Natural Born Angel (Immortal City 2)

Of all nights, Kevin had decided to let Samuel actually handle things at the diner!

“You’re sure sure?” Kevin asked, concerned. He had heard her cries.

“KEV

IN!!!”

“OK, OK,” she could hear Kevin muttering through the door. His steps slowly descended down the stairs.

The bath was almost overflowing now, and Maddy scooted over and turned the tap off.

Carefully, slowly, Maddy stood up, trying not to knock anything over and trying to understand this new feeling: there were two new appendages attached to her body.

Did she dare look?

She turned to the partially fogged mirror. Just by her thinking it, her wings slowly expanded, stretching out so she could see them.

They weren’t monstrous; they were beautiful.

Maddy’s wings were smaller than those of most Angels she’d seen and, uniquely, were shaped more oblong than normal Angel wings. They were delicate and sleek, almost like hummingbird wings. To Maddy they seemed almost lighter than air.

Maddy gasped: silver threads seemed to come alive and move throughout the wings. They also had a slight purplish glow. She turned around and craned her head to look at her back and see the entire span of wings. Beneath the shredded holes in her sweatshirt, she could see the faint glow from the base of her wings, where her Immortal Marks normally were. She turned back to face the mirror.

She reached and touched her own wing. The feathers were sharp, insistent. They were hot to the touch, alive, electric.

She had wings.

Maddy looked down at the floor – there were only the slightest few drops of blood, nothing near the terrible mess she had dreamt of. Her wings had already apparently cleaned themselves off, just as she had seen Jacks’s do in the rainstorm following her save. They gleamed.

Cautiously poking her head out into the hall, Maddy made sure that Uncle Kevin had, in fact, disappeared downstairs. She crept down the hall to her bedroom and quickly closed the door. She had some thinking to do – it wasn’t every day you grew wings, after all.

Maddy picked up her phone and saw that she had a missed call from Jacks. She paused, looking at the name JACKS on her call log. What was she going to say: “Hey, I just got some wings. Want to go get pizza?”

She set the phone to silent and placed it back on her desk.

A light, warm wind gusted through Maddy’s open window, sending a few papers tumbling end over end in her room. She noticed that she could slightly feel the breeze on the feathers of her wings. She walked to the window to close it, but paused as she looked out at the hills beyond. They had sunk into twilight, the Angel City sign blazing like a beacon. The soft wind blew again. She closed her eyes, feeling its warmth against her cheek.

Maddy opened her eyes and stepped closer to the window. Then, as if automatically, her right foot stepped on to the window sill. Then her left foot. She looked down, feeling as if she were in a dream.

Everything in her body told her: do it.

Maddy leapt from the window.

The sick feeling of gravity smashing her stomach up into her throat, like the sheer drop of a rollercoaster, hit her. White-hot adrenaline tore through her body as the ground below rushed towards her. A scream began to grow from within her. Then, suddenly, almost as if under their own power, she felt the wings behind her flap once, then set. Just as she was about to hit the ground, she levelled off, careening past the oak in the back garden, sending early leaves scattering. Then, with a taut strength powering through her wings, she flapped awkwardly above the diner and was flying off through the Angel City night.

The warm night air whipped her hair and clothes as Maddy tried to use her wings to move towards the Angel City sign just up the hill. She gained more and more elevation as she tested her wings, which seemed to respond to her, even though they felt like something that wasn’t really part of her. Her flying was stilted, awkward, not like the graceful flight she’d experienced with Jackson.

Higher and higher she climbed, passing the Angel City sign, until she at last turned to look back on the Immortal City. It was a vast grid below her, millions of lights, each one representing a person, a dream. She could clearly see Angel Boulevard down below her, a glittering neon slash burning in the night.

A shout of sheer delight escaped Maddy’s lips. She couldn’t help it, even if it was awkward.

She was flying.

Thrusting her wings, Maddy rose even higher, and then dived, banking down the hill. She buzzed over the tops of the tall palms, experimenting with letting her hands tuck beside her, flowing with the airstream. The exhilaration of it completely overwhelmed her. This wasn’t like when she had gone flying with Jacks. This was totally different. She felt powerful. She felt a surge of energy that she had never felt before. Something in her turning on. An awakening. A feeling that this was who she was. This is where she had always belonged. This really was the new Maddy.

She closed her eyes, and slowly twisting in the dark air, she let the freedom course through her entire body, her entire being. It was unlike anything she had ever experienced – she was untethered from the earth. She opened her eyes and looked out again at the twinkling lights of the Immortal City. Everything seemed so insignificant from up here. Everything in perspective.

Pumping her wings hard, she shot further up. She attempted to spin right, hard, and her wing froze for a moment. Maddy panicked as she began plummeting towards the ground hundreds of metres below. Her wings flapped back and forth, almost uselessly. It only took a few moments for them to correct themselves, however, and she was flying along again, trying to maintain a straight course. She definitely had some learning to do.