Unearthly
Author: Cynthia Hand
Date: 2011-01-04 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Young Adult; Fantasy; Angels; Paranormal; Romance; Paranormal Romance; Supernatural; Urban Fantasy; Fiction; Young Adult Fantasy; Social Themes; General; Young Adult Fiction
Description: In the beginning, there's a boy standing in the trees . . . . Clara Gardner has recently learned that she's part angel. Having angel blood run through her veins not only makes her smarter, stronger, and faster than humans (a word, she realizes, that no longer applies to her), but it means she has a purpose, something she was put on this earth to do. Figuring out what that is, though, isn't easy. Her visions of a raging forest fire and an alluring stranger lead her to a new school in a new town. When she meets Christian, who turns out to be the boy of her dreams (literally), everything seems to
Publisher: HarperTeen

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Angela

Clara

Angela

Clara

Angela

Clara

Angela

Clara

Angela

Clara

Angela

Clara

Angela

Clara

Excerpt from Boundless

Prologue

1 - Welcome to the Farm

About the Author

Back Ad

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

ANGELA

Clara’s having visions again.

It’s the Fourth of July. If we were back home in Wyoming we’d be celebrating, eating watermelon, and watching the fireworks over Jackson Hole, making fun of tourists. Instead we’re in Rome wolfing down my grandmother’s infamous spaghetti with the whole Zerbino clan, my aunts and uncles and cousins crammed shoulder to shoulder around the table. We’re a loud bunch, the Zerbinos. Borderline obnoxious. The aunts are gossiping about the woman who lives next door, who seems, as far as they can tell, to have three separate-but-equally-serious boyfriends who don’t know about one another. They’re gabbing so loudly about it I’m sure the lady next door can hear them. I look across the table at Clara like can you believe I’m related to these people? but her eyes are completely blank. I ask her a question, and she doesn’t answer. She doesn’t hear me.

She’s seeing the future.

Does it make me a bad person that I find it funny, the way she stares off into space, a single strand of spaghetti stuck to her chin?

But then the fork falls from her hand, clattering loudly onto the table, and my relatives notice that Clara’s not with us anymore. Someone asks her if she’s all right. Someone touches her shoulder, shakes her gently. She doesn’t respond. The room erupts into a flurry of frantic Italian. My uncle Alberto, who’s sitting next to her, starts thumping her on the back. Hard. My cousin Bella screams something about allergic reactions and paramedics. And Clara just sits there, leaning over the table, her face inches away from her plate. Oblivious.

In my estimation she has about two more seconds before they’re giving her the Heimlich.

“She’s not choking!” I yell in Italian at my uncle. “Leave her alone! You’re going to hurt her!”

He keeps right on thumping.

“Stop, Alberto, stop!” orders Nonna.

He stops. Everybody always listens to Nonna.

Suddenly Clara takes a deep breath and sits up. She blinks a few times, like she has no idea where she is, how she got here. It must be quite the sight to wake up to, everyone at the table staring at her in alarm.

“Sorry,” she mumbles, her face going a lovely shade of red. She clears her throat and tries to smooth her hair behind her ear, and I notice that her hand trembles before she tucks it back into her lap. “I’m okay. Sorry about that.”

More staring. Then Bella says, “What’s wrong with her, do you think?” and everybody starts talking about how she could have some sort of medical condition, possibly narcolepsy, which is a funny-sounding word in Italian, narcolessia. They shift to discussing how strange Clara is, even for an American. It could be that she’s out of her head with grief, because her mother died a few weeks ago. Or that she has a delinquent brother who’s missing—how do they even know this, I wonder? Have they been listening in on her phone calls to Billy when they’re talking about Jeffrey? Or maybe, they speculate, she has some kind of drug problem.

They don’t think she can understand what they’re saying. But of course she does. She can understand any language on earth. I meet her eyes across the table and try to give her an understanding smile. Yes, sometimes it sucks being an angel-blood, but it’s always good for a few laughs, right?

She doesn’t smile back. She murmurs something unintelligible and slips away from the table. I take a moment to try to explain to my family that (a) Clara doesn’t do drugs, and (b) she doesn’t need a doctor. I take the grief angle and run with it.

“Clara’s going through a hard time,” I say. Which is true.

I find her upstairs at the little sink in our bedroom, scrubbing frantically, trying to get spaghetti sauce out of her white shirt.

“So.” I lean against the door frame. “A new vision.”

“Yep.” Scrub scrub scrub.

“What is it this time?” I ask.

She keeps scrubbing, but the stain is not coming out; it’s just spreading. “Not much to go on yet. Darkness. A bad feeling.”

Of course there’s more she’s not telling me. Clara’s always holding back something.

“Oh, so a fun vision,” I say.

She gives a humorless laugh. “Yeah. Let the good times roll.”

My visions have never been like hers. I’ve blanked out a few times, the way she did tonight, but it never lasts that long. It’s more of a flash when it happens to me, a set of images that hit me rapid-fire, one after another, always the same: a long path made of checkered purple-and-tan stones, opening to a wide-open area, palm trees, parked cars, bikes whizzing by, the sun high in the sky overhead. Then a set of five wide steps leading to a courtyard of some sort, framed with archways, archways, archways never-ending, and beyond them a larger courtyard. Red flowers. A flash of dark figures standing in a circle.

They used to scare me, the dark figures. I thought they might be fallen angels, bad guys, there to hurt me, or stop me from doing whatever I’ve been sent to this place to do, or drag me to hell, or something equally unpleasant. Then I figured out that I’m seeing Stanford University, and the figures are statues—replicas of Rodin’s Burghers of Calais. Stanford has a thing about Rodin.

Anyway, the point is, my vision never reveals anything bad. It shows me a bright, sunshiny day and a set of steps. The only thing my vision has in common with any of Clara’s is that at the top of those steps I see a guy with his back turned to me, like she saw the back of Christian in her initial vision—not that she knew it was Christian at the time. I have no idea who my guy is either, but he’s wearing a gray suit, which makes me think that he’s someone older.

I’m supposed to give that guy a message.

After years of having this vision, all my notes and research and attempts to slow it down and figure it out, that’s about as much as I know.

I sit at the foot of the bed and try not to let my envy show on my face. Clara always seems to get important visions, dramatic moments that she’s meant to play out, and then we all have to play along, like she’s the lead in our production. With her, there’s always some element of danger, a Black Wing lingering nearby, a terrible grief, a purpose behind her purpose. After all, Clara’s a Triplare, a three-quarter angel, rare and powerful and desired by everybody, good side and bad, although she doesn’t want to do anything with that power. Clara has this Pinocchio-like wish: deep down all she wants is to be a real girl. A normal girl. Even though she’s anything but.

Me, I’m a singing telegram. Nobody to save. Nobody to fight. Just words—words I don’t even know yet. Clara’s the heroine of the book. I’m the delivery girl.

I remind myself that there have been a lot of heavenly messages delivered in the history of man. It’s an important job. It’s vital. It’s not all wrapped up in the personal, like Clara’s is. It’s not about who or what I am. It’s a job I have to do. Simple as that. Easy. But still important.

That’s what I tell myself.

Clara gives up on the shirt, tosses it down on top of her suitcase. Sighs heavily. “So, now your family thinks I’m a freak, right?”

I shrug. “They already thought that. But they think I’m a freak, too. Too many books,” I say, shifting to Italian. “A girl like her should be going out, meeting the young men, getting a boyfriend, not hiding away in libraries and churches.”

She smiles, a real one this time. Freaks love company. “Okay, then. Just so long as you’re a freak too.”

“Never underestimate the power of freaks,” I tell her.

She looks thoughtful. “I thought you had a boyfriend, though. In Italy, I mean. Didn’t you?”

Like she doesn’t already know that this is a subject I don’t talk about. But I’m a decent actress when the situation calls for it. I grew up in a theater, after all. So it’s not too hard to play the slut card. I arch my eyebrow at her and angle my body suggestively across the bed and say, “Not that the Zerbinos know about. I’ve had all kinds of sexy Italian studs in here, and Nonna never had a clue.”

“Oh. I thought . . .”

“We’ll have to find you one,” I say quickly. “That’s just what the doctor ordered, I think. A summer fling.”

Out goes the light in her eyes. That’s the last thing she wants. She’s still pining for the cowboy, still thinking about him in like half of her waking moments and most of her dreaming ones. Over the last three weeks, since we’ve been on this trip, I’ve learned all of her wistful thinking-of-Tucker expressions.

Clara thinks she’s good at hiding her emotions, but she’s pretty easy to figure out. She wears her heart on her sleeve for everybody to see. And her heart, for the moment, is definitely broken.

She doesn’t know the first thing about the state of my heart. Or that it’s kind of broken, too.

CLARA

We’re on the metro when it happens again, on the way back from the Hard Rock Café in Rome. It’s dumb, I know, going out for a plain old cheeseburger in this city of eternally amazing food, but after almost a month in Italy, pasta’s getting old. I stand next to Angela as the train follows its rickety path under the city, my shoulder bumping hers as we take the corners, the light in the car dim and greenish in a way that makes everything feel like a film noir. We’re talking about how we want to spend our second month in Italy.

Well, Angela’s talking. Me, I’m thinking about Tucker. I’m wondering what he’s doing right at this moment. It’s almost nine o’clock at night here, which means it’s almost six in the morning there. He’s sleeping, probably. Soon his dad will come in and wake him, and together they’ll go out to the barn and milk the cows. The air will smell like sweet alfalfa and horse sweat, and maybe he’ll pause in the middle of the barn and think of me, in the place where we first kissed, and he’ll wish I were there.

Or maybe, because he’s a smart guy, he won’t think of me at all. He’ll have realized that being with me is not worth all the angel baggage.

He’ll have moved on.

“There’s this one old library I go to in Milan,” Angela’s saying. “I’d love to see if they have something about the . . .” She stops, as we’ve agreed not to say the word Triplare out loud in public. “The T-people, in there.”

I raise my eyebrows at the term T-people, clear my throat to get some of the Tucker-related tightness out. “Oh come on, Ange, enough with the libraries. We’ve been to a dozen libraries already. I say we go to Pompeii. Embrace the tourist thing.”

“Pompeii’s sad,” she says with a been-there-done-that roll of her eyes. “There are all these plaster casts of people in the positions that they died in. Very depressing.”

“I hate to remind you, O-she-whose-entire-wardrobe-is-black, but you’re all about the depressing,” I say. “You know you love a good tragedy.”

She gives me a hint of a smile like she’s about to say Yes, yes, I do, but I don’t hear because by that point, just that fast, I’m thrown into a vision. And then bam—I’m back on the train.

I inhale sharply, like I’m breaking the surface from underwater. There’s a hand on my shoulder, chipped black nail polish—Angela. She’s guided me to a seat and is sitting across from me, staring at me with knowing, sympathetic eyes. A river of Italian flows around us, so many people simply going about their evenings, unaware that anything is out of the ordinary. I blink a few times. Everything’s slightly blurry. Angela digs in her bag for a minute and produces a crumpled-up tissue.

“It’s clean,” she says, and when I don’t understand, when I don’t respond, she quickly dabs at my face.

I guess I was crying.

“Are you all right?” she asks in a low voice.

I’m still trying to catch my breath. This sucks. What I wouldn’t give to be normal, for once.

“We’ll talk about it later,” Angela says when I don’t respond. “Not here, obviously.”

I stare at the floor. I’ve been having this new vision for a little more than a week now, the first time at the Zerbino family dinner (boy, was that ever a spectacle—I should start charging admission), once in the shower, and once when we were on a bus coming back from Venice. Of course Angela’s noticed, but I haven’t really gotten into the details with her. Something about the vision this time, about what I feel inside of it—it’s bad. Like people dying, bad. But not like last time. Last time my vision was marked by grief; this time what I feel is fear. Sharp, heart-squeezing, abject terror. I don’t want to talk about it later.

“Well,” Angela says as my pulse returns to its normal rhythm. “At least you didn’t fall down. I don’t know how I would have explained that to all these people if you—”

She stops, the words fading on her lips. Her entire body goes rigid, like she’s been turned to stone, her eyes fixed on something over my shoulder. Or someone.

I turn to see who she’s looking at.

At first glance I think he’s your typical Italian guy leering at us American girls, midtwenties maybe, olive-skinned, dark eyes, wavy brown hair that’s carefully styled, wearing a simple white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to below the elbow, and khaki pants, shiny leather shoes. Cute, I think. He’s staring at us with a hint of a smile.

I get this weird, unsettled feeling, a tingling along my spine.

