Illuminate: A Gilded Wings Novel, Book One Read online

  Illuminate: A Gilded Wings Novel, Book One

  Gilded Wings [1]

  Aimee Agresti

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (www.hmhco.com) (2012)

  Rating: ***

  * * *

  Haven Terra is a brainy, shy high school outcast. But everything changes when she is

  awarded a prestigious internship at a posh Chicago hotel under the watchful eyes of a

  group of gorgeous strangers: the powerful and alluring hotel owner Aurelia Brown; her

  second-in-command, the dashing Lucian Grove; and their stunning but aloof staff of

  glamazons called The Outfit.

  As Haven begins falling for Lucian, she discovers that these beautiful people are

  not quite what they seem. With the help of a mysterious book, she uncovers the evil

  agenda of Aurelia and company: they’re in the business of buying souls. Will they succeed

  in wooing Haven to join them in their recruitment efforts, or will she be able to

  thwart this devilish set’s plans to take the souls of her classmates on prom night at the

  hotel?

  Review

  "It may be a debut, but from the first paragraph readers will feel they are in the hands of a confident, professional writer. . . . Agresti builds suspicion deftly and slowly, keeping readers turning pages as her story grows. . . . Smart, well-crafted and sophisticated; without a doubt, this belongs on the top of the stack of the current crop of angel books. More, please!"--Kirkus Reviews, starred review

  "Part The Picture of Dorian Gray, part The Devil Wears Prada, this original and engrossing story will keep surprising readers right up to the thrilling climax."--Josephine Angelini, author of Starcrossed

  "Haven is a character who will definitely surprise you—in the best way possible. Mysterious and deliciously creepy, Agresti's debut will keep you turning pages until the explosive climax."--Cara Lynn Shultz, author of Spellbound

  About the Author

  Aimee Agresti is an entertainment journalist and author. As a staff writer for Us Weekly magazine, she interviewed many celebrities and penned the magazine’s coffee table book Inside Hollywood. In addition to Us, her work has appeared in People, the Washington Post, Mademoiselle, and the New York Observer. Illuminate is her first novel for teens. She lives in Washington, D.C. Visit her website at www.aimeeagresti.com.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One

  1. A Rare Opportunity

  2. Good Things Come in Threes

  3. Your New Surroundings

  4. Not a Bad Place to Visit

  5. Welcome to the Ring of Fire

  6. It’ll Probably Be Just Hideous

  7. Everything Sinful Is Glamorous

  8. What’s with the Book?

  9. That’s Not Quite How I Imagined Paradiso

  10. You Will Be Spending a Good Deal of Time There

  11. Tell Me You Forgive Me or I Won’t Let You Go

  12. Don’t Get Too Comfortable

  13. Beauty Is Genius

  14. You Might Have a Dark Side

  Part Two

  15. Be Cool, Please

  16. You’re That Girl

  17. An Evening in Alcatraz

  18. We Mustn’t Underestimate Her

  19. Please Give Me Your Soul

  20. Charm Her, for God’s Sake

  21. The Induction

  22. An Unexpected Visit

  23. Not Human, but Devil

  24. Today Was . . . Unfortunate

  25. We’ve Got to Do Something About Dante

  Part Three

  26. You’re a New Woman

  27. I Need to Talk to You

  28. I Want You to Win

  29. Rendezvous at the Library

  30. You’re Next

  31. Time for a Change

  32. We’ll Always Have Metamorfosi

  33. You Have to Do This for Me

  34. A Decline, Without Regrets

  35. Be Strong . . . and Be You

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright © 2012 by Aimee Agresti

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  Harcourt is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Agresti, Aimee.

  Illuminate / by Aimee Agresti.

  p. cm.

  Summary: A brainy, shy high school outcast interning at a Chicago hotel discovers that the hotel staff has an evil agenda planned for her classmates on prom night.

