Natural Born Angel Read online

  Sadie led Maddy through double doors into the plush offices. They were as well appointed as the NAS headquarters, but much more classic, with a ’30s art deco flair. Maddy felt like she was stepping back to a more glamorous time in Angel City’s past.

  A receptionist sitting at the front desk gave Sadie a hand signal. Sadie nodded and quickly opened the door to the inner office, motioning for Maddy to walk in.

  “Mr Kreuz will see you now,” Sadie said. Maddy took a few timid steps in, and Sadie pulled the door shut, leaving Maddy alone in the room.

  From behind a tremendous cloud of smoke, a shorter, somewhat portly Angel emerged, cigar first. Maddy realized she hadn’t ever seen an overweight Angel. In fact, he might have been the most un-Angelic Angel she’d ever met. Louis Kreuz wore a sleek herringbone suit and gold tie and had a thin moustache. He stomped towards her.

  “You must be the Godright girl,” the man said loudly, brashly, putting his hand out to shake. “I read about you. You’re famous.”

  Maddy timidly put her hand forward, and it disappeared in his meaty paw as he shook it up and down.

  “I’m Louis. But you probably already know that. If you were dumb, you wouldn’t be going through Guardian training. We’d just jump you straight to Archangel.” Louis Kreuz laughed heartily at his punch line. The phone on his desk beeped and a light flashed green, indicating a call was coming through. With irritation he turned his head to the thick oak doors. “NO CALLS, YOU NITWITS!” he shouted at the assistants through the doors.

  Maddy took a second to look around. She found herself in a plush, oak-lined room. Just outside the two large windows that swung open on to a garden, glorious purple and pink flowers flourished. Their scent wafted into the room, mixing with the cigar. Old, silver-framed photos of Louis Kreuz with practically every famous Guardian ever lined the walls. Memories from Angel City’s Golden Age. They were all signed: “With love always, to Louis”, “Louis, where would I ever be without you, darling?”, “Louis: you still owe me $10, you lug!” Maddy even saw a picture with Jackson’s Aunt Clara, the former “Pearl of Angel City”. Jackson had told her once there had even been rumours of an affair between the two of them, which the newspapers, radio and news-reel films at the time had been as eager to exploit as the blogs and ANN would be today.

  Kreuz looked at Maddy. “You mute?”

  “What?” Maddy started.

  “You mute? You haven’t said nothin’.”

  Maddy’s face flushed. “Well, I just want to tell you what a great opportunity it is— ”

  Kreuz’s face turned serious. “Save the canned lines for the interviews on ANN. You think you’re ready to become a nominee?”

  Maddy gulped. “Yes,” she said firmly.

  “Well that’s good. Because I don’t. In fact, I told them as much when they sent you along to me. What’s a half-Angel, half-human who’s never had a day of training and hasn’t even got her wings yet going to do here? But they insisted. And everybody’s got a boss. Including me. Only difference is mine goes by the name Gabriel, he’s on the Council of Twelve, and he started a little thing I like to call Protection for Pay. You mighta heard of it.”

  Maddy was at a loss for words. She tried to stare at the same spot on the carpet, wishing she were literally anywhere but there at that moment. While she had found courage in the conference room at the NAS with the pretentious Archangels, this direct attack from Kreuz left her feeling small and wounded.

  “You’re coming in so late in the game, I don’t even know where to start. These other Guardians, they practically started trainin’ in their mothers’ wombs. And now they want to fast-track you over a couple years?” Kreuz snorted.

  “I. . .” But Maddy trailed off. He was right. She was starting training incredibly late, although she knew she wouldn’t be Commissioned for at least two years at a minimum.

  The short, powerful man looked at her, taking a large puff off his cigar before blowing out an enormous cloud of thick grey smoke.

  “That ain’t to say you can’t do it. Just know I’ll be watching you. Closely.”

  With that, he walked across the office and back around to sit at his enormous walnut desk, where he began checking emails on his silver-and-black PowerMac, a small concession to modern days. He still puffed away on his cigar.

