This time someone else is with me in the blackness, another person’s breathing shuddering in and out somewhere behind me.
I still can’t see anything, can’t determine where I am, even though this is like the umpteenth time I’ve had the vision. It’s dark, as always. I am trying to keep quiet, trying not to move—not to breathe, even—so I can’t exactly explore my surroundings. The floor is slanted down. Carpeted. There’s the faint scent of sawdust in the air, new paint, and this: the hint of some distinctly masculine smell, like deodorant or aftershave, and now the breathing. Close, I think. If I turned and reached out, I could touch him.
There are footsteps above us: heavy and echoing, like people descending a set of wooden stairs. My body tenses. We’ll be found. Somehow I know this. I’ve seen it a hundred times in my visions. I’m seeing it right now. I want to get it over with, want to call the glory, but I don’t, on the off chance that it won’t happen this time. I still have hope.
There’s a noise from behind me, strange and high-pitched, like maybe a cat yowl or a birdcall. I turn toward the sound.
There’s a moment of silence.
Then comes a burst of light, blinding me. I flinch away from it.
“Clara, get down!” yells a voice, and in that wild, scuffling moment I instantly know who’s with me—I’d recognize his voice anywhere—and I find myself vaulting forward, upward, because some part of me knows that now I have to run.
I wake to a ray of sunshine on my face. It takes me a second to place where I am: dorm room, Roble Hall. Light pouring through the window. The bells of Memorial Church in the distance. The smell of laundry detergent and pencil shavings. I’ve been at Stanford for more than a week now, and this room still doesn’t feel like home.
My sheets are tangled up in my legs. I must have really been trying to run. I lie there for a minute taking deep breaths from the abdomen, trying to calm my racing heart.
Christian’s there. In the vision. With me.
Of course Christian’s there, I think, still peeved with him. He’s been in every other vision I’ve had, so why stop now?
But there’s some kind of comfort in that.
I sit up and glance over at Wan Chen, who’s asleep in the bed on the other side of the room, snoring in little puffs. I free myself from the sheets and pull on some jeans and a hoodie, fight my hair into a ponytail, trying to keep quiet so I don’t wake her.
When I get outside there’s a large bird sitting on a lamppost near the dorm, a dark shape against the dawn-gray sky. It swivels to look at me. I stop.
I’ve always had a complicated relationship with birds. Even before I knew I was an angel-blood, I understood that there was something off about the way birds went quiet whenever I passed by, the way they followed me and sometimes, if I was oh-so-lucky, dive-bombed me, not in an unfriendly way, really, but in an I-want-to-see-you-closer sort of way. One of the hazards of having wings and feathers yourself, I suppose, even if they’re hidden most of the time: you attract the attention of other creatures with wings.
One time when I was having a picnic in the woods with Tucker, we looked up and our table was surrounded by birds—not just the common camp-robber jays that try to get the food you’re eating, but larks, swallows, wrens, even some kind of nuthatch Tucker said was extremely rare, all hanging out in the trees around our table.
“You’re like a Disney cartoon, Carrots,” Tucker teased me. “You should get them to make you a dress or something.”
But this bird feels different, somehow. It’s a crow, I think: jet-black, with a sharp, slightly hooked beak, perched on top of the post like a scene straight from Edgar Allan Poe. Watching me. Silent. Thoughtful. Deliberate.
Billy said once that Black Wings could turn into birds. That’s the only way they can fly; otherwise their sorrow weighs them down. So is this bird an ordinary crow?
I squint up at it. It cocks its head at me and stares right back with unblinking yellow eyes.
Dread, like a trickle of ice water, makes its way down my spine.
Come on, Clara, I think. It’s only a bird.
I scoff at myself and walk quickly past it, hugging my arms to my chest in the cold morning air. The bird squawks, a sharp, jarring warning that sends prickles to the back of my scalp. I keep walking. After a few steps I peer back over my shoulder at the lamppost.
The bird is gone.
I sigh. I tell myself that I’m being paranoid, that I’m just creeped out because of the vision. I try to put the bird out of my mind, and start walking again. Fast. Before I know it, I’m across campus, standing under Christian’s window, pacing back and forth on the sidewalk because I don’t actually know what I’m doing here.
I should have told him about the vision before, but I was too upset that he rejected my being-a-doctor idea. I should have told him before that, even. We’ve been here for almost two weeks, and neither one of us has talked about visions or purpose or any of the other angel-related stuff. We’ve been playing at being college freshmen, pretending that there’s nothing on our plates but learning people’s names and figuring out which rooms our classes are held in and trying not to look like complete morons at this school where everybody seems like a genius.
But I have to tell him now. I need to. Only it’s—I check my phone—seven fifteen in the morning. Too early for the guess-what-you’re-in-my-vision conversation.