  [1. Supernatural—Fiction. 2. Internship programs—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.A268754I1 2012

  [Fic]—dc23

  2011027326

  For Brian

  The soul is a terrible reality.

  It can be bought and sold or bartered away.

  It can be poisoned or made more perfect.

  There is a soul in each one of us. I know it.

  —Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

  Part One

  1. A Rare Opportunity

  Up until that point, English class had been unremarkable. We were halfway through The Picture of Dorian Gray. Mrs. Harris, with her voluminous behind precariously perched on the front of her strained wooden desk, scanned the room searching for flickers of comprehension—or, at the very least, consciousness—in a sea of clueless faces. I slid down in my seat, letting my long wispy hair, still damp from my morning encounter with winter’s sloppy-wet sleet, fall around the sides of my face: trying to hide. I’ve never much been one for participation. I generally know the answers—I just don’t appreciate the attention that comes from knowing them. Answer correctly and you have further cemented your reputation as a brainy, hopeless outcast. Answer incorrectly, and not only are you considered a bookish nerd, but now you’re even bad at that. It was a lose/lose situation. So I read ahead in the book, tuning her out, glancing up every now and then to the clock above the chalkboard or to the windows where blustery, chalk-white skies hung over another frigid January day. Evanston, Illinois. The tundra that was the greater Chicago area would likely look this way until April, but it never bothered me so much. I liked the way that braving its wind-whipping wrath could make a person, even someone as easily tossed around as me, feel stronger.

  “So let’s talk about the nature of good, evil, and hedonism,” the teacher droned on.

  At the mention of hedonism, on reflex, my eyes darted two rows in front of me. Buzz-cropped Jason Abington, wearing his basketball jersey, number 9, to advertise the big game this weekend, nibbled on the cap of a blue ballpoint pen—my blue ballpoint pen. Somewhere inside my stomach, swarms of butterflies fluttered from their cocoons. It was for this very reason that the front outside pocket of my backpack bulged at all times with scores of these pens, which I had, optimistically, bought in bulk. Jason never seemed to have his own, and he had asked to borrow one from me weeks ago and then again and again and now this is what I had become to him: a purveyor of pens. At the desk beside him, a blond creature—his blond creature—named Courtney twirled her artfully hot-rollered, bodacious curls. This is what boys like him were conditioned to expect. This wasn’t me, and I couldn’t imagine it ever would be, regardless of what magical metamorphosis one was expected to undergo during high school. I was a work in progress, but I had no reason to
believe the finished product would ever be quite like that.

  I had stopped paying the least bit of attention to Harris’s lecture when she called, “Ms. Terra? Haven. Did you hear me?”

  To be honest, no. Scrambling, I shuffled through the shards I had caught of her lecture, searching for the most likely line of questioning and then shooting out an answer that ought to fit. “Um, Dorian and Lord Henry believe in following the senses, pursuing whatever pleases them, uh, no matter the consequences, and, um, not worrying about right and wrong?” I proposed, sweat dampening my temples. Jason angled his head back just a touch in my direction. I felt other eyes on me too.

  “Thank you, that’s lovely.” She was holding a slip of paper she had just taken from a senior girl, bored, chewing gum, who now left the room. “But your presence is requested in the principal’s office.”

  A weak chorus of “Oooooh” broke out as I gathered my books and boulder of a backpack. As I squeezed through the aisle, passing Jason’s desk, he looked up for only a moment, expressionless and still chewing on my pen.

  In my two and a half years of high school, I had yet to set foot inside Principal Tollman’s office—I’m just not that kind of girl. So I couldn’t imagine what this could be about. On the walk there, footsteps echoing on the linoleum, faded voices muffling out from passing classrooms, I tried to think what it could be: Was it Joan? Was something wrong with her? This is how it is with me, always expecting the worst.

  But in our case, this sort of overreaction was justified.

