Page 18 of Angel Lost

My eyes sting, and a weariness settles in my bones. We’ve been at this for hours. Too long.

“Again,” Chano booms out, kicking the sole of Zephyr’s bare foot.

“Enough, Chano. He’s exhausted,” I say. “We all are. We can try again tomorrow.”

“We don’t have many tomorrows,” Chano growls. “What’s the use of having an angel seer if he can’t see anything? We’re just left with a fuckingangelif he doesn’t have visions.”

Zephyr tenses next to me as Chano storms out of the classroom. Farrell’s clipped, precise footsteps follow. Raising my head slightly off the floor, I bang it back down. Damn it. “He didn’t mean it, Zephyr.” I reach out, patting his chest. “He’s just worried.”

With a grunt, Zephyr heaves himself upright. “We all are,” he says quietly.

I squeeze my eyes shut as he leaves, his bare feet slapping across the tiles and down the corridor, away. Fuck. I bang my head on the floor again. Harder. What if we’re worrying over nothing? Maybe I’ll go, register, and come straight back to school.

And maybe not.

I’d do just about anything to sleep, instead, here I am trailing into the library. A faint aroma of leather and ink tickles my nostrils. Rows of books fade into the distance, shelves reaching floor to ceiling as far as I can see. Useless. All of them. I weave toward the current news section. Maybe here, in the newspapers, the magazines. The modern stuff. There has to be something. A clue as to why some aethers vanish.

I hustle my pile to a big central table. Naeve loved it here, and I can half see why: the place is so quiet. Licking my thumb, I flick through the latest glossy magazine. It’s all gushing love for the Angel King, gossip about the royal household, and stupid pseudo-journalism about eligible wives for Prince Kai and his step-uncle. Can I puke yet? I fling the thing across the table.

A single manicured finger pins the magazine down before it falls over the edge.

Hewie.

He grins.

“It’s p-p-past midnight,” he says, his smile fading as he takes in my expression, my rumpled clothes.

I thought he’d gotten over that stammer. “Yeah, yeah, just studying.”

“Gossip magazines?” he asks. “What class is that for exactly?”

I rub the heels of my hand into my eyes and let my head loll back.

A chair scrapes over the hardwood floor toward me, and Hewie nudges my shoulder. “If you’re looking for answers there, you must be desperate,” he says. “Tell me what you’re looking for. Iamthe queen of gossip. Boy, I half wish you really were studying.” He gazes off into the middle distance dreamily. “I would ace that class.”

I choke back a snort and haul myself straighter. He knows I’m aether…I may as well explain, and so I do.

“Nope,” Hewie says confidently. “None of these have ever talked about aether registration.”

Pile of rubbish. I sweep the entire stack off the desk with a grunt. Hewie squeaks and rushes to gather the magazines up, smoothing the covers out like a ruffled mother hen.

“I was going to say they might still help, if you knew how to look, but I’m not sure you deserve to know how now,” he snaps.

I grab his wrist. “Anything, Hewie…please?”

“You skimmed them, didn’t you?”

I nod.

“Mistake!” he crows. “Take the gossip in the mags about the oh-so-eligible Angel King and his heroic search for a suitable wife and add the underground chatter about the rips and what do you get?”

I scrunch my nose.

“It’s obvs, Lorelei!”

It is one hundred percent not obvs. Dammit, obvious.

“The goddesses demand balance, right?" He smooths a crease in a magazine, his perfectly tailored—if slightly old-fashioned—jacket shifting as heleans in, eyes bright. “Life, death, good, bad—the five elements. But the Angel King is missing at least one, and he won’t share power. The first leader who can’t balance this world’s magic. Eltanin is off-kilter, and people are starting to blame him.”

---