Dark Angel (3 page)

If Holly hadn’t lived next door to me all our lives, I know for sure we wouldn’t be buddies.

‘Costume time!’ Grace announced, knocking at my door an hour later than planned.

I checked my watch. Eight thirty.

The single organizational skill Grace possesses is the ability to produce an inhaler for Jude whenever he has an asthma attack. Otherwise she floats blissfully through total chaos.

‘How’s Jude?’ I asked as I let her in.

‘Not so good,’ she frowned. ‘His dad took him to the ER.’

‘What did I tell you!’ I yelped. ‘I said he needed to see a doctor.’

‘The hospital is keeping him in overnight. They say the smoke from Black Rock is definitely making him worse.’

‘See!’

‘Yeah. Honestly, Tania, this happens so much. I guess I’ve become a little blasé.’

‘Gotcha.’ I backed off, sensing that Grace had already done the
mea culpa
routine on herself. ‘You’re sure you want to be here? Shouldn’t you be at the hospital?’

She shook her head. ‘You mean, with Dr Medina standing guard, bedside?’

‘I hear you.’ Everyone in the world loves golden, gentle, generous Grace – everyone except Jude’s family. What’s not to love? She’s a people magnet, the most popular girl in our year with both students and teachers. You’re naturally drawn to the way she always makes time and space for you; you bask in the sunshine of that laid back, effortless smile.

‘So show me the sketches,’ she insisted, and I had to admit that I hadn’t made any yet and Grace sighed and made me sit down and focus until I developed the bird of paradise idea into something that could be scrambled together in the space of twenty-four hours – basically a turquoise one-piece bathing suit from my closet, draped with petals of gold foil to mimic plumage and topped with an elaborate bird mask with a high purple crest.

‘We need Orlando,’ Grace sighed as we discussed details. ‘He’d know how to do this.’

I need Orlando, period, I thought. God, I was missing him, and how come minutes stretched into hours, hours into days when he was away?

At ten pm Grace got a message from Jude in the hospital.

Out of my mind, crazy bored. When can u visit?

Early 2moro. Get some sleep xox

Bed is lonely without u.

Sleep!
Grace’s finger trembled over the Send button and she sighed as she pressed it.

‘Go home,’ I told her. ‘He’ll be OK in the morning; they’ll let him out of the hospital, you’ll see.’

When I finally went to bed it was past midnight and my room was a mess. Scraps of gold foil and stray feathers from my mom’s old feather boa littered the carpet. Before I could slide under the sheet, I had to clear cans of paint and glue from my bed. Then I opened the window to disperse the fumes. As I sank my head against the pillow, though my costume was almost complete, I still had the sickening feeling in my stomach that I really, truly didn’t want to go to the party on Black Rock.

Eventually though, I quit worrying about who I would talk to and would anyone even want to dance with me and I drifted off in the darkness.

I drifted, then jerked awake, turned on to my side, drew my knees up to my chest, tried to sleep. It was no good. I turned again, stretched my legs, pulled the pillow over my head to cut out the distant sound of a siren wailing along a deserted highway.

I don’t know if I was asleep or awake but I smelled woodsmoke. It’s unmistakable; not unpleasant, especially the sweet scent of burning pine resin. I breathed it in, began to wonder, where is this fire – on the mountain or inside my head?

Suddenly I feel the wind. It’s so strong it almost lifts me off my feet. And I see the first orange firebrands in the dark sky, flung into the air ahead of raging flames, then the fire itself, heating the mountainside so that trees burst into flames, turning to ash, and the flames jump gorges and rampage on.

I raise my head, try to get out of bed but smoke is filling my lungs, a blast of red-hot wind forces me back.

Live embers drop on my flesh, fade and die. Though the fire has found its own direction and is running towards me, I can’t move. Flames are sweeping down Black Rock, trees are twisting and cracking – sharp explosions all around, the sound of branches crashing to the ground
.

The head of the fire sweeps over the ridge on to Becker Hill. It hits an old-style log cabin overlooking the lake and explodes into a wall of flame; now it’s arching over the next house in its path, leaping over the roof, leaving it untouched.

The hot wind blasts down the hill, tearing at doors and shutters, flinging those firebrands into porches, shattering windows
.

