He let go of me, letting me fall, gently, to the ground.
“I will. And if you think I’m giving up on that,” he said, brushing the hair out of my face, “you’re crazy.”
“That’s no good-bye,” I whispered, pushing down the lump welling in my throat.
“Nope. It’s a promise.”
Asher gave me one last look, a millennia of history contained within that one gaze. “See you on the other side,” he said.
In a rustle of black feathers, he moved to the window.
Then he was gone. And everything went still. The bottom of my life fell out from beneath me. Just like that.
On shaky legs, I walked to the window and leaned my hands against the weathered sill. The night unfolded before me, a dark expanse of stars.
What have I done?
The floor creaked, and soon Cassie had walked up beside me.
“You okay, babe?” she said softly, putting a reassuring hand on my back.
“No,” I said, wiping away a tear. “But I will be.” I let my head fall onto her shoulder, and she wrapped her arms around me.
“I think what you’re doing is incredibly brave,” she said.
“That’s not why I’m doing it.”
“I know.” She pulled away and looked at me, her green eyes sparkling. “You’re doing it because it’s right. And you won’t have to go through it alone. I know your secret now, and nothing could make me leave your side.”
“Not even Dan?” I asked hopefully.
“Not even Dan. Come on, he’s not as important as my best friend!”
“You know, you really need to start making sure I’m not in the room before you talk about me,” Dan said, coming up behind her. “I always hear you.”
“You need to stop sneaking up on us then,” Cassie replied blithely, waving him off.
“You guys have to get the bickering under control,” Ian cut in, clapping a hand on Dan’s back as he approached. “If we’re going to work as a team now.” His brown eyes found mine, searching. Ian, always comforting, always a friend, even when neither of us deserved it. “And Skye, Cassie’s right. We’re here for you. We’re going to help you, whatever you need. We’re in this together.”
For a moment, I couldn’t find the words to say what I was feeling. I looked around at my friends, my family, the only people I knew I could always count on. They were so loyal, dependable. As long as we were all together, I would never be alone. I’d questioned it once, but I knew I would never have to question it again.
“You guys are the best,” I said, standing up. “I can’t believe how far we’ve come since the night of my birthday. It seems like yesterday, but I feel like a different person now.”
“You kind of are,” said Cassie.
“But we still love you.” Dan smirked. “Weird silver wings and all.”
“Come on, Skye,” Ian said. “Pack up. Let’s go home.”
I looked around at my friends and nodded.
“I’m ready,” I said.
“For whatever’s coming,” said Dan.
“For the road ahead,” Ian added.
“For a nap!” Cassie laughed.
“For all those things,” I said. “And whatever else we’re about to face.”
3
Raven’s fork scraped against her plate.
I flinched involuntarily, and noticed I wasn’t the only one. Everyone around the table—Cassie, Dan, Ian, and Aunt Jo—was looking at her.
“Sor-ry,” she snapped.
“It’s okay,” I said next to her, trying to convey both reassurance and thankfulness in my voice. She just glared at me. I’d been really nice to her since learning she had saved my life, but the nicer I was, the more it seemed to get on her nerves. Raven may have joined our group, but I had a feeling it was going to take a while before it really sank in. For all of us.
We’d returned from the camping trip on Friday. Now it was Sunday. It had better sink in soon, I thought, or one of us might not make it to Monday.
“Go ahead, continue talking,” she said. “By all means, don’t stop on my account.”
I cleared my throat.
“Thank you, guys, for coming over for dinner tonight. You’ve stuck by me throughout this whole journey, and I can’t tell you how much it means to me. Because it’s only going to get harder from here, and I just want to make sure you know that. If you want to leave, I understand. I’m not going to force anyone to help me. This is a battle I have to fight myself.” I paused, and looked around the table hopefully. “Not that I wouldn’t really, really love some company.”
I held my breath. No one moved.
“Can you pass the mashed potatoes?” Dan whispered to Cassie. She obliged.