I turn back to Angela. She’s gazing out the window where there is nothing to see but the dark tunnel we’re moving through. She pushes a strand of hair behind her ear, then returns her hands to her lap, where she starts twisting the ring on her index finger around and around, a nervous habit I’ve never noticed in her before.

I take another look at the guy. He meets my eyes, his smile widening, his eyes knowing, almost laughing.

“Ange . . . ,” I say, turning back to her. “Who is—”

Then it hits me. This must be Angela’s secret Italian boyfriend.

Aha. I’ve been wondering if he was going to turn up. I even made a dumb joke about it when we first landed in Rome, like, So where’s Mystery Boy? and Angela gave me a look that would have withered flowers, so I dropped it. I tried asking her about it last week, and that time she acted like she’d had a string of boyfriends in Italy, no special one. But now here he is, in the flesh, and Angela is trying so hard to hide that she is totally freaking out.

“Oh,” I say, stifling a smile, relieved that’s it’s nothing dangerous. “I see.”

She leans forward and grabs me by the wrist. Hard.

“Don’t read me,” she mutters under her breath. But touching me only makes it easier to pick up what she’s feeling. I see a flash of this guy in her mind’s eye, a memory, a close-up of his face, his eyes, which are a beautiful chocolate brown, his breath warm against her cheek as he steps closer, looks from her eyes to her lips.

I jerk my hand from Angela’s. A voice overhead announces the next stop, and the train begins to slow. We’re still two stops away from ours, but Angela jumps up.

“Let’s get off,” she says loudly. “It stinks in here.”

I don’t argue. The train stops and the doors hiss open. I follow her out, and even though she’s trying to act all casual, I don’t miss the I-could-care-less-about-you look she casts the Italian guy’s way. And I don’t miss the way he nods back at her, still smiling.

Like he’s calling her bluff.

ANGELA

My mother always says that love is like a snakebite, a venom slowly spreading through your veins. She’s never told me about her own romantic life, the husband she had in those years before I was born, the man who broke her heart by dying. It’s hard to imagine my mother in love. All that’s left now is the kind of passion she feels for church or her work running the Garter or sometimes for me, when I wear something low-cut or put on lipstick that’s too red. She’ll take one look at me and drag me off by the arm to her bedroom, where there’s a portrait of Jesus on the wall. She’ll sit me down on a little wicker stool next to the bed. And she’ll talk about love as a snakebite. As something dangerous. As something bad.

“You must guard your heart,” she always says.

What’s weird about it (besides the fact that Jesus in this painting has blue eyes and straight golden hair—I mean, come on) is that I think she really means my heart. Like, she’s not saying the word heart as another word for virginity. She’s not talking about lust, although that’s bad too, of course. She’s talking about love.

My mother is afraid that I’m going to fall in love.

“Guard your heart, Angela,” she says, and I nod and tell her I’ll be good. There are no boys in my life. No hottie who’s caught my eye. No chance at love.

“I’m too busy for boys,” I say, and she says, “Good,” and pats my hand and looks at Jesus like the three of us—me, Mom, and Jesus—are a happy little family, and we’ve just finished up a family discussion.

Good talk. Problem solved. None of that pesky falling-in-love business.

But I wonder, is all this antilove talk because of my father, because of who that makes me? Does she think that I should avoid love because deep down, there’s something dark inside of me? Something not worthy of love?

She’s told me the story three times, with less detail every time I’ve asked. She was walking, at night, in Rome. Her husband had died a few months earlier, of cancer, and she was distraught. She was staying with her mother, surrounded by the chattering crowd of the Zerbino family. It was doing her good, she said, being part of our loud, boisterous family, eating good food every day, being reminded of life. But that night, she’d wanted quiet. She’d wanted to be alone. She went to mass at San Marco, and the angel followed her home. She woke up to his dark shape standing over her bed. Paralyzed. Unable to scream.

“Did he say anything?” I asked her one of those times, but she shook her head, turned away, her fingers clutching at the small golden crucifix she’s worn around her neck for as long as I can remember. She left me with the image of his shadow looming over her. His black wings cutting off the light.

My conception was not an act of love. To her, I was a curse.

She came back to the States and hid herself away, hid her growing belly, her shame. She cut herself off from her family and her friends. People thought she was grieving for her dead husband, and she was, but she was also grieving for herself. Part of her had died that night, she told me. But then one morning a different kind of angel came to her—a golden man, she called him—who told her that I was not a curse, but a blessing. I would be a remarkable child, born of angels and men. A shining child, he said. A miracle.

That’s when she got the idea to call me Angela, and sometime after that she decided to love me.

And maybe that’s the snakebite she talks about. Maybe her love for me was that slowly spreading stuff in her blood, like I was a disease that infected her. She didn’t want to love me, but she did. She couldn’t help it. Still, it doesn’t explain why she insists that I stay away from love, like she knows something about me that I don’t.

“Guard your heart,” is all she says.

I don’t tell her that I fell in love two years ago. Truly, madly, deeply—isn’t that how the song goes?—I fell in love. That’s what I don’t have the guts to say out loud.

CLARA

Angela doesn’t say more than two words on the way back through the old cobblestone streets to the house. She walks like she’s late, almost a run, and occasionally she passes her hands up and down her bare arms as if she’s cold, even though it’s a balmy night. I try to stay out of her head, give her some privacy, but it’s hard. They argued the last time they saw each other—that much I can’t help but pick up. They argued and she was angry when she left him and she wondered if maybe she’d never see him again. And now she’s a hot jumble of panic and wounded pride and yearning, such a deep yearning it takes my breath away.

She’s got it bad for this guy.

“Are you okay?” I ask breathlessly when we reach the little house where her grandmother lives. Angela stops on the stoop and glances down the street.

“I’m fine,” she says, too lightly. “It just got crowded in there.”

Uh-huh.

“Wow, I am so tired,” she says, and pushes her way past me.

Inside, her grandmother is standing at the stove, stirring something in a pot, a sauce of some sort. The kitchen is filled with a wonderful stewed-tomato smell. I swear, the woman is always cooking, day or night.

“Hi, Nonna. We had a nice time. Going to bed now,” Angela says, and darts up the stairs. I start to follow, but Rosa lifts a hand to stop me.

“You meet handsome Italian boys?” she asks in her loud, pieced-together English, wiggling her eyebrows.

“Uh—one,” I answer. “We saw one cute boy.”

“You must beware the handsome ones,” she says, and makes a tsking noise with her tongue. “Pretty face, rotten soul. Watch out for those. Those boys no good for you. Those boys will get you in plenty of trouble.”

Turns out, she’s not wrong.

ANGELA

Seeing him again is like being lit on fire. I literally feel his gaze on me, a heat that starts at my feet and washes up my body, and I look up, and there he is, sitting across the crowded car on the metro.

My heart goes all boom-boom-boom, and it’s like the rest of the people in the train dim, leaving only him in bright colors. I have to look away. I have to remind myself that he broke my heart last time. He called me a child. I said some things I shouldn’t have. I stormed out. And when I came back he was gone.

No calls. No emails. No letters written in his haphazardly scrawled print. Gone. I haven’t heard from him in over a year.

I remind myself that I’m mad at him.

But he’s smiling at me.

Clara is looking back and forth between him and me, bright-eyed with curiosity. The heat has reached my face now. The air in here feels hot and heavy, pressing in.

I have to get off this train, I think. I try to keep my head on straight, try to act like I don’t care, but he’s pinning me with that smile, an invitation written all over his face. I get up as the train slows down, and I say, “Let’s get off. It stinks in here.”

All of a sudden I get the image in my head of the green sofa in his flat—sun pouring through the windows, the smell of linseed oil, the roughness of wool on my skin. I feel dizzy with how much I want to go back to that moment. I look over at him again. There’s that flash of uncertainty in his eyes that makes him look like a little boy, even though he’s anything but. He missed me. He wants to see me.

He wants to more than see me.

He smiles.

I don’t smile back. The train stops, and Clara and I get off. I feel like there’s no breathable air in the world, and I take off walking, Clara trailing me with the questions she doesn’t ask, and I don’t want to explain.

But I know I’ll go to him later. It isn’t even like there’s a choice. In a flash I find myself out on the street again, closing the door softly behind me so I won’t alert Nonna to me sneaking out in the middle of the night.

Clara knows. That can’t be helped; she was awake when I slipped out. She’s going to want answers, and I’m going to have to provide some eventually.

But not tonight.

The metro’s closed. I’ll to have to walk across half of Rome, but I don’t care. I know the path by heart, by heart—a funny expression, so true. My heart knows right where to go.

I walk and walk. I stumble down the Spanish Steps, aglow and beautiful in the dark, big pots of roses and azaleas lined up along the sides, the fountain at the bottom whispering. I love this place more than any other sight in Rome, and I’ve been avoiding it all summer, because it makes me think of him.

Some man calls out to me drunkenly in Italian, Come here, sweet beauty, and staggers toward me. He’s harmless. I could knock him out in two seconds flat, but that’s when I start to run.

I don’t stop until I reach his flat.

For a minute I stand outside the door and worry. That I misunderstood. That it wasn’t an invitation I read in his eyes. That he was simply being polite, the old, “hello, ex-girlfriend, you’re looking well” expression on his face, and nothing more.

Is this what I am, his ex? It seems like the wrong word, because he was never really my boyfriend. He was my whole world, but not my boyfriend. Quickly, before I can reason myself out of this, I knock.

He opens the door immediately, like he was waiting, his hand on the doorknob.

We stare at each other. He’s wearing the same thing he was on the train, a white dress shirt and khaki trousers, but the shirt is unbuttoned, open, revealing an expanse of smooth brown chest. He is Michelangelo’s David, come to life. He’s everything I remember: the dark, lightly oiled curls, his fine, almost delicate face, the chocolate eyes that make me feel like I’m drowning, never able to get enough air in my lungs when he’s looking at me like that. Like he’s glad to see me. Like he wants me. I gulp in a breath, try to say something witty, because he loves it when I’m witty, but I don’t have enough air. So I give up with the words, and then I literally throw myself at him.

He catches my waist in his hands as our bodies crush into each other. Our lips come together. I want to touch him everywhere at once, to confirm that this time he’s real, not a figment of my overactive imagination, not a memory. He’s here. He’s mine again. My anger is gone.

“You jerk,” I whisper when he lets me come up for air. You broke my stupid heart.

He traces a finger down my cheek, from my temple to the corner of my mouth, smoothing over my bottom lip, which already feels bruised and swollen. I nip at his finger and he smiles, but his dark eyes are solemn.

“Angela,” he says like he’s worried for me. “Nothing has changed, you know. I can’t give you any more than this.”

“I don’t want any more than this,” I say.

A lie. And he knows it’s a lie. But I don’t care. I’ll play this game if it means I get to see him.

“Angela,” he says again, and I shiver at the sound of my name on his lips, like a magic word or a prayer. I stop his questions with a kiss, and kick the door closed behind us.

My first kiss occurred at an eighth-grade birthday party. Typical, I know. We were all sitting around on Ava Peters’s living room floor. We’d already been through a bunch of dumb attempts to pass time, like that levitation thing—light as a feather, stiff as a board—one of us pretending to be dead (Ava Peters, in this case, since she was the birthday girl) while the rest of us lifted her only using two fingers. Hardly mind-blowing, but it was mildly entertaining. We’d also been through a few rounds of truth-or-dare, which ended up with us prank-calling random people and challenging one another to eat dog food or try on Ava’s mother’s bra over our clothes, since none of our truths, at that stage, were very interesting. And then somebody piped up, “Hey, let’s play spin the bottle.”

I suppose it was inevitable. Hormones.

I’d been thinking up reasons to excuse myself and go home, because thirteen-year-olds were lame, I thought. Not their fault, really. I was mystified as to why I’d been invited to this party in the first place. Ava Peters, even back then, was one of the most popular girls in school. Why she’d taken a sudden interest in me, why she’d pressed that hot-pink cardstock invitation into my hand after our English class the day before, I could only guess at, but it made my heart beat fast, that she’d asked me. Maybe my remarkableness was finally showing, I thought. Maybe I was finally going to shine.

But then it turned out to be another lame adolescent party.

I got up. The words “I have to go. My mother needs me to close up the theater tonight” (when in doubt, blame the weird mother) were on the tip of my tongue, but when I heard this—“Hey, let’s play spin the bottle”—I sat down again.

Kissing was not lame. Kissing could be interesting.

We shifted into the rough approximation of a circle and Ava fetched a bottle.

