Hallowed

Chapter 4 Freaking Out

This time in the dream, there are stairs. A set of ten or twelve concrete steps, complete with a black handrail, leading up between two aspen trees. Why would there be stairs in the middle of the forest? And where do they lead to? I grab the rail. It’s rough, the paint flaking off to expose patches of rust. The steps are edged with moss. As I climb I notice I’m wearing nice shoes, Mom’s sensible black pumps, the ones she always loans me for formal occasions.

I see Jeffrey ahead of me in the trees. Others wait there too, shadowy figures at the top of the hillside, people I recognize: Angela, Mr. Phibbs, Wendy. It feels like they’re all staring at me, and I don’t know why. I glance back, and the heel on my nice shoe catches. I lose my balance on the stairs, almost falling, but Christian’s there again, his hand at my waist, steadying me. For a moment we stare at each other. His body radiates a kind of heat that makes me want to step closer to him.

“Thanks,” I whisper, and I open my eyes to my bedroom ceiling, a strong cold wind still rattling the trees outside.

“You’re freaking out,” Angela observes with a mouthful of green bean salad. We’re sitting at a booth in the Rendezvous Bistro in Jackson on a Saturday night, post — action movie, eating salad because that’s all we can afford at this place.

“I’m fine,” I say.

“You are so not fine. You should see yourself.”

“Well, it sucks, okay? I just wish I knew if it’s a dream or another vision, or what.” Angela nods thoughtfully. “Your mom said that some angel-bloods have their visions as dreams, right, while they’re sleeping?”

“Yeah, she said that, before I started having mine, way back when she was okay with telling me useful information. But I’ve always had my visions while I was awake.”

“Me too,” Angela says.

“So it makes me wonder, is this dream thing for real, or is it, you know, the result of bad chow mein at dinner? Is this a divine message, or my subconscious talking here? And either way, what’s it telling me?”

“See, there you go freaking out,” she says. “It’s messed up, C. You won’t even look at Christian during Angel Club. It’s like you two take turns avoiding each other. I’d find it hilarious if I didn’t find it so totally sad.”

“I know,” I say. “I’m working on it.”

She cocks her head at me sympathetically. “I like Tucker, Clara. Really I do. He’s a stellar guy, no one would argue with that. But have you considered the possibility that you’re not supposed to be with him? That you’re supposed to be with Christian, that he’s your destiny, that you’re supposed to fly off into the sunset together?”

“Of course I have.” I put my fork down, not hungry anymore. Destiny can really put a damper on the appetite. “I don’t know why he even cares,” I say.

“Why who cares? Tucker? Or Christian?”

“God.”

She laughs. “Well, that’s the big mystery, isn’t it?”

“I mean, I’m seventeen years old. Why does He care who I. .”

“Love,” she supplies when I don’t finish the sentence. “Who you love.” We’re quiet while the waiter refills our drinks.

“Anyway, you should write this dream stuff down,” she says. “Because it could be important. Check for variations, like you did with your vision. You should ask Christian about it too, because who knows, maybe he’s having the same dream, and if he is, then you can figure it out together.”

It’s not a terrible idea. Except that I’m not exactly crazy about spilling to Christian that I’ve been dreaming about him.

“What does your mom say?” Angela asks, gnawing on a bread stick.

“I haven’t told her about it.”

She looks at me as if I just told her I’d been thinking of dabbling in heroin.

“Why should I? She never tells me anything. Even if I did tell her, I’m sure she’d only bury me in platitudes about trusting my feelings and listening to my heart or some crap like that.

Besides, we don’t know that it means anything,” I say. “It’s probably just a dream. People have recurring dreams all the time.”

“If you say so,” she says.

“Can we talk about something else now?”

So we do. We talk about the rain, which Angela agrees is excessive. We talk about Spirit Week at school and whether or not it would be fair for us to use our special gifts to win the Powderpuff game on Wednesday. She tells me about this old book she found in Italy this summer that seems to be some kind of angel-blood roster during the seventeenth century.

“It’s like a group of them,” she tells me. “Congregarium celestial, literally like a herd of angel-bloods. A flock. It’s actually where I got the idea to form the Angel Club.”

“Anything else interesting happen in Italy?” I ask her. “With, say, a hot Italian boyfriend you’re now going to tell me all about?”

Her cheeks go instantly pink. She shakes her head, suddenly super interested in her salad.

“I don’t have a boyfriend.Italian or otherwise.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It was silly,” she says, “and I don’t want to talk about it. I won’t hound you about Christian, you don’t talk about my nonexistent Italian boyfriend, okay?”

“You already hounded me about Christian. That’s hardly fair,” I say, but there’s genuine pain in her eyes, which surprises me, so I let it drop.

