A Gift of Wings (24 page)

She lifted her hand and brushed the curls back from Josh’s forehead. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

His hand tightened on hers. “Lucky, what’s going on?” Josh asked, a hint of puzzled anger giving strength to his voice. “Who is Malachi anyway? And why did he bring me to this place—which I gather belongs to Aidan? Why were you here?”

“When I couldn’t find you, and you didn’t answer your phone, I—called Aidan. Malachi’s a—friend of his.”

“Not good enough,” Josh answered, looking at her through narrowed eyes.

She nodded. “I know,” she said. “I’ll tell you more later. Right now, you should probably rest.”

“Fine, be that way.” Josh’s response was short, but the sigh he released as his eyelids fluttered closed sounded relieved.

Lucky remained on the bed beside him, holding his hand, until his slowed breathing indicated he’d fallen asleep. Then she carefully disengaged her hand from his and, kicking off her sneakers, curled up in the chair which she had moved closer to the bed.

Hearing Aidan’s footsteps in the hall, she looked up to see him standing in the doorway. At his gesture, she rose and moved out into the hall to join him. Stepping off the deep pile of the red rug, she felt the chill of the marble floor tiles through her thin socks.

Gesturing for her to follow, Aidan moved down the hall toward the living room, past what appeared to be a large well-appointed bathroom, and stepped into what Lucky assumed was his bedroom. She hovered in the doorway, looking around, as he entered and pulled open a drawer.

Like the rest of the apartment, the room was decorated sparely, but Lucky was relieved to see two framed pictures on top of the dresser. The larger of the two was a black-and-white photograph of a woman sitting at a piano. She was turned slightly away from the instrument, looking toward the photographer, but one hand rested on the keys as if she had been interrupted in the middle of a piece. Long light-colored hair fell forward over her shoulders, framing a delicately beautiful face alight with love as she smiled into the camera. The smaller picture was in color and showed the same woman, her arms around a boy with messy golden curls, who looked to be about eleven years old.

“My mother,” Aidan offered.

“She’s very beautiful,” Lucky said.

“Yes,” he responded, “she was.”

“Will you tell me what happened to her?”

He looked at her for a moment before responding. “Someday, maybe. Not tonight.”

He handed her the clothing he had taken from the drawers, a couple of t-shirts and a pair of sweats. “For you and Josh. I thought they’d be comfortable for you to sleep in.”

“Thanks.” Lucky felt a hint of warmth in her cheeks at the thought of sleeping in his shirt.

“I have to leave soon, to meet the rest of the band and get set up for tonight’s show. You’ll be okay here while I’m gone. It’s true, what I told Zeke. After my mother’s death, we made sure to protect this place with every ward and spell imaginable. Only Zeke, Malachi, and Kev can pass freely through the wards without my permission.”

“Kev?” Lucky asked.

“That’s right,” Aidan said, his lips quirking upward, “you haven’t had the pleasure, have you? Kev—Kevin—is my brother, half-brother really. We share a father.”

“The Seraph,” Lucky’s words were half statement and half question.

“Yes,” Aidan replied, offering no additional information.

“Thanks again for these,” Lucky said, indicating the clothes in her hands, as she moved toward the door.

Waving away her thanks, he began tugging his t-shirt over his head. “I should get changed,” he said, his voice muffled by the cloth.

Lucky’s jaw dropped as the shirt lifted, exposing the well-defined muscles of his abdomen and chest. With a little squeak, she turned and fled back down the hall to the guest room.

A few minutes later, she heard Aidan’s booted footsteps leave his room and move down the hall away from her, and she followed him into the living room.

“Do you have something I could read while you’re gone?” she asked.

“There’s a bookshelf in my room,” he said, shrugging his leather jacket on over his long-sleeved black t-shirt. “Help yourself to anything you want.” After a pause, he added, “And if you get hungry, there’s food in the fridge. Some spaghetti, sandwich stuff, leftover pizza. Help yourself to that too. It’s nothing spectacular, but it’ll keep you from starving.”

“Thanks,” Lucky said. Although the thought of food held no appeal at the moment, she appreciated the offer.

