Jessica Swift These Wings Were Made to Fly Page 6

  Red snorted in laughter.

  “Shut up!” Squeaky said, giving her companion a kick. She then turned to me, “Mama Colleen said I could shoot you for any reason, don’t tempt me.”

  “I’m betting I could kick your teeth in and mash your face into the floor before I even started sawing logs. Don’t tempt me,” I snapped back at her.

  The scowl remained on Squeaky’s face, but I swear I saw a flicker of fear run across it.

  I was taken to a large bedroom and thrown into a cage. Red clicked a padlock onto the door, but not before she looked up at me, a small quirk of a smile appearing for a second. As she walked away I could swear I heard her murmur “Bulb Head.”

  The enclosure was five by eight foot in size, meant for dogs, and took up half of what looked like a small bedroom. It was made with heavy chain-link fence that included a top, in case I could somehow squeeze through that one inch gap to the room’s ceiling above me. A window allowed me to look outside. There was a large pavilion with three long benches not far away. A couple of cultists were setting up a table at the front with paper plates, plastic cutlery, and condiments like ketchup and mustard.

  Great, I was privy to a cultist barbecue.

  Chapter 13

  I watched from my miniature prison, trying not to salivate, as every member of Rumor’s crazy little following ate their burgers and hotdogs. After dinner Rumor was led to an elevated platform by a woman I hadn’t seen before. She was totally average, middle-aged with glasses and graying-ginger hair that had white feathers braided into it. More white feathers hung from her jewelry and a belt for her robe. This had to be Mama Colleen and, while she looked like a suburban mom that should be making cookies for her kid’s school bake sale, everything about her screamed “leader” to me.

  I couldn’t tell what she was saying but her entire audience was enraptured, and once in a while they would cheer. Meanwhile Rumor stood there with her eyes downcast, she was dressed in a white robe painted with rainbow swirls and trimmed in gold, her wings were folded but not hidden. I noticed the woman kept at least one hand on Rumor’s shoulder or wing the entire time, like a person keeping a dog in check.

  When the speech was finished she gave Rumor a side hug before handing her off to the ladies-in-waiting. A moment later the door to the bedroom where I was located opened and Rumor was led in. When she saw me she came over, her fingers reaching through the enclosure toward me. Her mouth was open slightly in surprise.

  This close I could see her face was covered in a fine shimmer of silky makeup and her long lashes were covered in white mascara, making them look like they were covered in frost. A simple crown of tiny white flowers sat atop her head.

  She looked miserable.

  The girls pulled her away from my cage to fawn over her like a doll, changing her into a plain robe of silver before parking her in a chair in front of a vanity dresser. They began talking to her in overly chipper voices about how beautiful she was and that it was such an honor to serve her.

  “Thank you,” Rumor said to them, followed by, “Please leave now?”

  They looked at each other. I heard small, hushed complaints, including “she’s never asked us to leave before.” Soon, however, they all stepped out.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, looking at me through the reflection of the mirror. “They told me if I went with them they wouldn’t hurt the rest of the cast.”

  There was a tranquilizer pistol set casually on a dresser. “They’ve never had these guns before,” she said in her airy, distracted voice as she picked it up. “Mister Roth gave them these guns.”

  “Roth?” I said.

  “The man.”

  Oh, Bulb Head.

  I had an idea.

  “Take the gun and get out of here, Rumor,” I said. “Shoot everyone who gets in your way.”

  “Dart guns only have one shot,” she said. “The cast will rescue us.”

  “The cast doesn’t know where we are! If you get out you can tell them where this encampment is and they can come back to get me.”

  “The cast will rescue us,” she said again in the exact same tone.

  I rattled the wall of the cage in frustration. I could feel a building headache between my eyes. Great, I was stuck here, waiting, because the princess couldn’t rescue herself. She wasn’t restrained in any way. She could have easily taken flight at the pavilion!

  “How many times has the cast rescued you?” I asked.

  “Every time,” she said.

