Jessica Swift These Wings Were Made to Fly Page 2

  “Oh god,” I whispered to myself.

  Wings.

  “Oh god, oh god.”

  I had sprouted wings.

  I shook one, feeling the sensation of it moving against my spine, like rolling a shoulder. It was sore, like sleeping on a limb funny. I could feel the wing, it was attached to my body and covered in feathers.

  I suddenly couldn’t breathe.

  I stumbled out of the cardboard bin, the wings behind me spreading out as I fell to the ground on all fours. My stomach heaved but there was nothing in it to come out. I stayed like that until my knees started to hurt.

  This couldn’t be happening.

  I stood up, the wings folding in behind me, and I felt a wave of dizziness. I must have lost a lot of blood overnight. When I tried to pull my shirt down it got caught on the tops of the wings. I ended up tearing the entire back of it off and wrapped myself up in the now ruined blanket.

  Carefully, I put one foot in front of the other and emerged from the alleyway. It was midmorning, the sun higher up than I expected, then again, how else would it have managed to reach my bin in the alley? There weren’t a lot of people or cars on the road since everyone was at work or school by this point. Still, I would have to be careful to avoid anyone. The blood on the blanket looked bad but at least it was something normal, the last thing I needed were people panicking over seeing a winged freak.

  I needed to clean up, and I absolutely hated myself for where I was going.

  With the light of day, I knew where I was and began making my way to my destination. A few people did see me, but apparently a girl wrapped in a dark, stained blanket either didn’t seem to register on their radar or they only wanted to mind their own business. One older guy’s eyes did widen and he asked me “Are you okay?” before I disappeared quickly around a corner.

  When I got to Brandy’s house I waited outside, watching to see if anyone was there. After last night, I wouldn’t be surprised if Brandy had stayed home from school. There were no cars in the driveway, but I made sure to check through the windows.

  When I was sure no one was home, I popped part of the cardboard off the broken sliding door, as little as I could manage, and slipped in. I wandered through the rest of the house to double check that it was truly empty. With that done I threw my clothes in the laundry and jumped in the shower.

  Even with the shower being a tub combo, instead of a smaller shower stall, it was awkward with my new appendages. I knocked the shampoo over twice and kept bumping into the walls. It was hard to wash them and they felt strange. The feathers were like hair, the lowermost ones almost as long as my arm. The entire process took over an hour and the hot water ran out. I tried to dry them by ruffling them with a towel, but it hurt. After some trial and error I found smoothing them down did the trick.

  With the wings clean I could see that they were tawny, stripes of darker brown running through them horizontally, like an owl or hawk. I ran my fingers through them, they were admittedly gorgeous. I wrapped a towel around myself and tried to spread them out but found the bathroom too small. I moved to Brandy’s room and, while there was more space, it took me standing diagonally to get them to their full length.

  Each wing was a bit longer than I was tall, and I stood barely over 5’7. The feeling of stretching them out was amazing and I found myself yawning in response. I’d had terrible sleep last night (go figure), so I laid down on the bed. It felt a million times better than cardboard but it took some wrangling with my wings before I found a comfortable position. Lying on my stomach, with one tucked in and the other spread out on top like a blanket, I fell asleep.

  I woke up three hours later starving. I exchanged my towel for a bathrobe, throwing my clothes in the dryer and making myself a sandwich. Before I could take a single bite I paused. I could shower, wash my clothes, and take a nap, but by taking their food, I felt I would cross a line.

  My stomach rumbled loudly.

  "Sorry Brandy,” I said before taking a bite. I decided I would have to take the fifty out of my tumble-drying jeans and leave it on the kitchen counter or something.

  After finishing my sandwich I went back into Brandy’s room, finding an old backpack in the top of her closet, one she must have deemed no longer fashionable, and a low-cut halter tank top I wouldn’t have to slice through to get the wings to fit. I headed to the bathroom, finding a new toothbrush and a spare tube of toothpaste in a drawer.

  The dryer buzzed and I changed into my clothes. Luckily the blood had washed out okay, but the shirt, as I’d expected, was obliterated. When I put on the backpack it nestled perfectly in the gap between the wings, (it was still too much to think of them as my wings.) I pulled out the money to leave behind and saw the bills were stained with dark brown. There was no way I could pay them with this. With a sigh I put the money back in my pocket.

  There was a buzz from my phone.

  Still alive? The text read.

  I had a feeling the messenger wasn’t joking. I replied with a simple Yes.

  Go to the mall.

  I had to admit, whoever this was, they hadn’t steered me wrong so far. Not to mention I didn’t really have anywhere else to go. Before I left there were a few things I had to do. The staple gun they'd used last night was still in the kitchen so I reclosed the spot I had opened. With another pang of guilt I also took a longer, thin jacket, cutting slits into it with kitchen scissors. The combination of it and the backpack managed to hide the bulk of the wings.

  I left through the front door, locking it behind me. I look one last look at Brandy’s house, letting out a deep breath through pursed lips. I knew I was never going to see the house, or Brandy, ever again. Moving so much meant I was used to the feeling of not getting too attached to places or people. That, at least, was my one normal in all of this.

