Unearthly

Chapter 7 Flock Together

Monday around seven thirtyish, I drive to the Pink Garter to meet Angela Zerbino.

The theater is completely dark. I knock but no one comes to the door. I get out my cell and then realize that I never got Angela’s phone number. I knock again, harder.

The door opens so fast that I jump. A short, wiry-thin woman with long, black hair peers up at me. She looks irritated.

“We’re closed,” she says.

“I’m here to see Angela.”

Her eyebrows shoot up.

“You’re a friend of Angela’s?”

“Uh—”

“Come in,” says the woman, holding the door open.

It’s uncomfortably quiet inside, and it smells like popcorn and sawdust. I look around.

An ancient-looking cash register sits on top of a glass snack counter with rows of candy lined up inside. The walls are decorated with framed posters of the theater’s past productions, which are mostly cowboy themed.

“Nice place,” I say, and then I bump into a pole with a velvet rope and nearly send the whole line of them crashing to the floor. I manage to right the pole before it starts a chain reaction. I cringe and look at the woman, who’s watching me with a strange, unreadable expression. She looks like Angela except for the eyes, which are dark brown instead of Angela’s amber color, and she has deep wrinkles around her mouth that make her look older than her body suggests. She reminds me of a Gypsy in one of those old movies.

“I’m Clara Gardner,” I say nervously. “I’m doing a project with Angela for school.”

She nods. I notice that she’s wearing a large gold cross around her neck, the kind that has the body of Jesus draped across it.

“You can wait back here,” she says. “She won’t be long.”

I follow her through an archway into the theater itself. It’s pitch-black. I hear her moving off to one side; then a pool of light appears on the stage.

“Have a seat anywhere,” she says.

Once my eyes adjust, I see that the theater is filled with round tables covered in white tablecloths. I wander over to the nearest one and sit down.

“When do you think Angela might get here?” I ask, but the woman is gone.

I’ve been waiting for maybe five minutes, completely creeped out by this point, when Angela comes bursting through a side door.

“Wow, sorry,” she says. “Orchestra went late.”

“What do you play?”

“Violin.”

It’s easy to imagine her with a violin tucked under her chin, sawing away on some mournful Romanian tune.

“Do you live here?” I ask.

“Yep. In an apartment upstairs.”

“Just your mom and you?”

She looks at her hands. “Yes,” she says. “Just my mom and me.”

“I don’t live with my dad either,” I say. “Just my mom and brother.”

She looks back and kind of examines me for a couple seconds. “Why did you move here?” she asks. She sits down in the chair across from mine and stares at me with solemn honey-colored eyes. “I assume that you didn’t actually burn your old school to the ground.”

“Excuse me?” I say.

She looks at me sympathetically. “That’s the rumor going around today. You mean you didn’t know that your family had to flee California because of your delinquent behavior?”

I’d laugh if I wasn’t so horrified.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “It will blow over. Kay’s rumors always do. I’m impressed by how quickly you were able to get on her bad side.”

“Uh, thanks,” I say, smirking. “And, my obvious delinquency aside, we moved because of my mom. She was getting sick of California. She loves the mountains, and she decided she wanted to raise us somewhere where we couldn’t always see the air we breathed, you know?”

She smiles at my joke, but it’s just to be polite. A pity smile.

Another long silence.

“Okay, so enough with the chitchat,” I say restlessly. “Let’s talk about our project. I was thinking about the reign of Queen Elizabeth. We could talk about what it was like to be a woman, even a woman with a lot of power, back in the day. A female empowerment kind of project.” For some reason I think this will be right up Angela’s alley.

“Actually,” she says. “I had another idea.”

“Okay. Shoot.”

“I thought we could do a presentation on the Angels of Mons.”

I almost choke. If I’d been drinking water I would have sprayed it all over the table.

“What are the Angels of Mons?” I ask.

“It’s a story from World War I. There was this big battle between the Germans and the British, who were badly outnumbered but won. After it was over there was a rumor going around about these phantom men who appeared to help the British. The mysterious men shot at the Germans with bows and arrows. One version said that the men were standing between the two armies, shining with a kind of unearthly light.”

“Interesting,” I manage.

“It was a hoax, of course. Some writer made it up and it got out of hand. It’s like an early version of UFOs, a crazy story that kept getting told again and again.”

