Maddy put the phone down, sighing, sorry she had brought up his wings. She constantly tried to let Jackson know she loved him regardless of whether he was an acting Guardian or not. That love had deepened over the past year as she had got to know Jackson more and more, spending more time with him, sharing their thoughts and feelings and the private little jokes they came up with. They’d sneak away to dodge the paparazzi and have secret picnics high in the Hollywood Hills, or Jacks would have her over for dinner at his own new gorgeous house in Empyrean Canyon, and they’d stay up late cuddling and making out, streaming cheesy TV shows from when they were younger.
Even though he was the Jackson Godspeed, Maddy just felt comfortable with him. Like she could really be herself for once, free to express herself without shyness. And even when they talked about sex, Jacks was a true gentleman. Maddy of course wanted to have sex with Jacks – sometimes she was so attracted to him that she almost couldn’t believe it – but she also wanted the first time to be the right time, and she wasn’t quite ready to take the plunge. They’d talked without embarrassment, and they agreed that she should focus on finishing high school and starting university before they actually took things to a more physical level. “We have a lot of time,” Jacks had told her. She loved him for that.
On her bedroom desk sat a framed picture of her and Jacks in front of the pond in Central Park – he’d taken her on her first trip to New York City as a graduation present that spring. The Plaza Hotel and Midtown skyscrapers rose from behind the screen of lush trees and the duck-filled pond they stood in front of. They had been so happy that week. She picked the photo up and studied their glowing faces before putting the photo on top of her suitcase. There was no way she was leaving it behind.
She walked downstairs, yawning, each step of the staircase in the old house creaking as she descended. Every step had a different creak, and at this point she knew them by heart, like notes on a scale.
Suddenly, a jolt coursed through Maddy’s body. Her hand gripped the banister tightly. Her vision rapidly became blurry – everything seemed to grow grey and foggy. She could see nothing concrete, and she felt like she was going to trip forward into an empty expanse, a grey void that would expand for ever, with her falling through it.
All at once, she felt heat. The worst kind of heat she could imagine. Blistering, searing, inescapable. Smoke appeared, with flames following. Maddy’s pulse raced as she realized it was a fire.
From the smoky darkness suddenly emerged a small boy in a striped shirt whom she had never seen before. His hands stretched towards Maddy as he attempted to escape the flames. The child’s eyes bulged terribly out of his pale skin as he began coughing. Coughing blood.
Maddy shrieked.
And just as suddenly found herself standing on the stairs in her uncle’s house, gasping for air, her fingernails making marks in the wood of the banister. There was no fire.
It must have been a vision. She sometimes had seemingly random, splinter-like visions of grim violence and destruction. Similar visions to this had been one of the signs that she might be part Angel.
But what had this been a vision of?
And who was the boy? She’d never seen him before. She hoped against hope that he was going to be OK. But she had no way to know who he was, where he was, anything. Just those seconds of her vision. For all she knew, the visions weren’t always even truly real, just tricks of her overactive half-human, half-Angel brain.
Step by step, she slowly took the final part of the staircase down to the kitchen on the ground floor. Kevin was there, dashing in for a moment with his apron from the diner still on.
“Hey, Mads! Have you seen my phone around here anywhere?” Kevin asked her.
“Did you leave it by the microwave?” Maddy suggested absently. That was where he always left it.
“Good thinking.” He turned to the microwave and lifted it off the counter. “Aha.”
“How’s the new waitress doing?” Maddy asked, seeking the sanctuary of a familiar topic.
“Oh, she’ll be fine,” Kevin said, playing with a loose thread on his apron. “It’s been getting pretty busy, you know. I might even bring on someone to help me with managing the kitchen.”
Maddy could only shake her head and smile. Yeah, right. She couldn’t imagine anyone manning the cooking besides her uncle. Yet . . . change was in the air.
“How is it out there today?” she said.
Kevin peered out of the slats of the front blinds. “Could be worse.”