  This is just what happens when you are discovered, as I was, at roughly age five, in a muddy ditch somewhere off Lake Shore Drive in the dead of winter. A little Jane Doe, barely breathing, no memories of anything that came before that night, no one to ever come looking for you. And you get raised by the kind nurse who eventually takes you in, names you, feeds you, clothes you. After a thing like that, worry becomes more than a reflex; it becomes an umbrella shading daily life, hovering closer every time someone gets home late or doesn’t call when they say they will.

  “Ms. Terra, have a seat,” Principal Tollman said over the top of the rimless reading glasses perched on her nose when she saw me standing in the doorway of her office. She squared up in her chair. “So it looks like congratulations are in order.” I felt my eyes involuntarily bulge. “We’ve just been notified that you and two of your fellow eleventh-graders have been accepted into the Department of Education’s Vocational Illinois Leaders internship program.”

  It took me half a second too long to process.

  “Oh, wow. That’s great, thanks,” I said, more reserved than she probably expected, but I was preoccupied. In my mind I was sorting and sifting through everything I’d applied for in the past year. There was just so much. Anything that could earn me extra cash for college or would sound good enough to help me clinch a scholarship to one of my dream schools. Internships, fellowships, essay contests—my mailbox flooded with the constant stream of applications and deadlines and hopes. And yet, somehow, this didn’t even ring a bell.

  The principal took off her glasses and stared at me with a faint smile, a director waiting for the reaction shot she wanted. “This sounds fantastic,” I said. “I really am honored. But forgive me, I can’t seem to recall actually applying for this.” A nervous grin propped up the corners of my mouth.

  She laughed, a small, charmed chuckle. “Yes, well, that’s because you didn’t. That’s the beauty of this particular internship. They just pluck the best and the brightest and place those students with a thriving Illinois enterprise for the semester. It’s a new pilot program the state is trying out. You will each be paired up with someone at this business who will act as a sort of advanced independent-study tutor and a mentor. And—” Glasses back on, she read from a paper. “It appears you’re going to be placed at the Lexington Hotel in Chicago. Why, that’s really remarkable, you know. They’re about to reopen, and the woman who owns it has become the toast of Chicago’s business world practically overnight. You may have seen her in the Tribune and on the news. This is a tremendous privilege. It says here that room and board are provided, and there’s a considerable stipend in exchange for good old-fashioned hard work.”

  Her words rushed at me too fast to make sense of. So I would be living at this place? Living at a hotel? Working full-time? No actual classes? “Considerable stipend”? It was a lot to wrap my head around. Do things like this just fall from the sky? Perhaps the near-perfect grades I worked so hard for, the afterschool job I had held for pretty much a decade, the Saturday nights spent at home studying, were finally paying off in something that could give me a shot at the pricey and prestigious schools on my college wish list.

  “I know we’ve started our semester—the timing is a bit odd; I suppose the state board is still ironing out the kinks—however, we’ll make it work since this is a rare opportunity.” She said this with a hands-clasped, tilted-head gravity that suggested she would like some gratitude and gushing in return.

  “Thank you, Ms. Tollman. I appreciate it. This is really great.” My mind was already five steps ahead, wondering what Joan would say. Would she even let me go? What would I bring? How would I tell them at the hospital?

  “You start next week. Everything you need to know should be in here.” She stood and thrust a slim manila envelope at me, then surprised me by grabbing my limp, unsuspecting hand for a firm shake. “Do us proud, Haven.”

  I had never seen so many people crowd the half-moon of the pediatric nurses’ station when there wasn’t an emergency. There must’ve been at least three dozen of them pulled from even the farthest corners of Evanston General Hospital’s compound and representing the full color spectrum of scrubs—pinks, blues, greens, Disney characters—all buzzing around me, nibbling on heaping slices of red velvet cake (my favorite).

