Wings of the Wicked

  More memories flooded my head, and I buried my face in my hands, whimpering. “Go away,” I snarled hoarsely.

  “You need to talk to me.”

  I dropped my hands. “I’m telling you to go away.”

  His mouth tightened in frustration for a split second. “Please, Ellie, come inside before you freeze to death.”

  I snarled and spoke slowly, emphasizing each word so he knew that I was dead serious. “You framed my real father for my mother’s murder. If you don’t get the hell away from me right now, I’m going to punch your head right off your shoulders. You know better than anyone how capable I am of that.”

  After a long, painful moment, he stood. Instead of looking up at him, I stared at the snowy porch floorboards.

  “I am sorry, Ellie,” he said, his voice cold and formal. “But everything I do is to protect you at any cost, even if it means sacrificing your father’s reputation. I’m sure he was a good man, but for years the thing you knew as your father wasn’t him. It is a tragedy what happened to your family, but you have to understand that we cannot risk exposing our world to the human world. I hope one day you will forgive me.”

  I looked up to meet his steady gaze. Our world. My family was my world. This nightmare I fell into the day I turned seventeen could never change that. I wanted to fly to my feet and hit him and scream at him, but it would do me no good. In truth, I was terrified of letting my emotions go. I’d lost control of my power for the first time in a long time, and from what little I could piece together from my memory, I’d hurt Will and Nathaniel. I’d hurt them badly, and I felt terrible for it. But my regret couldn’t make me forgive Will for what he’d done to my father’s name.

  His gaze narrowed and darkened at me. “Your mother fought like hell for her life, and here you are ready to throw your own away.”

  He turned and walked back into the house.

  I didn’t follow him. I pulled out my phone. There were eleven voice mails. All of them were from Kate, one of my only remaining ties to the human world. It was just me and the darkness now.

  My mother’s funeral went by in a haze. Fake friends and family I’d forgotten I had all attended, shared their condolences, gave me lifeless hugs. They all looked at me with pity, some with fear. The little girl whose daddy killed her mama and took off. When I stepped up to my mother’s coffin, I saw that they’d cleaned her up. No one could tell how the bones in her neck were shattered to dust, see the cracks in her skull or the bruises and gashes beneath all the makeup. They’d even put lipstick on her. When I touched her face, her skin was hard and cold, nothing like the softness and warmth that I had always known. She looked like a doll, frozen and clothed in a dress suit I knew she hated. She never wore it. That was why it looked brand-new. I think Nana had picked it out. How morbid, I thought, to have to pick out the clothes your daughter would be buried in. Perhaps it was even worse for the poor fool who did her hair and put the lipstick on her mouth. They could all be glad, though. No one saw her die but me.

  I felt the strange glances from everyone at the funeral who expected me to be crying. That wasn’t going to happen. Nana had wanted me to say something about my mother to everyone, but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t stand up there and feel all those eyes on me, knowing exactly what was going through their heads. Instead, Nana got up and spoke about how kind and generous my mother was, what a good daughter and mother she had been. Nana said nothing about my father, which was a wise decision. That day the world pretended my father had never existed. No one wanted to think about him, but of course he was on all our minds.

  I could feel Will there at the funeral the entire time, hidden within the Grim, but he only let me see him once without me having to follow him into that Hell dimension. I never spoke even a word to him.

  I would be moving in with Nana until I left for college in the fall, but I wasn’t ready to yet. I needed Kate. I needed to feel like a teenage girl. I needed to get away from reapers.

  That night I curled up in Kate’s bed with my knees tucked to my chin. I hadn’t cried since the night my mother died, and I didn’t want to start again. It hurt too much. Kate’s mom forced me to eat dinner and even made hot cocoa, but I only took it because she was relentless. Now I felt sick to my stomach, and every time I closed my eyes to try and sleep, I was hit by terrible memories in the darkness of my mind.