They were talking, of course, about the paparazzi that had followed her from basically the first night she went out with Jacks. They were a constant part of her life now, but she was hoping they would leave her alone once she went to university. She mostly tried to avoid them, and when she couldn’t, she would smile and try to be polite. Maddy realized her uncle was studying her.
“Maddy, you’re pale,” Kevin said. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I just had a . . . feeling.”
Kevin led her by the arm to the kitchen table.
“Here, sit down.” He pulled a chair out for her, then poured her a glass of water.
“I know your decision was difficult,” Kevin said tentatively. He was always a little stiff with the father-daughter stuff. “You must be having a lot of feelings about leaving Angel City.”
“Well, it wasn’t that, actually. It was a feeling. Like one of my visions.”
A dark cloud passed across Kevin’s brow.
“I just don’t know what it means,” she said.
Far off in the distance, sirens could be faintly heard. Maddy sat up straight in her chair. The sirens began to grow louder and louder. She jumped up from her chair and threw open the front door just as a pair of ambulances and three Angel City Police Department cruisers roared past on the street. Their sirens rang in her ear as they disappeared at top speed.
They were all streaming downtown. Maddy stepped out on to the lawn and looked towards the tall buildings of downtown Angel City. The paparazzi began shouting questions at her, but she paid no attention. Far off, she could see a tendril of smoke rising. Her eyes popped open and she raced inside to her confused uncle.
“I need to borrow the car.”
Maddy followed the spire of smoke coming from downtown, past the tall buildings and into the rough area east, where her uncle had told her never to go. Chinese stores crammed with plastic gewgaws and streets crammed with pedestrians gave way to grimy alleys peppered with the homeless, who shuffled around under the hot sun. Skid Row. The dark side of Angel City’s glamour.
Soon she was able to follow the smoke and emergency vehicles to a building set on a cracked side street. She parked her uncle’s old station wagon and jumped out, but was quickly stopped by bright-yellow crime scene tape and a line of ACPD officers guarding the perimeter. Smoke continued to roil out of the building as the firemen on the ladder shot water into the dying flames from their hoses. Maddy could read the remains of the name on the scorched building: ANGEL CITY MISSION FOR THE HOMELESS. A shelter.
Firemen and paramedics were placing blankets on the shoulders of soot-covered women and children, their eyes rimmed red and faces pale as they staggered away from the building. Survivors.
A news van suddenly appeared at the scene. Maddy tried to cover her face so she wouldn’t be recognized. That was the last thing she needed.
Ducking away, Maddy approached a firefighter near the yellow tape who was gulping water from a sports bottle. He was sweat-drenched, dark ash smeared on his yellow fire suit.
“What happened?” Maddy asked him diffidently.
The fireman nodded towards the building. “Fire at the family shelter. It started over on the men’s side. The guys were able to get out. But the fire had spread to the side with the women and their kids. Two out of three exits on their side were locked. Don’t ask me w
hy. Not all of them could get out.”
His words sent a shiver along Maddy’s spine.
Two emergency workers emerged from the now-smouldering entrance with a stretcher. Maddy watched them in horror. On the stretcher was the body of someone small, covered with a black tarp. With nauseating dread pouring into her stomach, Maddy realized it must be a child. The tarp briefly pulled back as the two men shifted it in their arms. For a split second, Maddy saw an arm underneath the tarp.
She couldn’t be sure. But she thought she saw a striped shirt.
CHAPTER 3
Maddy placed Kevin’s car keys absent-mindedly on the counter as she walked into the house in a daze, her mind still back at the terrible scene downtown. She climbed the stairs and reached her room, sitting down on the corner of her bed as she tried to sort her confused and surging emotions.
She looked around the room – or, at least, at what was left of it. The room seemed almost strange to her now. Foreign. Bare walls, empty wardrobe. Ghostly outlines where posters and pictures once hung. The room felt naked, stripped of its identity. It was her room, but it wasn’t her room any more.