Walking over to her, Aidan lifted his hand to touch her cheek before letting it fall back to his side. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he said, and then he was out the door. She heard the click as it locked behind him.

Lucky went back to the guest room and, feeling guilty for doing so, shook Josh awake and showed him the t-shirt and sweats Aidan had found for him to wear. When she was sure he was okay to stand and move about on his own, she left him to change, taking the partially thawed peas with her. After replacing the bag of peas in the freezer, she went in search of reading material.

Inside Aidan’s room, she paused for a few moments before the photographs on his dresser. His mother looked carefree and happy in both of them, her face filled with love. In the larger, black-and-white photo, that love was directed at the photographer; in the smaller one, it was directed at the boy in her arms, a young Aidan, his overlong, messy curls glinting in the sunlight. Lucky picked up the picture and held it in her hands as she studied the boy. He was attractive even then, his boyish features showing signs of the handsome young man he would become; otherwise, he looked much like any other well-loved eleven-year-old boy. His mischievous eyes were as yet innocent of the dark knowledge that haunted those of the Aidan she knew. With a sigh as much for her own loss of the carefree days of childhood as for his, she set the picture back in place.

The reason she had not noticed the bookshelf before was because it sat along the same wall as the door in which she’d been standing, not because it was small and inconspicuous. Quite the contrary, it covered almost the entire wall. Apart from a few scattered items—small art objects or icons—its shelves were filled almost exclusively with books. Modern paperbacks mingled with ancient-looking, leather-bound tomes, subject matters including popular and classic literature of various genres, science, history, politics, art, and mythology. Lucky was curious about the leather-bound ones with no titles indicated on the spines. Lifting a tall, thin volume from the shelf, she opened its cover to a frontispiece that displayed an engraving of a demonic-looking figure. Flipping to the title page, she found that the book was written in a language she couldn’t even recognize, let alone read.

When her next few selections proved to be similar, she decided she was intrigued enough to look through them even if she couldn’t read them. She chose a stack of volumes of various sizes and shapes, which she carried back to the guest room. Finding Josh asleep, she picked a book from the stack and curled up in the armchair next to the bed. She passed over the pages of text quickly, since she couldn’t begin to decipher it, but she paused to study the drawings and engravings. Showing scenes peopled with figures both winged and unwinged, they depicted a world that had become increasingly familiar to her over the last few days. With a change of scenery and clothing, the people represented could have been among those she had seen on the bus, on the street, or in the lecture hall at the OI. She found the pictures somehow reassuring. Many other people had known about this world over the years. She wasn’t alone.

Her thoughts were pulled from the book and its drawings when Josh spoke her name. Setting the book aside, she turned to find him tugging at the covers, trying to pull them more closely around himself.

“C-cold,” he stammered. “S-so c-c-cold.”

Lucky jumped up and ran to the closet where Aidan had gotten the linens and comforter. She grabbed a stack of blankets from one of the closet shelves and, hurrying back to Josh, covered him with all of them. A couple she left folded double in an effort to warm him up. Tucking the blankets in around him, she laid a hand on his forehead and found it to be oddly cold, the polar opposite of feverish. She tucked the blankets in a little more tightly, and promising to return with something warm for him to drink, she headed down the hall to the kitchen.

Filling the tea kettle with water, she set it on the stove to heat while she rummaged through the cupboards. Her search finally turned up a couple of boxes of tea and some hot chocolate mix. After locating mugs, she put a teabag in one and the contents of one of the hot chocolate packets in another. When the water started to boil, she switched off the burner, removed the kettle from the heat, and tipped some of the boiling water into each of the two mugs. Careful so as not to spill the hot liquid, she made her way back to the guest room and her cousin.

Josh was not shaking as badly as when she had left him. The blankets seemed to be helping, but his forehead still felt cold to the touch. Keeping the blankets tucked around him as much as possible, she helped him sit up.

“Tea or hot chocolate?” she asked.

