Immortal City

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Maddy sat up suddenly in the darkness. The dream she’d been having was so vivid, but now it faded from her mind.

Something about an accident on Angel Boulevard. The more she tried to hold on to it, the more distant it became. After a few moments she couldn’t remember any details at all. The only thing that stayed with her was a feeling — the undeniable feeling of being watched.

She let her eyes adjust to the darkness of the room.

Something was different, but what was it? Her gaze moved around the four walls that, since infancy, had been her entire world. The nightstand with her old retainer case. The jewelry box Gwen gave her. The small wooden desk Uncle Kevin bought for her at the flea market, now overcrowded with textbooks and financial aid paperwork. There were even a few tween posters on the wall that she hadn’t found the time to take down. It occurred to Maddy that adulthood had been forced abruptly and unwillingly on the little room, and it was doing its best to hang on to the last vestiges of her fading childhood.

A draft caused Maddy to pull the covers tightly around her. That was what had woken her. The window had been closed when she went to sleep.

And now, it was open.

Her eyes darted to the window and, in a breathless, panicked moment, took in the sight of a dark figure crouched on the sill. The letters of the Angel City sign spread out from his shoulders.

“You sleep like an Angel,” Jacks said. The shock of his words in the dark room sent Maddy’s stomach leaping into her throat. She didn’t even realize she had screamed until it came out of her mouth.

“Don’t be frightened,” Jacks said, sounding worried.

“It’s just me. I’m sorry, I so didn’t mean for that to sound creepy. Let me start over.”

“I’m not frightened,” Maddy gasped. “I mean, I was, I mean, you scared me to death.” Maddy made a conscious effort to slow her breathing and let the knee-jerk fear bleed out of her. Gaining her bearings, she trained a flinty eye on Jacks.

“What are you doing?”

“Can I come in?”

“No,” Maddy said curtly, “you may not come in.” She sat all the way up in bed and drew her knees into her chest.

Cool night air rushed under the covers and around her legs like seawater. Wearing only her old shirt and underwear, Maddy began to shiver.

“I wanted to talk to you,” Jacks said.

“I don’t understand what was unclear about what I said at school,” Maddy said coldly, “but I want you to leave me alone. I’m not part of your world, and I really don’t care to be.” She paused, waiting for Jacks to jump in with something argumentative or clever, or maybe even with another apology. Instead he simply sat there in his suit and V-neck, listening. The silence lengthened. When Maddy spoke again, her voice was softer.

“Look, I’m sure there are plenty of girls who would kill to have you sitting at their window tonight.” She paused, thinking of Gwen. “But I’m not one of them. If you’re still trying to apologize, then fine, you’ve apologized. Now you should just go home.”

“You’re right,” Jacks said. “You’re not part of my world. You’re not one of those girls. And maybe that’s why.”

“Why what?”

“Why I can’t stop thinking about you.”

Maddy rolled her eyes. “Guys like you don’t say that to girls like me.”

“I’ve never said that to anyone, actually,” Jacks corrected. “In fact, I’ve never done anything like this before.”

He let out a little laugh. “How am I doing?”

He swallowed hard, trying to push down his nervous-ness. He was astonished to realize he was nervous. Somehow being around Maddy just put him in a different space.

Jacks felt so present.

Maddy stared at him, letting the anger and frustration surge through her.

“Why are you doing this to me?” she asked finally.

He paused, considering.

“I’m being honest. I know you may not believe me.

But I haven’t been able to not think about you. When we were in the back at the restaurant, and. .” Jacks’s voice trailed off, his face coloring. “I still feel terrible about what I did. I lied to you and, even though I had good reasons for it, it was wrong of me.”

Maddy studied him. Was he telling the truth?

Jacks smiled. “I mean this in the best possible way: I’m not going to leave you alone until you let me make it up to you. I’m serious. I’ll be here every night. You might as well get me some pajamas and a toothbrush.”

Despite her best efforts not to, Maddy laughed. She looked at Jacks and could see the faintest twinkle of light in his eyes.

“So what you’re saying is that I should just give in and let you make it up to me. Otherwise you’ll be tormenting me like this for the rest of my life?”

“Pretty much. Yeah.”

“Well.” She sighed. “What do you have in mind?”

“Come fly with me.”