“Who wants to go first?” she asked, giggling nervously, and I volunteered. I took the sweating brown Coca-Cola bottle between my fingers, set it on the hardwood floor, and gave it a good, hard spin. We all held our breaths, like the bottle had hypnotized us, silent as we watched it turn around and around.

“If it lands on a girl, spin again,” Ava said. Of course we hadn’t thought beforehand to lay down any sort of ground rules, like where would we kiss? On the mouth or the cheek or what? For how long? In front of everybody or alone?

I gave Ava my best oh yeah? face, which I’d been practicing in the bathroom mirror at home. “What, are you afraid I have bad breath?” I asked, but she didn’t answer, because then the bottle stopped.

It wasn’t pointing at a girl. It was pointing at Christian Prescott.

Christian Prescott.

Christian Prescott was the hottest guy in school, no contest. Green, green eyes, with a shock of wavy dark hair that he was always brushing out of those green, green eyes, killer smile, tall and lean but not lanky or awkward the way so many of the other boys in our class were. Perfection, that’s what he was.

I would never in a million years have guessed that my first kiss was going to be with Christian Prescott. What were the odds?

“Okay.” I cleared my throat and wondered if my face was as red as it felt.

He did not look particularly thrilled by this situation, but he tried to act cool with it. He was nice, in addition to being hot. He jumped up and held out his hand. I took it and he pulled me gently to my feet.

“The porch?” he suggested.

“Okay.” This seemed to be the only word I was capable of forming.

Everybody else sat there frozen, shock-faced, as he led me to the back porch. It was snowing outside, tiny white particles catching the porch light. Christian closed the door firmly behind us, then joined me as I leaned over the porch railing, staring out into the darkness behind Ava’s house.

“We’d better make this quick, or we’ll freeze to death out here,” he joked.

I wanted to say something sassy like, Oh, I think we’ll be warm enough, trust me.

“Okay,” is what I said. Again. I wished that I had brought lip balm. I had a tube that tasted like Dr Pepper. That would have been nice. He could have told everybody at school that I tasted like Dr Pepper. What would he tell them now?

He leaned closer, his green eyes somewhat wary, like I might bite him, but also curious. He smelled like Ivory soap. And Doritos, since we’d been eating them at the party earlier. I probably smelled like Doritos, too, but at least we both did. He wouldn’t be able to say that I tasted any worse than he did.

My brain struggled to process: Christian Prescott. Right here. Right now. About to kiss me.

My first kiss.

I tried to remind myself that I was, in fact, completely worthy of this guy. He was but a mere human, and I was the child of angels. One half-divine being. A shining child. Christian Prescott was lucky to get to kiss me.

“Close your eyes,” he mumbled, like he of course had done this kissing thing before, and this was how it was done properly—you closed your eyes.

“Don’t boss me around,” I said. I put my arms around his neck and pulled his head down until his lips were on mine. I waited for lightning to strike. I waited for fireworks. I waited for sweeping music in the back of my mind.

Nothing.

That’s what happened. Nothing.

His lips were warm and soft on mine, gentle but not passive, and it should have been amazing. It should have made my toes curl or something. But it didn’t. It was like kissing my brother, if I’d had a brother. Which I don’t. It was almost gross, in that way. Completely fraternal.

I stepped back. He stepped back. He smiled like he was relieved. “That was good,” he said, and I could tell that he was being kind. He knew that it was my first kiss.

He really is a stellar guy. I don’t know why Clara doesn’t give him a chance, already.

“Okay,” I said to him, back to okays again. “Let’s go in.”

And that was that.

After the party my mom asked me if I had a nice time.

I shrugged. “Parties are lame.”

She seemed pleased by my answer. “Were there boys there?” she asked, even though she already knew the answer—she’s the type of parent to call ahead and grill Ava’s parents about their plans for their daughter’s festivities.

“Boys are lame,” I said, and made a face. Then I went up to my room and plunked down on my bed and took out my journal.

First kiss today, I wrote. I didn’t feel anything spectacular. Maybe there’s something wrong with me.

I put the pen down. I’d kissed the hottest boy in my school, and I’d felt nothing.

I picked the pen up again.

Or maybe I could never be content with a normal boy, I wrote. Maybe I’ll have to wait for someone remarkable.

And that’s exactly what I did. I waited. I knew the moment I saw him that he was the one I was waiting for. The one whose kiss would make me see stars.

Someone remarkable.

CLARA

It takes a few minutes to extricate myself from Angela’s grandmother. Angela’s already in bed when I arrive upstairs, covers pulled up to her chin, eyes closed. I get in my pj’s and slip into the creaky metal-framed bed next to her, then turn out the light and wait for her to say something. Anything. But she turns her back to me. We both lie there in the dark and listen to the sounds of Rome, the mopeds on cobblestones, car horns, people shouting, the snatches of laughter and fragments of Italian from down the street.

This is not a city that goes to bed early.

After a while we hear Rosa shuffle into her room for the night. Angela sits up. She slides out of bed and moves toward the door, not stopping to get dressed, which means that she never got into her pajamas in the first place. She’s like a cat burglar as she pads her way silently down the hall and sneaks down the stairs. I hear the creak of the front door. And then she’s gone.

Suddenly I’m wide awake.

I wonder if there was something I missed on the train, a secret conversation that said, Meet me later, at that place, or if she simply knows where to find him; or maybe she’s randomly gone to look for him in this city of a little less than three million people. Or I guess it’s possible that she’s not with him at all but wanted to be alone so I wouldn’t see how upset she is, so she wouldn’t have to talk to me about it. I’d understand that. I know that love can hurt.

All I know is, she could hardly wait to get out of here.

It’s not fair, I think. Angela always pushes me to tell her everything that happens to me, and if I hold anything back and she finds out about it later, she gets all miffed and hurt and stuff. But when it comes to her own life, oh no, that’s personal. No secrets in Angel Club, she always used to say. Whatever. So yeah, as her official best friend, I’m offended.

But then there’s the part where I don’t tell her things, either.

Two hours pass. Three. It’s now two in the morning, and still no Angela. I get up, pour myself a glass of water, drink about two sips and dump it, stand and stare out the window onto the empty street below. The city’s quieter now. A cold draft moves across my bare feet and I shiver. I tell myself that Angela’s tough. She knows how to take care of herself. She’s been coming here every summer for her entire life, without incident. She’s probably fine. I force myself to lie down again, but sleep’s not happening. I keep coming back to that memory of hers I caught earlier, a moment away from being kissed. The anticipation of his lips on hers. The charged space between them. The sharing of breath. The look in his eyes as he decided to throw caution to the wind, and kiss her.

Which she wanted more than anything.

Someone looked at me that way once.

Tucker.

I close my eyes. It’s so easy to call up the way his hands felt cupping my face. He kissed me so many times, more than I could count, but each time it was like this wonderful surprise. He always got this I-want-to-kiss-you expression in his eyes, right before he’d draw me in. My throat aches as I remember the agonizing joy of those few seconds before his lips touched mine. The rioting drum of my heart. His smell, a mixture of grass and sweat, a hint of fish and river water from our afternoons on the lake, maybe lemon that he’d sliced to put on some trout for dinner, and that smell all his own, man-and-sun-and-cologne. The sheer warmth of him, his skin, his hazy blue eyes, the dimple in his cheek.

I open my eyes.

This is not healthy, I think. This is not good. It’s over. I need to get over it.

Over him.

Why is that so freaking hard?

I miss Mom. All of a sudden missing her hits me like a never-ending wave. I try not to dwell on it, but her absence is always here, like I’m walking around with a big open hole in my chest where my mother used to be. I wish I could call her. She’d know what to do, what to say to make everything all right again. She always did. She’d say something witty and true, make me a cup of tea, hug me, smooth my hair down, and tell me something to get me laughing.

She’s never going to do that, ever again.

Cue the big old lonely lump in my throat.

When I open my eyes again it’s morning, and Angela’s still not here. I get dressed and spend a few minutes pacing around the room trying to come up with some kind of plan. Maybe I can slip out and look for her—not that I have any clue where to look—before anybody else knows she’s gone.

But I have no such luck with the sneaking. Rosa’s already at the stove, and to make matters infinitely worse, Angela’s snotty cousin Bella is sitting at the kitchen table. They both turn to stare at me when I come down the stairs.

“Too much wine last night?” Bella looks me up and down. “These American girls never know how to drink wine,” she says in Italian.

Rosa eyes me with a mournful expression that totally reminds me of Angela’s mom. I don’t know if she’s sad about the way I look or the idea that I can’t hold my wine.

“I couldn’t sleep,” I say as an explanation. “I thought I might take a walk this morning, clear my head.”

Smooth, Clara. Yeah, get some of that superfresh Roman air.

“Where is Angela?” Rosa asks as I reach the door.

I’m a terrible liar. I’m going to come up with something brilliant like She’s sleeping in, and what this sharp old lady is going to see all over my face is She didn’t come home last night, and then all hell is going to break loose.

My mouth is suddenly dry. I let go of the doorknob, start to turn around. “Um,” I say, about to blow it, but I’m saved, because right then Angela comes in the door.

“Good morning, Nonna,” she chirps, going straight to her grandmother and kissing her on the cheek. “I was out for a walk and thought I might bring you back some apricots from the fruit stand on the corner.” She hands over a small brown paper sack. Rosa takes it and empties the fruit into a bowl on the table, beaming that Angela is so thoughtful.

“Grazie, sweet girl,” she says.

“I never knew that Americans liked walking so much,” sniffs Bella, but she reaches and snags an apricot. Bites into it noisily.

Angela dares to meet my eyes for the briefest of moments. I wonder if anyone else notices that she’s still wearing the same clothes as last night.

“Beautiful morning, isn’t it?” she says, and her smile is full of secrets.

ANGELA

I wake up in his arms, a ray of morning sun cutting across us in his tangled-up bed. Wow, I think. That was . . . wow. Totally worth the wait.

For a minute I keep perfectly still, savoring the feel of his body against mine, the hair on his legs a delicious counterpoint to my smooth skin, his breath in my hair, the steady thump of his heart under my cheek. I lift my head to look at him. He’s awake—he’s a morning person, one of his many flaws. His eyes are warm as he gazes down at me.

“Morning,” I say, my voice rough with sleep.

“Yes,” he says, an affirmation, Yes, it is morning. He reaches to brush away a strand of damp hair that’s stuck to the side of my face. I wonder if I was drooling on him.

His fingers trace the outline of my ear.

“You were whimpering,” he says. “What were you dreaming about?”

I dreamed about my vision. The guy in the gray suit. The steps. In the dream I climbed the steps and stood behind him, waiting, afraid to do what I was meant to do. I was supposed to touch him on the shoulder, I think, and then he would turn (and I would finally get to see his face!) and I would deliver my message. But I didn’t. In the dream, my hand lifted, hovered near his shoulder for several seconds, then dropped.

I don’t know the words, I thought. I’m not ready. I’m not prepared.

Panic seized me. I took a step back, then another, and another, then turned and fled down the steps, leaving the guy in the gray suit behind. The bright sunshine darkened into a storm. I ran, and the skies opened and poured rain down on me, chilling me, soaking me to the skin.

I’d chickened out. I’d failed my purpose. I had the sense that I’d lost everything, everything that was important to me, every hope, every dream.

I shiver. “Nothing,” I say.

A lie.

He raises his eyebrows the tiniest bit.

“It was a performance-anxiety dream,” I explain, “like my equivalent of one of those showing-up-for-class-naked dreams.” I glance at the clock on the nightstand. It’s almost seven o’clock. I sit up, drawing the sheet around me. “I have to go. My grandmother’s an early riser.”

“All right, just love me and leave me,” he says with a playacted sadness, folding his arms behind his head and watching me as I go around gathering up my clothes.

No, that’s what you’re going to do, I want to say, but I don’t. This is supposed to be casual between us.

I’m not supposed to love him.

“Sorry, babe,” I say as I slip on my shoes. “I gotta run.”

He smiles at the word babe, so American, then slides out of bed and starts to get dressed quickly. “I wish you could stay for breakfast,” he says. “I’m getting good at making eggs.”

“Rain check,” I say. “I’m going to have to think fast to explain things to Nonna as it is.”

“Will Clara tattle on you?” he asks.

This stops me. We haven’t talked about Clara, not this time. I guess I told him enough about her last year that he was able to recognize her on the train. She’d freak if she knew how much I told him, all about her and Jeffrey and her perfect Dimidius mother, although I knew pretty much squat about the real situation last summer. I didn’t know about Christian. Or Mr. Phibbs and Billy and the congregation. Or about Michael.