Maddy began shivering uncontrollably as she relived the vision she’d had on the staircase. It had to have been a premonition of the fire at the shelter. That boy emerging from the flames and smoke. His pale face and doomed hands reaching out to Maddy as his lungs blistered and burst from the inside. Flames licking up the striped shirt.
Maddy felt like she might throw up, and she began rushing to the bathroom before she controlled the nausea. Numbed, she slowly sat back down on her bed.
She could have saved that child. She could have prevented those people’s deaths. If she had only known how to focus on the frequency, as Jacks called it. They might not have had to die.
Her eyes drifted to the boxes and suitcase in the corner, the picture of her and Jacks sitting on top. Slowly, she walked over and picked up her suitcase. She hesitated only a moment before placing it on her bed. Opening both latches, she began unpacking it, putting clothes back in her drawers.
Maddy Montgomery wouldn’t be going to university.
In the space of just a few moments, Maddy had felt it deep in her bones.
She needed to become a Guardian.
“Maddy?”
The voice startled her.
Uncle Kevin stood in the doorway, concern on his face. “Are you all right? You left in such a rush.” He nodded to the open suitcase on the bed. “Are you still packing?”
“I – I’m unpacking,” Maddy said, her face turning slightly away from her uncle. She had a feeling he was going to be upset.
“I don’t understand,” Kevin said. “Why?”
Maddy turned towards him and sat back down on the bed.
“I – I can’t fully explain,” she said, her eyes on the floor. “But what I saw today. It was a fire downtown. I could have saved them. I had part of the vision, but I didn’t know what to do. If I had, I could have saved those people. That’s what’s inside of me, or at least a big part of me. And not having done it makes me feel like I’m somehow not complete.” She looked up at her uncle. “I know this may seem like a shock, but I think it’s my calling. To be a Guardian. I’d be making a huge mistake if I walked away from it.” She rushed on. “I know the Angel worship and the whole Protection for Pay set-up is . . . mercenary, somehow. I know how you feel about it and I agree. But just now I realized it doesn’t have to be that way for ever. I could have the opportunity to start changing things in the Angels, from within. And along the way, I could be helping people. Saving them from dying. Like I could have saved that boy today.”
An unreadable look came across Kevin’s face.
“Kevin, you know I’ve wanted your opinion this entire time, and you wouldn’t give it to me. Said I had to make my own decision. But I know you’ve thought university was the right choice for me the whole time. I’m so sorry if you’re disappointed in me, but I know now that this is what I have to do.” Maddy felt her chest grow incredibly tight. Why wouldn’t he say something?
“Well. . .” Kevin coughed. He hesitated, but his eyes glinted. A slight smile crossed his face. “Will you wait right here?”
After a few moments Kevin returned with a small cloth bag and a tattered-looking old leather journal. The bag held something small and heavy.
“Maddy, I’ve spent the last eighteen years thinking my sister made a mistake. I blamed her for it. I blamed your father. I blamed the Angels, too. It took me eighteen years to realize that it wasn’t a mistake. She was called to a great destiny. Her destiny was to have you. Sometimes we don’t understand why things happen, but I do believe, somehow, that there is” – he paused, searching for the right words – “a plan.”
He looked her directly in the eyes.
“‘The strength of a hero is not in her abilities. In her weapons. These things are important, but they are not the source of her strength. The source of her strength is in her belief in an idea – the idea that those who are strong, and those who are able, protect those who are not, and those who cannot protect themselves. The idea that the good, and the right, will triumph. She is willing to put herself in harm’s way – in mortal danger – to prove her belief in this idea.’”
Kevin opened the cloth bag he held. An Immortal Ring fell from the bag into his hand. A tingling passed over Maddy’s body.
“‘That it is the duty of those who have within themselves the power, and the gift, to help others.’” Kevin looked at the ring in his palm. “I didn’t say that. Your father did. In a speech to the Council a week before he was killed.”
Kevin handed her the ring. Her father’s ring.