“Fly? I can’t fl — I mean, I can’t go anywhere with you right now, anyway.” Jacks sat utterly still, framed by the letters of ANGEL CITY on the hill. “It’s totally out of the question,” she protested. “Besides, I have to work the morning shift tomorrow and my uncle would kill me.”

The Angel remained silent.

“Plus school,” she added, her brow knitted. She could tell by his silhouette that he had folded his arms.

“Maddy, it doesn’t matter if you can’t stand me. Just do it to do something. To make the night yours.”

“What?”

“To live, Maddy.”

“I’m living just fine, thank you very much,” she said, haughty.

“Really? By working the morning shift?” He softened.

“Maddy, you have the rest of your life to work the morning shift. I’m asking you to come fly with me tonight.”

Maddy opened her mouth to say something, then closed it. He was unbelievable. Still, she was surprised to realize her pulse had quickened, and she could feel her heart beginning to pound in her chest.

“I have applications, too,” she tried feebly.

“Stop making excuses.” Jacks grinned. Maddy eyed her jeans and gray hoodie folded over the desk chair.

“I’m still mad at you,” she said.

“Understood.”

“And you’re not forgiven for what happened at the diner or how you lied to me.”

Jacks nodded. “It’s a deal. I’ll meet you downstairs.”

Jacks reached into his pocket and pressed something. A car alarm chirped in the driveway, cutting up through the night air.

“I thought we were flying?” Maddy asked, confused.

“Yeah,” Jacks said, pulling out his Ferrari keys and jingling them. “Flying.”

The Ferrari roared as Jacks expertly shifted, hugging the turns of Mulholland Drive. The car rose quickly and effortlessly into the Hills. Maddy had promised herself that she would not enjoy this. In fact, she had had an idea to pout the whole time. That would show him that he hadn’t won.

But with the warm leather seat vibrating against her legs and the wind in her hair, Maddy felt the thrill of the moment sifting through her defenses like fine sand.

Jacks navigated a hairpin turn. She shrieked with surprise and held on to the door handle. Jacks looked over and smiled. Ahead, the lights of the Los Angeles Basin beckoned.

The most amazing thing, Maddy thought, was that Angel City looked different from inside the Ferrari. It really did. It felt different too. Even smelled different. It wasn’t the run-down, dirty city she knew. It was beautiful.

“I like to come up here at night after everyone has gone to sleep,” Jacks said. The car rounded another turn.

“Up here it feels like you’re alone, you know? Away from all the bother. Like the whole city belongs to just you.”

“The whole city does belong to you,” Maddy said, looking at Jacks. “It’s a little different for the rest of us.”

“Well, you know what I mean,” he said.

“And what’s the bother? All the little people getting in your way all the time?”

Jacks’s eyes roamed over her face. “Look, you seem to think I live this charmed existence. And I guess in some ways I do. But the truth is, I have to go through a lot of the same things you do. I have pressure on me. I have expecta-tions. And I’m not perfect. I struggle.”

“Yeah, right,” Maddy groaned, her tone rebellious.

“The kid in the hundred-thousand-dollar sports car is telling me about struggle.”

“I’m just trying to say we have more in common than you might think.”

“You don’t know the first thing about me!” Maddy exclaimed. Jacks downshifted hard, the gears grinding in protest. His blue eyes flashed.

“Why won’t you give me a chance, Maddy?”

“Because,” she nearly yelled, “you think you just get to have anything you want, don’t you? You want something, it’s yours. That’s the way life works for you. Well, that’s not how it works for me, so it’s not how it’s going to work with me. I don’t fall for the money and the charm and the car. It takes a lot more than that.”

Jacks nodded, suddenly thoughtful. He flipped on the car’s turn signal.

“Okay, let’s ditch the car.”

He pulled the Ferrari onto a gravel turnout next to an overlook and killed the engine. “Will you be warm enough?”

he asked. Maddy looked out to the bench framed against the twinkling cityscape.

“I think so.”

The wooden bench was cracked and worn smooth, yet was surprisingly comfortable as they sat. Just beyond their feet, the earth sloped down gently at first, then dropped off dramatically into a deep canyon. Cut into the hillside like temples, the Angel houses glowed in the night. Jacks took his jacket and draped it around Maddy’s slender frame.

“Thanks,” she said. No one had ever put a jacket around her before.

Jacks’s presence inside the jacket was almost overwhelming. His smell was intoxicating. Maddy took a deep breath, steadying herself. Silence overtook them as they looked at the city together. A cricket chirped nearby, stopped, then started again. Jacks spoke.

