Battle Angel (Immortal City 3)

“What?” Jackson said, taken aback.

“You don’t have to pretend with me, Jacks. I won’t tell anyone. I knew you were gone. I saw Mitch looking for you. Not too many places to hide down here.”

Emily looked toward the glimmering frosted glass in her room, which had been designed to look like a window onto a sunshine-filled day outside, and not like what it essentially was—a decoration in an underground bunker.

“Do you ever think about how funny it is that we Angels go down for sanctuary?” she said. “Shouldn’t we be going up?” She apparently got a laugh out of this, but Jacks was not in the mood for comedy.

“I hadn’t really thought about it,” Jacks said quietly.

“But, I guess, where would we go otherwise? Home?” she said. “Do you believe what they say about Home?”

“You mean that it’s where the Angels came from? And someday we’ll go back again? Supposedly, at least.” The lore said that Gabriel had been the one to lead the Angels from Home to help humanity and that one day he would lead them back. It was his destiny.

Emily eyed Jackson as if he’d said something strange.

“I wouldn’t even want to go there. Home,” she said. “It would be boring. A lot more fun things to do down here.”

Trying to ignore the implications behind her sexy stare, Jacks turned to leave. But before he could get the door open, Emily’s voice stopped him again.

“What’s it like?” she said. “Outside, I mean. What’s going on out there? Have they started yet?”

For someone who had just recently cowered in his arms in fright at the sight of a demon flying by, Emi

ly seemed to have recovered pretty well, Jacks thought. He remained quiet.

“Come on, Jacks,” she said. “I know you were up top. I’m not going to tell anyone. I just want to know if it’s started yet.” What looked like a flash of excitement flitted across her eyes.

“No,” he said. “It hasn’t.”

“Take me with you next time?” she said eagerly. “We can totally outfly the demons. I know it. You and me.”

“There’s not going to be a next time,” Jacks said, a pall casting over his face. The finality of what had happened between him and Maddy was starting to slowly sink in. Not just the initial shock of it, but the true reality.

“Jacks, are you okay? What’s the matter?” Emily said.

“Nothing,” Jacks said, but his face had grown ashen, his lips thin and colorless.

Emily pursed her lips, as if she was able to see something else on his face. “Have you been to see . . . her?” Emily couldn’t bring herself to say Maddy’s name. “You just need to forget about her, Jacks. And think about your future. What’s available to you right here, right now.”

But Jackson’s attention had turned inward, and even though Emily crossed her towel-clad legs an extra time in a desperate attempt to try to bring him back, it was clear that it wasn’t enough.

“I’ve got to go,” Jackson said broodingly, and turned away before she could do or say anything else.

“I’ll see you later, right?” Emily asked.

She received no answer. Jackson had already left.

CHAPTER FIVE

Upstairs in her room, Maddy felt a strange impulse to take an old shoe box out from under the bed. She pulled off the tape from the lid, lifted it, and spread the box’s contents out on the bed. Fanned across the comforter were ancient diaries, from way back in middle school, their covers marked with all kinds of stickers and cheerful marker graffiti.

Maddy smiled wistfully as she flipped through the pages, wrapped up in wonder at all the things that had seemed so important at the time: what boy Gwen was into at the moment, how embarrassed Maddy had felt when she tripped during an assembly, what they served and where she sat at lunch, whether she’d die before she ever kissed a boy. (Really kissed a boy, not just a peck like she’d done during the spin the bottle game in James Durgan’s basement that one time.)

Looking at her diaries, she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry—or both. When she’d had enough, she carefully put them back in the old box and slipped it under the bed, then sank down to sit on the floor with her back against the mattress edge.

Maddy started to shiver as she thought of the Darkness growing across the ocean, sprawling in the distance as it grew out of the sinkhole. The demons would cut down Tom and his fellow pilots without blinking. She could almost see the jets dissolving into blazing wreckage as the demons knocked them aside and advanced on humanity.

With a shudder, Maddy chased the bloody images from her mind. She couldn’t think that way. She couldn’t stand even another hour thinking that way, even if it might be true. She needed some kind of hope.