“No,” I say to answer the question. “She’ll cover for me. She’s the loyal type.”

“I’d like to meet her,” he says softly, like he knows this may upset me. “Why don’t the two of you come to dinner this evening? I’ll make something nice for us.”

My stomach clenches at the thought of Clara here, in his apartment, her wide blue eyes taking it all in, taking him in.

She’s prettier than I am.

An utterly stupid thought to have, I realize. I’m no plain Jane. I know that. I don’t have trouble getting a guy’s attention if I want to. But my mind jumps instantly back to British History, junior year, Clara and me standing in front of the class, Clara in her Queen Elizabeth getup for our class project. Christian Prescott in the front row. The way he looked at her like she was the most gorgeous creature he’d ever beheld in his life.

Or Tucker at prom that same year, gazing longingly across the room at Clara as she stood next to Christian daintily sipping her punch. I might as well have been invisible next to her.

They talked about me, that night. Christian said, “You’re friends with Angela? She’s kind of intense.”

Intense. That’s the word for me. Not beautiful. Intense.

There’s something about Clara that pulls boys in like a magnet—something to do with her vulnerability, I think. The heart-on-the-sleeve stuff. It makes them want to protect her. Guys always want to be the white knight.

It’s kind of pathetic.

“Sure,” I say now, lightly, as if I couldn’t care less about it. “I’ll invite her.” I button up my shirt, then pull my hair out of my collar and give it a little shake so it tumbles all down my shoulders, turn, and meet his eyes. He starts to pull a T-shirt over his head, those plain white tees he wears, sexy as hell, but I put my hand on his arm to stop him. I lean to whisper in his ear, “But I’d rather be alone with you.”

The truth.

CLARA

“He wants to meet you,” Angela says later, when we’re alone. No explanation—nothing—just “he wants to meet you,” with the dramatic voice.

“Who?” I say sarcastically, and when she doesn’t answer, “Aren’t you even going to tell me his name?”

“No.” She’s determined to be mysterious about the whole thing, but I’ll take what I can get. I’m that curious.

“All right,” I say. “Introduce me to Mystery Guy.”

We leave around sundown, ride the metro to the Spanish Steps. Angela keeps running her fingers through her hair, reapplying her lipstick. At the door of his flat, she turns to me and puts on her this-is-serious face. “Try to have an open mind,” she says.

She knocks. Somebody inside turns down the music, a slow and mournful kind of blues. Footsteps. Then the door opens and there he is again, the guy from the train, smiling broadly.

“Buongiorno,” he says. He leans over like he’s going to give Angela a brief kiss on the mouth, the kind a man might give his wife before heading off to the office, but she turns at the last second so his kiss glances off her cheek. She murmurs something I don’t quite catch. He looks at me. “Hi. Come in.”

We follow him into the apartment. It’s a small place, but cozy and well decorated. Right off it’s obvious that he’s some kind of artist or art collector. There are paintings everywhere, mostly in a type of impressionism, I think, although I don’t know much about art.

An artist, I think. How perfect that Angela would fall for an artist.

He leads us to the living room and a green velvet sofa.

“Have a seat,” he says, and we sit.

He reminds me of Orlando Bloom, I decide, slender and soulful-eyed, a relatively tidy mop of dark, curly hair, fine-boned face with distinctive crinkles around his eyes when he smiles. He’s older than I first thought, maybe even thirty. I wonder if that’s what Angela meant by me keeping an open mind.

An awkward minute passes where we all basically look each other over. Then Angela forces her gaze away from him, looks at me, clears her throat. “So. Um. This is Clara Gardner.”

“Good to finally meet you,” he says warmly. “Angela’s told me so much about you.”

That makes one of us, I think. He doesn’t have an Italian accent, which surprises me. There’s something foreign about it, soft r’s like he’s British, maybe faintly Middle Eastern, but definitely not Italian.

“Clara,” Angela says then, a nervous tremor in her voice. “Meet Phen.”

Wait.

I know that name.

I glance from him back to Angela. “I’m sorry. Did you say . . . ?”

“Phen,” he says, louder, like I’m hard of hearing. “It’s actually Penamue, but I go by Phen. With my friends, anyway.”

Right. Phen. As in, the guy who Angela met two years ago, who told her about the angel-bloods.

That Phen.

Angela’s in love with an angel.

ANGELA

I first met him in a church. I had a thing for churches back then; I suppose I still do. They’re so quiet most of the time, a quiet that’s different from anyplace else, cool and peaceful and contemplative in their very nature. I’m not religious, not the way my mother is, but I like churches. I go there to relax, to calm the inner voices of my everyday life, to think.

This church was located in a tiny, out-of-the-way corner of Milan, San Bernadino alle Ossa. I went there because I heard that there was a room decorated with human bones, and I found this horrible and fascinating. I was sixteen that summer, and I’d been going around Italy on my own private creeptastic tour, making a point to visit all the churches that housed the corpses of the saints, whose bodies were said to remain mostly fresh and pliable for hundreds of years after they’d died—incorruptible, is the term—that’s how good they were. It was morbid but fun, visiting these nuns in glass cases who all looked the same, dressed in white, their hands folded in prayer, sleeping eternally, like Snow White waiting for the prince’s kiss.

A room of bones was too good to pass up.

The room was in a side pocket of the church. There was a cross on the wall inside made from human skulls—in fact, the walls were almost entirely covered with bones, hundreds and hundreds of skulls and ribs and tiny bits I couldn’t identify. My mother would have had a heart attack if she’d been there. It gave me a wicked thrill, looking at all that macabre art, but it also kind of grossed me out. It was different from the bodies of the saints, so carefully laid out in order that people could come and be near someone holy, even in death. This seemed like a reminder—we all die, and it’s not so pretty—and I looked from one skull to another and thought about how each had once had a face. A life. It was a person who ate and drank and complained about the weather and tried to get by the best he could. Now on the wall of a church, gaped at by a morbid American tourist.

Right then I decided that it’s not polite to leer at the dead. I turned to go.

That’s when I saw him.

He was standing at the front of the church, directly under the dome, staring up at the fresco on the ceiling, angels and sky and people being borne up to heaven, I assumed. He seemed focused on one particular corner of the fresco, an angel in a pinkish robe, what a few hundred years ago might have been red, with gray, outstretched wings. He didn’t look like he was getting anything spiritual from the church, not praying or receiving any kind of divine inspiration. In fact he—the guy, not the angel—was almost scowling. Muttering to himself.

Then I noticed that he was also kind of glowing, a weak, almost unperceivable light flickering out of him.

I knew, in that instant, that he was one of them.

An angel.

Of course I had to introduce myself. I’d never met an angel before, not a real-life angel who existed outside the words in my books, the stories my mother told me. I smoothed my hair back—because, also, this guy was unbelievably attractive, perhaps the most ridiculously good-looking guy I’d ever seen—and applied a layer of lip gloss. I glanced around and saw that we were the only two in the sanctuary, and then I straightened my shoulders, walked up to him, and said, “Hello.”

Not in English, as it turned out.

In Angelic.

I’d never spoken Angelic aloud before that moment, and it surprised me as much as it did him—the way the word sounded, like two notes of music played simultaneously, like a feeling instead of a word.

Hello.

His gaze jerked down from the fresco on the ceiling and landed, red-hot, on me. Astonished. Then accusatory. Then curious.

I was all of those things, too. Because he and the fresco angel had the same face.

We stared at each other for like two minutes.

“What did you say?” he asked slowly in Italian, carefully, like he might have misheard—although there was no possible way that what I said sounded like anything else but what it was.

“I said hello,” I replied, in English.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded.

“I came to see the bones,” I answered. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to talk to God.”

I arched an eyebrow and folded my arms across my chest. “I see. So what does He say?”

Before he could reply, the door of the church groaned open on its rusty hinges and an old and bent-over Italian lady in a black dress hobbled in. She eyed us suspiciously, like two young people had no business making small talk in a church.

I smiled at the angel. The corner of his mouth twitched like he wanted to smile, too, but instead he looked stern. He crossed the sanctuary in three rapid steps and grabbed my arm, his touch slightly cool against my flushed skin.

“Come with me,” he said, and drew me off to the side, back toward the room of bones, where the old lady couldn’t see us.

I opened my mouth to tell him that he may be an angel but I was American and bossing me around was not going to fly, but he put a finger to my lips, which startled me.

“Come with me,” he said again softly.

I instantly got a weird, dizzy sensation in the pit of my stomach, and my legs wobbled, as if I’d just stepped off a roller coaster. Something had changed, darkened and brightened at the same time. He pulled me back out of the bone room and into the main part of the basilica, and the old lady was gone. I took a good look at him and gasped again.

He was all in black and white, his hair jet-black, his skin ice-white, and still glowing slightly, still hard to look at, he was so gorgeous. Everything around us was black and white, too, the colors of the world converted to an old movie, made up of shadows and stark contrasts.

He let go of my arm. “We can talk here. In private.”

“What did you do?” I asked, a shiver working its way down my spine, but I refused to let him see that he’d scared me.

“It’s not safe to reveal yourself the way you did,” he said, scolding me. “It was foolish.”

“Why?” I wanted to know. My voice sounded thin in this place, insubstantial.

“What if I’d been one of the fallen?”

“So it’s true? There are good angels and bad angels?” I knew the answer to this, of course. My biological father was definitely not a good angel. But I wanted to hear him define it for himself. I wanted to hear him say it.

“Yes. The sorrowful and the joyful,” he said.

“And which are you?” I teased, but I hoped I already knew the answer. Bad angels wouldn’t come to a church to talk to God.

He shrugged, a completely human gesture. “I’m neither. I’m ambivalent.”

It sounded like a joke. “Yes, well, I’ve had trouble with ambivalence myself,” I said.

He laughed. “What’s your name?”

“Angela.”

“Fitting,” he said.

“What’s yours?”

“Penamue. But you can call me Phen.”

“Phen,” I repeated, liking the sound of his name in my mouth. An angel’s name. “Where are we, Phen? Where have you taken me?”

“The same place we were,” he answered. “But a different dimension.”

My skin prickled with excitement at how cool this was, journeying to a different dimension with a full-blooded angel. Nothing this eventful had ever happened to me, not in the small Wyoming town where my mother had hidden me away for most of my life.

It was the start of something, I thought.

It was the start.

CLARA

You’d think I’d be used to surprises by now. My life is a series of announcements like, Guess what, Clara? You’re part angel. Guess what: that guy who you thought you were supposed to save, well, he’s an angel-blood, too. Surprise! Angel-bloods only live for one hundred and twenty years, which means your mother is going to die any day now. Ding dong! Guess who’s at the door? Your dad, who’s an archangel, which, by the way, makes you a Triplare, a three-quarter angel instead of the measly one-quarter angel you thought you were. And each of these times I basically have to reevaluate my entire life. You’d think that nothing could surprise me nowadays.

But once again, I’m floored.

A buzzer goes off in the kitchen. Phen excuses himself and slips out. I turn to Angela.

“Ange!” I exclaim, softly so Phen doesn’t hear me spazzing all over the place.

“I wanted to tell you, but it’s complicated,” she says.

“How complicated is it to say, Hey, FYI? This boy I like, he’s actually an angel?”

“I didn’t know I was going to see him this year.”

“And you’re like . . .” I lower my voice even more. “Spending the night with him?”

“It’s not like that,” she says, but clearly it is. She keeps looking at something in the corner of the room. I turn to see what it is—a stack of paintings leaning against the wall.

I get up.

“Don’t . . . ,” Angela says, but I’m already flipping through the canvases, until I hit one of Angela, sprawled across the green velvet sofa, half-wrapped in a blanket and nothing else, the sun falling across her hair in a way that makes it shine blue. It’s a beautiful painting. But that’s beside the point.

“Nice blanket,” is all I can get out.

Her jaw tightens. “I model for him sometimes. But mostly we hang out. We walk around the city. We talk.”

“You talk. About what?”

“About angel stuff, of course, but we also talk about music, and books we’ve read, and art. Poetry. He knows, like, everything.”

“Right, because he’s an angel.”

“Yes,” she says, with a defensive edge in her voice. “He’s an angel. So what?”

“I’m a hungry angel.” He appears in the doorway. “Dinner is served, ladies.”

This could be awkward.

