Boundless (Unearthly) (24 page)

“Don’t,” I say.

Dizziness crashes over me. I hear a strange whooshing sound, like wind in my ears, accompanied by the distinct smell of smoke. Christian turns, his face all scrunched up like he’s confused by what he sees in my head. He looks suddenly worried.

That’s when I pass out.

The black room is filling up with smoke.

I jolt into future Clara in the exact instant that the darkness explodes into light, and in that moment I understand: This light’s not glory. It’s fire. A fireball streaks over my shoulder and strikes the wall somewhere off to the side, behind me. Then Christian screams, “Get down!” and I drop just in time for him to literally leap over my body, his glory sword out and bright and deadly, blinding me. Everything’s a jumble of black-and-white flashing: Christian and the figures circling him, the swift movement of his blade against the dark. I scramble backward until my back hits something solid, glance over my shoulder to see what’s happening with the fire.

The flames lick up the side of the room, igniting the velvet curtains like tissue paper. This place is going to be an inferno in about five minutes. My heart’s hammering, but I swallow and push myself to my knees, then to my feet. I have to help Christian. I have to fight.

No,
he says in my mind.
You’ve got to find him. Go.

The high-pitched noise comes again, thin and reedy, frightened. Smoke chokes me, the air in here close and hot and heavy in my lungs, but inexplicably I turn away from Christian and what I think must be the exit and stumble toward the fire, coughing, my eyes watering.

I hit the edge of something hard and wooden right at chest level, hard enough to knock the wind out of me if I had any wind in me to begin with. I figure out what the barrier is at the same time that my eyes finally decide to adjust.

It’s a stage.

I look around wildly to confirm what I already know, but it’s so crazy obvious I can’t believe I never figured this out before. It all falls neatly into place: the slanted floor of the auditorium, the ghosts of white tablecloths along the front, the rows of metal-backed seats. The velvet curtains and the smell of sawdust and paint.

We’re in the Pink Garter.

And in that instant, I figure out what the noise is.

It’s a baby crying.

“Clara!”

I open my eyes. Somehow I ended up on my living room floor, and I don’t quite know how. Two sets of eyes are staring down at me, one blue and one green, both insanely worried.

“What happened?” Tucker asks.

“It was the black room,” Christian says, not a question.

“It was the Garter.” I struggle to sit up. “I need my phone. Where’s my phone?”

Tucker finds it on the coffee table and brings it to me, while Christian helps me over to the couch. I still feel out of breath.

“There’s going to be a fire,” I tell Christian.

Tucker makes a disbelieving noise. “Oh, great.”

I dial Angela’s number. It rings and rings, and each second that ticks by where she doesn’t pick up makes the sense of dread in my stomach grow stronger. But then, finally, there’s a click and a faint hello on the other end.

“Angela!” I say.

“Clara?” She sounds like she’s been sleeping.

“I just had my vision again, and the black room is the Garter, Angela, and the noise I hear—do you remember me telling you?—that noise, which is what gives us away, it’s a baby. It’s got to be Webster. You need to get out. Now.”

“Now?” she says, still half-awake. “It’s nine o’clock at night. I just got Web to sleep.”

“Ange, they’re coming.” I can’t help the frantic squeak in my voice.

“Okay, slow down, C,” Angela says. “Who’s coming?”

“I don’t know. Black Wings.”

“Do they know about Web?” she asks, starting to comprehend some of what I’m saying. “Are they coming for him? How would they know?”

“I don’t know,” I say again.

“Well, what do you know?”

“I know something terrible is going to happen there. You have to leave.”

“And go where?” she asks, still not fully getting it. “No. I can’t go anywhere tonight.”

“But Ange—”

“How long have you been having the vision? Almost a year? There’s no need to rush off all panicked and clueless. We’ll think it through.”

“The vision was different tonight. It was urgent.”

Her voice hardens. “Well, sometimes the visions are like that, aren’t they? And you think you know what they mean, but you don’t.” She sighs like she realizes that she’s taking her issues out on me, and she’s sorry. “I can’t go running off in the middle of the night on a whim, C. I have Web to think about now. We need a plan. Come to the Garter in the morning, and we’ll talk about your vision, okay? Then I’ll decide where to go from there.”

