Illuminate: A Gilded Wings Novel, Book One Read online

  “Purgatory, paradise—” I read.

  “That’s not quite how I imagined paradiso,” Lance said.

  “Yeah, I guess that must be the point.” I shrugged. “But then what’s going on here?” I pointed to the center section. The scroll below trumpeted it Metamorfosi and people shrouded in black capes stood tall, strong, powerful, a red and orange glow around their bodies. Some floated a foot or two off the ground surrounded by people bowing before them. In the center, one of these people stood reaching out to a caped, floating figure, their index fingers touching. In the partially painted black sky, a shadowy figure with sprawling obsidian wings hovered.

  “Good question,” was all Lance said.

  “Metamorphosis? What’s that about?”

  “I’m not sure I want to know.”

  We finally tore our eyes away, without a word, taking to the closet to pull out the paint, brushes, trays, tarps, and ladders stashed inside. Everything we needed, except of course artistic ability.

  When the supplies were at last assembled—tarp spread out to protect the floor, paint-splattered smocks thrown over our clothes, paint poured—we debated where to begin.

  “Should we start at the top?” I pointed to the white sky that needed to be black. “And work our way down?”

  Lance folded his arms, weighing the work that needed to be done. “Or we could go from the ground up,” he suggested.

  “Sort of a grass-roots campaign. I like that,” I agreed. He looked relieved. “I didn’t really want to go up on that ladder yet,” I added.

  “Me neither, to be honest,” he said.

  We had literally covered a good bit of ground, mimicking to the best of our ability the brushstrokes the artist had made before us, when we heard the sharp pistol-crack of heels echoing against marble. The sound drew closer and closer, until we turned around and there she was. Even her footsteps could make a person cower. We both paused for a moment, brushes poised above the wall.

  Aurelia stood before us, scrutinizing what we had done. She shook her head and let her eyelids fall shut for just a second. When she opened them she looked only at me, a smile—the iciest one I had ever seen—on her lips.

  “Art is the quickest way into the soul,” she said, in my direction. “This is meant to evoke a feeling. You have the power to convey that but I don’t see that you are. Why don’t you have any passion?”

  Up until this point, I thought we had been doing a pretty passable job.

  “I’m sorry,” I said as a reflex, regretting how weak I sounded. “I’m a better photographer than painter. I’m really not a painter at all, to be honest.” I fidgeted with the brush in my hands, drops of paint falling softly on my sneakers.

  “We’re doing our best,” Lance managed, mumbling and adjusting his glasses. He got a streak of gray paint on his cheek in the process.

  “Never show fear or uncertainty. I’m more angry at that than I am with the lack of fire in your work.”

  She was still looking only at me. I had nothing to say. It seemed safer to keep quiet.

  “You’ll visit the Art Institute, both of you. Do you know who Hieronymus Bosch is?”

  “German painter,” Lance blurted out.

  “Dutch painter,” I corrected softly.

  “Dutch painter. Born Jeroen Anthoniszoon van Aken,” he said, more softly this time, trying to redeem himself. I looked at him from the corner of my eye.

  “See his Garden of Earthly Delights, and Seven Deadly Sins. They’re on loan from the Prado. I want his hell here.” She pointed to the wall. It was more chilling because her voice was so steady, serious, and, if anything, laced with as much longing and disappointment as fury.

  Another set of footfalls clacked toward us: Lucian.

  “A word please?” he whispered to Aurelia, resting his fingertips lightly on her elbow. She nodded. Together they walked slowly away from us.

  Lance and I exchanged rattled glances, then silently took action. He started pouring the paint from the trays back into the paint cans. I collected our brushes and stalked off to the closet, where there was a sink inside. I was about to turn the faucet on when I caught a low murmur. I held my breath. It came through the vent—the closet backed up against the office with the computer I used. It was Lucian, a hard edge to his honeyed voice, a thread being pulled just too tight.

  “If you didn’t want this to have to be done by other people then you should have made some sort of dispensation for Calliope.”