  With these new wings on my back though, I was worried if anything would ever be normal again.

  Chapter 4

  I was starving by the time I made it back into downtown. With my wings hidden no one paid any attention to me, but I still had the urge to spread them out.

  Nepasko Lake sat on the border between Northern Idaho and Washington. While the mall itself was overly big for the city it resided in, being two stories tall, it served the surrounding area for miles. Some people drove all the way from Montana to come here. I kept my head down and walked inconspicuously as I thought about my situation.

  One: I had freaking wings.

  Two: Suits were real and trying to kill me.

  Three: I had to fix both on my own somehow.

  The thought crossed my mind that I might be able to cut the wings off, but it sounded horrific. Besides, what was I supposed to do, use a hacksaw? I shuddered.

  This was getting me nowhere. With a sigh I plopped down on a bench. I was tired and I wanted this nightmare to end.

  A girl my age sat down next to me and began playing with her phone. Her black hair was cropped short with a gray beanie pulled low over her head, causing her bangs to form a curtain over her face. She wore a black tank top, a red checkered shirt over it, and dirty gray jeans. She tapped her left palm. My eyes travelled from a simple black ring on her middle down to her pale left wrist where a little tattoo of a question mark with a vertical line through it was inked.

  “You’re being followed,” she said quietly. It took me a moment to realize she was talking to me and not her phone, which I now noticed wasn't even turned on. She tapped her thumbs on the dead screen as though texting. “Exit north, through the food court, and then take off when you reach the end of the parking lot.”

  “Wh-” I began but she interrupted me.

  “Go!” she shouted before shoving me off the bench, forcing me into a standing position.

  We were currently on the second floor so I dashed down the walkway toward the open spiral staircase that would take me down to the first floor. I heard the girl shout something in response but I was already on the steps.

  A man in a business suit bumped
into me halfway down, I tried to move past him but he grabbed my arm, his expression angry and intense. His grip was like iron and I had to twist to break his hold.

  Unfortunately, this sent me off the side of the stairs.

  I tumbled over the glass railing of the staircase, my wings shooting out through the tank top and slits in the jacket. I felt them catch air and found myself hitting the floor on my feet with a surprisingly graceful landing. I didn’t stick around to consider this, instead running to the food court. Two more men in suits began squeezing through other people to get to me, their pace hurried but not enough to draw too much attention.

  I shoved past a family, my body hitting a table, feathers dragging through ketchup before slamming the outside doors open. I kept going, running diagonally in the rows of cars in the hopes that I wouldn’t be seen. It was when I hit the grass at the end of the parking lot that I stopped, my mind racing.

  It was one thing to call them Suits, it was another to actually see them. Suits were real. As in, literal men in suits. Suits with a capital S.

  Mom never was one for subtlety.

  Then I remembered what the girl had said. Take off? What had she meant by take off?

  I looked behind me, seeing five of the Suits now exiting the same door I had, their heads turning one way and then another in unison as they scanned the landscape looking for me. At first I thought I had imagined it but now, with them all clustered together, I saw that they nearly looked like clones. Their faces were identical. Only their hair and eye color were different.

  I would later think about the fact that I was able to determine eye color from the distance of a parking lot.

  I started running again, heading east, opposite the direction I had originally come from. The last thing I wanted was to draw more creeps to Brandy’s house. I ran until I thought my lungs were going to explode which was, to my surprise, halfway across Nepasko.

  When had I been able to run that far for that long?

  It was another block to a park by the lake so I kept going until I found a picnic table. I collapsed onto the seat, closing my eyes in relief and pulling hair out of my mouth as I panted.

  The entire table shook as something hit it. I leapt up and spun around, seeing one of the Suits standing on the seat opposite where I’d just been.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” was all I could manage.

  He continued toward me, stepping up onto the table, down on my seat and then the ground, like they were stairs. I backed away slowly, unsure of what to do.

  Something fast dropped from the sky at an angle, hitting the guy square in his back and sending him face first into the ground. It was the girl from the mall, her beefy leather boots leaving dirty prints on his black, tailored jacket. Her plaid over-shirt was missing.

  Her wings were spread wide open.

  Unlike mine they were solid colored, the large feathers at the bottom nearly black and the smaller ones becoming lighter toward the top until they were a tawny gold. I was awestruck, suddenly realizing I wasn’t alone.

  “Y-you can fly?” I stammered.

  “You can’t?” she shot back.

  The guy under her started to move.

  She took my arm and started to run, saying, “We don’t have long, fledgling, so I’m going to make this quick. Keep running until you’ve hit maximum speed and then jump as high as you possibly can, which is going to be a lot higher than you’re expecting. You need to pull your wings out and then push them down, hard. Remember, you’re an airplane, not a helicopter. Keep at an angle, and after that, it’s a matter of up and down.”

  “What if I can’t?”

  “Then you die.”

  She let me go.

  I ran ten more feet before launching off the ground. She was right, I found myself jumping nearly the height of a large tree, when I felt myself stalling in the air I snapped my wings open. I could feel the air resistance as I pushed down, gaining a touch of height, my body wobbled and I found myself unable to raise them again.

