A Gift of Wings (15 page)

Aidan resisted the urge to flip him the bird and took a long swallow from the bottle Kev had handed him.

When Aidan made no response to his comment, Malachi lifted his gaze to Aidan’s. “You did well in that last exercise. Extremely well, considering that you have been out of practice for so long. Do not worry. You will be back in form before you know it.”

“What exactly do you think we are up against?” Aidan asked after a moment. “I know I have a lot of training to do just to get into good enough shape to be a fit second. But I don’t know what kind of battle—or war—I need to be prepared to lead the Forces into. Are we talking Dark Forces, Angelic Powers, what?”

“Yes,” both men responded.

Kev continued, “We’re caught in the middle on this one, bro. We have enemies on both sides, and it’s difficult to know if, when, or from where the threat might come.”

“Fortunately, we have allies on both sides, too,” Malachi added. “Not all of the beings of influence in the Heavens support the new Metratron. And many of the Dark Ones continue to recognize the need for alliance. Those on either side who support the Alliance will fight with us should the extremists on either side precipitate a war. Of course, the problem is, if that should happen, we’re also caught in the crossfire between the two.”

“How’s that for a morale booster?” Aidan quipped. “Welcome to the Forces of the Fallen, friend to none and enemy to all.”

Kev’s voice was dead serious as he shot back a brief “Welcome to my world.”

***

Aidan showed steady improvement as they moved through the day’s remaining drills and battle exercises. He could feel his senses sharpening and his instincts refining to the point where he felt as if every cell in his body was capable of experiencing all five bodily senses and a few extras. As his senses and skills improved, he was amazed to find that his powers were stronger than they were two years ago. He had expected them to grow weak from lack of use. Sure, he was out of practice—a fact to which his tired, aching body could attest—but he was remembering old moves and techniques with ease and learning new ones more rapidly than he could have imagined. As the day wore on, the mock battles stretched longer as it became increasingly difficult for the combined forces of Kev and Malachi to defeat him, and he even brought the final exercise to an end by besting both his opponents with an economical series of elegantly lethal maneuvers.

Aidan left the training facility battle-scarred and weary, but filled with a growing sense of certainty that his life was back on track. That certainty was stronger than any resistance he had had to returning. He now realized that the very strength of his resistance had sprung from his innate knowledge that the outcome was inevitable. He had been fighting against the life he had been born to live. Now that he had accepted that, well, it didn’t mean that the path would be filled with roses, but it did mean that he no longer felt as if his day-to-day existence was ripping him apart from the inside out. That had to count for something.

***

Lucky left her apartment for the Oriental Institute about 1:30 on Friday afternoon. Mo had tried to convince her to skip the lecture and hang out with her until it was time for them to get ready for the dance, but Lucky had adamantly refused. She didn’t know why she felt so compelled to go to Zeke’s lecture. She had liked Zeke, and she was interested in finding out more about her friend the
lamassu
, but her desire to attend the lecture went way beyond that. Almost more than a need to go, it was an utter inability
not
to go. For some reason she didn’t understand, she felt with great urgency that she had to be at that lecture.

As she walked the mile or so from her apartment to the OI, she had the sense that she was being followed. She zigzagged through a few of the blocks to see if she could shake the feeling, but to no avail. A couple of times, the sensation that some unknown someone right behind her was reaching for her was so strong that she swung around to confront whoever it was. No one was there. By the time she reached the OI, her pulse was racing.

After a quick stop in the museum to say hi to the
lamassu
, she hurried up the stairs to the lecture hall and made her way to a seat that was roughly in the middle of the room. The crawling sensation on the back of her neck during the walk there had made her paranoid, and she wanted to be sure she was in a very visible position.

“Mind if I sit here?”

She jumped at the question, pulling hard enough on the locket she had been holding like a talisman, to cause the weakened chain to give way. Now a little annoyed as well as anxious, she enclosed the broken necklace in her hand and looked up at the speaker who had startled her, realizing she recognized the voice at the same moment as her eyes fastened on Aidan’s familiar features. A blush stained her cheeks as she met his intense blue gaze, and she pressed her empty hand against her thigh to hide the fact that it was trembling.