“You said I wasn’t forgiven for lying to you. Well, it wasn’t all a lie.” He paused. “I was only two. . when my father. .” He trailed off.

Maddy chose her words carefully. “I thought Angels couldn’t die.”

“True Immortals can’t, but there are only twelve of them. Born Immortals can be. . made mortal. ” Jacks traced a circle in the dirt with the toe of his shoe. He stared at it, thinking for a split second of the policeman’s visit to his house and the mutilated wings that had been found on the boulevard. “I don’t even really know what my dad looked like, aside from a few old pictures. He died fighting the rebel terrorists.” Jacks looked away, his blue eyes reflecting the lights of the city.

Maddy raised an eyebrow — that’s something they definitely hadn’t covered in Angel History. But there were a lot of things the Angels kept to themselves.

“Well, I know what he looked like,” Maddy said. “He had dark hair. And pale, blue eyes.” Jacks laughed a little, shaking his head.

“I have my mother’s eyes. .” he said. “And, I’m told, my father’s wings.”

“His wings?”

Jacks nodded. “Broad and strong. A Battle Angel’s wings.”

The question came out of Maddy so fast she didn’t have time to stop it.

“Can I see them?”

“My wings?” Jacks asked about his most famous feature in disbelief. “You don’t know—” he cut himself off, holding his tongue. Not wanting to come across to this girl as conceited.

“Yeah, your wings,” Maddy said, now embarrassed but unable to take it back. “I mean. . what’s the big deal?

Can’t I see them?”

Jacks got to his feet and pulled Maddy up with him.

Maddy watched the muscles move under his shirt. Suddenly, the quiet night filled with the shrill tearing of fabric and Jacks’s wings expanded out of his back. Razor sharp, they pierced the night sky, knifing out from behind his shoulders with such force it blew her hair back. The sound of the whoosh was deafening. The wings reached out six feet in both directions, then settled, powerful and muscled, awaiting the command to fly. They glowed with their trade-mark blue luminescence, casting light on Maddy’s face. She was breathless.

“What do you think of them?” he asked.

Slightly afraid, but overcome with curiosity, Maddy reached out and ran her finger across the top of the left wing. It was hot to the touch.

“They’re. . great.”

Jacks smiled. “Want to try them out?”

Maddy pulled her finger away. “You mean actually fly?”

“Sure. Real deal.”

“I don’t know,” she said, unsure.

Jacks held out his hand to her. “Do you trust me?”

Somehow, strangely, Maddy felt as if the question held within it far more than just this night. She was at a crossroads. She looked at this boy Angel, young and perfect, his hand outstretched before her like the hand of fate itself.

It was a simple response — just a single word — but somehow, on some level, Maddy knew that it would change her life in ways she couldn’t imagine.

Her lips moved.

“Yes.”

Maddy pulled her hood up around her head and cinched the drawstring tight. “Put your arms around my neck,” Jacks instructed, kneeling down. “And hold on tight.”

When she finally gathered the courage to open her eyes, she and Jacks were rushing through the dark canyon just beyond the outlook. Maddy looked at Jacks’s winged body. It wasn’t just powerful; it was incredibly graceful too.

The wings instinctively and effortlessly adjusted to the air currents as they sailed. Then they curved like airplane flaps, and with a powerful thrust, Maddy and Jacks ascended steeply out of the canyon.

Maddy screamed at first, but then something amazing happened. The scream grew into a shout. And the shout grew into a laugh. A laugh that seemed to start all the way in her toes and radiate throughout her body. Jacks and Maddy soared high over Angel City and into the night, as the stars hovered above.

“I thought you would put your arms out!” Maddy yelled.

“What?!” Jacks struggled to hear her over the wind.

Maddy yelled louder. “I thought you would put your arms out when you flew! Like Superman!”

Jacks laughed. He reached his arms out and let his palms ride on the air current. Maddy gripped his waist with her legs, then traced her fingers over his arms until they found his hands. Fingers laced, they buzzed the palm trees of Santa Monica, the neon pier, and then rushed out over the churning Pacific. Then Jacks climbed, up through the misty marine layer, until they were floating atop a moonlit bed of velvet white.

They flew past spiraling freeway connections swirling with traffic even at this late hour and rocketed over the rooftops of Brentwood, Westwood, and Beverly Hills. Then they dropped low to buzz the lights of Dodger Stadium.

