Black Wings Read Online Free PDF Page B

home. Only a few blocks from here.
    “Maddy, come on, come on!” Beezle shouted. He was off my shoulder now, wings flapping, claws tugging at my sweater like he was trying to pick me up and carry me away.
    “You,” I said, addressing the thing before me. I had the slightly hysterical thought that our conversation thus far had been less than scintillating. “I remember you.”
    It paused. I still couldn’t see the features of its face, but I sensed that it smiled. Sweat pooled at the base of my spine.
    “Do you, now?”
    “Yes,” I said. “You killed my mother.”
    A chuckle. “And a very tasty morsel she was, too.”
    The sly remark filled me with rage. That was my mother it was talking about. My mother, whom I’d loved more than anyone, had been nothing but a bar snack to this . . . thing.
    I felt the familiar burn of magic in my chest, filling up my throat, pulsing on my tongue. But I couldn’t control it; I didn’t know what to do with it. I’d never called magic for anything but soul release, and I wasn’t sure how I was calling it now. I gasped for air and flung my hands in front of me.
    A ball of blue fire hovered above my palms for a split second, then flew where the monster’s chest should have been. I still couldn’t see much more than a huge black mass. The ball exploded and the monster howled its rage. The combined force of exploding magic and angry monster breath flung me backward through the air. I smashed into the stop sign at the corner and crashed to the ground. The last thing I remembered was knocking my forehead against concrete.
    I don’t know how long I lay there before I realized that Beezle was tapping my cheek with one little finger, his anxious face very close to my nose. It made me cross-eyed to look at him.
    “Maddy?” His voice was low and urgent.
    “Ugh,” I said.
    “Are you okay?”
    I took a moment to assess things. My ears rang, my vision blurred and every part of my body ached. It felt like I’d been hit by a train, or possibly an airplane.
    “I hurt all over,” I whimpered, and then I turned my head to the side so I could vomit.
    Beezle tactfully flew a few feet away until I was finished being sick. “Can you stand up?” he asked.
    “Working on it,” I said, and laid my cheek against the cold sidewalk.
    I must have passed out again. I had a vague sense of being lifted very gently. I heard Beezle and another voice fading in and out, although I couldn’t understand what they were saying. I wondered who was talking to Beezle. Most people thought he was just a statue, or maybe a stuffed doll. It sounded like they were arguing. The arms that held me gripped me a little tighter. I felt safe and warm, so I let go into the darkness again.
    I went further, falling, falling, falling through darkness, back to the beginning. And there was a girl, and her name was Evangeline, and I saw her, and I was also a part of her.
     
     
    At first Evangeline thought he was something she dreamed. He came to her as she lay under the half-moon in the cool of the midsummer evening. Her mother snored away in the hut and Evangeline, unable to sleep, had felt the stars calling her and gone out to listen to them.
    The warmth of the earth cradled her, and the grass stroked her long black braids with loving hands, and the stars told her their secrets in whispers. Her fingers pressed into the earth and she closed her eyes and opened herself to everything.
    Then she heard the great leathery flapping of mighty wings. Evangeline opened her eyes to find the dark angel blocking out the sky, and all she could see was his awful beauty, haloed in starshine and moonlight, and his black, burning eyes. He whispered her name, and his voice wound into her ear and down her throat and under her ribs, and she knew what he had come for. She opened her arms to him, and his smile dazzled like the Morningstar and he enfolded her in his great black wings.
    Evangeline woke the next morning to the sound of her