Immortal City

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

From Maddy’s point of view, three things seemed to happen simultaneously. First, the house itself seemed to simply explode. The windows, which a moment before had been cold and still and covered in raindrops, suddenly disinteg-rated into a thousand glittering pieces. The front door disappeared, blown into razor-sharp splinters that knifed their way through the living room. In the kitchen, utensils, tea-cups, and plates were tossed into the air like lethal confetti.

Second, something collided violently with Jacks.

Maddy saw it only out of the corner of her eye. It came through the window, moving so fast it was nothing more than a blur in her peripheral vision. A blur with wings.

Jacks was propelled backward through the furniture and in-to the old TV, which gave a buzzing death cry as it shattered.

Third, as she turned to look back at Jacks, Maddy felt the fingers of an iron grip wrap around her throat. Another winged blur had come through the living room window, and this one had come for her.

She flew backward like a pinball, hitting the wall of school photos and sending most of the frames shattering to the floor. The impact was so violent she was momentarily disoriented. Angel blood. . perversion of nature. . Council will kill you if they can. The words mixed with a strange image of a dark figure with glowing eyes. She must be dreaming. She had to be imagining the phantom before her.

The need for oxygen brought Maddy suddenly, painfully back to the present. She was staring into an expressionless black mask with gleaming, computerized eyes. The Angel stood larger than Jacks by nearly a foot, was muscularly built, and wore some kind of futuristic black armor that covered his entire body. His wings were armored too and black, like bat wings. Whatever Maddy had imagined Angel Police would look like, it wasn’t this. The mask made the Angel look like a ghoulish robot.

Her mouth opened to scream, but the vise-like hand that was around her throat simply tightened and choked off the sound. She flailed. She clawed at the enormous arms and willed her feet to move, but the Angel’s grip constricted like a snake. Her knees buckling under her, Maddy felt her body surrender. The Angel lifted her by her neck and threw her against the far wall.

She heard the crack as her head smacked against the stone fireplace. A high-pitched ringing began in her left ear.

She tried to roll over and scramble away, but the Angel was over her at once, pinning her to the ground. His speed and strength were spectacular. Overwhelming and absolute. She saw a heavy glass paperweight sitting on a stack of bills on the corner table, grabbed it, and swung it at the Angel’s head. He caught her arm midswing. She heard the crackle of a radio from somewhere within the mask. The voice was cold and indifferent.

“I have the girl. Prepare for extraction.”

It was already over.

Behind her, in the direction of the kitchen, Maddy heard a male scream. She recognized it at once. Kevin. She had never heard him scream before. The sound made her blood run cold. This was all her fault. She had led them to a trap.

Maddy looked into the masked Angel’s glowing, electronic eyes. His mouth was hidden, but Maddy had the strangest feeling that he was grinning at her.

In an instant, the glowing eyes looked up, as if in surprise.

Jacks’s hand whistled through the air, catching the Angel’s arm and bending it in an impossible angle. Jacks’s other fist blurred, his Divine Ring a flick of light in the dark room, landing a crushing blow into the black mask.

The look on Jackson’s face was something she had never seen before. His eyes flared, ferocious. They burned with a kind of fire. Maddy could only think of one word to describe it: wrath. His mouth opened to release an inhuman roar. Wings burst from behind him, broad and menacing. Maddy’s mind flickered back to what Jacks had told her at the outlook: a Battle Angel’s wings.

The black Angel came at Jacks again. He thrust his hand forward as she had seen Jacks do in the diner and at the street corner, but Jacks was faster. For a moment the Immortals shimmered in time, flickering like television static. Maddy saw Jacks blur a hand around the Angel’s leg, and with a howl of rage on his lips, he threw the winged creature into the wall.

Jackson’s murderous eyes shot back to Maddy.

“Are you okay?” he thundered.

“I think so.”

The sound of Kevin’s screams came back to her. She struggled to her feet and stumbled into the kitchen.

Maddy found Kevin sitting against the cabinets below the sink. A jagged cut on his forehead had begun to ooze blood. The candles that he had so carefully set up were now cracked and broken on the floor around him. The scrapbook sat mangled in the corner, its pages wrenched out, pictures scattered everywhere. One of the photos had caught on an overturned candle and was starting to burn.

“Kevin!” Maddy screamed.

“I’ll be fine!” Kevin yelled. Another explosion shook the walls as more winged silhouettes crashed into the house.

