Flightless (Fairy, Texas Book 2) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Epilogue

  Flightless

  Fairy, Texas

  Book 2

  by Margo Bond Collins

  Surviving Fairy, Texas has never been harder.

  Laney Harris never meant to hurt anyone—least of all Josh, the beautiful, glimmering-eyed boy with the silver wings she met when she moved to Fairy, Texas. But her good intentions didn't help save Josh's wings when he stepped in to help protect her, and now her guilt is almost as overwhelming as his pain.

  Josh Bevington doesn't know how to survive in Fairy, Texas without his wings. He's no longer the golden—or in his case, silver—child, destined to become a leader among his People. Instead, he's damaged. Broken. Destroyed.

  Flightless.

  Worst of all, Josh doesn't know how to stop blaming Laney for his misery, especially since she seems to have gained everything he's lost. But when Laney's biological father shows up in Fairy, determined to use his daughter's newfound powers for his own ends, Josh and Laney will have to overcome their problems and work together—or risk losing everything they care about.

  Flightless

  Fairy, Texas

  Book 2

  Copyright © 2016 by Margo Bond Collins

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval systems, without prior written permission of the author except where permitted by law.

  Published by Bathory Gate Press

  Granbury TX

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Epilogue

  For Readers

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Dedication

  This one’s for Blaire Edens and Erin Hayes—colleagues, cheerleaders, collaborators, partners in crime… Whatever we call it, I know that without you, I’d be the madwoman in the attic. Love you!

  Chapter One

  Josh

  I dream of flying.

  I slip into the ether, the otherworld that hides our wings from the norms, the regular humans who outnumber us. The ones who call us “fairies” or sometimes “demons,” even here in Fairy, Texas, a place named for us. At night, I spread my wings and soar.

  Out of the corners of my eyes, I catch glimpses of my wings, silver-blue in the twilight of the ether, as they beat—one, two, three—until I catch an updraft. Below me, the tiny Texas town where I grew up grows ever smaller, the Earth falling away until I could map it out if I wanted, the houses like those on a Monopoly board, perfect little rectangles at odds with the twisting back-roads and sprawling ranches surrounding them.

  Sometimes my friend Mason is with me, laughing and pointing, urging me to join him in dips and turns and rolls, like he did when we were children—though when he speaks, I can't quite make out what he says.

  Every so often, Laney is there, too, flying with us.

  Some deep part of me knows that there's something important I need to learn from her, and then I realize that she's flying, too, though she has no wings.

  At those moments, I almost remember, until I'm distracted again by the feel of my wings beating, the ethereal wind in my face, the sheer joy of flight.

  But when I wake up in the morning, my wings are still gone, ripped away from me with cold, hard iron.

  Every day.

  I can dream all I want, but in the end, I'm still flightless.

  * * *

  For the first time in my life, I dreaded seeing my friends and classmates.

  I had waited until the late bell rang, and even then, I stood outside Fairy High, unable to force my legs to move.

  It's not like most of my classmates would even know what happened to me. Only about twenty percent of Fairy is made up of the People—of fairies, demons, angels, whatever you want to call the winged clan that settled here even before Columbus landed in Cuba.

  That's what our legends tell us, anyway. What Oma Elaine taught me in my after-school lessons.

  Those lessons weren't like the ones in school. They were more like the Sunday school classes I sometimes attended with my fully human friends. These were told in parables, like the apocryphal scripture of a lost tribe. I guess that's what it was, really—those stories of the heroes who had escaped persecution in all the old worlds, from ancient Babylon to medieval Venice.

  Never once in those lessons had she talked about any of the People who had lost their wings and survived.

  "It's a miracle that you're alive, Joshua," she said to me, the sing-song cadence of her speech reflecting a lifetime of immersion in the Old Tongue, the secret language we all learned. "We should thank the God above and learn to accept His will."

  That sounded all well and good until I stood outside the school and tried to convince myself to go in.

  Over the arched double doorways leading into the three-story, red brick building were carved the words "Men's Entrance" and "Women's Entrance"—something I had never paid attention to until Laney had pointed it out.

  Laney Harris.

  She was another problem.

  Oma Elaine—and even my father, for that matter—treated her like she was some sort of prodigy, but they (and all the other People who knew about it—more and more every day, it seemed) called her nala—vampire.

  That was the side I saw when she took down Roger Bartlef. He had supposedly been our Abba, our spiritual leader, but had tried to take over every aspect of the People. When he set Laney up to be raped in order to force her to bear the child who would become our version of a lord and savior, it had unleashed something in her—probably the same something Bartlef had seen in her from the beginning, though I doubted even he had anticipated that Laney would use it to fly up into the air, attack Bartlef, drain all his power from him, and drop his limp body from high enough up to break his neck and kill him.

