Ryder's Angel

Chapter Three: Broken Panic: Danny

Chapter Three: Broken Panic: Danny

Screaming. The acrid smell of smoke. Crack of fire.

Angeline grabbed a still sleeping Kayla, who woke with a shout, and we leapt out of bed and out into the common. We were blasted with heat of fire, the sting of smoke, and the blades of two helicopters directly above us. Water was flying everywhere, leaves ripped off the overhangs. Angeline gave Kayla to Jason with her hair whipping wildly around her face.

We vaulted a fire that was quickly burning through the floor beneath, and her skin on her back started to split. “We’ve got to shut down the copters before they come!”

Her wings unfolded – blinding white, feathery angel wings with inhuman strength – and she leapt into the smoky air with me transforming into a leopard. She threw me into the open doors of the copter, but there was a force field. It was like hitting a giant rubber ball. I was flung down to the burning dock, but morphed into a falcon just in time. With Ang at my side again, we ran to the others, who were in a big circle, almost toppling over one another, with Kendall and Kayla safely in the middle.

“Hazel,” shrieked Angeline, “get us out!”

“I can’t!” Hazel screamed, “I’ve been –” She crumpled to the ground out of the corner of my eye. Flames licked up beside her, but one of the older kids picked her up.

With the blades whipping our hair and the fire scorching our skin, there was no other way out. The copters came closer, the doors sliding open. There were two thuds as two shadows jumped from the helicopter. The infernal machines spun around and flew away.

 I saw the first shadow: the deadly male mutant, with his greasy, shoulder length and yellow serpent eyes glowing red in the fire. The other shadow was just that: a writhing mass of black clouds shaped like a woman. She had red eyes and shadow claws. When she bared her teeth, it just looked like a set of fangs floating in black air.

 They advanced. We were too weak, we would never make it. My body ached; I didn’t think I could take them even if I tried.

 And that’s when Kendall – poor, brave Kendall – wheeled out of the circle and rammed into the shadow woman.

 Angeline screamed a spine-tingling scream, overlapping with the unsuspecting shadow woman’s.

 A thick thud resounded above the roaring of the flames. A slick dagger had sprouted from Kendall’s back. I didn’t see anymore, for we all scattered. I was forced away from our temporary home, away from my adopted family and sulfuric smoke and Kendall, who was dead.

Dead… Gone…

* 

When I fell in a grassy field, my heart wrenched. Kendall was dead…

 Angeline screeched. I got wearily to my feet, and quickly counted everyone – fifteen, with the sixteenth and seventeenth on the ground. We crowded around Kendall with his eyes glazed over. Then someone laid Hazel beside him.

 Jess, a healer, knelt by her and put her ear to her chest. “She’s alive, just dazed.”

 None of us breathed a sigh of relief yet. I crouched by Angeline, who was sobbing uncontrollably. With my arm around her shoulders, we waited for good news, for Jess to say Kendall was breathing…

 But when her eyes filled with tears as she stared at Ang, she buried her head in my chest and wept. Her whole body shook with those uncontrollable sobs. I held her face in my chest so she didn’t have to see Jason and ten-year-old Mason carrying Kendall away. Two others took Hazel and followed them up to our second temporary home, a tree house high up in a massive tree, in the middle of this deadened field of corn. I picked Angeline up, letting her cry, and began the trek to the tree house. No one said a word, and we all dispersed silently to fall into a bed and sleep. I laid Angeline in a bed and then took up first watch at the entrance to the house.