My mind wanders back to the dream, to Christian, the way he’s always looking out for me, catching me, keeping me on my feet. He’s become my guardian, maybe. Someone who is there to keep me on the path.

If only I knew where that path was headed.

We’re in the parking lot when the sorrow hits me. At least, I think it’s sorrow. It’s not as overwhelming as it was that day in the forest. It doesn’t paralyze me in the same way. Instead it’s like suddenly, in the space of a few minutes, I go from fine, laughing even, to wanting to cry.

“Hey, are you okay?” Angela asks as we walk to the car.

“No,” I whisper. “I feel. . sad.”

She stops. Her eyes go saucer wide. She glances around.

“Where?” she says much too loudly. “Where is he?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I can’t tell.”

She grabs my hand and pulls me through the parking lot toward the car, walking fast but trying to stay composed, like nothing’s wrong. She doesn’t ask me if she can drive my car; she goes straight to the driver’s seat, and I don’t argue. “Put on your seat belt,” she orders me once we’re both inside. Then she floors it out of the parking lot and onto the street. “I don’t know where to go,” she says in a half-terrified, half-excited rush. “I think we should stay somewhere well-populated, because he’d have to be crazy to obliterate us in front of a bunch of tourists, you know, but I don’t want to go too close to home.” She does a quick check of the mirrors. “Call your mom. Now.”

I fumble in my purse for my phone, then call. Mom picks up on the first ring.

“What’s wrong?” she asks immediately.

“I think. . maybe. . there’s a Black Wing.”

“Where are you?”

“In the car, on 191, driving south.”

“Go to the school,” she says. “I’ll meet you there.”

It’s the longest five minutes of my life before Mom lands in the parking lot at Jackson Hole High School. She gets in the back.

“So,” she says, reaching up and feeling my cheek like sorrow is some kind of fever, “how do you feel?”

“Better now. I guess.”

“Did you see him?”

“No.”

She turns to Angela. “How about you? Did you feel anything?” Angela shrugs. “Nothing.” There’s an edge of disappointment in her voice.

“So what do we do now?” I ask.

“We wait,” Mom says.

So we wait, and wait, and wait some more, but nothing happens. We sit in the car in silence, watching the windshield wipers push the rain off the glass. Occasionally Mom asks me how I’m doing, which is hard to answer in any clear way. At first, what I feel most is terrified that any second now Samjeeza’s going to show up and murder us all. Then I downgrade to just plain scared — that we’re going to have to run now, pack up and leave Jackson, and I’ll never see Tucker again. Finally I arrive at mildly freaked out. Then embarrassed.

“Maybe it wasn’t sorrow,” I admit. “It wasn’t as strong as before.”

“It would surprise me if he came after us so soon,” Mom says.

“Why?” Angela asks.

“Because Samjeeza’s vain,” Mom says matter-of-factly. “Clara mangled his ear, burned his arm and his head, and I don’t think he’ll want to show his face until he’s healed, which is a long process for Black Wings.”

“I would have thought they could heal quickly,” Angela says. “You know, like vampires or something.”

Mom scoffs. “Vampires. Please. Black Wings take a long time to heal because they’ve chosen to cut themselves off from the healing forces in this world.” She touches my cheek again.

“You did the right thing, getting out of there, calling me. Even if it wasn’t a Black Wing. It’s better to be safe than sorry.”

Angela sighs and looks out the window.

“Sorry,” I say. I turn to Mom. “I guess I’m kind of on edge.”

“Don’t be,” she says. “You’ve had a lot to deal with.”

She and Angela switch places. Then she pulls out of the school parking lot and onto the road, heading back toward town.

“What do you feel?” she asks as we pass the restaurant.

“Nothing,” I say with a shrug. “Except I have a feeling I might be losing my mind.”

“It doesn’t matter whether this is a false alarm or not. Samjeeza will come after us, Clara, eventually. You’ll need to be ready.”

Right.

“How does one get ready to be attacked by a Black Wing, exactly?” I ask sarcastically.

“Glory,” she says, which immediately gets the told-you-so look on Angela’s face. “You learn to use glory.”

“Hey, I think I see a flicker,” Christian says, startling me. “You’re doing it.” My eyes snap open. Christian wasn’t here earlier, when I got up onstage and started trying this bring-the-glory thing, but here he is now, sitting at one of the tables down in the audience at the Pink Garter, staring up at me with amusement like he’s watching a show. For a split second our eyes meet and then I glance down at my hand, which is definitely not glowing. No glory.

Clearly I suck at bringing glory if it’s not a do-it-or-die situation.

“What flicker?” I ask.

