Page 10 of Out of the Blue
It’s a slow process. The Being is limping, and her right wing is drooping so low it almost brushes the grass. The sky is pitch black now and it’s hard to see where we’re going, although her skin glows like dying embers in the darkness. My stomach flutters with nerves. It’ll be a miracle if we can make it to the other side without anyone spotting us. Then again, it’s a miracle she’s alive at all – maybe a second one isn’t too much to ask for.
As we follow the path towards the foot of the hill, the rotting building comes into view. I pull the Being back and crouch down by some gorse bushes. The ruin is just a shadowy lump before the glittering skyline, but there’s the tiniest bit of movement around it: the outline of a couple, kissing in the darkness.
‘Shit!’
I fall to the ground, pulling the Being down with me. She spreads her wings flat, or as flat as she can, given the state her right one is in. The feathers tickle the nape of my neck.
A voice comes floating out of the darkness. ‘Did you hear something?’
‘You’re imagining things. Not scared of the dark, are you?’
The girl laughs and pulls the boy towards her. There’s some shuffling and lip-smacking as they kiss again. My pulse is pounding so loud I’m sure they’ll hear us. Footsteps crunch on the stones, but then there’s silence. I poke my head over the bushes. The couple have disappeared.
‘Come on,’ I whisper. ‘We’re almost there.’
We scramble up a steep, rocky slope, the Being grunting a little as the stones dig into her bare feet. The ruin is much more exposed than I realized. It’s perched on a low peak overlooking a pond, clearly visible from the road; three of its four walls have crumbled away, and the only one left has several large windows gaping through it. I kick some cigarette butts and an empty bottle of Buckfast out of the way, clearing a space for the Being on the ground. She starts to copy my movements, thrusting her right leg back and forth like a broken football player in aFIFAgame.
‘No! Look, like this.’
She follows my lead as I ease into a crouching position. The night air is starting to nip at my skin, but I shrug my arms out of my hoody and put it around her shoulders. (Not very successfully, given the pterodactyl-sized wings attached to her back.) She’s completely naked underneath. Until now, I hadn’t even given it a second thought.
Past the pond, headlights sweep across the road. I press myself against the wall, my heart in my mouth. The car glides by, disappearing around the corner and past the Parliament.
‘That was too close,’ I murmur. She can’t stay here, but there’s no way I can walk her back to our flat without her being swamped by a hundred Wingdings en route. Even if I could, there’s nowhere in the flat for her to stay – I can hardly stick her in the bottom bunk and hope Rani doesn’t notice.
‘I’ll come back,’ I tell the Being. ‘I’ll go home and get you some clothes, and then we’ll figure something out, OK?’
It’s far from ideal, but right now it’s all I can think of. I tell Perry to stay, pull the hoody back over the Being’s shoulders, and sprint back down the hill. This is a dream. This is madness. This is really,reallydamn ironic.
But I don’t have time to think about why it’s happening, or what it all means. There’s only one question on my mind:
Where the hell am I going to hide an angel?
SEVEN
The answer comes to me on my way home. Or, rather, I come to it: number four, Shona’s flat. The key is still upstairs, in the pocket of my grey jeans, waiting for me to let myself in and water her plants.
Think, Jaya, think.Shona said she’d be in Italy for two weeks. If she left on Monday, then that gives me eleven full days, maybe more if she wasn’t including travel time. I sprint up the final flight of stairs, my chest swelling with excitement. It’s like a sign – a gift from the gods, if there are any, or at least from a hippy and her bonsai tree.
The lights in the hallway are still on when I push the front door to number five open. Dad stomps through from the living room, looking tired and pissed off in equal measures. Oh shit, he knows. How does he know? Can he smell the Being on me? Do they have a smell?
‘Where the hell have you been? It’s half past twelve!’
My face is frozen with shock. Somehow, I manage to mutter an apology. I kick off my very muddy trainers, mentally crossing my fingers that he won’t notice Perry isn’t with me. ‘I just went for a walk.’
‘Forthreehours? In the rain?’ His eyes flicker over my damp hair, my grass-stained jeans. ‘God, Jaya, look at the state of you. You’d better take a shower before you catch a cold.’
There are times when Dad is so absorbed in his research, I could set myself on fire and he wouldn’t notice, but the whole Concerned Parent act is much more annoying. It’s just so fake. Even in the years before Mum died, he barely paid any attention to us. Not since he started his last job, anyway. Before, when we lived in a wee house in the village and he worked in a music shop, he’d pick us up from school and take us into town to go ice skating, or to Milo’s Diner for peanut-butter milkshakes.
That stopped after he got the job at Tomlinson. After that it was all business trips and conferences, phone calls in the middle of meals, and nights when he wouldn’t come home till ten o’clock. It feels like we stopped being enough for him.
There’s no time to argue with him though. I have to get back to the Being.
‘OK, sorry,’ I say. ‘Won’t happen again.’
I try to push past him, but he puts a hand on my arm. ‘Wait, Jaya – I . . .’
For a second, I’m shocked by how old he looks. His hair has gone from sandy blond to almost entirely grey in the past few months, and time has carved deep lines around his eyes and mouth. He’s only thirty-six, but he looks a good decade older.