I’m trapped in my bed, feeling the searing heat. My heart is thumping through my ribs. I hear a baby cry, a woman scream. The flames arch again in a fantastic riot of yellow and red. Someone is praying; a figure runs straight into the flames without looking back, then a second person – straight into the inferno – and the cries stop and the only sound is wind sucking around corners, whooshing through the room, and roof timbers cracking in the roaring flames
.

And me sitting up and sobbing
.

Someone ran into the room and turned on the light. Mom held me and promised it would all be all right, that it wasn’t real, only a nightmare – the same way she’d soothed and comforted me through all the years.

I knew not to share with Holly, or Aaron or Leo. Instead I chose Grace, once I’d checked with her that the medics had given Jude the all-clear.

‘He’s home,’ she’d told me when we met at the school gates. ‘They gave him new medication and warned him to stay inside until the smoke clears from the valley.’

‘I don’t get it,’ I told her as we headed for class. ‘Why do I always dream the same thing – the fire, the people burning to death? How come I believe I’m actually there?’

‘I have no idea. I never even remember my dreams, let alone relive them the way you do.’

‘So that’s it? It’s a recurring nightmare, end of story.’

She nodded. ‘What else?’

‘You don’t think it’s a kind of sixth sense – something weird and extra sensory that most people don’t know they have?’ I almost apologized as I said it, knowing how crazy it made me sound.

Grace wasn’t willing to give the idea any space. ‘Think about it. Make the link with the specific history of your house – not the actual house, but the plot it stands on – the fire, the tragedy.’ She hesitated, obviously not wanting to continue and hurt my feelings.

‘Go ahead – you’re planning to be the psychology major,’ I sighed.

‘Somehow that event has taken hold of you, deep down in your subconscious. Then yesterday, when we were discussing the latest fire out at Black Rock, it lit up those dark corners of your brain, and there you go again – classic nightmare build up.’

So Grace was a rationalist, a budding scientist who didn’t believe in the paranormal – I already knew that.

‘Something new happened – I heard the baby crying,’ I confessed. And I feel connected; it feels like it’s happening to me.

‘Only in the dream,’ she insisted, blocking my way into the noisy classroom. ‘You hear me, Tania –
only
in your imagination.’

‘OK, yeah.’ I stopped there, didn’t press on to describe the link I felt to that long-gone child – the love and the pity, the helplessness when I heard her cry.

Dad was home for a week after working two weeks on the Utah site. During his down time he likes to hike in the forest, fish in white-water rapids and read biographies of dead American presidents. This is down to his immigrant background. In Romania he and his family lived on the breadline in a tiny apartment on the tenth floor of a cement tower block in Bucharest. His dad traded black-market Levi jeans until 1986 when he fell foul of the Communist regime and the entire Ionescu family had to flee the country by stowing away in a shallow compartment concealed under the floor of a truck.

And I guess while I’m on the subject of parents, you may have the wrong idea about my domestic goddess mom with the stack of sweet-smelling laundry and the ever-hugging arms. She’s also a commercial property lawyer working for a multinational energy company, renting office space all over the world. I’m serious – she’s a legal hotshot, so she was currently on a plane to Russia and Dad was on the couch with JFK.

‘They found firefighter guy,’ he told me, deep and staccato, when I walked in the house after school. ‘He took shelter in old mine.’

‘Is he OK?’ I asked.

Dad shook his head. ‘Didn’t make it. They told family in Irvine County. Brother lives here in Bitterroot.’

So I went straight on to Zoran’s blog, expecting and probably hoping to see ‘Cancelled’ written all over the invite to his party. But no, he’d updated everyone with the sad news and decided in spite of the tragedy that the Heavenly Bodies event would go ahead: ‘Our doors are still open, the band is here. We’re ready to party.’

‘Look at this,’ I said to Dad. ‘Don’t you think he would cancel?’

‘Lot of money, lot of time getting ready,’ he shrugged. ‘Live music, caterers. Anyhow, celebrities don’t think how we do.’ And he went back to the Cuban missile crisis and how the president was rumoured to have taken his eye off the threat of nuclear war to admire the curvaceous charms of Marilyn Monroe.

So when Grace called to tell me that Jude still couldn’t leave his house, I was more than ready to call a rain check.

‘Let’s stay home, girls together,’ I suggested. ‘Play some music, read magazines.’

‘And miss the big event?’ she argued. ‘Tania,
everyone
will be there!’

