Illuminate: A Gilded Wings Novel, Book One Read online

  We chatted about the day’s events, munching on the food until we finished it off. “Anyone else ravenous and weirdly exhausted today?” Lance polled us as he sat back in his chair to digest.

  Dante and I both raised our hands. Now that I was finally sitting down and not under Aurelia’s watchful eye, my body could acknowledge how worn-out it was. In our defense, it was after three o’clock by now.

  “Glad it’s not just me,” Lance said, rubbing at his eye under his glasses.

  “But nothing like a little gossip to get the blood flowing.” Dante turned to me. “So, back to the important stuff—Aurelia and Lucian. They were, like, all over each other?” Dante said with his mouth full, something he only did when he was really excited.

  “They weren’t exactly ‘all over each other’; it was just a kiss,” I clarified. Dante stopped chewing and looked disappointed by this. “But still interesting, no?”

  “Only mildly interesting at best, Hav. Please. I mean, look at this place. Of course they’re all gonna hook up. It’s like a reality show: toss a bunch of gorgeous people in one place, make sure there’s a club nearby, booze, the whole thing. It would go against human nature if they didn’t all go after each other. You’re so precious, Hav.”

  Lance shrugged and nodded in silent agreement.

  “Okay, okay, so my gossip isn’t that juicy,” I said in a flat tone. “So, what are the rooms like?”

  4. Not a Bad Place to Visit

  Dante and Lance, as it turned out, were sharing a room. I wasn’t sure what this might mean for me. I made my way down in the moaning elevator to the basement level: home sweet home.

  “Your rooms are part of our staff quarters and are not as luxe as the rest of the hotel’s accommodations,” Aurelia had explained to us. “However, I’m sure you’ll find them to your liking.” She had also mentioned that some members of the Outfit stayed in rooms on this level so it seemed logical to think that I might be paired with one of them. I didn’t completely love that idea. On one hand, it could be a quick way to make friends; but on the other, none of them had been especially warm so far, and I got the impression that those barriers might not be broken down no matter how much time we spent together. I hoped I was wrong about that, but my instincts were generally pretty good, even when I didn’t want them to be.

  The door to my room was located at the very end of the wide, dim hallway. Along the wall to the left was Dante and Lance’s room. I was glad to have them so close. I swiped my keycard, quick and sharp, in the lock. Just in case, I knocked softly as I pushed open the door. Nothing. I peeked inside to find my duffel bags and coat sitting on a twin bed—the only bed in the room. Relief washed over me and I exhaled: I would be bunking alone. I plopped down on the bed, which was pushed lengthways against the near wall, and slipped my battered feet out of the torture traps of my shoes, wiggling my toes to regain feeling.

  My back against the wall, I surveyed my kingdom. I certainly hadn’t expected anything palatial like the guest rooms we had viewed on our tour, so this place seemed just fine. Joan liked to say that much of finding joy in life lay in keeping expectations in check. I didn’t always believe that—because I do have a tendency to dream—but in this case she was right. Mine was a slim shoebox of a room, long, narrow, and windowless, but in addition to the bed there was enough space for a desk like those that studded the library (though this one was slightly nicked around the edges), a delicate lavender velvet-cushioned chair, and a wooden four-drawer dresser with those animal-like feet you sometimes see on old furniture. At the far end of the room was a closet the size of a phone booth, and at the opposite end, a bathroom not much larger than the closet.

  The color scheme mimicked that of the larger suites we had seen: lavender and green, from the wallpaper and the worn carpet—which also bore the hotel insignia—to the floral comforter and the curtains covering a blank, windowless spot on the wall. (I couldn’t imagine why anyone would have gone to such trouble.) Aurelia had informed us this was the original color scheme of the Lexington, but that now only one room per floor retained this pairing—the rest were done in the more opulent burgundy, black, and gold. It was nice to feel a bit of history in my room, even if it wasn’t as posh as the renovated rooms in the rest of the place. The basement itself wasn’t as bad as it sounded either. It had those same colors in the carpeting and in the faded striped wallpaper on the top half of the wall; the bottom half was a mahogany wood paneling. Very speakeasy.