“I thought you might be getting tired of Italian,” he says as we settle around a small table tucked into the back of the kitchen. The food smells wonderful, curry and lamb, something Indian. Phen pours three glasses of white wine. I dig right in, because it gives me something to do besides talk. I need some time to let this revelation settle in my brain.

“So, Clara,” Phen says after a while, “tell me about yourself.”

I take a sip of wine, which I know should taste good but instead tastes sour and strange. “I, uh . . .” How much has Angela told him about me, I wonder? “Well, I recently graduated from high school. I’m going to Stanford in the fall.”

“With Angela. You’re a couple of geniuses, you two,” he says. “What do you plan to study?”

“I don’t have a plan, exactly. I guess I’m hoping that I’ll try out a bunch of stuff and find something I like.”

“Do you have any hobbies? Talents?” he asks.

Suddenly I feel like I’m at a job interview.

“Uh—” I don’t know what to say. I used to be a ballet dancer, but that feels like a million years ago. I’m not into sports like Jeffrey, or poetry like Angela, or music like Christian. Fishing, maybe? I like fishing. But fishing was all about Tucker. Hiking, boating, swimming in rivers, white-water rafting—I can’t separate any of those things from Tucker.

I need a hobby.

“Clara’s an empath,” Angela supplies for me.

I half choke on my bite of meat.

“Interesting,” Phen says as I cough like crazy. Finally my lungs calm down a bit. I take a drink of wine and wish it were water.

“What’s your story, Phen? Angela really hasn’t told me very much about you,” I say, eager to change the subject. “You’re an Intangere?”

“Yes, I think we’ve established that,” he says wryly.

“And what do you do?”

“Are you asking if I flit around from cloud to cloud, sing in a heavenly choir?”

I take a bite, chew for a minute, shrug. “I guess I don’t know what it is that angels actually do.”

He takes a long drink of his wine. “You’re direct,” he says. “I like that.”

I smile and wait for him to answer my question.

“We do angel business,” he says after a minute. Smirks. “You mere mortals wouldn’t understand.”

“Angel business, like helping the souls of the dead find their way to heaven or hell?” I glance over at Angela, who gives me a warning look. She’s been superquiet this entire time. For once I’m the one asking all the questions.

“Yes, some angels handle the souls of the dead,” he says.

I remember my mother telling me once that more than a hundred people on this planet die every minute. That’s a lot of angels. “So is that what you do? Look after the dead, guide them toward the light, that kind of thing?”

“No,” he says. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m what you would call a muse.”

Angela looks surprised. “A muse?”

“I inspire people,” he says, like it’s something ordinary people do as a vocation: professional inspirer.

“You never told me that,” she says. “Have you ever inspired me?”

He raises his eyebrows, laughs when she gasps.

“I thought I was your muse,” she says with a flicker of disappointment. “Can you put an idea directly into my head?”

“I can give you an image, a line of music, a word, anything I want. But most of the time I don’t have to. I simply provide a brief moment of clarity. You fill in the rest.”

“That’s amazing,” she says, and I can almost see her mentally going over the stuff she’s done around him, the poems she’s written or the music she’s played on her violin for him, trying to understand how he might have inspired her.

“Yeah,” I agree, if only to be agreeable. “It is. Very cool.” Truthfully, though, the idea of an angel who’s able to plant ideas in my head without me knowing about it doesn’t sound like good news to me. Who knows what else he could plant there? It’s a little bit Invasion of the Body Snatchers, in my opinion. I make a silent note to keep my mental barrier up around him, the way my mom taught me, so he won’t be able to read my mind. Or stick stuff in it.

“It’s a small gift, compared to what others can do,” he says modestly, but I can tell he’s flattered. I guess he doesn’t get to take credit for what he does that often. And I don’t for a second believe that being a muse is all this guy can do.

“So give us an example,” Angela says. “Something you inspired.”

“Oh, I don’t know. ‘Once upon a time,’” he says. “I came up with that.”

Angela’s eyes widen. “You came up with the phrase ‘once upon a time’?”

“It was a long time ago.” He eats a bite of food while we stare at him. “Humans are brilliant in their own right. And quick to learn, I’ve found.”

“So you’re a teacher? Officially, I mean?” she asks, her voice a little more high-pitched than normal, maybe because she wants him to teach her more “officially.”

“It was my duty, once upon a time, to teach humans,” he says.

“What did you teach them?” I ask.

“How to write. Some have argued that was a bad thing, giving them the written word.” He smirks. “Leads to all kinds of trouble. But that was my job.”

I have a sudden flash of this guy scratching out the ABCs on a cave wall for a group of awestruck Neanderthals. Then it occurs to me. He’s an angel, but he doesn’t give off an angel vibe. No sorrow. No joy. Which means that I don’t know what side he’s on.

Which means I can’t trust him.

Once again I get the distinct feeling that something bad is going to happen, that someone’s-dancing-on-my-grave sensation.

“So you were a Watcher,” I say slowly, trying to keep my voice casual.

His eyes flash at the word.

“Clara,” Angela mutters. “Enough with the Spanish Inquisition.”

I meet Phen’s dark eyes, hold his gaze.

“What do you know about Watchers?” he asks.

“I’ve read The Book of Enoch.”

He sighs. “Inaccurate.”

“Okay, set the record straight. You were there, right?”

Silence. I wonder if I’ve gone too far, if I’ve foolishly cheesed off somebody who’s going to turn out to be a Black Wing and squish me like a grape.

“Originally it wasn’t a bad thing, to be a Watcher,” he says. “All the term means is that we were sent to watch over the humans, teach them. Some of us did more than watch, obviously.” He looks away. “Some of us fell in love with them.”

Angela shoots me a glare that would melt steel. I ignore her. “So you’re not evil, is that what you’re saying?”

He meets my eyes again. “I’m ambivalent. I refuse to fight on either side.”

“You’re neutral,” Angela pipes up. “Like Switzerland.”

“Yes.” He turns to her with an amused expression, pats her on the knee affectionately. “Exactly like Switzerland.”

“You were rude to him,” Angela says to me when we’re back in the spare room at Rosa’s house. She scowls into the mirror and takes off her necklace, starts brushing out her hair.

“I just asked him some questions, Ange. Relax.”

“You interrogated him.”

“I don’t know him.”

“Yeah, well, I do. I’ve known him for years. He’s not evil, Clara. I know there’s all that crap about him being an ambivalent, but that only means he doesn’t want to fight. He’s above that.”

I sit down on the bed, kick off my shoes. “Right. Above it.” I don’t understand how she could be okay with this when she’s so gung-ho about her own duty, her purpose, her bright white wings that mean that she’s so pure of heart, so committed to the side of good. Why wouldn’t she hold Phen to the same standard?

“He’s a good guy,” she says, grabbing a handful of hair and starting to braid it.

“He’s not a guy at all.”

“Look, I don’t need you to protect me, Clara,” she says. “I met him in a church, remember? Hallowed ground and all that? If he was evil he wouldn’t have been able to go in there, right?”

“Okay,” I admit grudgingly.

“So let’s drop it. I don’t want to fight.” She finishes braiding one side and starts braiding the other. I go to the sink to wash my face. I’m brushing my teeth when she appears in the mirror behind me.

“I thought you’d like him,” she says, and I don’t have to be an empath to know that she’s disappointed in my reaction. She likes Phen. More than likes him. She wants me to like him, too. She wants me to see what she sees in him.

I lean over and spit into the sink. “I didn’t say I don’t like him. I said I don’t know him.”

“Okay, so get to know him. Come hang out with us tomorrow. We’re going to Vatican City. Embrace the tourist thing, like you said.”

Her eyes meet mine in the mirror, hopeful.

I’m a softie. That, and I really do want to see St. Peter’s Basilica. “Okay, fine.”

“Really? You’ll come with us?”

“What, you want me to pinkie swear?”

“You’ll like him,” she says. “You’ll see.”

“All right. Hey, wait.” I catch her by the shoulders before she buzzes out of the room. “You haven’t told him about me, have you? About me being a . . . T-person. About my dad?”

“No,” she says, frowning. “We haven’t talked about that kind of thing much this time.”

“Well, don’t. I know you trust him or whatever, but that’s my private stuff, okay?”

“Okay,” she says with a dismissive shake of her head.

“Promise me.” I look into her eyes.

She smirks. “What, do you want me to pinkie swear?”

“Yep.” I hold up my hand, pinkie raised. She grins and hooks my finger with hers. We shake.

“Seriously, though,” I say.

“Seriously. I won’t tell him.” She presses a hand over her heart. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

ANGELA

That first summer, Phen followed me back to Rome. He set a place and time for us to meet, always the same—a small café a short distance from my grandmother’s house, at nine o’clock in the morning on Tuesdays and Fridays—and when the sun began to sink below the horizon he’d bring me back to the café, and he’d say, “Thank you for the lovely day, Angela. See you next time.” That’s the way he kept it, in the beginning. Careful. Courteous. A temporary arrangement where he, the centuries-old angel, would instruct me, the naive little angel-blood schoolgirl.

We took a lot of walks. At first he was hesitant to tell me about the angels and the war between them, but he did let me in on the ways to tell the good from the bad. I thought that the wing-color thing was a bit cliché, really—white for good, black for bad; definitely not politically correct—but it wasn’t about color, he said. It was about light. Black is the absence of light. White is the gathering of it.

He showed me a secret Rome, one I’d never seen in all my touring and being dragged around by my relatives. Phen’s Rome was different: a Rome born out of his perfect memory, the way a grandfather could show you his hometown. Every place was a story, and Phen’s stories stretched back to the days when this sprawling, magnificent city had been a couple of primitive thatched huts. At the Coliseum, he told me about a brave man he once knew, a man who would never show up in the history books. He pointed out the exact spot where the man died. He showed me a house where the most powerful woman in Rome had lived in the year 1636. He told me that she’d invited him inside and boldly tried to seduce him, and I tried to act like the image of this jewel-bedecked Italian broad running her slutty hands all over him didn’t bother me.

But it did bother me.

Because there was nothing grandfatherly about Phen. Most of the time I forgot about his age, or lack thereof. I knew he’d been around since before man had taken his first crawling steps on this planet, but in Rome he passed easily for a run-of-the-mill Italian man in his midtwenties. He wore the right clothes. He used the right slang. He wasn’t like those vampires you see on television who are so clearly old men stuck in young bodies, the way they talk like they’re still in Victorian times, their lips curling up in disgust at the idea of modern frivolities like electricity and gasoline-powered engines. Phen was part of the world; he embraced it. He loved it.

He made it easy to forget, sometimes, that he was more than the most remarkable guy I’d ever met. My heart leapt every time he touched me, even the most innocent, casual of brushes: his arm bumping mine as we walked together, his hand on my back as he guided me through a doorway.

I wasn’t a fool, though. I tried to talk myself out of falling for him. He’s an angel, I kept telling myself. You’re a teenager. Get real. You have almost nothing in common. It would never work. Don’t kid yourself. He probably thinks of you as a child.

“Why Italy?” I asked him one Friday afternoon as we sat down for a late lunch at a restaurant we’d found by following our noses. “Why stay here, out of all the places in the world you could go?”

“The food, of course,” he answered, taking a bite of his calzone.

“It’s a good thing angels don’t need to worry about high cholesterol,” I joked.

He laughed, and the sound warmed me. “Actually, it’s the language. I find Italian to be the most beautiful and expressive of all the human languages.”

I shifted into Italian immediately. “So, Phen,” I asked, “what do you do? When you’re not playing tour guide to American angel-bloods?”

“Many things. I write. I paint. I think about things. . . .” He leaned forward, caught me in his magnetic smile.

I blushed. I wanted him to like me so much.

“What do you do,” he asked, “when you’re not startling angels in churches?”

“I have a thing for horror movies. And I play the violin. And I read.” I skimmed over the part where I researched everything I could get my hands on about angels and the Nephilim and their ways. It sounded too nerdy. “I write some, too. Poetry. Not very good.”

“I would love to hear you play the violin sometime,” he said.

“I would love to see your paintings sometime,” I said right back at him.

He nodded. “After lunch, then,” he said, as if that settled it. “We’ll go back to my flat.”

His flat. I gulped down a glass of wine.

Once we were there, enclosed by the walls of his apartment, I was so nervous that I kept bumping into things. His flat was just as he was: tasteful and elegant but not old-fashioned, a mix of modern furniture and well-kept antiques. The art studio was at the back. He led me inside and turned on the lights. I wandered from painting to painting, from cityscapes of Rome to close-ups of flowers, to canvases crowded with people or stunning singular portraits. The subjects of his paintings were all different, but there was something similar about them, a unifying factor that marked them as created by the same hand. It had to do with the use of light and how he used it to show the life of the thing he painted, like there was something bright pushing out from inside a child’s body or a flower’s petals or from some particular archway of an ancient building, radiating outward, something that transcended the physical. He cleared his throat like he was embarrassed, exposed through his work.