Steps thundered on the stairs as they swooped down from above. The siege’s noose was tightening around them.

“You have to go now,” Kevin said, and looked at Jacks. “Fly!”

They would only have a moment to escape or never.

Jacks’s wild eyes were on Maddy, but he didn’t move.

He waited for her decision. Maddy looked in Kevin’s eyes.

Something in them didn’t want her to go, but begged her to all the same.

“Okay,” Maddy said, turning to Jacks. “Let’s go.”

She felt his heavy arm scoop her up and had only a moment to dig her nails into his skin before they were torn skyward. They shot through the jagged opening of the window, Jacks’s wings thrashing the air, and climbed into the foggy night.

The wet rushing air burned against Maddy’s face.

Compared to now, the first time they had gone flying had been a leisurely stroll. Now they rocketed through the night, ferociously, painfully. Angel City receded below them until it was nothing more than an indistinct glow. The night fog enveloped them.

The muscles of Jacks’s back rose and fell with the exertion of his wings. Maddy looked back through the lashing air. She saw nothing at first, just the fog and inky black night. Then the unmistakable outline of Angel wings emerged. Three dark shapes were coming toward them in the dark, their yellow eyes glowing like banshees’.

“There are three of them!” she yelled over the rush of the wind. Slowly, surely, the pursuing Angels seemed to be nearing. Maddy watched helplessly as they began to close the gap.

Then, through a break in the fog, she spotted it. The Los Angeles skyline. In the foggy night the twinkling buildings hovered like ocean liners on a sea of mist. When Jacks spoke again, his voice was little more than a whisper in the wind.

“Listen. This will probably be the worst pain you have ever experienced in your life. Everything in your body will tell you to let go, but you have to hold on. You have to hold on, Maddy, no matter what. No matter how badly it hurts.

You can never, never let go. Can you do that for me?”

Maddy nodded. She crossed her arms around his neck and gripped her elbows with as much strength as her hands would bring to bear. Jacks wrapped his arms around her arms, pulling them so tightly around his body she winced.

Banking steeply, they soared toward the towers of glass.

The Angels behind them had gained. Maddy didn’t need to look back. She could hear the hiss of the wind over their wings. Jacks rushed forward with disorienting speed.

She watched as a towering building emerged from the fog like a ghost. It quickly eclipsed her vision, a wall of glass rushing eagerly to greet them. Jacks didn’t change course.

He didn’t slow down. Maddy felt a primal panic well up inside her. She watched the wall approach until she could see her reflection in it. The raw terror overpowered her rational thinking, and she screamed. In that exact instant, Jacks buckled at the waist, pumped his wings, and wrenched Maddy straight down.

They dove. Viciously. The thrust nearly tore her off Jacks’s back. It was like the first big drop of a roller coaster — except excruciating instead of fun. Every cell of her body screamed at her to let go. Pleaded. The tearing sensation in her arms and fingers was overwhelming. Blood drained from her head.

They flew directly down the tower’s surface, so close she could touch it, so fast it appeared as a single, unbroken sheet of glass. A strange popping noise filled her ears, and she realized the windows were exploding as they passed. A wave of shattering glass pursued them as they rushed toward the fast-approaching ground.

Maddy’s eyes opened in agonized slits and she saw the street. It was like death itself rushing up at her. Then, with impossible precision, Jacks leveled and shot straight forward over the ground. Streetlights, signs, cars: all flew by at deadly speeds, missing them by inches.

The acceleration bled away and Maddy found she could breathe again. She looked back. Sure enough, the first Angel had been pulled into Jacks’ trap. He was not as nimble — or as strong — as Jacks, and as he leveled, his wing caught on a streetlamp, sending him tumbling over the pavement and taking several parked cars with him.

One down, she thought.

“Are you okay?” Jacks’s voice was strained with exertion.

“Yes,” Maddy gasped. She hazarded another look behind her.

“There’s two now!” she shrieked.

“Hang on.”

Zigzagging through the jungle of downtown, Jacks banked hard and low. Maddy looked up at a gaping concrete mouth. They were going into a tunnel. She heard the snap of air as one of the Angel agents swooped in right behind them.

The tunnel was bathed in an eerie blue-green. Headlights reflected off the tunnel’s glossy ceiling, giving it a cold, futuristic feel. Up ahead Maddy could see a row of orange lights coming right at them. She heard the blare of the semitruck’s horn. The sound seemed to come from everywhere all at once. Jacks put on more speed. The big rig bore down on them, filling the claustrophobic tunnel, its trailer only a few feet from the tunnel’s ceiling. Maddy realized with sickening certainty they were going up over the top.