  My mind flashed to the loopy scrawl at the bottom of the mural. I would check it, but I was almost certain I was right: it had been signed by Calliope. She had started this mural. So why wasn’t she completing it? I couldn’t imagine getting that far along, doing all that hard work, and then not finishing it. It just seemed odd. But I silenced my racing mind and struggled to listen.

  “I will not have you issuing judgments on me.” A tremor ran through Aurelia’s voice. “I do not need to defend myself to you. There is such a thing as protocol, which is what I adhered to.”

  “Which is fine, but this is where we are now. Yes, we’re ramping up recruiting efforts, but this is where we are presently.”

  “I’m concerned this will impact our timeline.”

  “I’m working as quickly as I can, Aurelia.”

  “We will finish this later. You’ll take care of her at least.”

  Lucian didn’t say anything.

  I turned the faucet on, running my fingers through the bristles but watching the vent. Sharp, spiked footsteps sliced out of the gallery. Ten seconds later, a slower gait followed. A few steps, then they stopped, as though he were contemplating a change in direction, and then they continued on, through the door, which clicked closed behind him.

  Lance and I barely spoke the whole way to the L. The January deep freeze gave us a fine excuse to keep quiet; no use struggling through chattering teeth or straining over the roaring wind as it swirled around us.

  The Art Institute was quiet, save for a school field trip or two, and once ensconced inside, a lightness settled over me, a clamp that had been pressed over my heart released, and I felt like myself again. Lance might have felt it too—his pace slowed, his shoulders fell from their tense, hunched-up place near his ears, and his signature slouch returned. We grabbed a map with the exhibit marked and headed up the sweeping staircases running through the center of the building. At last, we passed through the pillar-lined doorway to the expansive room we sought.

  “How did you know Bosch’s real name and not know he was Dutch?” I asked in a whisper. All the marble picked up and carried the sound, making my voice so much more powerful.

  “I got nervous,” he whispered back, watching the walls for the two works we most wanted to see.

  “She makes me nervous too.”

  “Well, you were really playing it cool with Lucian.” He couldn’t suppress the smile breaking out on his face.

  “Fine, guilty.”

  We found what we had come to see, both works so important they had each been given their own walls. The Garden of Earthly Delights, I was surprised to discover, actually looked a lot like the Paradiso panel of the mural at the hotel, except in a garden, not in a barren, ugly landscape with a lake of blood. Two-thirds of it really was a garden, and the other third was hellish—no one was frolicking there. Seven Deadly Sins was a wild circular affair segmented by sin, with four bubbles depicting death, judgment, and seminal experiences of that sort pulled out.

  “I’m glad to see these,” I whispered after we had gazed quietly at both for some time. “But it’s not like I’ll be able to duplicate any of this, even in terms of color.”

  “I know. I’m not sure what they want from us.”

  “It’s kinda nice to get out of the hotel for a little while.”

  “I’m in no rush to get back if you’re not.”

  And with that, we set off roaming to the next exhibit room and the others, slow and careful not to miss anything, separating in each room, but never g
oing in entirely different directions.

  We had just wandered into nineteenth-century French art when it caught me. On a far wall, staring out, I went straight for it, seeing nothing else along the way. The subject was lying in shallow inky water at night, floating with her wrists bound in rope and a halo above her head. She seemed to be glowing, angelic, in her white dress in an otherwise nearly all-black painting. Somewhere far in the distance a shadowy figure watched from atop a hill, just a silhouette, but a menacing one. She appeared to be my age. She didn’t look like me necessarily—her hair was much lighter, her skin pale—but the image felt . . . familiar. In a way I couldn’t make sense of, it felt like me.

  What had I looked like when they found me when I was little? There hadn’t been water, but there had been ice along that stretch of snow-matted grass down from the road. I had been back there only once. I made Joan take me a couple of years ago. I just thought I should see it, even though she didn’t want me to. It looked something like this painting, I supposed. A girl nestled at the bottom of a hill, left for dead.