  I looped the duffel bag strap around my leg and dragged it across the bed to me. It seemed as good a time as any to start unpacking. I had just begun taking out sweaters, jeans, rolled-up socks, when a few quick knocks made me jump and then the door burst open. Dante breezed in and plopped down next to me.

  “I can’t believe you’ve got your own bachelorette pad and Lance and I have to share,” he said with an exaggerated pout.

  “Sorry . . . but not that sorry.” I smiled.

  “You know that dude got almost twenty-four hundred on his SATs?”

  “Why is that always the first question you ask people? If you weren’t so cute, people would really hate you.”

  “Let it go, fifteen hundred.”

  “I don’t test well. You’re mean.”

  “Please, you love me. Just saw a bunch of the glamazons in the hall. Can we please revisit our discussion about how everyone is, like, drop-dead gorgeous around here?”

  “Must be something in the water.”

  “Let’s hope. Drink up, sister.”

  “You said it. Seriously though, what’s the deal with them?”

  “Got me. Sexy, but a total snooze. I feel like there’s no personality under their perfect shells.”

  “I guess personality is overrated: note to self.” I shook my head and emptied the last of the duffel, then started in on the second one, stacking everything on the bed surrounding Dante. He just lay there not particularly bothered by the mounding, teetering piles of clothing. I took an armful and kneeled on the floor, sorting them into drawers.

  “Who needs personality when you look like that?” he said. “Didn’t know they even made them that way in the Midwest. At least there’s some good eye candy for me. And you, depending on how they swing.”

  I had to laugh to myself; this was what I loved about Dante. He had declared himself out freshman year—he liked to joke to me that he knew that if he didn’t like me in that way then clearly there had to be a reason. It was just flattery but I didn’t mind. Of course, being open about his sexuality didn’t do much for his popularity. There weren’t really any other guys so sure of themselves in our school. But it only made us closer—we threw ourselves into our schoolwork and friendship and bonded over our lack of social lives.

  My mind flashed to Lucian. Then I tried to snuff it out. I had no business even thinking of him. He looked high school aged, yet he had this awesome responsibility, this real job. I got the impression he was a sort of wunderkind or something. He had the air of someone who had breezed through school early or else he was doing a gap year before college, like they do in Europe. Or maybe his dad was someone important who’d ushered him into this place. Either way, he was obviously out of the realm of sensible crush objects for me, but I couldn’t help it.

  Dante read my silence. “Uh-huh. I noticed someone got a look from the superhot sort-of boss.”

  He knew me too well. “Please.” I looked him square in the eye, but my blush gave me away. “You’re crazy. And besides, I’m sure I wouldn’t know what to do with him or any of these Outfit characters. As you might have noticed, everyone here is just a little out of my league.”

  “Ugh!” he groaned, stomping a foot on the bed. “Enough with you and your inferiority complex.” He threw a pair of balled-up socks at me, hitting me on the head.

  “Hey!”

  But he kept the hits coming, pelting me like a batting machine. I swatted and yelped, throwing my hands up to block, until finally every pair of socks—and I had a lot of them—l
ay on the floor around me and the tumult ceased.

  “You deserved that.”

  “Haven, girl, you are no fun. You think everyone’s out of your league. You’re sixteen now. Own it, baby!”

  “Um, sure.” I threw myself on the bed, yawning. It was just after seven in the evening but I was worn-out. I felt more drained than I ever did after a full afternoon on my feet at the hospital.

  “So how are we celebrating anyway?” Dante asked. We both studied the cracked eggshell surface of the ceiling.

  “Oh, I don’t know, we really don’t—”

  “Oh yes we do. We are celebrating your birthday, so get over it.” He sat straight up and snapped his fingers. “I’ve got an idea. We’re going out.”

  “Define ‘out.’”

  He sized me up. “If I were a tomboy turning sixteen with limited sartorial resources, what would I wear?”

  “I guess not this?” I rolled onto my side, propped my head up on my arm, and gestured to the business casual attire I had worn all day.