  Kate inched up behind me and rested her chin on my shoulder. She wrapped her arms around me and squeezed gently. I knew she meant well, so I wouldn’t punish her for being kind to me. She, like everyone else, thought my dad had killed my mom. Thanks to Will and Nathaniel.

  “They’ll find him,” Kate whispered.

  I said nothing. There was no way I could tell her the truth, and I wasn’t even sure I would want to if I could. Why should I bring her into this horrible world? She didn’t deserve that kind of punishment. But then again, why did I?

  At Nana’s house, I was moved into the guest room, a room filled with too much white and nautical blue and maple wood furniture. It had been my mother’s room when she was growing up, but her scent and feel had long since faded. Nana had already gone to my house and packed up certain belongings my mom had kept, things that were special to her, and to Nana and me. All of them were still in boxes on one side of my room that I had only stared at since they’d arrived. My clothes were still in the suitcase or in a pile next to them. The hangers in the closet were empty. To unpack and move in here would be to accept that my old life, my old home—everything—was gone forever.

  Returning to my house and walking past where everything happened rebroke my heart with every step. Will had cleaned up all evidence of the reaper like he and Nathaniel had discussed. There was no dark stain in the spot where I’d torn apart the reaper, no dried blood on the walls, no claw marks, nothing. It was as if a tornado had blown through my foyer, and no one had ever died. I don’t know how Will did it, but I had a feeling that book of Nathaniel’s that Will took wasn’t a Martha Stewart home-cleaning guide. Magic had to have been involved. The police had questioned me relentlessly about the inconsistency of the damage, but I had no information for them, and they soon gave up.

  A soft knock on the door jarred me from my thoughts. Nana appeared, her white hair pulled into a low ponytail, and her eyes—so much like my mother’s eyes, and nothing like my own—were gentle behind her reading glasses. “Hey, sweetheart. Come down for dinner.”

  I forced an apologetic smile. “I’m not hungry.”

  She peered over her glasses at me and rested a hand on her hip. “That wasn’t a request. I want you downstairs in two minutes.”

  Nana’s enormous dark gray cat, Bluebelle, waltzed through the door and rubbed his wide belly against my leg. Animals always seemed to love me, but Bluebelle couldn’t decide between purring and stretching his ugly, smushed face into a ferocious hiss. I reached down to pet him, but he clawed at me and tried to bite off my fingers. Bluebelle was an asshole.

  “Bluebelle,” Nana called. “Come on, you old grouch. Two minutes, Ellie.” Then she disappeared. She was like my mother in so many ways that I wasn’t, because I wasn’t really related to either of them. When I looked into the mirror, I didn’t see anything of my mom.

  My eyes fell to one of the boxes filled with stuff from my room. I dragged myself off the bed and opened the box to unpack a framed picture of me and my mom and my dad from our last vacation together.

  Nana made pasta for dinner that night and promised all the carbs would give me energy for tomorrow, my first day back to school. I wasn’t interested in conversation, but she kept pushing.

  “Would you like me to drive you to school tomorrow?” she asked. “I know it’s a long commute, and I don’t mind.”

  I poked at the leeks and artichokes mixed in with the pasta. “I’ll be fine.”

  She frowned. “Don’t be afraid to accept my help. I love you.”

  “I know, Nana. And I appreciate everything you’ve done for me, but I want to feel norm
al. I want to go to school by myself like it’s a normal day.”

  “That’s a very grown-up decision,” she said. “I’m proud of how well you’re handling this.”

  My smile vanished. I had everyone fooled. I was angry, and everything was my fault. I should have known, should have done something, should have protected my parents. Will had been right, and I’d been in denial the whole time. I was too stubborn to stay away from the people I loved in order to protect them, and I had just stood there and let that monster kill my mother. Everything was my fault.