  I don’t know how long I had been standing in front of that piece, but it was long enough that Lance had gone ahead to see the rest of the exhibit, and then come back for me when he was ready to move on.

  He stared at the painting for a few minutes, quietly by my side. And then finally: “I’m thinking of Italian Renaissance next. It’s the next floor up,” he whispered.

  “Have you heard of this before?”

  He leaned in to see the placard posted beside it and read aloud: “La Jeune Martyre.”

  “The young martyr,” I translated absent-mindedly, not like he needed me to.

  “‘By Paul Delarouche, 1855. Oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris.’” He stepped back to consider it once more. “No, never seen it. Pretty haunting, huh?”

  I nodded, a shudder running through me, and soaked in one last look before pulling myself away.

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

  By the time Lance and I left the Art Institute, dusk had fallen. We had walked every inch of that museum, even stopping to get a snack in the café and browsing in the gift shop. I had scanned the racks of postcards, through so many of the usual suspects, Van Goghs and Picassos and Monets, until I found it—a card of La Jeune Martyre. I bought it, a dollar well spent.

  We had just turned the corner to the hotel, the brisk, sharp wind forcing me to burrow my face farther into the puffy collar of my parka, when it hit me. My mind had been preoccupied, bracing for what might await us inside (and constructing a defense to the question, “What took you so long?”), and an uneasiness began to set in—and with it, a tingle, the prelude to an all-out burn, in the scar above my heart. I tried to imagine an ice cube there, cooling away the fire. I stopped walking, dead in the middle of the sidewalk. Lance continued a few paces ahead and then, looking as if he’d lost something, stopped and glanced back.

  “It’s warmer if you keep walking. Standing still only invites frostbite. Scientific fact.”

  “No, I know.” I shook my head. “I need to run to a drugstore. I forgot to pack a few things and I’ve been meaning to get out the past couple days, but you know how crazy it’s been.”

  “I think there was a CVS a couple blocks back,” he said.

  “Yeah, thanks. Do you need anything or . . .?”

  “Nah, I think I’m good, but do you want company? It’s kind of dark out. I think I should go with you.”

  I sort of did want company—now that I thought about it, I wanted constant companionship from now until whenever that book stopped issuing threats—but I felt like it would require too much explanation, more than I was prepared to give right now. This book has told me to create some combination of bunker/fallout shelter/panic room, so I’ve got some shopping to do, no big deal. It was too tall an order to try to make that sound breezy.

  “No, I’ll be fine. It’s so close by, I’ll be back in no time.”

  “You sure?”

  I tried especially hard to appear at ease. “Yeah, I’ll catch up with you back there.”

  “Okay. I get the idea there’s no telling you what to do.” I had to smile when he said this. Before this job and this book, I liked to think that. “Let me know when you get in?”

  “Sure.”

  We waved awkward goodbyes and Lance continued on.

  Once at the drugstore, I decided it made the most sense to walk up and down every aisle keeping in mind the few tenets of emergency supply shopping the book had dictated. Before long I had accumulated so much that my basket could barely hold it all. I already had a first-aid kit so I was generally in good shape with those medical staples, but I went to town on everything else. Among my finds: six-packs of bottled water and Gatorade, boxes of protein bars, a mini fire extinguisher, a pocketknife, a lighter, mace, a flashlight, packs of batteries, trail mix, and a few candy bars. (I was hungry, so it probably was not the best time to shop.) It seemed sufficient. I was about to check out when I decided to grab extra gauze and burn ointment for my tingling scars.

  There was hardly anyone else in the store, but I noticed a guy in a parka, and not just any winter weather deterrent, but a black one engulfing him all the way down to his ankles. He was enormous—he had to have been at least six foot five. I had noticed him first in the snack aisle and paid him no mind, but now he stood before the display of medical tape and scissors and I could tell from the angle of his head, he was peeking over at me. He had the hood up, so I couldn’t see anything except his feet: black patent leather sneakers like the ones Dante had made such a fuss over. The ones we had seen on Beckett. That made me feel safe. It had to be him, right? Should I take a chance and try to say hello? But if for some reason it wasn’t him, then I’d be so embarrassed, and I might be just as embarrassed if it was him and he wasn’t particularly friendly. I had to at least stop staring.