  “Roll your shoulders!” the girl shouted as she crouched before jumping, her own wings opening.

  I did, bringing my wings upward and down again, pushing higher and higher.

  Oh my god this felt amazing.

  Before long people, then cars, were tiny dots on the ground, roads were dark ribbons separating the park from the rest of Nepasko Lake. Buildings were nothing but brown and black and white squares.

  The other winged girl rose up to meet me. “Angle your body horizontal and follow me. Try to keep above and behind, a touch to the side as well. If you can, sync your wing beats with mine,” she said.

  The wind against my face was crisp and it whipped my hair all over. We headed mostly south for a little more than an hour before her altitude began to decrease. I watched her dive down and swoop up at the last minute, landing perfectly on her feet. I half fell, straining as I tried to do the same, afraid of hitting the ground too fast and too hard. I ended up at a run, tripping the last few steps, my hands landing on the ground in front of me as I rolled.

  The grass we stood in reached up to my waist. I suspected, come mid-summer, it would be as tall as I was. In front of me stood a rickety wooden shed the size of a small garage, broken windows revealing dusty darkness. To my left was a tall pole barn in better shape with farm equipment parked inside. Up on a hill there was a big blue farmhouse. Except for the property full of trees there was nothing but rolling farmland as far as the eye could see.

  “Not bad for a fledgling,” the girl said. “The first time I tried landing I got dirt up my nose.” She held her wrist out and tapped her tattoo saying, “My name is Terra and this is an interrobang. It’s a failsafe I hope I never end up using but also comes in handy on days like today.”

  “I’m Jessica Swift,” I said, expecting a handshake while she went in for a fist bump. Her fist met my palm in a sideways awkward turkey. “Where are we?”

  “Somewhere safe,” she said, walking up a set of steps built into the hill. “I’ll explain everything when we’re inside.”

  Chapter 5

  When we reached the back door Terra pulled a small leathery case out of her pocket and produced two metal tools from it. I’d never seen lockpicks in person before and so watched with quiet interest as she gently jiggled one tool and tapped with the other. After several minutes I heard a distinctive clack and Terra opened the door with a flourish of her hands and a “Ta da!” I couldn’t think of why anyone would want to break into this place until I realized we happened to be people breaking in.

  “This is my dad’s house,” she said, “so we won’t be disturbed here.”

  “Why don’t you have a key?” I said.

  “Too easy to lose while travelling and, if I did, they could trace it back to here. I try to keep my ties difficult to trace.”

  The house was furnished, but a layer of gray dust covered everything. Terra opened the kitchen cupboards and pulled out some cans and a clear glass bowl. Using a can opener from a drawer, she plopped the contents into the bowl and placed it in the microwave.

  I took a seat at a small breakfast nook.

  Once she got the food heating she spoke. “I can tell based on talking to you for the last twenty-four hours or so, and the fact that you can’t fly very well, that you’re quite new and inexperienced.

  “Wait, twenty-four hours?” Then it hit me. “You’ve been the one messaging me.”

  I watched her look in the fridge and make a face as she pulled out a moldy bag of shredded cheese. “Yeah, it wasn’t hard to find your number. So tell me, how long have you had your wings, a week now?”

  “Today,” I mumbled.

  Terra gaped. “Holy crap Jessica, you already have angels chasing you after a single day?”

  “Angels?” I said.

  “Yeah, that’s the catchall term we use for them. Those guys, who came after you at the mall, were bottom-feeders. They all sorta look like the same guy that’s a cross between a clothing ad and a law fir
m. Unlike what you see in most depictions, the bottom-feeders don’t have wings unless they manage to get promoted to archangel. These days promotions are only handed out if they manage to kill a nephil. So every time a child dies an angel gets its wings.” The microwave dinged and Terra pulled out the chili, spooning it up into two bowls and sliding one across the table to me.

  “And I’m a nephil?” I said.

  “Right,” she said. “A nephil is an angel-human hybrid. At some point an angel fell in love with your mom and together they created a little abomination, that’s you, sort of.”

  “What do you mean sort of?”

  “Pure-blooded nephil are easy to track. I don’t know if angels can smell them or what. To no one’s surprise, I’ve never had the opportunity to ask. Most nephil are killed before they’re even born, the few that do survive don’t make it past their infancy. In the last twenty years, however, something has been happening. A small handful of nephil created have been,” she seemed to be searching for the right word, “anomalous. It makes us harder to find.”

  The chili was too hot and I had to blow on it before taking a bite, it was good though. “So why has it taken sixteen years for wings to suddenly sprout from my back?”

  “No one knows they’re a nephil until they hit their Grace, which basically means angel puberty. I was an early bloomer at eleven. I turned sixteen a couple months ago. As your Grace awakens you grow wings and other weird stuff starts to happen to you.”

  “You mean like coming home to your house on fire and someone slaughtering your mom?” I said, drawing a trail through my chili with a spoon.

  “Yeah,” she said quietly, “but there are worse things they can do.”

  My gaze shot up to look at Terra, her face was down, bangs hiding her expression.