  Well, even if it was just the first time, she wasn’t technically wrong I guess.

  A few minutes later the ladies-in-waiting came back, this time with Mama Colleen herself in tow.

  I saw Rumor’s posture change, becoming rigid.

  “Rumor!” Mama Coleen shouted like a disappointed mother. “What do you think you’re doing? You have a ceremony to memorize and I find you here, corrupting yourself by talking to this wretched thing?”

  “Hey I’m not wretched!” I said. “I’ll have you know I get straight A’s in school and I eat all my vegetables at the dinner table.”

  She ignored me, instead putting her hands on Rumor’s shoulders. “Sweetie, please, let your ladies do their job, you wouldn’t want them to get in trouble, would you?”

  Rumor looked at me for a while longer before settling on the four girls. “No Mama Colleen,” she said.

  “And you wouldn’t want to let down everyone who’s counting on you, right?”

  Rumor’s face was passive, but her voice trembled, “No Mama Colleen.”

  “You want to make me proud, right?”

  This time it was nothing but a whisper, “Yes Mama Colleen.”

  “Of course you do. We love you, Rumor. Come here.”

  Mama Colleen opened her arms wide. Rumor hesitated before stepping in for a hug. From my angle I saw Mama Colleen looking at Rumor’s wings, stroking them tenderly. Her fingers dug into the feathers and she suddenly ripped out a handful, causing Rumor to cry out in pain. I saw blood on the tips of the quills.

  “Now go with the ladies, Rumor, or else I’ll have to punish them too.”

  As Rumor was led away I looked again at the feathers Mama Colleen decorated herself with.

  I was wrong, Rumor was being held captive, but not in restraints I could physically see.

  “You’re sick,” I said, horrified.

  Mama Colleen looked at me, Rumor’s feathers still clutched in her fist. “She is none of your concern. You, meanwhile, are being sold to Pinnacle. If anything, you should be more worried about yourself.”

  I slammed my whole body against the fence, causing the cage to move forward a few inches, my fingers clinging tightly to the thin metal that separated us. “When I get out of here,” I said in a low voice, “and I will, I’ll make sure you regret ever laying a finger on her.”

  Mama Colleen took a step back. “Rumor will never leave this compound again,” she snapped. “No one will take her from us. Not you, not her cast, not anyone. We will have our judgment.”

  She slammed the door shut behind her. I know she’d intended to intimidate me, but I wasn’t Rumor, and I’d seen that moment of fear in her eyes. I don’t know if it was my tone, or if she’d seen something I wasn’t aware I was projecting, but that one little action had cost her everything.

  Most kids stay in the general circle of other kids in education, from Kindergarten through high school if they’re lucky. They get a long time to learn and adapt to everyone’s personalities. Moving around a lot meant being in different schools all the time, so I never really got that chance. Being the perpetual new kid meant I had to be fast at figuring out personalities, deeper down than the initial meet and greet.

  I knew a bully when I saw one.

  While Squeaky was a run-of-the-mill schoolyard bully, Mama Colleen was a manipulator, using Rumor’s angelic appearance to control those around her.

  I, meanwhile, was an inconvenience. One angel was a miracle, two was a problem. By setting me
up to be evil I’d been instantly condemned by everyone in the compound. There was no possible way they were going to let me go, nor were they apparently planning to keep me around as a spare savior. I had to find a way out before they came back.

  I checked the edges of my cage, hoping to find a loose screw or shoddy workmanship, but it was built solid. I felt especially stupid because, if I were outdoors, I could have tipped the whole thing over.

  My only hope was the door. With enough force I might break the padlock. I kicked at the frame until the metal bent and I was out of breath, but it held firm. I sat back in defeat. At this point my best bet was to wait until the metal rusted in fifty years.

  I looked down at the floor. The fake wood was scratched up from where I pushed the cage forward at Mama Colleen.

  That gave me some options.

  I was about to body slam it again when I heard someone call out from the other side of the door.

  “Hello?”

  Then, of all things, she knocked.