  “Dear god, no. I’m sure we can find something.” He sprang up, now on a mission, and began rummaging through the dresser I’d just loaded so neatly. He didn’t look thrilled with the selection, but he couldn’t have been surprised. I had never been much of a shopper, which he knew. Shopping for me consisted of following him around and scurrying back and forth to the fitting room when he requested new sizes and colors of whatever he was trying on. He had a gift for that type of thing, a style and signature. I was a little more utilitarian in dress. “Tell me you brought some good jeans and not just those beat-up ones you wear all the time—anything but those. Where’s your white V-neck T-shirt?”

  “In there somewhere.” My hand flitted at the dresser he was hunched over. I made no attempt to help. “Tomorrow’s our first full day here—I already have an assignment—don’t you think we should get our rest?”

  He wasn’t listening to a word of it though—or else he would have surely mocked me. With his back to me, he opened the top drawer, scanning quickly, then closed it. He tried the middle one—pulling out a pair of jeans and throwing them on his shoulder—and then dug into the bottom drawer, rummaging some more, locating a shirt. He tossed it and the jeans at me, and the shirt landed on my head like I was a coat rack.

  “Put that on. I’ll give you a belt. It’ll be sort of a rocker chick kind of look.”

  “You’re serious?”

  He gave me that exasperated look I knew so well, the one with the scrunched-up nose and mouth that said I was trying his patience, then pointed toward the closet, snapping his fingers.

  “Okay, okay, okay,” I said. I tucked myself behind the closet door, yanking a chain to turn on the bare light bulb above.

  “Thank you. You know I live for these rare occasions when you let me play stylist. And someone has always been very pleased with my work.”

  “I know, I know. So where are we going anyway?” I called to him, slipping out of my pants and button-down, and tugging on the jeans—of course he would’ve chosen my tightest pair. I pulled on the T-shirt, tucking it in. “Won’t I be cold in this? I’m sure it’s chilly outside now that it’s dark. I think I need—”

  “We’re not going outside,” he replied, cutting me off. “We’re going to . . . the Vault.”

  I burst out of the closet. Dante was curled up on the bed, tossing around a pair of socks I’d missed, but paused to give me a once-over. “Cute,” he said, clearly trying to distract me. But I was wearing the look I gave him when I was on the verge of vetoing one of his brilliant ideas—my signal that I was a flight risk.

  “I’m sixteen, not twenty-one,” I said.

  He waved his hands at me to halt my protest. “Please, so am I, get over it already. You know that secretly you totally wanna go. All the cool kids are doing it,” he teased. We said this all the time, usually when we weren’t about to do anything even remotely close to what the cool kids were doing. “C’mon, seriously, they said we’re allowed in, so let’s test it.” He leaned over and untucked my shirt all around except a bit right in front. “Sloppy chic, I like it.”

  I barely noticed. Arms folded across my chest, I weighed this possibility, knowing that it wasn’t something that should even require convincing. And then I surprised myself.

  “Okay,” I started carefully. “Suppose, hypothetically, that I did possibly want to see what this Vault business was all about—”

  “Really?! Wow, I was expecting I’d have to do a way bigger sales pitch. This is fabulo—”

  I held up a hand to hush him.

  “Hang on. Just suppose I said yes. You have to promise not to run off and leave me alone there when you get your groove on.” On the few occasions we had actually made it to a party, Dante usually inadvertently abandoned me at some point, his ADD kicking in, and I’d be forced to search for him, often finding him dancing—in his own world, not necessarily with anyone—or, more likely, he would have rounded up a group of poor, unsuspecting partygoers for a poker game and he’d be cleaning out every penny they had on them of their parents’ money. Being a mathlete did have its advantages, he used to say. Either way, I was left to fend for myself.

  He thought about it for less than a second.

  “Deal.”

  I studied myself in the full-length mirror on the back of the closet door.

  “So, is this really okay, do you think?”

  “Yeah, we’ve totally made lemonade outta lemons. I’ve got a belt that’ll be perfect. Seriously though, if we start hanging at the Vault every night we’re gonna have to get you some new threads.”

  “We’ll see.” I took a seat beside him.

  “Speaking of . . . ooooh, what’s this?” He reached out, taking the pendant of my necklace in his hands, examining it from every angle. “I like it. It’s so not you and yet so you.” He leaned back to get the full effect.

  “I know, right? It’s from Joan. Birthday gift.” My fingers ran over the smooth ridges of the wing. I could only imagine what Joan would say if she knew I was even entertaining the idea of going to a club.

