You obviously had something to prove.”

  “That’s quite enough.”

  “The bottom line is, I think we’re scaring her now. I think I’m scaring her. She’s now at war with herself. I’m certain she’s still drawn to me, but she resists with great force. I don’t want to say I have lost her, however . . .”

  “Is that your official assessment? That she cannot and will not be won over to our side?”

  He paused, weighing it. “Yes, I’m afraid it is.”

  “You do know what that means.”

  “I do.” His words sounded heavy. I could only imagine this meant that things were going to be getting even more dangerous for me.

  She sized him up, judging him, with a smirk. I should have been scared, jumping out of my skin at this whole talk about me, this plotting. But something else rose up inside: anger. Fury. It set my blood simmering. What had I done to get myself pitted against this? Why did everyone assume that they could manipulate me so easily? Why should it be a big shock that I’d be strong-willed against them? I could be a warrior too. I had come this far already.

  “I’m not fully convinced,” Aurelia said finally. “Back off for now. We will reassess as the first day of mass recruitment arrives.”

  He glared at her, his eyes bullets. “You want me to suffer.”

  “Maybe.” She smiled, straightening the piles on her desk. “But you had an assignment and until it is completed in some acceptable manner, you can’t walk away from it.” And then, in an icy, accusatory tone: “You like her.”

  He said nothing.

  “That’s fine, I don’t need to hear you say it to know it’s true. It won’t surprise you to know that I don’t care. We need her soul above all others. We are on the brink here and she will be that one piece we need. Have you looked at your photo again? They are getting worse by the day. She took wretched ones at the Vault too—I had to remove the horrid things from the screen out front. Her soul-illuminating powers are strengthening and there’s no telling to what degree her physical prowess is catching up.” When she spoke this way, it still sounded like it was about someone other than me. I didn’t feel that much stronger. Maybe my arms and legs were getting more used to all the climbing I was doing; my sprinting speed had improved but not to any shocking degree. “It will just be so much easier if we don’t have to escalate this to battle. So we will reestablish her trust, and then we will determine our next course of action.”

  “Fine.” He sounded disgusted. “Can I go now?”

  She waved him off, calling out as he reached the door: “I’ll see you out there. Don’t stray too far.”

  But Lucian had already slipped out, slamming the door shut behind him.

  25. We’ve Got to Do Something About Dante

  Some sort of evolution had happened, and my fear and horror of this morning had metastasized into a ferocity that couldn’t be reasoned with. It could have been the extreme fatigue that made me feel careless and invincible, but I couldn’t stand to hear them talk about how they could so easily play me. I couldn’t let them do to me or to Dante or Lance what they had done so swiftly and effortlessly to Neil. So, after climbing back down to my room, I ripped off my destroyed stockings for the sake of appearances, put my scuffed shoes back on, and made one more trip upstairs.

  The kitchen of Capone had never been so packed and boisterous—or, at least, not on the rare occasions I’d trespassed back there. I wasn’t allowed back here now either, but I shot through it, making a beeline for Dante’s station at the front. As I walked, the heads of his fellow sous-chefs whipped to watch me and I heard them call out, “Etan! Etan!” Sure enough, by the time I got close enough to see Dante’s dreads tied back in his pink bandana, Etan caught my elbow and yanked me, sharp and rough, back out the way I had come. A scream broke out from my lungs: “Dante!” I saw him turn around. Everyone around us froze. I felt like the entire dining room heard it and I didn’t care. Dante gave me a look of fear—I didn’t know if it was for me or for himself. Then everything snapped back into place. He turned back around, the chefs continued cooking, and Etan tightened his grip.

  “I’m afraid it’s a bad night for catching up with your friend. Try another time,” he said firmly, dragging me out with more force than was necessary. He tugged me with one incredibly strong hand and I noticed that in the other hand he brandished a gleaming meat cleaver. I stopped resisting and let him push me, leaving me with an extra shove outside the kitchen’s back door.

  When I got back to the lobby, I spotted Lance running toward me. He slowed to a walk as he got closer. We met near the front desk.

  “Was that you? Is everything okay?”

  “Whaddya mean?”

  “Yelling?”

  “You heard that?”

  “I think everyone did.”

  I was about to open my mouth to respond, but he cut me off. “Look, there’s no cereal.”

  “What?”

  “The cereal, it’s all gone, every box in the pantry, even the ones they keep in those bulk shipments—”

  “Back in that closet off of the walk-in freezer?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “I don’t know. I just know there’s more home-cooked meals left for us in the fridge and I’m not touching that stuff.”

  “Good, we can’t. Who knows what they might be putting in there.”

  “But I’m ravenous. I mean, brink of starvation.”

  “I have a couple Power Bars and I have an idea,” I said, walking back toward the elevator as he followed me. “Get your coat, we’ll make a break for it.”

  What’s open around here, this time of night, besides the restaurants in the hotel?”

  I led us around the deserted, desolate block—the neighborhood really cleared out at night, and I couldn’t tell if it felt particularly creepy because of the things we’d started to understand about the Lexington or if it really just was a sketchy area. What little light there was illuminated the cold clouds our breath made. My bare legs went entirely numb. Eventually, after
making almost a full loop, I found that dive bar I’d seen from the tunnels below the hotel.

  The warm air inside heated our faces instantly as smoke billowed from every corner of the place, from the pool tables in the back to the bar up front. There were baskets of shelled peanuts on every table. I could have eaten thousands of them. But we hadn’t even attempted to sit down at one of the sticky, beer-sloshed tables yet when a bald, middle-age bartender with a jiggling beer gut stopped us for ID, holding out his hand and shaking his fingers with an air of impatience.

  “Could we just get something to eat?” I asked, trying to channel Aurelia by smiling in a way that might help our cause.

  “Not if you’re not twenty-one,” he said.

  “C’mon, we look twenty-one,” Lance tried.

  “You don’t even look eighteen,” the man countered.

  “We’re starving,” Lance said.

  “And surprisingly well paid,” I added.

  “Sorry. Move it along. Let’s go.”

  We pleaded a little while longer, unsuccessfully, and finally gave up. I was getting that feeling again, my blood starting to bubble up, until I thought it might burst every capillary; I felt like I just might have the power to punch out a window or something. I was angry now, angry again, and I was sick of having to fight for everything: for food that wouldn’t potentially poison me; for time with my best friend; for my life. We went back around the corner to the hotel, heads heavy with disappointment, stomachs painfully empty. I dug out a Power Bar for each of us. Lance took a seat on my bed and ripped open the wrapper, devouring the bar.

  “You’re so smart to have snacks. Why didn’t I ever think to have snacks?”

  “Probably because you thought we’d have access to food that wasn’t going to cause us physical harm.”

  “Maybe so.”

  I took a bite of my own Power Bar and kicked off my shoes, tucking them in the closet and then stopped, thinking. “Get out of the uniform—”