Blest Page 10

  It took all of her willpower not to mouth Jim’s name. She wondered if anyone else knew that he was such a graffiti artist. Probably not.

  “Cool,” Ben added, stretching his thick ox’s neck to get a better look.

  “It’s stupid,” Shane snapped. “Who would ever waste their time on something like that? It doesn’t even mean anything.”

  Maybe not to you, Claire thought. She kept stealing glances at the picture for the rest of lunch. Gunner asked if she wanted to try flying home with him after school, even though Maria and Ben warned him that the Tribunal could punish them for revealing themselves to humans, but she said she still wasn’t confident enough with her flying. Really, though, she couldn’t even focus on the conversation. Her eyes kept drifting to the graffiti, Jim’s love note to her.

  “They banished us from our place in Glisten, just because we know humans aren’t capable of having free will,” Shane was saying. Not this again, Claire thought. “Have you turned on the TV lately? Gone on the Internet? It’s obvious allowing humans to do whatever they want turns them into animals.”

  Gunner pounded the table. He always loved these speeches. “Humans need demons to control them,” Shane went on. “Their free will is destroying the Field. First, we have to find the Portal so we can get back the powers the angels stole from us—all the original demon powers. Durability. Invisibility. The ability to manipulate matter!”

  Claire didn’t know about the whole free will theory. She herself didn’t have free will when it came to being with Jim. If being a demon meant letting the other demons decide what and who you liked, how did the demons have free will?

  When the bell rang and everyone started toward their afternoon classes, Claire told Gunner that she had to go back to her locker. She turned into the hallway, then waited for most of the kids to trickle out of the cafeteria before running out into the parking lot. The gleaming graffiti was drawing her in like a magnet. She stopped right in front of the wall, staring up at the water tower, at the two birds.

  “Claire!” Jim’s voice was a strained whisper.

  She looked left and right, and finally directly up. Jim grinned from the roof, waving down at her. “I thought this might get your attention. Come on up, you can only see this wall from the cafeteria and it looks like everyone’s gone.”

  Claire looked over her shoulder before bolting up to the roof. She had flown a few times with Gunner, but the wings still felt a little unwieldy behind her. Jim backed out of sight, moving away from the ledge, and she landed next to him. Almost immediately, their bodies were intertwined, kissing wildly. Claire clung tight to Jim, burying her face in his flannel shirt, breathing in the warm, familiar scent of him. She blinked away the tears that pricked at the corners of her eyes. She couldn’t ruin the moment by crying. Not when Jim had created something so beautiful.

  “How did you manage to make that thing so fast?” she finally asked.

  Jim winked. “The early bird gets the chance to graffiti the wall.”

  “And you knew I was going to come out?”

  “How could you resist?” His blue eyes twinkled.

  Claire laughed. “I think most couples have beaches and cliffs and forests as their romantic getaway. We have a rusted metal building.”

  Jim kissed her on the forehead. “That’s what makes us special.”

  Claire huddled against him, tugging at the corners of his shirt and listening to his heart pound. “I like the birds. I like how their colors blend together.”

  “That’s one of my favorite things about colors,” Jim murmured. “The more you combine them, the deeper and richer they are, the more complex. I almost wonder if that’s happening with our wings.”

  Claire looked up at him. “What do you mean?”

  Jim nodded. “The white feather you have. I have a red one.”

  She gasped. “You do?”

  He gently released her and turned, spreading his wings to their full extent, almost three feet across in either direction. Claire noticed a flash of crimson on the left wing. It looked like it was in the exact same place as her white feather. So far, none of the other demons had commented on it. She had a feeling that Shane had noticed, but for some reason he hadn’t said anything.

  “What do you think it means?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” Jim turned back around, furling his wings. “All I know is that it makes me feel more connected to you, even when we have to run away from each other in the hall the cafeteria. None of the angels know what it means—they’ve never seen it before. I think it has to do with our promise, that day. You remember?”

  Claire nodded. “We swore on blood,” she whispered. “That we would stick together, no matter what.”

  “So I don’t want you to ever feel alone, or that I’m not thinking of you,” Jim said urgently, lifting her chin with his thumb. “That feather means that I’m always with you. We’re in this together, Claire.”

  For a second, they stood in silence, looking out across the fields and the parking lot, focusing their eyes on the real Pearlton water tower in the distance. Then, the bell rang.

  “Lab!” she said suddenly. “We’re supposed to be at Lab by now!”

  Jim kissed her one last time. “Oops. Here, I’ll go through the lobby and you go through the cafeteria.”

  Claire nodded and hopped off the roof, sailing to a patch of brown grass nestled between two sharp corners of the gym. She sprinted past the tennis courts and pivoted as she came to the front steps of Pearlton High School, leading to the lobby and taking the stairs two at a time.

  Luckily, no one was in the hallways. She already heard classes starting and teachers droning against closed doors. She charged down the stairs leading to the basement level and sprinted across the hall, her backpack heaving against her shoulders. Her heart practically stopped when she barreled through the doorway. Everyone else was already at the lab tables, paired off in partners. The only table with one person at it was Jim, who looked equally breathless.

