Illuminate: A Gilded Wings Novel, Book One

by Aimee Agresti

  “See, so the phone is in place here.” All business, he dug his hand into the neck of my sweater. “And the camera’s eye is lined up through this tiny hole I cut in your sweater—sorry.”

  “No, please. This is the most I’ve ever worn this sweater.”

  “And so the wire runs from the inside of the sweater down to your jeans and inside your right jean pocket. If you’ll kindly feel inside there—”

  I did as I was told: “Wow!” Inside my fingers found a remote control the size of a stick of gum with a doorbell-size pushbutton.

  “That’s your remote control.”

  “But how—”

  “They took the camera away from our office but they left the accessories,” he explained. “So from there, all you have to do is start snapping.”

  “Really?” I hit the button a couple times. “That’s so cool.”

  “Yeah. And then I’ll e-mail them to myself, print them out, and scrub them off the hard drive of the gallery computer.”

  “That’s totally amazing, Lance. Seriously, you’re some kind of genius.”

  “Thanks,” he said, proudly. “I try.”

  “So, should we test it out?”

  In less than half an hour skulking around the Vault, looking like we were just there to hang out, I managed to snap group shots of a slew of the newer Outfit members. We finished up with a stroll through the lobby so I could get a couple of the new girls at the front desk. We would amass a collection of these photos and then, when the time came, I would destroy them.

  The next two days we checked in with Ruthie so often, we succeeded in making her more worried than she had already been about Dante. The first two times we called, he was still asleep. It was going on sixteen hours now. The third time we called he showed signs of stirring—a relief. And the fourth time we had her ask him what day it was: “Is it Haven’s birthday?” we heard on the other end of the phone. Our hearts sank. The following day brought no better news: “He still doesn’t seem to have any idea what the Lexington Hotel is,” she said. “And he’s sleeping all the time. It’s just not normal at all. I don’t know what to do.” We didn’t either. Lance and I debated endlessly at what point Dante should be taken back to the hospital, not that we imagined there was much they could do for him there.

  Prom was now only two days away, but we had seen shockingly little of Lucian and Aurelia, besides our nighttime spying rituals. But when we keyed into our gallery office, we found a note waiting on our desk in Aurelia’s delicate hand. Just seeing it sent a chill.

  Haven and Lance,

  Kindly report to the ballroom to decorate for Saturday’s festivities.

  Yours, Aurelia.

  When we did, we found at least two dozen members of the Outfit already at work moving and setting tables, arranging the lights and DJ booth, setting up a lighted cityscape meant to be the Chicago of 1871. They had even brought in the life-size replica of a cow we had ordered. My mind flashed to all of the ridiculous photos that would be snapped around it on Saturday night. I felt bad for the thing.

  Beckett strutted around with a clipboard in hand, barking orders at his minions, and made his way over to us.

  “You can do tables”—he pointed to me—“and you can hang lights,” he ordered Lance, before walking away. It was the most he’d ever said to either of us. I guessed that Lance was thinking the same thing I was: we were severely outnumbered in this room. The place was teeming with Outfit members and yet it was virtually silent. There were none of those little conversations that made the day pass. They all shot us glares out of the corners of their eyes.

  Lance and I headed in our opposite directions and set to work. I unfolded a flame-colored tablecloth, while across the room he climbed to the top of a towering ladder, which either of us might once have balked at, but after all of those nighttime drills seemed so much less intimidating. So much had changed in these last few months.

  I had just placed the last favor at its setting and heard the crash—the explosive fireworks pop of shattering glass.

  My head whipped in Lance’s direction, just as he wailed. The ladder was empty; he was lying on the ground. I ran to him; no one else moved an inch. Every member of the Outfit continued doing whatever mundane task they were engrossed with, not saying a word, not even so much as looking at him.

  When I got to him, he was picking shards of broken glass off the arm of his uniform. A few smashed torches lay scattered around him.

  “Careful, it’s easy to lose your footing up there,” Beckett said as he passed by us. Lance wouldn’t have made a misstep. We climbed steeper slopes than this in the dark every night. He hadn’t fallen on his own. Lance shot me a look that confirmed this.

  “Are you okay?” I whispered. “Can you stand up, do you think?”

  “Fine, I’m fine,” he said, slowly raising himself, bits of glass and the crushed wood of the torches raining down from his body. He had twisted when he fell, landing on his stomach, and some of the sharper pieces had sliced straight through his vest and shirt in clean swipes across his torso and chest. I wondered how deep they went.

  “You’re pretty cut up, aren’t you?”

  “A little,” he said, wincing but trying to cover it up.

  “Can you make it downstairs? If they’re not too bad, I can take care of it.”

  “Yeah, thanks.” I could see the sting in his eyes.

  We got to my room and I made a beeline for that first-aid kit and all those extra bandages. “Does it feel like you’ll need stitches?” I asked as I pulled out my supplies and set them on the desk.

  “I don’t know,” he groaned. “I’d rather not, I mean, if you don’t have to.”

  “I’m flattered that you think I could do stitches on you. We would have to take you in for that.”

  “Oh. No, I don’t think I need them.”