“No, please do,” she answered, giving a small shake of her head.

As Aidan seated himself next to her, Lucky was struck by his size. His jean-clad legs were so long that his knees knocked into the seat in front of him, so he parted them, placing one to either side of the seat’s curved back. When he was settled, his right thigh was brushing Lucky’s left knee, and his right arm was resting on her side of the armrest. She bumped against him as she retrieved her backpack from under her seat and tucked the locket with its broken chain into the inner zippered pocket. His nearness did nothing to alleviate her racing pulse.

As the silence between them lengthened, it occurred to her to wonder what he was doing there. Why would he even have known about the lecture, let alone cared to come to it?

She turned toward him to ask the question at the same time as he turned toward her.

“What are you—”

“So, what brings—”

When their words collided, they both stopped speaking. At Lucky’s small, self-conscious laugh, Aidan smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling. Gazing into those warm blue eyes through the fringe of his lashes, Lucky was struck dumb for a moment. Then taking a deep breath, she began again, “I was just going to ask how you came to be here.”

“Yeah, me too.” Aidan’s smile widened. “Zeke is… an old friend of mine. I heard he was giving a talk and thought I’d see what he has to say. What about you?”

“I ran into him in the museum downstairs on Monday, and he asked me to come. It seemed important to him. And then, for some reason, it became important to me too. It was like I couldn’t
not
come, if that makes any sense.”

Aidan responded with a humorless chuckle. “Yeah, Zeke sometimes has that effect on people.” He didn’t look at her as he spoke, his face turned toward the stage at the front of the room. As if just becoming aware of the first part of her comment, he turned to her with a question, “What were you doing here on Monday?”

“I was hoping maybe I could get a job at the Suq—the gift shop downstairs. The girl took my résumé, but I think the chances are pretty slim. Anyway, while I was here I stopped in to see the
lamassu
. Zeke came in while I was visiting him.”

“
Visiting
him?” Aidan’s lips quirked in amusement. “You visit the huge, winged man-bull on a regular basis?”

Lucky frowned at him, her nervous awareness of him dissipating somewhat in a brief surge of annoyance. “Yes, I
visit
him on a somewhat regular basis. What’s so funny about that?”

Aidan shook his head, making not even the slightest effort to wipe the amused smirk off his face. “It’s just that when you say it like that, it sounds like you’re just stopping by to see a friend, like he’s—what’s her name? your buddy? Mo, isn’t it?—like he’s her or something.”

Lucky shrugged. “I do sort of feel like he’s my friend. I mean, it’s not like we have long, heartfelt conversations or anything—I am aware that he’s a statue. I’ve just always liked him.” Blushing a little, she admitted, “I went in to say ‘hi’ to him before I came up here.”

At her words, Aidan laughed out loud. The sound was soft and warm and rich, wrapping around Lucky like a blanket and banishing her annoyance in another crashing wave of awareness. Couldn’t Zeke just start, already? What was he waiting for anyway?

Scanning the room, she saw that the lecture hall was about half-filled. Her senses still largely occupied by the young man sitting next to her, she didn’t pay much attention to the other attendees, but she had the impression that there was no one else there that she recognized, besides the long-haired man who, she saw with relief, was just stepping up to the podium. Zeke looked much as he had when she’d met him, only this time his shirt was a pale olive green, and his sports jacket was a deep chocolate brown.

She had forgotten how substantial his voice seemed until he spoke, and the sound flowed into the room like the waves of the ocean, rolling and resonant and ancient. After thanking his audience for generously choosing to spend part of their Friday afternoon listening to him, he began the lecture. Dimming the lights, he switched on a slide presentation, flashing a picture of Lucky’s large, winged friend on the screen behind him.

“You are all no doubt familiar with this fellow,” he began, and Lucky was distracted by the elbow Aidan poked into her side as he chuckled in response. She pushed him away, casting a glare at him that he, unfortunately, probably couldn’t see since the lights were down. Zeke was mid-sentence when she tuned back in.