  I refocused my attention on the gauze bandages, debating what size roll to get, when I noticed a rustling at the end of the aisle, and then the crack of plastic being torn open. I looked from the corner of my eye, behind a curtain of my hair. Slowly inching away from him, I spotted the rack holding the medical scissors, the ones used for cutting bandages: the whole handful of them were swinging. His hands, shielded by his body, were moving, and the plastic and paper of the scissors packaging dropped to the floor.

  And then he took off.

  He blew past me, giving me one strong-armed shove as he ran, knocking the wind out of me. My forehead crashed into the shelf, and a flash of light knocked out my vision for a moment. I fell to the ground in a heap, boxes of Band-Aids, tubes of burn ointment and antiseptic raining down on me, the contents of my basket scattered across the floor. I struggled to pry my right eye open; the space above my eyebrow felt like it had been severed in two and a tennis ball was wedged into it. I touched it and could feel a bump rising already.

  Then I heard the scream. I’d never heard a scream like that. Chills ran straight down my spine, so sharp I ached.

  It took me a few minutes to move. I heard a man’s voice at the front of the store. “ . . . yes, Twenty-second and State Street . . . the one at the corner . . . Yes, a woman on the ground . . . Please hurry . . . thank you.”

  I slowly eased myself into a sitting position. Sirens shattered the night outside. The aisle was a mess. I didn’t know whether to move or to hide or to run. I figured the guy had left if the clerk called for help, but how did I know he wouldn’t come back? I heard another voice at the front now, murmuring. I crept to the end of the aisle and peeked to the front of the store. The cashier was speaking to another customer, a woman.

  “And then he just ran outta here with a knife or something in his hand, stabbed her, I guess. She went down, but she got in a good punch to the eye, and he disappeared.” The cashier heaved; they were both looking outside the front windows of the store. “Never seen anything like it, all my years. Guess I’ve just been lucky.”

  “Where did he go?” I asked f
rom my spot at the end of the aisle, scared to move forward. My voice came out sounding so meek even I could barely hear it. Outside, a woman lay sprawled on the ground, with another customer hovering over her. I figured she must still be alive because the person seemed to be speaking to her and getting some response. “Did they catch him?”

  “Don’t know, hon,” the cashier said, elbows on the counter. “You okay?” I nodded. “Hope you don’t mind, I locked us in till the cops get here. Thought it’d be safer.”

  I nodded again, letting my eyes drift to the scene unfolding outside the glass doors. Blinding lights swirled, more sirens blared as an ambulance approached. But before the EMTs could get out, the victim sprung to her feet. She steadied herself on her heeled boots, gathered her black coat around her, and then took off running, so fast I never saw her face, just the dark hair swinging in the wind. It occurred to me now that she had been at the ATM when I got to the store. The paramedic in the passenger side of the ambulance jumped out and started to run after her but then stopped and gazed into the night, seeming to have lost her.

  “Now, why would she go runnin’?” the cashier said, shaking his head.

  I kept watching, expecting her to come back. More sirens sounded and a police car pulled up, lights flashing.

  I told the officer—a forty-something man with a paunch, a thick mustache, and a thick Chicago accent, which I found oddly comforting and strong—what little I had seen of the man, but I didn’t mention that I thought I might know who he was. It couldn’t possibly be Beckett, could it? I had my first trip in a police car (it probably felt a lot different in the front, where I sat, than in the back). He told me they hadn’t caught the guy and that he didn’t understand why the woman took off either. “Shock, coulda been,” he reasoned. “But if she ran, she must be okay. Youz be careful, ’kay?” I nodded. He chalked it up to just another mugging, but when you don’t see that kind of thing on a regular basis—or ever—it sticks with you. When you’ve been told that you’re in danger by a book that’s writing its pages just for you, scenes like this tend to want to cleave onto your memory and not let go.