The Divine Ring looked enormous in her small, delicate hands. Like Jacks’s, it sparkled just as magnificently, throwing pools of amber light against her palm.
“He wanted you to have this when the time was right. He had hoped it would guide you on your way. I swore I would never give it to you, but something kept me holding on to it. I didn’t know at the time, but I think I know now.”
Tears were forming in Maddy’s eyes. “Oh, Kevin. . .”
Now he handed her the journal. Its dark and worn leather wrapped around yellowed, battered pages, some poking out unevenly. The whole thing was held together by a thick blue rubber band. Maddy’s breath caught in her throat as she slowly slid the rubber band up the edge of the smoothed and worn leather. Carefully, she opened the journal and saw an inscription on the first page:
Jacob Godright – Guardian Training Notes
She slowly flipped through the pages: complex formulas, long diary entries, diagrams . . . they were all from her father. His handwriting, so distinctive – she thought she recognized the shape of her own R’s in his – filled each page. She felt overwhelmed with emotion holding this book, which her father had spent years filling with his knowledge, in her hand.
“Everything your father ever learned on his way to becoming one of the most skilled Guardians in his day was kept in that book. He told me himself. It only makes sense that you should have it now.”
As Maddy moved through the pages, something fell out from between the paper, slowly floating to the floor. Reaching down, Maddy picked it up. It was a wallet-sized photo of her mother. On the back was simply written: “With love, for ever, Regina.”
Maddy swiped a few tears from her eyes and looked up at her uncle.
“Thank you. For everything,” she said, leaning forward and giving him a warm hug. She heard a sniffle. Her uncle was looking away. She was pretty sure he might be crying a little bit.
“Oh, I was just cutting some onions before I came up here. Must be one of those delayed-reaction things.” He squeezed Maddy on the shoulder. “Now I should get back to the kitchen before things go too haywire.”
Maddy nodded, smiling, and watched Kevin leave the room. Her eyes once again turned down to her
father’s Divine Ring in her hand. It glowed as she touched her fingers to it. She could sense its energy.
She was going to become an Angel. A Guardian Angel.
She could not wait to tell Jacks.
CHAPTER 4
The world around Jacks seemed to swim, rippling with his every breath. A blue tint filtered through the room. The light turned the Angel doctor, a specially trained Immortal, indigo in his white lab coat outside the hyperbaric immersion chamber. The doctor examined numbers on his hand-held instrument reader, dictating notes to his medical assistant. Their faces twisted and stretched like in a funhouse mirror. Even if he hadn’t been listening to his favourite playlist piped in through his headphones, Jacks wouldn’t have been able to hear them – he was fully submerged in the advanced therapeutic solution, and the glass of the chamber was too thick. Jacks’s muscular limbs drifted as he floated suspended in the chamber, breathing through a mask, his sole functioning wing outstretched behind him, a series of cables and hoses connected to his body. They trailed up to the top of the tank to send readings and numbers to the team of technicians outside.
If only the blue light had come from Jacks’s famous wings and not the series of screens along the back wall of the darkened room. But ever since the accident, his wings had lost their unique blue iridescence.
At his stepfather’s insistence, Jacks had been submitting himself three times a week to this immersion therapy, by far the most advanced and expensive of its kind, hoping to speed the recovery of his wings, one of which had been reattached in the wake of the vicious demon attack he’d survived. And three times a week, he left disappointed. The doctors always told him to be patient, that “next time we’ll see some improvement”. But there never was any.
He still couldn’t fly. And that’s all that mattered.
Inside the chamber, two incredibly complex robotic machines operated underwater where Jacks’s wings met the back of his shoulders, the outline of his Immortal Marks visible and glowing. The finely tuned machines – advanced nerve reconnectors – knit tissue and cells back together inside the solution that had been specially engineered just for Jacks. The sensation wasn’t unpleasant. It sometimes tickled Jacks a bit, but it wasn’t too bad.