  20

  I HAD BEEN EXPECTING THE STARES. THE WHISPERS. The coldness. No one at school knew how to handle this any better than I did. I walked sluggishly through the hall, keeping my eyes up and ahead—no way would I stare at the floor like a coward—hugging my books to my chest. I knew what they all saw when they stared at me, because I’d had the misfortune of passing by the bathroom mirror despite my attempts to avoid it. They all saw the dark circles the concealer couldn’t hide under my eyes, that my hair was dull and flat and had lost most of its shine, that I was thinner because I hadn’t been eating.

  In my literature class I stared at the blank page of my open notebook as my classmates scribbled furiously. I couldn’t concentrate when my mind kept revisiting the explosion of memories my amnesia no longer blocked. The assignment was to write a one-page essay on where we saw ourselves five years from now. No doubt everyone wrote down how they would be graduating college, starting careers, maybe getting engaged, and some would already have had a baby or two. Me—I saw myself dead in five years. Maybe five months. Maybe five days.

  When the final bell rang, I stopped by Kate’s locker to say good-bye.

  “Why don’t you come over to my place?” she offered with a concerned look. “We could not-study for the psych quiz tomorrow.”

  I sighed and leaned my head against the locker next to hers. “Maybe tomorrow. I’m a little exhausted, and Nana wants me home for dinner.”

  She smiled cautiously, and I was grateful that she didn’t argue with me. “How about we hit up the bowling alley for a couple hours after school tomorrow?”

  “That’d be fun,” I said. I knew I needed to force myself to get out and do something besides go to school and hang out at Nana’s.

  “Does that mean you’re coming?” she asked with a hopeful lilt to her voice, raising her eyebrows.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll go.”

  She played with a lock of my hair. “You’ll let me know if you’re not okay, right?”

  I chewed on my bottom lip. “I’m as okay as I can be. Got to move on with my life, you know?”

  “Yeah.” She studied me with her cool blue eyes.

  I hoisted my backpack higher on my shoulder. “See you tomorrow morning?”

  She smiled. “Of course. You know I’m here for you. We’ll have plenty of time to talk.”

  A sickness flooded my heart. If only I could tell her everything. I wanted so badly to talk to her, to tell her everything, because I needed to talk to someone. I needed to talk to Kate. I needed her.

  I turned my face away and rubbed my eye before she saw the tears that budded. “Yeah. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Before she could respond, I was marching briskly down the hall, leaving her at her locker. When I burst through the doors to the student parking lot, I saw the last person I wanted to see in the entire world leaning against the grill of my car. I rubbed away the tears that threatened to give away my feelings as I approached, feeling the curious eyes of other people around the parking lot.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked, my voice sharper than I’d intended it to be.

  The green of Will’s eyes had been placid but troubled, and then they flashed, as if my words had stung him. He looked down briefly. “I wanted to make sure your day went all right. That you’re all right.”

  I walked right past him to the driver’s side door. “I’m alive, aren’t I?”

  He followed me. “I don’t want to fight.”

  I realized then that we hadn’t spoken for days, which was strange for me. It seemed like I saw him every single day. I was so used to his presence near me, all around me, and even when I was furious with him, I noticed his absence. I missed him. I missed him even now, when he was standing only two feet away from me. But I was still too mad to give in to the effect he had on me.

  “Please just hear me out,” Will pleaded.

  I opened my mouth to interject, but he spoke again quickly.

  “I did what I had to do. I know you don’t understand that now, and I don’t expect you to. Ellie, I’m sorry that I hurt you.” He reached out a hand to touch my face, his fingers warm in the bitter cold air. “You know I’d never hurt you on purpose.”

  I closed my eyes at his touch and swallowed shakily. “Regardless of your intentions,” I said slowly, “you still hurt me. And I’m not ready to forgive you yet.”

  He took my hand and lifted it to his mouth. His lips kissed my palm, and wings fluttered through my insides. He looked down at my hand for just a moment before returning my gaze painfully. “Please, please forgive me. I can’t bear the way you look at me now.”

  I pulled away. “Let’s talk in the car.”

  After I sat down and he climbed into the passenger seat, we fell into an awkward silence.