  Maddy stood there, frozen, unsure what to do. After a moment, Kreuz looked up at Maddy, annoyed.

  “What are you still doing here? You got training to do.”

  Blushing in confusion, Maddy turned around and walked out of the door.

  Sadie was standing by the receptionist, one hand poised on a box of tissues. Maddy’s hands were shaking from the encounter, but Sadie almost seemed disappointed that Maddy wasn’t more crushed. She moved her hand away from the tissues and, leaning down, picked up a brand-new laptop that was sitting on the desk. It had the initials MMG engraved on it.

  “This is yours,” Sadie said as she handed it to Maddy, who had never had her own brand-new computer before – Kevin had only been able to buy used ones for her. And she certainly had never had her own new two-thousand-dollar MacBook Pro.

  “Well, thanks,” Maddy said, letting out her pent-up breath and examining the object in her hands.

  The receptionist spoke into her headset: “Churchfield on two.” Then, after patching the call through to Kreuz: “Gary, you’re on with Louis.”

  From inside the office, Maddy could hear Kreuz starting to yell on the call.

  Sadie looked at her watch.

  “We’re running late. Let’s get you to your first class.”

  Maddy nodded, looking for a brief moment over her shoulder to the door that led back into Kreuz’s office as his muffled yelling continued.

  She was astonished to find that the hallways inside the office and classroom buildings that flanked Louis’s enormous office were all marble. They passed door after door of Angel instructor offices and old classrooms, and Maddy wondered how Northwestern would’ve stacked up. Sadie finally stopped outside a door. Maddy looked through the window into the classroom. A younger Angel in a tan corduroy jacket with elbow patches perched on a desk, looking over some notes. The room looked strangely conventional. And otherwise empty.

  “Where’s everyone else?”

  “Oh, Mr Kreuz felt that you should have private tutors, especially to begin with. That way you wouldn’t feel as behind as you would with the rest of those who are training to be Guardians. It’s really for your own good.”

  Maddy’s brow creased as she tried to figure out what kind of game Kreuz was playing.

  “OK. Private tutor. Got it.” Maddy thought about how she’d never had a private anything, much less a person dedicated to teaching her. “Anything else I should know?”

  “That about covers it. If you need anything, you know where to find us,” Sadie said. She put her slight hand on Maddy’s shoulder and squeezed it in encouragement, the first friendly sign she’d given Maddy. “And good luck.”

  The door opened with a creak as Maddy pushed it and stepped into the classroom.

  The corduroy-clad Angel shuffled his notes together and looked up. “You must be Maddy. I’m Philip. We’ll be working together for a while.”

  Maddy shook his hand and settled into a chair, nervously lowering her book bag to the ground. She found she was actually anxious to discover what her first lesson in being a Guardian was going to be: freezing time like Jacks could do? Some cool trick where she got to dial in to a Protection’s frequency and wouldn’t have to have the disturbingly random and hard-to-act-upon “static” images that had been with her since childhood, like the one of the boy in the fire? Something even more useful and amazing she couldn’t even imagine?

  “We may as well get started,” Philip said. Maddy leaned forward, her eagerness showing despite herself.

  Reaching down to a bag at the foot of th
e table with both hands, Philip pulled out an enormous textbook. He threw it on the table between them, where it landed with a thundering thud. The book was old, a dark olive green, and had no pictures or graphics on the outside. Maddy thought it must be at least two thousand pages long. Simple black lettering was pressed into the front cover of the book: ANGEL AERODYNAMICS.

  She reached forward and timidly flipped the book open. The pages were crammed with text, with only the occasional graphical aid. There were also endless formulas and algorithms: calculus and algebraic figures spread across the pages. Maddy had to stifle a groan.

  “This should keep you busy for some time,” Philip said calmly. “I’ll be back in three hours to see how you’ve done on the exercises in the first three chapters.” The Angel rose from his chair to leave the room.

  “But— ” Maddy started.

  Philip turned at the door, his ear cocked, with a wicked look on his face.

  “Yes. . . ?”