One side of his mouth hitches up. “Must have been my imagination.” Uh-huh. Insert another one of the classic Christian-Clara awkward silences. Then he coughs and says, “Sorry I interrupted your glory practice. Carry on.” I should close my eyes and try again, but I know it’s no use. There’s no way I’m going to achieve glory with him watching me.

“God, this is frustrating!” Angela exclaims. She slams her laptop closed and pushes it across the table, blowing out a long, aggravated breath. She’s been scouring college websites, trying to figure out what college she’s supposed to go to, which to most people is a pretty big deal, but for Angela, it’s a huge deal, the hugest, since she thinks it’s a college campus she’s seeing in her visions. Talk about pressure.

“Didn’t get that ancient text you wanted on eBay?” asks Christian.

She glares at him. “Funny.”

“Sorry, Ange,” I say. “Can I help?”

“The vision doesn’t give me very much to go on. There’s a set of wide steps, a bunch of stone archways, and people drinking coffee. That describes practically any college in the country.”

“Look for trees,” I tell her. “I have a good book if you’re trying to identify what area certain trees grow in.”

“Well, I hope I get something decent to go on soon,” mutters Angela. “I have to apply, you know? Like, now.”

“Don’t sweat it,” Christian says nonchalantly. He glances down at his notebook, where I think he’s working on calculus homework. “You’ll figure it out when you’re supposed to figure it out.” Then he looks up, and his eyes catch mine again.

“Did you?” I can’t help but ask, even though I know the answer. “Did you figure it out when you were supposed to?”

“No,” he admits with a short, almost bitter laugh. “I don’t know why I said that. Drilled into me, I guess. That’s what my uncle always tells me.” He hasn’t talked much about his uncle. Or his purpose, outside of the initial “I was having visions of you in the forest fire, I thought I was supposed to save you, and now I’m confused” conversation. Once, he showed us that he could fly without flapping his wings, Superman style, hovering over the stage like David Blaine while Angela, Jeffrey, and I gaped up at him like idiots.

Occasionally he gives Angela some random angel fact, so she’ll be satisfied with what he’s contributing to the group. He seems to know more than we do, but mostly he’s been pretty tight lipped.

“So,” Angela says, and the expression on her face makes me nervous. She gets up and crosses to stand next to Christian’s table. “What happens now?”

“What do you mean?” he asks.

“You haven’t fulfilled your purpose, right?”

He stares at her.

“All right,” she says when he doesn’t say anything. “At least answer this: when you had your vision before, did it come during the day, or at night?” He looks off at the shadows in the back of the stage area for a minute, deciding, then glances back at her. “At night.”

“You dreamed it?”

“Usually. Except one time I was awake.”

Prom. When we danced, and then we had the vision, together.

“Well, Clara’s having a new dream,” Angela says. I give her what I hope is my most angry glare, but she ignores it, of course. “Like maybe it could be a vision. We need to figure out what it is.”

Christian looks at me, immediately interested. I’m literally standing in the spotlight, so I jump down from the stage and walk over to them, feeling his gaze following me.

“What vision?” he asks.

“It might only be a dream,” Angela answers for me. “But you’ve had it what, Clara, ten times now?”

“Seven. I’m walking up a hill,” I explain, “through a forest, but not like the hill in my — in our vision. It’s a sunny day, no fire. Jeffrey’s there, and he’s wearing a suit for some reason.

Angela’s there — at least she was last time I had it. And some other people too. .” I hesitate.

“And you’re there,” I say to Christian.

I can’t tell him about how he takes my hand, how he whispers straight into my mind without saying anything out loud.

“It’s probably only a dream, you know?” I manage. “Like my subconscious working something out, my fears, maybe, or like those dreams where you show up to school naked.”

“What does the forest look like?” he asks.

“That’s the weird thing about it. It’s like a normal forest, but there are these stairs — a set of concrete stairs in the middle of the trees. And a fence.”

“What about you, have you been having any strange dreams?” asks Angela. “Some clue to add to all this craziness?”

Christian finally drags his gaze away from mine to look at her.

“No dreams.”

“Well, personally I think it’s more than a dream,” she says. “Because it’s not over.”

“What?”

“Your purpose. There’s no way you go through all that, the visions and the fires and everything, and then that’s it. No way. There has to be more.” My empathy chooses this moment to kick in, and I get a jolt of what Christian’s feeling: Resolve. Determination. A yearning underneath everything that makes me catch my breath. And certainty. Pure, absolute certainty. That Angela is right. That it’s not over. That there is more to come.