There’s a high-pitched wail in the background. The sound of it makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

“Oh, great. You woke him up,” she says, annoyed. “I have to go. I’ll see you in the morning.”

She hangs up on me.

I stare at the phone for a minute.

“What was that all about?” Tucker asks from behind me. “What’s going on?”

I meet Christian’s eyes, and he knows what I’m thinking. “We can take my truck,” he says.

We start moving toward the door. “We’ll go over there and I can put my hand on her and try to show her what I see. Maybe she’ll be able to receive it. We’ll make her understand. Then we’ll pack her and the baby up and take them to a hotel.” I sling my coat over my shoulder.

“Wait, what?” Tucker follows us out onto the porch. “Hold on, Carrots. Explain this to me. What’s happening?”

“We don’t have time.” I look at Tucker over my shoulder as I’m dashing away, and I say, “I have to go; I’m sorry,” and then I climb up into Christian’s pickup and we take off, spraying the gravel in the driveway, off to Jackson, and I get the sinking feeling that the trials my dad was telling me about are really about to begin.

Just before we get to town, I get a text from Angela:
trp dr
, it says, and I don’t know what that means, but it makes my bad feeling get worse. Then when we arrive at the Garter, we find the front door open a crack. Christian and I both stiffen at the sight. We know that Anna Zerbino keeps this place locked up extra tight in the off hours, ever since an incident last year when a group of drunken tourists broke in and stole a bunch of costumes out of the dressing rooms and went gallivanting in chaps and petticoats all over town. Christian toes the door open enough for us to pass through, and we creep into the front lobby. The room is empty. He takes a moment to inspect the door, but there’s nothing to suggest violence. The lock is intact.

I cross the lobby to the red velvet curtain that separates the front of the house from the auditorium and push it aside. The lights are off. The theater is a pit of blackness straight out of my worst fears, and I can’t look at it for more than a few seconds before I have to turn away.

Upstairs there’s the sound of a muffled voice, a dragging noise like a chair scraping across the floor.

I glance uncertainly at Christian like,
What should we do?

He gestures with his head toward the back corner, where there’s a staircase that goes to the second floor. We take the stairs slowly, careful not to make any noise. At the top we stop and listen. This door is closed, a ribbon of bright light glowing beneath it.

I’m tempted by the ridiculous urge to knock, like maybe if I act normal, things will be normal. I’ll knock, and Anna will answer it all serious and ask us what we’re doing here at this late hour, but then she’ll take us back to Angela’s room, and Angela will look up from where she’s sprawled on her bed, reading, and she’ll say,
Really, you guys? You’re really so paranoid that you couldn’t wait until morning?

I could knock, and then there wouldn’t be anything evil on the other side of that door.

Christian shakes his head slightly.
What do you feel?
he asks.

I open my mind. The minute I lower my defenses—which I wasn’t even aware I had up—sorrow floods me, a deep penetrating pain, so fierce it makes me gasp for air. I lean against the wall and try to delve inside the suffering, to identify its source, but all I get is an image of a woman’s body floating facedown in the water, her dark hair spreading out around her head. The angel—oh yes, definitely an angel—is not Samjeeza, that much I know. His sorrow is different from Sam’s, angrier, a rage caught up in an agony that’s centuries old and still red hot, but it’s also more controlled than Sam’s, less self-pitying, like he’s channeling his emotions into something else: a purpose. A desire to destroy.

There’s a Black Wing,
I say to Christian silently, careful to keep the words flowing only between us, the way Dad taught us to do.
Grade-A sorrow. That’s about all I can get—it overwhelms everything else. What about you? Can you tell what somebody’s thinking in there?

There are at least seven people in that room,
he says, closing his eyes.
It’s hard to sift through.

“I told you that you’re not welcome here,” a voice says suddenly, low and frightened. “I want you to leave.”

“Come now, Anna,” responds another voice—an older man, from the sound of it, with the slight lilt to his speech that Dad has. “Is that any way to treat an old friend?”

“You were never my friend,” Anna says. “You were a mistake. A sin.”