“Okay,” I say, taking a breath. “Sounds like you have it covered.”

I can just picture the look on Mom’s face when I tell her that I’m going to do a project on angels for British History.

“I thought it would be interesting for the class,” says Angela. “A specific moment in time, like Mr. Erikson suggested. I also think we can relate it to today.”

My mind races, trying to think up a tactful way to turn down her idea.

“Yeah, well. I did really like the Elizabeth thing, but—” I’m floundering.

She grins.

“What?”

“You should see your face,” she says. “You’re really freaking out.”

“What? No, I’m not.”

She leans forward across the table.

“I want to research angels,” she says. “But it has to be British, because it’s British History after all. And this is the best British angel story there is. And wouldn’t it be crazy if it were true?”

My heart feels like it’s fallen into my stomach.

“I thought you said it was a hoax.”

“Well, yes. That’s what they would have wanted everyone to think, wouldn’t they?”

“Who’s they?”

“The angel-bloods,” she says.

I stand up.

“Clara, sit down. Relax.” Then she adds, “I know.”

“You know wh—”

“Sit down,” she says. In Angelic.

My jaw literally drops.

“How did you—?”

“What, you thought you were the only one?” she says wryly, looking at her nails.

I sink into the chair. I think this classifies as a real, honest-to-goodness revelation.

Never in a million years would I have expected to stumble upon another angel-blood at Jackson Hole High School. I’m floored. Angela, on the other hand, is so energized that she’s practically shooting out sparks. She scrutinizes me for a minute, then jumps up.

“Come on.” She bounces onto the stage, still smiling that cat-ate-the-canary kind of grin. She waves at me impatiently to join her. I get up and slowly climb the stairs onto the stage, looking out into the empty theater.

“What?”

She takes off her coat and tosses it into the dark. Then she takes a few steps back so that she’s about arm’s length away from me. She turns to face me.

“All right,” she says.

I’m starting to get pretty alarmed.

“What are you doing?”

“Show thyself, ” she says in Angelic.

There’s a flash of light, like a camera’s. I blink and stumble with the sudden weight of my wings on my shoulder blades. Angela is standing with her own wings fully extended behind her, beaming at me.

“So it’s true!” she says excitedly. Tears gleam in her eyes. She furrows her brows a little and her wings disappear with a snap. “Say the words,” she says.

“Show yourself! ” I shout.

The flash comes again, and then she’s standing with her wings out. She claps her hands together delightedly.

I’m still stunned.

“How did you know?” I ask.

“The birds tipped me off,” she says. “What you said in class about them.”

So much for laying low. Mom’s going to kill me.

“Birds drive me crazy, too. But I didn’t know if that was a freak coincidence or what.

And then I heard you were a whiz in French class,” she says.

“I take Spanish, myself. I’m so good at it because I speak fluent Italian, on account of my mom’s family, all those summers in Italy. It’s similar, a Romance language and whatnot. That’s my story, anyway.”

I can’t stop staring at her wings. It’s such a shock for me to see them on someone I don’t know, a crazy juxtaposition: Angela with her glossy black hair sweeping over one side of her face, black tank top, gray jeans with holes in the knees, dark eyeliner and lips, purple fingernails, and then these blindingly white wings stretched out behind her, reflecting the stage lights so she’s lit with a radiance that is positively celestial.

“I didn’t really know for sure, though, until your brother beat the wrestling team,” she says.

“The entire wrestling team?” That’s so not the version I heard from Jeffrey.

“Didn’t you hear about it? He went to the coach and asked to be on the team, the coach said no, tryouts were in November, better luck next year, so Jeffrey said, ‘I’ll wrestle the best guys on the team for each weight class. If they beat me, fine, I’ll try again next year. If I beat them, I’m on the team.’ That’s how the story circulated. I have gym first period, so I was right there, but I didn’t pay much attention until he was halfway through the middleweight. Practically the whole school turned out to watch him beat the champion heavyweight. Toby Jameson. That guy’s a monster. It was an amazing thing to watch. Jeffrey just took him down, didn’t even look winded, and when I saw him like that I knew that he couldn’t be entirely human. And then later I wore the angel shirt to Brit History and watched your face get all tense and broody when you looked at it. So I was pretty sure I was right.”