  We waited until a respectable hour—which according to Dante was about eleven o’clock—to launch ourselves into the revelry of the Vault, killing time in my room, while Lance took a nap in theirs. Dante had crept in earlier, while Lance was sprawled fast asleep—his glasses still on—on the bottom of their bunk beds, and procured his promised belt. It was a thick and worn chocolate-brown leather piece adorned with a clunky buckle bearing DANTE in rhinestones.

  “Really?” I said as he suited me up, looping it into my jeans.

  “It’s fierce,” he assured me.

  On him, yes, but on me, it didn’t quite pack the same fashionable ferocity. “I feel like this is one of those tags: ‘If lost please return to . . .’”

  “Well, you told me not to abandon you, didn’t you?” He laughed back, taking great pleasure that this wasn’t quite my style. “Love it.”

  When the time came to get Lance, I hovered while Dante poked him in the arm, getting in a few good jabs before he woke with a start, arms flailing, and rolled right out of bed landing at our feet. We tried to stifle our giggles, but couldn’t.

  “Rise and shine, time to party,” Dante said.

  Lance sat up and rubbed his eyes then his elbow; it looked like he had landed on his funny bone. He laughed too.

  “Thanks. Kind of. Ow,” he said, bending and extending his arm.

  Much more low-maintenance than Dante or me, Lance was ready in a flash—he literally rolled out of bed and was set to go. Dante had decked himself out in a pink plaid button-down and his best jeans, the slim dark indigo pair he saved for special occasions. The three of us found our way to that elevator just beyond the lobby, descending in silence, imagining what we might find.

  Even before the elevator doors opened, the music hit us, traveling up the elevator cables and into our car, pulsing. When the jaws did finally part, we were deposited before that imposing steel door. Coming in
as we had from the hotel, we had the advantage of no line—most club-goers were forced to queue up in the alleyway outside (among Dumpsters and the occasional rat—not a pretty place; we had seen it that afternoon and were told the line could snake all the way down the side of the building) and then were led inside to another elevator taking them to this point.

  This second elevator opened now, disgorging a handful of revelers—three high-heeled, short-skirted women and a pair of blazer-bedecked, open-collared men, all flirting with one another, whispering in one another’s ears, complimenting one another’s clothes for the sake of giving that guy an excuse to touch the sequins on her dress, or that girl a reason to run her hand along his lapel or undo another button on his shirt. Dante, Lance, and I all traded glances. We got a few looks ourselves, but no one bothered to say anything. The group was granted passage through the checkpoint and into the main event—music crashing out at us as the doors opened and the club swiftly swallowed them.

  I could feel the music regulating my heartbeat, forcing it to settle on a new rhythm, something syncopated that my body had trouble keeping up with. My lungs seemed to forget how to take in air, remembering too late and then scrambling for it with a gasp. A blond woman, who had handed us our tote bags earlier today, stood at the door, clipboard in hand, along with another perfect male Outfit specimen by her side. Before today, I hadn’t known that people like this existed outside of movie screens and magazine pages. It took so much less to be special at school. I now felt that if I were forced back into a room with the classmates who had seemed so perfect, I would no longer be nearly as intimidated. These people here were absolutely otherworldly.

  “Hi there. Dante, and my fellow interns,” he started to introduce us. The woman’s smoky, black-smudged eyes showed no trace of understanding. But she and the man—as chiseled as Lucian, but a hollow brunette version—just nodded at us, looking not quite at us but rather through us. Dante was unconcerned; his eyes bulged at something else: “Wow, man, nice kicks!” He pointed to the man’s shoes, a shiny black patent leather–looking sneaker, which looked completely unremarkable to me. “Those are totally the limited edition Palindromes, right? Only fifty in existence?!” He crouched down to get a closer look. “Whoa.” The man nodded again, but said nothing. Dante pointed toward the door. “So it’s cool if we check the place out?” The woman didn’t say a word but the man grabbed hold of a steering-wheel-size dial at the center of the black-painted steel door and pulled it open for us. “Thanks, man,” Dante said. We all exchanged jubilant looks, quietly shocked that this was so easy. We were in! I smiled shyly at the man as I passed.