  “Nothing,” Maddy said after a moment, remembering what Kreuz had said to her and resolving not to show them any weakness. “I just remembered I do have a calculator on my phone. I don’t like to use the ones on these computers. Thanks!”

  Smiling tightly, Philip left the room.

  With a sigh, Maddy opened the book. She looked at the copyright page: 1957. The book was older than Uncle Kevin! This was a far cry from the sexy and flashy Guardian training she’d thought she was going to encounter on her first day.

  Maddy started work, and although the text was dense, she was surprised to see that some of the formulas weren’t as difficult as she had first thought. She had always been near the head of the pack in her maths classes, and she’d aced the AP calculus exam.

  She had barely done the first exercise in the chapter when her iPhone buzzed in her bag. Pulling it out, she saw it was a text from Jacks. It read: “Angel Aerodynamics?”

  Fingers flying, Maddy wrote back: “How’d you know?”

  Jackson: “Haha, everybody gets that first. Don’t worry, it gets better! J Can I take you to dinner after in celebration of your first day?”

  Maddy thought for a moment, wondering if she wouldn’t have too much homework to do after her first day. She remembered Jackson’s advice to her the night he had come to her room to take her flying when they had first met: “Just do it to do something.”

  Maddy: “OK. As long as you aren’t embarrassed by a date who’s doing square root calculations during dessert.”

  Jackson: “Pick you up at seven.”

  Maddy flipped the phone to silent and went back to work.

  Three hours later, when Philip came back, Maddy still had the Angel Aerodynamics book open and was writing in her notebook. The jacketed Angel raised an eyebrow and smiled mercilessly as he eyed Maddy. “Still working, I see? Don’t worry, this is difficult for even our most . . . practised Angels.”

  Maddy put her pencil down and closed the massive textbook. She looked up at Philip.

  “Oh, I just finished early so I thought I’d do chapters four and five, too – I like to work ahead. I was just starting chapter six when you walked in, but I can do that next time.”

  She smiled sweetly at Philip.

  At that moment Sadie arrived and whisked Maddy away to her next class. She had a stack of other books for Maddy, including Practical Flying for Guardians, Second Edition; Time Manipulation in Guardianship; as well as The Book of Angels, a biblical-era book. Maddy thought it was a strange choice, but apparently it played into an Angel history class – which she would be taking for a second time, having been forced to study Angel history at ACHS.

  As they stepped out into the blinding sunshine, Maddy saw a group of beautiful young Immortals walking together towards a canteen on the grounds. She could’ve sworn they looked over at her, followed by a snatch of laughter. Sadie glanced at the Angels from the corner of her eye.

  “If you’re wondering about lunch, you just tell me what you want and I’ll have it delivered to the class. Mr Kreuz feels it would be best if you have working lunches, at least at first, since you have so much ground to cover.”

  Maddy didn’t respond. She thought about the cigar-chomping boss, and anger flushed through her – he was trying to keep her away from the other Guardians in training! She pushed the thought from her mind, trying to focus on the task at hand: surviving her next class. She wondered what boring thing they’d try to throw at her this time: translating ancient Angel texts from Latin into modern English? Memorizing every Archangel since 1910? Reciting the NAS’s charter and constitutional amendments, year by year?

  Caught in this storm of thoughts, Maddy turned the corner and almost ran directly into a female Angel who was in the middle of a sentence. Her Australian accent was unmistakable: “. . .even believe what’s going on here now? Next thing you know we’ll be taking applications from anybody off the street who thinks— ”

  The beautiful, lithe Angel, who was walking with another potential Guardian, stopped short. “Oh, hi, Sadie,” Emily Brightchurch said.

  Sadie cleared her throat. “Emily, this is Maddy Montgomery. You’ll be seeing a lot of her around here.”