  Mr. Webb clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “Perfect! Let’s mix you two together again, eh?” He waggled his eyebrows. “We’ll be looking at sparrow skeletons today. Maybe you can figure out why different wings make birds act different.”

  For a moment, Claire stood in the doorway like she had turned to stone. She could feel Shane and Maria watching her. Jim kept his head down. It took all the effort Claire could muster to crack her face into a sneer as she approached him. “I can’t believe I got partnered with him,” she muttered to Shane.

  “That’s freaking awful,” Shane agreed. “We shouldn’t have to be within a ten-foot radius of them.” Maria stayed quiet, her eyes darting from Claire to Jim and back again.

  Mr. Webb burst out of the supply closet with trays full of rattling bones. “Okay, class! We’re going to sketch the wings here and see how they’re connected to the bird’s spine.”

  “Some things with wings don’t have spines,” Shane said behind them.

  Jim gritted his teeth, but he didn’t make a sound. Just one lab period, Claire told herself, fighting the urge to reach out and take Jim’s hand. She was a demon, not an angel, and right now she had to play the part.

  She glanced at Mr. Webb and wondered what he was really thinking. What was his story? How had he come to be the resident wing remover or whatever? Was he really human, or had he come from Glisten or Slag long ago?

  The hour-long lab was painful. Claire’s face hurt from trying to act disgusted whenever Jim approached her. She kept reminding herself that he knew she was putting on an act, but faking it for so long was still hard. Every time Jim came close, it was like a flurry of little arrows pierced her skin, making her ache all over.

  Through her lab goggles, she could occasionally catch his eyes, just briefly. She itched to pass him a note, to reassure him that it was all an act, but she could hear Shane a
nd Maria whispering behind her. Mr. Webb told them to pick apart the wings from the vertebrae. Claire moved her gloved hand to the sparrow’s left wing, but she was shaking. In fact, she shook so hard that she pushed the tray off the counter and sent it flying onto the floor.

  “Crap!” she blurted, and bent down to pick up the little pieces of bones scattered across the tiles. Jim dropped to his knees to help. Their hands brushed as they both tried to pick up the tray. She jumped back to her feet, feeling like her heart was going to explode. Behind them, Shane and Maria had stopped what they were doing to look at her.

  “He’s really freaking clumsy,” Claire managed. That seemed to satisfy Shane, who snorted his agreement. Maria lingered, watching her for a moment before returning to work. Jim quietly arranged the sparrow’s bones again and placed them back on the tray. He rose from the floor, catching her eyes. She let out a long breath. How long could they keep this up?

  12

  Jim never thought he would be grateful for the chance to exercise until he was too tired to think, but the school day had done it for him. When Sydney had texted him saying to come to her house, that they would have to start training even harder than before, he hadn’t even asked why.

  In Sydney’s driveway, there was a two-story building she called a “garage.” The first floor housed her mom’s SUVs, but the second floor had a bedroom, an office, and a gym. There were no stairs to the second floor. Instead, there was simply a door that opened out into the air. When she’d pulled her car into the driveway, Sydney leapt up and flew to the door, opening it and flying inside in a single fluid motion. Jim and the others quickly followed. Inside the room, there were four pull-up bars.

  “Okay. Do as many pull-ups as humanly possible,” Sydney instructed.

  “Don’t you mean as angelically possible?” Jim ventured.

  Sydney had laughed, but then her face turned to stone and she marched up to him. “First, do as many as humanly possible. Take a break for five minutes. Then, do as many as angelically possible.”

  He thought she was joking, but after his fourth set of pull-ups, he realized Sydney wasn’t going to cut them any slack. When Leo said he was “too robust” for that many pull-ups, Sydney asked if “robust” was a new word for “weak.” When Nora lay down on one of the rubber mats and said she wouldn’t get up, Sydney said that she had ten seconds before “I start plucking out your feathers, one by one.”

  The always-hyperactive Miles seemed to be the only one who enjoyed the workout. “This is what makes you a good flier, man,” he explained to Jim a half-hour into their pull-ups. “You wanna be a crappy flier, you don’t work out. But these are muscles your body has, like, never used this way before. So you gotta make them big and bigger and biggest.”

  Jim was just grateful for the chance to distract himself from his horrible experience with Claire in Lab. He knew that she had just been pretending to hate him. But, really, was insulting him every five minutes necessary? Couldn’t she have just ignored him instead? He had gotten up at dawn to paint a picture that he wanted her to see. They had such an amazing connection on the roof. And then in Lab, she had acted like any other Pearlton High School bully. It was harder than he thought it would be to keep reminding himself that she was just doing what she had to do.

  The repetitive, up-down motion of the pull-ups slowly burned his anxieties away. His mind went quiet as he listened to Miles’s steady breathing on his right and Leo’s panting on his left. He kept his eyes on the orange sunset blushing through the window, burning over the pine trees that sprouted around the lake. All the new words he had learned over the past week tumbled and rolled in his mind. The Tribunal, the Field, the Portals. Guardians, the angels who fought the demons on the Field.

  He didn’t even realize the training was over until Sydney came up next to him, grinning. “Hey, iron man. The day’s over. Good work, though.”

