Jocelyn Davies - A Radiant Sky

“There’s no angel clause in those adoption papers, though,” I said.

“A legal oversight.”

“She’s not joking,” Raven said suddenly, putting down her fork and looking up. “You people are always joking. This is serious, and it’s going to get worse. Much worse. Those vengeful angels you’re laughing about won’t have any qualms about hunting you down and killing you in the night.”

Dan gulped as Raven turned to look at me. “I know you think they’re your friends, Skye. Ardith and Gideon, and even Asher. But they’re not. You’re just a prize to them. Both sides were fighting over you, vying for control of your oh-so-special custom blend of powers. You’ve angered the Order by siding with the Rebellion, and now you’ve betrayed the Rebels, too. They’re going to use force if necessary. Capture you, control you—or kill you, whichever serves to benefit them the most. They have a lot to gain from using you, but if they can’t, you’re safer dead—where they know you can’t harm them—than alive.”

“Well, that will only give me nightmares for about a million years,” Cassie muttered under her breath.

“You don’t mince words, Raven, do you?” I said. “But thanks. I need honesty right now.” I looked around the group. “There can’t be any secrets. No sugarcoating. It’s for our own safety.”

Raven’s eyes bored into mine. “I’m with you. I’ll be with you, to the end. Let’s take this as far as it will go.”

The look in her eyes told me her reasons were complicated. I shuddered as I pictured Devin, standing over her with his sword dripping blood, her mangled wings lying on the ground beside her. She had saved my life to spare him the pain of losing me, but when he’d deliberately defied the Order, her only option was to obey their commands and kill him. Her plan had been to get to him first, but instead, he’d struck the first blow. The Rebellion had offered her a place alongside me and Asher, but when I’d healed her, something shifted. We both had grown beautiful, silver wings. Wings not of the Order—and not of the Rebellion, either. Wings that only made it clearer I belonged to neither side. And that Raven and I were bonded together, a strange, celestial magic flowing between us. We had to join forces, whether we wanted to or not.

“Just stop being so nice to me,” she muttered.

And now, Devin was a Rebel, free to choose what he wanted, love who he wanted. She hadn’t heard from him since.

I didn’t blame Raven for having mixed feelings about all this. I understood it all too well.

Aunt Jo drained her iced tea.

“First of all,” she said. “There are some things you need to know up front. If you’re going to try to succeed where your parents failed, you should know everything about what they were trying to do.” The room fell silent, and Aunt Jo straightened. “As angels who had been cast out, humans living on earth, they had some, let’s say, unresolved feelings of anger and resentment toward the Order and the Rebellion. They had lived, one as a Rebel, and one as a Gifted, and they decided that neither side was right. So they were forming a splinter group. Their goal was to preserve the balance of the universe.”

“Whoa,” I said. “So they were big-picture people, huh?”

Aunt Jo looked stern. “I don’t want to send you off into this with unrealistic expectations, Skye. There’s a reason they failed. Their mission was massive.”

We all chewed thoughtfully for a bit, in silence, as we processed this.

“So what was their plan?” Ian asked.

“Plan?”

“Yeah,” I said, “how were they doing this?”

Aunt Jo sighed. “It didn’t work. Why would you want to do the same thing?”

“Well, we need a jumping-off point,” I said. “If we know what didn’t work, maybe it will help us figure out what will.”

Aunt Jo looked down at her plate and stabbed a slab of meatloaf with her fork. Cassie and I exchanged looks. Why was she being so evasive? What doesn’t she want to tell us? I wondered.

“Does anyone want more iced tea?” Aunt Jo said suddenly. She didn’t wait for an answer before going to the kitchen.

“That was weird,” I said. “She is definitely hiding something.”

“Maybe something terrible happened.” Cassie’s eyes were growing wide, the way they did when some grand idea had captured her imagination. “And that’s why the mission failed. Like, her own powers let everyone down, and it’s her fault they didn’t succeed. Or she and your mom got into a huge fight! Or—ooh!—a lost love, or—”

“Aliens!” Dan cried. Cassie shot him a look. “What?” he said. “Six months ago you would have given me the same look if I’d said fallen angels. ”

The door swung open and Aunt Jo returned with the iced tea pitcher. We all went silent. She arched an eyebrow.

“Done speculating?”

“What?” Cassie asked innocently. I kicked her under the table.

Aunt Jo poured herself some iced tea and took a sip.

“Okay,” she said. “Here’s what happened. Skye’s mom still found herself having visions, even after she was cast to earth. In these sudden bursts of Sight, she was able to pick out faces, and later, names. It turned out she was seeing Rogues—children of Rebels and humans—who showed extraordinarily angelic powers and gifts. The thing about Rogues is that they usually don’t know what they are or what they’re capable of. Only that they’re a little bit different, that they don’t quite belong, and that sometimes, strange things happen when they’re around. What tied these specific Rogues—the ones she was seeing—together was that they all knew. And they were all dealing with it. Some in good ways, some in bad.”

She paused to take another sip of tea. It looked like she was only getting more nervous. Ian glanced at me, but when I caught his eye he looked away.

“Who did she see, Aunt Jo?” I asked carefully.

“She saw three Rogues. One,” she said with a shaky breath, “was a man named Aaron Ward. The second was a man named James Harrison.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Ian’s gaze flick back to me, but I was too wrapped up in my own thoughts to look at him this time.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Was the third . . . ?”

She glanced up from her plate for the first time and nodded. “It was me.”

Cassie gasped, her eyes growing wide again. “You’re a Rogue?”

“I guess I didn’t have a chance to tell you that part,” I said.

“Look,” Aunt Jo said. “In the visions, your mom saw the three of us engaged in some powerful ritual that we could use to call all the Rogues to our side. We would be able to call them to their true angelic selves and—like us—they would finally know who and what they were. The idea was that with strength in numbers, we could overtake the Order and the Rebellion and create a third group that would forever keep the peace—hold the two sides at bay, and keep them from ever gaining power over the other. The irony of course is that control of you, Skye, would give one side ultimate power, for all time. After you were born, we worked harder than ever to make our powers strong enough to create that third group.”

I swallowed hard. Again, it seemed to come down to me.

“What happened?” I asked. “Why didn’t it work?”

“I don’t know. At first, we were frustrated. The three of us were together, and we were strong. We should have been able to do it, and we didn’t know why it wasn’t working. That’s when Mer saw the vision of the fourth.”

“The fourth?”

“In the days right before your parents were killed, she began to have a new vision. One in which there was a fourth member of our group. But the fourth was a mystery, surrounded by shadows. Your mom couldn’t tell who she was seeing—gender, age, powers, nothing. Mer died before she could ever find out who would complete our circle.”