‘But you can’t leave poor Jude.’

‘What am I gonna do? Hammer at the door pleading with the parents from hell to let me in?’

‘OK, but how’s he going to feel knowing you’re out partying?’

‘Don’t do that to me,’ she warned. ‘Jude knows how much I’ve been looking forward to this, so he’s fine with it. What does Orlando want you to do – stay home and mope?’

‘Actually, he said for me to go party.’

‘Exactly my point! And the costumes, Tania – we made a lot of effort.’

I stood with the phone to my ear, gazing out of the window at the sun sinking behind Black Rock. It looked like a gold coin with a red rim melting on to the dark horizon and turning the sky violet. ‘Why don’t I want to go?’ I sighed.

‘Because deep down you’re an antisocial loner with depressive inclinations and I see it as my duty to rescue you from yourself!’ Grace declared in doctor–patient tones. ‘I’ll be over at your place in thirty minutes, dressed and ready to party.’

I
t was time to go, Grace told me.

There she was at my door, dressed as an angel, totally convincing. Whatever image you have in your head, double it for the effect Grace made in her costume, all gauzy and ethereal with her smooth pale skin, soft, full lips and shining, clear grey eyes. Long, fair curls hung loose. She wore fine silver and gold cord wrapped around her torso over thin white chiffon folds like a Botticelli Venus, showing the curves of her breasts and the lean lines of her thighs. And white feathered wings spread wide behind her.

‘Can I get a ride?’ Holly called over the fence. Her version of angel was bolder, more warrior archangel – with her physique how could she help it? Her blonde hair was invisible under a silver headdress shaped like a helmet, there were no soft folds to her metallic tunic and she wore shiny wristbands and open gladiator sandals, also in silver.

‘Sure,’ Grace told her. ‘Just throw your wings in the back.’

Holly frowned as she strode up the drive. ‘I don’t do wings the way you do wings,’ she said, showing us the two small silvery ones attached to the heels of her sandals. Mercury, messenger to the gods – that was who she was.

Grace and I paused then grinned our approval.

‘Where’s Aaron?’ Grace wanted to know.

Holly shrugged. ‘We had a fight over who would drive. Now he says he won’t go to the party. Do I look like I care?’

‘Poor Aaron.’ I said this deliberately. We all do, as a kind of joke – ‘Poor Aaron’ – every time Holly throws her weight around. Example: she leaves this incredibly gorgeous guy standing outside the music store in town for a whole hour then doesn’t even say sorry when she shows up. Poor Aaron. Or she beats him at tennis then makes sure everyone knows. Poor Aaron again. But he grins and doesn’t seem to care. I guess that means they’re in love.

‘Get in the car,’ I told Holly. ‘And don’t squish my mask.’

For once, Holly did as she was told. ‘Hey, Tania, you rock,’ she told me as she assessed my turquoise and gold splendour with a cool eye.

Compliments from Holly are rare. ‘Did I just hear her say something positive to me?’ I muttered to Grace.

‘Get in the car too,’ Grace told me, glancing at her wrist and remembering that angels don’t wear watches. ‘I’m sure we’re gonna be late.’ Pot, kettle, black.

‘Bye, girls,’ Dad said, coming around the side of the house carrying JFK. He wouldn’t put the book down, wouldn’t eat or sleep until he’d read all eight hundred conspiracy-laden pages. ‘Say hi to Zoran Brancusi from me.’

Grace released the handbrake and slid down the drive.

‘Awesome. Does your dad actually know Zoran?’ Grace was surprised. I find she usually takes stuff too literally.

‘Like, yeah!’ Holly laughed from the back seat. ‘There are only a million Romanians living in the United States as we speak!’

‘Be back before midnight!’ Dad called after us.

So we set off down the road, three little Cinderellas totally thrilled to be going to the ball.

Holly demanded music. Grace played a CD by a girl singer she’d just discovered. She was only the same age as us but she sang wise, soulful songs about her boyfriend leaving, the world lying at her feet in fragments but finding the strength to carry on. The album title track was called ‘Out of the Ashes’.

‘I thought it was Tania who was fixated on things burning!’ Holly sighed.

‘Listen, I just like her voice, that’s all.’ Grace drove through town, along Main Street, already in deep shadow, out along the tourist route up towards Black Rock.