The hybrid said, “You only have three-hundred and twenty-five . . . well, four now,” while the verity said, “And three months left.”
Even though it peeved me that they’d looked me up on a holo-ranker, I was pleasantly surprised by that figure. Since I shed feathers like a molting chicken and hadn’t signed up to any celestial missions since Paris, I’d imagined I’d dropped below the hundred bar, but apparently, I’d inadvertently accomplished a crap-ton of good deeds. Although we didn’t earn the amount of feathers on the sinner’s scorecard when we weren’t signed up to them, if we managed to help them change, even in the smallest way, we collected a feather for our kindness.
“Aren’t you going to pick it up?” the hybrid asked.
“And relive my glory days? Nah. I’m a carpe diem sort of girl.”
A profuse amount of white appeared around her green irises.
“Tell me something. Have I become a case study in the guild or a cautionary tale?”
The verity’s entire face puckered, as though she’d ingested one of Jase’s signature sour-gummy tequila shots. “The ophanim are worried about you, Celeste. Especially Ophan Mira.”
“Ophan Mira?” That kicked my smile up a notch. I highly doubted the guild elder cared about her unspectacular pupil’s fate. “I’m sure she’s devastated by my absence. Give her my best, will you?” As I finally stepped past them and climbed up the stairs toward the street exit, the number they’d thrown at me whirled through my mind.
Three-hundred and twenty-four. Not that I’d had any intention of completing my wings, but the amount needed to reach a thousand was so preposterous I snickered.
On my way out, I blew Leon a kiss, which he pretended to catch and pocket even though he was busy chatting up a pretty blonde—I guess Alicia and him were currently off—then craned my neck toward the steel-black sky. Although it wasn’t freckled with stars like in the guild, I thought it was the loveliest sky.
Imperfect and real.
Choked with smog and lights instead of quartz and honeysuckle.
And noise. So much noise. None of it harmonious. There were no rainbow-winged sparrows twittering arias, no quartz fountains weeping crystalline water onto night-blooming lilies. Just good-old honking yellow cabs, buzzed college students, and animated neighborhood drunks.
I loved this city all the more for its imperfections because it reflected the life I’d chosen, instead of the one chosen for me.
2
The next morning, after meeting with my advisor to discuss my criminal justice assignment, I got on the subway and headed downtown to the penthouse Muriel had bought after I was accepted into Columbia University.
Although I hated how Jarod’s caregiver had come into my life, I couldn’t imagine her not being part of it.
After waking up alone in my hotel room in Paris, I’d rushed to the Demon Court where I’d forded through news vans and police barriers, shrieking Leigh’s name at the top of my lungs, demanding to speak with her. It was Jarod’s bodyguard, Amir, who’d finally heard my pleas. Although he’d warned me to go home, I insisted on seeing Leigh, so he’d allowed me inside.
Four and a half years later, and I still shuddered. How many more years until I could think back on Leigh and not feel like my heart was being stabbed by the letter opener she’d used to slit her veins?
I blinked away the dark memory and focused on peeling off my flaking black polish, my array of rings reflecting the strips of light that made everyone in the subway appear wan and sickly.
Mimi hated that I used the public transit, but during rush hour, there really was no better way to navigate the city.
I thought about getting a motorbike again. I’d need to get my license first. Pausing my nail-polish removal, I dug my cell phone out of my fabric tote and researched motorcycle licenses how-tos until I exited onto the sun-drenched Fifth Avenue sidewalk.
I inhaled a slow breath of early fall air. Indian summers in New England had always been my favorite season—the air tepid and full of tiny living things, the canopy of leaves and stretches of grass blanketing Central Park in lush greens. It was the season I’d missed most during the two years I’d lived abroad.
When I arrived at the Plaza’s residential entrance, the doormen greeted me by name, and I greeted them by theirs, asking one about his teenage daughter and the other about his new grandchild. Mimi didn’t leave the apartment often—I made sure she had everything she needed at her fingertips—but when she did go out, she dawdled in the lobby, inquiring after everyone’s families. Although no angel-blood ran through her veins, Mimi was worthier of wings than most of Elysium’s inhabitants.
Definitely worthier than my genitor, who’d dumped me in the New York guild the second I was out of her womb before moving to another fletching-residence. Being an ophanim meant she was allowed to travel between guilds, and yet, she’d never visited, never used the guilds’ holographic phones to contact me and had failed to attend my wing bone ceremony—a key moment in an angel’s life, almost more significant than our ascension because it was the day we could finally exit the guilds and start accumulating our precious little feathers. By that point, though, I no longer cared to make her acquaintance because I had Leigh, and she filled my quota of affection.
And now, I had Mimi.
As I rode the elevator to the twenty-first-floor penthouse Mimi had purchased with money Jarod had left in her name, I thought back on the day I’d suggested leaving her side. I’d had nowhere to go, having decided I would never again step foot in a guild, but hadn’t wanted to burden Mimi. Her complexion had rivaled the white marble tomb we’d passed on our way out of the Montparnasse Cemetery where we’d buried Leigh and Jarod’s bodies.
“Do you have family waiting for you, Celeste?”
“Leigh was my only family.”
“And Jarod was mine.”
So I’d stayed, and we’d become each other’s family. And our bond forged by grief transformed into a connection wrought from love. I’d found in Muriel the mother I thought I no longer needed. After all, I’d already been fifteen and had spent five years navigating the human world with little help from the ophanim who deemed us self-sufficient the day our wing bones formed.
Muriel had taken over my education, filling my mind with knowledge that wasn’t taught in the guilds. What enthralled me most, ironically, was the human justice system. I devoured books about it, learned loopholes, gobbled up the stories of the Adlers’ unlawful way of exacting law that Mimi recounted while she cooked in our spacious kitchen. When I turned eighteen, I confessed my dreams of becoming a lawyer or a judge, but that would require a college education and I didn’t have a single school transcript to my name.
A week later, I received three invitations to attend colleges. “I didn’t even know colleges invited people to attend!”
Mimi had offered me that quiet smile of hers that hid a mountain of thoughts.
“They don’t, do they? Normally, I mean. You did this. You got me in.”
“What matters isn’t how you get in but what you do once you’re inside.” She’d been cutting through the warm pound cake I’d helped her bake. “So which one calls out to you?”