3
I’d sworn never to step foot inside a guild after Paris, yet once Muriel settled in for a nap, I took a cab to the quartz dormitories. The nondescript green door filled me with such anger that I almost spun around, but in the end, I stowed away my vindictiveness, squared my shoulders, and twisted the knob.
Startlingly, the door clicked.
I supposed that while I still had feathers, the ophanim couldn’t lawfully lock me out.
Guilds were always busy, but late afternoons were always the busiest. The atrium with its rampant honeysuckle vines, seven quartz fountains, and domed glass ceiling was crawling with winged girls and warbling sparrows. The sweet-floral air seeped into my lungs like glue as the crowd of fletchings split around me, their mouths parting. As I trekked toward the channel, my plan to yell until I either lost my voice or a high-placed angel flitted down the dazzlingly-bright flue firmed up.
“Fletching, you’ve come home.”
I came to a dead-stop in front of Ophan Mira, who extended her crimson wings as though to bar me from reaching my destination. Home? The fact that she assumed I considered this guild my home made me wonder if she thought dementia was upon me.
“No, Ophan. I’ve come to call on the seraphim.”
Ophan Mira tipped her head to the side, her short, peppery black hair grazing her narrow shoulders. “The seraphim are busy people. What can I help you with?”
“Can you cure cancer, Ophan?”
“I cannot.”
“Then you can’t help me.” I tried to walk past her, but a woman with a sheet of blonde hair that reached the bottom of her wing bones stepped next to Ophan Mira, barring my path.
Since I’d never met her before, and her wings were as bushy as my old professor’s, I assumed she was a new recruit of Guild 24.
“Are you trying to keep me away from the channel?” I asked pleasantly even though I was not feeling pleasant at all.
“Cancer is a natural phenomenon, Celeste. A necessary phenomenon. When souls are tired of living—”
“Natural? It’s a disease! A cell mutation! There is nothing natural—”
“Calm down, Fletching.”
I gritted my teeth and balled my hands. How dare she tell me to calm down! She wasn’t the one with the banged-up heart.
My nostrils flared as though I’d run all three miles from the Plaza to this place, which was as much my home as the dumpster behind the greasy burger joint on the corner. “I request an audience with the seraphim.”
“To discuss this cancer? Fletching, have you learned nothing during your years under my tutelage? We don’t interfere in human timelines. We are not guardians of lives; we are guardians of souls. If this human has cancer, then her envelope’s time has come, and her soul—if worthy—will be collected and recompensed.”
“She’s only sixty!” My voice snapped like fully-feathered wings.
“Six decades is a respectable lifespan.”
Irritation threatened to make me gnash my teeth. Sixty was too young. “Muriel should be allowed at least two more decades!”
“Calm down, Celeste.” Ophan Mira’s use of my name made me blink. She so rarely used our first names.
My gaze raked over the fire-veined quartz for those posters with my face on them, but the hallway walls were smooth and unadorned. No WANTED flyer or rebellious honeysuckle vine in sight.
Her hand came up to my twitchy shoulders. I took a step back, hating when people touched me without my consent.
“I will relay your displeasure to the Seven—”
“Displeasure?” I snorted.
“—but I will not allow you to make a further spectacle of yourself in my hallways. If you’d like to wait for the seraphim’s response on site, please go sit in the cafeteria, and either I or Ophan Lia”—she gestured to the new recruit—“will come get you when we hear back from them.”
“I’m just supposed to trust you’ll convey my message?”
Mira’s thin eyebrows writhed. “Trust? Oh, Fletching, how deeply out of touch with your race you’ve become if you begin to question the one value we hold dearest above all—honesty.”
My forever-smarting wings could attest to that being their top priority. “How unfortunate that compassion isn’t what you value most.” A spark of pain traveled through my wing bones. I didn’t have to glance down to know a feather had just detached itself from my stupid appendages.
“Our kind isn’t to blame for someone’s personal choice.”
“Someone? Leigh wasn’t just someone. And what choice did she have?”
“Celeste, the cafeteria now, or I will not convey your message.” Ophan Mira’s eyes seemed to glow like the quartz around us. “Do you remember where it is or would you like Ophan Lia to escort you?”
Shrieklessly—I was way beyond words at this point—I spun, and the fence of feathers from the rubbernecking fletchings retracted. My pulse hammered my skull as I barged down the hallway and into the vast quartz courtyard with its raised botanical beds. I’d always thought the Elysian sky shone down on the guild, but the unwavering blue was an illusion, just like the celestial rain that sprinkled the crops through strategically-placed openings in the glass dome. Angels were such experts at deception.
I took a seat at a teardrop-shaped quartz table partially hidden by a fig tree that produced fruit year-round. Fletchings favored the tables closer to the slab of quartz with its perpetual offering of warm grains and steamed fish, chilled juices in glass jugs, and toppling pyramids of jewel-toned produce. The fragrance of my childhood turned my already upset stomach.
As I waited, I folded my legs, refolded them, jiggled them, staring down the few fletchings who had the audacity to stare back. Eventually, they all averted their curious gazes. Bored of eye-battling, I fished my phone out and messaged Muriel to tell her I was running an errand and to call me when she woke up. And then I opened my browser. The only word I’d managed to type in earlier sat tauntingly in the search bar: best. To add insult to injury, my search engine was suggesting a drop-down list of bests—best movie, best Chinese restaurant, best hotel in Manhattan, best gyms.
Freaking gyms? I never exercised. Hated it. With a passion.
“Hi.” A light voice startled me out of choking my cell phone.
I peered up at the owner of the voice, a golden-haired child with a thick side-braid and charred-brown eyes. When she climbed onto the chair next to mine, keeping her little legs bent underneath her for leverage, I snapped, “What are you doing?”
Instead of growing large and watery, her eyes stayed soft, and she smiled. “You look sad.”
I scanned the courtyard, imagining this was some sort of set-up, the ophanim trying to cajole me by sending a cherubic emissary, but no teachers roamed the cafeteria, and most of the fletchings had left.
“I’m Naya.”
I set my phone down. “Shouldn’t you be with Ophan Pippa, Naya?”
She wrinkled her button nose. “She’s telling a story about monsters. I don’t like monsters.”
“The world’s full of them, so better get used to them.”
“Have you ever met a monster?”