Clara? His voice in my head is bleary.
Oh crap, sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you.
Where are you?
Outside. I—Here … I dial his number.
He answers on the first ring. “What’s up? Are you okay?”
“Do you want to hang out?” I ask. “I know it’s early….”
I can actually hear him smiling at the other end of the line. “Absolutely. Let’s hang out.”
“Oh, good.”
“But first let me put some pants on.”
“You do that,” I say, glad he can’t see me totally blushing at the idea of him in boxers. “I’ll be right here.”
He emerges a few minutes later in jeans and a brand-new Stanford sweatshirt, his hair rumpled. He restrains himself from hugging me. He’s relieved to see me after our argument at the bookstore a week ago. He wants to say he’s sorry. He wants to tell me that he’ll support me in whatever I decide to do.
He doesn’t have to say any of this out loud.
“Thanks,” I murmur. “That means a lot.”
“So what’s going on?” he asks.
It’s hard to know where to begin. “Do you want to get off campus for a while?”
“Sure,” he says, a spark of curiosity in his green eyes. “I don’t have class until eleven.”
I start walking back toward Roble. “Come on,” I call over my shoulder. He jogs to catch up with me. “Let’s take a drive.”
Twenty minutes later we’re cruising around Mountain View, my old hometown.
“Mercy Street,” Christian reads as we pass through downtown looking for this doughnut shop I used to go to where the maple bars are so good it makes you want to cry. “Church Street. Hope Street. I’m sensing a theme here….”
“They’re just names, Christian. I think someone had a laugh putting city hall on Castro between Church and Mercy. That’s all.” I check my mirrors and find myself unprepared for the glimpse of his gold-flecked eyes gazing at me steadily.
I glance away.
I don’t know what he expects of me now that I am officially single. I don’t know what I expect of myself. I don’t know what I’m doing.
“I’m not expecting anything, Clara,” he says, not looking at me. “If you want to hang with me, great. If you want some space, I get that too.”
I’m relieved. We can take this “we belong together” thing slow, figure out what that really means. We don’t have to rush. We can be friends.
“Thanks,” I say. “And look, I wouldn’t have asked you to hang out with me if I didn’t want to hang out with you.” You’re my best friend, I want to say, but for some reason I don’t.
He smiles. “Take me to your house,” he says impulsively. “I want to see where you lived.”
Awkward conversation officially over. Obediently I make a right toward my old neighborhood. But it’s not my house. Not anymore. It’s somebody else’s house now, and the thought makes me sad: someone else sleeping in my room, someone else at the kitchen window where Mom always used to stand watching the hummingbirds flit from flower to flower in the backyard. But that’s life, I guess. That’s being a grown-up. Leaving places. Moving on.
The sun is coming up behind the rows of houses when we get to my street. Sprinklers cast nets of white mist into the air. I roll the window down and drive with my right hand, let my left hand drag through the cool air outside. It smells so good here, like wet cement and fresh-cut grass, the aroma of bacon and pancakes wafting between the homes, garden roses and magnolia trees, the smells of my life before. It’s surreal, passing along these familiar tree-lined streets, seeing the same cars parked in the driveways, the same people headed off to work, the same kids walking to school, only a little bigger than the last time I saw them. It’s like time has stopped here, and these past two years and all the crazy stuff that went down in Wyoming never took place.
I park the car across the street from my old house.
“Nice,” Christian says, gazing out the open window at the big green two-story with blue shutters that was my home-sweet-home for the first sixteen years of my life. “White picket fence and everything.”
“Yeah, my mom was a traditionalist.”
The house, too, looks exactly the same. I can’t stop staring at the basketball hoop that’s set up over the garage. I can almost hear Jeffrey practicing, the cadence of the ball hitting the cement, his feet shuffling, his exhaled breath as he jumps and puts the ball through the hoop, the way the backboard thumps and the net swishes, and Jeffrey hissing, “Nice,” between his teeth. How many times did I do my homework with that sound in the background?
“He’ll turn up,” Christian says.
I turn to look at him. “He’s sixteen, Christian. He should be home. He should have someone taking care of him.”
“Jeffrey’s strong. He can handle himself. You really want him to come home and get arrested and all that?”
“No,” I admit. “I’m just … worried.”
“You’re a good sister,” he says.
I scoff. “I messed everything up for him.”
“You love him. You would have helped him if you’d known what he was going through.”
I don’t meet his eyes. “How do you know? Maybe I would have blown him off and kept on obsessing about my own thing. I’m good at that.”
Christian catches his breath, then says more firmly, “It’s not your fault, Clara.”
I wish I believed him.