  Maddy, flustered, stumbled on her words. “Nice to meet you, Emily.” Of course she knew who Emily was – an Australian Angel transplant who had come to Angel City that year to finish her training – though they’d never officially met. Emily was one of the most gossiped-about Angels in this year’s nominee class, and her earthy sex appeal was undeniable. She had caused a scandal by appearing in a series of arty, provocative black-and-white Bulgari ads on billboards along the Halo Strip, just across from the Chateau Marmont. She had flaunted the jewellery and her Immortal Marks – and nothing else – in the ads, and the billboards had caused more than their share of near-accidents on that stretch of Sunset Boulevard. She had deep-red hair, the hint of a few sun freckles and an absolutely perfect complexion.

  The sexy Angel looked Maddy fully up and down, and gave her a plastic smile that wasn’t meant to fool anyone.

  “Hi, Maddy. Hope you’re getting settled in. We’re so happy you’re joining us, even though it’s at such a late, late stage.” Emily flashed the fake smile even brighter. “Everyone is so impressed that you’re willing to try despite your . . . difficulties . . . to be a Guardian when the rest of us have been training for so long.”

  Totally taken aback, Maddy stuttered out a few shocked words. Why was the privileged Angel being so . . . snotty? Maddy had never done a thing to her!

  “Be a sweetheart and say hi to Jacks for me, would you?” the Aussie Angel added. “Ta!” Emily turned to her companion Angel, who was eyeing Maddy with thinly veiled disdain. “Let’s go, Zoe. The others are waiting.”

  The two female Guardian trainees whisked away into the sunny afternoon, leaving Maddy speechless in their wake.

  “So glad you’re getting to know some of the other Angels,” Sadie said as they stepped into the golf cart.

  “Yes. Me too,” Maddy said grimly, looking over her shoulder as the two Angels joined the other group and disappeared into the canteen.

  Crossing the grounds in the cart under swaying palm trees, Sadie and Maddy soon turned down a road that led between the enormous white hangars Maddy had seen when she first arrived. Each one looked exactly the same, save for individual painted black numbers. They were low and hidden by a screen of trees behind the thick walls that surrounded the entire training campus, so you would never know they were even there. No frills. But obviously something was going on in them. Sadie parked the golf cart outside the building marked #5.

  Going into the building was like stepping into a pool of darkness. The sunlight outside contrasted with the inky blackness inside the building. After a few moments, Maddy’s eyes began adjusting to the dark, and she saw she was in a large room, one that was still only maybe one-tenth the size of the entire hangar. It was tiled from floor t
o ceiling in individual TV screens, like the inside of a dome. A number of computer monitors glowed along a control panel to the side, and in the middle of the room loomed a large metal platform. No one was present except for one Angel. She stood up, smiling genuinely to greet Maddy. Maddy suddenly recognized her as the female Archangel who had spoken up for her at the meeting at the NAS.

  “Hello, I’m Professor Archangel Archson,” she said. “But you can call me Susan.” With her olive complexion and rich, dark hair pulled into a bun, Susan seemed at first glance like another impossibly gorgeous Angel, but there was an accessible side to her that Maddy immediately sensed.

  Sadie excused herself, leaving Maddy and the professor alone together. Susan offered Maddy a cup of tea, which she politely declined.

  “Well, if you don’t mind. . .” The woman poured herself a cup of the steaming brown liquid, mixing in a few drops of honey and fresh-squeezed lemon. She smiled warmly again at Maddy.

  “You look confused,” Susan said. “Sometimes we Archangels teach classes. It keeps us close to the incoming classes of Guardians.”

  Maddy tried to smile back, but the fact that her teacher was not just an Angel but an Archangel made her feel even more nervous.

  Susan looked at Maddy. “Tell me what you know about frequencing.”

  Maddy’s mind went back to what Jackson had told her, as well as her own experience with the phenomenon – her own strange visions, Angel “abilities” dating from way before she knew she was part Angel, the grisly premonitions that would overrun her at random times.

  “Well, every person has a frequency. It’s unique. And every Angel has the ability to pick up on these frequencies.”

  “That’s right,” the professor said, nodding encouragingly.

  “But normally it’s like static, if you don’t know the frequency. It doesn’t make sense, it’s all jumbled. That’s what used to happen to me . . . before I knew.”