When he chose the chocolate, she held the steaming mug to his lips, so he could sip the hot beverage. By the time he had consumed half the mugful, his shivering had subsided, and he was able to remove one hand from under the blankets to hold the cup for himself. After Lucky handed him the mug, she closed her fingers around his cool ones, pressing them against the mug for warmth. When she released his hand, he lifted the cup and drained the rest of its contents before handing it back to her.

“Thank you,” he said, tucking his arm back under the blankets. “I don’t f-feel like I’m turning into an ice cube anymore.”

“Do you want the tea too? Or more hot chocolate?”

He shook his head as his eyes began to close. “I think I’m going to go back to sleep now.”

Lucky helped him keep the blankets around him as he lay back down, and she remained beside him until he fell asleep. Then she went back to the chair, where she retrieved her book.

She had looked through the pictures in two of the books and was halfway through a third, when her attention was arrested by one of the pictures. Against a dark background stood a winged man, with lines radiating from him indicating rays of light. Arching from his shoulders were wings like those of a dragon, and around his neck was a familiar medallion. As she studied the picture, Lucky’s hand rose to clasp the amulet resting against her chest. Turning the page, she found another drawing of the same man surrounded by figures of darkness, bat-winged and owl-eyed. They seemed to be looking to the shining man with the amulet as a kind of leader. A few pages later was a detailed drawing of the amulet itself, the dragon outlined against the background of a fiery sun. She wished she could read the language in which the book was written. She wanted to know what it had to say about the amulet and the man who was shown wearing it.

“Ah, the Light-Bringer’s Medallion,” said a familiar resonating voice, startling her so she nearly dropped the book.

Lucky turned to face the long-haired Cherub who had materialized beside her, asking irritably, “Don’t you ever knock, or give some kind of warning before you just show up?”

Zeke’s eyes held a mischievous glint as he replied, “I find the element of surprise frequently puts me in a position of advantage.”

The angel wasn’t wearing his usual conservative academic khakis and sports coat, but was dressed in loose flaxen pants and a long tunic that fell to just above his knees. His feet were bare.

“Don’t you feel guilty about invading people’s privacy?”

He cocked his head as if he were thinking, then he shook his head. “No, not really.”

Giving the argument up as a lost cause, Lucky registered the words he had spoken when he materialized into the room. “The Light-Bringer’s Medallion?”

“Yes.” Zeke pointed at the drawing on the page in front of her. “That is what the drawing you are looking at depicts. And,” he added more slowly, his eyes looking from her rising hand to the pendant it moved toward, “what you are wearing around your neck. Aidan gave that to you?”

She shook her head, “He
loaned
it to me. He said it would protect me and would help him find me if I was in danger.” She looked down at the amulet cradled in her hand. “It was how I called him today when Josh—”

As she said her cousin’s name, she glanced at the bed, where he was moving restlessly beneath his blankets. By the time she had reached the bed, he was throwing off the covers. Her hand brushed his when she reached to help him, and she was stunned by how warm it felt. Placing her hand on his forehead, she discovered that his skin was now as hot as it been cold earlier.

“Something’s wrong with him,” she said. “Something more than a concussion. A while ago he was freezing, and now he’s burning up. I don’t know what to do for him.”

Before she had finished speaking, Zeke had taken one of Josh’s hands in one of his own and had placed his other hand on her cousin’s forehead. As Lucky watched, pale blue light began to emanate from both of Zeke’s hands, and then the two puddles of light began to grow and extend, reaching fingers toward each other, until a shaft of light stretched from Josh’s hand up his arm to his forehead. When Zeke released that hand and reached across Josh’s body to clasp his other hand, the light extended from one hand to the other. Soon, a third shaft of light covered Josh’s remaining arm, so that the upper half of his body was encompassed by a glowing triangle of blue light. Zeke removed his hands from Josh’s body, uttering a word that Lucky felt more than heard, that was less sound than the sense of the tumblers of a lock rolling into place. She gasped as light shot from each corner of the triangle to meet in its center, where it formed a fist-sized, glowing ball—located almost directly over the place where Josh’s heart would be.

Zeke watched Josh in silence and then turned toward the door, gesturing for Lucky to follow. He paused at the doorway to direct a last glance toward her cousin as he said, “He’ll rest easier now.”