  I laughed, saying, “I’d answer the door but I’ve got my hands full playing jailbird right now.

  “Right, sorry.”

  There was some shuffling before Red, the second tier lady-in-waiting from before, entered. She held a paper plate with a cheeseburger on it and some plain potato chips, setting it on a table before going back to retrieve a sleeping bag from the other room.

  “I thought you might be hungry,” she said. “So I brought you some food. Oh, but Mister Roth has the key, so I don’t have a way of getting it to you. I’m sorry.”

  “No it’s okay,” I said. “Here, I’ll lift this cage up a little and you can slide the plate under.”

  The ceiling allowed me to pull the cage up for Red to push the burger through, the top bun sliding off in the process. Honestly, at this point I was so hungry she could have crammed pieces of the burger through the chain links and I would have eaten them.

  “I wasn’t sure if you would want cheese or not,” Red babbled, “but Rumor always likes extra cheese so I added two slices to yours with some ketchup and dill pickles. If you don’t want dill pickles though I can get you some sweet ones instead but, uh, it’s got mustard. Rumor hates mustard but-.”

  I shook my head, biting into the burger. “No this is perfect,” I moaned in bliss.

  Chapter 14

  “So what’s your name?” Red asked me once I was finished with my burger. “I’m Margaret.”

  “Jessica,” I said, folding the paper plate up and poking it through the cage wall.

  “That name sounds so ordinary,” she laughed. “I’ve never met another angel except for Rumor. I didn’t know more than one existed.”

  I thought of the cast as well as all the Suits that attacked me at the mall. “Oh, they’re around.”

  “What’s it like to have wings?” she asked next, unrolling the sleeping bag and pushing it through from the bottom of my enclosure.

  “Shouldn’t you be afraid of me?” I said. “I’m supposed to be some sort of falsie, according to Mama Colleen anyway.”

  “I don’t know,” Margaret said. “Before yesterday no one had heard of a false angel until Mama Colleen starting calling you that. It feels like they made it up on the spot because they weren’t expecting you.”

  It was nice to know not everyone in SOAR followed the rules blindly. Because of that, I decided to oblige her. “Having wings is like having an extra pair of arms,” I said. “Except the arms are really thin, and the thumbs and fingers are extra long. Or maybe they’re like legs, except you fly instead of walk. Actually, they’re not like either one. Seeing my wings in my peripheral vision freaks me out, like I keep thinking someone is standing really close to me. Flying through? It’s like those dreams you have, except a thousand times better because it’s real. Feeling the cool wind in your face and the warm sun on your back is unlike anything else in the world.”

  Margaret listened to all of this with her eyes closed, a small, contented smile on her face. “You’re not like Rumor at all,” she said after a minute. “You’re so normal, and I think you make Mama Colleen really angry.”

  “Mama Colleen shouldn’t be allowed to push people around,” I said. “What is it about Rumor that’s got people excited enough to start a-” I had to bite back the word cult “a following?”

  “Rumor’s going to herald the apocalypse, bringing judgment down on humanity. A couple of members are bringing some kind of horn from the east coast where the main SOAR encampment is located. Rumor’s supposed to blow on it or something.”

  “Jeez,” I said, “a whole apocalypse? No pressure or anything.”

  Margaret laughed.

  She seemed like a nice girl that didn’t belong in a cult, and I really wanted to ask her to help me escape. I had a very strong feeling she would get the key and unlock my cage. The words themselves were on the very edge of my lips when one of the white-robed girls, a hood drawn up low so that I couldn’t see her face, crashed through.

  “You!” she shouted, grabbing the front of Margaret’s shirt and slamming her against the side of my cage. “You shouldn’t be here.”

  My mind flashed back to Mama Colleen ripping Rumor’s feathers out, and I knew this wouldn’t end well for Margaret. I reached through and tried to pry the girl’s fingers off. “Leave her alone!”

  The white-robed girl clamped down on my fingers. “You just sit tight little fledgling,” she snarled.

  Wait, fledgling?