  “She was going to divorce him,” I confessed. “She was going to get out, be safe. But we were too late. I was too late to save her.”

  “Don’t blame yourself.” His voice was a whisper.

  I frowned and swallowed. “It doesn’t matter that you and everyone else keep saying that. I’ll feel like this no matter what.”

  “I know,” he said. “But it isn’t your fault.”

  If I continued to argue with him, I would only get angry, and I was desperate not to get mad at him anymore. I was tired of fighting with him.

  “You understand why I did it, right?” he asked in a small voice.

  He didn’t elaborate, but I knew what he was talking about. “There had to be something else you could have done,” I said.

  “There may have been,” he admitted. “I don’t deny the possibility of it. But Nathaniel and I made a decision. The reaper said he killed your father years ago, and we don’t have a body for the police to find. Your father would have been a suspect anyway. This was the most logical and safest solution for you.”

  I glared at him. “My real dad was a good man, Will. He is a victim in this, and now the whole world thinks he’s a monster. He was never a monster. A monster is what killed him, and now my family and I will have to live with this lie for the rest of our lives!”

  I took a deep breath to erase the anger from my voice. “I’m sorry that I hurt you. I never wanted to hurt you or Nathaniel. I didn’t know that it was you trying to hold me back.”

  “You weren’t trying to kill me,” Will said. “You were defending yourself and your mother.”

  “Whether I tried to kill you or not, I almost did. I can’t let that happen again. I feel like every slightest emotion that I have is about to send me over the edge. Everything is so magnified. I can’t handle myself. I’m dangerous, and you know it.”

  “You can handle this.”

  “I heard you guys talking when Nathaniel had me under. That I’d never gotten that bad before. That my … eyes had changed. Nathaniel said that I—Gabriel—knew that if I became dangerous—”

  “No.”

  “—that you would have to—”

  “Ellie, that’s out of the question.”

  “But I’ll come back,” I assured him. “You are the only one who is strong enough to defend yourself against me. If I might hurt someone else, someone who isn’t as strong as you, then this may be the only answer.”

  “No,” he repeated firmly, his jaw clenching as he shook his head and shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “No. I won’t. Not ever.”

  “You may not have a choice.”

  “You can’t ask me to do that
. Ask me anything else, anything but that. I would let you kill me first.”

  I watched him sadly, unable to think about losing him, no matter how angry I was or how much my heart hurt. Every one of my Guardians before Will had been killed in battle, and now I remembered each one of their deaths like a knife to my heart.

  “Something happened to me that night that I didn’t tell you about,” I said, my voice breaking. “When I lost it, everything came rushing back to me all at once. I remember everything. I’ve spent five hundred years with you, and I remember them all.”

  He laid his hand over mine and held it. I forced myself to take back my hand, but the movement was unbearably difficult. Bastian’s face flashed across my mind, and then Merodach and Kelaeno invaded behind him. I couldn’t face them without Will. I couldn’t save the world on my own.

  “I’m going out with Kate tomorrow,” I said. “Afterward we will go patrolling. But I need to feel happy at least once before I launch into Terminator mode and go after Bastian. I’m going to kill them all.”

  “I’ll never leave your side.”

  “I need you there. But I need you to be just my Guardian right now. Nothing more.”

  “Anything for you.”

  I looked over to where he sat, but he had vanished.

  Just after six the next evening, I stared into the bathroom mirror. My phone sat untouched next to my hand on the counter, waiting for me to call Kate. I could pull this off tonight. Nobody would be paying attention to me. No one even cared.

  There was a soft knock on the door.

  “Come in,” I called.

  Nana emerged with Bluebelle on her heels. The cat made an ugly meow as he darted through the door. Once in the bathroom, he gave an irritated shake and sauntered around, as if surveying his territory. He started toward me to rub against my leg, but I didn’t reach for him. I knew it would have been a better idea—and possibly less painful—to hug a cactus than to touch Bluebelle.