Jacks took them out over the scorched deserts of Palmdale and swung so low over an orange grove Maddy could taste the tangy citrus in her mouth. Circling back, they wove through the skyscrapers of downtown. Finally, Jacks pointed them toward a familiar sight. The Angel City sign. He brought them down gently on top of the fifty-foot glowing C

of the word CITY . When Maddy unlaced her fingers from Jacks’s hands, she realized they had gone numb. They sat there together and let their feet dangle over the edge. Everywhere below, humanity twinkled up at them through a fine layer of mist.

“This is my favorite view in the entire city,” he said, a little smile playing across his lips.

“It’s wonderful,” Maddy admitted, her head still spinning from the flight. Jacks’s smile widened into a grin.

“It’s perfect, right?” But when he turned to Maddy, she was looking away from him. Her gaze had fallen down below and fixed on something. Jacks followed her line of sight until he saw the dormant Kevin’s Diner sign.

“So you live with your uncle?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“And you work at the diner for some extra spending money?”

“No,” Maddy said, slightly annoyed. “Kevin can’t afford to bring on another waitress, so I fill in. It’s only temporary, just until the cash flow improves”—she hesitated, embarrassed—“but it’s been temporary for four years now.

At least I get to keep my tips.”

“That doesn’t seem fair.”

“Life isn’t fair,” Maddy said, irritated. “Well, for me at least. For you it’s perfect.” She folded her arms. Like in the classroom, Jacks’s face fell.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, his mind churning with frustration. He looked into Maddy’s eyes, trying to figure out anything he could do, what he could say, to break through this wall she had set up against him.

“I mean, don’t get me wrong, Jacks, this was. .

amazing,” she said. “It’s just. . this isn’t me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean this is your life, and it’s great. But it’s not mine. My life is down there. I’m going to wake up in the morning, and I have to go back to being Maddy Montgomery.”

She looked up at him and realized, with surprise, they were face-to-face. Jacks seemed surprised too. It had happened again. It was like a force greater than the two of them was drawing them together. Their lips were now inches apart. The air between them was thick with their body heat. Her lips wanted nothing more than to close the tiny gap between them and kiss. It was more than just how he looked. It was that same feeling she had felt in the back room of the diner. A connection between them. An electricity. As her heart began to pound, it was all she could do to whisper.

“I should go home now.”

They drove back listening to the purr of the Ferrari’s engine.

Maddy watched the view disappear as they descended.

Jacks wore the expression of a man trying to work out a difficult puzzle and getting nowhere.

“Here,” he said, pulling out his iPhone, “I want you to have my number. Just. . in case.”

Maddy took down his info and added it to her phone’s address book simply as Jacks. In silent amusement she stared at the screen. What Gwen wouldn’t do for this number. She slipped the phone back into her pocket as they pulled up outside the darkened diner. “I did have a good time,” Maddy said at last. “Thank you again.”

Jacks nodded and gave her a vague kind of smile. She got out, closing the door quietly behind her so as not to wake Uncle Kevin. She had turned to go when she heard the window rolling down.

“Maddy, wait.” She peered back in the car. Jackson hesitated, considering his words. Then he spoke. “I want to take you somewhere. Out. Tomorrow night.” His expression was strangely conflicted, but his tone intent.

“Tomorrow? I–I don’t know,” she stammered.

“You’re not afraid to fly, but you’re nervous to go out with me?” Even in the dark car, his eyes pierced her. “Come with me, Maddy. Please.”

The word was out of Maddy’s mouth before could stop it.

“Sure.” What? She hadn’t even thought the word before saying it.

“Great. I’ll pick you up,” he said.

“Wait, Jacks,” she said, panic rising in her stomach, but he was already rolling the window up. “No, wait. Jacks, I can’t!” she yelled, but her protest was lost in the throaty rumble of the Ferrari. In another moment, he was gone.

Maddy just stood there letting the dawning anxiety overtake her. What had she just done?

She slid her key as quietly as she could into the lock.

Thank goodness Kevin was a heavy sleeper. She went upstairs. Slipping off her jeans and hoodie once again, Maddy sank exhausted into her bed. She turned her head on the pillow and looked at the glowing Angel City sign on the hill.

Absolutely confused and awash with the tingling sensation that she was still flying, Maddy drifted away into sleep.