Silence falls over us again, but this time it’s weightier.
I should tell him about the vision. I should stop stalling. I don’t even know why I’m stalling.
“So tell me,” he says, leaning his elbow on the edge of the window.
Thus I rattle off every detail I can remember, ending with my revelation that it’s him there with me, him in the dark room. Him yelling for me to get down.
He’s quiet for a while after I’m done. “Well. It’s not a very visual type of vision, is it?”
“No, it’s pretty much darkness and adrenaline, at this point. What do you think?”
He shakes his head, baffled. “What does Angela say?”
I shift uncomfortably. “We haven’t really talked about it.”
He looks at my face, his eyes narrowing slightly. “Have you told anybody else?” He reads my guilty expression. “Why not?”
I sigh. “I don’t know.”
“Why haven’t you told Billy? That’s the entire reason she became your guardian, you know, to help you through stuff like this.”
Because she’s not my mom, I think.
“Billy just got married,” I explain. “I didn’t want to spill my depressing guts all over her on her honeymoon, and Angela, well, she had her own thing going on in Italy.”
“What thing?” he asks, frowning.
I bite my lip. I wish I could tell him about Phen.
“Who’s Phen?” Christian asks with a hint of a smile, able to pick that much out of my head. “Wait, wasn’t he the angel who told Angela about the Black Wings all those years ago?” His eyes widen as they meet mine. “He’s the mysterious Italian boyfriend?”
It’s official. I suck at keeping secrets, especially from him.
“Hey! No mind reading! I can’t talk about it!” I sputter. “I promised.”
“Then stop thinking about it,” he says, which is like someone telling you not to think of an elephant, which of course is the first image that pops into your brain. “Whoa. Angela and an angel. What’s this about the gray wings?”
“Christian!”
“He’s not a Black Wing, is he?” Christian looks genuinely worried, the way he always does whenever the topic of Black Wings comes up. They killed his mother, after all.
“No, he’s not—” I stop myself. “I would have told you if—Christian!”
“Sorry,” he mutters, but he’s not very sorry at all. “So, uh … back to your vision. And why you kept it to yourself this long. Because that, I’m pretty sure, you are allowed to tell me.”
I’m relieved to be off the subject of Angela, although the vision stuff is not any easier to talk about. I sigh.
“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to be having a vision,” I confess. “Not right now.”
He nods like he understands, but I get a flicker of pain from him.
“I’m sorry I didn’t say something about it earlier,” I say. “I should have.”
“I didn’t tell you mine, either,” he says. “For basically the same reason. I wanted to be a regular college student for a little while. Act like I have a normal life.” He gazes up through the windshield into the peach-colored sky. A vee of ducks is cutting its way across the horizon, heading south. We watch the birds ride the air. I wait for him to start talking again.
“It’s ironic,” he says. “You’ve been having a vision of dark, and I’ve been having a vision of light.”
“What do you mean?”
“All I can see is light. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. Just light. It took me a few times to figure out what it is.”
I’m holding my breath. “What what is?”
“The light.” He looks over at me. “It’s a sword.”
My mouth drops open. “A sword?”
“A flaming sword.”
“Shut the front door,” I gasp.
He does his laugh/exhale thing. “At first all I could think was, How great is this? I’m wielding a flaming sword. A sword made of fire. Awesome, right?” His smile fades. “But then I started thinking about what it could mean, and when I told my uncle about it this summer, he completely freaked out. He started me doing push-ups on the spot.”
“But why?”
“Because obviously I’m going to have to fight.” He clasps his hands together behind his neck and sighs.
“Who?” I’m almost afraid to ask.
“I have no idea.” He drops his hands, his smile mournful as he looks at me. “But Walter is trying to make sure that I’m prepared for whoever it is.” He shrugs.
“Wow,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, well, we’re kidding ourselves if we think we’re ever going to be allowed to lead normal lives, aren’t we?” he says.
Silence. Finally I say, “We’ll figure it out, Christian.”
He nods, but there’s something else that’s bothering him, a grief that reverberates through me and makes me look up to meet his eyes. Then I know without having to ask that Walter’s dying and that it’s the one-hundred-and-twenty-years rule.
“Oh, Christian. When?” I whisper.
Soon. A few months, is his best guess. He doesn’t want me to be there, he says silently, because he doesn’t think he’ll be able to say it out loud. It hurts him so much, Walter telling him to stay away, the idea that he might never get to spend time with him again. He doesn’t want me to see him like that.
I understand. At the end my mom was so weak she couldn’t even walk to the bathroom. That was one of the worst parts of it, the indignity of it all. Her body giving out. Giving up.
I scoot over and slip my hand into his, which startles him. The familiar electricity passes between us, making me feel stronger. Braver. I rest my head on his shoulder. I try to comfort him the way he’s always managed to comfort me.