“So. You’ve seen my paintings,” he said. “Now it’s your turn.”

From somewhere he produced a violin, a bow, then led me out to the living room, where he sat down on the sofa, his elbows on his knees, and waited for me to play. It was an old, gorgeous violin, so much nicer than the one I had at home. I tucked it under my chin gently, closed my eyes, and began to play a song I knew by heart from Bach’s Chaconne, a difficult piece but one that never failed to sweep me away. The music swelled around us, filling the room, and I poured all my longing into it, my desires, like I was telling my life story through the notes as they winnowed up and around me. Like I was telling Phen the things I didn’t dare to say out loud.

When I finished and opened my eyes again, Phen had tears on his cheeks. So did I.

“Beautiful,” he murmured, and I knew that he was talking about more than the song. He was gazing at me like I was a butterfly trapped in his net, like he was tempted to pin me up behind glass even though he knew he should let me fly away.

I swallowed. My heart was dancing, my head swimming, my body alive with sensation.

Finally. So this is what it feels like, I thought, to be in love.

I spent a great deal of time the following year thinking up ways to seduce Phen. I didn’t know how just yet, since I didn’t know anything about how one goes about seducing anybody, at that point. But I would learn. I would figure it out. I didn’t care if it was crazy. I was going to live my life without holding anything back, I told myself. I was going to taste those perfectly sculpted lips of his. I was going to feel his arms around me.

I was going to be his, and he was going to be mine.

I threw myself into the research of how one might tempt an angel, with the same kind of passion I used for all my other research. It was the painting, I thought. That was my way in. He liked beautiful things. I would become a beautiful thing. I would become a muse.

He emailed me a few days before I flew to Rome for the second summer. I’d given him a piece of paper with my contact information on it, but he hadn’t been in touch until now: this brief message from penamue@gmail.com, no kidding.

It said, I am looking forward to seeing you.

I took that as a good sign.

For the first couple weeks back in Rome we fell into the same routine from the year before. Tuesdays and Fridays. We walked. We talked, although mostly it was Phen who did the talking. I was suddenly, inexplicably, tongue-tied around him. But he didn’t bring me to his flat again. He took me to museums and cafés and churches, always bringing me home at sunset. “See you next time,” he’d say. Next time.

“See you,” I’d answer. Plotting, plotting, how next time I would make my big move.

Then one day I simply worked up the guts and showed up at his flat. It was a Wednesday afternoon. I knocked. He answered, wearing a paint-splatted white T-shirt and jeans with holes in the knees, wiping his hands on a cloth. My head spun, seeing him like that, in the middle of his process. My heart felt like it would burst. I love you, I thought immediately, and it was embarrassing, the way I’d fallen so hard and he didn’t have a clue.

He looked genuinely surprised to see me.

“Hello,” he said in Angelic, our private joke.

Here goes nothing, I thought.

“I want you to paint me,” I said, jumping right to the chase. “Will you paint me, Phen?”

His eyebrows rumpled at my request.

“Please?” I asked, my voice wavering. I’d been planning this for months, but at that moment I was scared.

He nodded and stepped back to let me come into his apartment. He dragged his green sofa into his studio and told me to lay down on it. I had a flash of Leonardo DiCaprio painting Kate Winslet aboard the Titanic, the way she held up the diamond and said something like, “I want you to paint me in this. In only this.”

He went into the kitchen to clean out his brushes and prepare a new set, and I fumbled around getting into a slinky black nightie I’d brought for the occasion. It was too much, I knew immediately after I’d put it on. This whole thing was a huge mistake. He’d think it was lewd.

Too late. He came back into the room and stopped short when he saw me. I fought the urge to pull down the nightie, which ended at the tops of my thighs. Too short. Indecent. Improper. Crass. I’d screwed up. I’d messed up any chance I would have ever had with him.

I bit my lip.

“Sorry,” I said.

His eyes raked down my body almost critically for a few seconds before he glanced down at the floor. I braced myself to hear him tell me to put my clothes back on. He looked at his hands, where the backs of his fingers were smudged with red paint. Then he nodded.

“Take it off,” he murmured.

My throat closed.

“What, now?” I choked out.

“Now,” he answered with the hint of a smile, not looking up. He turned and picked up a crocheted afghan that was draped over the back of a chair in the corner. “Cover yourself with this,” he instructed, handing it to me without looking. When I’d done as he asked he set about pulling the fabric across me how he wanted it, revealing parts of me and hiding others. When he was finished he went to the window and opened the shades. The room flooded with light. He set a new canvas on an easel, spent a moment angling it just so, and then picked up a single black charcoal pencil and started to sketch me.

I held as still as I could. It was quiet. All I could hear was the rough scrape of his marks against the canvas. I almost didn’t dare to breathe, for fear of spoiling the moment.

Suddenly he laughed.

“Relax, Angela,” he said. “Talk to me. Tell me more about your life this year. I’ve been thinking of you all these long months.”

I sighed and spilled. That’s when I told him about Clara, how she’d stumbled around Jackson that past winter with what might as well have been a neon sign over her head that read ANGEL-BLOOD in flashing letters. I talked about how Clara was obsessed with Christian Prescott because she thought he was her purpose.

“Ah,” he said. “Purpose. I haven’t heard that word in a long time.”

I told him about the man in the gray suit.

“How mysterious,” he said with a smile. “Well, we’ll see how that goes, won’t we?”

He didn’t say anything else about purpose, and I didn’t press him. I was too busy feeling the strokes his hand made on his canvas like real touches on my skin. I stayed like that for an hour, maybe more, until suddenly he stopped working. He put his pencil down.

“Enough for today,” he said. “We’ll pick up tomorrow. I’m hungry.”

He stepped past me into the living room, leaving me to get dressed alone. My disappointment was a lump in my throat. He didn’t see me as anything but another subject. A way to pass the time. But then, he wanted me to come back tomorrow. I hadn’t completely blown it.

I posed for him every day that week. He never let me see his progress, but when it was all done he announced that I should come to dinner at his place, and we’d celebrate my return to Italy, and he’d show me the painting. I stood next to him, fully clothed this time, and he pulled the cloth he’d been using to cover the canvas aside, and I sucked in my breath.

It was me—not just my body, my nose and my blue-black hair and my legs stretched out against the soft, green velvet of the sofa, but what was inside: the light in me almost seeming to pulse from the canvas, gleaming along my bare shoulder, shining in my eyes.

A woman, not a girl.

A shining woman.

He saw me.

“It may be the best piece I’ve ever done.” He turned to gaze at me with a warmth that spread all through me. “You are a wonder, Angela.”

Oh geez, I thought dizzily. I haven’t even kissed him yet, and I feel like my sky is full of fireworks. Lightning strikes. Magic.

“Kiss me,” I whispered in Italian.

Something in his eyes flashed, like pain and triumph at once. “Angela . . .”

“Kiss me,” I said again, and put my arms around him. I looked up into his face, his dark-with-secrets eyes, and I smiled. “Ti voglio baciare,” I said. I want to kiss you.

He lowered his lips to mine.

I was undone.

I was reborn.

This was actually happening. I was kissing him, my fingers in his hair, and it was like setting a match to gasoline. I couldn’t get close enough.

He pulled away, his breathing ragged. “Wait. I can’t do this, as much as I’d like to. As beautiful as you are. We can’t.”

“Why?” I wanted to know, my knees still quaking from the force of the kiss. “I’m not asking you to go steady or anything. I want you to be the first, is all.”

His eyes flashed up to mine at the word first. “Why?” he asked hoarsely. “Why would you possibly want me?”

“Have you taken a good look at yourself in the mirror lately?” I asked, and then, maybe because I didn’t want to come off as totally shallow, I added, “You’re the only person who really understands me, Phen. That’s why I want it to be you.”

And because I love you. I didn’t say out loud, but I wondered if he could see it on my face.

“Besides, I want to experience it with someone who really knows what they’re doing,” I said playfully, thinking of that lady in 1636.

He gave a small, disbelieving laugh. “Oh, I don’t know what I’m doing.” His dark eyes were dark with something like desire.

“I know you want me,” I said. I kissed him again. Slowly. Showing him it was all right.

He groaned, then pulled away again. “This isn’t supposed to happen this way. I was supposed to teach you.”

“So teach me.”

“I’m not good for you,” he said. “I’m not . . . good.”

“You’re not bad,” I protested. “You’re ambivalent, right?” Up to then I’d liked the idea of his ambivalence. If he’d been a White Wing, there’s no way I ever would have tried this. He would have been too good for me. Untouchable. But it was perfect like this. He was perfect.

I leaned in again, but he took me by the shoulders and pushed me away from him. Hard. I stumbled back.

“No,” he said. “Angela, please try to understand. I’m sorry if I led you to think . . .”

Rejection flared through me. Sudden tears sprang to my eyes. “You led me to think what? That you could be interested in someone like me?”

He sighed. “You are magnificent, strong-willed, smart. You’re amazing. Any mortal boy would be lucky to have you.”

“I don’t want a mortal boy,” I said, my voice silly and cracking and vulnerable. “I want you. It can be casual. I don’t care.”

He closed his eyes for a minute, his jaw tightening. Then he dropped his head, sighed again, and said, “I can’t be with you, Angela.”

“Why not?”

“You’re a child,” he said.

I stepped back like he’d slapped me. “I’m a child.”

He didn’t say anything.

“You . . .” I was shaking, I was so hurt and mad and utterly crushed. I couldn’t catch my breath. “Well, you’re a tease, then. Play me something on your violin, Angela. Take it off, Angela. You . . . you were toying with me.”

He looked up. Anger flared in his eyes. “No. I didn’t ask for this. I don’t need this.”

“Great. Fine. I don’t need you either. You . . . asshat,” I blurted out, and then I charged for the door. I couldn’t stand to be in his presence for another second. I ran. Out of his flat. Down the cobblestone streets, all the way back to my grandmother’s, where I flung myself down on my bed and cried harder than I’d ever cried before.

How stupid of me, I thought later, when I could form coherent thoughts again. How adolescent. I touched my lips where the memory of his kiss still lingered. How foolish. I should go back, apologize.

But when I did, he was gone.

CLARA

“So who’s the dead guy?” Angela asks.

We’re in the Sistine Chapel with Phen. There is so much here, so many different frescoes and murals and tapestries, that I don’t know where to look. It’s giving me a headache, to be honest.

“That’s Moses,” answers Phen. “It’s called The Discussion Over the Body of Moses.”

“Looks like a pretty heated discussion,” Angela says. “Who’s the angel with the spear?”

“Michael.”

I can’t help myself. I turn and look, and yep, there’s my dear old dad, wearing golden armor and some kind of feathered helmet, threatening to poke the devil. He even sort of resembles my dad, something in his face that reminds me of Jeffrey. I swallow. I haven’t seen either of them, Dad or Jeffrey, since the week of Mom’s funeral.

“So Michael’s kind of a badass,” Angela says, the side of her mouth hitching up in a half-suppressed smile. She meets my eyes, practically winks at me.

Phen scoffs. “He thinks so. He’s called The Smiter, after all.”

I quickly look away, struggling to keep my face neutral. I’m so going to strangle her later.

“And who’s the angel in green?” she asks.

Phen squints up at the fresco. “Hard to say. Uriel, probably.”

“Why, because Uriel is fond of the color green?”

He scoffs again. “Because Uriel is Michael’s bosom friend.”

Okay, bad idea or not, I have to admit this is interesting. We’ve been hanging out with Phen for only a couple of hours and already I’ve learned so much stuff I didn’t know before. Like my dad has a best friend. Uriel.

“So the left side is the life of Moses, and the right side is the life of Jesus, and the ceiling is creation,” Angela’s saying as I wander off a few steps. I crane my neck to see the famous depiction of God creating Adam on the ceiling. It’s always struck me as ironic, how the figure of God is reaching, his body almost fully extended in his effort to touch Adam, and there’s Adam all blasé about it, like he can’t be bothered to even lift his hand that far.

“What about this?” I hear Angela whisper as she and Phen make their way over to look at the back wall, Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment: a tangle of naked writhing bodies, some of them being lifted up toward heaven, some being dragged down.

“What about it?” Phen says after a long moment.