They would have to squeeze through the tiny gap between the top of the truck’s trailer and the ceiling of the tunnel.

“Do you trust me?” Jacks yelled. Maddy pressed her lips against his ear.

“Yes!”

In an instant, Jacks rolled so they were flying flat against the ceiling. Maddy pressed her body against Jacks’s chest, knowing that if she moved, she would be killed. They slipped over the top of the truck, instant death mere inches away. Maddy felt, more than heard, the impact behind them as the agent collided with the semi. The shock of the Angel’s body against the windshield clapped her ears like a bomb.

Jacks rolled level as they soared over the tops of the cars behind the semi. They approached the end of the tunnel, the damp night air getting closer.

Two down.

Maddy looked back. Nothing.

“I don’t see anyone!”

“What?!” Jacks yelled.

Maddy squinted to be sure.

Before Maddy could respond, she felt the crushing impact from above.

He must have gone around the tunnel.

A gloved hand wrapped around Maddy’s wrist. The crackling voice was older and surprisingly genteel through the black mask.

“Hello, Madison.”

Jacks thrashed his wings and rammed hard against the Angel, then dove. The agent’s grip on Maddy’s arm ripped loose painfully, and he fell back behind them. As he flew in evasive maneuvers, Jacks’s eyes scanned the sky, his head darting back and forth, until he trained on a hazy, blinking light above them. A chance.

“Maddy,” he yelled, banking sharply and preparing to climb. “I need you to hang on for me one more time. Will you do it for me?”

“I’ll try,” she said weakly.

Jacks wrapped her arms in his vise-like grip and, using his last ounce of strength, climbed straight up like a rocket into the night sky. The weight of the acceleration was crushing against Maddy’s small frame. Faster. Higher. Her eyes became long tunnels as the blood rushed out of her head.

“Just hang on, Maddy! Hang on!”

Jacks’s voice echoed somewhere far away.

She simply didn’t have any more strength in her fingers as they began slipping. The world began to recede. Her eyes closed as the blackout swept over her. She barely heard the sound of the jet engines growing closer or felt the sizzling heat as they passed through the jet wash. The next thing Maddy knew, she could feel metal below her feet.

Groggy, she opened her eyes. She saw riveted metal and glowing, round windows. They were on the wing of an airliner. Jacks maintained balance on the wing as the 747 banked to land at LAX. He pulled Maddy close against the side and they waited there, unmoving. The metal of the roaring aircraft was frigid against Maddy’s skin. She watched a woman inside the plane as she glanced out her window. The passenger’s eyes grew wide, and her mouth hung open as she took in the image of the two of them on the wing.

They left the airliner moments before the 747 touched down. Jacks flew them low over the palm trees until black, silent canals came into view. The pungent smell of stagnant water filled Maddy’s nostrils as they landed and Jacks pulled her under a white footbridge. They sat there next to the water, listening for anything. The lap of the canal was the only sound. Otherwise it was silent. Nothing.

For the moment, they were safe.

“Are you okay?” Jacks asked, panting, exhausted.

“I think so. What about you?” Maddy asked.

“I will be.”

“Was that. .?”

“Yes,” he said. “Those were Council Disciplinary Agents.”

“This is all my fault,” Maddy said quietly.

“No, it’s not. You had no idea.”

“I forced you to go to see my uncle when you knew the danger, and now”— her breath caught—“I’ve put him in danger too.”

“He’ll be okay, Maddy.”

They sat there listening to the lap of the water.

“What do we do now?” Maddy said.

“Hide. Find someplace safe and dry where I can recover my strength. I can’t trust any Angels. Not even my stepfather. We need someplace they won’t be looking.”

Maddy thought of the one place she had known as safe her whole life. The image of Uncle Kevin crouching in the kitchen as the ADC tore into her house made her shudder. There was Gwen’s. But that was just down the block from her home, and her friend’s entire family would be there. And for all Maddy knew, the Angels would be watching her best friend too.

After a moment, Maddy thought of it. It was far from ideal. But under the circumstances, it was the only place they could go.

“I know somewhere. We’ll be safe there, I think.”

“Where?”

“A. . friend. He might not be all that excited to see you, but I think he’ll help me.”

Jacks looked at her. “Who?”