“It was that obvious?”

“To me it was,” she says. “But I’m glad. I’ve never known anybody else like me.”

She laughs and before I can totally process what she’s saying, she bends her knees and swoops up off the stage, gliding effortlessly over the darkened theater and up into the rafters.

“Come on,” she says.

I stare after her, thinking of the huge amount of damage I will probably do if I try.

“I don’t think you have enough insurance on this place for me to try to fly here.”

She drops lightly back down to the stage.

“I can’t fly,” I admit.

“It’s hard at first,” she says. “I spent all last year climbing up into the mountains at night so I could jump off ledges and catch some air. It took months before I was really able to get the hang of it.”

That’s the first thing anybody has said that makes me feel better about flying.

“Didn’t your mom teach you?” I ask.

She shakes her head wildly, as if she finds the idea hilarious.

“My mom’s about as human as they come. I mean, what angel-blood would name their kid Angela?”

I stifle a smile.

“She lacks imagination, I guess,” she says. “But she’s always been there for me.”

“So it’s your dad then.”

Her expression becomes instantly sober. “He was an angel.”

“An angel? So that means you’re a half blood, a Dimidius.”

She nods. Which means she’s twice as powerful as me. And she can fly. And her hair is a normal color. I’m a pot of envy.

“So your mom’s not human,” she says. “That means you’re—”

“I’m only a Quartarius. My mom is a Dimidius and my dad’s just a normal guy.”

I suddenly feel a little exposed standing there on the stage with my wings out, so I fold them in and will them to disappear. Angela does the same. For a minute we stand contemplating each other again.

“You said in class you’d never met your father,” I say.

Her face is carefully blank.

“Of course not,” she says matter-of-factly. “He’s a Black Wing.”

I nod like I completely understand what she’s talking about, but I don’t. Angela turns away and wanders out of the pool of light on the stage into one of the darkened corners.

“My mother was married once, but her husband died of cancer right before she turned thirty. He was an actor, and she was this shy costume designer. This was his theater. They never had any kids. After he died, she went on a pilgrimage to Rome.

She’s Catholic, so Rome’s a pretty important place for her, plus she has family there.

One night she walked home from evening mass, and a man followed her. She tried to ignore it at first, but she had a bad feeling about him. He started to walk faster, so she ran. She didn’t stop until she was at the family’s house.”

Angela sits down at the edge of the stage, her legs dangling over into the orchestra pit. She keeps her eyes downcast while she tells the story, her face turned slightly away, but her voice is steady.

“She thought she was safe,” she says. “But that night she dreamed of the man standing at the foot of her bed. His face was like a statue, she said. Like Michelangelo’s David, impassive, sad in the eyes. She started to scream, but then he said something in a language she couldn’t understand. His words paralyzed her; she couldn’t move or make a sound. She couldn’t wake up.”

I sit down beside her.

“And then he raped her,” she murmurs. “And she realized it wasn’t a dream.”

She glances up, embarrassed. One corner of her mouth lifts.

“So the downside is that I wasn’t exactly conceived in love,” she says. “But the upside is that I have all of these amazing powers.”

“Right,” I say, nodding. I wonder how old she was when her mother told her that story — it’s not really the kind of story you want to hear from your mom. I’ve never heard of such a thing happening. An angel raping a human? I can’t imagine it. The night is starting to take on a weird sort of Twilight Zone feel. I came to work on a history project, and now I’m sitting on the edge of a stage with another angel-blood as she spills her entire life story to me. It’s surreal.

“I’m sorry, Angela,” I say. “That. sucks.”

She closes her eyes for a moment, as if she can see it all in her mind.

“So if your mom is human and you’ve never seen your dad, how did you even know you were an angel-blood?” I ask.

“My mom told me. She said that one night, a few days before I was born, another angel appeared to her and told her about the angel-bloods. She thought it was a crazy dream for a while. But she told me as soon as she saw that there was something different about me. I was ten.”

I think about the way Mom told me about the angel-bloods, only two years ago, and how hard it was to accept. It blows my mind to think about what I would have done if she’d sprung that kind of information on me when I was a kid. Or if she’d been raped.