“No one?” I asked.
“Oh, I thought you were being rhetorical,” Cassie said. “Are you insane? Of course we’re not leaving.”
“Seriously,” said Ian. “If I was going to bolt, it would have been in the woods with the vengeful angels staring us down.”
“They’re only going to get more vengeful,” I pointed out.
“But we can prepare for that, right?” said Dan.
“And I’m pretty sure I’m obligated by law to help you,” Aunt Jo grinned.
“There’s no angel clause in those adoption papers, though,” I said.
“A legal oversight.”
“She’s not joking,” Raven said suddenly, putting down her fork and looking up. “You people are always joking. This is serious, and it’s going to get worse. Much worse. Those vengeful angels you’re laughing about won’t have any qualms about hunting you down and killing you in the night.”
Dan gulped as Raven turned to look at me. “I know you think they’re your friends, Skye. Ardith and Gideon, and even Asher. But they’re not. You’re just a prize to them. Both sides were fighting over you, vying for control of your oh-so-special custom blend of powers. You’ve angered the Order by siding with the Rebellion, and now you’ve betrayed the Rebels, too. They’re going to use force if necessary. Capture you, control you—or kill you, whichever serves to benefit them the most. They have a lot to gain from using you, but if they can’t, you’re safer dead—where they know you can’t harm them—than alive.”
“Well, that will only give me nightmares for about a million years,” Cassie muttered under her breath.
“You don’t mince words, Raven, do you?” I said. “But thanks. I need honesty right now.” I looked around the group. “There can’t be any secrets. No sugarcoating. It’s for our own safety.”
Raven’s eyes bored into mine. “I’m with you. I’ll be with you, to the end. Let’s take this as far as it will go.”
The look in her eyes told me her reasons were complicated. I shuddered as I pictured Devin, standing over her with his sword dripping blood, her mangled wings lying on the ground beside her. She had saved my life to spare him the pain of losing me, but when he’d deliberately defied the Order, her only option was to obey their commands and kill him. Her plan had been to get to him first, but instead, he’d struck the first blow. The Rebellion had offered her a place alongside me and Asher, but when I’d healed her, something shifted. We both had grown beautiful, silver wings. Wings not of the Order—and not of the Rebellion, either. Wings that only made it clearer I belonged to neither side. And that Raven and I were bonded together, a strange, celestial magic flowing between us. We had to join forces, whether we wanted to or not.
“Just stop being so nice to me,” she muttered.
And now, Devin was a Rebel, free to choose what he wanted, love who he wanted. She hadn’t heard from him since.
I didn’t blame Raven for having mixed feelings about all this. I understood it all too well.
Aunt Jo drained her iced tea.
“First of all,” she said. “There are some things you need to know up front. If you’re going to try to succeed where your parents failed, you should know everything about what they were trying to do.” The room fell silent, and Au
nt Jo straightened. “As angels who had been cast out, humans living on earth, they had some, let’s say, unresolved feelings of anger and resentment toward the Order and the Rebellion. They had lived, one as a Rebel, and one as a Gifted, and they decided that neither side was right. So they were forming a splinter group. Their goal was to preserve the balance of the universe.”
“Whoa,” I said. “So they were big-picture people, huh?”
Aunt Jo looked stern. “I don’t want to send you off into this with unrealistic expectations, Skye. There’s a reason they failed. Their mission was massive.”
We all chewed thoughtfully for a bit, in silence, as we processed this.
“So what was their plan?” Ian asked.
“Plan?”
“Yeah,” I said, “how were they doing this?”
Aunt Jo sighed. “It didn’t work. Why would you want to do the same thing?”
“Well, we need a jumping-off point,” I said. “If we know what didn’t work, maybe it will help us figure out what will.”
Aunt Jo looked down at her plate and stabbed a slab of meatloaf with her fork. Cassie and I exchanged looks. Why was she being so evasive? What doesn’t she want to tell us? I wondered.
