Maddy turned towards him and sat back down on the bed.
“I – I can’t fully explain,” she said, her eyes on the floor. “But what I saw today. It was a fire downtown. I could have saved them. I had part of the vision, but I didn’t know what to do. If I had, I could have saved those people. That’s what’s inside of me, or at least a big part of me. And not having done it makes me feel like I’m somehow not complete.” She looked up at her uncle. “I know this may seem like a shock, but I think it’s my calling. To be a Guardian. I’d be making a huge mistake if I walked away from it.” She rushed on. “I know the Angel worship and the whole Protection for Pay set-up is . . . mercenary, somehow. I know how you feel about it and I agree. But just now I realized it doesn’t have to be that way for ever. I could have the opportunity to start changing things in the Angels, from within. And along the way, I could be helping people. Saving them from dying. Like I could have saved that boy today.”
An unreadable look came across Kevin’s face.
“Kevin, you know I’ve wanted your opinion this entire time, and you wouldn’t give it to me. Said I had to make my own decision. But I know you’ve thought university was the right choice for me the whole time. I’m so sorry if you’re disappointed in me, but I know now that this is what I have to do.” Maddy felt her chest grow incredibly tight. Why wouldn’t he say something?
“Well. . .” Kevin coughed. He hesitated, but his eyes glinted. A slight smile crossed his face. “Will you wait right here?”
After a few moments Kevin returned with a small cloth bag and a tattered-looking old leather journal. The bag held something small and heavy.
“Maddy, I’ve spent the last eighteen years thinking my sister made a mistake. I blamed her for it. I blamed your father. I blamed the Angels, too. It took me eighteen years to realize that it wasn’t a mistake. She was called to a great destiny. Her destiny was to have you. Sometimes we don’t understand why things happen, but I do believe, somehow, that there is” – he paused, searching for the right words – “a plan.”
He looked her directly in the eyes.
“‘The strength of a hero is not in her abilities. In her weapons. These things are important, but they are not the source of her strength. The source of her strength is in her belief in an idea – the idea that those who are strong, and those who are able, protect those who are not, and those who cannot protect themselves. The idea that the good, and the right, will triumph. She is willing to put herself in harm’s way – in mortal danger – to prove her belief in this idea.’”
Kevin opened the cloth bag he held. An Immortal Ring fell from the bag into his hand. A tingling passed over Maddy’s body.
“‘That it is the duty of those who have within themselves the power, and the gift, to help others.’” Kevin looked at the ring in his palm. “I didn’t say that. Your father did. In a speech to the Council a week before he was killed.”
Kevin handed her the ring. Her father’s ring.
The Divine Ring looked enormous in her small, delicate hands. Like Jacks’s, it sparkled just as magnificently, throwing pools of amber light against her palm.
“He wanted you to have this when the time was right. He had hoped it would guide you on your way. I swore I would never give it to you, but something kept me holding on to it. I didn’t know at the time, but I think I know now.”
Tears were forming in Maddy’s eyes. “Oh, Kevin. . .”
Now he handed her the journal. Its dark and worn leather wrapped around yellowed, battered pages, some poking out unevenly. The whole thing was held together by a thick blue rubber band. Maddy’s breath caught in her throat as she slowly slid the rubber band up the edge of the smoothed and worn leather. Carefully, she opened the journal and saw an inscription on the first page:
Jacob Godright – Guardian Training Notes
She slowly flipped through the pages: complex formulas, long diary entries, diagrams . . . they were all from her father. His handwriting, so distinctive – she thought she recognized the shape of her own R’s in his – filled each page. She felt overwhelmed with emotion holding this book, which her father had spent years filling with his knowledge, in her hand.
“Everything your father ever learned on his way to becoming one of the most skilled Guardians in his day was kept in that book. He told me himself. It only makes sense that you should have it now.”
As Maddy moved through the pages, something fell out from between the paper, slowly floating to the floor. Reaching down, Maddy picked it up. It was a wallet-sized photo of her mother. On the back was simply written: “With love, for ever, Regina.”
Maddy swiped a few tears from her eyes and looked up at her uncle.
“Thank you. For everything,” she said, leaning forward and giving him a warm hug. She heard a sniffle. Her uncle was looking away. She was pretty sure he might be crying a little bit.
“Oh, I was just cutting some onions before I came up here. Must be one of those delayed-reaction things.” He squeezed Maddy on the shoulder. “Now I should get back to the kitchen before things go too haywire.”
Maddy nodded, smiling, and watched Kevin leave the room. Her eyes once again turned down to her
father’s Divine Ring in her hand. It glowed as she touched her fingers to it. She could sense its energy.
She was going to become an Angel. A Guardian Angel.
She could not wait to tell Jacks.
CHAPTER 4
The world around Jacks seemed to swim, rippling with his every breath. A blue tint filtered through the room. The light turned the Angel doctor, a specially trained Immortal, indigo in his white lab coat outside the hyperbaric immersion chamber. The doctor examined numbers on his hand-held instrument reader, dictating notes to his medical assistant. Their faces twisted and stretched like in a funhouse mirror. Even if he hadn’t been listening to his favourite playlist piped in through his headphones, Jacks wouldn’t have been able to hear them – he was fully submerged in the advanced therapeutic solution, and the glass of the chamber was too thick. Jacks’s muscular limbs drifted as he floated suspended in the chamber, breathing through a mask, his sole functioning wing outstretched behind him, a series of cables and hoses connected to his body. They trailed up to the top of the tank to send readings and numbers to the team of technicians outside.
If only the blue light had come from Jacks’s famous wings and not the series of screens along the back wall of the darkened room. But ever since the accident, his wings had lost their unique blue iridescence.