“It took me a long time to find out anything else,” Angela says. “My mom didn’t know anything about angels besides what it says in the Bible. She said I was a Nephilim like in Genesis, and I would grow up to be a hero like in the days of Samson.”

“No haircuts for you, then.”

She laughs and drags her fingers through her long black hair.

“But you knew about the Dimidius and Quartarius and all of that,” I say.

“I’ve picked up the facts here and there. I consider myself a bit of an angel historian.”

It’s quiet for a minute.

“Wow,” I say.

“I know.”

“I still think we should do our history project on Queen Elizabeth.”

She laughs. She turns toward me and pulls her legs up and sits Indian-style, so close her knees brush mine.

“We’re going to be best friends,” she says.

I believe her.

I have to be home by ten, which gives us hardly any time to talk. I hardly know where to begin, the questions come so fast. One thing is clear right away: Angela knows tons about the angels, so much of the history, the powers they’re rumored to have, the names and ranks of different angels who appear in literature and religious texts.

But in other areas, things about angels and angel-bloods that you can only get from the inside, she doesn’t know much at all. She and I could learn a lot from each other, I realize, being that my mom only tells me what she thinks is absolutely necessary, if that.

“You did all your research in Rome?” I ask.

“Most of it,” Angela says. “Rome’s a good place to find out about angels. Lots of history there. Although I met an Intangere in Milan last year, and I learned more from him than any other source.”

“Hold up. What’s an Intangere?”

“Silly,” she says like I should have guessed. “That’s the Latin for the full-blooded. It literally means whole, untouched, complete in itself. So there’s the Intangere, Dimidius, Quartarius, you know.”

“Oh right,” I say like it had just slipped my mind. “So you met a real angel?”

“Yep. I saw him and I don’t think I was supposed to. We were in this little out-of-the-way church, and I saw him standing there kind of glowing, so I said hello in Angelic.

He looked at me and then grabbed me by the arm and suddenly we were someplace else, but like we were still in the church, too, at the same time.”

“Sounds like heaven.”

She frowns and leans closer like she hadn’t heard me correctly.

“What?”

“Sounds like he took you to heaven.”

Her eyes widen with sudden comprehension. “What do you know about heaven?”

she asks.

I flush.

“Well, not a whole lot. I know that it’s dimensional, that it exists right on top of Earth.

Like a curtain, my mom says, a veil. She went there once — I mean, an angel brought her there.”

“You’re so lucky to have your mom,” Angela says with envy in her eyes. “I have to work so hard to get all my information, and all you have to do is ask.”

“Well, I can ask,” I say a bit uncomfortably, “but that doesn’t mean she has to answer my questions.”

Angela looks at me closely.

“Why wouldn’t she?”

“I don’t know. She says I have to find out these things on my own, by experience, or some baloney like that. Like earlier, you said your father was a Black Wing. I have no idea what that is. I assume it’s something like a bad angel, but my mom’s certainly never mentioned it.”

Angela thinks for a minute.

“A Black Wing is a fallen angel,” she says finally. “I guess they fell a long time ago, closer to the beginning.”

“Beginning of what?”

“Time.”

“Oh. Right. Are their wings really black?”

“I think so,” she answers. “That’s how you know them. White wings equal good angel, black wings equal bad.”

Crazy, all that I don’t know. It makes me feel foolish. And uncomfortably curious. And scared. “You just go up and ask them to please show their wings?”

“You command them, in Angelic, to show themselves.”

“And they have to?” I ask.

“Did it feel like you had a choice when I commanded you?”

“No, it just happened.”

“That’s how it is for them too, a kind of tool for immediate identification that’s programmed into them,” she says. “Useful, right?”

“How do you know all this?”

“Phen told me. He’s the angel I met in the church. He warned me about the Black Wings.”

She stops abruptly, dropping her eyes.

“What?” I prompt gently. “What did he say?”

She closes her eyes briefly and then opens them. “He said that they might try to find me, someday.”

“But why would they want to find you?”

She looks up.

“Because my father was one. And because they want us,” she says. Her gold eyes are suddenly fierce. “They’re building an army.”

“Mom!” I scream the minute the door of the house closes behind me. She comes running out of her office, alarm all over her face.

“What? What is it? Are you hurt?”

“Why didn’t you tell me there’s a war between the angels?”