“Is this how it’s going to be?” she asks. “We’re all going to be sorted? In the end?”

I want to hear this. I move closer, hold my breath so I can listen over the shuffle of feet and quiet chatter of the tourists around us. For a minute Phen looks like he’s going to say something serious, impart some crucial piece of knowledge about the universe, life and death, heaven and hell, eternal rewards and everlasting punishment. Then he smiles.

“If I told you it’d spoil the surprise,” he says.

She whacks him in the arm. “Fine. Don’t tell me.”

“Oh, I won’t.”

“You’re a jerk, you know that?” she says, but she’s laughing.

Phen wants to climb to the top of the dome at St. Peter’s. Good thing I’m wearing decent shoes, is all I’m saying. It takes us a while to get there. First we have to take an elevator and then climb something like three hundred and twenty-three steps in this claustrophobic, shoulder-wide spiral staircase. But then we’re outside, and it’s like standing on top of the world, Rome stretched out beneath our feet all ablaze in the setting sun.

It takes my breath away. Well, that, and I just climbed all those stairs.

“This is amazing,” breathes Angela.

“Yes,” Phen says, and I guess he should know amazing when he sees it. “It is.”

I stand at the rail and take a few pictures of the view, but I realize there’s no way that my camera will be able to capture how beautiful it is. Then I turn and impulsively snap a picture of Phen and Angela. I know the second I see it flash across my screen that I’ve taken a gorgeous photo of them, standing close together but not touching, Phen not looking at the sunset but at Angela, openly admiring the way she’s bathed in golden light, strands of her long, dark hair blowing around her face as she gazes out with a rapt expression. In that instant I get the sense that this might not be a one-sided thing, their relationship. He might like her, too.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. It seems wrong to me, an eighteen-year-old in love with someone who’s older than dirt—literally—but who am I to judge? My mom married an angel too, after all.

Age is only a number, right?

I should go, I think, slip away and let them have this romantic moment together.

But then Angela says, “I have to pee. I’ll be right back.”

I stare at her, baffled. “You’re going to go all the way down to the bottom? I’ll come with you,” I offer.

“No. You stay,” she says, and I recognize the no-nonsense tone. This isn’t about her having to go to the bathroom. This is about her wanting me to be alone with Phen.

“Wait,” I say, but she’s already gone.

“Women,” Phen says with a laugh. “They always pick the most inopportune times to powder their noses.”

“Yeah, women are so dumb that way,” I say, irritated. I don’t like to be manipulated, even if I understand why she’s doing it. I should be nice, make small talk, try to get to know him. And he is likable, I’ll admit. Funny. Charming. I can see what Angela digs about him, and I know that this is important to her, that she wants me to approve of him, but I can’t help it, hypocritical or not. For some reason I can’t quite put my finger on, he makes me uncomfortable.

He smirks. This guy is a master at smirks. “You don’t try very hard to hide the fact that you don’t like me.”

I look away, embarrassed that it’s so obvious. “I like you, Phen.”

“Right,” he says sarcastically.

“Well, I want to like you, anyway.” That much is true.

“Why?” he asks. “Why do you care?”

“Because Angela cares.”

“Ah. I guess that makes you a good friend.”

“I guess.”

“So you’re trying to like me, but you can’t quite manage it,” he says with a laugh. “Why?”

“Because I don’t know what you are,” I answer. Might as well be honest.

He lifts his arms palms up, in a gesture that says, What you see is what you get.

“No,” I say. “You’re an angel.”

“Thank you for reminding me.”

“But you don’t act like an angel. You don’t feel like one. You don’t talk like one.”

“I see. Do you know many angels?” he asks.

Oh, crap. I do not want this conversation to become about me and the angels I know. The angel, singular. I turn away, watch the last wedge of the sun disappear behind the horizon. Below us in the square, the people are like tiny dark ants against the stone, milling around, and I suddenly feel so removed from them, like we’re different species, them and me, and I’m alone, watching them but unable to be part of their world.

“We’re not all alike, you know,” Phen says then. “Angels.”

“I get that. But you look like one of us, and you’re not. So I guess I don’t understand what you’re playing at, or what you want with Angela.”

I look up at him. All the humor is gone from his eyes. He rakes his fingers through his hair, then sighs heavily.

“I never fit in with the others,” he says after a thoughtful pause. “Never. The joyous ones with their optimism, their duties, their never-wavering faith in what He wanted. The Watchers who loved the humans so much it killed them to watch them die like pretty butterflies. The sad ones, who hated the humans for their free will, and hated Him for giving it to them. I don’t love or hate humans. I respect them. They shape themselves, in a way that we angels do not. They tell lies and sleep around and curse, and they try to define themselves so valiantly. Who am I? they keep asking. Why am I here?”

I don’t know what to say to this. That’s all I’ve really been asking myself for the past two years. Is that what makes me human, I wonder, that I keep asking this question?

“I think Angela is beautifully human, even if she is more than that. So are you. And yes, I’m an impostor. I make myself seem young and I pretend. It’s the only way I can feel anything.”

He sounds tired, sad. Maybe I’ve been overly judgmental about this whole thing, I think. I haven’t had an open mind, that’s for sure. But I still can’t read him. I can’t look into his heart and know whether his intentions are good or bad. So, almost without thinking, I turn and put my hand over his on the rail.

His eyes flash up to mine. His skin is cool, smooth, but hard, like touching a statue. He gives me a sorrowful smile.

“It takes a great deal of energy, being human, even if it’s only on the outside,” he says, and for a moment he lets me see the layer of him that’s under the surface: his spirit, a blurring like someone is smudging charcoal around him. His soul is gray. Cold. Almost colorless. I feel how weary he is with himself, how resigned that this existence is all that there will ever be for him, day after day after day, until the end of the world, and even then he doesn’t know what will happen or if anything will truly change.

“Humans fear death so much, but there is no death,” he whispers. “There is only the illusion of it. We can never cease to be. We must stay like this. Forever.”

Trust an angel to make eternity sound like a huge bummer.

“You should leave Angela alone,” I say then, firmly. Because Angela deserves someone good. Phen may not be evil. But he’s not good. She deserves someone who will be crazy about her for her, her zany intelligence and spurts of kindness, her little quirks. Not just for her “humanness.” She deserves someone real.

Phen pulls his hand away, smirks again, and the blurring around him stops, solidifies. He’s done showing me the truth.

“I tried to resist her,” he says. “Have you ever tried to say no to her?”

“You clearly didn’t try hard enough.”

“It’s a tad hypocritical,” he says, his voice harder, “you disapproving of me for pretending to be something I’m not.”

“Oh yeah? And why is that?”

“Because you’re not human either. But you want to be.”

My breath catches. It’s true. I’m more angel than human. But he can’t know that. Can he?

“I’m human,” I protest. I want to lie, tell him that I’m only a quarter angel, that my angel blood is so diluted that it hardly matters, that I’m a smidge away from being completely normal, but I’m afraid he’ll see right through me and that will only make things worse. I fortify the mental wall I’ve built between us. “I’m not pretending anything.”

“You’re a child pretending to sit at the grown-ups’ table,” he says.

“If I’m a child, then so is Angela,” I shoot back.

“Indeed.” He sighs like this place suddenly bores him, tugs his hand through his hair again. “We should go find her. It’s getting dark.”

ANGELA

The Vatican didn’t go well. I can see it all over Clara’s face when I get back from the bathroom. She doesn’t like Phen. She’ll never like him. She thinks he’s too good, too special, too angelic for me. I’m only a Dimidius, after all.

“Where does she get off, judging me?” I rant to him later, after I’ve snuck out and basically attacked him back at his flat. He strokes my hair, trying to pacify me, but I’m still mad. “I mean, it’s not like she’s so flawless.”

“She’s worried about you,” he says.

I glance up at him. “Don’t do that. Don’t act like you’re endangering me or something. I thought we were past that.”

“I’m an angel,” he says simply. “What we have isn’t normal. Clara wants something normal for you.”

“Well, I don’t want normal.” I snuggle down into his chest, press a kiss there. “I don’t know why she’s so fussy about it. She of all people should understand. Her mom married an angel, for heaven’s sake!”

I know the minute I say it that I’ve betrayed her.

Phen tenses, his hand freezing on my bare back. “What?”

I sit up and untangle myself, pull the sheet to cover me. “I shouldn’t have told you,” I say. “I didn’t mean to. Please, don’t . . .”

“No, I won’t,” he says softly, almost like he’s talking to himself. “It has nothing to do with you,” he says, and I’m not sure what he means by that. He looks at me sternly. “But you should be more careful. If the fallen knew, they would hunt her.”

“Okay.”

He pulls me back down to him. We lie there for a minute without talking.

“This is foolishness, Angela,” he says finally.

I close my eyes. “If this is foolish, I don’t want to be wise.”

“I care about you, more than I could ever have expected,” he says. “And I’ve . . . enjoyed this.”

“Me too.”

“But I can’t love you. And you deserve love. Clara is right about that.”

I swallow down the lump in my throat. “I don’t need love right now,” I whisper. “Okay?”

“Okay,” he says, and then I kiss him, as if I can make it like this conversation never happened, like I can make everything but us go away. And, for a little while at least, it does.

When I get back to the house Nonna is sitting on the front step. Waiting. She stands up when she sees me.

“So. It is true. You’ve been with a boy. All night.”

I force myself to stay casual. “Did Clara tell you that?”

“I don’t need Clara to tell me what is plain,” she says. “You have defiled yourself.”

“Oh, Nonna, don’t be so dramatic.”

She bangs her cane against the cobblestone, hard. “Your mother does not send you here for this!”

“So why does she send me?” I shoot back. “To get rid of me for a few months, that’s why. So she can be alone without a kid to weigh her down. Right?”

“Of course not. She sends you so that you might learn history, and understand the world. So that you will learn about family.”

I don’t say anything.

“Today you and Clara will take a train to my sister in Florence. You will stay there for the rest of the summer. And you will not see this boy again.”

“He’s not a boy,” I say.

“I don’t care what he is,” Nonna says wearily. “You will go. Now get upstairs and pack.”

I want to refuse. I’m eighteen now, a grown woman. I make my own choices. But I don’t argue. When Phen said good-bye to me this morning there was a finality in his voice, like maybe he won’t be there if I go back again. I guess I always knew that our time together would be fleeting. Ephemeral. And if he doesn’t decide to call it off now, it’s not like going to Florence will stop us from being together.

“Fine,” I say softly. I slip past Nonna into the house. In the kitchen, Clara looks up at me from the table, then looks quickly away.

“Well played,” I tell her.

“I didn’t do anything. She has eyes, you know. She could see you weren’t here. I tried to cover, but—”

“You’re a crappy liar,” I fill in. Which is true. Clara couldn’t lie her way out of a paper bag.

“Sorry,” Clara murmurs. “But Ange, about Phen—”

“Don’t concern yourself with Phen,” I interrupt. “Now apparently I’ve got some packing to do.”

CLARA

Angela doesn’t speak to me for a solid week. I pass the time wandering around Florence alone, seeing the sights without her. I consider how hard it’s going to be come fall, when we have to head off for Stanford together. But I’m not sorry for what I said to Phen. Not really. I was protecting her, I tell myself. The only way I knew how.

It doesn’t matter though. By the end of the week, she’s sneaking out again. Out the window, this time. Phen must have followed us here.

I’m going to have to talk to her about it. About him.

Angela’s great-aunt, Betta, puts us to work making her mandatory Sunday night family dinner. I watch Angela while she’s chopping lettuce for the salad, and I can tell she’s barely here with me. She’s still with him. Her eyes are far away. I wonder if I looked like that, with Tucker. If it was so plain on my face.

She looks up, sees me staring at her, and her expression darkens.

“You’re judging me,” she says. “Again.”

I don’t know how to tell her what I think. My throat closes around the words I would say, about what I saw of Phen’s soul, what he said, what I said to him. It’s not what she wants to hear. Still, I should tell her. It might hurt, but it’s important for her to know what he’s really like. I glance out the window and spot Betta on the balcony hanging up sheets, humming to the radio, safely out of earshot.

“Ange, listen,” I begin, even though I have a feeling that she won’t.

“Don’t bother explaining,” she says before I can get another word out. “I know this thing with Phen won’t work. He and I both know it. We’ve been over it. Maybe that’s part of what drives me crazy about him. He’s forbidden fruit. I know we can’t be together.”

I let out a tiny sigh of relief. Thank God she’s being sensible. Finally.

