“When you’re storming the aerie, remember that ropes won’t hold angels.” He whispers the last word.
I’d forgotten how much stronger he is than a man.
“You mean you could have gotten out all that time? You don’t even need me. Why didn’t you do it already?”
“What, and miss the fun of rattling their tiny little brains wondering what happened?” He swiftly unties me and pulls me to my feet.
His evasive maneuver doesn’t escape me. “Ah, I get it. You can escape at night, but not during the day. You can’t outrun bullets, can you?”
Like most people, my first introduction to angels was through the looping footage of the Archangel Gabriel being shot. I can’t help but wonder if the angels would have been less hostile if we hadn’t immediately killed their leader. At least, they think he was killed. No one knows for sure because the body wasn’t recovered, or so they said. The legion of winged men floating behind him dispersed with the panicked crowd, quickly disappearing into the smoky sky. I wonder if Raffe was part of that legion.
He arches his brow at me, clearly refusing to discuss the effect of bullets on angels.
I give him a smug smile. You’re not as perfect as you look.
I walk over to the door and put my ear to it. “Is there anyone else in the building?”
“No.”
I try to turn the knob but it’s locked.
Raffe sighs. “I was hoping not to show excessive strength and raise suspicion.” He reaches for the knob, but I stop him.
“Well then, good thing I got us covered.” I pull a slim lockpick and tension wrench out of my back pocket. The soldier who searched me before tying me up did a fast job. He was looking for guns or bulky knives, not skinny little picks.
“What’s that?”
I get to work on the lock. It feels good to surprise him with a talent that angels don’t have.
Click.
“Voila.”
“Talkative, but talented. Who would have thought?”
I open my mouth to make a smartass comeback, then realize I’d only be proving his point, so I stay quiet, just to prove that I can.
We sneak out into the hallway and stop at the back door.
“Can you hear the guards?”
He listens for a moment. He points to eleven o’clock and five o’clock. We wait.
“What’s in here?” I ask, pointing at the closed doors.
“Who knows? Supplies maybe?”
I start for one of the doors, thinking of venison or even guns.
He grabs my arm and shakes his head. “Don’t get greedy. If we raid them on our way out, they’re less likely to just forget about us. We don’t want trouble if we can avoid it.”
He’s right, of course. Besides, who’d be stupid enough to store guns in the same place as their prisoners? But the thought of venison makes my mouth water. Oh, I should have bargained for that stew while I had the chance.
After a few moments, Raffe nods and we slip out into the night.
~
We make a run for it, Raffe and me. My heart flip-flops in my chest as I pump my legs as fast as they will go. The air frosts from my mouth. The smell of soil and trees beckons us toward the forest. The trees rustling in the wind masks the sound of our pounding feet.
Raffe could run much faster, but he stays close.
The moon disappears behind clouds, and the forest turns dark. I slow to a walk once we’re inside the canopy, not wanting to smash into a tree.
My breathing is so heavy, I’m afraid the guards will hear it. The adrenaline rush of a run for freedom drains, and I’m back to being scared and tired. I pause, bending over to catch my breath. Raffe puts his hand on my back, urging me to keep going with gentle pressure. He’s not even out of breath.
He points deeper into the forest. I shake my head and point to the other side of the camp. We need to go around to retrieve his wings. My pack is replaceable; the wings and sword are not. He pauses, then nods. I don’t know if he knows what I’m after, but I know that his wings are never far from his mind, the way little Paige is never far from mine.
We skirt around the camp, going as deep into the forest as we can without losing sight of the camp. This gets tricky several times since the moonlight is so dim now, and the camp itself is mostly under canopy. I have to rely more heavily on Raffe’s night vision than I like.
Even knowing he can see, I can only go so fast without walking into a branch or losing my footing. It takes a long time to navigate the forest in the dark, and even longer to find my stash.
Just when I see the tree hiding our goods, I hear the distinctive click of a gun’s safety latch behind me.
My hands are up in the air before the guy can say, “Freeze.”
CHAPTER 18
“Just for interrupting my night, you’re getting latrine duty.” Obi is clearly not an early morning guy, and he doesn’t bother to hide that he’d much rather be sleeping than dealing with us.
“What do you want with us?” I ask. “I told you we didn’t kill those people.”
We’re right back where we started—Raffe and I sit tied to our chairs in what I’m starting to think of as our room.
“It’s now more about what we don’t want. We don’t want you telling others our numbers, our location, our arsenal. Now that you’ve seen our camp, we can’t let you go until we move.”
“How long will that be?”
“A while.” Obi shrugs noncommittally. “Won’t be too long.”
“We don’t have a while.”
“You’ll have as long as we say you have,” says Boden, the guard who caught us. Or at least that’s what the name on his uniform says. It could, of course, just be a uniform that he took from a dead soldier that already had that name on it. “You’ll do everything the resistance movement says. Because without it, we’d all be doomed to the hell those angelic motherfu—.”
“Enough, Jim,” says Obi. There’s enough weariness in his voice that I’m guessing that good ol’ Jim and maybe several of the other soldiers have repeated these exact same lines a million times over with the zeal of the newly converted.
“It’s true,” says Obi. “The resistance founders warned us this time would come, told us where to go to survive, galvanized us while the rest of the world was falling apart. We owe the resistance everything. It’s our greatest hope of surviving this massacre.”