Natural Born Angel (Immortal City 2)

Maddy smiled. “Were you expecting someone else?”

“No, I just . . . I just never thought it would happen to me.”

“No one does. It was a heart attack. Minor. You’re going to be fine. My Archangel will be contacting you tomorrow to debrief you. Until then, rest easy. They’ve contacted your family to let them know you’re OK.”

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Rosenberg’s face turned ashen. “Lauren,” he said gravely. “I . . . I killed her. She was on the plane.”

Maddy nodded to their right. Rosenberg looked over and saw his assistant, sitting, covered in a blanket and talking to a Santa Monica paramedic.

“Lauren?” he said, confused. “You’re alive?”

He looked at Maddy.

“How. . . ?”

An ambiguous look crossed Maddy’s face. “I just had to,” she said. “What’s . . . done is done. It can’t be changed now.”

Maddy’s mind spun dizzily as she realized she’d just made an illegal save.

The onlookers had grown to an excited crowd. Dozens of mobile phone cameras clicked, capturing Maddy post-save. Fans screamed as the cameras snapped. A team of Santa Monica police arrived and did their best to hold the crowd back.

“Maddy’s first save! Maddy’s first save!” some of the onlookers shouted, taking more pictures, unable to believe their good luck in witnessing the historic occasion.

The photos were doubtlessly already being picked up by blogs and news outlets around the world. A strange, inevitable panic entered Maddy. They were taking pictures of Maddy with her Protection, Jeffrey Rosenberg. And his assistant, Lauren. Not her Protection. An illegal save.

“You know what my last thought was?” Rosenberg stammered, his mind reeling with the memory. “I remember thinking, This is it. This is how I die.”

The man had tears in his eyes.

“You saved my life . . . and Lauren’s.”

“Yes, I did,” Maddy said, surprised at the emotion coming out of Rosenberg. She’d read his frequency the moment he came into the conference room at the NAS, and she hadn’t felt this.

The hot liquid spilled from his eyes, running down his ample cheeks.

Maddy walked over to Rosenberg’s assistant.

“How are you?” Maddy asked awkwardly. Lauren looked at her with wide eyes. She was still shaking. The girl knew she should be dead.

“I – I didn’t have protection,” Lauren stammered. “How did you save me?”

Maddy felt her face screw into an inscrutable mask. Hot tears rushed up towards her eyes. She turned away, looking off the end of the pier to the shimmering blue ocean, which would have been Lauren’s unmarked watery grave, her body trapped in the twisted and incinerated jet. Maddy remained silent.

“God bless you,” Lauren said, weeping.

Maddy looked over at Lauren, and then to Rosenberg. “God already did.”

The crowd was getting more boisterous as word spread that Maddy was on the pier with her first saves. More pictures, more tweets, more Facebook updates – and inevitably more questions about how she saved someone who wasn’t a Protection. “But I need to go now.”

Applause rose from the crowd. A woman in the front row dabbed at her eyes with a tissue, and a man next to her gave Maddy a hearty thumbs-up. Maddy deployed her wings and, to the thrill of her audience, rocketed elegantly and effortlessly into the cloudless sky.

Soon the pier floated away underneath her, becoming smaller and smaller, set against the vast blue of the ocean.

Wings spread and taut, Maddy soared back towards Angel City. A cool breeze had picked up, and she floated along the slipstream. Maddy tried to take a deep breath of the cool air. The true enormity of what she had done started to hit her. An unsanctioned save. A numb terror crept into her bones as she thought about the Angel Disciplinary Council Agents in their black uniforms, ruthless in their pursuit. They’d be after her, and they would cut off her wings. There seemed to be no way she’d be able to escape them. Maddy figured that if the Angel Disciplinary Council were going to come for her, she may as well make it easy for them by flying. They could have her within seconds if they wanted to. She wouldn’t stand a chance. Soon she was over Beverly Hills and could see the enormous black shiny box that was the NAS headquarters.

As she flew ever closer to Angel City proper, Maddy’s body began shaking. An unsanctioned save. Punishable by wing removal. And mortalization. Though Maddy figured she probably wasn’t Immortal anyway, being only half-Angel. Funny, she thought semi-hysterically, that was one question that hadn’t been addressed in training.