She stops. “What?”

“Angela Zerbino’s an angel-blood,” I say, still spazzing out. “And she told me that there’s this war that’s going on between the good and bad angels.”

“Angela Zerbino’s an angel-blood?”

“Dimidius. Now answer my question.”

“Well, honey,” she says, still looking confused. “I assumed you knew.”

“How would I know if you didn’t tell me? You never tell me anything!”

“There’s both good and evil in this world,” she says after a long pause. “I told you that.”

I can see how carefully she’s choosing her words, even now. It’s infuriating.

“Yeah, but you never told me about Black Wings,” I exclaim. “You never told me that they go around recruiting or killing all the angel-bloods they come across.”

She flinches.

“So it’s true.”

“Yes,” she says. “Although I think they are more interested in the Dimidius.”

“Right, because Quartarius don’t have much power,” I say sarcastically. “I guess I should be relieved, then.”

Mom’s still processing. “So Angela Zerbino told you she was an angel-blood. She just told you?”

“Yep. She showed me her wings and everything.”

“What color were they?”

“Her wings? White.”

“How white?” she asks intently.

“They were a perfect, eye-piercing white, Mom. Why does it matter?”

“The shade of our wings reflects our standing in the light,” she says. “White Wings have white wings, of course, and Black Wings have black. For most of us in the middle, the offspring, our wings are varying shades of gray.”

“Your wings have always looked pretty white to me,” I say. I’m instantly struck with the urge to summon my wings, to see what shade they are, to discover what my spiritual state really is. I sure as heck don’t know.

“My wings are fairly light,” Mom admits, “but not as the new-fallen snow.”

“Well, Angela’s were white,” I say. “I guess that means she’s a pure soul.”

Mom goes to the cupboard and gets a glass. She fills it with water at the sink, then stands drinking it slowly. Calmly.

“A Black Wing raped her mom.” I look at her to see if there’s any reaction to that.

None. “She’s worried that someday they’ll show up to collect her. You should have seen her face when she talked about it. Scared. Like, really, really scared.”

Mom puts the glass down and looks at me. She doesn’t seem at all rattled by anything I’ve told her. Which rattles me even more. And then I realize.

“You already knew about Angela,” I say. “How?”

“I have my sources. She hasn’t exactly tried to hide her abilities. For someone who’s worried about Black Wings, she’s not being very careful. And to reveal herself to you like that. It’s reckless.”

I stare at her. At that moment it fully dawns on me how much my mother hasn’t told me.

“You’ve been lying to me,” I say.

She meets my eyes, startled by my accusation. “No, I haven’t. There are just some things that—”

“Are there a lot of angel-bloods in Jackson Hole?”

She seems hurt by my sudden question. She doesn’t answer.

I pick up my backpack from where I tossed it onto the kitchen floor and head for my room.

“Hey,” says Mom. “I’m still talking to you.”

“No, apparently you’re not.”

“Clara,” she calls after me in an exasperated voice. “If I don’t tell you everything, it’s for your own protection.”

“That doesn’t make sense. How does being clueless protect me?”

“What else did Angela tell you?”

“Nothing.”

I go into my room and slam the door, take off my coat, and throw it on the bed, fighting the urge to scream, or cry, or both. Then I go to the mirror and summon my wings, gathering them around in front of me so I can see the feathers more closely.

They’re fairly white, I think, running my hand over them. Not as the new-fallen snow, as my mother said, but still white.

Not as white as Angela’s, though.

I hear Mom come down the hall. She stops in front of my door. I wait for her to knock or come in and tell me that she doesn’t want me hanging out with Angela anymore, for my own protection. But she doesn’t. She just stands there for a minute. Then I hear her walk away.

I wait for a while, until I’m sure that Mom is safely downstairs again, and then I sneak down the hall to Jeffrey’s room. He’s sitting at his desk with his laptop, typing away, chatting with someone by the looks of it. When he sees me he types something really fast, then jumps up to face me. I turn the music down a notch so I can hear myself think.

“Did you tell her you’d b-r-b?” I say with a smirk. “What’s her name, anyway? No point denying it. It will be more embarrassing for you if I have to ask around at school.”

“Kimber,” he concedes immediately. “Her name’s Kimber.” His expression stays neutral, but I can see a hint of red creeping into his ears.

