“Giant Killer, unidentified bogey at my twelve, within range but I do not see anything. Pretty spooky, over.” There was a taste of fear in the pilot’s voice this time.
“Where the hell are you?” the pilot said aloud.
“Showtime, get out of there now. That is a direct order!”
The pilot’s eyes grew in terror and shock. He saw it: just ahead of him, emerging from the waves, was some sort of enormous, terrible, black, smoking object. It seemed to be on fire. And he was heading straight for it.
“Showtime, you’re on a vector for collision. Take evasive manoeuvres. Now, now!”
The cockpit erupted in alarms as all of the F-18’s instruments suddenly began failing. With all his strength, Jenkins pulled on the stick to pull the jet up, but he was helpless: it wouldn’t respond. There was no changing course. He was being drawn in.
With supreme terror, the pilot saw the giant, flaming thing turn towards him as it surged further up from the roiling waves. He saw its eyes. Red and unblinking.
“Dear God! MAYDAY! MAYDAY! MAYDAY!”
The giant hand of the thing reached towards the screaming F-18 and pulled the jet down to the ocean, with Lieutenant Jenkins in it, as easy as a child playing with a toy. The aircraft crumpled under the impact. Instantly igniting, the jet fuel turned the fighter into a tumbling mass of fire, human body parts and shrapnel.
“Raider one-one-two, do you copy? Raider one-one-two, do you copy? Jesus, Showtime, answer!” they called from the tower. But Lieutenant Jenkins could not hear them. There was no more Lieutenant Jenkins.
The burning flotsam of the shattered and twisted remains of the jet floated atop the waves, pouring black smoke into the darkening sky.
Satisfied, the terrible thing slowly submerged again beneath the murky waves, as if it had never even been there. Slipping underwater, it somehow continued flaming and roiling hot smoke even as it dived. The fiery creature flared with menace as it slowly drifted ever deeper undersea, a bonfire burning into the ocean depths.
CHAPTER 2
Maddy woke with a start, her eyelids popping open, her breath coming quick and shallow. She pushed herself up in bed and sat there gasping, letting the terror of the horrific nightmare slowly bleed o
ut of her. A cold sheen of sickly sweat clung to her skin. Just a dream, Maddy, she told herself. It was just a dream. Lifting her head, she looked out of the window. There it was, like a ghost in the misty half-light – the Angel City sign. It loomed huge and silent on the hill, perfectly framed by Maddy’s bedroom window. She sighed. The final remnants of the dream faded to nothing, replaced by the reality that she was still living in Los Angeles. Still stuck in the Immortal City.
She looked out of the window at the brilliant Southern California morning. The grass on the hill beyond her bedroom window was brown and dry from the hot summer, and the towering, fifteen-metre letters of the Angel City sign gleamed in the sunlight above it. She let her eyes drift from the window to the walls of her bedroom, which seemed strangely naked, no longer covered with childhood posters and mementos of her youth, and then to her nearly empty wardrobe, which had a few lonely wire hangers in it.
The nightmare had plagued Maddy more than a few times now. And it was always the same: Jackson Godspeed came into her uncle’s diner, just as he did the first time they met, except in the dream he wore a casual T-shirt and faded blue jeans. The truth was, it didn’t matter what he wore. He was the world’s most famous Guardian Angel, and he had the perpetual look of a model who had just stepped out of a fashion magazine or off a billboard. He came in, looked at her with his pale blue eyes, and told her she was going to train to be a Guardian. Just like he had done in real life almost nine months before.
And in the dream she always hesitated.
“I . . . I don’t know what to say, Jacks,” she said to him. “I guess I need time to think about it.”
“Maddy,” he said, looking at her and yet seeing right through her, his eyes distant in a way she’d never witnessed when she was awake. “You don’t have a choice. You don’t seem to understand. You’re already changing.”
In the dream, she opened her mouth to speak, but the words died on her lips as a sharp pain erupted in her back. The muscles of her back contracted violently, twisting into excruciating knots. Maddy staggered backwards across the dining room. Her hand flew out to catch herself but managed only to knock over a nearby table, sending cups and dirty plates shattering on the floor.
Jacks hadn’t moved.
She convulsed again, and all at once she realized it was more than a muscle spasm in her back. Much more. Something was moving back there. Something inside her was alive. The skin on her back stretched tight, pulled taught like a drum. She choked back a wave of nausea as she felt the thing – no, things – twist inside her again, pushing eagerly against her, trying desperately to get out.
Then she heard it.
It started like the sound of tearing construction paper, followed by a tremendous POP. It was the sound of her skin splitting along her spine. There was the feeling of something exploding out of her back, and then with a sudden whoosh of air, she was pushed hard against the floor.
She had wings.
They protruded out of her back, jutting up through her shredded waitress uniform and the mangled remains of her back. She lifted her head to look at her reflection in the plate glass window. Her wings looked nothing like Jacks’s wings, nothing like the beautiful, luminescent wings of the Guardians. Maddy’s wings were horrific. Deformed and sickly, they thrashed uncontrollably on her back like the ill-formed appendages of something that was never meant to be.
The wings of a monster.
Recalling the nightmare again, Maddy shuddered and ran her hands across her back. She put one foot, then her second foot on the floor next to the bed. Pulling up the T-shirt she slept in, she quickly spun and looked at her back in the full-length mirror. She knew it had been a dream. But she wanted to make sure, nevertheless.
The wings of her nightmare were not present in the mirror. Instead, what looked to be two elegant tattoos remained on her back. These were her Immortal Marks, the mark of every Angel, indicating Maddy was not – or at least not entirely – human. They were different from Jacks’s marks, or any of the other Angels’, for that matter. Full-blooded Angels had marks that were elaborate and ornate. The marks that had begun forming on Maddy’s back over the last several months were simpler and smaller than most, but they were also undeniable. They were a sure sign that the secrets she had learned about her past were true.