“The whole city does belong to you,” Maddy said, looking at Jacks. “It’s a little different for the rest of us.”
“Well, you know what I mean,” he said.
“And what’s the bother? All the little people getting in your way all the time?”
Jacks’s eyes roamed over her face. “Look, you seem to think I live this charmed existence. And I guess in some ways I do. But the truth is, I have to go through a lot of the same things you do. I have pressure on me. I have expectations. And I’m not perfect. I struggle.”
“Yeah, right,” Maddy groaned, her tone rebellious. “The kid in the hundred-thousand-dollar sports car is telling me about struggle.”
“I’m just trying to say we have more in common than you might think.”
“You don’t know the first thing about me!” Maddy exclaimed. Jacks downshifted hard, the gears grinding in protest. His blue eyes flashed.
“Why won’t you give me a chance, Maddy?”
“Because,” she nearly yelled, “you think you just get to have anything you want, don’t you? You want something, it’s yours. That’s the way life works for you. Well, that’s not how it works for me, so it’s not how it’s going to work with me. I don’t fall for the money and the charm and the car. It takes a lot more than that.”
Jacks nodded, suddenly thoughtful. He flipped on the car’s turn signal.
“Okay, let’s ditch the car.”
He pulled the Ferrari onto a gravel turnout next to an overlook and killed the engine. “Will you be warm enough?” he asked. Maddy looked out to the bench framed against the twinkling cityscape.
“I think so.”
The wooden bench was cracked and worn smooth, yet was surprisingly comfortable as they sat. Just beyond their feet, the earth sloped down gently at first, then dropped off dramatically into a deep canyon. Cut into the hillside like temples, the Angel houses glowed in the night. Jacks took his jacket and draped it around Maddy’s slender frame.
“Thanks,” she said. No one had ever put a jacket around her before.
Jacks’s presence inside the jacket was almost overwhelming. His smell was intoxicating. Maddy took a deep breath, steadying herself. Silence overtook them as they looked at the city together. A cricket chirped nearby, stopped, then started again. Jacks spoke.
“You said I wasn’t forgiven for lying to you. Well, it wasn’t all a lie.” He paused. “I was only two . . .
when my father . . .” He trailed off.
Maddy chose her words carefully. “I thought Angels couldn’t die.”
“True Immortals can’t, but there are only twelve of them. Born Immortals can be . . . made mortal.” Jacks traced a circle in the dirt with the toe of his shoe. He stared at it, thinking for a split second of the policeman’s visit to his house and the mutilated wings that had been found on the boulevard. “I don’t even really know what my dad looked like, aside from a few old pictures. He died fighting the rebel terrorists.” Jacks looked away, his blue eyes reflecting the lights of the city.
Maddy raised an eyebrow—that’s something they definitely hadn’t covered in Angel History. But there were a lot of things the Angels kept to themselves.
“Well, I know what he looked like,” Maddy said. “He had dark hair. And pale, blue eyes.” Jacks laughed a little, shaking his head.
“I have my mother’s eyes . . .” he said. “And, I’m told, my father’s wings.”
“His wings?”
Jacks nodded. “Broad and strong. A Battle Angel’s wings.”
The question came out of Maddy so fast she didn’t have time to stop it.
“Can I see them?”
“My wings?” Jacks asked about his most famous feature in disbelief. “You don’t know—” he cut himself off, holding his tongue. Not wanting to come across to this girl as conceited.
“Yeah, your wings,” Maddy said, now embarrassed but unable to take it back. “I mean . . . what’s the big deal? Can’t I see them?”
Jacks got to his feet and pulled Maddy up with him. Maddy watched the muscles move under his shirt. Suddenly, the quiet night filled with the shrill tearing of fabric and Jacks’s wings expanded out of his back. Razor sharp, they pierced the night sky, knifing out from behind his shoulders with such force it blew her hair back. The sound of the whoosh was deafening. The wings reached out six feet in both directions, then settled, powerful and muscled, awaiting the command to fly. They glowed with their trademark blue luminescence, casting light on Maddy’s face. She was breathless.