“Does anyone want more iced tea?” Aunt Jo said suddenly. She didn’t wait for an answer before going to the kitchen.
“That was weird,” I said. “She is definitely hiding something.”
“Maybe something terrible happened.” Cassie’s eyes were growing wide, the way they did when some grand idea had captured her imagination. “And that’s why the mission failed. Like, her own powers let everyone down, and it’s her fault they didn’t succeed. Or she and your mom got into a huge fight! Or—ooh!—a lost love, or—”
“Aliens!” Dan cried. Cassie shot him a look. “What?” he said. “Six months ago you would have given me the same look if I’d said fallen angels.”
The door swung open and Aunt Jo returned with the iced tea pitcher. We all went silent. She arched an eyebrow.
“Done speculating?”
“What?” Cassie asked innocently. I kicked her under the table.
Aunt Jo poured herself some iced tea and took a sip.
“Okay,” she said. “Here’s what happened. Skye’s mom still found herself having visions, even after she was cast to earth. In these sudden bursts of Sight, she was able to pick out faces, and later, names. It turned out she was seeing Rogues—children of Rebels and humans—who showed extraordinarily angelic powers and gifts. The thing about Rogues is that they usually don’t know what they are or what they’re capable of. Only that they’re a little bit different, that they don’t quite belong, and that sometimes, strange things happen when they’re around. What tied these specific Rogues—the ones she was seeing—together was that they all knew. And they were all dealing with it. Some in good ways, some in bad.”
She paused to take another sip of tea. It looked like she was only getting more nervous. Ian glanced at me, but when I caught his eye he looked away.
“Who did she see, Aunt Jo?” I asked carefully.
“She saw three Rogues. One,” she said with a shaky breath, “was a man named Aaron Ward. The second was a man named James Harrison.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ian’s gaze flick back to me, but I was too wrapped up in my own thoughts to look at him this time.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Was the third . . . ?”
She glanced up from her plate for the first time and nodded. “It was me.”
Cassie gasped, her eyes growing wide again. “You’re a Rogue?”
“I guess I didn’t have a chance to tell you that part,” I said.
“Look,” Aunt Jo said. “In the visions, your mom saw the three of us engaged in some powerful ritual that we could use to call all the Rogues to our side. We would be able to call them to their true angelic selves and—like us—they would finally know who and what they were. The idea was that with strength in numbers, we could overtake the Order and the Rebellion and create a third group that would forever keep the peace—hold the two sides at bay, and keep them from ever gaining power over the other. The irony of course is that control of you, Skye, would give one side ultimate power, for all time. After you were born, we worked harder than ever to make our powers strong enough to create that third group.”
I swallowed hard. Again, it seemed to come down to me.
“What happened?” I asked. “Why didn’t it work?”
“I don’t know. At first, we were frustrated. The three of us were together, and we were strong. We should have been able to do it, and we didn’t know why it wasn’t working. That’s when Mer saw the vision of the fourth.”
“The fourth?”
“In the days right before your parents were killed, she began to have a new vision. One in which there was a fourth member of our group. But the fourth was a mystery, surrounded by shadows. Your mom couldn’t tell who she was seeing—gender, age, powers, nothing. Mer died before she could ever find out who would complete our circle.”
“What happened after my parents died?” I asked. “Did you just give up?”
Aunt Jo put her hand on my arm. “Oh, hon,” she said. “After they died, there was no point. You came to live with me, and my whole life changed so suddenly. We had no way of finding out who the fourth could be. Without Mer’s visions to guide us, I’m afraid to say we were a bit lost. We disagreed on how to proceed, of course. Aaron wanted to keep going. He thought there was surely a way. James was a new father too, but his wife didn’t know his true lineage, and the secrets he was keeping from her were beginning to tear them apart. I was caught in the middle. All I knew was that I had to raise you right, as I promised your parents I would. And I had to hide you from the truth about yourself and your family. One morning, we woke up to find James gone. Aaron begged me to reconsider, but I had made up my mind. We weren’t going to continue on our mission. And so he packed his bags and left, too.” Aunt Jo’s voice broke suddenly, and I reached out to squeeze her hand.