  I looked down at the hand that had seized mine. While the black ring on her middle finger was absent, I saw a little interrobang tattoo on her wrist.

  Terra.

  Terra turned again to Margaret, saying, “You should go, before someone else finds out you’re in here. I won’t report it this time, but next time?” she paused for effect before whipping around and leaving. Margaret gave me one last apologetic look before following her out the door.

  Did Terra really mean to sit tight? Was the rest of the cast here or just her? I had no way of knowing what was happening. At the moment I was the only one holding the rest of us back from escaping. Once I was out we could find a way to get Rumor.

  I decided to try and find my own way to escape.

  I counted sixty breaths from when the door closed before I got to work. Pushing the cage was tricky. If I moved it too fast the bottom would screech on the floor, and it was too heavy and awkward to pick up and walk around. I ended up with a combination of lifting and pushing from the bottom.

  I got to the dresser where the tranquilizer gun sat and tried to push my fingers through. If I could grab it maybe I could use it when someone opened my cage. Unfortunately my hand was barely able to fit between the holes in the fence. I could fire the gun with my arms out, but getting the gun into my side to hide would be impossible. Besides, fumbling around with it I was more likely to bump the trigger and accidentally shoot myself.

  Except for the gun there was a tray of perfumes on the dresser. I could probably get the drawers open, but with the angle I wouldn’t be able to reach inside very far. I was considering knocking the perfume tray over to spite everyone when I saw a bowl of hair accessories on the vanity. It took me a moment to get there, and the bowl was barely within reach, but I managed to slide it off the edge until all the bits and pieces fell out into my reach.

  Including, yes, a bobby pin!

  I remembered Terra picking the lock at her dad’s house. She had a fancy set of picks but I’d seen people in movies use a bobby pin. I snatched the pin and bent it into an L shape before jamming it into the lock, feeling the tumblers inside as I jiggled it. I had no idea what I was doing, but it looked like what Terra had done and this was my last desperate effort.

  After twenty minutes and picking up the bobby pin for a twelfth time, I gave up.

  I sat down, drawing my knees up and resting my head on them. Despair and anger bubbled up in me. I wanted to tear this whole place apart and everyone in it. I had to keep from wanting to slap Rumor too, reminding myself
she was being held captive here in her own way. In a lot of ways I was the lucky one between us.

  I guess the only choice I had was to sit and wait.

  It had been a long day I decided, as I flopped belly-down on the sleeping bag. The silky outside material felt nice and cool on my skin. Throughout this ordeal I’d kept my wings tucked in tightly against my body, and it was a relief to relax some muscles. They eased out against my backside, the feathers tickling the backs of my knees slightly. I brought them up and out, feeling a couple of pops in my spine as I stretched and yawned.

  I was dog tired. Or maybe it was bird tired?

  I fell asleep with those thoughts in my head and when I woke it was well past midnight. The moon was high in the sky and its blue light filled the room. The door to the room was open, the darkness beyond absolute. Standing in the room to the left of the door was a white-dressed silhouette.

  “Terra,” I whispered. She didn’t answer and, after a moment, I knew why.

  It was Rumor.

  She was pointing a gun at me.

  Chapter 15

  I recognized the tranquilizer gun from the dresser, and my hands were up in a surrendering gesture immediately.

  “Whoa!” I said. “Rumor, hey, ease up. I’m not having any sleeping problems so I think it’s safe to put that thing down.”

  “No,” she shook her head quickly, making her pale locks whip around. “No no no. I can’t let them take you.”

  “Let who take me, Rumor? Are you talking about Pinnacle?”

  She looked terrible. Her face was contorted in misery, and I could see tears spilling down her cheeks. I’d never seen her with this intense of an expression before, even during her panic attack. It made her look human for the first time since meeting her.

  “Yes. They got these guns from Pinnacle,” she said. “They got these guns, in advance, in exchange for a nephil. For you. Mama Colleen is going to give you to Pinnacle, Jessica. She’s going to give you to Doctor Draper.”