  He dropped from the bar and shook his arms. His muscles burned from his shoulders all the way up through the back of his arms, but in a good way. He unfurled his wings slightly. An ache shot through him and he winced.

  “Short-term pain for long-term gain, right?” she asked.

  He nodded and looked around the gym. Free weights were piled in a corner and there were a few machines with different levers and pulleys. “If you didn’t know what these things were, you’d think they were some kind of torture devices,” he said.

  “Some people would say that that’s not far off,” Sydney said. “Luckily, you’re not one of them.”

  He wiped the sweat from his face with the bottom of his shirt and looked around. Only Sydney and he were left in the gym. “Where’s everyone else?”

  “Oh, they’ve been back in the house for like ten minutes. We didn’t want to disturb you, you had a warrior face on.”

  “Worrier face, maybe,” he replied.

  “You’d be stupid not to be worried,” Sydney said quietly as they drifted down to the ground floor, letting their wings catch the air like parachutes.

  “What do you mean?” he asked, catching up to her as she slipped out under the garage door and hopped up the steps leading to the house.

  “There’s a good chance that a powerful demon is coming to Pearlton,” Sydney said flatly. “That’s enough of a reason to worry. And this one might be a Planewalker, too.”

  He followed her down a long, narrow hallway decorated with big tapestries of medieval battles. Jim’s eyes coasted over them, taking in the yellows and oranges and whites that seemed to dominate the pictures. Each one had armies with white wings pitted against armies with red wings. He wondered if they were all real battles that had taken place between angels and demons. There was so much he didn’t know.

  The hall opened up into a broad living room with two couches, a few plush chairs, and a fire crackling quietly in a stone hearth on the other side of the room. On either side of the fireplace were windows that looked out onto the lake. Nora and Miles sat on one of the couches, tapping into their phones. Leo had sprawled out across the other couch, one arm hanging off it like he was a sailor lost on a raft at sea. His eyes were closed and his mouth was open. Every few seconds, a snore gurgled from deep within his throat.

  “Can we get off our phones and try to interact like a real Feather?” Sydney demanded, slapping her hand on the doorway.

  Leo startled awake. He tried to turn his head from the couch to look at Sydney, but instead rolled off and hit the wooden floor like a rock.

  “You woke sleeping beauty,” Nora said, putting her phone into her pocket. “Sorry, Miles and I are trying to figure out how these tornadoes are related to the Planewalker. We’re tracking weather reports across the country.”

  Miles peered up from his phone, surprised. “We are? I guess I should stop playing Minecraft then.” He looked at Sydney, grinning. “What’s the plan, chief?”

  “Just . . . I don’t know. Gossip, or something. Be social.” Sydney backed out of the hall. “I’ll be right back,” she said, her voice echoing.

  “She says be social and then retreats to her room,” Nora said. “Typical.”

  Jim settled onto the couch Leo had rolled from. Leo still looked groggy as he hauled himself back up. “She’s right, though. Sometimes I feel like we don’t talk enough in school. I mean, we talk, but only about serious stuff.”

  “Totally,” Miles leaned forward. “I mean, we can’t even talk in class. Who invented that rule, anyway? They might as well make it illegal to have friends.”

  “Jim, who are you bringing to the Homecoming Dance?” Nora asked brightly, folding her hands in her lap.

  “W-what?” Jim croaked.

  “Forgive her, we call her Nosy Nora in my family,” Miles said, “always with the questions and the blah blah blah’s and who-gives-a—”

  “It’s a perfectly valid question,” Nora interrupted. “I saw Jim buying a rose yesterday.”

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sp; Jim paled. “Um . . .”

  “Oh, man, Jim, you got a girl?” Leo asked eagerly.

  “Leo!” Nora said. “No one ‘gets’ a girl. We do not come out of vending machines.”

  “I was just asking who she was,” Leo replied.

  “Then ask that.”

  “Jim,” Leo said, rolling his eyes. “Who’s the gir—who’s the lucky lady?”

  Nora nodded approvingly. “You’ve got to forgive him, Jim. I’ve been trying to train the bro out of him for at least a year, but with very little to show for it.”

  “I don’t have a girlfriend or anything,” Jim said quickly. “I . . . um . . . I didn’t get any roses myself, if that’s any sign of how things went.” That much was true. Really, why didn’t Claire send him a rose?

  “Bummer,” Leo said.

  “Well, what’s the quote?” Miles said. “Better to have bought a rose for two dollars and funded the school dance than . . . never have spent the two dollars in the first place.”

  They all laughed and some of the awkwardness in the room dissipated. Jim still felt strange hanging out with people who had tried so hard, for so long, to make him feel alone. He could remember when Leo had slapped his books out of his hands in the hallway, or when Miles had made fun of every question he asked in Algebra last year. But now everything was different. He knew they felt bad about it, that they were trying to start over with him.

  He stared into the fire as the other three talked about the Homecoming Dance. He wondered where Claire was, and if she was thinking of him. He felt too nervous to even text her. What if Gunner picked up the phone? Or Shane? What if Sydney saw a text come in from Claire? He sighed. A relationship shouldn’t have to be like a spy movie.