“Oh my god,” said Cassie. “He was your boyfriend, wasn’t he?”
“Cassie! That is so not the point.”
“No,” Aunt Jo said. “It’s true. I’ve never loved anyone like I loved Aaron. I doubt I ever will. He’s been impossible to replace, even all these years later. The only one who’s ever truly understood.” It made sense. Aunt Jo had been alone for as long as I could remember. I always figured she was just too independent to settle down. She was always out on some trip to the back country with her outdoor adventure company, fending off bears and sucking the venom out of rattlesnake bites. She could kill a massive spider with her bare hands and bake a mean batch of cookies to boot. I couldn’t imagine her actually needing somebody.
“He’s the one in the picture,” I realized. “The photo I found in the shoebox.”
Aunt Jo nodded. Neither of us mentioned the other thing in the shoebox—the diamond ring—or the dress that she’d given me to wear to prom, the one she said had at one point been intended to be a wedding dress. I shook my head in wonder at Cassie. She was right. It was lost love, all these years. I always laughed at Cassie’s ability to jump to the most tragically romantic conclusion, without fail. But you kind of had to hand it to her, the girl knew her stuff.
“So that’s what we have to do,” I said. “We have to reunite the three of you. And we have to find the fourth.”
“Skye, how—”
“I’ll use my visions. I’ll find a way.” I was my mother’s daughter, with my mother’s blood. She was dead, and now it was up to me. Maybe I was stronger. Maybe I’d find something she couldn’t.
“I don’t know. . . .” Aunt Jo’s eyebrows knitted together. “There has to be some other way.” Without looking at me, she began clearing up the plates and silverware.
“What way?” I asked, standing up and helping her. “I can’t think of any other way. And I don’t have time to. It has to be this. The Order and the Rebellion aren’t goin
g to waste any time now that I’ve gone off on my own. If they’re not hunting me already, they’re going to start soon.” I shuddered as I remembered the flashes of white feather I’d catch glimpses of between the trees. I would never get used to the chilling sight, but I had a feeling my days of being stalked by angels weren’t nearly over.
Aunt Jo brought a stack of plates into the kitchen, and I followed her.
“Is it because of Aaron? Don’t you want to see him again?”
“That was another life, Skye,” she said, setting the plates just a bit too heavily on the counter and turning to me. “Another time. I was a different person then.” She opened the dishwasher and began to load each fork, spoon, and knife, one by one. “I don’t want to be reminded of it.”
I took the rest of the silverware and shoved it into the dishwasher all at once.
“Skye!”
“What is wrong with you? Since when are you afraid of anything?” I knew my eyes were flashing silver in frustration.
“You couldn’t understand.”
“Try me,” I said through gritted teeth.
She crossed her arms and turned to face me. I had never seen this side of her before.
Aunt Jo smoothed a hand over her graying blond ponytail. Then she walked to the refrigerator and pulled a bottle of bourbon down from the cabinet above it. Without saying a word, she took a tumbler from a different cabinet and poured herself a generous glass. She downed it in one gulp.
When she turned around, there was fire in her eyes. It looked so familiar, I flinched. She reminded me of Asher—when he was serious, determined, on a mission to protect me. When he let his intensity show instead of masking it behind jokes. It’s the Rebel blood in her, I realized.
“When I was your age,” she said, as if she was reciting a speech she’d practiced in her head for a long time, “I was mad at the world. I knew that I was different, and I knew why. I never knew my father, and my mother didn’t know what to do with a problem kid like me. I felt like there was no real place for me. I distrusted a lot of people—and strongly distrusted the rest. I picked a lot of fights. Did some things I would kill you for doing.” She narrowed her eyes at me.