“But that doesn’t change how I feel about him,” she says then, staring up at me with the paring knife still clutched in her hand. “He might not be my destiny, like what you have, but it doesn’t change the fact that I . . .” She looks embarrassed, wipes sweat off her forehead, and goes back to cutting up lettuce. “I guess I thought you’d understand.”

So much for sensible. She’s right, though. I’m the last person qualified to lecture someone else about affairs of the heart. I’m the poster girl for the it’s complicated relationship status on Facebook. I still dream about Tucker almost every night.

“I do understand,” I say. “But—”

“That’s why we agreed to keep it casual,” she says like she didn’t hear me. “It was temporary; we knew that. We’re just friends, really. That’s all.”

“Friends,” I repeat slowly.

“Yes.” She holds out her hand, and it takes me a second to realize that I’m supposed to give her a tomato I’ve been holding. “Friends.”

I pass her the tomato. She slices it quickly, without looking at me. I remind myself that she’s a grown-up, and besides, we’re going to head back to the States in a few weeks and I’m sure there will be all kinds of smart, hot boys for her to keep it casual with at Stanford. Boys who have souls with colors.

I open my mouth to tell her that.

“Don’t,” she whispers. “Don’t ruin this for me, C. Leave us alone. It will work itself out.”

And so I don’t talk about what I saw in Phen that day on the top of St. Peter’s. I tell myself that it’s her life, and I stay out of it.

It’s a decision that I will always regret.

Read on for a sneak peek at
BOUNDLESS

PROLOGUE

The first thing I’m aware of is the dark. Like somebody just shut off the lights. I squint into the inky nothingness, straining to see something, anything, but my eyes don’t adjust. Tentatively I feel with my feet along the floor, which is oddly slanted, as if the room is being tilted downward. I take a step back and my leg strikes something hard. I stop. Try to regain my balance. Listen.

There are voices, faint voices, from somewhere above.

I don’t know what this vision is about yet, where I am or what I’m supposed to be doing or who I’m hiding from. But I do know this. I’m hiding.

And something terrible has happened.

It’s possible that I’m crying. My nose is running, but I don’t try to wipe at it. I don’t move. I’m scared. I could call the safety of glory, I think, but then they would find me. Instead I draw my hands into fists to stop the trembling. The darkness closes in, pressing and encasing me, and for a moment I fight the urge to call glory so hard that my fingernails break the surface of my palms.

Be still, I tell myself. Be quiet.

I let the darkness swallow me whole.

1

WELCOME TO THE FARM

“How you holding up, Clara?”

I jolt back to myself in the middle of my bedroom, a pile of old magazines strewn all around my feet, which I must have dropped when the vision hit. My breath is still frozen in my lungs, my muscles tense, as if they are preparing me to run. The light streaming through the window hurts my eyes. I blink at Billy, who leans against the door frame of my bedroom and offers up an understanding smile.

“What’s the matter, kid?” she asks when I don’t answer. “Vision got you down?”

I gulp in a breath. “How did you know?”

“I get them, too. Plus I’ve been hanging around people who have visions for most of my life. I recognize the post-vision face.” She takes me by the shoulders and sits down with me at the edge of my bed. We wait until my breathing quiets. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asks then.

“There’s not a lot to it yet,” I say. I’ve been having this vision all summer, since Italy with Angela. So far there hasn’t been much to go on but darkness, terror, an oddly slanted floor. “Should I tell you anyway?”

Billy shakes her head. “You can if you want, if it would help you get things off your chest. But visions are personal, for you and you alone, in my opinion.”

I’m relieved she’s so laid-back about it. “How do you do it?” I ask after a minute. “How do you go on living like normal when you know that something bad’s going to happen?”

There’s pain in her smile. She puts her warm brown hand over mine. “You learn to find your happiness, kid,” she says. “You figure out those things that give your life meaning and you hold on to them. You try to stop worrying about the stuff you can’t control.”

“Easier said than done.” I sigh.

“It takes practice.” She jostles her shoulder into mine. “You all right now? Ready to come up swinging?”

I conjure a weak smile. “Yes, ma’am.”

“All right, then, get to work,” she says playfully. I resume packing, which is what I was doing before the vision clobbered me, and Billy grabs a tape gun and starts sealing up the finished boxes. “You know, I helped your mom pack for Stanford, back in the day. Nineteen-sixty-three. We were roomies, living in San Luis Obispo, a little house by the beach.”

I’m going to miss Billy, I think as she goes on. Most of the time when I look at her I can’t help but see my mom, not because the two of them look anything alike, outside of being tall and gorgeous, but because, as my mom’s best friend for like the last hundred years, Billy has a million memories like this one about Stanford, funny stories and sad ones, times when Mom got a bad haircut or when she lit the kitchen on fire trying to make Bananas Flambé or when they were nurses in WWII together and Mom saved a man’s life with nothing but a bobby pin and a rubber band. It’s the next best thing to being with Mom, hanging with Billy. It’s like, for those few minutes, when she’s telling the stories, Mom’s alive again.

“Hey, you okay?” Billy asks.

“Almost done.” I cough to cover the catch in my voice, then fold up the last sweater, lay it in a box, and glance around. Even though I didn’t pack everything, even though I left my posters on the walls and some of my stuff out, my room looks emptied, like I’ve already moved out of this place.

I can’t believe that, after tomorrow, I won’t live here anymore.

“You can come home anytime you like,” Billy says. “Remember that. This is your house. Just call and tell me you’re on your way and I’ll run over and put fresh sheets on the bed.”

She squeezes my hand and then heads downstairs to load boxes into her truck, which she’ll be driving to California tomorrow, me following along in my car.

I go out into the hall. The house is quiet but also seems to have some kind of energy, like it’s full of ghosts. I stare at Jeffrey’s closed door. He should be here. He should have already started his junior year at Jackson Hole High School. He should be well into football practice and his disgusting early-morning protein shakes and tons of mismatched stinky gym socks in the laundry basket. I should be able to go to his door right now and knock and hear him say, Go away, but I’d go in anyway, and then he’d look at me from his computer and maybe turn his throbbing music down a notch or two, smirk, and say, “Aren’t you gone yet?” and maybe I’d think of something smart to fire back, but in the end we’d both know that he would miss me. And I would miss him.

I miss him.

The front door bangs shut downstairs. “You expecting company?” Billy calls up.

I become aware of the sound of a car pulling up in the driveway. “No,” I holler back. “Who is it?”

“It’s for you,” she says.

I book it down the stairs.

“Oh, good,” says Wendy when I open the door. “I was afraid I missed you.”

Instinctively I look around for Tucker, my heart speeding up.

“He’s not here,” Wendy says gently. “He, uh—”

Oh. He didn’t want to see me.

I try to smile while something in my chest squeezes painfully. Right, I think. Why would he want to see me? We’re broken up. He’s moving on.

I make myself focus on Wendy. She’s clutching a cardboard box to her chest like she’s afraid it might float away from her. She shifts from one foot to the other. “What’s up?”

“I had some of your stuff,” she says. “I’m headed to school tomorrow, and I—I thought you might want it.”

“Thanks. I’m leaving tomorrow, too,” I tell her.

Once, when her brother and I first got together, Wendy told me that if I hurt Tucker she’d bury me in horse manure. Ever since we broke up some part of me has been expecting her to show up here with a shovel and bean me over the head with it. Some part of me thinks that maybe I’d deserve it. Yet here she is looking all fragile and hopeful, like she missed me this summer. Like she still wants to be my friend.

“Thanks,” I say again. I smile, reach for the box. She smiles shyly back and hands it over. Inside there are a couple DVDs, magazines, my dog-eared copy of Vampire Academy and a few other books, a pair of dress shoes I loaned her for prom.

“How was Italy?” she asks as I set the box down next to the door. “I got your postcard.”

“It was beautiful.”

“I bet,” she says with an envious sigh. “I’ve always wanted to backpack around Europe. I want to see London, Paris, Vienna . . .” She smiles. “Hey, how about you show me your pictures? I’d love to see them. If you have time.”

“Um, sure.” I run upstairs to get my laptop, then sit down with her on the living room sofa and cruise through my photos of this summer, her shoulder pressing into mine as we look at pictures of the Coliseum, the Roman arches, the catacombs, Tuscany with its vineyards and rolling hills, Florence, me making that dumb “I’m holding it up” pose at the leaning tower of Pisa.

And then up flashes a picture of Angela and Phen at the top of St. Peter’s.

“Wait, go back,” Wendy says as I click past it.

I reluctantly press the back button.

“Who’s that?” she breathes.

I get it. Phen is hot. There’s something magnetic about those brown eyes of his, the manly perfection of his face and all that, but sheesh. Not Wendy, too.

“Just a guy we met in Rome,” I tell Wendy. That’s about as close to the truth as I can come without going into the gory details of Angela and her secret, “swear you won’t tell anybody, Clara” boyfriend. Who is, according to her, a summer thing only. She’s been all “Phen who?” ever since we returned to Wyoming, like she never even met the guy.

“Did I mention that I want to go to Italy?” Wendy says, raising her eyebrows. “Wow.”

“Yeah, there are a lot of hot guys in Italy,” I admit. “Of course, then they become beer-bellied middle-aged men in Armani suits with their hair slicked back who look at you like ‘how you doing?’” I give her my best pervy Italian grin, tilt my chin up, blow an air kiss at her.

She laughs. “Ew.”

I close my laptop, glad to get the subject off Phen. “So, that was Italy.” I pat my stomach. “I gained like five pounds in pasta.”

“Well, you were too skinny before, anyway,” Wendy says.

“Gee, thanks.”

“I hate to be the party pooper, but I should go,” she says. “I’ve got loads to do at home before tomorrow.”

We stand, and I turn to her, instantly choked up at the idea of saying good-bye. “You’re going to do awesome at Washington State and have all kinds of fun and become the best vet ever, but I am so going to miss you,” I say.

Her eyes are misty, too. “We’ll see each other on breaks, right? You can always email me, you know. Don’t be a stranger.”

“I won’t. Promise.”

She hugs me. “Bye, Clara,” she whispers. “Take care.”

When she’s gone I gather up the box, take it to my room, and close the door. I dump the box out on my bed. There among the things I’d loaned Wendy, I find some items from Tucker: a fishing lure that I bought him at a tackle shop in Jackson—his lucky Carrots lure, he called it, a pressed wildflower from one of the wreaths he used to make for my hair, a mix CD I made him last year, full of songs about cowboys and songs about flying and songs about love, which he listened to a bunch of times even though he must have thought it was mostly corny. He’s giving it all back. I hate how much this hurts me, how much I’m clearly still hanging on to what we had, so I put it all carefully back in the box, and I seal the box with tape and slide it into the shadows at the back of my closet. And say good-bye.

Clara.

I hear the voice in my head, calling my name, before I hear it out loud. I’m standing in the quad at Stanford University, in the midst of more than fifteen hundred teeming freshmen and their parents, but I hear him loud and clear. I push through the crowd, looking for his wavy dark hair, the flash of his green eyes. Then suddenly there’s a break in the people around me and I see him, about twenty feet away, standing with his back to me. As usual. And as usual, it’s like a bell chimes inside me in a kind of recognition.

I cup my hands around my mouth and call, “Christian!”

He turns. We weave toward each other through the crowd. In a flash I’m by his side, grinning up at him, almost laughing because it feels so good to be together again after so long.

“Hey,” he says. He has to talk loudly to be heard over the people around us. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Yes, fancy that.”

It doesn’t occur to me until right this minute how much I’ve missed him. I was so busy missing other people, my mom, Jeffrey, Tucker, Dad, caught up in all that I was leaving behind. But now—it’s like when part of you stops hurting and suddenly you’re yourself again, healthy and whole, and only then do you understand that you’ve been in pain for a while. I missed his voice in my head, in my ears. I missed his face. His smile.

“I missed you, too.”

About the Author

CYNTHIA HAND is a native of southeastern Idaho and currently lives with her husband and two children in Southern California, where she teaches writing at Pepperdine University. She has graduate degrees in creative writing from Boise State University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Instead of a muse, Cynthia has a guardian angel named Buster. He wears a Stetson in place of a halo, prefers a beat-up pickup truck to flying, and loves to correct Cynthia’s grammar. Find out more at www.cynthiahandbooks.com.

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Credits

Cover photo © 2012 by Howard Huang

Lettering by Peter Horridge

Cover design by Sasha Illingworth

Copyright

Copyright © 2012 by Cynthia Hand

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.

Epub Edition © NOVEMBER 2012 ISBN: 9780062258571

ISBN 978-0-06-225857-1

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