I’m right here, I tell him. I’m not going anywhere. For what it’s worth.
“Thanks.”
“Forget all the gloom-and-doom stuff,” I say after a while. “Let’s just live a little.”
“Okay. Sounds like a plan.”
I pull away, glance at the clock on the dashboard. Seven forty-five—plenty of time, I think. I know something that will make us both feel better.
“Where are we off to now?” Christian asks.
“You’ll like it,” I say, starting the car. “I promise.”
An hour later I park the car near the visitor center at Big Basin Redwoods State Park and hop out.
“Follow me,” I say, and head off beneath the towering trees toward the Pine Mountain Trail.
I’m surprised that I remember the way, but I do. I remember like it was yesterday. It’s shaping up to be a sunny day, but it’s cool in the shadow of the giant redwoods. There aren’t any other hikers along the path, and I get the eerie sense that Christian and I are the only two people on earth, like somehow we’ve wandered back into a time before the dawn of man, and any moment now a woolly mammoth is going to step out of the trees to confront us.
Christian stays a few steps behind me as we hike, a quiet appreciation for the beauty of this place rolling off him. He doesn’t hesitate when we reach Buzzards Roost and have to do a bit of rock climbing. Within moments we’re at the top of the ridge, gazing across the valley of enormous trees, blue coastal mountains in the distance, the gleam of the ocean barely visible beyond them.
“Wow,” he breathes, turning in a slow circle, taking it all in.
“That’s what I said, the first time.” I sit down on a boulder, lean back to soak in the sun. “This is where my mom brought me to tell me about the angels, when I was fourteen. She said it was her thinking spot, and now that I live here again, I think it could be mine, too. I’m supposed to find a thinking spot for happiness class. A safe zone, the professor calls it.”
“How’s happiness class going, by the way?”
“Okay, so far.”
“Are you feeling happy?” he asks with the hint of a smirk.
I shrug. “The professor says that happiness is wanting what you have.”
Christian makes a thoughtful noise in the back of his throat. “I see. Happiness is wanting what you have. Well, there you go. So what’s the problem, then?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why is the class only okay?”
“Oh.” I bite my lip, then confess. “Every time I meditate, I start glowing.”
His mouth opens. “Every time?”
“Well, not every time now, since I figured out how it works. Every time that I do it the way you’re supposed to—empty my mind, focus on the present; you know, just be, remember?—whenever I actually get into it, then boom. Glorified.”
He gives a disbelieving chuckle. “So what do you do?”
“I spend the first five minutes of every class trying not to meditate while all the other students are trying to meditate.” I sigh. “Which is not conducive to the whole stress-relief thing.”
He laughs, a full-blown, delighted kind of laugh, like he finds the whole thing hilarious. It’s a great sound, warm, spine-tingly, and it makes me want to laugh too, but I only smile and shake my head sadly like, What else can I do?
“Sorry,” he says. “But that’s too funny. All last year you stood up on the stage at the Pink Garter and you tried so hard to achieve glory, and you couldn’t, and now you have to work to hold it back.”
“That’s what we call irony.” I get to my feet, brush dirt off my jeans. “All right. Not that I don’t enjoy chatting with you, Christian, but I didn’t bring you up here to talk.”
He squints up at me. “What?”
I take off my hoodie and toss it down next to him.
Now he really looks confused. I turn my back to him and summon my wings, stretch them over my head, flex. When I glance over at him again, he’s standing, staring with a kind of yearning admiration at my feathers, which gleam white in the sun.
He wants to touch them.
“Clara—” he says breathlessly, and takes a step forward, and reaches out.
I leap off the rock. The wind rushes me, cold and greedy, but my wings open and carry me up and up. I sweep out and away from Buzzards Roost, skimming the trees, laughing. It’s been forever since I’ve flown. There’s nothing on earth that makes me feel happier than this.
I circle back. Christian’s still on the rock, watching me. He’s taken off his jacket. He unfolds his gorgeous white and black-speckled wings, steps to the edge of the rock, and looks down.
“Are you coming or what?” I call.
He grins, then lifts off the top of the rock in two powerful beats of his wings. My breath catches. We’ve never flown together before, not like this, not in the light of day, unimpeded, without there being something terrible we were flying away from or something scary we were flying toward. We’ve never flown for fun.
He zips by me, so fast all I see is a streak against the blue of the sky. He’s a better flier than I am, more gifted at it, more practiced. He hardly has to flap his wings to stay aloft. He simply flies, like Superman, cutting through the air.
Come on, slowpoke, he says. Get the lead out.
I laugh and start after him.
Today it’s just us and the wind.