  Joan had, of course, orchestrated the whole thing. Now she bent over the sheet cake bearing the message HAPPY BIRTHDAY AND CONGRATULATIONS, HAVEN! WE’LL MISS YOU!, dishing out precisely sliced pieces as fast as she could and, naturally, with a smile.

  She had just turned fifty a few months earlier, but besides her gray hair, which she hadn’t bothered to dye, you would never have guessed her age: her social calendar, from her book clubs to her bridge nights, put mine to shame. I wished that she tried to date more—of the two of us, she seemed to have a better shot at it—but she could be stubborn about that. It was the only thing she got touchy about. Joan had divorced a year or so before she found me, after discovering she couldn’t have kids of her own. She didn’t talk about it much, but the other nurses had over the years, so I’d gotten the whole story in bits and pieces. They thought she was too scared now, and they tried to push her into dating and set her up to little avail. But at least she had plenty of friends. She was always either going to a party or throwing one. I wished to one day be such a good hostess. At the moment, though, I was doing my best as the center of attention, another tricky role for me. As problems went, this was a fine one: surrounded by so many well-wishers I had managed only one bite of my celebratory confection before being pleasantly besieged by a tug at the arm of my salmon-hued scrubs here, an ambush hug or a jolly pat on the back there.

  “Y’know, I just don’t know how I’m going to tell some of my patients about this. They’ll be devastated!” said blond-beehived Nurse Calloway from cardiac. She stabbed at her cake as Dr. Michelle from pediatrics—the youngest resident in the entire hospital, and my idol—and white-haired Nurse Sanders, with glistening eyes behind her thick glasses, nodded in agreement. This was my little sorority. “You’ll break all their hearts,” Calloway went on.

  “And those are hearts that are already in pretty bad shape to begin with!” Dr. Michelle chimed in with the punch line. We all laughed. This is what passed for humor in these parts. Indeed, a few patients liked to call me a “heartbreaker,” which was certainly something I never heard from anyone who wasn’t an octogenarian with failing vision. Dr. Michelle smiled. “We’ll miss y
ou, Haven.” She could almost pass as a patient in her department, being so energetic, young, and, like me, only a couple inches over five feet.

  Sanders sniffled. “Could you still come on weekends? Or evenings?”

  “Now I’m starting to feel bad,” I said. “Maybe I should stay.”

  At the other end of the nurses’ station a good fifteen feet away, Joan perked her head up, waving her cake knife in the air. “I know you’re not guilt-tripping my girl, are you, ladies?” she called over to us, cutting a piece of cake for herself at last. Propped up on the table behind her was a framed photo of me, about ten years old wearing a mini–candy striper’s uniform. Images of me were all over this place: I was everyone’s surrogate child smiling from their desktops and cabinets and computer wallpaper. The hospital had pretty much been my daycare center for as long as I could remember; I came to work with Joan and was babysat by anyone and everyone until I was old enough that they could start giving me something useful to do. Joan wandered over, plate in hand, mouth full of cake, and put her arm around me. “We have to let this one spread her wings. She’ll fly back.” She winked.

  “I’ll be back at the end of June. You’ll barely have time to miss me,” I said, a crater deepening in my heart. “I’ll do a goodbye tour before I go today.”

  And tour I did, making the rounds to see all my favorites and ending the day with the toughest stop of all, pediatrics. I cut a pied piper’s path through the ward, collecting pajama-clad followers as I went room to room dispensing hugs and kisses and promising to be back soon. We landed back at the playroom and gathered at the bulletin board we had assembled together: a collage of photos of each child in the ward, running the length of the wall, with a border in a riot of colors. It looked like a massive yearbook page, and we updated it with new photos of everyone on a regular basis. It had started as nothing really, just a little project for photography class last year. I had asked a few kids if they would be willing to let me photograph them and they agreed, and then somehow everyone wanted in on it. Jenny, a bandana-clad fourteen-year-old, had explained once, “we look better in your pictures than we do in the mirror.” I assured her no Photoshop was involved—this was them.