  “Come ’ere, let me see. And take that off already.” I waved toward his shirt and vest. I removed the cap from the bottle of antiseptic and laid out a buffet of bandages, all different sizes, and gauze. Then I wet a clean washcloth and applied some antibacterial soap.

  “You have to be careful,” he called out to me, his voice pained. “First Dante, now me. You’re next, Haven.”

  “I know,” I said. I finished up and returned to the main room to find him still unbuttoning his shirt. “Do you need help? Are you not able to move your fingers?” I grabbed his hand, wondering if he might have some nerve damage even though his hands were only slightly nicked from the glass. Nothing too catastrophic-looking. “Squeeze my hand.” He did without a problem.

  “I’m fine.” He resumed unbuttoning slowly.

  “Then what’s wrong? Let’s bandage you. You must be covered in glass.” He shed his vest and shirt and still had on a white T-shirt underneath. He stopped again. I got the picture and softened my tone. “I know this is weird, but seriously, I practically grew up in a hospital, remember? I’ve seen it all, so no need for modesty. This is just like another day at the office for me.”

  He looked like he wanted to say something but then he gave up and shook his head. He lifted his shirt up and off. Because of those years at the hospital, my trained eyes went to the wound first: a sharp, ragged slice, bloody and oozing across his abdomen. Then, professionalism fading, I absorbed the rest of him: strong arms with muscles bulging beneath the skin and broad shoulders, tapering down to a rippled torso that looked as if stones had been skipped across its surface and had frozen that way.

  “It, um, looks like all of that running and climbing and all is paying off, I guess,” I stammered.

  “Thanks,” he said, so shy it was barely audible.

  I suddenly understood the concept of someone looking vastly better out of their clothes than in them. For an instant, I couldn’t help but wonder how I would stack up to that comparison. I had never really encountered any sort of bare flesh in such close proximity to me, ever. I had pretty much exaggerated about my experience at the hospital: the parade of wounded and a
ching there was much different than this, and, truthfully, I saw mostly arms and legs and glimpses here and there, and a lot of old people or kids. Not friends of mine, not . . . this. This fell into another category entirely.

  Quietly and quickly, I cleaned the gash and applied antiseptic and bandages. Then I tended to his forearms and hands, making sure no slivers of glass had been left behind. He wore that cuff on his wrist every day, and now I pulled a shard of glass from near that single wing. We didn’t speak. For the first time since we’d met, the silence between us felt . . . off. I was eager to fill it but at a loss as to what to say. I didn’t want to feel this way with Lance.

  “You’re all set here,” I said finally. “Was that it? Any other scrapes or anything?”

  “No, thanks though.” He had already grabbed for his undershirt.

  “I’ll leave out a couple of these,” I said as I reassembled all of my first-aid supplies. “We’ll, or you’ll, want to change that dressing—” My fumbling hands knocked the capped bottle of antiseptic off the desk onto the floor and he lunged for it on reflex. When he bent forward, I looked and couldn’t stifle a gasp.

  Lance’s bare shoulder blades bore the same scars I had on mine.

  He heard my reaction and froze, then rose slowly, so slowly now, until he was facing me. He handed me the bottle and I set it down on the desk, eyes still locked on him. That was what he hadn’t wanted me to see. And that glimpse had been enough to know: he was like me. He had to be. Do I tell him? We both tried to speak at the same time. I let him go first.

  “There’s some stuff I guess you don’t know about me”—he shrugged, searching for the words—“that I don’t even completely know about myself.”

  “I’ve seen those before.” I had my uniform on, which I generally appreciated for its ability to cover up the multitude of sins on my skin, but if I could have easily shown him my matching scars at that moment, I would have.

  “You have?” He looked puzzled; I could see him trying to figure out when he might have possibly exposed those.

  “On me.”

  His eyes bulged. His jaw dropped just enough to register shock. “Do you . . . do you know what they mean?” he stammered, his eyes darting around, as though someone had been listening in.

  I nodded. “Yeah. You?”

  He nodded too. “A very recent development.”

  We both sighed.

  “Yeah, I guess we’ve gotta be better about pooling our information,” I said.

  “I know, kind of a flaw in our study group here.”

  “Well, any other secrets I should know about?”

  He didn’t answer very quickly, which indicated the affirmative. His shoulders fell and I could see him decide to give in. He headed for the door, waving for me to follow.

  When we got to his room, Lance opened the desk drawer and produced a small stack of postcards, handing them to me. I pawed through—each had a different picture of Chicago and its landmarks, and all were vintage shots from years past—I flipped them over, but there was no writing whatsoever.

  “I know, so it seems nuts, but when no one is in here and it’s just me, these have messages on them. They just appear. But they’re never signed.”

  “What do they say?”

  “You know, the usual: wish you were here; you’re in danger; you’re not just a run-of-the-mill outcast, you’re some kind of freakish angel. And then they mostly say to make sure you don’t get into too much trouble and to take my cues from you. You’re, like, the ringleader, I guess.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah. And, weirdly, they say this thing found me, I didn’t find it.” He held up his cuff.

  “I heard that too, with this.” I pulled out the necklace.

  “I guess it’s like our membership card in a club.”