“Pretty name. The blond girl, I assume?”

“You didn’t come in here just to mock me, right?”

“Well, that’s pretty fun, but no. I wanted to tell you something.” I move a pile of dirty laundry off his beanbag chair and sit on it. My breath catches for a second, like I’m breaking a rule, Mom’s all-important “don’t tell your kids anything” rule, as a matter of fact. But I’m sick of living in the dark. And I’m ticked off, ticked off at everything, at my whole crappy life and all the people in it. I need to vent.

“Angela Zerbino’s an angel-blood,” I say.

He blinks.

“Who?”

“She’s a junior, tall, long black hair, kind of Emo, gold eyes. Loner.”

He looks at the ceiling thoughtfully like he’s calling up Angela’s face in his mind.

“How do you know she’s an angel-blood?”

“She told me. But that’s not the right question, Jeffrey.”

“What do you mean?”

“What you should be asking is why Angela Zerbino told me that she was an angel-blood. And if you asked me that, I would answer that she told me because she knew that I was an angel-blood.”

“Huh? How did she know you were an angel-blood?”

“See, now that’s the right question,” I say. I lean forward. “She knew because she saw you take on the wrestling team last week. She watched you wrestle Toby Jameson, who probably weighs two hundred pounds, without even working up a sweat. And she said to herself, wow, that guy’s a good wrestler, he must be an angel.”

His face actually pales. It’s mildly satisfying. Of course I’m leaving out some of the other troublesome details, my stupid thing about the birds and French class and the way I ogled her angel shirt, falling so neatly into her trap. But Jeffrey was the linchpin: She was only certain that we were something more than human after she observed him on the wrestling mat that day.

“Did you tell Mom?” He looks a little green at the thought. Because if I told Mom, that’d be it for Jeffrey. No more wrestling, or baseball in the spring, or football in the fall or whatever he was dreaming up. He’d probably be grounded until college.

“No,” I say. “Although she’s bound to ask the right question herself, sooner or later.”

It’s kind of odd, come to think of it, that she hasn’t asked me already. Maybe her sources already told her that, too.

“Are you going to tell her?” he asks, so softly I can hardly hear him over the music.

His expression is truly pathetic, and where a few moments before anger surged through me, now I feel drained and sad.

“No. I just wanted to tell you. I don’t know why. I wanted you to know.”

“Thanks,” he says. He gives a short, humorless laugh. “I think.”

“Don’t mention it. I mean ever. Really.” I get up to leave.

“I feel like a cheater,” he says then. “All the ribbons and medals and trophies I won in California, they don’t mean anything. It’s like I was taking steroids, only I didn’t know it.”

I know exactly what he means. It’s why I dropped out of ballet, even though I loved it, and why I never picked it up again in Jackson. It felt dishonest, doing so easily, so naturally, what the others girls had to work so hard to accomplish. It was unfair, I thought, to take the attention away from them when I had such a huge advantage.

So I quit.

“But if I hold myself back, I feel like a fake,” says Jeffrey. “And that’s worse.”

“I know.”

“I won’t do it,” he says. I look into his dead-serious gray eyes. He swallows, but holds my gaze. “I won’t hold myself back. I won’t pretend to be less than I am.”

“Even if it puts us in danger?” I ask, glancing away.

“What danger? Angela Zerbino’s dangerous?”

That’s when I’m supposed to tell him about the Black Wings. There are bad angels now, angels that hunt us and sometimes kill us. There are shades of gray we didn’t know about before, and it’s something that I should tell him, something that he needs to know, but his eyes are pleading with me not to take any more away from him.

Mom told us that we’re special, but what kind of “gift” comes with a war between angels as the strings attached? Maybe I don’t want any more taken from me either.

Maybe I don’t want to be remarkable, don’t want to fly or speak some bizarre angel language or save the world one hot guy at a time. I just want to be human.

“Watch yourself, okay?” I tell to Jeffrey.

“I will.” Then adds, “Thanks. You’re all right sometimes, you know.”

“Remember that next time you’re dragging me out of bed at five in the morning,” I say wearily. “Tell Kimber I said hi, by the way.”

Then I escape to my room and lay in the dark turning the words Black Wing over and over in my head.