  That’s not generally the kind of thing you expect out of teenage girls, so I couldn’t really blame Bartlef for being surprised.

  I couldn’t blame him for much of anything anymore, since he was dead.

  I was finding, though, that I could blame Laney for all kinds of things, even when I probably shouldn’t.

  When I woke up in the hospital, loopy on painkillers and reeling from the shock, I had told her that I loved her, that we were two halves of the same whole, that we were in this together.

  I wasn’t sure I believed that anymore. I didn’t know what I believed.

  The only thing I did know was that I didn’t want to walk back into my hig
h school.

  "You can do this, Bevington." I found myself muttering that more and more often the closer I got to returning to school.

  Now I convinced myself to put one foot in front of the other, to step through the doorway and into a hallway that shouldn't have felt alien. I'd been attending this school for almost two years. But it felt unfamiliar—like someplace I'd never been before, someplace slightly dangerous.

  As far as most of my regular, human classmates knew, I had been in a car accident—supposedly in a head-on collision with Bartlef, his henchwoman Hazel Biet, and several other People who had actually died before Mason had helped Laney rein in her crazy, life-sucking power—and according to the story, I had some relatively minor spinal damage.

  It wasn't perfect, but it explained my long hospitalization and any issues I had with my back.

  With the spot where my wings once attached.

  Not that far from the truth, in some ways.

  I could still walk and talk, but a central part of my nervous system had been taken from me when my wings were ripped away with cold iron.

  Sometimes, I still felt them. Phantom limb syndrome, Oma Elaine said.

  If I thought about it too hard, tears welled up in my eyes.

  As I moved slowly past the row of gray metal lockers toward my own, everything around me went silent. At first, it was like ducking into the ethereal realm—a muting of noise that brought a kind of peace with it.

  For a bare instant, I wondered if, in my terror of returning to school, I had shifted out of this reality.

  But I wasn't in the ether.

  If it's not the ether, then it must be…

  Even the thought trailed away as I glanced up to find what felt like most of FHS watching me limp down the hall.

  A few of them, mostly the other People, lowered their gazes when I made eye contact. Feet shuffling, they moved—but not in any particular direction. Just away from me and my disability. They knew the real story and I doubted they would ever look at me the same way again.

  Then Mason was there, pushing his way past the students between us, his loud, cheerful voice all but forcing them to acknowledge their own silences. "Josh. Welcome back, man. You ready to jump into algebra? That shit's been kicking my ass."

  Kayla, Mason's girlfriend and Laney's stepsister, followed close behind him, deigning to give me an icy smile.

  She still hadn't forgiven me for the part I had played in convincing the town and school, but especially her, that Mason and I were both having sex with Laney.

  Neither of us was, of course, but apparently Mason was an excellent actor.

  I wasn't sure how that was my fault, but since I didn't live with her like Laney did, and I wasn't dating her like Mason was, I guess I was the best target for all her unspent anger. I returned her smile, trying to make my own feel genuine.

  According to Mason and Laney, Kayla had initially resisted the mind-wipe Dad and Oma Elaine had done on all the humans who had been around the night Laney killed Bartlef—so they had told her everything.

  She had been surprisingly calm about it.

  But then one morning, she woke up and it was all gone, as if the mind-wipe had been on a time-delay. Except for one part: for some reason, she remembered that she wasn’t angry with Mason or Laney because it had all been a hoax.

  Now, even though everyone was trying to be extra-careful around her, Kayla still got a weird expression on her face sometimes, like she was trying really hard to remember something that was just out of reach. Then she would look frightened, and try to cover it up with some bitchy comment.

  By unspoken agreement, none of us pressed her for more details of her memory about why Mason and I had pretended to be sleeping with Laney.

  We all preferred ice-queen Kayla to confused-and-bitchy Kayla.

  Although he didn’t say anything specific about it, I could tell that the whole thing worried Dad.

  "Right?" Mason was saying.

  I snapped my attention back to my friend. "Sorry. I missed that last bit."

  "I said, we've got football practice this afternoon. Time to get you moving again."

  My stomach clenched at the thought. I had been cleared to play by both the human doctors at the hospital and the Fairy doctor who tended all our ethereal injuries. Not that the Fairy doctor had much experience in the kind of injury I had sustained.

  But he said that technically the wounds where my wings had been were healed enough for me to do any physical activity.

  Except the one thing I wanted to do.

  Fly.

  To be honest, I didn't know if I could function without my wings. I didn't know if I could even make it through algebra class without them. Or the next ten minutes, for that matter.