That night when I come into my room there’s someone standing on the eaves outside my window. In a split second all my mom’s baloney about Samjeeza being injured and vain and biding his time to come after us seems like exactly that— baloney — and I think, it’s him, it was his sorrow I felt the other day, I knew it, and my heart goes into crazy-panicked mode and my blood starts pumping and I glance wildly around my room for a weapon. Which is a joke because, a) I don’t have weapons so much as average teenage girl stuff in my room, and b) even if I were to procure something other than a nail file to defend myself with, what weapon works on a Black Wing? Glory, I think, got to call glory, but then I also think, wait. Why is he just standing there?

Why hasn’t he started in on the cheesy evil I-will-kill-you-little-bird lines yet?

It’s not Samjeeza, I realize then. It’s Christian. I can feel his presence plain as day, now that I’ve calmed down enough to think straight. He’s come to tell me something. Something important.

I sigh, put on a sweatshirt, and open the window.

“Hey,” I call out.

He looks over from his spot on the edge of the roof, a place that perfectly overlooks the mountains, which are still glowing a faint snow-dusted white in the dark. I climb out the window and sit down next to him. It’s freezing outside, raining a chilly, miserable drizzle. I immediately hug my arms around myself and try not to shiver.

“Cold?” he asks.

I nod. “Aren’t you?” He’s wearing a black T-shirt and his usual Seven jeans, gray this time. I hate that I recognize his clothes.

He shrugs. “A little.”

“Angela says that angel-bloods are supposed to be immune to cold. It helps with the flying at high altitudes, I guess.” I shiver again. “I must not have gotten the memo.” He smiles. “Maybe that power only applies to mature angel-bloods.”

“Hey, are you calling me immature?”

“Oh no,” he says, his smile blossoming into a full-blown grin. “I wouldn’t dare.”

“Good. Because I’m not the one peeping into someone else’s window.”

“I wasn’t peeping,” he protests.

Right. Something important.

“You know, there’s this new amazing invention,” I tease. “It’s called a cell phone.”

“Yeah, because you and I have such amazing heart-to-heart conversations over the phone,” he shoots back.

It’s quiet for a second, then we both start laughing. He’s right. I don’t know why it’s easier here, but it is. Out here we can finally talk. It’s a bona fide miracle.

He turns toward me, his knee brushing mine. In the dim light from my window, his eyes are a deep, dark green.

He says, “In your dream, the fence you mentioned, it’s a chain-link fence, on the right as you climb the hill.”

“Yes, how did you—”

“And the stairs you see, they have moss growing on the edges, and a railing to hold on to, metal, with black paint?”

I stare at him. “Right.”

“On the left side, back behind the trees, there’s a stone bench,” he continues. “And a rosebush, planted beside it. But the roses never bloom — it’s too cold up there for roses.” He looks away for a minute. A sudden puff of wind stirs his hair, and he brushes it out of his eyes.

“You’re having the dream, too?” I whisper.

“Not like yours. I mean, I dream about that place all the time, but—” He sighs, shifts uncomfortably, then looks at me.

“I’m not used to talking about this,” he says. “I’ve sort of become a professional at not talking about this.”

“It’s okay. . ”

“No, I want to tell you. You should know this. But I didn’t want to tell you in front of Angela.”

I draw my sweatshirt up to my chin and cross my arms against my chest.

“My mom died,” he says finally. “When I was ten years old. I don’t even know how it happened. My uncle doesn’t like to talk about it, but I think. . I think she was killed by a Black Wing. One day she was there, doing long-division flash cards with me at breakfast, driving me to school, kissing me good-bye in front of the boys at school and embarrassing me. . ” His voice wavers. He stops, looks away, clears his throat lightly. “Then the next minute, they’re pulling me out of class. They say there’s been an accident. And she’s gone. I mean, they let me see her body, eventually. But she wasn’t inside of it. It was just. . a body.” He looks at me then, eyes gleaming. “Her gravestone is a bench. A white stone bench, under the aspen trees.”

Suddenly my head feels all cloudy. “What?”

“It’s Aspen Hill Cemetery,” he says. “It’s not a real cemetery — well, it is a real cemetery, with graves and flowers and stuff like that, but it’s also like part of the forest, this beautiful place in the trees where it’s quiet and you can see the Tetons in the distance. It’s probably the most peaceful place I know. I go there sometimes to think, and. .” And talk to his mom. He goes there to talk to his mom.

“So when you said that thing about the stairs, and the hillside and the fence, I knew,” he says quietly.

“You knew I was dreaming about the cemetery,” I say.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers.

I look up at him, choking back a cry, putting it all together, the people wearing suits and me in a black dress, everybody walking in the same direction, the grief I feel, the way everybody looks at me so solemnly, the comfort Christian tries to offer. It all makes perfect sense.

It’s not a Black Wing’s sorrow I’m feeling, in the dream. It’s mine.

Someone I love is going to die.