“…
lamassu
or
aladlammu
, a guardian or protector figure from ancient Assyria, also referred to by the Babylonian term
karabu
. Statues of these winged bulls or lions with human heads were placed at the entrances to gateways and palaces. The Babylonian
karabu
is linguistically related to the Hebrew
cherubim
.” He pronounced the Hebrew term with a hard “ch” so that it sounded like a “k”. “And it is thought that the descriptions of the
cherubim
may derive from these hybrid figures. See how the prophet Ezekiel describes the
cherubim
, in one of the few biblical passages in which angels appear—I read from the New Revised Standard Version:

“This was their appearance: they were of human form. Each had four faces, and each of them had four wings. Their legs were straight, and the soles of their feet were like the sole of a calf’s foot; and they sparkled like burnished bronze. Under their wings on their four sides they had human hands…. As for the appearance of their faces: the four had the face of a human being, the face of a lion on the right side, the face of an ox on the left side, and the face of an eagle; such were their faces. Their wings were spread out above; each creature had two wings, each of which touched the wing of another, while two covered their bodies.”

As Zeke continued speaking, Lucky’s head began to feel strange, as if it were expanding. It didn’t exactly hurt; it just felt sort of detached from her body, floaty, like a balloon. Looking around her, she saw flashes of vari-colored light around the other people in the audience, and she wasn’t all that surprised when, as she watched, some of the flashes resolved themselves into transparent, flickering light-shadows of wings that stretched up and out from the shoulders of their owners.

But she was shocked when she turned her attention back to Zeke. In the dim light, it appeared as if his form were shifting. Right in front of her eyes, he changed in an instant from a man to an eagle, to a lion, to a bull, and then, once again, his form was that of the man she knew. Before she could even try to rationalize what she had seen, he was shifting again, growing larger. His face was somehow simultaneously those of man, eagle, lion, and bull, and his form, while still that of a man, was also encompassed by that of a bull with huge wings arching up and away from his back. As she stared, he grew larger and larger until his presence, like his voice, filled the room, and it hurt to look at him, but she couldn’t look away, and she couldn’t comprehend, and she couldn’t breathe. She was awed and terrified. Something was wrong, so terribly wrong with her. Gasping for breath, she lurched to her feet. She had to get out of this room.

Turning toward Aidan, to ask him to move his long legs so she could get by, she was surprised to find him already standing. Looking up toward his face, she clapped a shaking hand over her mouth to stifle the cry that struggled to escape. Extending upward and outward from his shoulders and back were the great flaming wings she had seen at the Icarus show. Drawing deep gasping breaths, she looked from Aidan’s wings to Zeke’s incomprehensibly morphing form. Back to Aidan, back to Zeke, back to Aidan. It was too much, and none of it could be real. Her heart was beating so hard she could feel it pounding against her chest, and her pulse was drumming in her ears, drowning out Zeke’s rolling voice as he continued to speak. If she could just get to the exit. With a choking cry, she tried to push past Aidan, then she felt herself stumbling and falling as everything went black.

***

Aidan caught the girl as she fell, scooping her up in his arms and heading toward the doorway with long strides. He hadn’t expected her to lose it so soon; then again, considering the terrified expression on her face, he was surprised she’d lasted that long. He wondered what she’d seen. Given her own developing powers plus the twist he was sure Zeke had provided, it was hard to say. He figured he’d find out soon enough.

Pushing the door open with his hip, he slipped through, careful of the girl in his arms, and strode down the hallway to the room that served as Zeke’s office when he was acting in his semi-regular capacity of visiting professor at the OI. Clutching Lucky to him with one arm, he turned the knob with his free hand, pleased to find the door unlocked. Not that a lock would have stopped him at this point, but things were easier this way. Once inside the office, he located the familiar, battered leather sofa against one wall. Taking two steps forward, he kicked aside a stack of papers that covered one end and lay Lucky gently on the sofa. When his scanning glance revealed nothing that would serve as a blanket, he stripped off his jacket and tucked it around her shoulders. Then he pulled Zeke’s office chair over to the sofa and sat down to wait. Once the lecture was over, Zeke and the others would be coming in this direction.