  Much less football practice.

  Still, I could tell Mason was giving me an out, a way to let this particular awkward moment pass.

  He was right, too. Only a few seconds after I mumbled something like agreement, everyone who had been staring at me was back to being too wrapped up in their own lives to pay any attention to my drama-fest.

  Mason clapped a friendly hand down on my shoulder, ignoring my wince at anyone touching me at all, much less so close to my injury. "So," he said, steering me down the hall toward our next class, "seen Laney yet?"

  "Not since I left the hospital." She had been there every day when I was recovering. But once I was released, Oma Elaine had decided it was time for Laney, our nala, to begin training in earnest.

  I hadn't asked "training for what?" Only part of me had wanted to know the answer. That was when I realized that the burning in my chest around her had been rage. I might know with my head that none of this was Laney’s fault, but my heart hadn’t fully accepted that.

  The only outlets for my anger were dead—Bartlef and the out-of-town People he had employed in his attempt to take control of our kind.

  That left Laney.

  Some deep part of me whispered, If she hadn’t come to Fairy, I would be whole.

  Oma Elaine’s decision to take Laney away from me for training had been two weeks ago. I hadn't heard much from her since other than a few texts.

  Now my chest constricted at the thought of seeing her again, but I fought to keep my expression neutral.

  Mason knew me too well, though. "Everything okay?"

  I started to nod, converted it into a shrug. "We'll see in English class, I guess."

  My back twitched where my wings used to be, a dull ache reminding me that really, nothing was okay.

  Chapter Two

  Laney

  I still dream about that night.

  The dreams aren’t always about killing Bartlef and the other demon/fairies he had drawn into his plot, though those deaths are often center stage in my nightmares.

  But sometimes in my dreams, Bartlef succeeds and the teenage boys he’s convinced to join him actually rape me.

  Sometimes I end up pregnant, carrying a thing inside me that I know will somehow destroy everything and everyone I love.

  Sometimes Josh dies in my nightmares, bleeding out on the auditorium floor before anyone can help him. Mason, too—dead before he can reach out to me. I wake up from those dreams terrified that I’m a monster for letting them die, until I remember that they survived.

  Sometimes in my dreams Sarah lives, and I wake up light and happy, certain that I will see her again, only to be crushed by the realization that I will never get to talk to my friend again, never see her shy smile or hear her quiet voice.

  The very worst dreams, though, are hardly dreams at all. They’re closer to memories.

  In those, I am once again floating in the air above the auditorium stage, and I begin drawing power away from Bartlef. It fills me with an incandescent joy that I can barely contain, spilling out of me as silver light. When I drop his almost-dead body to the floor, the finality of the crunch as his neck breaks makes me laugh out loud. When Hazel Biet snaps Sarah’s neck, my rage allows me to suck away her power in a matter
of seconds. And when Mason grabs my hand, part of me revels in his scream as I pull at the center of his power.

  Those mornings, I wake up knowing that I’m already a monster.

  * * *

  The pen I flipped around my fingers caught the glare from the fluorescent lights overhead and reflected it back at me, nerves making me clumsy. I dropped it for at least the third time.

  "Deep breath,” Ally said. "He'll be here in a minute. It'll be okay."

  I was glad she was talking to me, at least. Mr. Bevington and a few other demon/fairy adults had done a mind-wipe on everyone who had been there when Bartlef and crew died, but on some level, Sarah’s friends had known that I was connected to her death. For weeks—until well after Josh woke up—none of them had really spoken to me. They had barely been able to look at me.

  Ally had been the first one to thaw, and it had happened around the time we discovered Josh would make it.

  Things were still awkward sometimes, but all the friends I had made when I first moved here at the beginning of the school year were back to being welcoming.

  I watched the classroom door anxiously, waiting for Josh to walk through it.

  "Have you seen him since he got out of the hospital?" Ally’s sympathetic gaze made me want to cry.

  Mutely, I shook my head, my teeth clenched too tightly to speak. I still felt guilty about that. Not that I'd had much extra time to go see him. Oma Elaine had kept me busy with her afternoon lessons—part history class, part training session.

  And still I'd had plenty of time to feel guilty.

  Josh's wings, tattered, leaking blood onto the floor.

  My mind scrabbled away from the image. From the entire topic of guilt.

  Better to think of Oma Elaine's lessons.

  They hadn't done any good, as far as I could tell. I still didn't understand who or what "the People" were. Supposedly, they were run out of their version of Eden ages before they made their way to Texas—but I wasn't sure I believed that any more than I believed that God ever spoke through some burning bush to a guy in a robe.