“Oh, a sin,” he says. “I’m flattered.”

“I rebuke you,” Anna says. “In the name of Jesus Christ. Begone.”

This annoys him. “Oh, don’t be so dramatic. This isn’t about you.”

“Then what is it about?” This from Angela, steady and crazy calm considering there’s a Black Wing in her living room. “What do you want?”

“We’ve come to see the baby,” he says.

Christian and I exchange troubled glances.
Where is Webster?

“My baby?” Angela repeats, almost stupidly. “Why?”

“Penamue would like to see the wee thing, as would I. I’m the grandfather, after all.”

Holy crap, I think. Phen’s here. And … does that mean that the other angel is Angela’s father?

“You are nothing to him, Asael,” Anna spits out. “Nothing.”

At the name
Asael
my brain floods with every piece of information I’ve gathered about this guy over the past year: the collector, the big bad who would stop at nothing to recruit or destroy all of the Triplare from this world, the brother who usurped Samjeeza as the leader of the Watchers.
Very dangerous,
I can practically hear my father saying.
Without pity. Without hesitation. He takes what he wants, and if he sees you, if he knows what you are, he will take you.
I want to run, that’s my instinct—run, run down the stairs and out the door and not look back—but I clench my teeth and stay right where I am.

“He’s not here,” Angela says, like she’s only irritated at this intrusion and not terrified out of her mind. “You could have simply called, Phen, and I would have told you that. You didn’t have to make the trip all this way.”

Asael laughs. The sound makes my skin crawl. “We could have called,” he repeats, amused. “Where is the baby, then, if not here?”

“I gave him away.”

“You gave him away? To whom?”

“To a nice couple in a profile I picked at the adoption agency, who desperately wanted a kid. The dad’s a musician; the mom’s a pastry chef. I liked the idea that he’d always have music and good food.”

“Hmm,” Asael says thoughtfully. “I believe that Penamue was under the impression that you were going to keep the child. Isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” answers a voice I wouldn’t have recognized as Phen’s if I didn’t know it was him speaking. He sounds like he has a bad cold. “She told me she was keeping it.”

“Him,” Angela corrects. “And I changed my mind, after it was clear that you were going to bail on me.” She can’t keep the bitterness out of her voice. “Look, I’m not the maternal type. I’m nineteen years old. I go to Stanford. I have a life. Being strapped with a kid’s the last thing I want. So I gave him to some people who’d take care of him.”

I can’t see, but I can imagine Angela standing there, that carefully blank expression she gets when she’s hiding something, her hip pushed out a bit to one side, her head cocked like she can’t believe she’s still having this oh-so-boring conversation. “So it looks like you wasted your time,” she adds. “And mine.”

There’s a moment of silence. Then Asael starts to clap, slowly, so loudly I flinch every time his hands strike each other.

“What a performance,” he says. “You’re quite the actress, my dear.”

“Believe me or don’t,” she says. “It doesn’t matter to me.”

“Search the apartment,” Asael says, an untroubled calm to his voice, like still water on the lake, which doesn’t reveal the turmoil under the surface. “Look in all the nooks and crannies. I believe the baby is here, somewhere.”

I hear people moving away from us, down the hall, and then the noise of tossing furniture and breaking glass. Anna starts to whisper to herself, soft and desperate, something that I vaguely recognize as the Lord’s Prayer.

We should do something,
I send to Christian.

He shakes his head again.
We’re outnumbered
.
There are two full angels, Clara, and your dad said we wouldn’t be able to beat even one of them in a head-to-head fight. Then add in a few what I am betting are Triplare. We wouldn’t stand a chance in there.

I bite my lip.
But we have to help Angela.

He shakes his head.
We should figure out where Web is
.
That’s what Angela would want us to do,
he says. I can feel his desire to run away, the way he’s been conditioned to in this situation, and I can feel his fear, almost panic at this point, rising in him. He’s not afraid for himself. He’s afraid for me. He wants to put me in his truck and drive far away from here. He knows if we stay it will all play out like his vision, which ends with me covered in blood, staring up at him with glassy eyes. He can’t let that happen.

Now it’s my turn to shake my head.
We can’t just leave Angela.