  “Where’d you find these?” I held up the stack of postcards.

  “They were with that book I found for you. These were there marked for me in the same box.”

  “Yeah, the book . . .” I thought about it. “Now’s probably a good time to mention: I sort of get messages in there like your postcards.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Yeah. I thought you’d think I was crazy, so I didn’t say anything before.”

  “I know how that goes,” he said, letting it roll off him. “Anything interesting in there?”

  I couldn’t have asked for a better time to bring it up: “Well, the major bullet point seems to be that . . .” I just blurted it out. “It’s prom day—they’re going to kill me then. I don’t know how. It just gave that date, May 27. I didn’t want to say anything.” Saying it out loud, it sounded as absurd and bone-chilling as it had that first time I’d read it. But now that the date was so close, its finality made my head spin.

  “You didn’t want to say anything?” He spat out the words.

  “I figured, what was the point?”

  He shook his head, took his glasses off, and furiously polished them against his shirt. “I don’t even know where to start.”

  “I mean, I’m not going to let it happen so easily, but I figured, why get everyone upset?”

  “You’re completely ridiculous. But I’ll let that go.” He breathed a stressed sigh and leaned against his desk, arms folded. “Like we needed another reason to hate the prom?”

  “I know.”

  And then he caught himself. “I’m sorry, that’s not funny.”

  “No, it is, actually.”

  “No, it’s not, but . . . I’m just kind of freaking out, in general. I know that’s not cool to admit but . . . I am.”

  “Yeah, it’s okay, you’re in good company.”

  “Why though?” he said finally, softly. “Why us? Why is all this happening to us?” That word—us—reached out now and grabbed my heart, holding it tight, holding it together. Warm and comforting.

  “Well, I guess maybe—” I started, not entirely sure what I would say, but he jumped in pointing his finger in that professorial way.

  “I know. It’s because we can handle it. This stuff is coming at us because we’re capable of handling it.”

  “Wow,” I breathed. “Good answer.”

  We didn’t bother going back to set up the ballroom that afternoon. What did it really matter at this point? Instead we called Dante, who had some good news.

  He launched right in: “Omigod, I have GOT to talk to you guys!”

  “Dante?” A smile rose to my lips, a reflex. It sounded like him, finally.

  “How soon can you get here?” He was manic, in a good way. “I’ve got so much to tell you, it’s, like, some crazy shit!” Lance watched, trying to gauge what I was hearing. I gave him a thumbs-up.

  “That’s amazing, D, we’ll hop on the train right now.”

  “Can you do me a favor?”

  “Anything,” I said.

  “I will love you forever if you bring me some pizza! I’m dying to eat something that isn’t contaminated or some kind of poison or, you know, my mom’s boring healthy stuff.”

  I had to laugh. “You got it. See you soon.”

  Before long, Dante was not only telling us what we already knew—his name, his address, his job at the hotel—but things we didn’t know at all. We sat in a circle on the floor of his room, the pizza box in the center.

  “There’s a whole dark room full of these strange plants down by Alcatraz. They use that stuff in everything. Most are aphrodisiacs, uppers, mind control, brainwashing kinda stuff. But some are deadly,” Dante said between mouthfuls of pizza. “God, this is good. I feel like I woke up from a coma.”

  “They gave you something that night,” I prompted. “They knew you were going to meet me. What made you arrange that meeting, anyway?”

  “I don’t know, they must’ve changed the concentration of something they were giving me and all of a sudden, I was, like, awake again. I saw you coming into Capone and saw them not let you talk to me. I didn’t understand and I asked Etan. And, now I remember this, he got furiou
s at me. So then I just stopped asking questions. I tried to go back to however I’d been before so that I could just, like, pay attention to everything and figure stuff out. And that’s when I slipped you that message in your teacup. But they must’ve known.”

  “What did you take the other day? Before you went to sleep?”

  “Etan had said when I first started working with him that that’s the trifecta, those three spices. They’re not anything I’d ever seen before, and he goes somewhere to get them. Not the garden.”

  “I bet we know where,” Lance interjected.

  Dante looked confused.

  “We’ve got some things to tell you too. Later though.” I wanted him to keep going, now that his memory was working again.

  “So, anyway,” he continued. “That’s the trifecta for balance, if you serve someone something that’s too strong for them, which occasionally happens. It’s a sort of antidote. I started skimming some in the last few days, before I got knocked out.”

  “But where have you been when you haven’t been working?” I asked, impatient now, wanting to know everything, wanting my friend fully returned to me.

  “I don’t know. I’m sorry,” he said blankly. “I wish I knew. I know I was at Capone a lot. I think we worked through the nights a lot. And I have flashes of other places, but I can’t recognize them or make sense of them.”

  “I bet it’ll come back. It’s probably like a posttraumatic stress thing,” Lance said in a soothing tone.

  “Maybe you’re right,” Dante said. “So what’ve I missed? What’ve you guys been up to?”

  Lance and I looked at each other, now wearing matching expressions, no clue where to begin. Everything we’d said the past couple days had gone in one ear and out the other, but this time, we knew he would understand. We both shook our heads and had to smile at how grand the task would be to fill him in.